RT Article
T1 Speaking of grief and the grief of speaking: martyrs’ speech and the perils of translation
JF Culture and religion
VO 17
IS 4
SP 431
OP 449
A1 Kotrosits, Maia ca. 20./21. Jh.
LA English
PB Taylor & Francis
YR 2016
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1638624658
AB In Derrida’s Monolinguism of the Other, a theory about the universal and constitutive alienation of the speaking subject from language finds its exemplary grounding in Derrida’s own experience as an Algerian Jew, one whose relationship to the French language is both totalizing and exiled (‘I have only one language, it is not mine.’). He equates speaking not only with contingent citizenship and a divestment of what one never really had in the first place, but also with the extreme experiences of torture, threat and physical violence. He indeed uses the words ‘passion’ and ‘martyr’ to describe his experience. In this paper, I will read Derrida ‘backwards,’ and against the universalizing move Derrida and those following him make in order to suggest a way of reading some scenes of violent death as scenes about diasporic cultural divestment. I’ll specifically attend to martyrs’ speech, and do so reading them as archives of the perils and inescapable expenses of entering dominant cultural ‘languages.’
K1 Colonisation
K1 Early Christianity
K1 Language
K1 Martyrdom
K1 Translation
K1 Violence
DO 10.1080/14755610.2017.1296010