Constantly decomposing, the Tower of Babel echoes another aspect of this innate rupture in translation. This fascinating image has been portrayed by many thinkers as carrying the navel, the psychic construct of any translation. In fact, Derrida has described the story of Babel in Genesis 11 as ‘the myth of the origin of myth, the metaphor of metaphor, the narrative of narrative, the translation of translation’ (Derrida, 2007: 191). The biblical story of Babel follows the flood – a traumatic memory that participated desire for a phallic building to erect from earth to heaven. While the painful memory of human extinction continues to haunt the living, a longing for oneness emerges only to be destroyed – and scattered like the people of earth – in a deconstructing movement that turns the fantasy of origin into multiple languages.
Derrida points to the eruptive struggle at the core of this ongoing process of translation: the Godly act of deconstruction, the endless fall of the tower, and the scattering of the people. It is the impossibility of building the tower, the failure of complete unity between signifier and signified, word and its meaning, that creates the continual longing for bridging this unbreachable gap, yet, it is precisely the act of God that will forever un-ground any (Godly) position of origin. In personifying both the dream to finally have an origin – One origin. Singular. Identical with itself – and its collapse, God opens the multiplicity of languages in the ongoing process of translation.