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Dissemination. AI image YHWH says: "Yes! A single people, a single lip for all: that is what they begin to do! ... Come! Let us descend! Let us confound their lips, man will no longer understand the lip of his neighbor." Then he disseminates the Sem, and dissemination is here deconstruction: YHWH disperses them from here over the face of all the earth. — JACQUES DERRIDA, Des Tours de Babel   A Story We Think We Already Know The Tower of Babel is usually treated as the biblical explanation for linguistic diversity. Humanity speaks one language and decides to build a city with a tower reaching toward heaven. Seeing this, God intervenes, confounds their speech, and scatters them across the earth. The tower remains unfinished, and Babel becomes associated with linguistic confusion. For Jacques Derrida, however, the story is about much more than the origin of different languages. In Des Tours de Babel , he recasts the biblical narrative as a reflection on lan...

The Tower of Babel. AI image What Is Babel? The Tower of Babel is one of the best-known stories in the Hebrew Bible. It is commonly understood as an explanation for why humanity speaks many languages. According to Genesis, people once shared a single tongue and sought to build a city with a tower reaching toward heaven. God interrupted their project by confusing their speech and scattering them across the earth. Jacques Derrida begins somewhere unexpected. Before asking what Babel means, he asks a simpler question: What is Babel? His answer immediately unsettles the reader. "Babel: today we take it as a proper name. Indeed, but the proper name of what and of whom?" (Derrida, 1985, p. 223). At first, the question seems almost unnecessary. Surely Babel is the name of a tower. Yet as Derrida follows the biblical narrative, that certainty begins to dissolve. Is Babel the tower? Or the city? Does the name designate a place, an event, or the confusion of languages itself? T...