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Introduction French thought in the second half of the twentieth century resists easy characterization. Its major figures are usually grouped together under labels such as structuralism, post-structuralism, or French Theory, categories that are often as illuminating as they are reductive. Roland Barthes wrote on myth, literature, photography, and pleasure; Jacques Derrida developed deconstruction through close readings of philosophical texts; Jacques Lacan reformulated psychoanalysis through linguistics and topology; Michel Foucault investigated madness, discourse, punishment, and the historical constitution of knowledge. Their intellectual projects are sufficiently distinct that any attempt to identify a common denominator immediately risks oversimplification. Yet there is a striking family resemblance among them. Again and again, they direct their attention toward what appears secondary or marginal within established fields of knowledge. Derrida becomes interested in supplements, ...

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...

Des Tours de Babel. AI image  The "tower of Babel" does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something on the order of edification, architectural construction, system and architectonics. What the multiplicity of idioms actually limits is not only a "true" translation, a transparent and adequate interexpression, it is also a structural order, a coherence of construct. There is then (let us translate) something like an internal limit to formalization, an incompleteness of the constructure. — JACQUES DERRIDA, Des Tours de Babel Thesis Derrida does not read the Tower of Babel as a symbol of linguistic diversity alone. Rather, the unfinished tower exhibits the structural impossibility of completion. Its interrupted construction provides a concrete way of understanding some of Derrida's central philosophical concepts—especially différanc...