The Drive to Translate

In hindsight, last week seemed rushed. There is a lot of material in Security, Territory, Population, and perhaps the lectures warrant more than one class discussion. However, for better or worse, we are moving on to The Experience of the Foreign, which is another exciting but difficult text. The good news is that we will certainly have a chance to revisit Foucault's lectures because we will be reading his course from the subsequent year (The Birth of Biopolitics) in which he extends the analysis of the apparatuses of security into the 20th century through a reading of German ordo-liberalism and American neo-liberalism. At that point, it will be useful to remind ourselves of the main points from last week, which should contribute to a more thorough review of the text than was possible in one class period. In any case, after three weeks of Foucault, it may be good to move outside of his material for a while.

Before writing a post on the "apparatuses of security," with some more reflections on the position of Foucault in relation to Marxism, I want to mention some things to think about in trying to connect Antoine Berman's text to what we have read so far. At first glance, it may not be quite apparent how it fits into the course. I know that I said in the first week that I would be writing up reading guides for you. Predictably, perhaps, that plan fell by the wayside. However, I think that it is actually much more useful for both you and I if I just post to this blog once or twice a week. So, here are a few comments about the Berman reading.

There is one claim in Berman's text, stated very early, on pg. 8, which is useful to start with:
"In reality, however, the translating drive leaves any humanist project far behind. Polytranslation becomes an end in itself, the essence of which is to radically denaturalize the mother tongue. The translating drive always starts off with a refusal of what Schleiermacher has called das heimische Wohlbefinden der Sprache--the indigenous well-being of language. The translating drive always posits an other language as ontologically superior to the translator's own language."

This passage is quite interesting in its implications. Here Berman relates what he calls the "translating drive" to humanism, claiming that the translating drive "leaves behind" any humanist project. The first striking thing about this statement is that German Classicism and Romanticism are in many ways two of the first models for the contemporary humanities. The study and translation of literature prominent in early 19th century Germany was foundational for establishing the position of the humanities in the university. Many aspects of their models (the organic formation of the text, the spontaneous poesis of the subject, the purposiveness of cultivation etc.) eventually made their way to the United States--in New Criticism, for example--by way of the study of English Romanticism (which had itself borrowed liberally from the German case). Humboldt was responsible in many ways for defining the methodologies and the historical purpose for modern university education, and he gave particular attention to the study of languages and to comparative methods in the study of literature.

In this sense, it is somewhat counter-intuitive that Berman would locate a drive to translate in the intellectual work of this period and would claim that this drive actually moves beyond the confines of the humanist project for which it was also foundational. In chapter 3, which discusses Bildung (culture or cultivation), Berman discusses this question in terms of an intimate relation between the drive for Bildung and the drive to translate. In other words, university education, which in modernity was connected to the project of "forming" national subjects, was also a project of translation in which the process of national formation entered into intractable relations with the foreign. By the way, I think it is these relations that confront the translator with what he calls an "ethics of translation."

Taken at the level of the drive, Berman suggests that translation studies, and perhaps comparative literature as an entire field of inquiry, has the potential to work entirely against the grain of the humanist project to which it seems so bound. This point is debateable, but nonetheless interesting for our moment. For example, why are there so many students studying literature and comparative literature who are critical of the humanist project? How do the polytranslations involved in the "experience of the foreign" occur within the confines of the humanist project while also pointing well beyond them? What "models" or "practices" of translation facilitate a sublimation of the translating drive into the humanist project and which ones potentially subvert it?

Berman relies on an overly simplistic determination of "drive" in terms of sexual desire. Nonetheless, there is a question of desire involved in the relation between Bildung and translation, and psychoanalysis may provide us with a vocabulary for translation studies. It is possible to differentiate "drive" from both "desire" and "wish," but for now I won't get into these differences. In his early articulations of the relationship between the unconscious and dreams (e.g. The Interpretation of Dreams), Freud used terms such as "condensation" and "displacement" to refer to how the dreamwork created the manifest content of dreams. Interpreting the "latent content" of dreams remained an ongoing process which required the analyst to consider the dream-thoughts and associations of the analysand, what s/he knew about the analysand's past, and general principles concerning the structuring and development of the psyche (e.g., Oedipus, etc.). According to Freud, the psyche in its most rudimentary "formation" is, at least to some degree, an effect of repression. Repressed content emerges from the unconscious in the form of dreams, and, furthermore, dream content is never a direct translation of the "wish." Rather, the dreamwork patches together images through condensation, displacement, and other mediating narrative devices. The simple point here is that if the practice of translation is the effect of a drive, it is misguided to expect that any translation will somehow produce an adequate "copy" of the original. Maintaining "fidelity" to the original, while not sacrificing the coherency, conventions, and style of one's "own language," is a consistent problem whose final overcoming can only be imagined through a kind of repression. Structural models of languages that require a total consciousness of meaning are an example of this sort of repression, which forecloses many of the ethical, historical, and analytic problems that Berman is concerned with. This is one of my hypotheses.

Therefore, one question tomorrow will be how, precisely, Berman can claim that the "drive to translate" leaves behind the humanist project. Clearly, this problem is bound up with the "denaturalization" of the mother-tongue. In many ways, Freud also assumed such a "de-naturalization" of the mother-tongue, and equally connected it to the problem of the drive. Does the insight that there is nothing natural to the "mother-tongue" allow the practice of translation to move beyond humanism? Is there more to it?

In the style of this blog, this is by no means a cohesive argument, just some initial thoughts on tomorrow's text. Before entering into this sort of speculation tomorrow, it will be useful to discuss in detail the various modes of translation that were conceived during this seminal period in the creation of the humanities. Berman's text has the benefit of providing an overview of this period in German intellectual history while at the same time drawing out some of the most important theoretical problems.