35 research outputs found
Deconstruction and philosophy in translation: the Franco-German connection
In 1988 there was a conference in Heidelberg on the philosophical and political dimension of Heideggerâs thought, with contributions from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. This article considers a number of exchanges between French and German philosophers in the late twentieth century, focusing on the theme of translation. Taking Derridaâs intervention as a starting point, the article moves on to explore Victor Klempererâs analysis of the German language under Nazism, Derrida and Maurice Blanchot as readers of Heidegger, Paul de Man and Derridaâs interpretations of Walter Benjaminâs âDie Aufgabe des Ăbersetzersâ, in the context of the post-war French reception of German thought. The article concludes with a discussion of âuntranslatabilityâ, as developed by the French philologist and philosopher, Barbara Cassin, in her Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014), taking the history of the concept and word âsubjectâ as a way of reflecting on Europeâs identity, past, present and future
Some Wheat and Some Chaff: Jean Paulhan and the Postwar Literary Purge in France
A somewhat overlooked figure of French literary history, Jean Paulhan has resurfaced in the polemic surrounding the wartime activities of many respected intellectuals, most prominently Blanchot, Heidegger and de Man. Commentators on Paulhan\u27s role in the intellectual history of the period have tended to avoid reading his texts closely. Paulhanâone of the heroes of the literary Resistance in France during the Second World Warâtook the extremely unpopular and controversial stance after the Liberation of criticizing the National Committee of Writers\u27 proposed purge of suspected collaborationist writers. This essay demonstrates the rigorous consistency of Paulhan\u27s position in the context of his other works, and argues for the necessity of taking into account the internal logic and rhetoric, as well as the explicit argument, of his texts. A careful reading of De la paille et du grain (On the Wheat and the Chaff) reveals an unusually forceful and original insight into the relationship between language, literature and political commitment, which has many resonances for current debates on this question
'Genealogical misfortunes': Achille Mbembe's (re-)writing of postcolonial Africa
In his latest work, Sortir de la grande nuit, the Cameroonian social theorist, Achille Mbembe nuances his description of the ontological status of the postcolonial African subject, which he had theorized extensively in his best-known text, On the Postcolony, and at the same time exploits the conceptual resources of a number of Jean-Luc Nancyâs lexical innovations. This recent text is also a reprise of an earlier autobiographical essay, and the gesture of this âreinscriptionâ is critical to our understanding of Mbembeâs status as a contemporary âpostcolonial thinkerâ, and the way in which he positions himself within a certain intellectual genealogy of postcolonial theory. Within this trajectory, I argue that we can read fruitfully his relationship to three influential figures: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Ruben Um NyobĂš
Rumor, an anarchimedium
Beyond the only text Jean-Luc Nancy explicitly dedicated to it (âRumorationâ in La Ville au loin), rumor lurks in the background â under the surface â of any discourse on community, or on being-with. Following closely Nancyâs thought process in âRumorationâ (Nancy presents himself as walking, wandering in the city), this article interweaves fragments of a genealogy of rumor, from the ancient Greek logopoios to todayâs âfake newsâ. But rumor is precisely what evades genealogy, so although it can be thought of as an archimedium (pure mediality, as Maurice Blanchot suggests), its floating texture, made up of references to references, turns it into a kind of anarchistructure
Postcolonial untranslatability: reading Achille Mbembe with Barbara Cassin
Barbara Cassinâs monumental Dictionary of Untranslatables, first published in French in 2004, is an encyclopaedic dictionary of nearly 400 philosophical, literary, aesthetic and political terms which have had a long-lasting impact on thinking across the humanities. Translation is central to any consideration of diasporic linguistic border crossing, and the âUntranslatableâ (those words or terms which locate problems of translatability at the heart of contemporary critical theory) has opened up new approaches to philosophically informed translation studies. This article argues that there is a far-reaching resonance between Barbara Cassinâs Dictionary of Untranslatables project and Achille Mbembeâs theorization of the postcolonial, precisely insofar as they meet at the crossroads of (un)translatability. Both texts are read performatively, in terms of their respective writing practices and theoretical âentanglementsâ, one of Mbembeâs key terms
Between âGodâs Phallusâ and âThe Body of Christâ: the embodied world of contemporary African literature in Achille Mbembe and Jean-Luc Nancy
No abstract available
Singular Performances: Reinscribing the Subject in Contemporary Francophone African Writing
Using the work of V. Y. Mudimbe as a major theoretical reference, I set up a number of dialogues between francophone African literature, African philosophy, literary theory, postcolonial studies, cinema, cultural studies, and history to arrive at the notion of a "performative reinscription of subjectivity."<p></p>
Singular Performances covers a wide range of francophone African writers, each of whom is read within a broader theoretical context related to African subjectivity: Mudimbe and the philosophical subject, Aoua Kéita and autobiography, Bernard Dadié and ethnographic irony, Ousmane Sembene and Tierno Monénembo and the cinematic imagination, Véronique Tadjo and Werewere Liking and the female writing subject, and Sony Labou Tansi and the "spectral" subject.<p></p>
From Life to Survival: Derrida, Freud, and the Future of Deconstruction. By Robert Trumbull. New York: Fordham University Press, 2022. xi + 199 pp.
No abstract available