Trembling in translation: teachings from Kierkegaard and Derrida about ethics in translation

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Trembling is a word of relevance in the philosophy of Kierkegaard that was later adopted by Derrida in his development of deconstruction. Kierkegaard used the concept of trembling to describe the experience of Abraham when confronted by the paradox of choosing between his love for God and his love for his son Isaac. Derrida developed this idea when distinguishing between responsibility in general and absolute responsibility, giving rise to many interpretations centred around the need to suspend the ethical. Making use of some readings of Kierkegaard (mostly by Davenport and Simmons) which do not conclude with the aforementioned suspension of the ethical, this article offers a re-interpretation of Derridean thinking in which trembling is put forward as a key concept for a redefinition of translation ethics in a more hopeful sense, as an unavoidable tension between the generality of the norm and the singularity of the event that is translation.