The article presents some elements of Jacques Derrida’s reception in the United States, based on the translation of his undecidable “words”, especially on the translation of the French term entame. It tests the hypothesis that the reception of an author will produce, over time, an ever-greater uniformity of translations and an ever-smaller number of translators and publishers. The purpose of the article is to adapt Antoine Berman’s principle according to which any first translation calls for retranslations (1995, p. 84), because it is imperfect, too ideological and overly subjected to norms. Regarding the field of translation in humanities and social sciences, I make the assumption that the first time a work is translated, it is always for its content; it is the growing popularity of the author that will increase, in retranslations, the interest in his style, his way of playing with the language, etc. Most successive translations of Derrida allow me to confirm this assumption, but one example stands apart: Leonard Lawlor’s retranslation of La voix et le phénomène. However trivial it may seem, this exception among the usual renderings of entame (by broach and/or breach as proposed in 1976 by Gayatri Spivak in Of Grammatology), reveals a minor stream in Derrida’s reception in the United States—namely phenomenological theory—which does not seem to categorize him the way the major part of the reception community does. Therefore, a study of these terms in translation shows the influence still held by a school of thought like phenomenological theory that, arguably, still translates Derrida for what he offers (the object of the text), rather than who he is (the subject of the text).