Reading Shylock the Jew with Sarah Kofman and Barbara Cassin (and Kafka, Freud, and Derrida)

At the heart of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice lies the problem of conversion—with all its abysmal complexity and catastrophic potential. Against the grain of conventional readings, my talk presents Shylock as a character of resistance claiming a radically different thinking, a resistant logic that complicates the idea of universal convertibility, a logic that could be called translational instead of transactional: a trans— logic. Drawing on texts by Sarah Kofman, Barbara Cassin, Freud, Kafka, and Derrida, I argue that the figure of Shylock can be seen the figure of a thinking of living with otherness, diversity, and ambivalence: cherishing it, playing with it, making it work.

Caroline Sauter teaches Comparative Literature at Goethe University, Frankfurt. In Fall 2026, she serves as the Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor at Brown University’s German Department. Her work focuses on literary theory, on the interconnection of literature and Jewish thought, as well as on translation theory and practice. She has published widely on authors such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Hélène Cixous, Barbara Cassin, and Julia Kristeva and is the author of a monograph on Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of translation (Die virtuelle Interlinearversion, in German), the co-editor of several books and collected volumes, as well as the co-translator, together with Esther von der Osten, of Jacques Derrida’s Qu’est-ce qu’une tradition “relevante”? into German.