Aporias of Translation: Education, Literature, and Philosophy

ISBN-13: 9783030978945 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 175 str.

Elias Schwieler

Opis

This book proposes a new way for scholars in, for example, Education, Literary Studies, and Philosophy to approach texts and other phenomena through the concept and practice of translation. Its interdisciplinary perspective makes the book of value for graduate students and scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The unique take on translation as related to the notion of aporia is applied to a number of seminal and classical texts within literature, poetry, and philosophy, which gives the reader new understandings of the workings of language and what happens within and between languages, as well as within and between disciplines, when some form of interpretation or analysis is at work. Importantly, the book develops the notion of aporias of translation as a way to learn and develop our understanding of texts and phenomena, and thus functions as a pedagogical process, which helps us come to terms with the boundaries of language and academic disciplines.

Spis treści

For proposal stage:

1.      Introduction: Aporias of Translation

The three main fields of study, education, literature, and philosophy, are introduced in relation to the notion aporias of translation. A brief history of each of the two basic concepts of the book, aporia and translation, is given. These histories provide the reader with the relevant previous research on the two concepts, and also stake out the paths that the studies in the book will follow in relation to aporias of translation. The introduction, moreover, outlines the way aporias of translation as a practice relates to education and pedagogy. Relevant research on education is addressed and accounted for. Important secondary literature on the main themes and fields of study is described and related to the argument of the book. The introduction concludes with short summaries of the seven chapters (including the Coda) which make up the main studies in the book.

 

2.      The Education of Death

The chapter consists of an analysis of what the notion of an education of death, as suggested in Thomas Bernhard’s novel Gargoyles (Verstörung), might entail. The primary texts of the chapter are, besides Bernhard’s novel, a passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes), and Jacques Derrida’s Aporias (Apories). The translations of the primary texts are addressed and problematized, in order to highlight the aporetic character of translation, and how the aporias of translation, further, relates to an education of death. Specifically, when it comes to the notion of aporia, the chapter provides an analysis of Derrida’s thinking concerning aporia and death, which have a direct bearing on the notion of an education of death. The chapter concludes with a return to Bernhard’s Gargoyles in light of the previous analysis of the education of death, and suggests that a possible education of death points beyond the instrumentalism of formal education toward a notion of experience and Bildung developed through the confrontation with death and aporia.

 

3.      Translation and Aporia in Censorship, Critique, and Education

The main texts of this chapter are the censored chapter “At Tikhon” in Dostoevsky’s novel Demons, Derrida’s chapter “Vacant Chair: Censorship, Mastery, Magisteriality” in Eyes of the University: Rights to Philosophy 2, and Rodolph Gasché’s book The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy, especially the chapter on Heidegger’s notion of Auseinandersetzung  (“Toward an Ethics of Auseinandersetzung”). These three textual encounters set the stage for rethinking ethics in relation to education, critique, and censorship. The chapter begins with a reading of “At Tikhon,” and the correlation between the Dostoevsky and his protagonist in Demons, Stavrogin, concerning censorship. The reading also broaches the relationship between education and censorship, more precisely a certain pedagogical movement discernable in Tikhon’s treatment of Stavrogin, which borders on censorship. The chapter continues with an analysis of Derrida’s deconstruction of censorship in Kant. As Derrida notes in “Vacant Chair,” censorship is not limited to state sanctioned intellectual violence (Gewalt) as Kant would have it, but applies to any act to limit free expression. The chapter concludes by proposing an alternative way of doing critique which tries to address the inevitable censorship of any critique, but  in a manner that poses an ethical alternative in the form of Heidegger’s notion of Auseinadersetzung, proposed by Rodolph Gasché. In sum, the chapter poses the question if not translation, in fact, is a form of censorship. How, for example, can we come to terms with the gaps and omissions in the English translation of Demons? These absences, it is argued, are aporetic moments that can enrich our reading of the novel. Moreover, and by extension, the chapter probes the question of censorship also in relation to critique as an academic genre and to education as an academic discipline.

 

4.      Sensitive Readings: Literature and the Discourse of Critical Thinking

The chapter has a twofold aim: 1) To explore how the analysis of works of literature relate to the concept of what is called “critical thinking.” What characterizes a reading of a literary work that at the same time displays what within higher education discourse is defined as “critical thinking”? To address this question student undergraduate theses in literature are analyzed using Tim Moore’s seven criteria of “critical thinking” from his 2013 article “Critical thinking: seven definitions in search of a concept.” 2) The chapter, moreover, exposes the reduction of literary scholarship into simple instrumentalism by certain proponents of critical thinking, exemplified by arguments by critical thinking scholar Marin Davies, and Jon Elster’s criticism of what he calls the “obscuritanism” of humanities scholarship. The chapter, to counter these arguments, suggests that an important aspect of a literary analysis and literary scholarship is to be able to endure uncertainty. It is in uncertainty and undecidability, that is, in moments of aporia, which sensitive readings are performed. This is something completely different from the kind of “obscuritanism” with which Elster wants to characterize literary and humanities scholarship.

 

5.      The (Ir)responsibilty of Teaching: Deconstructing Diversity

The chapter consists of a critical review of the discourse of diversity, and also proposes, as an alternative, to consider the aporia of responsibility in relation to the “wholly other(s)” as in Derrida’s formula “tout autre est tout autre,” as he conceives of it in his book The Gift of Death. The chapter, furthermore, sets out to examine the different conceptions of difference and “the Other” which the discourses on diversity often refer to as a point of departure for a theoretization of diversity. The wholly other and the aporia of responsibility is then related to education, specifically to teaching as an act of addressing the other as altogether other. Key thinkers that figure in the chapter are Terry Eagleton, Alain Badiou, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. In line with Derrida’s notion of the wholly other(s), the chapter proposes a perspective on education and teaching which takes into consideration the impossibility of a formalized responsibility in relation to diversity, since as soon as responsibility is formalized and thematized according to certain determined principles, responsibility reveals a fundamental irresponsibility which it cannot escape. Every notion of responsibility, in other words, rests on a simultaneous irresponsibility; that is, the concept of responsibility is caught in an unsolvable aporia. This aporia of responsibility has consequences for teaching, since in teaching one has to address and respond to the other as wholly other. The responsiveness of teaching, moreover, beyond any kind of retribution or compensation, brings with it the necessity to translate, more specifically, to translate the aporia so that those involved will have to read and translate, in their turn, what it means to remain in the aporetic pedagogical situation that every instance of teaching and learning constitutes. Teaching as such has the possibility to be, as Derrida states of responsibility, “a dissident and inventive rupture with respect to tradition, authority, orthodoxy, rule, or doctrine.”

 

6.      Translation and Poetry: Reading John Ashbery

The chapter considers, first, John Ashbery’s practice of translation in relation to his poetry, which builds the foundation for a reading of Ashbery’s poetry in its own right.  As Rosanne Wasserman and Eugene Richie suggest in their introduction to Ashbery’s Collected French Translations – Prose: “Not only does translation transform a poet’s original work, but also the poet can offer us translations “closer to the originals than the originals themselves,” (note 43) [Ashbery, Selected Prose, 86]  as the intuitive, interpretive alchemy of translation enhances and deepens our sense of a text, bringing out the best of its original” (36-37). This assertion is the point of departure for the analysis of translation and poetry in the chapter. To achieve this aim, Ashbery’s poetry is related to the aporetic character of the concept of translation by reading a selection of his poems, such as “Soonest Mended,” “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name, “ “The New Spirit,” and “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” The chapter centers on a reading of “Soonest Mended” with the expressed notion in the poem of learning as a delusion and the eternal recurrence of  the same, the return of time. This theme provides the basis for invoking a “process of awareness,” namely what Ashbery calls the “experience of experience,” that is, a poetics of process (Silverberg, p. 115), which can be connected to the process of translation. The reading of Ashbery’s poems shows how an aporia is revealed and enacted when “meaning” becomes secondary and understanding must turn toward experiencing the event of translation as a process of language. This is where “learning / Is a delusion” (“Soonest Mended”) because what is learned is temporary and changes, transforms as soon as it has happened, so that “Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been / Learned” (“Soonest Mended”) and is thus undone. The chapter, in this way, points to translation as a pedagogical practice that “enhances and deepens our sense of a text,” to echo Wasserman and Richie’s introduction to Ashbery’s translations.

7.      Translation and the Aporias of “Words”

The chapter employs the developed notion of the aporia of translation to analyze Martin Heidegger’s essay “Words” (Das Wort, GA 12). Already a comparison between the original German title of the essay and the translated English title reveals a discrepancy which leads to an aporia; e.g. why did the English translator, Joan Stambaugh, choose to translate the German “das Wort” with the English “words”? What connotations do the English expression “the word” have that make it an inappropriate translation of the German das Wort? Another significant detail is that Heidegger’s essay carries the same title as the poem that is the main focus in his text, namely Stefan George’s “Das Wort” (“The Word”). This, then, is another reason to ask why the translator of Heidegger’s essay have chosen to render the title of the essay as “Words.” Taking this preliminary instance of an aporia of translation as a stepping stone, the chapter continues by invoking Paul Natorp’s conceptions “gewortete Wort” and “wortenden Wort,” that is, the “worded word” and the “wording word,” as developed in his Philosophische Systematik, to analyze Heidegger’s thinking regarding the mystery or secret (Geheimnis) of the word. Furthermore, by way of Heidegger’s translation of the Greek λόγος as “saying” as well as “Being,” the analysis invokes the translation of λόγος as “the Word” in John 1:1; that is, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and the debates on its translation. Given the complications of translation analyzed in the chapter, it concludes with a reflection on translation and education, and how translation can serve as a means to approach, not only languages, but also literature, poetry, and philosophy. J. Hillis Miller’s essay “Border Crossings, translating Theory: Ruth” is a significant essay which the chapter addresses regarding translation, theory, and the reading of biblical texts. Important Heidegger scholarship that is addressed in the book is, for example, Richard Capobianco’s Engaging Heidegger and Heidegger’s Way of Being, Markus Joachim Brach’s Heidegger-Platon: Vom Neukantianismus zur existentiellen Interpretation des “Sofistes,” and Jussi Backman’s essay “The Transitional Breakdown of the Word: Heidegger and Stefan George’s Encounter with Language.”

8.      Coda: Aporia and the Excess of Translation and Education

 

The Coda consists in an analysis of a number of conceptions and translations of excess; such as, for example, excess as Überschuß (Husserl), Übermaß, Überfluss (Heidegger), the exorbitant (l’exorbitant) (Derrida), sûrcroit (Marion), expenditure (dépense), excess (excédant, excès, surabondance) (Bataille). The excess of translation, it is argued, is an excess inherent in an aporia, that is, the insoluble character of aporia gives rise to an excess that cannot be contained in a single concept, theory, method, discourse, etc. Each system or discipline, then, such as a philosophical system, a system of ethics, a theory of education, or the academic discipline of Education itself, by defining and determining itself, opens up unto aporia, which means the system, theory, or discipline is always already in excess of itself. Examples from the previous chapters are revisited in order to sum up the main argument of the book, namely the educational and pedagogical possibilities of the theoretical concept aporias of translation, as well as its performative consequences.

O autorze

Elias Schwieler has a PhD in English literature and holds a position as Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Stockholm University, Sweden. His most recent scholarly work include the book Heidegger on Literature, Poetry, and Education: At the Limits of Metaphysics, published with Routledge (2017), and co-authored with James M. Magrini, College of DuPage, US, and the journal article “Evolving Bildung: Streaming Media, Art, and Technology” forthcoming in Popular Communication, co-authored with Niclas Ekberg, Luleå University of Technology, Sweden.

Blurb

This book proposes an original way for scholars in a range of subjects such as Education, Literary Studies, and Philosophy to approach texts and other phenomena through the concept and practice of translation. The book’s take on translation as related to the notion of aporia is applied to a number of seminal and classical texts within literature, poetry, and philosophy, which gives the reader better understandings of the workings of language and what happens within and between languages, as well as within and between disciplines, when some form of interpretation or analysis is at work. Importantly, the book develops the notion of aporias of translation as a way to learn and develop our understanding of texts and phenomena, and thus functions as a pedagogical process, which helps us come to terms with the boundaries of language and academic disciplines. Its interdisciplinary perspective makes the book of value for graduate students and scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences.”