I’m reading French critical theory and I’ve encountered a phrase which seems to not to make sense in translation, so I’ve returned to the source to see if I can figure it out. Unfortunately, my French is exceedingly shaky, so I’m hoping a more fluent speaker might be able to help.
The phrase in the original is:
"un centre qui arrête et fonde le jeu des substitutions"
My English translation reads:
**
“a center which stops and founds the play of substitutions”**
From context I suspect that a better translation would probably be:
**"a center which stops and grounds the play of substitutions"
I’m guessing that the translator picked an English word that sounded very close to the original “fonde”. Unfortunately, “founds” in English carries the connotation of “initiates” or “sets in motion” which is contrary to the “arrête” that comes right before it. I suspect that the author’s original meaning was intended to be closer to “anchors” or “fixes in place” … “foundation” in the sense of a stable base, not the beginning of a process.
What say you? Does my revised translation better capture the spirit of the original?
“Fonder” in French means “to found”, but it can mean to establish the foundation of something, or put it on solid ground, which seems similar if a bit different in meaning to “fix” or “anchor”. Cite. But I find it hard to discern the author’s intent only from this sentence fragment; honestly if I had to I might as well have guessed it referred to a hockey game. 
Maybe you could post a longer fragment of your text.
Also, I know that matt_mcl is a professional French-to-English translator, so let’s invite him here.
This highly jargonistic stuff is going to be tough to translate anyway, but it might help us if you could give us more of the passage from which this is taken. Give us the whole paragraph, maybe, and tell us what the subject matter is about. Of course, it could be that without the grounding in critical theory, we’ll be helpless.
Yeah, when I hear “critical theory” what comes to my mind is “obfuscated ‘philosophy’”, but I admit that I know nothing of the subject, and I’m curious to read a longer excerpt of this work.
It’s from Derrida’s essay “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines” from L’écriture et la différence
Here’s a bigger chunk from before the passage in question:
“La totalisation peut être jugée impossible dans le style classique : on évoque alors l’effort empirique d’un sujet ou d’un discours fini s’essoufflant en vain après une richesse infinie qu’il ne pourra jamais maîtriser. Il y a trop et plus qu’on ne peut dire. Mais on peut déterminer autrement la non-totalisation : non plus sous le concept de finitude comme assignation à l’empiricité mais sous le concept de jeu. Si la totalisation alors n’a plus de sens, ce n’est pas parce que l’infinité d’un champ ne peut être couverte par un regard ou un discours finis, mais parce que la nature du champ — à savoir le langage et un langage fini — exclut la totalisation : ce champ est en effet celui d’un jeu, c’est-à-dire de substitutions infinies dans la clôture d’un ensemble fini. Ce champ ne permet ces substitutions infinies que parce qu’il est fini, c’est-à-dire parce qu’au lieu d’être un champ inépuisable, comme dans l’hypothèse classique, au lieu d’être trop grand, il lui manque quelque chose, à savoir un centre qui arrête et fonde le jeu des substitutions.”
And here’s the translation I’m working from.
*"Totalization can be judged impossible in the classical style: one then refers to the empirical endeavor of a subject or of a finite discourse in a vain and breathless quest of an infinite richness which it can never master. There is too much, more than one can say. But nontotalization can also be determined in another way: not from the standpoint of the concept of finitude as assigning us to an empirical view, but from the standpoint of the concept of freeplay. If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinity of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field-that is, language and a finite language-excludes totalization. This field is in fact that of freeplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. This field permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and **founds *the freeplay of substitutions."
Believe it or not, this chunk actually makes perfect sense in the context of the literary theory Derrida is discussing. (To me at least … but I’ve been reading this stuff for a while.) It’s just the word “founds” in the final sentence feels like a significant mistranslation.
To be more clear … what he’s saying is that traditionally systems of interpretation have assumed the existence of a “transcendental signified” – a concept that provides an anchor point for determining the meaning of a text. So, for example, if you were Thomas Aquinas reading the Bible you would assume that meaning of the work was determined by God and eventually if you penetrated the various metaphors of the text you would arrive at a final interpretation that represented the truth He intended the work to have. Other readers operating in other interpretive systems might use other criteria to ground their interpretations.
However, if you eliminate the transcendental signified (the “center”), if you admit that there is no final authority to determine true meaning, then the process of interpretation will continue indefinitely. This is not because the text is infinite – the book still has a beginning and an end – but because you can wander in endless circles within a finite structure.
I think you’re correct in the OP with “fixes,” or perhaps “settles.” I realize that to fonder is more “found, establish” than “settle” in the sense of peopling a place, but it does seem to have some metaphorical use along the lines of “stop motion, fix firmly, provide an anchor,” which works alongside arrête. (I can’t find a French-English citation, but French fixer is used alongside établirto define fonder in a couple of the monolingual dictionaries online; not in the AF or in HJ’s cite, however.) I’m thinking of a little roulette ball bouncing around as the jeu, and fonder as the verb that stops the motion of the wheel, reducing the possibilities to one.