“Admiration of Nelson Mandela, or The Laws of Reflection”: Translator's Introduction

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. Jacques Derrida, “Ethics and Politics Today,” in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 300.2. Mustapha Tlili, “The Meaning of an Act of Compassion and Rigor: Preface to the American Edition,” trans. Franklin Philip, in For Nelson Mandela, ed. Jacques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili (New York, NY: Seaver, 1987), x. An earlier translation of “Admiration of Nelson Mandela,” by Mary Ann Caws and Isabelle Lorenz, appeared in this volume under the title “The Laws of Reflection: Nelson Mandela, in Admiration,” and later in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. II, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Likewise, the French text was also published in Psyché. Inventions de l’autre, vol. II (Paris: Galilée, 1987-2003). I will take this opportunity to note that my own effort has doubtless benefited from the consultation of Caws and Lorenz's translation, though many of my own decisions have, of course, for better or for worse, differed from theirs. I should also note, moreover, that behind the idea of retranslating this text there lay no polemical intention; in other words, this new translation is by no means intended to “replace” what is all in all, in my opinion, an excellent, a rigorous and an attentive, rendering.3. Jacques Derrida, “Racism's Last Word,” trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 290–9. For the debate that followed, see Ann McClintock and Rob Nixon, “No Names Apart: The Separation of Word and History in Derrida's ‘Le Dernier Mot du Racisme,’” Critical Inquiry 13 (1986): 140–54; and Jacques Derrida, “But, Beyond… (Open Letter to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon),” trans. Peggy Kamuf. Critical Inquiry 13 (1986): 155–70.4. Tlili, “The Meaning of an Act of Compassion and Rigor,” xi.5. I note in passing that this gesture already anticipates Derrida's 1999–2001 seminar on the death penalty, in which he will attempt to ally, in a philosophically rigorous fashion, “the reasons of the heart” – compassion, for example – with those of principle, in other words, with “reason itself”; Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. I, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013). See also Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 89f.6. Benoît Peeters, Derrida: A Biography, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 375.7. Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” trans. Avital Ronell with Christine Roulston, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 210; my emphasis.8. Cf. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 184. “Irony and history seem to be curiously linked to each other,” notes de Man, “but this can only be tackled when the complexities of what we could call performative rhetoric have been more thoroughly mastered.”9. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 84.