The Beast & the Sovereign I by Jacques Derrida

Author:Jacques Derrida
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2009-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

1. [Translator’s note:] In colloquial French, the word “bêta” can be used to refer to someone who is bête, a dolt, a dummy, often in the idiom “gros bêta.”

2. [Translator’s note:] This opened parenthesis does not close. The verbs bêtifier and abêtir mean to make or render stupid; bêterie is an alternative for bêtise itself.

3. [Translator’s note:] “Meaning” is in English in the text.

4. [Translator’s note:] A common French idiom meaning, literally, “stupid and wicked.”

5. Martin Heidegger, Der Ruf zum Arbeitsdienst, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Klostermann, 2000), p. 239. During the session, Jacques Derrida proposed this translation of Heidegger’s sentence: “The animal, and all that is merely living, cannot work.”

6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), p. 149: “vous le verrez cent fois plus stupide et plus bête que le fils du plus gros manant.”

7. [Translator’s note:] Derived from an obscene word for the female genitalia, “con” (adjective and noun) in current French usage means, roughly, “idiot(ic).”

8. [Translator’s note:] “Stupidity” is in English in the text. In what follows, the French text of the seminar gives long extracts from Ronell’s book, which Derrida read out in English and paraphrased and translated with comments during the session. I have separated out paraphrase (which I have largely omitted) from commentary (which I have translated in brackets).

9. Ronell, Stupidity, p. 40.

10. Ibid., p. 68.

11. Ibid., pp. 41–43.

12. Ibid., pp. 68–69.

13. [Translator’s note:] In French, “point d’intraduisibilité” means both “point of untranslatability,” and “no untranslatability [at all].”

14. [Translator’s note:] See session 5 above, n. 43.

15. Deleuze, Différence et répétition, p. 196 [p. 151].

16. Ibid., pp. 197–98 [p. 152].

17. [Translator’s note:] In French “Le Moi et le ça” is the standard translation of Freud’s “Das Ich und das Es,” “The Ego and the Id.”

18. Paul Valéry, “Extraits du Log-book de Monsieur Teste,” in Oeuvres, vol. 2 (1960), p. 45.

19. Paul Celan, “Le Méridien, ” in Le Méridien & autres proses, bilingual ed., trans. and ed. Jean Launay (Paris: Seuil, 2002), p. 59; trans. Jerry Glenn as “The Meridian,” Chicago Review 29 (1978): 29–40; reprinted in Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). [Translator’s note: As the editors of Sovereignties in Question point out (pp. 188 and 204), Glenn’s translation is the one used by Derrida himself in the U.S. version of the seminar. With occasional slight modifications, it is the version used here and in what follows (although I have also consulted the translation by Rosemarie Waldrop, in Paul Celan: Collected Prose [New York: Routledge, 2003], pp. 37–55); page references are to the reprinting of Glenn’s translation as an appendix in Sovereignties in Question (pp. 173–85).]

20. Ibid., pp. 66–67 [pp. 176–77].

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