Abstract

“Poetry, Animality, Derrida”: this title is traced by a play of the letter, by the chance of an acronym: “pad.” This pad – the random drawing up of these three letters, p, a, d – is perhaps untranslatable. As such, it might bear witness to Jacques Derrida's memorable remark about poetry, translation, and the materiality of words: “The materiality of a word cannot be translated or carried over into another language. Apocalypse distracted: deranged, absent‐minded, diverted apocalypse. Not in some merely maniacal or else nihilistic manner: it is necessary to reckon, as always in Derrida's writing, with the workings of deconstruction as what he calls a “strange strategy without finality”, with “distracted apocalypse” as a figure of that. Derrida's commentary on Lawrence's poem is too rich and suggestive to be readily summarized.