Guest lecture by Dr Caroline Sauter: "La caresse d'une langue. Derrida (and) translation"

Dr. Caroline Sauter (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main):

La caresse d'une langue. Derrida (and) translation

In her lecture, Caroline Sauter approaches Jacques Derrida's text "Was ist eine 'relevante' Übersetzung?", which she translated from French into German with Esther von Osten (2023). In his text, Derrida treats Portia's speech, as well as the entire Shakespeare drama The Merchant of Venice, as a problem of translation problem. However, by refusing to translate the central sentence "Then must the Jew be merciful", he unbalances the scales of translation. At the very beginning of his text, Derrida encounters (anti-Semitic) hatred, which evokes a logic of destructive conversion, with tenderness (la caresse), in a strong yet delicate gesture. Against the logic of the quid pro quo, Derrida develops a theory of translation as a tender caress that wastes itself, renders itself, offers itself as a gift. This is condensed in the double image of the flickering flame or licking tongue, langue, language: translation as la caresse d'une langue. How can this caresse be translated - into other languages, but also into an ethics, a politics, a philology of tenderness?

Caroline Sauter is an interim professor of comparative literature at Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main. Her work focuses on the intersection of literature and theology, in particular Jewish thought, European-Jewish literature as well as literary theory, translation and translation theory. She is the author of a monograph on Walter Benjamin's philosophy of translation (Die virtuelle Interlinearversion, 2014) and numerous academic essays, co-editor of several anthologies and, together with Esther von der Osten, translator of Jacques Derrida's "Was ist eine 'relevante' Übersetzung?". She was a Feodor Lynen Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Harvard University, as well as a research assistant at the ZfL Berlin and the Department of Comparative Literature at Goethe University Frankfurt a.M. Most recently, she completed the manuscript Language and Love: Literature - Theology - Theory, in which she examines the problem of linguistic expressibility of love and desire.