Translation is “a doubly performative and thus a doubly violent gesture”: it stresses “the absence of the original”, and also “constitutes the reader” of the next text, and constitution always implies some violence. But this violence is also a ‘hospitality’, in Derrida’s sense. This article focuses on Portrait de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif, where Cixous demonstrates that Derrida’s thought is inseparable from its linguistic expression in French, consequently defying translation into any other language. Finally, some examples from Cixous writing are read as a manifestation of this “resistance to the unavoidable translation” which characterizes her work.