Abstract

This essay considers together two recent posthumous publications by Derrida: Geschlecht III, and La vie la mort, both of which raise questions concerning translation. In Geschlecht III that is first of all the problem of how to translate the German word, how Heidegger’s reading of Trakl profits from, or loses in its translation, and how Derrida’s reading of Heidegger either does or does not translate Heidegger’s own interpretive practice. Reference to La vie la mort enables analysis of Benjamin’s concept of translation as a form of life that is “not limited to organic corporeality,” and consequently allows me to understand how Derrida’s thinking, very different from that of either Benjamin or Heidegger, takes us way back to something like originary inorganic lifedeath.