Administering Interpretation by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2019-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Derrida’s Shylock

The Life and the Letter of the Law

Katrin Trüstedt

1

In “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation,” a text that was first published in Critical Inquiry in 2001, Jacques Derrida unfolds a reflection on the problem of translation that departs from a phrase from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: “Mercy seasons Justice.”1 This phrase serves as a starting point both for the introduction of an unusual translation and for a general reflection on translation itself. Derrida proposes the translation “Le pardon relève la justice,” in which the verb “to season” is translated by “relever” and, as such, related to the movement of translation: “seasoning” is understood in terms of a movement of trans- or sublation. Following Derrida’s title, the verb refers to a specific qualification or type of translation: a “relevant” translation.

What distinguishes this type of translation? Relever is the term that Derrida had also proposed some decades ago as the translation for G. W. F. Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung. In using relever as the name for the movement of translation, Derrida is thus linking the movement of translation to the transformation of Hegelian Aufhebung. A “relevant” translation is one that sublates the translated original in a new medium, that means: negates, elevates, and preserves the original in a new form. Translated back from Derrida’s French translation of Shakespeare, “Mercy seasons justice” thus reads: “Mercy elevates and interiorizes, thereby preserves and negates, justice (or the law).”2 With this elaboration, Derrida ultimately suggests that “mercy” is in some way a “relevant”—that is, a transformative and at the same time a true—translation of justice. This translation would thus be limited only in the way every relevant translation is. But what does it mean, that mercy “sublates” justice or, more precisely in this context, the law? What does it mean that the law is in need of sublation? And what would it mean for the law in this very particular, Shylock’s, case, to be in need of sublation and to be “sublated”?

The relation of law and mercy that informs The Merchant of Venice is usually understood in the context of a larger narrative: the narrative of the opposition between a supposedly “Jewish” obedience to the “letter of the law” and a Christian spirit of mercy, which is regarded as a sublation—a negation and elevation—of the Jewish relation to the law. According to this reading, Christian spirit exhibits, as Hegel puts it, “that which fulfils the law but annuls it as law [aufhebt] and so is something higher than obedience to law and makes law superfluous.”3 The ever-insisting, quasi-allegorical reading of the play thus frames the opposition of a Jewish law and a Christian mercy in such a way. Take Katharine Eisaman Maus’s introduction to the play as an example for this type of contextualization:

The opposition between the Christians and Shylock seems rooted in religious disparities. Judaism in the play is presented . . . as a sixteenth-century Christian like Shakespeare would have construed it, as a set of dramatically vivid contrasts with Christian norms. The law

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