Derrida's Babel: When a Name Refuses to Stay a Proper Name
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| Babel, in Braque's style. AI image |
Everyone knows the story of Babel. It tells of humanity's attempt to build a tower reaching the heavens, only to have God interrupt the project by multiplying languages and scattering peoples across the earth:
Genesis 11:7-9
7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.
8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.
For Jacques Derrida, however, the story is not primarily about the origin of linguistic diversity. It is about a single word: Babel.
Everything that follows in Des Tours de Babel unfolds from the peculiar behavior of that one term. Rather than using the biblical narrative to illustrate philosophical ideas, Derrida turns the word Babel itself into the place where fundamental questions about language, translation, and what philosophers call the proper name emerge.
He begins with a deceptively simple question:
"Babel: today we take it as a proper name. Indeed, but the proper name of what and of whom?" (Derrida, 1985, p. 165)
The question immediately unsettles what seems self-evident. Does Babel designate a city? A tower? The biblical episode? The text recounting it? Or the confusion of languages that follows?
The more closely one looks, the less obvious it becomes that this name refers to a single object. Before offering any theory, Derrida invites the reader to confront the instability of what first appeared to be an ordinary proper name.
When a Name Has Meaning
At first sight, nothing seems unusual about Derrida's question. Proper names appear to perform one of the simplest tasks in language: they identify a unique person or place. Unlike common nouns, they seem merely to point rather than to describe.
Babel, however, refuses to cooperate with this expectation.
As Derrida observes,
"Babel is at once proper name and common noun, confusion also becomes proper name and common noun." (1985, p. 167)
It identifies a unique place while simultaneously being associated, within the biblical narrative itself, with "confusion." The same linguistic form functions both as an individual designation and as a meaningful concept. It is neither simply a name nor simply a common noun, but both at once.
This ambiguity is not an accidental curiosity. It exposes a deeper tension within language itself. If a proper name can also function as a common noun, then the traditional separation between naming and meaning begins to dissolve. The supposedly pure act of reference is already entangled with signification.
Derrida's interest in the proper name therefore extends far beyond grammar. It concerns the structure of language itself. The proper name appears to occupy a privileged position outside ordinary vocabulary, yet Babel demonstrates that this privilege cannot be maintained.
Why Babel Cannot Be Translated
The consequences become especially clear when one attempts to translate the biblical narrative.
Should the translator preserve the word Babel? Or should it be rendered as Confusion?
Neither solution succeeds.
Leaving the name unchanged preserves its singular identity but conceals the semantic play on which the narrative depends. Translating it as Confusion conveys one of its meanings but erases the proper name. Whatever the translator chooses, something essential is lost.
This is not a problem that greater linguistic skill could overcome. The difficulty lies in the word itself.
As Derrida remarks,
"A proper name as such remains forever untranslatable." (1985, p. 167)
Yet the paradox immediately deepens. Within the Hebrew narrative itself, Babel can also be understood as "confusion." The name therefore proves to be both translatable and untranslatable, depending upon which of its functions one seeks to preserve.
Translation thus encounters a structural rather than a practical limit. Because Babel simultaneously performs two incompatible functions, no translation can reproduce both. Every decision preserves one function only at the cost of another.
From this perspective, Derrida's celebrated claim that translation is both necessary and impossible acquires a concrete meaning. Translation is necessary because languages differ and communication depends upon crossing their boundaries. Yet it is also impossible in the sense that no translation can preserve every function of the original. Something always exceeds the translator's choices.
Babel does not merely illustrate this predicament. It performs it.
A Name That Does Not Belong to Language
The paradox reaches its most striking formulation when Derrida writes:
"A proper name, in the proper sense, does not properly belong to the language... although and because its call makes the language possible." (1985, p. 168)
At first sight, the statement seems impossible. How could a word fail to belong to the language in which it appears?
The paradox becomes intelligible once one considers the peculiar status of proper names. Unlike common nouns, they cannot simply be replaced by semantic equivalents. Pierre is not translated into Peter in the way that pierre becomes stone. Proper names circulate across languages while resisting translation.
They participate in language, yet they are never fully absorbed into its system of meanings.
Derrida also exploits the multiple senses of the word proper. A proper name is supposed to be someone's own, something belonging uniquely to an individual. Yet Babel belongs to no single language. It has been inherited, repeated, cited, interpreted, and transmitted across linguistic traditions while never becoming the exclusive property of any one of them.
The proper name turns out to be less "proper" than its designation suggests. Its identity depends precisely upon its capacity to circulate beyond every original context.
The Babelian Performance
The biblical narrative therefore becomes an allegory of language itself. God's interruption of the builders' project prevents the establishment of a single transparent language that would eliminate ambiguity once and for all. Instead, language is destined to plurality, interpretation, and translation.
As Derrida writes,
"Translation becomes law, duty, and debt, but the debt one can no longer discharge." (1985, p. 171)
Every act of translation responds to an obligation that can never be fulfilled completely.
This explains why Derrida concludes:
"Such would be the Babelian performance." (1985, p. 171)
The word Babel does not merely illustrate a philosophical thesis about naming or translation. It performs it. Within a single word, singularity and generality, reference and meaning, translatability and untranslatability remain inseparable.
The essay ends with a final warning:
"No theorization, inasmuch as it is produced in a language, will be able to dominate the Babelian performance." (1985, p. 171)
Philosophy cannot simply step outside language in order to explain it from above. Every theory remains caught within the very medium it seeks to describe.
The essay therefore returns us to Derrida's opening question: What is Babel? By the end of his reading, the question no longer admits a single answer. Babel is simultaneously a city, a tower, a proper name, a common noun, a problem for translation, and a meditation on language itself. Its refusal to remain one thing is precisely what makes it philosophically significant.
What first appeared to be the name of a biblical place gradually reveals the instability of naming, the unavoidable losses of translation, and the impossibility of making meaning perfectly identical with itself. In this sense, Babel becomes more than the name of a city. It becomes the name Derrida gives to the condition of language itself.
References
Derrida, J. (1985). Des Tours de Babel (J. F. Graham, Trans.). In J. F. Graham (Ed. & Trans.), Difference in Translation (pp. 165–248). Cornell University Press.
The Holy Bible. (1989). New Revised Standard Version. National Council of Churches.
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