Tempus Fugit

The co-implication of biology and technology described in some of Derridas later texts points to a conception of system and writing before and beyond the instance of 'life'. This point is particularly well articulated in his reading of [Walter] Benjamins thoughts on translation in Des Tours de Babel.(...) In the predace to his translation of Baudelaires Tableux parisiens, Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers (The task of the Translator), Benjamin uses a series of familial, geneological and genetic metaphors to descibe the process of translation from one language to another. Benjamins use of these metaphors is neither innocent nor arbitrairy, and Derrida show Benjamin to be quite aware of this. According to Derrida, the theory behind Benjamins metaphorical correlation of the textual and the genetic is not simply that we as living beings produce texts, use them, translate the vital into the textual, but that the translation of a text in general is a more fundamental process than life itself. (s.192f)