The relevance of Derrida’s translation: Mercy and ethos

Abstract

This study examines Derrida’s rhetorical ethos in his 1998 lecture, ‘Qu-est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’ [What is a ‘relevant’ translation?], given before an audience of French literary translators from the ATLAS association. This lecture provides a gloss, informed by Derrida’s seminars on forgiveness, on his partial translation of Portia’s lines from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Although Derrida’s translation turns on the rendering of ‘seasons’ as relève, his overtly rhetorical positioning in this lecture foregrounds the homonymic pair mercy/merci as a primary ‘relevant’. As a result, Derrida’s performative statements of gratitude and appeals for mercy may be read as speech acts that, while simultaneously evoking and repudiating the association of translation and conversion activated in the translation of these lines, also conjure his specular être-juif. As a result, rather than simply giving a public lecture on an intimate philosophical translation practice, in ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”?’ Derrida presents a rhetorical ethos that embeds translation, relevance, and mercy in a personally-inflected public reflection on the ‘Jewish Question’ and its very real historical consequences.