Money and Exchange in Plato’s Sophist: reading ἕτερον after Derrida

The act of translation is evidence of the untranslatability of one language into another. In addition to this paradox, each language harbours the problem of unspeakable‐ness. This indicates that the problems involved in translation are, perhaps, not problems of translation but of language. This is a significant philosophical problem that Western philosophy has attempted to solve, but so far without reaching a satisfactory conclusion. Written from a Derridean perspective, this article tries to outline the linguistic issues in translation by means of deconstructive discussion and contemplation of translation by Western thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man. It thus serves to illustrate Chinese scholars’ understanding of the dilemma of cross‐cultural translation.

A Weak Messianic Power: Figures of a Time to Come in Benjamin, Derrida and Celan

Reviewed by: Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal Philip Holden (bio) Javed Majeed . Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 309 pp. ISBN 1-4039-8595-2, $85.00. Javed Majeed's new book is an important intervention in contemporary auto/ biography studies. It is centrally concerned with the autobiographical writings of three figures, all published before the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. Mohandas K. Gandhi's and Jawaharlal Nehru's autobiographies are well [End Page 379] known internationally, but Majeed supplements them with less well-known autobiographical writings by the same authors: Gandhi's Satyagraha in South Africa and, stretching generic conventions somewhat, Nehru's voluminous The Discovery of India. In addition, the author compares these texts to the Persian poem Jāvīd Nāma by Muhammad Iqbal, the leader of the All India Muslim League who was one of the earliest proponents of a separate state for Muslims in South Asia. All three authors, Majeed argues, use autobiography as a means of production of "projects of selfhood" that are intimately bound up with the politics of nationalism (3). In contrast to many autobiographies produced in the subcontinent at this time, however, Gandhi's, Nehru's, and Iqbal's texts enact a "postnational" politics, frequently resisting homogenizing or fixed notions of nationhood. In the initial half of Autobiography, Travel and Postnational Identity, Majeed examines his autobiographers' deployment of the trope of travel. The writings of Gandhi, Nehru, and Iqbal are embedded in a rich contextual discussion of both colonial ethnographic travel writing concerning India, and accounts of travel within and outside the subcontinent written by Indians during the same period. Such an approach enables a careful reading of the texts in question that abstractions such as "diaspora" or "globalization" frequently do not. Majeed thus notes that while the autobiographies write back to colonial ethnography, and indeed appropriate elements of colonial modernity, they are also influenced by a tradition of Indian travel writing. Nehru, for instance, in this reading "recovers a historical narrative of adventurous travel interrupted by British colonialism" (68), in the process re-imagining a new geopolitical map in which India is no longer peripheral. The second half of the book consists largely of chapters adapted from previously published papers, and is more eclectic in subject matter. Successive chapters address the question of Muslim nationalism in all three works, Gandhi's elaboration of vulnerable "inter-gender identities" in his presentation of self, Gandhi's meditation on truth and the possibilities of translation with particular reference to the Bhagavad Gita, and Iqbal's relationship with British Idealist philosophers. While this section of the study is less tightly structured—the chapter on truth and translation, for example, focuses more on translations of the Gita than it does on Gandhi—it also contains some of the most interesting individual discussions. An example might be Majeed's account of Gandhi's initial promotion of the word "satyagraha" as a means of translating the English term "passive resistance," but then later, with the term having taken on new meanings in an Indian context, struggling to find an English equivalent for the word. Satyagraha, in this reading, as a "multi-authored and multiply translated term" exemplifies Gandhi's self-presentation as linguistically inept, [End Page 380] and his conscious foregrounding of his struggles with language, rather than attempting to dismiss the problem of interlinguistic and intersubjective translation (262). Majeed's range of theoretical reference is also impressive. Postcolonial theorists such as Nicholas Thomas, Anne McClintock, and Bill Ashcroft rub shoulders with Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Man, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Frantz Fanon. Nancy Chodorow's concept of the reproduction of mothering provides an insight into the manner in which Gandhi's reinscription of his shyness and stage-fright becomes part of a larger gender politics, exemplified by his inability to move beyond the words "I conceive" when giving an early speech on vegetarianism in London (227). Yet such eclecticism also has its drawbacks: most of the theorists or philosophers mentioned above are given walk-on parts. They are referred to briefly, frequently in support of arguments that emphasize the complex self...

In light of the perennial demand for an ethics of translation as a key to intercultural communications, this paper seeks to provide an ontological account of language that grounds the translation process and that can consequentially serve as a practical standard for comparatists, through inquiries into the seminal theoretical works of Jacques Derrida, Antoine Berman, and Emily Apter and with respect to such contemporary linguistic and philosophical topics as cultural globalization, untranslatability, among others. I argue that to prevent translation from becoming an explorative apparatus of hegemonic power that leads to cultural appropriation and domination, translators need to continuously stay aware of the fundamental and pre-originary care one innately bears towards the other. An ethics of translation – as that of comparative literature as a discipline – is constitutive of a non-national, non-identity, and non-subjective set of ethical principles that sustains and balances the powers coming from the host regions of related languages, while acknowledging the naturally irreconcilable and chronologically dynamic tensions in between. The very technicalities of the translating practice consist not only of the mechanical endeavor of pairing up words of various linguistic origins, but indeed an art of creating relations for a communicative understanding and experience of the foreign other, and simultaneously presenting a self-effaced invisibility of committed identity through a gesture of double-betrayal and resignation.

Both Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida attempted to rethink the notion of event by accounting for a certain poetic essence of literature. Notably, they tried to approach the eventness of the event by highlighting a phantasmatic dimension inseparable from what we call “the real.” They both refuse the conventional opposition between “phantasm” and “real event.” They redefine the role of the phantasm and of literature in relation to reality, and attribute to the phantasm a privileged access to what we call an “event.” But they do so with very different implications as to the status and definition of reality. This chapter discusses these two conceptions of the articulation between “phantasm” and “the real”—the first predicated on Malabou’s readings of Heidegger and Kafka, and the second following Derrida’s readings of Blanchot and Cixous. While Malabou’s “ontological phantasm” presents an ontological account of the event described as Being’s plasticity and indexed on a “new materialism,” Derrida strives to think a phantasm-event that precedes and exceeds the capture of ontological discourse, thus liberating literature and the event’s otherness from the authority of the philosophical decision on the truth of Being.

Women's Poetry and The Sexual Politics of Babel Karen Van Dyck In this article I explore the connection between babble and Babel, two states of language which accentuate deterritorialization, that is the foreign and unempowered status of the writing or speaking subject.1 By babble I mean the confusion within one language usually associated with infants who have not yet mastered the language, or a Cassandra figure who has lost control of the language. By Babel I mean the confusion caused by a multitude of different languages and the problems of translation that ensue. Although the Oxford English Dictionary in its definition of "babble" reports that it cannot trace any direct connection with Babel, it does admit that "association with that may have affected the senses." In the popular imagination both babble and Babel are seen as nuisances, posing as they do the impossibility of one to one equivalencies between words and things. It is this similarity that prompts me to consider how the specific babble of recent women's poetry in Greece might provide some insights into the more general question of Babel and translation which critics from Roman Jakobson to Walter Benjamin to Jacques Derrida have analyzed.2 In a larger work I trace the ellipticism of recent women's poetry— in particular Rea Galanaki's, Jenny Mastoraki's and Maria Laina's— back to the seven-year dictatorship which ended in 1974 (Van Dyck 1990). My hypothesis is that what began more generally as a ploy for evading censorship under the dictatorship actually became a distinguishing feature of women's poetry after the regime's fall. While most poets, with the lifting of censorship, assumed that poetry could speak clearly again and say what it meant, women poets continued to write poetry that was difficult to decipher. This babble, initially marginalized , or doubly marginalized, if we consider modern Greek literature's own marginal status in relation to other major literatures, has, in the 1980s, slowly begun to gain recognition as a viable alternative writing style. Let us first examine how women's poetry turned its minor status Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 8, 1990. 173 174 Karen Van Dyck into an empowering strategy of resistance, and then what its various styles of deterritorialization might teach us about translation more generally. Women's Poetry and Deterritorialization For centuries "good" women poets were thought to have "risen above" their gender. The term «γυναικεία γϕαφή» [women's writing] has a history of derogative or, at least restrictive, meanings. Traditionally "women's writing" represented women's experience, as defined by men. Immanuel Roidis' discussion of women's writing at the turn of the century makes this very clear; women's writing should be, «πεϕίεϕγόχειϕωνκαιμαγειϕικής»[aboutneedleworkandcooking]. When women's writing ventured into the public sphere Roidis derided it as «απόπειϕαι πιδηκισμοϕ» [attempts at imitation]. The Chinese saying he quotes makes his position clear: «Άμα q όϕνιθα αϕχίση να λαλή ως πετεινός, σφάξε την αμÎ-σως» [If the hen begins to crow like a cock kill her immediately] )1913: 85).3 Women in the private sphere were meant to keep things running smoothly by reproducing sons and writing about domestic life, so that men in the public sphere could get on with what was oddly considered to be more originary, and less derivative, the task of production. Although Roidis was exaggeratedly anti-feminist, his views of women's writing have nonetheless influenced generations of women writers and may be one reason why poets like Mastoraki and Laina are still reticent to call themselves "women poets." Because of its minor status reek women writers themselves deny the category "women's writing" any specificity. They respond facetiously or dismissively to questions about "women's writing." Jenny Mastoraki, for example, said in response to the question. "Do you write women's poetry?": Και βÎ-βαια. Όπως ο βολιώτης γιατϕός ασκεί βολιώτικη ιατϕική και οι πειϕαιώτικοιφοϕϕνοιβγάζουνπειϕαιώτικοψωμί.(1982:65) Of course. In so far as a doctor from Volos practices Voliot medicine and a bakery from Piraeus bakes Piraean bread. This is a response which Laina has since quoted in response to similar questions. Although women's poetry is no longer regarded as a ghetto of tender sentiments, and many critics even mention the importance of writing by women in the 1980s (Vitti 1987: 450; Maronitis 1987: 24), they still largely deny it its historical...

Diminishing I’s: The Unnamable’s Absent Subjecthood and the Disintegration of Meaning in the Face of Foucault’s Panopticon Mohammadreza Arghiani Since its publication in 1953, Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable has confounded casual readers and critics alike with its richly convoluted narrative voice and the intentionally ambiguous time and space. The title refers to both the character of the narrator and the narrative itself; the ambiguities created by the narrator’s contradictory, mysterious, and intertextual claims render both the narrator and the story “unnamable,” in the sense that neither can be positively identified, described, or defined, at least not to the extent that they might be sufficiently named. Thus, both the novel and the narrator are The Unnamable, and though initially daunting, this conflation ultimately points the way to an intelligible reading of the text because of what it reveals about the narrator’s position. In short, by applying a consideration of the importance of naming to literature first formulated by Jacques Derrida to the inherent difficulties presented by the text, one is able to see the unnamable narrator as the “model” citizen of the kind of society described by Michel Foucault’s metaphorical panopticon, an entirely circumscribed consciousness attempting to reach beyond the constraints of its position but ultimately failing in the face of overwhelming surveillance and oppression. The novel engages in a kind of “secret agent” discourse of interrogation and resistance in order to inhabit the inner life of the individual at the center of a panoptic, society even as that individual is rendered unnamable and unknowable to the reader. The narrator resists the [End Page 465] interrogation of society (and implicitly, the reader) by creating alternate identities with which to use the unique abilities of a narrator to inhabit other characters and escape from the surveillance under which he finds himself. This ability is only ever a delaying tactic, however, because the narrator’s efforts to use alternate characters in order to avoid surveil-lance only serves to divide the narrator’s agency across those characters, thus reducing him to a hollow placeholder instead of an actual person; in other words, the narrator’s efforts to escape the panoptic society ultimately only serves to dissolve his identity, leaving nothing except precisely that part of him that is controlled and surveyed by society. I Before exploring The Unnamable in more detail, it will be necessary to review the critical tools that allow for an accurate understanding of the novel. First, a look at Jacques Derrida’s consideration of the “name” of literature in his essay “Who or What Is Compared? The Concept of Comparative Literature and the Theoretical Problems of Translation” offers a means of understanding the novel and narrator’s most prominent feature (or lack thereof). Ostensibly a consideration of the phenomena in the comparative literature department, Derrida’s essay actually reveals the importance of names as they relate to meaning, because according to Derrida, proper names “cannot be translated . . . because they have no meaning, no conceptualizable and common meaning” (p. 36).1 What he means by this is that “they only have a referent, as one says, a unique referent, and when they are pronounced one can designate [viser] only a single, singular individual, one unique thing” (WW, p. 36). This claim demands interpretation because of the implications it has for Beckett’s unnamable narrator, because as will be seen, the narrator’s struggles are ultimately an attempt to become that “single, singular individual,” which is an irreducible identity, standing apart from any generalized mass of humanity, and precisely the thing quashed by the kind of oppressive society described by Foucault’s panopticon and the novel itself. Furthermore, the fact that the narrator is not simply unnamed but rather unnamable suggests the terrifying implications of the novel’s society, and subsequently, human society in general. If proper names have no meaning, then conversely, that which is unnamable would seem to have the potential for infinite meanings, such that the unnamable object is only ever visible in brief flashes, and never in its totality, like the quantum state of an electron, only ever [End Page 466] existing as a potentiality until observed by an...

The article examines the specifics of the translation of postmodern philosophical termi- nology. The authors explore Russian translations of the works of the modern French postmodernist philosophers Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida. Postmodernism as a philosophical movement is based on the concept of radical plurality. It is characterised by the multiplicity of dimensions and types of analysis. The authors look into the problem of choosing strategies for the translation of postmodern terminology and analyse the dilemma translators have to face: how to manoeuvre between polysemy and ambiguity in the translation of philosophical terms. The article analyses the translation of Foucault’s seminal work Les Mots et les Choses (translated by Avtonomova and Vizgin). Special attention is paid to the problem of translation of the postmodern terms discourse and episteme. Another focus of research is the analysis of the translation of Baudrillard’s work Simulacres et Simulation (translated by Pechenkina). In the final part of the article, the authors analyse the peculiarities of the translation of Derrida's treatise into Russian.

Wagner's Furious Host

A Cultural Ambassador East and West: J. Hillis Miller’s <i>Lectures in China</i>

Khora, as it figures in Plato’s Timaeus, as read by Jacques Derrida, poses a singular translation problem, not only for having more than one meaning, but also for having less than one. This might be thought of in terms of Derrida’s distinction between ‘polysemy’ and ‘dissemination’, in so far as any concept of translation will ‘re-mark’ a translation or reception of something like khora, the ‘all-receiving’. This means both that khora is untranslatable and that its translation into every language is inevitable, which has implications for the question of a ‘politics of khora’, as becomes particularly apparent in Derrida’s unpublished seminar from 1985–86.

By using the context of explaining hermeneutics to a class of senior monks studying to be translators at a 600-year-old Tibetan monastic university, practical scope is given to many intriguing, profound, and intractable problems of doing translation. Central issues in the hermeneutics of translation are reviewed while specifying shortcomings of doing word-for-word translation. Concrete illustrations taken from Tibetan philosophical culture supply clarity to the suggestive but occasionally elusive thinking of Walter Benjamin in his “The Task of the Translator,” augmented by the commentaries of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, John Sallis, and others. Additional specification is achieved by identifying and describing fundamental aspects of the semiotics that are operative in translation work.

Deconstruction and Translation explains ways in which many practical and theoretical problems of translation can be rethought in the light of insights from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. If there is no one origin, no transcendent meaning, and thus no stable source text, we can no longer talk of translation as meaning transfer or as passive reproduction. Kathleen Davis instead refers to the translator's freedom and individual responsibility. Her survey of this complex field begins from an analysis of the proper name as a model for the problem of signification and explains revised concepts of limits, singularity, generality, definitions of text, writing, iterability, meaning and intention. The implications for translation theory are then elaborated, complicating the desire for translatability and incorporating sharp critique of linguistic and communicative approaches to translation. The practical import of this approach is shown in analyses of the ways Derrida has been translated into English. In all, the text offers orientation and guidance through some of the most conceptually demanding and rewarding fields of contemporary translation theory.

C AN'T BUY ME LOVE. To the degree that the postmodern condition implies an unbridled consumerism, the cultural logic of late capitalism, pleasure for cash, and a product to gratify every possible impulse-if not, indeed, to construct the impulse in the first place-love is a value that remains beyond the market. While sex is a commodity, love becomes the condition of a happiness that cannot be bought, the one remaining object of a desire that cannot be sure of purchasing fulfillment. Love thus becomes more precious than before because it is beyond price, and in consequence its metaphysical character is intensified. More than ever, love has come to represent presence, transcendence, immortality, what Jacques Derrida calls proximity, living speech,' certainty-everything, in short, that the market is unable to provide or fails to guarantee. To the degree, however, that postmodernity in general, and Derrida's work in particular, also represents a skeptical attitude to metaphysics, a radical questioning of presence, transcendence, certainty, and all absolutes, the postmodern condition brings with it an incredulity toward true love. Where, we might ask, in the light of our experience, the statistics, our philosophy, or any documentary evidence outside popular romance, are its guarantees, its continuities, proof of its ability to fulfill its undertakings? At the same time, no amount of skepticism does away with desire which, if it is the destiny of a signifying organism, is fashioned, but neither produced nor erased, by the specific cultural order which gives rise to our doubts. Love thus occupies a paradoxical position in postmodern culture: it is at once infinitely and uniquely desirable on the one hand, and conspicuously naive on the other. Like the writer of Derrida's postcards, we know exactly the opposite of what we desire, of what we know our desire to be (PC 194). When Ferdinand de Saussure drew attention to the problem of translation, he enabled his readers to recognize the inevitability of