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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry:
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. David Wills, professor of French and Francophone studies at Brown University. We're here today to talk about his translation work, with Perjury and Pardon, lectures by Derrida, seminars that he gave in the 90s. Dr. Wills, wonderful to have you on today.
David Wills:
Happy to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
PJ Wehry:
Now I see you've translated a lot of Derrida's work. Why Perjury and Pardon next? What made you choose this two volume translation set?
David Wills:
Okay, the answer to that is pretty simple. I didn't choose it, it chose me,
PJ Wehry:
I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.
David Wills:
because there's a team of nine people officially at the moment who are working systematically through the seminars of Danai-desu teaching career, of which there are 43 years. You can imagine one volume per year. There's a lot to work with. And when the decision was made to publish the seminars, made in conjunction with Derendez' heirs after he died, he died in 2004, having said that he really didn't want the seminars published as is. But his wife and children understood there were tape recordings of the lectures and so on, and that sooner or later it would probably find its way to the web in one form or another, and that it was better to undertake something organized. So once that decision was made, and once the French publisher, which was originally Edition Galilée and is now publisher. When that decision was made, we decided to start from the end and work backwards,
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
mostly because the closer to the end of his life, at least, the work existed on hard disk that could be accessed easily, and there were manuscript versions easy to find. And so we in 2003. And we've worked to Perjury and Pardon, which comes from 1997 to 1999. And other colleagues have been working on the previous volumes. And I had done a small volume because that backwards progression has been respected, generally speaking. But there have been a couple of volumes published from earlier years. and one in TypeScript. So that work has to be gone back to, and there's a certain amount of editorial labor involved in that, which is not the case for the ones from the 90s on, when he was typing on a computer. So it came to be my turn, these two volumes. And so here we are. So this in the series working backwards Perjury in Pardon 1 and Perjury in Pardon 2, the volumes 5 and 6 of the backwards chronological series, but which will go back to 1991-92 because it's at that investigating a whole group of questions that he included within the broad title of Questions of Responsibility. So in fact, that covered the whole work he did beginning in 91 and going for 12 years until 2003. So just to quickly mention the other volumes, After that, there's a series of three volumes on witnessing. He morphs from the secret into witnessing in general. Then hospitality, and those two volumes are already in, have been translated and are in press now by translations by colleagues of mine. Then perjury and pardon, then the death penalty, then the beast and the sovereign. under which, as I say, he included under the general umbrella of questions of responsibility.
PJ Wehry:
As you undertake this work, just to give us kind of the lay of the land, what are some common misconceptions or mistakes people make about translating?
David Wills:
Well, let me speak in the case of Derrida's work, because that's really what I've translated. I've translated a couple of things, something by Jean-Luc Nalcy and a couple of other philosophers. But generally speaking, my translation works is limited to the work of Derrida. I think what is the problem for some translations, some of the earlier translations of Derrida's work, they weren't undertaken by people with an ear for the extent to which he's using idiomatic colloquial language. So one has to have a good
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
knowledge of French from at that register, in that register at that level, not just a literary French, not just word-for-word and as you mentioned when we were talking just And with Derrida, there's also a certain amount of work on, I'll say work and play with the language itself, right?
PJ Wehry:
Yes.
David Wills:
And of course, you know, many translators will pick up on a certain amount of that. But there is also a level at which Derrida is speaking in everyday French and working with everyday idiomatic French. And working with the question of translation, and there are often, it's probably not a single seminar where the question of translation doesn't come up. And you know, he's famous for using precisely idioms that are impossible to translate in order to further his idea that translation is necessary and impossible.
PJ Wehry:
Right.
David Wills:
Right? impossible you know there's no way that that one can just transliterate word for word all the time I mean one can up to a certain extent but but that extent is limited and therefore as I say one has to have a good sense of the language as it were from the inside I mean I'm not a bilingual speaker I mean I've learned I've learned French I didn't grow up speaking French but Most of those of us who are involved in the translating of the seminars at this point are people who have studied French extensively. There are a couple of Francophone native speakers in the group. So that sort of sense is necessary. But then one also has to work with and struggle with precisely these idiomatic terms that Derrida uses and works with order to poeticize philosophy in a sense,
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
in order to say that if one is to develop a problem in all its complexity, one has to wrestle with language. And that one has a right, therefore, both to spell out things extensively, page after page after page. the right to introduce short shortcuts, short circuits, right? And just to give an example from this from this volume, from Perjury and Pardon, there is a one of the seminars, which he begins with saying, he had to mal, which is already a contraction of the expression in the appadoo mal, which is responds to you when you say sorry. You bump into them and you say sorry and they say no problem. And il n'y a pas de mal is something that he wants to use in order to introduce the question of the difference between saying sorry and making an excuse. And the extent It can be also massive when it comes to asking forgiveness for the unforgivable, which involves normally evil acts. And the word mal is le mal means evil. Or it doesn't only mean evil. It can just mean wrong. mean evil. So he's using that as a condensation of various ideas that he wants to develop. So what does the translator do with that? Il n'y a pas de mal. My solution in this case was to say no harm done, which is obviously not a word for word translation. It doesn't have the word evil in it. But it does have the word harm, right? you could have been doing something terrible to me, for which you really need to apologize, as it were, for which you really need my forgiveness, right? Because that's more of the question. Or it could have been something trivial. So one has to come up with those sorts of solutions.
PJ Wehry:
Yeah, I'm looking at it and obviously I think when you say, like if you said no evil done, that would have been a weird English phrase, right? Like it would have been original.
David Wills:
Right.
PJ Wehry:
But if you say no harm done, what's important to you to capture because what seems to be important to Derrida is the colloquial nature of what he's saying.
David Wills:
Precisely, precisely, yeah. Yeah, so, you know, I mean, this is a common enough example. I think that there would be very few translators who wouldn't understand the idiom of it. But precisely, you can't transliterate in that case.
PJ Wehry:
Right. Right.
David Wills:
And so you're going to lose something, right? No harm done is not the same as no evil done, right? So you are necessarily making those choices. And I guess, you know, I often say to myself, as do colleagues, that translation is not something we choose to do. Most of us are doing other work in our own fields as well. I can't say that if somebody had come to me and said, you know, you're going to spend however much of my career I've spent in terms of translating what, 20%, 30% or something in terms of the output, I would have probably said, no, I don't think so. Right? There's a certain mechanical element to it. It's something you can pick up and put down, unlike work of your own that requires developing thinking that requires concentration and can't be interrupted with translation. You can pick it up and put it down. Obviously, you have to get yourself back in the swing of it. But it's mechanical in that sense. Doesn't require the same sort of intellectual commitment, I would say. I mean, it requires knowing the ideas, knowing Gerrida's ideas to when he is precisely trying to condense something, ideas that are developed in a much more straightforward manner in other places and so on. And then there's some pleasure in finding a good solution, of course, that is closer to, I think, what literary translators, the level at which they work much of the time. Right.
PJ Wehry:
Um, because you mentioned it, I did want to ask you, uh, your own major work, um, prosthesis, dorsality, and animation, uh, three volumes published in the post humanity series, um, you know, I would love for you to just mention, uh, what your own work is on, but also what is, uh, what is meant by post humanities there?
David Wills:
Right, well that's a title that the editor of the series, Kerry Wolf, came up with at the University of Minnesota. I guess it was, on the one hand, to refer to, once again in shorthand, refer to a variety of post this or that, post-modernism, post-structuralism, and so on, that was around at the time. ago now, I think when the series began, at least. About that. So it was that. And it was also to put it in the context of a certain questioning of what constitutes the human that started to be in vogue, if you like, around the same time. So questions about relations between the human and the animal, which Wolf's own work deals with. questions of the humanism's response to the grand questions of the 20th century and the awful events of the 20th century, the extent to which the humanist response was able to was adequate to those monstrous things, if you like,
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
and so on. what comes after the human or how the human gets extrapolated, how the human gets prosphetized as I would say and is in a relation necessarily with the non-human or the inanimate. The animate is necessarily in relation with the inanimate from the start. I would argue that, I would argue for example that that the fetus in the womb is responding to an otherness that is totally other in the same way as when it comes out of the womb and it has to deal with the inanimate world that it's faced with. There's no point in which the human is not dealing with its others. Other humans, of course, other animals, of course, but huge extent, other inanimate objects. As soon as we put on clothes, as soon as we put on spectacles, we are proselytizing ourselves, you with your headphones right now,
PJ Wehry:
Yes.
David Wills:
and your microphone, and I with my computer, and laptop, and so on. So we're always in that sort of relationship that is adjacent to the human. of the human, but non-human, and so on. So some of those ideas were behind the choice of that name for the series, as far as I know. I personally didn't have anything to do with that choice.
PJ Wehry:
Heh.
David Wills:
But the work that I've done, it's true, all raises the question of how the The human negotiates its relations with the non-human, in particular the inanimate world, how our bodies increasingly are interacting with, but interacting to the point of internalizing pretty much. And now
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
with the development of technology, that becomes more and more obvious, right? Chips in the brain.
PJ Wehry:
Right.
David Wills:
forth. You know, the model, my model for prosthesis was, was a wooden leg. My father actually was an amputee.
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
And so he, we called it a wooden leg, of course, it wasn't wooden. But it was that sort of rudimentary prosthesis that was supposedly fulfilling the simple a disability, we would say, on the part of the human. And to me, and this became autobiographical in a sense, and that's a question that gets raised in that first volume, I do tell the story of how in the family, that wooden leg represented far more and many other things that had nothing to do with its simple replacement that had been amputated. And it was something around which all our family relations turned in a way. And
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
I would even say that my relation to my father worked through the wooden leg, not that I didn't have human relations with him,
PJ Wehry:
Right.
David Wills:
but that there was never a moment when the fact that he had this disability did not enter into our relations. whether the leg was on or off. Right.
PJ Wehry:
Right. It was a fundamental part of his identity and a part of any kind of story he constructed.
David Wills:
Right, and since you've used the word identity, an important element of that is the fact that it's a fundamental part of his identity, which is completely alien to
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
him as a human, as it were. So it also fragments or ruptures his identity, in a sense. So that he was a father who was whole to me, but he was also a father who had a disability. a father who was part flesh and part steel. There was no getting around that, so he didn't have a simple identity in that sense. And, you know, I would say that all of us, to the extent that we are prosphetized, are dealing with that type of fragmented or fractured identity.
PJ Wehry:
Yeah, I'm just sitting with that for a second. Yeah, I even as you walk through this, I can see why you ended up doing so much work with Derrida, right? Your approach and even the way you use your language is very reminiscent.
David Wills:
Maybe,
PJ Wehry:
Hahaha
David Wills:
yeah, I guess. But definitely, the idea of prosthesis is developed in his work extensively, and time and time again in places where he tries to deconstruct, if I can use that word, since it gets used in relation to his work, where he tries to deconstruct the human or relations between the human and its others. He says that it's not just about relation of one human to another, or relation of the human to the non-human animal, but he's always saying that the inanimate other is part of the equation, and that the human, he would be the first to argue that the human is technologized
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
originarily from the beginning. in different ways.
PJ Wehry:
If you don't mind me transitioning back to
David Wills:
Sure.
PJ Wehry:
Perjury and Pardon, and
David Wills:
Right.
PJ Wehry:
thank you for, that was a little bit off topic, but it was just really digging in a little bit into your biography, not crazy deep, but that was just, I wanted to ask you about that, that was fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about how Derrida approaches the idea of forgiveness?
David Wills:
Right. Um... I mean, the outside hypothesis, if you like, that is followed through in the work is the idea that one can only forgive the unforgivable. He says at a certain point, I wrote it down for us, there is forgiveness if there is such a thing only of the unforgivable. Excuse me. So what does he mean by that? He means that the trivial things that we say sorry for, pardon me.
PJ Wehry:
Yes, no harm done. Yeah.
David Wills:
And he opens the whole seminar with saying, Pardon in French which means sorry. uh... but which is in essence saying forgive me the trivial things where that is working uh... at reveal right and can be forgiven right so as soon as i say sorry you say no harm done right i've been to you i a i say sorry you say no harm done that's forgivable he he says if this is any real forgiveness right go much further than that, it has to go all the way to those things that we consider to be unforgivable. And the first example he takes in the first session of the first year of Von Neumann is a book by the philosopher Vladimir Yankalovich, who wrote a book on forgiveness. And he was writing it against the background of the Holocaust. Right? So there would be an example, right? How can one forgive the Nazis for the Holocaust? One can't, in a sense. Right? On the other hand... If there is anything, if there is a forgiveness that really is forgiveness in the strong, strong sense of the word, it would have to be up to the task of forgiving the unforgivable. And he works from that through various things, such as in French there is, and in most countries that have adopted human rights law in relation there is in France in particular there is a law that says there's no statute of limitations for a crime against humanity they use the word
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
and prescriptible the imprescriptible meaning to say that it's not anything that can ever be written off right so you know if if Hitler were alive today or any of those uh... nazi figures that were condemned uh... at at uh... nuremberg if if if those people uh... were around uh... fifty years later seventy five years later however much later it were it happened to be they would still be under french law they would still be liable to be tried for the crimes they had committed so so there is a sense in which uh... the law is saying this is unforgivable But that is of course intention in in in tension with The way that forgiveness functions a culturally from trivial cases all the way to more serious cases politically from smaller things all the way through and another example he refers to is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
It's in tension with... I've lost the beginning of my sentence now.
PJ Wehry:
You were talking about where he, actually this might be a good place to kind of go. In the second volume he talks about the political dimensions. In the first
David Wills:
Right.
PJ Wehry:
volume he talks about how the current accounts of forgiveness according to most traditions fail at providing a good accounting of forgiveness.
David Wills:
Right.
PJ Wehry:
So he gives like biblical accounts, Kant, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare.
David Wills:
Right, right. Right, that was the point I was going
PJ Wehry:
Thanks for watching!
David Wills:
to make. Not only cultural, not but, or political, but also religious, in particular religious conceptions of forgiveness, right? Religious conceptions of forgiveness, for example, Christian grace, right, is supposed to be an absolute form of forgiveness, right? God for everything. Right? You can do anything but it doesn't exclude you from Christian forgiveness, for example. So he puts that into contrast with how the same notion supposedly worked in ancient Greek thinking, where they have closer to indulgence than
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
forgiveness in the Judaic tradition, in the Koranic tradition to some extent. He wants to say that all of these are dealing with it differently, so that there the idea of the unforgivable is that it is forgivable, right? In certain cases, for example. So that is in tension precisely with a law of no statute of limitations, right, which seems
PJ Wehry:
Right.
David Wills:
not to allow for forgiveness. Yeah, so but
PJ Wehry:
If I can give a real-
David Wills:
you were mentioning something about volume two?
PJ Wehry:
Well, I was going to actually, to give a real example, you're talking about if Hitler were alive today, a real example of this statue of limitations question, I was talking to Dr. Lewis Gordon probably a year ago now, and one of the things that's come up is there's no statue of limitations on murder, and we literally have, in the United States, we
David Wills:
Thanks for watching!
PJ Wehry:
have a history of lynchings, especially in the 50s, and people proudly posed for newspaper photos with their names attached, and we know who those people are, they're still alive. We know who these people are. And so that, I mean, this is a very live question. It's, you know, I like the example of Hitler as a hypothetical, but you know, because in some ways it's almost too close to home when you think about these very living and real examples of how statue limitations can play out.
David Wills:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
Um, so
David Wills:
I mean, the, I was just going to say the examples that he concentrates on in that second volume are precisely the, in terms of contemporary examples, are the South African example,
PJ Wehry:
Yeah.
David Wills:
right, where apartheid comes to an end, there have been all these crimes committed, but the country wants to move on, right?
PJ Wehry:
Right.
David Wills:
have the right to say what they experienced and shocking things, right? And the relatives of the victims are able to ask for apologies and so on and so forth and face their victimizers. And you know, that was an important and cathartic experience for that country. at the end of that period of apartheid. So that example he concentrates on. And then the other one, which I guess alongside that seems trivial, but it was contemporary at the time, at the end of the 90s was the impeachment of Clinton.
PJ Wehry:
Thanks for watching!
David Wills:
Because there's a moment when Clinton says, I'm sorry, when he goes before the television cameras, I can't remember exactly what moment it was process, but where he said, you know, I've done things and I'm sorry, I've caused harm, right? He doesn't say I've lied because he was still faced with the perjury charge, right? But he says I'm sorry. was working in the American political context, right? And in relation to Clinton's potential or real legal liability. But also just in relation to the political situation and the cultural situation and how the Republican Party was using this against the Democratic Party, just as the Republicans would approach the Democrats doing the same in impeaching Trump, right? It's a political process. There's no getting away from it. But he was fascinated in it, fascinated in that, in its American context, but also in what he saw as this global flourishing, as it were, of scenes of forgiveness or scenes of asking for forgiveness. And the Pope, for example, didn't say sorry for the Inquisition, but introduced something that nevertheless suggested a type of saying sorry. Picasso's Guernica
PJ Wehry:
Perhaps.
David Wills:
got restored to Spain, and there was a type of reparation that was made in that case. various various political figures at that time and I think it still goes on this could be a humorous aside for later perhaps but he
PJ Wehry:
I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.
David Wills:
was fascinated by the idea that suddenly everybody's saying sorry in these political situations but measuring how sorry they are in relation precisely to what they in terms of, you know, penitence, reparation, and so on and so forth, right? So it's a guarded sorry. So is that a situation of forgiveness that's going on there?
PJ Wehry:
And how does, I mean, it's interesting that you bring up. Clinton not saying sorry for lying. How does lying as a thread kind of tie into this whole discussion?
David Wills:
Alright.
PJ Wehry:
How does Dare to Use lying to kind of work within this framework of forgiveness?
David Wills:
Because he sees perjury, right? And in the American context in particular, the functioning of perjury and the emphasis that's placed on perjury in the legal system and how the sanctions against perjury are strong, right? liabilities such as obstruction of justice and so on and so forth right and perjury is a big thing so he sees sees it as being important in that contemporary cultural context but also once one looks at Augustine once one looks at
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
Rousseau both of whom wrote confessions right he of the lie to be something of a paradigm for fault in general. Right? That not because there's any comparison between simple comparison between lying and committing a massacre. Right? But that there is a type of structural continuity can be can be understood within the idea of of perjuring yourself making yourself into something that you tell yourself you're not right
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
you're lying to yourself you have to lie to yourself in order to lie to somebody else right and if you're lying to yourself you're making yourself other than you are and therefore making yourself capable of being a criminal on the final analysis all the way to performing something unmentionable, unforgivable. So he sees this sort of balance between the lie and the forgiveness. He would look at biblical examples. the flood where God went back on his own word, right, and said, sorry to humanity, I won't do this again, right? A very interesting mechanism, right? Very interesting thing going on there where God in a sense says I lied, right? fault. I didn't lie in a simple sense but I unleashed, I let myself get angry angry enough to unleash this this flood. Let's have a new covenant where I say I won't do this again. So it's as if the new covenant, right, was a reparation for a fault which was a type of lie because when when one signs a new contract, right, That's a contract where one is pledging to be truthful to that contract. So in the case of God, one could say that the implication is that in the first covenant, he wasn't truthful to it. He broke the contract in the sense of a perjuring of himself, in that sense. I mean, the
PJ Wehry:
Interesting.
David Wills:
word in French, par jour, the event, the lie itself, and to the person who tells the lie, who does the lie. So, Impajur is a liar, a perjurer, and Le Pajur is the lie itself. And he plays with that ambiguity in the final chapters of the second volume.
PJ Wehry:
So even as we're talking about this, why can forgiveness not be reduced to just repentance and punishment? Why does he need perjury? Do you mind expanding on that a little bit more? Maybe more in terms of like why can't it be forgiveness in this? Why does it have to be the the lie? Why is it the in office in office?
David Wills:
Ah,
PJ Wehry:
If I could
David Wills:
okay.
PJ Wehry:
say in authenticity
David Wills:
Right.
PJ Wehry:
That is the real problem
David Wills:
okay well it's for those if you like thematic reasons that i just uh... outlying right that
PJ Wehry:
Yes.
David Wills:
visit way in which one can say that the the basic harm is a type of life
PJ Wehry:
Yes,
David Wills:
uh...
PJ Wehry:
I understand. Yes, I'm tracking with that. So why can't
David Wills:
What's
PJ Wehry:
it be the
David Wills:
that?
PJ Wehry:
other explanations? Sorry. Yeah,
David Wills:
Well,
PJ Wehry:
yeah.
David Wills:
the other explanation is in terms of the work that he wants the title to do, where on the one hand, pardon is forgiveness, but it also has the word don or gift in it. So that's why it transliterates into English as forgive. Pardon.
PJ Wehry:
Ah.
David Wills:
And perjury, we have the old word in English, forswear. When you forswear, it means when you go back on your oath. So we do have these. And he wants the idea of the gift to be something of a paradigm case for what he often calls situations where you know damned if you do damned if you don't there's no there's there's no way that you can there's no way that I can just give you something without expecting something in return even if I want to and there's no way that you can receive a gift from me without having some idea that you owe me something right so the I if the idea of a gift would have to be something that totally exceeds any economic exchange. So he studied in other situations how that functions. So I think he wanted to keep that as, as I say, the umbrella term, giving, how to give, giving freely, to what extent that is possible, how to give without indebted the other person, the person necessarily feeling they're indebted and so on and so forth. So I think there's a strong sense in which outside of those thematic concerns that I mentioned he sees a parallelism of giving, forgiving and swearing,
PJ Wehry:
Yeah, thank you. That's a great answer to what was admittedly kind of poorly worded question. So appreciate that. Even as you talk about the aporia, it reminds me all the way at the back, at the beginning of our conversation, we were talking about translation, right? This is kind of the thing that fascinates Derrida is that we have to try and translate. We have to try and forgive, but it's impossible, right? And that's even the start of this. that one only ever asks forgiveness for what is unforgivable. And in a lot of ways, 15 years ago when I was first starting to read Derrida, and I was trying to understand him, you start to understand he's an Algerian Jew, he's trying to process the Holocaust. You see his talks with Labarth and Gadamer as they're talking about their heritage from Heidegger. When we talk about the unforgivable, And I don't want to oversimplify, because that's really dangerous to Derrida, but this idea that we've all been taught the Holocaust in history class, right? You know, or in the news, and we saw, we've seen the videos of the bodies being pushed with bulldozers, and it's overwhelming, right? It's, we can't even begin to fully grasp that, right? We say words like six million and we don't, that's, it's really not comprehendable, right? When we talk about numbers that big. And so if we can't even comprehend the evil, how can we forgive it? Is that kind of, is that a good, another way of saying what Derrida's saying?
David Wills:
Yeah, I mean, I don't know to what extent he would consider these things to be quantifiable, right? And as you just suggested, you know, six million means something, but also means something impossible to comprehend, right? But I think in terms of how perjury and pardon function, as we said at the beginning, it goes all the way from this the trip most trivial to the most horrendous. So, so along that scale right we wrestle all the time with with trying to quantify and to say how bad is this right? How bad
PJ Wehry:
Right.
David Wills:
is this and so what's the punishment? We want the punishment to fit the crime right? of quantifying. But in the final analysis, it's something that I think he would shy away from trying to, presuming to be able to conceptualize in a systematic way. I mean, he takes, for example, the outrageous case of the merchant of Venice and the pound of flesh, that Shylock is required to give in order to pay his debt. And it's there where he brings into play, in a very explicit sense, the extent to which the Christian version of forgiveness is in tension with the Judaic version, and how the
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
Christian version, in fact, in that particular case, is, He's pretending a certain superiority that allows it to enslave, in the final analysis, the Jew in the picture. So all the while, when Portia is giving this wonderful speech about the quality of mercy and introducing mercy, which is another word he uses a lot because it means grace, And it means something, a gratuitous forgiveness, in its best sense. But it comes from mercis, the Latin word for wages. So it's totally tied into an economic situation. And thanks, remerciement in French, all these words function as economic words, even though they're be representing this gratuitous sense of grace, of giving, once again, that's where the giving comes back, right? Of giving gratuitously without expecting anything in return. Pure forgiveness, pure grace, which is precisely not what is an operation there.
PJ Wehry:
Right.
David Wills:
And when Portia gives this speech, tongue-in-cheek because she uses it in order to gain it as a lawyer because she's dressed as a lawyer in order to precisely win an argument over Shylock and put him in a situation of totally losing everything even at the very moment where she's invoking this idea of grace or mercy.
PJ Wehry:
Yeah. Yeah.
David Wills:
Earthly power is most like God when mercy seasons justice, is that famous line. I'll give you the pure Shakespeare. Earthly power doth then show likest gods when mercy seasons justice. So justice itself, so that would be the level at which there's an attempt to quantify, right? And have the punishment fit the crime. I at the outside, right?
PJ Wehry:
Right.
David Wills:
Justice by itself is not enough, right? If we want to be godlike, we have to introduce mercy and Derrida loves the word seasons there, and he uses it in the culinary sense, right? When mercy spices up justice.
PJ Wehry:
I'm going to go ahead and turn it off.
David Wills:
But it's more complicated because in the French version of Shakespeare is is relevant, which is the same word that is used for Alfhaven in translations of Hegel. And what we call, what we translate as sublation these days. So there would be an overcoming, a replacement and an overcoming. So mercy would have to replace an overcoming come justice. Right? If we are to have a justice system like close to gods, right? So he's playing, as I say, both with the sense of spicing up justice and of transcending justice.
PJ Wehry:
Dr. Wills, I want to be respectful of your time. One, thank you so much for coming on today. Besides buying your excellent translation, which I think everyone should do, what is one thing that you would leave to our audience about carefully reading Derrida, or even perhaps about forgiveness? What's one thing that you would leave our audience thinking about this week?
David Wills:
Well, first of all, the audience will have to forgive me
PJ Wehry:
Yeah
David Wills:
for my failure to express these ideas as well as I could have or might have. And I say that jokingly, but I also say it because it's something that another dimension that we didn't get to that Derrida raises, which is the idea that, in fact, forgiveness is there in as soon as one opens one's mouth.
PJ Wehry:
Mm.
David Wills:
As soon as one opens one's mouth, one is presuming that the other person is going to listen to what one says, whatever is going to come out of one's mouth. One requires that before one can even speak.
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
I have to have a relationship of trust with We can't say the slightest thing unless I trust that you're listening to me and prepared to listen to me and vice versa. So there's a relationship of trust that is a way of saying, sorry for inconveniencing you but I'd like to say something.
PJ Wehry:
Yes, yes.
David Wills:
If one can think about the idea that one is saying sorry when everyone speaks, it might bring the idea of forgiveness to the fore. But also, I guess, just to reinforce the importance of this work by Derrida,
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
both to bring into day and situations that are massively impossible, seemingly impossible to deal with
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
through these thematic and through this philosophical thinking that is far from removed from everyday ethical situations. reading De Maede that yes he's often he's not like another philosopher that he's not he is not trying to willingly trying to confuse you
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
he's or to think about them from a different point of view than the point of view from which we normally think about them, and to realize to what extent we are in these sorts of situations, in situations of secrecy,
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
David Wills:
not just when we are Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac, but in everyday relations. when we have to determine how much room we're going to give to a so-called guest. We're in situations of forgiveness, as I say, from the moment we open our mouths, that these are things worth thinking about because they're the ethics of the everyday in many respects, but also they go all the way to these insoluble problems that we keep trying to face, how to deal with terrible things that happen.
PJ Wehry:
Dr. Wills, it's been a genuine pleasure talking to you today. Thank you very much.
David Wills:
You're very welcome. I enjoyed talking to you too.