In Response to Denis Hollier’s ‘Blanchot, Speaking in Tongues: Otherness in Translation’

Abstract

In Response to Denis Hollier's Blanchot, Speaking in Tongues: Otherness in Translation Janet Bergstrom Denis Hollier begins his text with a question that functions, it seems, as a pretext or perhaps I should say as a screen, namely: should French literature be taught in translation? I should specify that he is asking whether it should be taught in translation in French Departments in the U.S., since in the Cinema Studies Department where I sometimes teach French or German literature in connection with film, this question would never arise. From then on written Professor Hollier's essay deals with literary language and its irreducibility through a discussion of two essays by Blanchot, in 1932 and 1947. Literary language, or was that object of study that fascinated the Russian Formalists (a number of whom worked in the cinema as well) and was subsequently, if I am not mistaken, imported into France in translation and even by foreigners. Mainly, Professor Hollier poses questions that arise from the first of Blanchot's essays in which we learn (if we are not Blanchot scholars, and I am poetic language, not) that Blanchot rejected Curtius's history of French literature in an essay whose title already more or less announced his rejection: French Culture Viewed by a German. In 1932, then, Blanchot rejects Curtius's claim that he could understand the specificity of French literature, that he could understand its clarity, its transpar- as a Ger- valued German poetry in its alliance with philosophy over French prose wasn't in a position to have an opinion about French literature. I am led to wonder, at this point, to what extent we are talking about linguistic specificity and to what extent, as we follow Hollier with Blanchot, we are talking about cultural specificity. Did Blanchot believe that it was Curtius's strangeness to the French language that made him an unlikely candidate for comprehending the opacity hiding behind, or screened by, the seeming clarity of Racine's or La Fontaine's writings or was it the fact that, as a German, he could never understand this literature from the cul- ency. By this, Blanchot apparently meant that Curtius man who presumably