Deconstruction and philosophy in translation: the Franco-German connection

In 1988 there was a conference in Heidelberg on the philosophical and political dimension of Heidegger’s 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 Derrida’s intervention as a starting point, the article moves on to explore Victor Klemperer’s analysis of the German language under Nazism, Derrida and Maurice Blanchot as readers of Heidegger, Paul de Man and Derrida’s interpretations of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers’, in the context of the post-war French reception of German thought. The article concludes with a discussion of ‘untranslatability’, as developed by the French philologist and philosopher, Barbara Cassin, in her Dictionary of Untranslatables (2014), taking the history of the concept and word ‘subject’ as a way of reflecting on Europe’s 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. Paulhan—one of the heroes of the literary Resistance in France during the Second World War—took 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 Nancy’s lexical innovations. This recent text is also a reprise of an earlier autobiographical essay, and the gesture of this ‘reinscription’ is critical to our understanding of Mbembe’s status as a contemporary ‘postcolonial thinker’, 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 Nyobè

Rumor, an anarchimedium

Beyond the only text Jean-Luc Nancy explicitly dedicated to it (‘Rumoration’ in La Ville au loin), rumor lurks in the background — under the surface — of any discourse on community, or on being-with. Following closely Nancy’s thought process in ‘Rumoration’ (Nancy presents himself as walking, wandering in the city), this article interweaves fragments of a genealogy of rumor, from the ancient Greek logopoios to today’s ‘fake news’. 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 Cassin’s 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 “Untranslatable” (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 Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables project and Achille Mbembe’s 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 “entanglements”, one of Mbembe’s key terms

Between ‘God’s Phallus’ and ‘The Body of Christ’: the embodied world of contemporary African literature in Achille Mbembe and Jean-Luc Nancy

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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

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&gt

Irving Goh, ed., French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK. London: Routledge, 2020. xv + 194 pp. Notes, table, and index. 170.00U.S.(hb).ISBN9780367408220;170.00 U.S. (hb). ISBN 9780367408220; 48.95 U.S. (pb). ISBN 9781032087436; $48.95 U.S. (eb). ISBN 9780367809287

No abstract available