1.1 What is (Wrong With) “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?”?

This essay and the companion story interwoven in with it, the beginning of which you’ve just read, come out of a certain disgruntlement with Jacques Derrida’s 1998 lecture “Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction ‘relevante’?” (Derrida Reference Derrida1999), which I will mostly be engaging in its English translation by Lawrence Venuti as “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b). Kathryn Batchelor (Reference Batchelor2023) seems to reflect a similar kind of disgruntlement in noting that Venuti’s translation, published in Critical Inquiry and later included in the second and third editions of The Translation Studies Reader (Venuti Reference Venuti, Derrida and Venuti2004, Reference Venuti, Derrida and Venuti2012), has canonized the essay “as a key text in Anglophone translation studies; many a Masters student in the UK, if not further afield, finds themselves required to read it, sometimes to their own bemusement” (Batchelor Reference Batchelor2023: 1).

Why are they bemused? Because, she suggests, “Derrida’s lecture is a strange, centaur-like beast” (1).

For one thing, she says, it’s not really about translation.Footnote ¹ It’s mainly about the themes of mercy and forgiveness as developed by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice – the topic of a two-year seminar Derrida was in the middle of giving when he delivered this lecture at the Assises de la Traduction Littéraire à Arles conference, in France. Indeed she notes that the entire discussion of The Merchant of Venice and mercy and justice in the 1998 talk – fully two thirds of the talk: pp. 30–45 in French (Derrida Reference Derrida1999), 183–97 in English translation (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b) – was recycled almost verbatim from the written text that Derrida was then reading to his students in the two-year seminar series, recently published in two volumes (Derrida Reference Derrida2019, Reference Derrida2020 in French, and Wills Reference Wills, Michaud and Cotton2022, Reference Wills, Michaud and Cotton2023 in English translation). The opening and closing frame on translation is tacked on, through the rather flimsy pretext of commenting on the possibility of translating “seasons” in the line Shakespeare gives Portia, “mercy seasons justice,” with the same verb he used back in 1967 to translate Hegel’s hebt auf “sublates”: relève.Footnote ² The rare minor edits he introduced into the text of the seminar were brief phrases linking the discussion of forgiveness and mercy to translation.

And for another thing, she says, the ostensible translation studies frame is “not particularly interesting, for the reflections that Derrida presents are on what Matthew Reynolds (Reference Reynolds and Reynolds2019: 36) terms ‘Translation Rigidly Conceived,’ or in other words on ‘translation (traduction, Übersetzung, traduccion, translación, and so forth), in the rigorous sense conferred on it over several centuries by a long and complex history in a given cultural situation’ [Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 179]” (quoted in Batchelor Reference Batchelor2023: 4). Yawn.

So what is a translation scholar to do with this accidentally canonized essay, if it is this tediously pedestrian on the topic of translation?

The solution offered by one unnamed lecturer online (https://archive.nptel.ac.in/content/storage2/courses/109104050/lecture12/12_7.htm) is to celebrate the uncharacteristically pedestrian Derrida as comfortably and reassuringly conservative. For example, Derrida writes “A relevant translation is a translation whose economy, in these two senses, is the best possible, the most appropriating and the most appropriate possible” (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 179), and the lecturer comments:

And it does seem, at least on a superficial reading, as if Derrida’s essay from beginning to end is a championing of “relevant translation”: “A relevant translation would therefore be, quite simply, a ‘good’ translation” (177). It’s “the best possible” (179). “What the translation with the word ‘relevant’ also demonstrates, in an exemplary fashion, is that every translation should be relevant by vocation” (199).

It’s not just “good,” “the best possible”; it’s “exemplary” proof that “every translation” should be called to be relevant.

But another way of dealing with the essay, as brilliantly exemplified by Michael G. Levine (Reference Levine2022), is to argue (and “show”) that Derrida doesn’t really mean all this tepid praise. Actually, Levine suggests, he despises relevant translation. In calling it “good” translation, “the best possible,” he’s paraphrasing standard views, not stating his own. He’s pretending to praise a commonly accepted conservative perspective on translation, one that he himself doesn’t condone and would never practice.

Why would he pretend such a thing?

Perhaps just to be fair? But then he never explicitly distances his apparent support for “relevant” translation in that way.

Perhaps to satirize that perspective? But if that’s what he’s doing, the satire is nowhere overtly tonalized in the written text of the talk. Maybe in Arles in 1998 he read those passages in a sarcastic tone, or accompanied them with ironic eyerolls at his audience? Certainly, we can project derisive body language onto his imagined delivery as we read those words.

Perhaps because he assumes that smart people will immediately recognize tepid praise for commonplace/marketplace assumptions about “good” translations (“the best possible”) as polite irony? But Derrida’s audience in Arles consisted of professional literary translators, and he repeatedly addressed them in the talk/paper as people who knew much more about professional marketplace translation than he did. Shouldn’t he have assumed that they would have been trained to embrace professional translation norms uncritically, as part of the cost of making a living? Shouldn’t he have worked rhetorically to wean them away from those assumptions, instead of simply repeating them unchallenged as truisms?

His one overt hint in this distancing direction comes a few pages in: “je ne transgresse pas un code de la bienséance ou de la modestie au titre du défi provocant,” he writes, “mais de l’épreuve” (Derrida Reference Derrida1999: 25). As Venuti (Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b) translates that: “I don’t transgress a code of decency or modesty through a provocative challenge, but through a trial” (178).Footnote ³ We’ll return to the “trial” in Section 2.1; for now, note simply that he is admitting that he is transgressing. He doesn’t say explicitly what “code” he is transgressing; he doesn’t list or even mention the norms of the professional translation marketplace or “relevant translation.” The noun phrase un code de la bienséance, ou de la modestie “the code of decency or modesty” is a deliberate and surprisingly tendentious euphemism – perhaps a reductio ad absurdum. It might even be read – maugre Derrida’s famous politeness – as a deeply submerged défi provocant “provocative/defiant challenge”: you professional literary translators are like a Decency League, concerned with banning obscene language and bare skin in entertainment and demanding buttoned-up modesty in social dress and comportment, or, in a professional translation context, banning “irrelevant” deviations from the strait and narrow into weird postmodern experimentations that might (im)plausibly be read as zombie translations.

Read that way, Derrida’s repeated praise for “relevant translation” might well be taken as letting some air out of his audience’s tires.

Michael Levine’s (Reference Levine2022) reading of the essay is infinitely more attractive than the anonymous lecturer’s, but I put scare quotes around “show” a few paragraphs ago – Levine “showing” that Derrida doesn’t really mean all this tepid praise – for a reason. Levine reads every sentence of the essay far more attentively than any other commentator I’ve seen, with the possible exception of Hélène Cixous (Milesi Reference Milesi and Cixous2012); but the highly persuasive evidence that he marshals for his conclusions is mostly circumstantial, based on analogues from other work by Derrida himself and others. Textual evidence for those readings taken directly from “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” is hard to find and always requires some impressive intuitive leaps.

This passage, for example, serves as a kind of hermeneutical tipping point:

The problem there is that ne signifie rien d’autre “signifies nothing other” neglects to mention the several different kinds of autres “others” that “What is a relevant translation?” could be made to signify:

1. (1) “relevante” directs our attention to a specific kind of translation that usefully differentiates it from other professionally accepted kinds;

2. (2) “relevante” signifies a defect or deficiency in the accounts Derrida gives of “relevant translation”;

3. (3) “relevante” signifies a defect or deficiency in professional translation as here defined by Derrida as “relevant translation”;

4. (4) “relevante” is a Latinate derivative that is problematically pulled in different and crisscrossing ways in English and French; and

5. (5) “relevante” as (4) pulled in those ways makes Derrida’s title untranslatable.

Heading off that list is (1) the boring strawman “other” that Derrida seems to be implicitly rejecting in favor of (4–5), which are the only two “others” that Derrida explicitly mentions as his reasons not to faire l’économie “make the economy” (economize) on the word “relevant” – not l’oublier, le laisser tomber sans retard “to obliviate it, to let it tumble without retardment” (not to forget it, drop it). Both (4) and (5) make relevant/relever interesting without indicating anything about (2–3) defects or deficiency in the whole business of “relevant translation.” His happiness at the (5) untranslatability of his title may be a subtle hint that Levine might be right about his take on “relevant translation,” that it (5>2>3) “shies away from l’épreuve de l’expérience, from the dangerous ordeal” (Levine 13) of untranslatability – but Derrida doesn’t draw that line. He only (arguably) hints at it.

I will also be arguing more generally that Derrida could (and perhaps should) have pushed harder on the imageries that he mobilized in the essay.

Well, that’s a euphemistic way of putting it. Let’s just say that my zombie reading of the essay, and the zombie memoir interwoven with it, like a pound of narrative flesh in rebarbative reverse, is an extremist strategy for exploring the possibilities that might have emerged had Derrida pushed harder.

1.2 Toward “What is a ‘Revenant’ Translation?”

Kathryn Batchelor has an intriguing alternative to Derrida’s opening pages on “Translation Rigidly Conceived,” one focusing on a throwaway remark Derrida makes in his introductory paragraphs: “le mot … dans le corps de sa singularité idiomatique” (Derrida Reference Derrida1999: 21) “the word … in the body of its idiomatic singularity” (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 175, quoted in Batchelor Reference Batchelor2023: 8). She tracks Derrida’s word-oriented play with translation through a series of his other works, focusing particularly on relève,Footnote ⁵ and concludes:

My only hesitation about Batchelor’s approach is that it focuses all its attention on (4–5) and doesn’t engage the slippage Derrida leaves undeveloped in his argument between (2–3) and (4–5). “Rather than seeking to build on Derrida’s lightly sketched analogy between the economy of translation and the economy of mercy” means that we can just ignore (2–3) the defects and deficiencies in Derrida’s discussions of “relevant translation” and focus all our attention on (4–5) “how translation – through the translative body of the word relevant – ‘puts [languages] to work’.” That would mean ignoring not only half of the essay but half of the translationality of “the translative body of the word relevant.” If the half that is ignored is the half that just drags the expected brilliance of Derrida’s riffing down, no great loss. But …

Levine (Reference Levine2022) takes another tack: he complicates every aspect, every moment, in Derrida’s essay by triangulating it with other writings, especially Derrida’s (Bass Reference Bass, Derrida and Derrida1987) “To Speculate – on ‘Freud’” (the uncanniness of the Freudian repetition compulsion); Austin’s (1962/Reference Austin, Urmson and Sbisà1975) How To Do Things With Words (the tension between constative statements and performative actions); Freud’s (Reference Freud and Freud1997) “Theme of the Three Caskets,” to which Derrida (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b) alludes in passing (184n4: -phor and -fer and the -latum in translation as carrying); Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Nicholson-Smith Reference Nicholson-Smith, Laplanche and Pontalis1973) in Language of Psychoanalysis (“the reemergence of infantile prototypes that are experienced with a strong sensation of immediacy,” which “may also be observed in the process of translation” [Laplanche and Pontalis 455; quoted in Levine 9]); and so on.

Along the way Levine highlights several imageries that will prove useful as we edge from “relevance” toward “revenance”: the uncanny repetition of “haunting bodies and stalking ghosts” (8); “a series of ghosts standing in for others, for a structure of haunting without origin or end” (8–9); the idea that “something inside [the Hegelian dialectics] seems to work against them, something that secretly, silently, and insistently undermines and reworks them from the inside out” (13); “tongues that lick each other” (14) and the tensions between an embodied langue-as-tongue and a disembodied langue-as-language (15: “a certain licking and caressing of la langue”), or, as Derrida (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 199) puts it (and Levine quotes on p. 12), “what, in being freed from the body, is elevated above it, interiorizes it, spiritualizes it, preserves it in memory.”

That kind of interiorized, spiritualized memory is one of the things that “revenant” zombie translation will call into question.

2.1 Derrida’s Economies

Derrida says he wants to explore “a certain economy that relates the translatable to the untranslatable, not as the same to the other, but as same to same or other to other” (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 178; Derrida’s-and-then-Venuti’s emphasis). One imagines a poster with a vertical line down the middle labeled “same to same or other to other,” and “what is translatable” on one side and “what is untranslatable” on the other. “Relating” would then be a matter of drawing a string across from “what is translatable” to “what is untranslatable.”

Not a complex image. The complication is that he wants to call it an “economy.”

But perhaps “relat[ing] the translatable to the untranslatable” is just what high-school English teachers are apparently still calling a “thesis sentence”? Maybe he’s just putting a kind of title on the idea of an economy of relation and will next set about filling in the real economic complexities?

Maybe – but he actually seems to be heading in the opposite direction. In the next paragraph it’s no longer an economy but “a principle of economy”: “How does a principle of economy permit one to say two apparently contradictory things at the same time (1. ‘Nothing is translatable’; 2. ‘Everything is translatable)?” (179; Derrida’s-and-then-Venuti’s emphasis). A principle of economy, like an ideal type of economy, or the Platonic Form of “economy,” is not a loose gathering of forces functioning to regulate the distribution and valuation of resources; it’s an abstract structure with no possibility of play in it.

A principle of economy actually sounds less like an economic circulation and more like a principle of parsimony, or Occam’s Razor: let’s define translatability and untranslatability as parsimoniously as we can, for example by treating them not as opposites but as different instantiations of the same thing.

For Derrida, as for most practicing translators, the parsimonious response to loose talk of untranslatability involves reference to “the experience that I suppose is so common to us as to be beyond any possible dispute, namely, that any given translation, whether the best or the worst, actually stands between the two, between absolute relevance, the most appropriate, adequate, univocal transparency, and the most aberrant and opaque irrelevance” (178).

In other words, if “translation” is defined in one way (as the perfect target-language reproduction of every aspect of a source text, including style and word order), “nothing is translatable”; and if “translation” is defined in another way (as a pragmatic workaround that gives the target reader a pretty good idea of what is going on in the source text, without quantitative equivalence), “everything is translatable.”

Derrida (Reference Derrida1999) calls this an “économie de l’entre-deux” (26) / “economy of in-betweenness” (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 179): real-world translation would seem to be the middle excluded by a dumb binary. Not exactly earth-shaking news: this is pretty much true of every binary. And of course he didn’t invent the dumb binary or the idea that real-world translation happens between the poles: the old chestnut “as freely as you must, as closely as you can” goes way back, at least to early-modern Europe. His audience in Arles was made up of practicing literary translators, who may not have known the history behind the binary but would certainly have recognized its general contours. And he addressed them as people who knew more about translating than he did.

It’s a little strange, perhaps, that in roughing in the practical situation on the ground, he describes what a practicing translator would call a learned knack, a talent for workarounds,Footnote ⁸ a knowing how to handle semantic difficulties, as an “economy”:

That is actually just the first hyperbole: perfect “free” translation, which conveys the whole sense and style of the original by straying at will from its quantitative word count, sentence count, paragraph count. The other is perfect “close” translation, which captures the exact meaning and style of the original with the exact same sentence structures and each word translated accurately and without remainder.

Because real-world translation falls into the middle between those impossible extremes – those “hyperboles” – it is never either perfectly free or perfectly close. This is obviously what Derrida calls “translation (traduction, Übersetzung, traduccion, translación, and so forth), in the rigorous sense conferred on it over several centuries by a long and complex history in a given cultural situation” (179) – and nobody needs him to tell us that. This is the domain in which Derrida tells us hardly anything about translation, and in which what he does tell us is him belaboring the obvious, knowledge that is “relevant” only to undergraduate students taking their first class on translation.

But now consider the passing hints that Michael Levine gathers from here and there in Derrida’s text and reads as a more trenchant sketch of an economy that produces “relevant” translations:

This is a good first step past the tired platitudes: rather than simply defining “relevant translation” as “good,” “the best possible,” Derrida feels uneasy about that relevant “goodness.” Derrida nowhere overtly confesses that botheredness, that provocation, that irritation, that unsettlement, that fascination; that’s all speculation. But it’s productive speculation. It organizes the hints to which Levine directs our attention in plausible and attractive ways. In those hints Derrida is still somewhere in the middle between extreme hypotheses, but he is more forthcoming about what he wants to happen in that middle. Instead of being just vaguely dans l’entre-deux “in the in-between,” he insists on courting impossibility, courting untranslatability. His rejoinder to the marketplace tolerance for “the most possible” is effectively Goethe’s advice in the Maximen und Reflexionen (which Derrida didn’t cite, or perhaps even know): the translator must “bis ans Unübersetzliche herangehen; alsdann wird man aber erst die fremde Nation und die fremde Sprache gewahr” (Goethe 1826/Reference Goethe and Hechter1907: 449), or “quest toward the untranslatable: there you will catch your first glimpse of the foreign country and its language” (Robinson Reference Robinson2014: 224). The impossible ideal for Goethe isn’t translatability but untranslatability (in modern German die Unübersetzbarkeit; in Goethe’s German die Unübersetzlichkeit). As it did for the Romantics and Walter Benjamin before him, for Derrida too that seems to mean radical literalism – tellingly, something like the perfection of “close” translation that adheres strictly to the extreme hypothesis that makes translation (seem) impossible, but now as a deranging tool rather than an ideal. Ply the waters of l’entre-deux “the in-between” by steering away from marketplace tolerance for lowered expectations and mobilizing the opposite extreme, word-for-word perfection, as a complication.

Like Goethe, Derrida knows that he will never reach that goal, but no matter: the tricky pleasure lies in the approach. That approach begins to stir hints of the impossible ideal into the mundanity of “relevant” translation, enlivening it by hybridizing it. Or in Derrida’s terms, “it puts to work the languages, first of all, without adequation or transparency, here assuming the shape of a new writing or rewriting that is performative or poetic” (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 198). “Without adequation or transparency”: remember that “the most appropriate, adequate, univocal transparency” was Derrida’s characterization of what he called “absolute relevance” (178). (This is one of those rare moments in the essay when Derrida distances himself clearly from “relevant translation.” But even that “clarity” is only available through une épreuve “a test”: you have to have a good enough memory to recognize “without adequation or transparency” as a callback to a brief list of attributes twenty pages earlier.)Footnote ⁹

Levine (Reference Levine2022) calls that “performative or poetic” approach l’expérience de l’impossible and notes that Derrida calls it une épreuve “an ordeal” involving “experimentation”: “A ‘relevant’ translation, one satisfied by the most possible, le plus possible, shies away from l’épreuve de l’expérience, from the dangerous ordeal, the testing and experimentation that every attempt at translation conceived of as an ‘experience of the impossible’ should be” (13).

What specifically should that experience be? “Comme ce qui est dû à Shylock, l’insolvable même,” Derrida (Reference Derrida1999: 21) says: “Much like what is owed to Shylock, insolvency itself” (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 175).

Or, as we’ve seen him putting it:

Is that self-testing, that experimental self-propulsion into danger, an economy? Probably not. But now we’re getting somewhere interesting. The static structure of the purported économie de l’entre-deux “economy of the in-between” imposes that restrictive code de la bienséance, ou de la modestie “code of decency or modesty” on the market-conscious translator, who compliantly creates a “relevant” translation, which is to say a “good” translation, “the best possible.” As we’ve seen, that “decency” or “modesty” requires that the market-conscious translator steer clear of Derridean postmodern “irrelevancy,” the kind of experimentalism that takes the compliant translator’s eyes off the prize (income, a livelihood, or Latin mercēs). But the wrench that Derrida tosses into the workings of that code is not a “provocative challenge” so much as a test, a trial, an ordeal, une épreuve – one that he creates for himself, to push his translations beyond boring “relevance.”

Then again, what is “the untranslatable,” exactly? Most commonly it refers to a word or a phrase or a whole source text that commentators view as impossible to translate adequately, without remainder; but that can’t be what Derrida means here. He means not a specific text but an abstraction, or perhaps a felt kinesthesis, an aporia, standing in for a nebulously defined but strongly felt translation strategy. His “transgression” is more or less the opposite of the untranslatable text: his source text could be translated “relevantly,” which is to say “well,” “the best way possible,” or piously, decently, modestly, respectably, but he would find the result of that “bestness” distasteful. He doesn’t want to yield to that marketplace norm, which to him feels like a pious dumbing down, a decent or modest condescension, a case of the bland leading the bland. He wants to push himself to translate more complexly, indeed more problematically, more aporetically. He musters up a strategy that he calls l’épreuve de l’intraduisible “the trial of the untranslatable” to goad him into that problematized or aporetic zone where the available words and phrases are not what the marketplace would consider “relevant.” He wants to deprive himself, “relieve” himself, of the usual idiomatic resources that feed the marketplace zone of relevant translation, in order to intensify the performative/poetic feel of the work.Footnote ¹⁰

That aporetic trial zone is what I want to call the zombie zone.

2.2 Levine’s Transferential Economy

Beyond that emphasis on “the experience of the impossible/untranslatable” as an “ordeal,” Levine tends to read Derrida symptomatically, as driven by various unconscious formations to obsess about certain things and to ignore others:

“Fated,” “haunted,” and “ventriloquized”: three verbs that subtly nudge us toward a recursive/revenant economy in Section 2c and ultimately toward a zombie economy of translation in Sections 5c–5g. So when Derrida rambles strangely about a principle of economy or an economy of the in-between, when he seems to be lost and confused and mostly mouthing painfully obvious platitudes, that is because he has been translating “a certain language of economy … from The Merchant of Venice,” and that language has been ventriloquizing him. He’s not in control. He’s the ventriloquist’s dummy, and thus not to blame for any dumb remarks at which we may be gaping.

As for “subtly drawing attention” to transference, to the “bearing” of transference, Derrida first hints in this direction early in the essay:

The hint there that “translation,” as le motif apparemment plus neutre “an apparently more neutral motif,” will be competitively influenced by transference “in all possible codes and not only that of psychoanalysis” leads Levine (Reference Levine2022) to “the way the very word and act of ‘translation’ will have borne ‘transference,’ will have been affected, inhabited, and displaced by it from the very first” (7).

But note how deftly Levine sidesteps transference’s psychoanalytical “code.” Derrida declines to restrict transference to that code, but he also declines to exclude it. And it should go without saying that that psychoanalytical code would entail the unconscious transfer of affect not simply from one word or “motif” to another but from one person to another.

It would not, in other words, be just “the very word and act of ‘translation’” that would have been “affected, inhabited, and displaced by [transference] from the very first.” It would also be the affective body of Derrida himself.

Who then, we might ask next, would be the parental figure whose emotions and desires might notionally have been unconsciously transferred to Derrida? Levine seems to hint that it is Shakespeare, or The Merchant of Venice as Shakespeare’s authoritative word. That would be the sense in which Derrida is “haunted” and “ventriloquized” by the play: “affected, inhabited, and displaced” by it.

In suggesting that Derrida is “haunted” by Hegel’s ghost, too, Levine is hinting at another kind of transference: Hegel not just as an influential philosopher whom Derrida has deconstructed, but as a revenant that lurks inside Derrida’s Geist.

I’m going to be linking that “something that secretly, silently, and insistently undermines and reworks them from the inside out” not just with revenants but specifically with zombies – zombies irrepressibly popping up out of secret underground passageways. That “something” keeps “secretly, silently, and insistently” returning and resisting, like traumatically repressed memories.

But that’s not all. Derrida himself later writes:

Antonio is the play’s main figure of endettement insolvable “insolvent indebtedness,” and also of the serment de fidélité envers un original donné “oath of fidelity to a given original,” namely Shylock’s bond [lien]: “Let me have judgment,” he says, “and the Jew his will” (IV.1.81). He agreed to the bond that would take his life if he defaulted; now that he has defaulted, he is ready to die. Derrida is reading that insolvent indebtedness and that oath of fidelity as a figure of “all translation” – which is to say that Antonio is a figure for every translator. But for whom else?

Certainly for Derrida himself as a translator. But what about Derrida as the author of this essay?

That last question becomes especially pressing in the part about “a promise that is, moreover, impossible and asymmetrical, transferential and countertransferential.” Transference, as we’ve seen, is not to be limited to a psychoanalytical “code”: the Latin roots of transference have been around for more than two millennia, in the “codes” of transport, property deeds, and so on. But countertransference was expressly theorized for the first and definitive time for that psychoanalytical “code” – by Freud himself, in 1910, as die Gegenübertragung – and has only ever been extended beyond that “code” metaphorically.

If we begin with Derrida-the-translator and Derrida-the-author transferring his/their affects to other people, we may find Derrida’s identification with Shylock and disidentification from Portia invested in his attitudes toward his audience in Arles. The (notional) submerged hostility of “I transgress a code of decency or modesty not through a provocative challenge, but through a trial” (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 178), implicitly calling that audience esclaves des bienséances “slaves to respectability,” is really more intense than it needs to be with this room full of strangers. Decency, modesty, respectability, and mercy. The transference of Antonio’s “insolvent indebtedness” to “all translation” and thus all translators may not be transferential in the strict psychoanalytic sense, since Derrida (Reference Derrida and Graham1985; Graham Reference Graham and Graham1985) made a similar case in reading Benjamin’s “Task” in “Des Tours de Babel” a decade and a half earlier. But if there is a promise that is not only “impossible and asymmetrical” but “transferential and countertransferential,” and that promise is therefore somehow lodged in the relationship between Derrida-the-analysand and some other-as-analyst, who is that other?

One could imagine that authoritative other as Portia, perhaps. Levine (Reference Levine2022) refers to Derrida being haunted and ventriloquized by “the language of confession and even that of Shakespeare’s Portia (echoing in the verb ‘porter sur’ and all the other verbs bearing on bearing)” (7) – but that would clearly be transference, not countertransference. Given the fact that Portia and Derrida exist in different “codes” – Portia in the “code” or fictional “frame” of written drama and stage performance, Derrida in the “code” of “real life” – it is difficult to imagine her transferring her unconscious feelings to him. Portia can be interpreted as a living human being, and therefore also as a psychoanalyst, whose “analysand” is not only Shylock but her husband Bassanio,Footnote ¹¹ and the duke, and all of Venice – and it would even be possible to imagine her as an analyst with Derrida on the couch. But that would all be transference, at work in Derrida’s unconscious (or ours). In that scenario it would be considerably more difficult to imagine countertransference at work. What unconscious feelings might we picture Portia harboring for Derrida the Jew, and how might we imagine those feelings skewing her judgment as she frees Antonio from Shylock and strips Shylock of all his possessions and his human dignity in the name of Christian mercy?

A more plausible stand-in for the other-as-analyst to Derrida-as-analysand, I suggest, would be “the reader,” any reader – but especially perhaps Michael Levine. He does, after all, brilliantly mobilize Freudian psychoanalysis in the service of teasing out Derrida’s unconscious proclivities, and thus of complicating the platitudinous obfuscations that here and there seem to “mar” and “hinder” Derrida’s usual brilliance. If we were to envision a session with Levine as the shrink and Derrida on the couch, we might also explore Levine’s countertransferential inclination to give Derrida all manner of little breaks. Compared with Kathryn Batchelor’s and my own more disgruntled reading of Derrida’s essay, Levine seems determined to mobilize the unconscious tendencies he identifies in and behind Derrida’s essay to the end of protecting Derrida against possible accusations of being boring or ill-informed about translation. In Bakhtin’s (1929/Reference Bakhtin and Emerson1984) terms, Levine-the-psychoanalyst double-voices Derrida in order to “stylize” him, to enhance the force and intelligence of his talk. What lurks (countertransferentially) just behind the boring parts and the apparently ill-informed parts is the usual Derridean brilliance.

2.3 Recursive/Revenant Economies

But there is another way of reading that (counter)transferential economy that Levine identifies in the interstices of Derrida’s essay, the way “the word and act of translation” is “affected, inhabited, and displaced” by transference – or, reading that euphemistic paraphrase “the word and act of translation” (i.e., excluding Derrida himself from the transference) as Levine’s countertransference to Derrida, the way Derrida’s mobilization of translation is repeatedly or recurringly “affected, inhabited, and displaced” by transference.

In Section 2.2 I suggested that Portia might be interpreted as the analyst who countertransfers unconscious affects to Derrida as her analysand, but noted that the two of them occupy different “codes” or “frames.” That reminded me of the moment in Derrida’s famous deconstruction of John Searle in “Limited Inc a b c” (Weber and Mehlman: 1977/Reference Weber, Mehlman, Derrida and Graff1988) when he quotes Searle protesting that “we do not, for example, hold the actor responsible today for the promise he made on stage last night in the way we normally hold people responsible for their promises” (88–89), and corrects him: “It would not be the actor who should be held responsible but rather the speaker committed by the promise in the scene, that is, the character. And indeed, he is held responsible in the play and in the ideal – i.e. in a certain way fictional – analysis of a promise” (89).

Yes, obviously. But it is equally obvious that that shining stable “real”-versus-“fictional” binary is not particularly Derridean. I read it as Derrida implying something like “in the rationalist Enlightenment philosophy to which Searle obviously gravitates, it would not be the actor who should be held responsible but rather the speaker committed by the promise in the scene, that is, the character.” He would, in other words, be condescendingly doing Searle a favor – helping Searle keep his rationalist categories and hierarchies straight – doing Searle’s conservative philosophical work for him, since poor benighted Searle seems to be incapable of doing it for himself.

Where Derrida himself, in his own name, goes with that same apparent binary is that the reperformance of a “serious” performative on stage only seems to be secondary, belated, supplemental. In actuality all manner of reperformance, not just on stage but “in real life,” creates the conditions of possibility that make it possible for “serious” performatives to communicate:

In other words, while Searle commonsensically follows Austin in believing that the “serious” performative comes first and any reperformance comes second and is parasitical on the “serious” performative that it imitates/follows, Derrida is not simply proposing to make the reperformance come first. It’s not the existence of a single actual reperformance that comes first; it’s the possibility of reperformance in general that conditions every “serious” performative. If an utterance must be iterable in order to communicate, if every promise must be repeatable in order to count as a promise, the transition(ality) from performance to reperformance and from reperformance to performance must be built into the very communicability of any utterance.

Apply that law, now, to transference, or to the transferential economy that Michael Levine so brilliantly teases out of Derrida’s essay. It’s not that the translator translating or the writer writing comes first, in the fullness of Enlightenment rationality, and then is belatedly “corrupted” by transference and/or countertransference. It’s not that the goal of (psycho)analysis should be to “purify” transference and countertransference out of the therapeutic session or other discursive encounter, and so to “restore” some imagined rationalist (super)ego-forthrightness that has been “corrupted” by the unconscious. Rather, it’s that all analysis, all therapy, indeed all understanding in non-therapeutic as well as therapeutic settings emerges, is constantly emerging out of unconscious (counter)transference, and that the goal of therapy and other embodied and situated talking and knowing is to become aware of that inevitability – of that uncanny, iterably emergent repetition.

As I’ve been hinting, I want to call that kind of economy a recursive economy – an economy of recurrence – in which what recurs is a Latin recurs (“recourse”): a coursing back/again; a renewed course; a return or a recurrence. What recurs in a recurrence is recurrence, return, recourse.

It might also be called a revenant economy: an economy of returns, either from away or from the dead. A revenant in secular terms is a returner, a prodigal; in mythological terms it is a thing reborn, a phoenix. In horror contexts it is a zombie or a ghost that returns from the dead. (“Who you gonna call?”)

A zombie economy would be a special case of a revenant economy: compare Michael Levine calling Derrida “haunted” by Hegel, which is already one step beyond what Derrida himself says, in the passage I quoted earlier: “the relève, Hegel’s Aufhebung, [being] explicitly a speculative relève of the Passion and Good Friday into absolute knowledge, the travail of mourning also describes, preserved in its grave, the resurrection of the ghost or of the glorious body that rises, rises again [se relève] – and walks.” “One important way to gauge the radicality of Derrida’s transferential praxis,” Levine (Reference Levine2022) adds, “is to examine the place it makes for haunting bodies and stalking ghosts. These are not only the specters of what once was but a series of ghosts standing in for others, for a structure of haunting without origin or end” (8–9).

That would be a revenant economy without zombies – and that is more or less where Derrida ends his essay, very briefly; very much in “passing” (from Hegel to the endnotes). Where he begins the essay is quite different: there his concern is with the links between relève and the English word “relevant,” which is not yet quite French (but apparently is being introduced into French, as a loan word). Imagine a triangle, with relève at the top, “relevant” at the bottom left, and Aufhebung at the bottom right. In a sense the structure of Derrida’s essay is from left to right, from “relevant” to Aufhebung, like a pendulum swing from the pivot point of relève.

In terms Derrida never uses, it would be a movement from a relevant economy to a revenant economy.

But now let’s narrow revenant economies to those horrifically embodied revenants called zombies.

3.1 Life After Death

In the block extract quotation from the anonymous lecturer in Section 1.1 there was an interesting moment that I forbore to comment on there, saving it instead for here: the place where Derrida brings Walter Benjamin into the conversation. “It would thus guarantee the survival of the body of the original,” Derrida writes, and then adds parenthetically: “(survival in the double sense that Benjamin gives it in ‘The Task of the Translator,’ [das F]ortleben and [das Ü]berleben: prolonged life, continuous life, living on, but also life after death)” (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 199; Derrida’s-and-then-Venuti’s emphasis).

What makes that interesting is that Benjamin scholars have long rejected translations of das Überleben as “the afterlife” in English, here vie par-delà la mort in French, or, as Venuti translates Derrida, “life after death.” According to the scholars, Benjamin does not mean that the source text dies and is reborn in and as the translation (see Robinson Reference Robinson2023: 36–37). But what if Derrida is hinting at something more? Even if the scholars are right about Benjamin’s intended meaning, in other words, what if this apparently misleading translation of das Überleben is directly relevant to Derrida’s half-hidden theme in the article (“buried” in the final sentence of the main text, to be “exhumed” here in this book) of death and revivification?

A ghost would be a revenant but would not mark “the survival of the body” (199; emphasis switched). The “glorious body that rises” would presumably be Jesus, a mythological revenant whose body does survive, like the phoenix, but with nail holes in his hands and feet and Easter Sunday in mind. (Though I don’t remember the Bible saying that his revenant body gave off heavenly light: glorieux “glorious.”)Footnote ¹²

What interests me here is the revivification of a disgusting undead body that rises, rises again – and shambles.

3.2 Whose?

But whose undead body?

Shylock’s.

Shylock in the play? He doesn’t die in the play!

Imagine Shylock dying after the end of the play and being reanimated as a zombie centuries later. Maybe tomorrow. Shylock “returning” in the sequel as a Holocaust zombie. As six million Holocaust zombies.

But Shylock wasn’t killed in a Nazi gas chamber. How can he be a Holocaust zombie?Footnote ¹³

3.3 Reading Shylock’s Experiences as Anticipations of the Holocaust

Think of Shylock’s experiences as portrayed in the play.

1. (a) He has loaned money to Bassanio with Antonio as the guarantor of the loan. Shylock wants to have nothing to do with Antonio, who has treated Shylock detestably:

            He hath disgraced me and

   hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses,

   mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted

   my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies;

   and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. (III.1.53–7)
   Finally, however, he agrees to loan Antonio the 3,000 ducats without interest, only requiring that if Antonio should prove unable to repay the debt by the specified date three months hence, he must surrender a pound of his flesh.

2. (b) When Antonio can’t pay, Shylock takes him to court and demands his pound of flesh. Bassanio’s new wife Portia disguises herself as a male attorney and first offers Shylock 9,000 ducats in place of the pound of flesh, but Shylock refuses. Portia urges mercy (IV.1.190–211) – this is the focus of Derrida’s commentary (Derrida Reference Derrida1999: 30–45; Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 183–97) – and backs her urging with money (she’s rich); but Shylock remains adamant. For him it’s not about the money, or the letter of the law: he hates Antonio for his smug anti-Semitism and wants to make him suffer. It’s an affair of the heart. It’s blood revenge.

3. (c) As Shylock is about to begin cutting Antonio’s flesh (“nearest his heart”: IV.1.265), Portia launches two powerful legal quibbles (clinging casuistically to the letter of the law): (1) the bond only allows Shylock to remove flesh, not blood; if he sheds one drop of Antonio’s blood, Venetian law requires that all his assets be stripped from him by the state. And (2) he must cut out exactly one pound: “if the scale do turn / But in the estimation of a hair, / Thou diest, and all thy goods are confiscate” (IV.1.344–46).

4. (d) Beaten, Shylock reluctantly gives up the pound-of-flesh plan and asks for the 9,000 ducats Portia offered him earlier, but she says (still clinging tenaciously to the letter of the law) that he has already rejected that offer in court.

5. (e) Portia next invokes a Venetian law prescribing that any alien (and a Jew is an “alien” by default)Footnote ¹⁶ who tries to take the life of a Venetian citizen must forfeit all his property, half to the intended victim (Antonio), the other half to the state; and the duke may decide whether to have Shylock executed or spare his life. Shylock asks to be executed, because if all his assets are confiscated he will have no way to make a living.

6. (f) The duke spares Shylock’s life, but in return requires that Shylock convert to Christianity and deed all his assets to his alienated daughter Jessica and her Christian intended, Lorenzo. If Shylock refuses this offer, he will be executed. He agrees.

In summary, then, in (c–f) the Christians threaten to kill Shylock unless he gives up all his assets and converts to Christianity. Let us consider reading this as an anticipation of the Holocaust: four centuries later, six million Shylocks are killed and their assets are seized by the state. To avoid this fate, some Jews convert to Christianity, but that doesn’t save their lives or their assets. (To the Nazis Judaism was not a religion but a biological race, a blood inheritance. They could not trade it away by converting.)

And in (a–c), imagine the grisly business of exacting a pound of flesh in lieu of a repayment of debt as an anticipation of zombies eating human flesh. Back in Act III Salarino said, “Why, I am sure if he forfeit, thou wilt not take his flesh! What’s that good for?” and Shylock replied, “To bait fish withal; if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge” (III.1.50–3).

It is but a small escalation of that revenge from an affect to a hungry subrational revenant.

Not, I might add, to an imagined European bison.

3.4 Mercy and Revenge: Spirit and Body

In (b) and at various other points along the way Portia and the duke urge Shylock to show mercy, which they specifically espouse as a spiritual virtue that stands in stark contrast to Shylock’s vindictive obsession with the flesh. Derrida keeps returning to this body–spirit dualism in the Christian imagination of Judaism:

Zombies too, of course, are paradigmatically all body and no spirit. (Except for Melanie, the eponymous protagonist of The Girl with All the Gifts, discussed in Section 4b. She is a second-generation zombie born with spirit intact – and it’s a Nazi spirit. Portia rediviva.)

Derrida neglects to mention in connection with “St. Paul the Christian [being] on the side of the spirit or sense” that Paul’s side-taking links body or letter to killing: God “also hath made us able ministers of the new testament,” Paul writes to the Corinthians; “not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Cor. 3:6, KJV). The letter is the body of the text; in the court scenes in The Merchant of Venice, it is specifically the letter of the law. Shylock invokes the letter of the bond signed by Antonio to demand his pound of flesh, which would likely kill him; Portia invokes the letter of Venetian law to strip Shylock of all his assets and threatens to have him killed if he fails to surrender his possessions.

The Christian side famously thematizes the standoff in binary terms: the Jew invokes the letter that killeth (revenge); the Christian invokes the spirit that giveth life (mercy). But actually, that self-congratulatory Christian binary to the contrary, both sides invoke the letter of the law in order to kill. The Christian invocation of the spirit that giveth life levies a carceral penalty that is nakedly and unashamedly enforced by the letter that killeth. All the “spiritual” talk of mercy and forgiveness is theological gaslighting. It is demanded of the Jews, not offered by the Christians.

And we have already seen Derrida’s carefully controlled Jewish ire at the merciless Christian destruction of Shylock in the name of mercy: “No one could better express the ‘mercenary’ dimension of ‘merci’ in every sense of this word. And no one could ever express it better than Shakespeare, who has been charged with anti-Semitism for a work that stages with an unequalled power all the great motives of Christian anti-Judaism” (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 191).Footnote ¹⁸ Fictional Holocaust zombies (and golems) have explicitly been mobilized by post-World War II storytellers in the service of revenge against those “great motives of Christian anti-Judaism” – and, well, by “Jacques Derrida” (that Algerian Jewish heteronym) in “his” zombie memoir.

4.1 The Theory

Gomel begins by airing the shock some people feel at seeing Holocaust zombies in novels, movies, and video games,Footnote ¹⁹ and their strong disapproval at the “cheapening” or “degrading” effect these images might have on memories of the suffering of six million Jews. Her response:

Not just “memory” but memories: “visceral, corporeal memories”; the “monstrous bodies” of memories. They return to bring back “the trauma of reality.” Not what Derrida calls “what, in being freed from the body, is elevated above it, interiorizes it, spiritualizes it, preserves it in memory” (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 199), but the uncanny repetition compulsions of “haunting bodies” that arise like the “something” that “seems to work against” the Hegelian dialectics, that “secretly, silently, and insistently undermines and reworks them from the inside out” (Levine Reference Levine2022).

Translation as that embodied memory, that bodily transfer of past trauma into the present.

Gomel writes about the “crisis” of narrative historiography, as meaningful links become harder and even almost impossible to maintain between a horrific past and the “political free-for-all” that the present has become, “littered with what Han [Byung-Chul] calls ‘junk-shops – great dumps of images of all kinds and origins, used and shop-soiled symbols’ (Han Reference Han2024: 39).” “Unfortunately,” she adds, “the Holocaust has become part of the ‘junk-shop’ of atrocity instead of a unique historical event that it was.” She paraphrases Lawrence Langer (Reference Langer1995: 7) as suggesting that “collective trauma expresses itself through phantasmagoric eruption of the past into the present” and adds: “Trauma is the past repeating itself in the present in all its irreducible violence, beyond ideological falsehoods or convenient excuses. Trauma is the body of the victim that refuses to stay buried.”

And so:

Of course Shylock is not a Muselmann. But throughout the court scene in Act IV he certainly becomes more and more abject, more lost and confused in his abjection.

4.2 Female Zombies

By Holocaust zombies Gomel means both Jewish zombies and Nazi zombies. Sometimes, as in John Blackburn’s (1958/Reference Blackburn1961) novel A Scent of New-Mown Hay or M. R. Carey’s more recent The Girl with All the Gifts (Reference Carey2014), the zombies are neither undead Jews nor undead Nazis, but women infected with a fungus created by a surviving (or zombified) female Nazi. In Blackburn’s novel the infection is a surviving female doctor’s revenge for the crushing of Nazism in World War II; in Carey’s, however, the “girl with all the gifts” from the title is Melanie, a second-generation zombie who retains her intelligence – her “spirit” – and uses it to release the fungus into the world, with the Nazi utopian plan of purifying the human race.

In another recent female zombie story the zombie is Jewish. John Ajvide Lindqvist is a Swedish horror writer; his 2021 short story “She” tells the tale of a Swedish couple who hire a Polish construction firm to build them a house for a lot less money than a Swedish firm would have charged. Once they move in, however, they are awakened by a horrible crashing noise and find a woman’s body tumbling down from the attic at the end of a hangman’s noose. This is not a ghost; her body is physically palpable. “Her head jerked forward and her hair fell over her face, and at the same time, I heard a sort of wet, dull crack like breaking ice” (Lindqvist Reference Lindqvist and Helgadottir2023: 20). The couple wakes the next morning to find the body gone, but the hanging scene is repeated the next night, and the next, until at the end of the story we find the couple hiding out in their bedroom as a zombie slouches like some rough beast toward their door:

What the dead want, Gomel suggests, is “to be let in.”

It turns out that the Polish construction firm built their house out of a big old tree that had been used as a hanging tree in World War II. The hanging in the Swedish couple’s house was a reenactment of a scene from the war, in which the Nazis murdered the entire population of a small Jewish village. One girl tried to run but was brought down by a bullet from a Swedish sniper and then hanged from that tree. The Swedish sniper was the grandfather of the husband, the story’s first-person narrator; and it was with the money willed to the couple by the grandfather that they paid for the house.

As Gomel tells the story, “This history is not known by the characters in the story because they do not want to know.” Nobody wants to know. The grandfather and the other principals in the story are all dead. And, as Gomel adds, “The dead are forgotten. Until they return.” She sums up the story:

4.3 Jewish Zombies

The published Holocaust zombie tale that best lends itself to the imaginary sequelization of The Merchant of Venice, however, is a 2012 Polish novel, Igor Ostachowicz’s (Reference Ostachowicz2012) Noc żywych Żydów (“Night of the Living Jews”),Footnote ²⁰ in which the Jews murdered in Poland during World War II are reanimated and rise as zombies from basements and unmarked graves. As Jan Borowicz (Reference Borowicz, Schult and Popescu2015) reports, “The explicit justification for their appearance given by Night of the Living Jews is simple: Jewish victims of the Holocaust and World War II have been forgotten” (176). The novel has been surprisingly popular in Poland, but also, as one might expect, politically controversial. “Ultimately,” Gomel (Reference Gomel2024) sums up the debates, “the novel is not a resolution but a symptom of the very problem it tries to address: the chasm between (narrative) history and (traumatic) memory.” Specifically, that means that “the undead Jews function not as an attempt to create an alternative (more truthful or more complete) narrative of the Holocaust in Poland but rather as a mute and bewildering witness to what such a narrative would both reveal and conceal: millions of corpses, left either unburied or un-mourned or both.”

“Millions of corpses”: “Jacques Derrida’s” “zombie memoir” interwoven with this long essay, “Six Million Shylocks,” shifts the scene of this million-headed return from Poland and the Holocaust to Venice, as a zombie sequel to Shakespeare’s play. The zombie Shylocks return with a redoubled determination to get their pound of flesh – exactly that pound’s worth – out of every Gentile body they encounter. And eat it. And turn their Portian tormentors into zombies like them.

5.1 The Philosophical Zombie

That famous monologue that Shylock delivers in The Merchant of Venice more fully goes like this:

In analytic philosophy since Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap in the 1930s, physicalism – these days reportedly the majority view among analytic philosophers – is the belief that there is nothing that is not physical. Everything is physical. There is only one substance in the universe: physicality (i.e., material monism). That means that if there is such a thing as mind, or consciousness, or subjectivity, or qualia, it/they must be an entirely physical thing, or at least have an entirely physical cause. (This extension is called the “causal closure of physics.”) If those mental experiences are not reducible to physicality, they simply do not exist. If I tell you what it feels like to be me, and you tell me what it feels like to be you, and we find significant differences between the two but also some common ground, either we are deluded in thinking that we have such experiences, or those experiences must be reducible to physical causes.

Saul Kripke (Reference Kripke1972/1980: 153ff) famously posed this hypothetical: if God had created the world with the idea of creating a purely physical universe, and, once he’d finished that, started thinking that he really needed to provide for consciousness, would that have required more work, or not? Physicalists would say no: creating the physical world would be enough to create any thoughts, feelings, experiences, and so forth that people might claim to possess. Antiphysicalists would say yes, it would have required more work: the physical facts alone cannot explain consciousness. Consciousness depends on at least some nonphysical properties.

In Shylock’s monologue at the beginning of this section, obviously the eyes, hands, organs, dimensions (the human shape and form), and senses are physiological things. But what about Shylock using his eyes and ears and nose to enjoy the calm beauty of a spring day? Is that purely physical? What about Shylock’s feeling of running his hands over a cat’s fur, or a tree trunk, or (in memory) his deceased wife Leah’s bare skin? Is that purely physical? And what about affections and passions? To the physicalist they must be treated as neural activity, synaptic transmissions. To the extent that we map those transmissions mentally, and say that we “feel” affections or passions, and assume that our feelings are qualitatively different from the physical causes of those things, the physicalists say we are deluded. For the physicalist, being “hurt with the same weapons” must mean physical injuries only – not the feeling of pain, and certainly not emotional injury. If you prick us, yes, we bleed – but we don’t feel pain. If you tickle us, we laugh, but that is purely an autonomic response to physical pressure on the ribs or skin. We don’t feel hilarity.

And what about feeling wronged and lusting for revenge? Not physical: not real.

What makes this strain of analytical philosophy relevant to revenant translation is that antiphysicalists like David Chalmers (Reference Chalmers1996: 94–106) have developed the notion of a “philosophical zombie,” or “p-zombie,” as a thought experiment designed to disprove physicalism. A p-zombie is thought to be physically identical to a neurotypical but completely lacking in conscious experience:

Chalmers notes that the zombies he is imagining are not like “Hollywood zombies” – the kind based since 1968 on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. “Typically,” he notes, those zombies have “little capacity for introspection and lack a refined ability to voluntarily control behavior” (95). Ned Block (Reference Block1995) suggests that “it is reasonable to suppose that there is something it tastes like when they eat their victims” (quoted in Chalmers Reference Chalmers1996: 95). Chalmers calls those other zombies “psychological zombies,” and says he is imagining “phenomenal zombies,” in the sense that they lack phenomenality – the ability to feel themselves living, feel themselves experiencing. They might see the colors of that spring day, hear the sounds, smell the smells, but they don’t realize they are perceiving those things, and can’t enjoy them.

In a sense the Shylocks in “Six Million Shylocks” are p-zombies. They behave like the George Romero zombies that have dominated zombie movies and fictions since 1968: they stagger disjointedly, they have dead eyes, they can’t talk, and, since Dawn of the Living Dead in 1978, they eat brains. But at one point, when the Portia Brigade has taken up positions around the perimeter and are machine-gunning the Shylocks down, the Shylocks stop staggering stupidly forward and turn back, ducking into the secret passageways that allow them to come up behind the Portias’ positions around the perimeters and kill them. They behave as if they have the mental ability to think strategically, to make and carry out a military plan to outflank and decimate the enemy. They can’t talk; their eyes remain dead; to all outward appearances they are still the mindless undead bodies that zombies have been since Romero’s “ghouls” in Night of the Living Dead. But it’s difficult to imagine them outflanking the Portias without the consciousness required to make a plan.

What made me think of Shylock’s monologue was that antiphysicalists have argued that if a p-zombie were pricked, it would bleed, and flinch away from the pain – but would not feel any pain. P-zombies are a useful test of physicalism because flinching is a physical effect, and according to the “causal closure of physics” must have a physical cause; but if we neurotypical human beings feel the pain, and flinch away from the pain that we feel, the flinching has a nonphysical cause. The injury is physical, but the pain is a quale, a qualitative experience. There is something that it’s like to be in pain. We feel pain. And if the p-zombies are acting in exactly the same way normal human beings act in response to pain but are thought to have no conscious life, no way to feel the pain, we have to assume that there is some other nonphysical cause behind the flinching. (In zombie movies the “psychological zombies” typically show no fear of shotguns and the like, and do not seem to feel the pain of limbs being blown off. In that way they are clearly different from normal humans. David Chalmers posits “phenomenal zombies” as a way of proving that antiphysicalism doesn’t adequately account for human consciousness.)

Chalmers cites Block (Reference Block1978) on a possible nonphysical cause like this: “the people of a large nation such as China might organize themselves so that they realize a causal organization isomorphic to that of my brain, with every person simulating the behavior of a single neuron, and with radio links corresponding to synapses. The population might control an empty shell of a robot body, equipped with sensory transducers and motor effectors” (Chalmers Reference Chalmers1996: 97).Footnote ²¹ And arguably they could create a plausible simulation of consciousness. They could simulate feeling in the robot body – or the zombie.

Obviously the existence of those Chinese people is a physical fact, and the radio links involve oscillating electric and magnetic fields that push the electrons in the receiving antenna around, which creates a tiny oscillating voltage, and all that is physical. But the simulations are not physical. They are mental/experiential constructs based on experientially organized imitations.

Whether this is a plausible scenario, Chalmers says, is beside the point. The point is to ask whether the observed identical behaviors of a p-zombie Shylock flinching away from an injury and a neurotypical human Shylock flinching away from a feeling of pain can be plausibly assigned a physical cause. Chalmers says no. The behavioral response to an injury without a feeling of pain would be observably different from the behavioral response to pain.

He admits that there are other ways of combatting physicalism and thus underscoring what he calls “the hard problem of consciousness” (Chalmers Reference Chalmers1996: xi–xii) – namely, that it seems to require mind–body dualism but there is no scientifically or philosophically credible explanation for the separate existence of mind. David Stoljar (Reference Stoljar2018), for example, suggests that it’s enough to imagine two physically identical humans who have different tastes in coffee. That one deviation should be enough to overthrow physicalism.Footnote ²²

Still, Chalmers insists, we’re so familiar with the close coexistence of biochemistry and consciousness that it’s all too easy for us to assume a conceptual or even physical link. The p-zombie postulate is a useful way of highlighting the key differences.

5.2 Hegelian Ghosts, Marxist Zombies

We’ve seen Derrida associating the Hegelian Aufhebung/relève with “the resurrection of the ghost or of the glorious body that rises, rises again [se relève] – and walks” (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 200); now it is time to remember that German Idealism, the idealism that powered Hegel’s dialectics, has widely (at least until recently) been read as a monism of the spirit – the exact opposite of physicalism, a monism of the body. This reading of Hegel has met with serious challenges since the late twentieth century, for example from Robert Pippin (Reference Pippin1989, Reference Pippin2010, Reference Pippin2019) and Terry Pinkard (Reference Pinkard1994, Reference Pinkard2000, Reference Pinkard2012), and, from an analytic perspective, by Robert Brandom (Reference Brandom2002, Reference Brandom2014, Reference Brandom2019) and John McDowell (Reference McDowell and Deligiorgi2006, Reference McDowell, Sanguinetti and Abath2018). Since what I want from Hegel is not the full complexity of his idealist metaphysics but a model, even a caricature that can serve as a model, I will ignore the new rethinking and outline the old reading of his idealism: the idea that the mind/spirit of God only emerges into full worldly existence by being particularized in and as the minds of humans (and the aggregate of those human minds is “spirit”). Because we humans were created by God, we are conscious of his consciousness, and that allows us to realize his self-consciousness, which is his perfection. In this view, mind or spirit is the basis of all creation; the objective world is objectified spirit. As a result, Hegel’s idealism was thought to be “objective idealism.” But because Hegel combined objective idealism with the subjective idealism of individuals, he was more accurately characterized as an “Absolute Idealist,” believing in God’s self-consciousness and self-actualization as Absolute Spirit. The historical development of that Absolute Spirit in objective cultural practices and its psychological and intellectual development in the minds of individuals were interlinked features of his idealism.

Think of Hegel’s idealism as feeding the antiphysicalism of the previous section: human beings are partially physicalized instantiations of mind or spirit. Now consider the materialist turn brought to Hegelian thought by Karl Marx: instead of starting with spirit and imagining the physical world as objectified spirit, Marx started with the material conditions under which people live and work and relegated “spirit” to the realm of illusion and distortion.

But actually it’s a bit more complicated than that. If we read “spirit” as “ideology,” Marx was pretty much all over the place with that notion. In some moods he described ideology as sheer gaslighting perpetrated by the ruling class, especially in feudalism and capitalism; in those moods (by which I basically mean the Marx idealized by the Second International and baked into the core state policy of the Soviet Union) his belief was that once the socialist state had taken control of the means of production, the illusions and delusions of ideology would fade away and be replaced by hardcore practical knowhow. When that didn’t happen in the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks couldn’t figure out who to blame or how to begin to fix the problem. The primary solution was what Leon Trotsky called the “Thermidor” of Josef Stalin: a paranoid bureaucracy dedicated to the random arrests and executions of whole families, whole neighborhoods, whole groups of people, in the millions.

What is variously called Western Marxism or Hegelian Marxism assigned ideology a more active role in stabilizing a society. That stabilization was arguably the cause of the resistance Soviet citizens displayed to the utopian Soviet expectation of change – indeed, expectation of perfection: “Soviet Man.” The reason state ownership of the means of production didn’t magically transform Soviet citizens into “New” Men and Women was that the ideological “spirit” had the lingering power to condition the behavioral “body” – specifically, in this case, to condition “body” to resist pressures to change – and the state didn’t recognize or understand that power.

What I want to get out of this digression, though, is a suggestion: that the Western Marxist human was a human body guided by consciousness, and the Second International Marxist(-Leninist-Stalinist) human was a p-zombie, imagined as guided entirely by physicality once the superstructural illusion of ideological consciousness had been jettisoned.

5.3 The Death of the Original and its Return as a Zombie Text

Recall now Jacques Derrida translating Walter Benjamin’s das Überleben as vie par-delà la mort “life after death” (see Section 3.1): “Elle assurerait ainsi la survie du corps de l’original (survie au double sens que lui donne Benjamin dans La Tâche du traducteur, fortleben et überleben: vie prolongée, vie continuée, living on, mais aussi vie par-delà la mort)” (Derrida Reference Derrida1999: 46; Derrida’s emphasis). “It would thus guarantee the survival of the body of the original (survival in the double sense that Benjamin gives it in ‘The Task of the Translator,’ [das F]ortleben and [das Ü]berleben: prolonged life, continuous life, living on, but also life after death”) (Venuti Reference Venuti and Derrida2001b: 199). As we’ve seen, that “double sens(e)” is arguably a translation error: in Benjamin it’s only survival in the single sense of “prolonged life, continuous life, living on.” A morphological translation of das Überleben as “overlife” or “superlife” may be more “relevant.” But as I suggested earlier, Derrida’s vie par-delà la mort might be read as his sly hinting at a revenant translation – and “he” has built that reading into “his” zombie memoir “Six Million Shylocks.”

And note what is surviving in the essay about “relevant” translation: le corps de l’original “the body of the original.” The body of the source text dies and returns from the dead, but only as a body – not, say, as a spirit, a ghost, or even a body with consciousness.

In other words, the body of the source text dies and returns as a zombie translation.

A metaphor? Not quite.

Benjamin (1923/Reference Benjamin and Rexroth1972) actually writes that “in völlig unmetaphorischer Sachlichkeit ist der Gedanke vom Leben und Fortleben der Kunstwerke zu erfassen” (11): “in fully unmetaphorical objectivity/thinginess is the thought of the life and the continuing life of art works to be grasped.” For Benjamin the art work really is alive. It’s not a metaphor. He doesn’t explicitly say that the source text dies and is reborn as the translation, but if we follow Harry Zohn, Steven Rendall, and Jacques Derrida in reading “so … geht die Übersetzung aus dem Original hervor. Zwar nicht aus seinem Leben so denn aus seinem ›Überleben‹” (19) as “so emanates the translation out of the original. To be sure, not so much out of its life as out of its ‘afterlife’,” which is to say as death and resurrection/revivification/return, that too should be grasped in fully unmetaphorical objectivity.

The only part of “the body of the source text dies and returns as a zombie translation” that might be grasped metaphorically, in a notional reconstruction/revivification of Benjamin’s embodied mind, is “the body”: Benjamin says nothing about the survival of the source text’s body. That is Derrida’s addition to the image. And obviously in adding “the body” to the image, Derrida also lays the groundwork for my addition of “zombie” in “as a zombie translation.” Without that specification of “the body” there is no reason to assume that the revenant translation is mindless, senseless, without a “spirit” or “soul,” without consciousness.

In “Six Million Shylocks” the heteronymous “Derrida” is first led to imagine his (and Walter Benjamin’s) ideal translation as a golem translation; only then, gradually, as a zombie translation.

How does Benjamin imagine the unmetaphorical life of a text?

In the Kabbalistic framework that he learned from his friend Gershom Scholem, the actual physical work of art embodies a divine spark that was emanated into the world when the Ein Sof (“the infinite”: God prior to any self-manifestation) constricted its light, creating a void and pouring the divine light of existence into it; this is called the Tzimtzum, or construction/concentration. Each divine spark, wherever it is found, is wrapped in Kelipot (also romanized Qliphoth), the “impure shells” or “husks” that cover and conceal the sparks of the holy, to protect them from evil – but according to some Kabbalists the Kelipot originate in the Sitra Achra, the demonic other side, and yet also feed off the holy, and protect the holy sparks by placing limits on their power to reveal the truth. Evil as a necessary limitation – at least for a while, until the messianic end (see Robinson Reference Robinson2023: 136–40).

But Benjamin’s “failure” to mention the “survival of the body” that Derrida highlights is only part of the story. For Benjamin the task of the translator is to translate as literally as possible, and so to avoid conveying the “spiritual” “sense” of the source text into the target language – because only that “senseless” or “mindless” translation strategy generates enough friction between the two languages to begin to abrade the Kelipot shells. Ultimately, in some dim distant future, translations will have worn away the Kelipot shells sufficiently to release the divine spark hidden inside texts and reveal what Benjamin calls die reine Sprache “pure language”Footnote ²³ – but in the short term, in the act of translation, for the Derridean/Benjaminian zombie Kabbalist only the source text has a “soul,” that divine spark, and in creating the translation as revenant the translator should seek not to convey that “soul.” The translation should be soulless, senseless. Its function is not to simulate or reproduce the divine spark but to liberate it from the source language – and to that end it must be a zombie text. Effectively Benjamin’s call for radical literalism that despises the “sense” adumbrates Derrida’s “survival of the body” without the “soul.”

Over time, then – the timeless time of Heilsgeschichte, sacred history – zombie translationality eats the Kelipot (let’s say philological) brainsFootnote ²⁴ of source languages everywhere, gradually liberating their divine spirits. (In zombie Kabbalah the mind is not a home movie shown by the brain; it does not flicker out when the brain is eaten. The brain, and the rest of the human body, is a shell that imprisons the mind. Eating the brain breaks the mind out of prison.)

What I have been construing as Benjamin’s (and Derrida’s) zombie Kabbalistic take on translation is actually only a slight intensification of orthodox Jewish tradition. In addressing the Christian stereotype that Jewish thought is all body and no spirit, Derrida neglected to mention that Jewish rabbis have tended to insist that God wrote the Bible in Hebrew, and because the shape of every letter and every diacritic and every stray ink spot was written in his own hand by God, only the body of the Hebrew Bible is holy, and thus “the Bible.”Footnote ²⁵ Translations are only cribs – which is to say, zombie texts. They cannot reproduce the holiness of the source text; they can only moan about it.

5.4 The Legend of the Septuagint as a Gateway to Christian Theology

One historical watershed for the turn Christian theology ended up taking away from ancient Hebrew thought was arguably the legend of the Septuagint, the first Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. According to the legend, that translation was undertaken in the early third century BCE in Alexandria by seventy-two rabbis, six from each tribe of Israel, sent by Eleazar, high priest in Jerusalem during the Second Temple period, to King Ptolemy II Philadelphus at the latter’s request. This legend is attributed to one “Aristeas” (see the “Letter of Aristeas” in Robinson Reference Brandom2014: 4–6), who claims to have been a member of the king’s bodyguard when this all took place, and to have interviewed the seventy-two translators; most likely “Aristeas” was a pseudonym of the actual unknown author, probably a devout Alexandrian Jew writing in the late second century BCE.

The Jewish neo-Platonist philosopher Philo of Alexandria, writing a century later, roughly twenty years before the supposed birth of Christ, picked up the legend and further mystified it:

“Possessed,” “under inspiration,” “dictated to … by an invisible prompter”: who was that prompter? By the time the Christian Church Fathers picked up the story – especially Augustine in On Christian Doctrine (428 CE), but anticipated by Epiphanius of Constantia in 392 CE – that prompter had become the Holy Ghost (Robinson Reference Robinson2014: 34). And because the Holy Ghost was reportedly dictating the Greek translation nearly three centuries before Jesus Christ was born to a virgin to save us all from sin, etc., the Septuagint Bible superseded the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible, after all, was written by people who didn’t know Jesus. The Septuagint was the pure and perfect Word of God.

Jerome, who had learned Hebrew from a convert while both were living as hermits in the desert, scoffed at this legend. In his “Letter to Pammachius” (395 CE; Robinson Reference Robinson2014: 23–30) he provided a long list of errors that the Septuagint translators had made, and in Preface to the Pentateuch (401 CE) he wrote:

We might even push this imagery further, following Walter Benjamin’s Jewish mystical tradition, and imagine that every authorized translation of the Christian Bible is itself to be understood as a conscious divine spirit-entity. The entity that “is” the Christian Bible would then be the indwelling Holy Ghost – a bodiless revenant-in-advance of the dead-and-resurrected revenant Jesus Christ that stands alongside God the Father and God the Son as a “series of [three] ghosts standing in for others, for a [triune] structure of haunting without origin or end” (Levine Reference Levine2022: 8–9). Christian Bible translators take the Holy Ghost into their beings, let themselves be haunted by that revenant spirit, and let the haunting guide their choice of words and phrases – and that ghostly guidance transfers the revenant spirit into the text.

5.5 (Un)translatability and the Recursive/Revenant Economy of Zombification

This would be the larger spirit/letter or mind/body context for translation coming out of Portia on mercy versus Shylock on revenge: because of the Jewish rabbinical insistence on the divine body of the sacred source text (not) returning as the (zombie) translation-which-is-not-a-translation, the Hebrew Bible is definitively untranslatable; because of the Christian insistence that the Bible is not body but mind, not letter but spirit, it is perfectly and totally translatable.

What Derrida calls the impossible ideal of perfect translation is the core myth of Christian Bible translation. What makes that impossible ideal theoretically possible and even theologically inevitable is the divine inspiration of the Holy Ghost. What Derrida calls “relevant” translation is a secularization of that Christian mythology: in it target readers are led to trust human sense-for-sense translations as “the most possible,” with generous allowances for minor imperfections.

But it’s actually more complicated than that. What Jerome writes in the “Letter to Pammachius” is in fact that “in translating from the Greek – except of course in the case of Holy Scripture, where even the syntax contains a mystery – I render, not word for word, but sense for sense” (Robinson Reference Robinson2014: 25). The idea that “even the syntax contains a mystery” is manifestly a survival of Jewish body/letter mysticism: the actual material words on the page, or the physical sounds of the words as they were read aloud, in the source-textual sequence of words in actual sentences, were the Bible’s body, the Bible’s letter – the letter that killeth, as Paul insisted. The “mystery” contained in the syntax was the holiness of that body, imparted to it by God when he wrote the Bible. In worrying about protecting the holiness of that divine body by translating Scripture word for word, Jerome is still very much a Jewish rabbi.

Now given that Christianity was then still in the throes of separating itself from Jewish thought, and would be for at least a millennium to come, we might plausibly write off Jerome’s mysterious-syntax exception as understandable caution. His detractors are trying to brand him a heretic for daring to translate sense for sense a bishop’s letter. That seems harmless enough – but still potentially heretical. So now to defend himself against those heresy charges Jerome thinks it’s a good idea to write a long open letter in which he vituperously defends sense-for-sense translation of the Bible by citing all manner of translation errors from the Hebrew to the Greek made by the Seventy and the four Evangelists and calling those errors “sense-for-sense translation.”

That would suggest that Jerome the eremite didn’t have a tiny fraction of Augustine’s institutional savvy. He had anger-management problems. He flew off the handle, and endangered himself and others.

Still, giving him the benefit of the doubt, we might imagine him starting to wonder while writing the Letter to Pammachius whether maybe attacking the Septuagint and the Greek New Testament as error-ridden wasn’t necessarily the smartest move for him to be making. Better play it safe, maybe, by also claiming to translate Scripture word for word? And throw in some verbiage about “mysteries” for good measure?

But deeper analysis would suggest that “even the syntax contains a mystery” was not just a kneejerk self-protective move on Jerome’s part. It wasn’t an accident. It was actually the secret key to the theological shift. The Christian Church needed the mystery. Theologically speaking, sense-for-sense translation was a red herring.

Not only that: ultimately all talk of translation strategies of any sort was a red herring, a gaslighting, a spinning of theological wheels. Ultimately it didn’t matter how a Bible was translated. All that mattered was winning ecclesiastical approval. If the Church approved it, it was declared divinely inspired. As Theo Hermans (Reference Hermans2014) puts it, “in a particular institutional context” – Western Christian/Mormon theocratic – equivalence is not so much “extracted from texts” as it is “imposed on them through an external intervention. In other words,” he adds, “equivalence is proclaimed, not found” (6).

The real shift from Jewish Bible translation theory to Christian Bible translation theory wasn’t from word-for-word to sense-for-sense, or even from Holy Untranslatability to Total Translatability. It was from the divine inspiration of the source text to the divine inspiration of the target text.

The Jewish view was that the Hebrew source text was untranslatable because human translators lacked the “mysterious” ability to transfer the divine spark to a target language. The Christian answer to that was Philo’s “invisible prompter,” retheologized as the Holy Ghost: if human translators were incapable of transferring the divine spark to a target language, the Holy Ghost did have the spark, and indeed in some sense was the spark.Footnote ²⁶ The whole idea occurred to the early Church Fathers as they read PhiloFootnote ²⁷ on the legend of the Septuagint: the Holy Ghost had the magical/mysterious power to transform a dead book (the Hebrew Bible, written by people who didn’t know Jesus, which was also, by the bye, written in a language that most of the Church Fathers could not read) into a Holy Scripture (a Greek book that the Latin-speaking Church Fathers could read much better than they could the Hebrew).

5.6 Zombie Translation as That Dangerous Ordeal

What we might call the Christian “mystery religion” began to wane in the early-modern period, under the onslaught of the pragmatism of the emergent (and mostly Protestant) middle classes.

Erasmus of Rotterdam, bastard son of a Catholic priest and his housekeeper, remained a Catholic but was a true Renaissance Humanist, and in 1516 not only retranslated the New Testament into Latin (superseding Jerome’s “divinely inspired” Vulgate) but submitted the Greek source text to modern – “scientific,” post-magical – text-critical analysis (see his “Letter to Maarten Lips,” Robinson Reference Robinson2014: 65–75). His text-critical innovations were extremely influential with theologians of both the Protestant and the Catholic Reformations.

Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible appeared between 1517 and 1522; eight years later, in 1530, he defended himself against his many detractors through an attack on Jerome’s Vulgate as a mystified word-for-word translation. Luther’s basic method was German peasant-becoming-bourgeois common sense: you have to watch how German speakers’ mouths move as they talk and translate that way (see Robinson Reference Robinson2014: 84–89).

William Tyndale published his English translation of the New Testament in 1526; he was arrested in 1535 and executed by the Inquisition in 1536; but by the end of that decade there were already four translations of the full Bible into English, all following Tyndale’s innovations. In 1534 Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy had declared him Supreme Head of the Church of England, eventually making it safe to publish English Bibles in England.

And yet even in 1528–29, just a handful of years before refusing to swear fealty to King Henry as head of the Anglican Church (and being executed for his stubbornness), the great Catholic “Humanist” Thomas More published a fictional dialogue with a Lutheran, attacking the Protestant idea of making the Bible available to the masses in English on the grounds that then laypeople would be treating of “the mysteries of Jesus Christ” at the pub over a pint (Robinson Reference Robinson2014: 81).

So yes, in the early modern period Jerome’s call for sense-for-sense translation (of secular texts) began to catch on, with dull civilizational memories of the Christian association of “sense” with “spirit” fueling the change. In effect what Derrida calls “relevant translations” were secularized and pragmatized early-modern descendants of magical Christian “Total Translatability.”

Derrida’s (Jewish?) resistance to that Christian theological history, as we saw in Section 2.1, was to subject the pressure he felt to create “relevant” translations to the “test” or “trial” or “ordeal” of the untranslatable (l’épreuve de l’intraduisible). In the terms I’ve been developing over the last few subsections, he didn’t want to abstract the body of the original out of existence: he wanted that body to survive in some form, to some degree. He didn’t want translation to entail the resurrection of a ghost, say a disembodied revenant Holy Ghost. Nor did he want his choices guided by lingering phantomatic traces of that ghost, with its power not only to dwell inside the source text and render it spiritual/semantic/relevant through and through, but to make the jump to the target text as well. He wanted to zombify the translation. He wanted to retain something of the mindless corporeality of untranslatability even in translation.

The recursive/revenant economy of that zombification would go something like this.

Untranslatability is translatability’s dangerous supplement. It moves through the secret underground passageways below and beyond translatability like the vanguard of a zombie apocalypse – like the six million Shylocks of the heteronymous zombie memoir we’ve been tracking by fits and starts.

The decency and modesty (respectability) of translatability relies on the exclusion of such threats – the erection and codification of walls, fences, moats, demilitarized zones around the perimeter, as in the bad old days (pre-1797) of the Venetian Jews being confined within the walls of the Campo di Ghetto Nuovo.

Because Napoleon removed the gated walls around the Ghetto and made the Jews full citizens of Venice, the Portia Brigade in my story has no recourse against the six million Shylocks when they arrive. The Jewish zombies have flooded the city before the Portias have a chance to mobilize against them. No one knows where they come from, but they emerge out of the dozens of secret passageways dug and brick-lined by the confined Jews in centuries past. And when the Portia Brigade with their tommy gunsFootnote ²⁸ take up defensive positions around the Ghetto, and mow down the hordes of Shylocks in the tens of thousands, piling up the bodies in the square, the Shylocks reverse direction, flee back into the secret passageways, which make it possible for them to outflank the Portias just outside the armed perimeter, and to slaughter their attackers and eat their brains (finally getting their respective pounds of flesh).

5.7 An Alternate Ending to “Six Million Shylocks”

As “I” (??) originally wrote the story, the Portias circle the wagons in an attempt to keep the Shylocks not in the Jewish Campo di Ghetto Nuovo but out of a Christian enclave. Instead of killing all the zombies inside the perimeter, they face outward and gun down all the zombies trying to force their way in.

Jacques Derrida, however – our narrator and supposed author of the “memoir” of the night of the six million Shylocks – wants to let the zombies in.

Not only that: he recognizes that the zombies are always already in.

The very act of excluding the Shylock zombies gives them the power to undermine – negatively condition – not just the methods of relevant translatability but its philosophy, its theory, its ethos.

The general of the Anti-Zombie Force, Portia – the Supreme Portia in charge of the Portia Brigade, the most brilliant shape-shifter (man, woman, spotted hyena, Komodo dragon, Tasmanian devil) of all the highly trained shape-shifting Portias – mobilizes her letter-of-the-law Christian troops around the perimeter, armed to the teeth, with orders to blast any Shylock that approaches the wall. This campaign is wildly successful. Soon tens of thousands of Shylocks lie maimed and mutilated in the street, staining the cobblestones with their dark blood. The brigade has laid in vast stockpiles of ammunition, and as they keep repelling the zombie hordes, they don’t run out of ammo. They keep reloading and firing and the Shylocks keep dying the second death.

But to the force’s horror, every murderous fusillade revivifies zombies inside the wall. No one can tell where they’re coming from. They seem to be popping out of nowhere.

It’s harder to kill the zombies inside the compound. The Portias never seem to have a clean shot. The Supreme Portia tasks a whole battalion, 500 troops, with hand-to-hand combat, and issues each Portia a gleaming new meat cleaver from the mountain of cleavers beside her; the troops set about cleaving skulls. Many Shylocks manage to fall on their attackers, even with brainpans gaping open, and feast with their dying strength on their attackers’ faces.

The Shylocks in their black gaberdines and yellow caps tend to mill five or six rows deep around workspaces where human translators are working, distracting the humans, moaning in their ears, swaying back and forth, jostling the translators’ fingers off the home position on their keyboards.

Most of the translators are frantic with these distractions. They try to type faster, to finish their jobs by the deadline, keep them relevant.

But one translator seems to be in his element.

That would be Jacques Derrida, who has tunneled into the compound with a pelle “shovel,” par l’enlève et le relève de la terre à la pelle “by shoveling the dirt up and out.” Sometimes it seems as if his typing – on a manual typewriter! – revivifies the Shylocks. They are slithering out from between the keys. He moans along with them. He moans out Shylock’s lines from a French translation by Jean-Michel Déprats (Reference Déprats, Shakespeare and Venet2011) that was published seven years after his death –

– and the Shylock zombies emit a moaning kind of cheer.

His mɛ̃ɛ̃ɛ̃ɛ̃ɛ̃ɛ̃ɛ̃ɛ̃ɛ̃s (mains = hands) try to integrate the zombies’ moaaaaans into his translation, seeking ways of stylizing the moans so that they distract from the transmission of semantic sense, teach him ways of twisting that sense, turning it/them into blunt puns, hapless aporias, hand dystonias, stammers, grunts, humorously spastic leaps.

He too is often distracted. All around him cleavers flash and hot dark blood gushes. His sly glee will sometimes slip back into confusion, bafflement, a kind of “relevant” mental fog.

Could he be a zombie too?