Das Planetarische

"I insist on the Christian dimension": Forgiveness, Translation, Secularized Representation, and the Outside of the Human

Rey Chow (Brown University)

Abstract

The question I will explore in this lecture pertains to the type of exchange specific to human relations we call forgiveness. Hannah Arendt's comments on the subject provide a compelling justification for its necessity: "Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacks the magic formula to break the spell." Yet precisely the imperative nature of forgiveness may be a source of epistemic conundrums. To elaborate this point, I shall begin with a reference to a key episode in the South Korean film Miryang / Secret Sunshine (directed by Lee Chang-dong, 2007), which stages forgiveness in a context of globalized Christian evangelism. As I will go on to argue, through a discussion of the writings of Jacques Derrida, Erich Auerbach, and Edward Said, among others, the connotations of forgiveness extend considerably beyond a strictly religious dimension, going so far as to bear on theoretical questions about translation, the secularization of representation, and the limits of the human.

Bio

Rey Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University. She is the author of many books, including "Woman and Chinese Modernity" (1991); "Writing Diaspora" (1993); "Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema" (1995); "Ethics after Idealism" (1998); "The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism" (2002); "The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work" (2006); and "Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films" (2007). Her work has been widely anthologized and translated into major European and Asian languages.