OPPORTUNITIES OF CONTACT: DERRIDA AND DELEUZE/GUATTARI ON TRANSLATION By Joanna Louise Polley A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Philosophy University of Toronto © Copyright by Joanna Louise Polley 2009 ABSTRACT Opportunities of Contact: Derrida and Deleuze/Guattari on Translation Joanna Polley PhD Department of Philosophy University of Toronto 2009 This work engages with three contemporary thinkers who offer directions for a philosophy of translation. The initial thesis is that translation is a privileged mode of examining difference in language, because it indicates both the necessity to bring what is irreducibly other or foreign into terms of familiarity, and the extreme difficulties, perhaps the impossibility, of such an enterprise. I examine the particular responses to this translation dilemma given by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze/Félix Guattari, ultimately arguing that although Derrida gives crucial insights into the problem itself, a future theory of translation would need to go beyond Derrida’s approach and adopt the radically pragmatic approach to language articulated by Deleuze and Guattari. Throughout, I examine this problem in terms of the distinction between Derrida as a philosopher of transcendence and Deleuze and Guattari as philosophers of immanence. Derrida’s work insists on the impossibility of representing the other in language, and his simultaneous necessity and impossibility of translation is valuable insofar as it offers resistances to the presumptions of translation as standing in for the other. I argue, however, that Derrida’s insistence on impossibility as marked in the performativity of language itself is ultimately unable to give us a satisfying account of the relation between language and the world, which leaves us with no direction for how we might engage with concrete problems in actual translation situations in a productive way. The central problem with Derrida’s view is his insistence on the model of inter- lingual translation as figuring the paradox of difference in language. The approach of Deleuze and Guattari reverses this order and re-conceives of translation in a pragmatic context, where inter-semiotic translations are uniquely able to release the creative power of language. Through their articulation of the expressivity of matter, Deleuze and Guattari place language in a wider context in which it is intricately engaged in a world. I place translation in this wider context in order to demonstrate how Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking ii about language allows us to re-conceive of translation practices as opportunities for transformations of both language and world. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Although I have never agreed with the common claim that a thesis is like a baby, I do think that the old saying ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ can be fairly applied in this case. It seems to have taken a small village to get this thesis written. I have my thesis supervisors to thank first of all. Robert Gibbs is responsible for my earliest fascination with continental philosophy and introduced me to the exciting idea of a philosophical engagement with translation. Rebecca Comay has also been a great source of inspiration since the beginning of my undergraduate degree, and both of my supervisors have provided extremely helpful guidance and support throughout this project. Mark Kingwell has been a valuable reader, providing generous feedback and always provocative comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Jay Lampert for highly constructive comments on several drafts and for his support of and advice about the idea of engaging Deleuze and Guattari on the question of translation. I was very lucky to have Daniel W. Smith as my external appraiser, and I am very grateful for his thought-provoking comments and questions. I would also like to thank our graduate administrator Margaret Opoku-Pare for all of her help and kindness through the past few years. I would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Jay Parekh and Mrs. Prabha Parekh, my daughter’s wonderful grandparents, for support of every imaginable kind, including the financial support without which it would have been very difficult to finish this degree. Thanks also to Rahul Parekh for generous support over the years and a great deal of extra childcare duty in the final months. My good friends in the graduate program, David Bronstein and Vida Panitch, shared with me the ups and downs of life as a grad student, and luckily for me finished just enough ahead of me to always be able to advise me on what was to come. My brother Mark deserves special mention for his unwavering encouragement, and especially for the constant and initially annoying phone calls asking me how the writing was going, which achieved their intended effect of making me work a lot harder just to have something to report. Indeed all of my siblings, Mark Polley, Sarah Polley, Susan Buchan and John Buchan have been an absolutely amazing source of support and encouragement and I thank them from the bottom of my heart. My Dad, Michael Polley, besides having been my earliest inspiration to a life of philosophical exploration, was an extremely valuable reader of many drafts, offering both enthusiastic praise and support and immensely constructive questions and comments. Thanks as well to Alessandro Bonello, my best friend, for help with Italian and Spanish translations, for so much philosophical insight, and for emotional support and constant encouragement. And most of all, to my amazing daughter Lily – my tiny philosopher - who inspires me every single day. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION The Translation Impasse and its Opportunities 1 Derrida and Untranslatability 4 Derrida and Transcendence 9 Deleuze and Guattari on The Virtual 15 Outline of the Work 21 CHAPTER 1 Derrida: Translation as the Site of Impossibility 29 Translation Conditions: Meta-language, Semantic Content or Subject matter 31 The Name: Singularity and Multiplicity 37 Iterability as Untranslatability 47 Reproduction and Transformation 52 The Language Contract 60 CHAPTER 2 Derrida: Performativity as The Meaning of Language Itself 68 Resistances: The Idiom and the Body 70 Suffering and Mastery in Language 77 Schibboleths and Dates 83 Why Translation? 92 Performativity and Futurity 97 Force 102 The Meaning of Language as Loss of the World 105 CHAPTER 3 Deleuze and Guattari: Language as Expressivity 111 Expressivity: Assemblages, Strata, Territories 114 The Investments of Language: Regimes of Signs 126 An Account of Sense: Content, Expression and the Order-Word 132 Becoming and the Event 146 Transformation and Translation 150 CHAPTER 4 Deleuze and Guattari: Translation as Transformation 154 What is Language? What are Languages? 158 Pragmatic Analysis 168 Becoming-Minor 189 v CHAPTER 5 Deleuze and Guattari: Translations as Becomings 194 Intensities and Becoming 194 Immanence and Writing 200 The Political and the Literary 206 Deferral 211 What is a Good Translation? 218 EPILOGUE Future Translation 221 Bibliography 236 vi 1 INTRODUCTION The Translation Impasse and its Opportunities If translation is an activity that is becoming more common and more necessary in our increasingly globalizing world, it also provides a way of thinking about language that is singularly insightful. And as the difficulties of negotiating across incommensurabilities lead to more sophisticated analyses of what happens in translation and in language in any of its activities, this progress in turn can inform actual translation practices in ways that both increase sensitivity to what resists the usual methods and that recognize and seize upon the distinct opportunities that translations offer us. More broadly, questions about why and how we translate can function as privileged points of access to considerations of difference in language in general. Translation is privileged in this sense because it is when we try to translate, to ‘say otherwise’, that many long-held presumptions about language seem to come undone. We can no longer take for granted that we can know that which is not already anticipated in our own languages. To put in question this saying-otherwise is to ask about how our own languages can give us what our own languages do not give us. This paradoxical question is what the following pages explore. My initial thesis, following Jacques Derrida, is that if translation is necessary it is because the foreign is irreducibly so, because there is no real equivalence by which a translation would demonstrate that the foreign text gives us that which we could say equally well in terms already familiar. This replaces the usual analyses of how best to ascertain what familiar expressions correspond to the foreign expression with the larger concern for how to let what is irreducibly other into language, how to mark or preserve or encounter the other without 2 reducing this to what we already know, to the presumed universal meanings for which language is thought to function as a mere vehicle of expression. The difficulties of inter-lingual translations in light of this problematic demonstrate the limitations of correspondence theories of language. If language simply refers to things then translators would only have to figure out what things were being referred to and refer to them in the target language. But the experiences of translators seem overwhelmingly to have shown the referential use of language to be only one possible function of language and an extremely limited one. Translators simply do not find the things being referred to without passing through some subjective interpretation that must take into account the very forms of language itself. But the view that language is primarily referential persists in many analyses that imagine a source text that conveys something that we can access outside of the language in which it is expressed. Language can refer to concepts or ideas or themes as well as objects, and it remains a common view that translation can somehow simply reproduce such references.