Translation of Derrida

David Wills, despite being a wonderful translator of The Gift of Death, suppresses a lot of crucial aspects of the French in his rendering the following sentence (on page 70 of both the French and the English editions):

Des engines à donner la mort sans compter livrent une guerre sans front.

Wills translates this as:

Countless machines of death wage a war that has no front.

While this gets at the condemnation of the horrific deaths occurring every day over the claims of religions to the divine logos that is happening here at this stage in Derrida's text, it makes it sound as if the (interpretative) machines were bad in and of themselves. What Derrida is getting at is more subtle: he is saying that machines both without number (i.e. there are many of them, too many) and, more significantly, without calculation--sans compter--relate themselves to death. The play on sans compter is crucial because Derrida advocates a type of dissimulative counting or accounting for the other throughout the text: it is one of his main theses regarding the economy of the gift of death. These machines are being condemned because they refuse to account: and this is the only way in which Derrida follows in the tradition of the philosophical condemnation of machinery or technology. The only machine Derrida will condemn (and yet there are so many, an innumerable amount) is one that does not calculate.

Furthermore, this gift of death is there in the French sentence! Machines, without counting and without number, give death (donner la mort!). Wills is trying to suggest that any death given by a machine is not a gift. Derrida, however, is asking, "What would it be like for a machine to give death?" This machine would be, for Derrida, a dissimulative machine, a machine that calculates but that breaks its own mode of functioning, its law or its program, through that very calculation. It is only thus that it could relate to death as a gift, as something inscribed within yet exceeding its ability to account for it. I'm moving too quick--there will be another post that will outline this stuff in more detail. For now, let me just suggest a different translation:

Machines of giving death without number(ing) wage a war without front.

I can't really think of a good way to bring the "sans compter" into the sentence with its dual signification, so this will have to do for now (using number in the sense Derrida gives to it in the section on "Enumerating" in The Politics of Friendship). I'll get on it, however, and make something better--including a more computational, machinelike sense. One should also note that "front" can also mean "face:" so we are getting a war where the face of the other (in the sense that Levinas gives to this formulation and that Derrida discusses with respect to the front earlier in the text), is not present or able to be faced--it would truly be a machinelike waging of a war if machines, who have no face, are the ones that are putting to death. Any suggestions however are very welcome!