www.zeon.com.tw
insofar as it can be the guarantee of the Thing” (Lacan 1992: 76). Here the relation between the “reality” of moral agency and the “real” by which the subject lives, a relation characterized by “the reverse and the same combined” (55), reminds us of Benjamin’s elusive distinction between “sense” and the “way of meaning,” or language and “language as such.”10 The possibility for the subject to become a
“separate identity,” of course, is also the possibility of language, here taken by Lacan to be bound up with the possibility of entering the ethical, of making judgments about the good, the “relevant.” Such are the consequences when language is accepted as the fundamental feature of human existence. Benjamin is profoundly aware of this whole problematic: “For in reality there exists a fundamental identity between the word that, after the promise of the snake, knows good and evil, and the externally communicating word” (1996a: 71).
Without this grounding of human language in at least an awareness of the need to refind its Thing, lost in the “communication of matter in magic communion”
(70), it would not be possible to speak of responsibility for the other other than as the indeterminate, undecidable externalization of the demands of the object. For the colonized, linguistic experience, fundamentally the experience of translation, seems to start with a traumatic denial of transparency in communication. But, as Paul Verhaeghe points out, every subject is affected by an inherent, structurally determined trauma, so that externally inflicted trauma does not enter a neutral ground but finds itself interacting with structural trauma in diverse ways (2001: 52-58). Trauma as structure and trauma as event, therefore, are also “the reverse and the same combined,” that is, joined in the movement of quantity. The main contribution of Benjamin’s theorizing of translation lies in reminding us that the universal and the contingent, or translatability and untranslatability, are not simply opposed in abstract counterposition, cut away from the “magic communion” of mutual translatability. Any “relevant” theory of translation must begin with his advice to return to the real, to the necessary universals of translation determined by the biological underpinnings of language and structured around the “unchanging apparatus,” around the zero degree of translation and of identity. Such universals would confirm, once more, that “languages are not strangers to one another.” For translation is first and foremost “translation of the language of things into that of man”:
PDFCMD Trial Version
www.zeon.com.tw
It is necessary to found the concept of translation at the deepest level of linguistic theory, for it is much too far-reaching and powerful to be treated in any way as an afterthought, as has happened occasionally. (69) Perhaps this is also a form of “cognitive mapping,” not in the sense of the totalizing of transnational complexities, but formed by a willingness to question every practical judgement in translation as to its ethical implications in providing reference points for the kinship of languages and of cultures.
Notes
1 Richard E. Palmer (2001) associates the term “liminality” with the anthropologist Victor Turner, who is “interested in a certain state experienced by persons as they pass over the threshold from one stage of life to another.” This state occurs for instance in rites of passage and is marked by marginality and indeterminacy. Palmer then refers to Paul Friedrich and others to establish that marginality is “the realm of Hermes.”
2 “Shifting out” is Bruno Latour’s rendering of “débrayage,” a term from Greimasian narrative semiotics. In Latour’s explication, “When the reader [of a narrative] is sent from one plane of reference to another, it is called shifting out” (1999: 310). In a different but more “translational” context, Jean Laplanche refers to the “tangential departure,” which means pretty much the same thing (1992b: 203).
3 As Michael Dutton points out, it is through a long process of historical association with this function of language that Asian studies has been reduced to “little more than a ‘content provider’” (Dutton 2002: 523, 526). What should be faulted, however, is not the “applied” side of language itself, but the one-sided attribution of the role of the intermediary.
4 Interestingly, some versions of the legend provide a contractual situation similar to that of The Merchant of Venice, Jacques Derrida’s paradigmatic text of translation (1978;
to be discussed below): by force of a previous agreement with Wu’s predecessor, the aborigines demand yearly human sacrifices from the Han settlers, but Wu “translates” them into empty promises, leftover heads from a previous rebellion, and cows (Jhang 1990, 34-39). Also, in later elaborations, there is usually a rock which serves to render human heads permanently after Wu is killed (35, 37, 39). It should be noted that although it is true that Wu is accused of fraudulent practices only in recent accounts, to conclude (as Jhang 1990:
40 does) that they are simply outweighed by the majority of older written accounts amounts to ethnocentric privileging of established Han written culture at the expense of the suppressed oral tradition of the aborigines.
5 The lecture deals with a series of Freud’s works, starting with nothing less than the Project for a Scientific Psychology itself. In the passage quoted here, Derrida is discussing the Freudian practice of dream interpretation in later texts, specifically the untranslatability of dreams and dream languages. For a study of this lecture as a significant rereading of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology, see Wilson 1998: 145-54.
6 In the terminology of the Kyoto school of philosophy, this is a shukan-teki stance, a stance of distanced observation. Shukan, Naoki Sakai explains, is the “epistemic subject,”
distinguished from (though possibly overlapping with) shutai, the “practical agent”:
“Whereas the epistemic subject emerges in the spatiality of synchronicity, shutai always flees such spatiality and can never be present to itself either” (Sakai 1997: 124, see also 24f, 198fn, 215fn).
PDFCMD Trial Version
www.zeon.com.tw
7 As Davis explains, decision necessarily implies ethical responsibility. “Only when faced with an impossible decision－one for which a preexisting ‘right’ choice is not
‘presented’－do we decide” (2001: 51). The radical divide between translatability and untranslatability is obvious. There is always a danger that this divorce from the possible might allow agency to veer toward irrationalism. In a different context, Geoff Boucher describes decisionism in this way: “In ethical decisionism, a sovereign subject that precedes all socialization determines, thanks to the unity of the sovereign will, a fresh course, without reference to established norms or protocols of legitimacy. Advocates of ethical decisionism (the legions of postmarxian admirers of the semi-nazi legal theorist, Carl Schmidt, for instance) tend to present the moment of decision as a ‘leap into madness,’ a ‘Pascalian wager,’ an ex nihilo determination of the exception that creates the rule” (2003).
8 In a note, Sakai explains that “feeling” and “signification” are irreconcilable only in some versions of (Japanese) neo-Confucianism in which the ontological priority of human nature, and with it the possibility of grounding “feeling” in intersubjectivity, is denied. By associating “feeling” in this sense with intensity as opposed to extensity as in Gilles Deleuze’s account of difference, Sakai gives primacy to quantity rather than quality in thinking “that which moves” (see 1997: 214n).
9 “A signifying organization dominates the psychic apparatus as it is revealed to us in the examination of a patient. Whereupon we can say in a negative way that there is nothing between the organization in the signifying network, in the network of Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen, and the constitution in the real of the space or central place in which the field of the Thing as such presents itself to us” (Lacan 1992: 118).
10 To say that, for Benjamin, the task of translation is “to purify the original of meaning” (Jocobs 1999: 79), therefore, misses the “translatability” between “sense” and
“way of meaning,” without which translation would lose much of its relevance as the informing principle of the “magical community” of all languages, human or inhuman.