Winter 2001
Volume 27, Number 2

What of this vocable "relevant"? It possesses all the traits of the linguistic unity that one familiarly calls a word, a verbal body. We often forget, in this same familiarity, how the unity or identity, the independence of the word remains a mysterious thing, precarious, not quite natural, that is to say historical, institutional, and conventional. There is no such thing as a word in nature. Well, this word "relevant" carries in its body an ongoing process of translation, as I will try to show; as a translative body, it endures or exhibits translation as the memory or stigmata of suffering [passion] or, hovering above it, as an aura or halo. This translative body is in the process of being imported into the French language, in the act of crossing borders and being checked at several intra-European customs points that are not only Franco-English, as one might infer from the fact that this word of Latin origin is now rather English (relevant/irrelevant) in its current usage, in its use-value, in its circulation or its currency, even though it is also in the process of Frenchification. This acculturation, this Frenchification is not strictu senso a translation. The word is not only in translation, as one would say, but in the works or in transit, traveling, travailing, in labor. In my proposed title, it serves, through a supplementary fold [pli], to qualify translation and to indicate what a translation might be obliged to be, namely relevant.
[...]
What is most often called "relevant"? Well, whatever feels right, whatever seems pertinent, apropos, welcome, appropriate, opportune, justified, well-suited or adjusted, coming right at the moment when you expect itัor corresponding as is necessary to the object to which the so-called relevant action relates: the relevant discourse, the relevant proposition, the relevant decision, the relevant translation. A relevant translation would therefore be, quite simply, a "good" translation, a translation that does what one expects of it, in short, a version that performs its mission, honors its debt and does its job or its duty while inscribing in the receiving language the most relevant equivalent for an original, the language that is the most right, appropriate, pertinent, adequate, opportune, pointed, univocal, idiomatic, and so on. The most possible, and this superlative puts us on the trail of an "economy" with which we shall have to reckon.

Jacques Derrida teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He also teaches at the University of California, Irvine, New York University, and the New School for Social Research. His most recent publication in English is Of Hospitality (2000).