German Philosophy in English Translation (Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies) [1 ed.] 1032391375, 9781032391373

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German Philosophy in English Translation

This book traces the translation history of twentieth-century German philosophy into English, with significant layovers in Paris, and proposes an innovative approach to long-standing difficulties in its translation. German philosophy’s reputation for profundity is often understood to lie in German’s polysemous vocabulary, which is notoriously difficult to translate even into its close relative, English. Hawkins shows the merit in a strategy of “differential translation,” which involves translating conceptually dense German terms with multiple different terms in the target text, rather than the conventional standard of selecting one term in English for consistent translation. German Philosophy in English Translation explores how debates around this strategy have polarized both the French-language and English-language translation landscapes. Well-known translators and commissioners such as Jean Beaufret, Adam Phillips, and Joan Stambaugh come out boldly in favor, and others such as Jean Laplanche and Terry Pinkard polemically against it. Drawing on Hans Blumenberg’s work on metaphor, German Philosophy in English Translation questions prevalent norms around the translation of terminology that obscure the metaphoric dimension of German philosophical vocabulary. This book is a crucial reference for translators and researchers interested in the German language, and particularly for scholars in translation studies, philosophy, and intellectual history. Spencer Hawkins is a Research Fellow in Translation Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He publishes in Translation Studies, German Studies, and Cultural Studies, and he translates philosophically oriented books. Along with Lavinia Heller, he is co-editing a special issue of Target on migrant scholars’ self-translations.

Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies

Advances in Corpus Applications in Literary and Translation Studies Edited by Riccardo Moratto and Defeng Li Institutional Translator Training Edited by Tomáš Svoboda, Łucja Biel, Vilelmini Sosoni Translation Competence Theory, Research and Practice Carla Quinci Intra- and Interlingual Translation in Flux Višnja Jovanović Systematically Analysing Indirect Translations Putting the Concatenation Effect Hypothesis to the Test James Luke Hadley Translating Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex Transnational Framing, Interpretation, and Impact Edited by Julia C. Bullock and Pauline Henry-Tierney German Philosophy in English Translation Postwar Translation History and the Making of the Contemporary Anglophone Humanities Spencer Hawkins Translator Positioning in Characterisation A Multimodal Perspective of English Translations of Luotuo Xiangzi Minru Zhao For more information about this series, please visit: www​.routledge​.com​/ Routledge​-Advances​-in​-Translation​-and​-Interpreting​-Studies​/book​-series​/ RTS

German Philosophy in English Translation Postwar Translation History and the Making of the Contemporary Anglophone Humanities Spencer Hawkins

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Spencer Hawkins The right of Spencer Hawkins to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hawkins, Spencer, author. Title: German philosophy in English translation: postwar translation history and the making of the contemporary anglophone humanities/ Spencer Hawkins. Description: First edition. | New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge advances in translation and interpreting studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022055795 | ISBN 9781032391373 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032391380 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003348559 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, German. | German language– Translating into English–History. Classification: LCC B2523.H348 2023 | DDC 193–dc23/eng/20230126 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022055795 ISBN: 978-1-032-39137-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-39138-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-34855-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003348559 Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To Arik Isaac, German-English translation in the flesh



Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

viii 1

1 When thought resists translation: The case for differential translation

35

2 The supertranslatability of metaphor in Hans Blumenberg’s translation histories

69

3 Retranslating Freud

102

4 The Americanization of a French understanding of being German 136 Conclusion Index

163 173



Acknowledgments

Many decisive turns on this book’s errant path took the form of conversations, both live and virtual. When you spend over a decade on a book, you have a lot of people to thank. Very dear colleagues and friends read drafts and discussed them with me at length. My deep gratitude goes out to these dedicated few: Benjamin Beckett, who offered perceptive insights on this work in its most germinal stages; Martin Born, with his uncanny ability to turn his experiences as a translator into precise theoretical insights; William Coker, who paradoxically both understands Hegel and how to write clearly; Garda Elsherif, a true peer in the subfield of the translation history of scholarship, whose encouragement was therefore all the more meaningful; Patrick Fessenbecker, who generously shared his matchless skill in forging sound academic arguments; John Fisher, who was the first to read the whole manuscript and see a future in it; Korey Garibaldi, who can take any moment in history (including the history covered in this book) and shine a light on the queer, brutal, sincere humanity in it; Stefanie Heine, for modeling brilliant and unwavering faith in the value of close reading; Raquel Pacheco Aguilar, who brought rigorous criticisms of the book’s premises from a translation theory perspective; William Roby, whose insights have guided my approach to editing for years; Ann Marie Thornburg, who magically found a way not to doubt this project’s merit over nearly a decade; Michael Tondre, who softly entered the book’s logic and then gave comments that led it where I had not yet dared; and Silke-Maria Weineck, who introduced me to Hans Blumenberg over a decade ago and has coached me on this project until the end. Parts of the first and third chapters were published in Translation and Interpreting Studies (2017) and in The Translator (2018) respectively. The fourth chapter was workshopped in the intraduisibles research group led by Judith Kasper, whose work on psychoanalysis and deconstruction is always guided by her fascination with the differences between languages. I learned a great deal from Theresa Meyer, Jonathan Schmidt-Dominé, Jana Wilhelm, Larissa Krampert, and of course Professor Kasper. They offered rigorous and open-minded feedback on the still inchoate argument. The fourth chapter was in many ways the hardest to complete, and I feel immensely grateful 

Acknowledgments  ix to the students and faculty of the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester, especially to Rebecca Tipton for the invitation and to Anna Strowe and David Charlston for incisive feedback, after a lecture I held there in October of 2022. Towards the end of my writing process, eminent intellectual historian Martin Jay was willing to read the whole manuscript, and his feedback saved the book from being too superficial in its engagement with relevant scholarship. Conducting a last round of research during the last months of the writing process based on his feedback helped me rethink not only who the book is in dialogue with, but the history of that dialogue and what tone I want to achieve in my writing. Finally in the very last month of my work on the book, I had the privilege of receiving meticulous input from Adam Lecznar, author of Dionysus After Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Literature and Thought (Cambridge 2020). His finegrained, professional edits brought the style and content of the book to the next level. I am grateful to count several eminent Translation Studies scholars among those who read my proposal and manuscript materials. Sandra Bermann and Lawrence Venuti commented on early drafts of the proposal, and David Gramling and Claire Wright kindly offered me feedback on early drafts of the manuscript. Alison Martin gave me the European point of view on how to seek the right publisher for a book manuscript, plus an invaluable kick in the pants to tighten up my publication schedule. At the point when I was close to publication, David Charlston, who published a formidable sociolinguistic monograph on Hegel translation, Translation and Hegel’s Philosophy in 2020, also with Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies, told me about his positive experience working with Routledge editor Elysse Preposi. I have since been very grateful for that recommendation; Elysse Preposi quickly supported my vision for this book and found rigorous anonymous peer reviewers—who in turn helped me better contextualize my argument and polish the manuscript. Thank you also to Harry Dixon, Editorial Assistant at Routledge, for his prompt and generous feedback that helped me get the manuscript in presentable form. I would also like to express sincere gratitude to Professor Bettina Blumenberg for granting me the rights to quote from unpublished material written by her father Hans Blumenberg, housed in the German Literature Archive in Marbach. The book’s roots go back to dialogues with faculty members who supported my academic work in German Studies and Comparative Literature when I first started studying German in 2002. Professors at Berkeley who graciously supported my first stirrings as a scholar through dialogue include Frederick Dolan, Hubert Dreyfus, Giovanni Ferrari, Anne-Lise Francois, Anthony Long, Leslie Kirke, and Hinrich Seeba, my strict yet approachable undergraduate honors thesis advisor. Berkeley is also where I got to know William Roby, whose intellectual courage has been a beacon lighting

x Acknowledgments my way for the past two decades. Dialogue with him on various porches of Berkeley and Oakland and correspondence about many writing projects have shaped my thinking about language and ignited my fascination with history in general. Berkeley was also where I got to know Yasha Levine, whose development into an incisive, dirtbag-left journalist and whose critiques of American corruption set a high bar for research and inspire me at least to look for little ways to make my research more courageous and relevant. My brilliant Attic Greek study buddy at Berkeley, Anne Kreps, who was about to transfer to the University of Michigan, first got me thinking seriously about graduate school, and coincidentally Michigan soon became my first choice. Faculty members at Michigan with whom I had multiple years of intensive dialogue were Anne Carson, David Halperin, Andreas Gailus, Yopie Prins, Vassilios Lambropoulos, and Silke-Maria Weineck—the last of whom still continues to help me through intellectual and pragmatic questions. At Michigan I met many other mentors and friends, including the inimitable Susan Abraham, Ido Admon, Eileen Basso, Mate Botji, Don Cameron †, Başak Çandar, Catherine Combes, Genevieve Creedon, Maayan Eitan, Rachelle Felzien, Maria Hadjipolycarpou, Samuel Heidepriem, Cora Jones, Amr Kamal, Michael Kicey, Peter Kitlas, Kader Konuk, Marjorie Levinson, Landon Little, Christopher Meade, Rostom Mesli, Olga Maymeskul, Benjamin Paloff, Mei Chin Pan, Michael Pifer, Rebecca Porte, Michael Rinaldo, John Rowland, Anton Shammas, Adam Sneed, Ramon Stern, Ryan Szpiech, Patrick Tonks, Elizabeth Wingrove, and Shannon Winston— just to name a few of the memorably inspiring people from whom I learned through courses and conversations during my seven years at Michigan. And a special thank you to Jim Porter: while I did not get to work with him directly as an advisor, I absorbed a lot of knowledge from his library while house-sitting for him during the academic year 2007–2008. I also learned a lot about language and life from my academic friends and colleagues with whom I discussed topics related to this book in Ankara, Vienna, Berlin, Marbach, and Germersheim: Hannes Bajohr, Gerhard Budin, Dilek Dizdar, Sandra Folie, Andreas Gipper, Martin Hanker, Patrick Hart, Lavinia Heller, Theresa Heyer, Ines Hülsmann, Federico Italiano, Annett Jubara, Andreas Kelletat, Donald Kiraly, Angela Kölling, Christoph Leschanz, Daniel Leonard, Melina Lieb, Stefan Maneval, Joanna Mansbridge, Anika Meier, Deniz Ortactepe, Jennifer Reimer, Carmen Reisinger, Christoph Roeber, Tomasz Rozmysłowicz, Birsen Serinkoz, Manfred Sommer, Scott Spector (a Michigan man in Vienna), Friedrich Stadler, Cory Stockwell, Daniel Syrovy, Sigrid Thomsen, Simon Varga, Gernot Waldner, and Heather Yeung. The students in the 2017 doctoral seminar I held on Freud and Nietzsche at the University of Michigan—Giovanni Doveri, Janice Feng, Erin JohnstonWeiss, Ozlem Karuc, Esteban Esquerre, Anna Nelson, Lucy Peterson, and Erik Pomrenke—offered insights and patience while we dove deep into the vicissitudes of Freud translation. I extend especially deep gratitude

Acknowledgments  xi to Norbert Bachleitner, my faculty host at the University of Vienna, who helped me discover archival resources and collegial contacts in Vienna during my Ernst Mach Fellowship. Suhrkamp Verlag and the Austrian Ministry of Education (OeAD) sponsored my research in the German Literature Archive in Marbach and at the University of Vienna, respectively. And I could not have completed the research without the many benefits of my ongoing affiliation with the German and Russian Studies Department of the University of Notre Dame. I will always be grateful to Bill Donahue for exposing me to the vibrant intellectual life at Notre Dame. I could not have cultivated fascination for such arcane topics into adulthood—to the point of finishing a book on the translation of philosophy— without the nurturing love of my family: my dear parents, my incredible son, my brilliant grandparents (including one actual rocket scientist), and all of my dear relatives, Alec, Ashton, Bodie, Casey, Chris, Chrystal, Eddie, Evan, Gillian, Josephine, Manuela, Michael, Kay, Raymond, Rick, Steve, Ursula, and Wendy. A family culture of profound respect for thought, inquiry, and learnedness made my choice to live a life of the mind thinkable. Besides them, there are the family members I chose over the writing years: Anna Kroth, who modeled intense academic work ethic for me every day for three years—during which time I discovered the topic for this thesis. For eight years, Ann Marie Thornburg was my most steadfast intellectual dialogue partner and helped me maintain a kernel of confidence that I had something to say in this book. During my year in Vienna, Carmen Reisinger taught me deep love for Austrian literary and linguistic culture, and for the last three years, Manuela Hauschild has made icy northern Germany feel like a kind of home. Hardly a week goes by when she does not teach me more fascinating nuances of the German language. Living through the pandemic in Germany was less miserably isolating thanks to wonderful, new friends: Lukas Hahn, Neil Insch, and Arın Öcal. My ultimate thanks are due to my boss at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Lavinia Heller, who has inspired my work through her own innovative philosophical approach to translation history, through dialogue, intellectual generosity, and through collegial respect. Her work has deepened my understanding of the all-but-insurmountable tendency for the translatedness of a text to recede to the margin of readers’ consciousness—a tendency to which translation theory can bear witness, but which it cannot alter. Our dialogue gave me the boost in courage I needed to see this book to completion.

Introduction

Our German unconscious You do not have to know much German to notice the vivid descriptiveness of German words: “slug” in English may sound onomatopoetic for a slimy invertebrate, but Nacktschnecke literally means “naked snail.” Vocabulary of Grecian origins, like “hyperthyroidism,” “synchronous,” and “sympathy,” cross untranslated between other national languages, with a localizing suffix added or snipped, but those concepts can also speak German: Schilddrüsenüberfunktion, gleichzeitig, and Mitleid contain everyday Germanic morphemes meaning “shield-gland-over-function,” “same-timely,” and “with-pain” (as in pain felt along with someone else who is suffering more). Odd combinations like “shield-gland” are the exceptions to German’s tendency towards easy decipherability. Voiced more discreetly in that gland’s English name, the German name for “thyroid” reanimates an old metaphor, in which ancient Greek medical texts compared the shape of the cartilage covering the gland to the wooden shields (θυρεός) carried by Hellenistic-era soldiers.1 The other two words, however, are built from such familiar, intuitive word parts that a German-speaking child might guess their meanings the first time hearing them. The intuitiveness of Germanic words has even taken on a pedagogical function: when children learn German in school, they learn Germanic words for “prefix,” “adjective,” and “verb,” (Vorsilbe, Wiewort, Tätigkeitswort) until they are linguistically mature enough to learn the “official” Germanized Latinate terms (Präfix, Adjektiv, Verb).2 In an admiring book on Sigmund Freud’s writing style, French novelist and essayist Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt explains how the German word for transparent (durchsichtig = through-sight-y) performs the transparency typical of Germanic vocabulary. Since French lacks such transparency, Goldschmidt argues, the “keywords of Freudian thought are opaque in French.”3 To illustrate the contrast, Goldschmidt compares Freud’s German to calm and transparent water. The unconscious is normally inaccessible to the conscious mind, much as the underwater remains of a shipwreck would be invisible to anyone gazing down from shore. Yet when Freud explains DOI: 10.4324/9781003348559-1

2 Introduction the workings of the unconscious, it is as if calm, clear waters allowed us to glimpse objects submerged deep below the surface. Freud’s well-structured writing can metaphorically calm the surface. Goldschmidt insists, however, that even a brilliantly pellucid writing style cannot clear away the figurative debris that clouds French vocabulary down to its depths. German vocabulary is just better at producing meaning than the vocabulary of languages whose lexical sources are Greek and Latin, i.e., foreign, dead languages.4 Long before Goldschmidt or Freud were born, German’s morphological clarity impressed the thinkers of the German Enlightenment (Leibniz, Wolff, Kant) and later of German nationalism (Campe, von Moser, Fichte). Beginning in the late seventeenth century, German writers found inspiration in the intuition that the versatility and transparency of German words enhanced the communicative potential of the language. These early advocates of German often fell into the trap of strong linguistic relativism, the stance that certain thoughts are only thinkable in certain languages.5 Baseless as they may be, beliefs about the uniqueness of the German language have sufficed to stimulate thinkers’ creativity throughout modernity. Thinkers like Kant, Hegel, Freud, and Heidegger wrote as if the vividness of Germanic vocabulary exposed meanings doomed to remain hidden in the Romance languages and English, all lexified, unfortunately, by dead languages. Most abstract Germanic vocabulary draws its component roots from internationalized medieval Latin vocabulary via the linguistic process known as loan translation, or calquing. English words often exhibit the dead-language roots that German words have calqued, but English speakers rarely notice that “sympathy,” for instance, ends with the Greek πάθος, meaning “pain,” whereas the German word for “pain,” Leid, is hard to miss in its loan translation, Mitleid. Translators’ introductions and footnotes in English translations of German philosophy sometimes point out this dimension of German philosophical language, and often constitute English speakers’ first exposure to the etymologies of words in their own language. Martin Heidegger’s term, Dasein, for instance, often goes untranslated in English. The term denotes human existence without the biological, sociological, and humanistic connotations of the word “human.” Its morphemes, “being there,” are approximately the same as those in the English word “existence,” coming from ἐξίστημι (more literally “standing out”). English translations of German philosophy often reintroduce readers to the richness of English words with Greek or Latin roots, by taking them on the uncanny detour of German etymology. This book does not aim to persuade anyone that German words are more transparent than those of other languages since that argument is too subjective and the counterarguments too abundant. After all, the feature of German semantics that Goldschmidt calls “transparency” makes word origins more apparent, but the presence of two meanings, often a concrete and abstract meaning, also introduces ambiguity into German vocabulary. To take the word “transparent” (durchsichtig) as an example, English differentiates

Introduction  3 between “transparent” and “see-through”: it speaks of “transparent motivations” and “transparent meanings” but reserves the near-calque “seethrough” for physical objects, like thin fabrics. English’s tendency towards such semantic doubling (along abstract-Latinate/concrete-Germanic lines) explains why it is easier to find German terms capacious enough to translate English philosophical terms than the reverse.6 This book looks primarily to translation history for influential cases of the English translation of German metaphor-laden philosophical terminology. Based on this history, it offers insights into translations of German philosophy, including practical advice to translators, while introducing the relevant translation problems to readers of German philosophy in English translation. With examples from published translations of continental philosophy texts, the present book evaluates strategies that translators use at conceptual impasses. The book will think through the translation problems that are raised when Freud, Husserl, and Heidegger write about notions that exceed neat conceptual categories—notions such as belatedness, openness, deferred causality, and the consciousness of flowing time. These philosophers’ vocabularies exemplify what Hans Blumenberg called “nonconceptuality”; they use deliberately ambiguous terms to describe thoughts and experiences that refuse definition. By the end of the book, I hope to have demonstrated that nonconceptuality is one of the most philosophically interesting forms of what Barbara Cassin has called the “untranslatability” of philosophical language.

Englishing nonconceptuality, or the world according to Christian Wolff In a short passage from The Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant presents examples of the symbolic tendency within language in general, without claiming that the German language illustrates its abstract ideas with unusually vivid morphemes. The list therefore only accidentally exhibits the concreteness of German vocabulary: Thus the words foundation (support, basis), to depend (to be held from above), to flow (instead of to follow) from something, substance (the support of accidents, as Locke puts it), and countless others … express concepts not by means of a direct intuition but only according to analogy with one, i.e., a transfer of our reflection on an object of intuition to an entirely different concept, to which perhaps no intuition can ever directly correspond.7 Kant’s list of metaphors are standard German words for concepts that we cannot relate back to mathematical definitions or to empirical, sensory objects; these concepts are so abstract that any definition we might give for them would be disputable and incomplete. Each metaphor takes the form

4 Introduction of a single German word: Grund (foundation), abhängen (depend), fließen (flow), and Substanz (substance, or morpheme-by-morpheme, “what stands beneath”).8 Only the last of Kant’s examples has a Latin origin, while the first three belong to a German tradition of loan translation. The Latin source is most conspicuous with abhängen, a word that means “to depend” and whose roots mean “to hang from,” modeled directly on the Latin dependere (“to hang” -pendere “from” de-). Even if the metaphors originate in Latin, Kant’s argument is more persuasive when read in German than in English since the English word “depend” does not ring of metaphor in the way abhängen does. The reason is simple: de and pend do not mean anything on their own in English while hängen and ab literally mean “hang” and “from” in the German language that was becoming standardized across central Europe when Kant published the Critique in 1790. Kant’s argument deals with an important line of inquiry throughout the Critiques: the limits of intelligibility. In Paul De Man’s reading of the abovequoted passage, Kant’s qualification—that there are “perhaps (vielleicht)” some concepts that defy definition—exemplifies the difficulty of deciding which concepts can only be expressed through rhetorical figures; De Man would rather argue that no concept can ever be absolutely defined, and he sees no exceptions to his characteristically deconstructionist observation that “the iconic representation that can be used to illustrate a rational concept is indeed a figure,” and thus every word is ambiguous, even if it represents a mathematically defined concept.9 De Man performs a characteristic deconstructive move here by offering a symptomatic reading of an often-overlooked passage in the work of a canonical thinker. In this case, he catches Kant attempting to exclude figurative language from philosophical work, in order to show that such a purification is in fact impossible as the linguistic sign for any given term necessarily interferes with the transmission of its denotations.10 In his generalizing zeal, however, De Man overlooks the way that Kant errs in the opposite direction. Kant may split too much when it comes to conceptual distinctions, but he also lumps too much when it comes to linguistic differences. Kant may underestimate the obstacles inherent in isolating a subset of concepts which can only be expressed in metaphors, but he also downplays the possibility that German-language philosophers, such as Kant himself, would be more inclined than philosophers writing in Latinate languages to make etymological metaphors central to their thinking. Kant leaves unsaid that the effects he is talking about play on the vivid images latent in German philosophical language, images which can even work on readers encountering German philosophy in translation. Kant presented this observation in §59 of the Third Critique, titled “The Beautiful as a Symbol of Moral Goodness,” in which he argues for metaphor’s power to give vivid expression to complexly structured objects, like a society living under despotism, for which Kant considers the image of a hand-cranked mill to be a fitting image. Writing as he did before the German Empire’s surge in nationalistic identification with their language

Introduction  5 in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, Kant paid no special attention to the unusual capacity of the newly developing German to generate etymological metaphors. Yet Kant would not be the last German philosopher to exclude historical linguistics while making a pathbreaking call for the historical study of metaphor. West German philosopher Hans Blumenberg cited this passage of Kant’s in the introduction to Paradigms for a Metaphorology as a way of introducing his research program into the history of influential metaphors, like Plato’s cave allegory, whose meanings cannot not be reduced to distinct concepts. Blumenberg quotes Kant’s statement that the function of metaphoric motifs in philosophical language “deserves a deeper investigation”—a statement which Blumenberg announces as “the initial impetus for the present study” and arguably for his career as a self-described “metaphorologist.”11 Like Kant himself, Blumenberg does not comment on the fact that Kant’s examples do not draw on ancient philosophers’ great allegories and illustrations but on latent images embedded in ordinary German language. Western philosophical language has drawn heavily on visual imagery at least since Plato, whom Adriana Cavarero reads as privileging reading over the relational forms of knowing established by listening.12 The visual evocativeness of German vocabulary has inspired serious wordplay across generations of philosophers. Primus inter pares here is Martin Heidegger, whose lectures heed the multiple registers of ancient Greek and modern German words. His lectures made him famous in the 1920s and continued to draw crowds after April 12, 1933, when he became the first National Socialist rector of Freiburg University and the willing executor of the Nuremberg Laws that called for the expulsion of Jewish students and faculty. Heidegger’s fascination with the German language spoke to the historical mood when the Third Reich’s policies of “germanizing” besieged territories in Eastern Europe (beginning with the historically German-speaking “Sudetenland” of Czechoslovakia) through settlement by German-speakers and through the imposition of German as local bureaucratic language—much as the previous Reich had done with their Eastern territories prior to the Treaty of Versailles. While Heidegger’s reverence for the German language gave National Socialist racial imperialism a high-brow underpinning,13 his insights into the particularities of the German language inspired movements that had no stock in Nazism—especially among French thinkers.14 First came the close translations among the French existentialists, then the tendency among the later French structuralists and poststructuralists to rank language above institutions, feelings, biology, or history as the foundation of human culture (leading to the so-called “linguistic turn” in a variety of academic disciplines). For postwar French thinkers especially, Heidegger’s nostalgic ear for the languages of feudal Germany and ancient Greece legitimated provincialism in a way that was unimaginable within the mathematized post-Cartesian universalism of early-twentieth-century French philosophy.15 The word “provincialism” suggests a close-minded preference for trusting

6 Introduction folk wisdom over discovering new ideas, but the provincialism that the poststructuralists took from Heidegger was an ability to see value in the local, particular, and constructed not just in universal, timeless truth. As mentioned above, Heidegger cunningly draws out the tension in the German word Grund, meaning “ground,” in the sense of the soil that farmers work, and “cause” or “reason,” with connotations of Enlightenment faith in the civilizing power of rationality. He does so extensively in the 1955–56 lecture Der Satz vom Grund (The Principle of Reason), whose English translation I analyze at length in Chapter 1. The word Grund is also a key term in Heidegger’s short 1964 talk, “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens” (The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking), whose French translation I discuss in Chapter 4: Denn das Sein des Seienden hat sich seit dem Beginn der Philosophie und mit ihm als der Grund (ἀρχή, αΐτιον, Prinzip) gezeigt. Der Grund ist jenes, von woher das Seiende als ein solches in seinem Werden, Vergehen und Bleiben als Erkennbares, Behandeltes, Bearbeitetes ist, was es ist und wie es ist.16 Here is the best-known English translation: For since the beginning of philosophy and with that beginning, the Being of beings has showed itself as the ground (arche, aition). The ground is from where beings as such are what they are in their becoming, perishing and persisting as something that can be known, handled and worked upon.17 The first sentence equates Grund with other Greek and German words to show that Grund means “ground,” “reason,” and more: primordial beginning (άρχή), cause (αΐτιον), and principle (Prinzip). (The English translator corrals the sentence’s definitional excess by cutting “principle.”) Heidegger’s long parenthetical reads like a short foreign-language dictionary entry while the next sentence defines Grund more specifically as the origin of any given being or thing and what makes it recognizable (Erkennbares) as such (was es ist und wie es ist). A thing’s Grund is thus not just its reason for being, but the very ground beneath its feet. As the deconstructionists were the first to show at length, the translation of Heidegger’s lectures into English requires careful attention to words’ polyvalence, and translators can demonstrate the fragility of conceptuality itself by drawing attention to the moments where arguments rely on the particularity of the language in which they are made.18​ To understand why German vocabulary has these unusual qualities, we have to go back to the emergence of German as a language of scholarship.19 Uncannily, Microsoft Word recommends switching to German word order for the first sentence of this paragraph (See Figure 0.1). During the

Introduction  7

Figure 0.1. Screenshot by the author. Uncannily, Microsoft Word recommends switching to German word order for the first sentence of this paragraph.

seventeenth century, the discourses of theology, psychology, and cosmology were just shedding their medieval bonds with Latin in France, and by the end of that century German-speaking writers finally inaugurated a discourse for teaching these subjects in the German language. The French influence was so total that Christian Thomasius—the first professor to post a Germanlanguage announcement for an upcoming lecture in 1687—could write in the pamphlet that introduced his lectures: “Gentlemen, if our German forefathers were to rise from the dead and come amongst us, they might think they were living in a foreign land.”20 Shortly thereafter philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754) pioneered a new German academic discourse by calquing French and Latin concepts.21 Wolff’s philosophy systematized many of Leibniz’s propositions (whose major works were all written in French and Latin) and provided Kant with one of his main intellectual opponents. Wolff coined philosophical German vocabulary from the materials of ordinary German: much of his vocabulary for topics ranging from logic, mechanics, and mathematics to metaphysics and theology is still in use today. According to his own testimony, Wolff wrote in German so that future Germanspeaking students could think systematically without having to learn Latin.22 Considering the rich polysemy of the German language, however, it may be no coincidence that skepticism about the coherence of German philosophical concepts followed quickly on the heels of Wolff’s inauguration of the project of German-language philosophy. The polysemy of the new philosophical German made conceptual associations apparent that were obscure in learned Latin. Immanuel Kant’s famous Critiques read as a test of the applicability of the new Wolffian vocabulary to rigorous philosophy.23 For instance, Wolff preferred the Germanic “world-wisdom” (Weltweisheit) to the Grecian term “philosophy.” Let us consider what happens when Wolff put the “world” (Welt) back at the heart of philosophy. Among the European languages, only German and Dutch (with wijsbegeerte, “drive to knowledge”) coined autochthonous synonyms for “philosophy” that were not derived from the Greek φιλοσοφία.24 The term Weltweisheit is itself a loan translation, which originated as the German translation of sapientia mundi from σοφία τοῦ κόσμου τούτου, a kind of

8 Introduction knowledge that Paul disparages in the First Letter to the Corinthians. After rehabilitation by German mystics like Paracelsus, this term meant the same thing as the term “philosophy” by the seventeenth century. By focalizing the “world,” however, Wolff and his predecessors picked a term that evokes a variety of abstractions—this planet, but also the global politicaleconomic system, professional lifeworlds, the laws of physics, and the universe, just to name a few. Like his contemporary fellow rationalist Leibniz, Wolff offered precise definitions for his concepts as a step on the way to the goal of uniting the empirical sciences, mathematics, and metaphysics.25 He thus attempted to speak rationally about the great domains of medieval metaphysics by developing a deistic conception of God, a physical definition of the universe, and a logically defensible notion of the soul. To give a sense of Wolff’s rationalizing discussion of topics that had hitherto been the provenance of religion, consider his entirely physical definition of “world”: “the world is a series of modifiable things, ordered next to each other, though linked to each other in one whole.”26 Rhetorically borrowing from the connotation of world (Welt) as earth, Wolff presumes a finite, physical universe. This position makes him vulnerable to attack by Immanuel Kant, who plays finitist positions against infinitist ones in the “Antimonies of Pure Reason” section of the First Critique.27 Indeed, Wolff’s definitions are best known today mostly as foils to their refutations by Kant. While Kant acknowledged the concepts of God, world, and soul to be ineradicable from theoretical thought, he also considered them impossible to systematize in any “rational” way. Kant argues against a rationalist definition of the universe because the competing positions can never be refuted: we have no way of knowing whether the coherence of natural laws or the physical unity are more fundamentally necessary to the structure of the universe because we humans have no way of modifying those aspects of the universe in order to see if it is still “the universe” without its laws or its structural coherence. Kant ranked notions as obscure as “world” among the “ideas of pure reason” since they can only be defined negatively while more concrete “concepts of understanding” can have formulaic definitions (a line is the shortest distance between two points) or concrete exemplars (a horse looks like that animal over there). In an easily overlookable case of metaphoric thinking, Kant (who had by now held astronomy courses) follows Wolff in using the word “world” (Welt) to mean “universe.”28 We could split up the large items from Kant’s list of ideas to create some modern categories—a project begun in postwar German hermeneutic philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s metaphor studies, which finds truth, human existence, and “the confrontation between theory and the lifeworld” as much in need of symbolic expression as God, soul, world, and freedom.29 The word “Being,” like “world,” has such a wide semantic range because its referents are not simple objects of ordinary experience.30 Such words attract metaphors (like the expression “worlds apart”—which suggests that each person’s subjective experience constitutes a separate world) and thus introduce translation difficulties.

Introduction  9 Any attempt to say something about grand abstractions like “the world” or “being” will fluctuate between different meanings of the word, including metaphorical uses. As Clive Cazeaux notes, the term “world” in Thomas Kuhn’s famous defense of scientific constructivism shifts between meanings: alternately naming the worldviews constructed by scientists and the natural world as unchanging object of scientific inquiry.31 Building on Kantian thought, Hans Blumenberg describes Kant’s “ideas of pure reason” collectively as “nonconceptual,” and emphasizes that nonconcepts, including “world,” can only be signified through metaphor.32 We conjure metaphors when we speak of them, and these metaphors are not always cross-cultural. They can thus frustrate translators. In English, “world” has never been a synonym for “universe,” nor does “world wisdom” suggest anything more than “street knowledge.” Yet to translate Welt with a different word would sacrifice its intuitive sense: that totality of spaces where humans belong. Considering the potential of discourses like philosophy, anthropology, and critical theory to articulate the most elusive features of human experience— as well as the last decades’ increasing acknowledgment across disciplines that ethics, epistemology, and ontology reflect the specifics of cultural practices, not universal truths—translators must discover resources to express the polysemy of philosophical concepts in particular languages.33 How can translators confront the nonconceptual aspect of foreign-language terms? Leaving terms untranslated draws attention to them and can thus encourage readers to learn about them in introductions and footnotes. This book promotes an even more philologically daring method: differential translation, that is, translating keywords variously by context rather than consistently as terms. This, I argue, is a non-standard but particularly effective strategy for representing polysemous words in translation. Disavowing both untranslatability and the necessity of terminological equivalence, what I term “differential translation” integrates signs of polysemy into the reading experience by presenting foreign keywords in brackets after their differing, context-dependent meanings. It is not a practice exclusive to the translation of German philosophy. In the introduction to Roy Harris’ 1983 retranslation of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de la Linguistique Générale, he justifies differential translation (without naming it) as a way of giving the reader insight, not into a concept, but into a mode of thought: Varying the translation of a key technical term may be objected to in principle on grounds of inconsistency. But the inconsistency in this case is superficial; whereas, as recompense, one gains the possibility of expressing nuances and emphases in Saussure’s thought which would otherwise risk being lost to the English reader.34 Through the “superficial” variation of signifiers Harris reveals the variety of signifieds that would otherwise have been conflated. Differential translation proliferates already in major translations without having been systematically theorized. It remains marginal in any subgenre of philosophy

10 Introduction where readers cherish the logical rigor offered by term-for-term equivalence over philological rigor. The strategy meets even more resistance when one equivalent has established itself in English, but the selection of words for this special treatment (in first translations or in retranslations) can have ramifications for the history of philosophy. The value of differential translation can be expressed through one of translation theory concepts most beloved by practicing commercial and literary translators: skopos. Conceived by Hans Vermeer and Katharina Reiss in the 1970s as a way of understanding translators’ agency, the concept’s name derives from the Greek σκοπός meaning “purpose.” The skopos, or audience-oriented rhetorical goal, of English translations has generally been to create texts that efface their foreignness, thereby reinforcing the anglophone exceptionalism created by English’s status as a global lingua franca.35 As philosopher and historian Jonathan Rée points out, early modern philosophical German discourse endowed Latinate words with prestige value, and modern German philosophy has absorbed the work of many advocates and innovators who specifically pushed back against that value system.36 For linguistic-historical reasons, German prose cries out loudly for differential translation.

The contested emergence of philosophical German The case for claiming the special status of German’s metaphoric resonances (compared to neighboring Western European languages) can be fruitfully situated in a long history of theoretical claims about the differences between English, French, and German prose styles. Translators of German philosophy—especially into English or French—must still reckon with the history of interlingual and intercultural translations between these traditions. In particular, the translation of German into English exposes philosophical concepts to a light much less hospitable to pure speculation. Centuries before the Germanification of academic language in the 1800s, written German was born of translation.37 German intellectuals invented the modern German language so that their compatriots could join Eurasian intellectual life without having to learn Latin (nor English, French, Arabic, or Greek). Some of the first recorded cases of loan translation from Latin occurred in the transcribed German sermons of Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) for the uneducated population. Here we see, for instance, the first uses of Zufall for accidens, whose roots literally mean “to(wards)-fall(ing),” expressing the randomness or serendipity of something “falling into one’s lap.”38 The next centuries were tumultuous for German literacy: it expanded with the rise of the printing press (1450), and the Reformation gave German theologians a lot to write about in the early 1500s. But German literacy took a devastating blow during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which drastically impacted all areas of life in central Europe.

Introduction  11 Towards the end of the seventeenth century, a defiant philosophy professor in Halle, Christian Thomasius, posted a course schedule in German, which functioned like Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses for the opposition to Latin hegemony at German universities.39 By the eighteenth century, Germany was gradually recovering from its political and economic setbacks, and writers and publishers began building the foundations of modern German prose. German writer and publisher Johann Gottsched (1700–1776) praised German’s “perfect” ability to form new compound words with clear meanings—an advantage which Gottsched saw for writing in German in all genres.40 Linguists and lexicographers now joined the poets and philosophers in praising the distinctions of the German language—at a time when French had even more advocates and Latin still held Europe-wide default status for education.41 By this time, national languages had been replacing Latin as the language of education, first in Britain, then across the continent. As a result, no lingua franca united the international sciences, leading to a predicament that Michael Gordin called “scientific babel,”42 when wealthy European nations (and later Japan) competed for centrality in scientific discourse. Englishlanguage philosophers had identified with the ideals of clarity and rigor ever since the seventeenth century when Francis Bacon’s empiricism seemed the ultimate bastion against the Catholic Church’s Aristotelean focus on pure logic and sophisticated rhetoric.43 The hallmarks of the new English style were an emphasis on well-founded observation and a cautious, hedging rhetorical style.44 Linguistic differences were beginning to reflect the rhetorical positions by which different European powers differentiated their worldviews. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the main linguistic rival to literary German was not English, but French. French writers wrote entire treatises touting the “clarity” of their language over and against German. The German-speaking intelligentsia claimed the status of cultural heir to the city-states of Greek antiquity while regarding the French as mere Romans: militarily superior, but culturally inferior.45 As historian Catherine König-Pralong explains, the word “scholastic” became the barb Schelling, Herder, and Fichte used to castigate the decrepit French intellectual culture: “At the beginning of the 19th century, German historiography invented German mysticism, which it contrasted with French scholastic philosophy and described as a pure, indigenous philosophy, belonging to the North and flourishing in vernacular from the 14th century onward.”46 Philosophers Johann Gottfried Herder and Schelling’s disciple Peder Hjort derided French thought as pedantic and spiritually vacant. German philosophy was on its way to earning a reputation as more profound than neighboring traditions. Claims of cultural superiority rallied linguistic arguments. In 1784 Antoine de Rivarol’s argument that the German language had no great literature even impressed the jury of the Academy of Berlin,47 whose preference for French against German followed the lead of Frederick the Great

12 Introduction himself.48 Rivarol remarked that French had the “unique privilege” among major European languages of solely utilizing subject-verb-object syntax, a grammatical structure that matched the “natural logic of all men” and “constituted common sense.”49 The French language supposedly mimicked the structure of thought by strictly adhering to subject-verb-object syntax whereas “inverted” sentences still plagued the Slavic, Germanic, and other Romance languages, which had failed to break with decadent Latin prose style. Rivarol called all deviation from subject-verb-object word order inversion and claimed that the great authors of Greece and Rome strove to avoid it, but that it was a blight that they failed to purge from their languages: “They sensed that inversion was the sole source of the difficulties and ambiguities that plagued their languages.”50 In 1840, Jules BarthélemySaint-Hilaire argued along these lines that French was the best language for philosophy because it had eliminated grammatical inversion, the greatest weakness of otherwise noble Latin.51 Germany’s slow path to nationhood delayed the emergence of German as a literary language, but momentum started to grow in the nineteenth century. In 1806, the Holy Roman Empire officially disbanded in the wake of defeats during the Napoleonic Wars. When the German states won independence back from the French Empire, political freedom awakened a spirit of national pride among the literary elite after centuries of languishing in the shadow of French hegemony in Western Europe. The German language was already slowly gaining political ground in Eastern Europe as the primary bureaucratic language within the Slavic-Germanic-Hungarian-Italic multilingualism of Hapsburg Austria. In 1808, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a rising star of German philosophy, gave a speech arguing for the founding of a strong German state to match the philosophical power of the German language. The speech invigorated the cultural nationalism of the nineteenth century, during which period German came to be regarded first locally and then internationally as a major language of poetry and philosophy. Only towards the end of that century did the German nation become a political reality in a period of rapid expansion around 1871, in which the wealthy southern German-speaking kingdoms unified into one empire along with Prussia and the other already confederated northern states.52 Germany’s pre-unification emphasis on culture over politics, combined with the new size and wealth of the German Empire, fertilized the ground for the rise of world-renowned German-language academic research cultures in the universities of Heidelberg, Göttingen, Tübingen, Jena, and Berlin.53 This cultural-linguistic view is well summarized in German lexicographer Johann Heinrich Campe’s long essay for the Prussian Academy on the purification of the German language, published with an innovative dictionary in 1801 (reprinted in 1808 during the French occupation of Prussia). Campe describes German as an “original language” (Ursprache), unlike the languages of the neighboring countries, whose Roman legacies alienate even their native speakers from their own speech. His agenda was to

Introduction  13 purify the German language of foreign loan words and replace those contaminations with any words—neologisms or established, but underutilized words—that bore unmistakably Germanic roots. The foreword to his dictionary inserted German-based words in brackets after the loan words they were meant to replace. The result is not uniformly persuasive. Quidditäten und Hocceitäten do sound more obscure than Washeiten und Dasheiten (what-nesses and that-nesses), though both options would stand out at a dinner conversation. By contrast, Germanic neologisms sound meaningless when they have not entered circulation yet, no matter how vivid their morphemes are: for example, Lehrgebäude (edifice of teachings) instead of System or Völkerschaft instead of Nation, which adds a noun suffix to the noun Volk (think “ethnicicity” or “ethnicitiness”).54 Total Germanification makes German sound stranger, not more straightforward. To justify this endeavor as more than an expression of national pride, Campe expands on the romantic notion that some languages are more original than others. German writers who adhere to this understanding of German as a “test case” of philosophical conceptuality will choose words whose other concrete meanings are familiar, so that the words themselves have a ring of truth or not: It is really true and certain that our language, like every true original language, can serve as a kind of test case (Prüfstein) for concepts. One can try, as I just have to hold it up against the artificial words of scholasticism, and one will find cases where one of these expressions cannot be translated into German because of its emptiness even if its emptiness is immediately apparent; or cases where a word’s true content does not deserve to be translated or made German once its Greco-Latin cloak is removed.55 Statements like these belong to a tradition of praise for German’s linguistic resources that stretches from Leibniz to Wilhelm von Humboldt.56 Campe’s work inaugurated a genre of dictionary still printed today in the German-speaking world: the foreign word dictionary (Fremdwörterbuch). Such dictionaries propose to define German words of foreign origin because they are trickier for German-speakers to learn, but in doing so it also marks out a foreign–native distinction between words of Latinate origin and their Germanic equivalents. The Latinate words were often already familiar, as Anglicisms like Computer are more common than the Germanic Rechner today. Campe was thus suggesting that the time was ripe for German words to replace their Latinate counterparts. Many of these replacements would already have sounded obvious at the time, and many have stood the test of time, like erstickend for etouffant, Überläufer for Desserteur, ehelich for conjugal. Some of them describe concepts so arcane that knowing either the Fremdwort or the Germanic equivalent would have signaled status among the educated elite, such as Volksbeherrscher for Ethnarch.

14 Introduction The goal of purifying the German language was thus the original motivation for the Fremdwörterbuch genre. The long title of Campe’s dictionary is: Wörterbuch zur Erklärung und Verdeutschung der unserer Sprache aufgedrungenen fremden Ausdrücke (Dictionary for the Explanation and Germanification of Foreign Expressions Foisted on Our Language). In an era such as today’s in which linguistics understands itself primarily as a descriptive discipline, such dictionaries sit uneasily on our shelves. To convey the shadow this prototype has cast over its successors, the foreword to a late twentieth-century foreign word dictionary begins with the disclaimer that it is not intended as a Germanification-book (Verdeutschungsbuch), but rather a guide to help “members of the German-speaking community understand vocabulary with origins from foreign languages, which is occasionally hard to understand.”57 The editor of the modern Fremdwörterbuch is right: loan words are harder for Germans to understand today than they were in the times of Napoleonic occupation when Campe wrote, due to the successes of early purification efforts. It is not that foreign medical words like “autism” (Autismus) would be foreign to an educated German, but for the wider German-speaking public a (quite stigmatizing) definition sounds more self-explanatory when presented exclusively in recognizably Germanic morphemes: “pathological self-centeredness” (krankhafte Ichbezogenheit). Ursprache or not, German exposes its morphemes more accessibly to speakers than English or the Romance languages—languages for which a “foreign word dictionary” would offer little comfort because there are too few “domestic words” to translate them into. Campe’s inaugural exemplar of that dictionary genre just preceded the liberation of the German states from the Napoleonic army in 1815 and the beginning of a long road to nationhood in which language played a central role—as in most modern nations. The problem for western German cultural nationalists was different from the Hapsburg situation, where a standardized German was imposed over multiethnic territories whose populations were otherwise well integrated into the imperial infrastructure. Since Germany’s nationalist movement was also a unification movement, it had to decide which dialect to select for its imagined community. Another side-effect of this belatedness was that Germany’s rise coincided with the expansion of print culture.58 This meant that the newly standardized language would be a language of print and would rely on reference books to define the parameters of German. If German society, still at this point a disconnected group of duchies and citystates, derived its identity from the unromanized purity of its language, this purity gave German poets and philosophers a cultural mission to write from a position of ethnic and spiritual purity, i.e., to write in German with minimal foreign loan words and many loan translations. German’s morphemic transparency, Campe’s main rationale for calling it an Ursprache, means that its words do not require knowledge of other foreign languages to hear the (often humorous) resonances of their multiple meanings. The English word “passion” has an intriguing etymology if

Introduction  15 you know classical languages, but Leidenschaft speaks directly to its hearers about the connection between suffering and desire. Here, as elsewhere, loan translation brings antiquity into modernity in a kind of philological Renaissance. While witty authors like Franz Grillparzer exploit this feature of German to produce wise and memorable wordplay (die Eifersucht ist eine Leidenschaft, die mit Eifer sucht, was Leiden schafft), philosophers with Heidegger’s deadly serious sensibilities59 use it to make the polysemy of words like Dasein, Lichtung, and Grund speak specifically German truths about the nature of Being. The illusion of transparency that German morphemes produce inspired Theodor Adorno’s plea to reinfuse German with foreign loan words and thereby to compensate for the Heideggerian “jargon of authenticity” that had permeated German-language discourses— especially theology.60 Such considerations produce dilemmas of loyalty for practicing translators. When translators just reproduce a foreign author’s self-presented cultural-linguistic supremacy, it can look to readers like the translators are making excuses for an author’s stance of cultural superiority. The foreign origin of the translated claim to supremacy does not neutralize it and make it cosmopolitan. This book is primarily focused on the twentieth century, a period haunted by the mobilization of German philosophy to support the Nazi regime.61 Starting around 1914, Fichte’s ideas took on a new meaning for the German intelligentsia: they inspired a generation of thinkers to argue that the superiority of German culture and science was adequate reason why the newly industrialized and militarized German Empire should conquer and lead Europe, from which position to better exploit the colonies under other European nations’ possession.62 The failure to achieve this goal in World War I was an inspiration behind the formation of the Nazi Party. The German language has since become so tainted by association with Nazism that linguistic arguments both for or against the use of written German are difficult to extricate from political propaganda interests.63 The suspicion that German philosophers were not only funded by the state but eagerly rose to the occasion of rationalizing state military propaganda, had been mounting among American philosophers since 1914, when 93 eminent German thinkers signed a manifesto justifying the Wilhelmine Reich’s invasion of Belgium.64 This early-twentieth-century reputation, however, did not erase the impact of the nineteenth-century German-speaking university on the United States. To name just one relevant case, after studying in Germany himself and later hiring a majority German humanities faculty during his tenure as dean of Harvard University, Charles Eliot introduced the German concept of the doctoral degree to universities in the United States in the 1870s.65 In the decades before that, American scholars routinely traveled to Germany to acquire terminal degrees at German universities. The postwar theory wave from France—with its heavy doses of translated German— would only reinforce the presence of a Germanic scaffolding to American intellectual life that dated back at least to the mid-nineteenth century.

16 Introduction

Translatability at the word level of discourse This book specifically focuses on translating German philosophical vocabulary—as opposed to style or other linguistic features. To isolate semantics while ignoring syntax does skate over those aspects of German academic prose that make it unapproachable to most Germans. German academics are famous for delaying the position of a sentence’s main verb while nesting recursive elements into long, byzantine sentences—the notorious Schachtelsätze.66 I bracket this topic here to focus exclusively on the functioning of words and morphemes—fully aware that philosophical concepts emerge not through single words but through the understanding arising out of relations between words.67 Studies like mine that trace words across contexts might strike some, at first glance, as mimicking the approach found in Emily Apter’s Against World Literature, released in 2013, one year before the English translation of Barbara Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables under Apter’s editorship.68 Apter and Cassin admirably demonstrate the interpenetration of different European and non-European linguistic traditions in European intellectual history, but have been criticized for universalizing the methods, insights, and citational practices of continental philosophy to the point of excluding or misreading foreign intellectual paradigms while reading translation history as a series of successes or failures in conveying source text messages (a misreading, considering these thinkers’ radically constructivist principles).69 While I, too, focus exclusively on the European canon here, I attempt to think from the underappreciated perspective of translators, not the arguably overrated perspective of canonical authors. I do not know of prior translation histories of philosophical vocabulary that also assess the ways translators convey polysemous words’ ranges of meaning. Nor do prior studies on the translation of German philosophy combine cultural and linguistic approaches to translators’ dilemmas. This book thus reads the wordplay of German philosophers as a socio-linguistic phenomenon while reading French and English translators’ reverence for their puns as a symptom of the mysticism evoked by canonical German philosophical writing (what Adorno memorably called “the jargon of authenticity”).70 What unites the four chapters of this book is a sustained attention to the inextricable relationship between philosophical language and everyday language. As phenomenologist Ludwig Landgrebe wrote at the opening of his qualifying dissertation (submitted to Edmund Husserl) on the concept of experience: The philosophical mindset and non-philosophical life are constantly in exchange with regards to their means of expression. […] [A word’s] “secondary meanings,” which are excluded by terminological fixation, make their power felt anyway and serve in part to distort the philosophical mindset itself, in part to spur it onwards, and to let a philosophical question emerge from the polysemy of ordinary meanings.71

Introduction  17 The experience of reading philosophy induces a conceptually generative competition for primacy between the specialized meanings of words comprising philosophical discourse alongside their more ordinary meanings in everyday speech. The intrusion of unintended (or unconsciously intended) meaning into the strictly logical writing process is of course a beloved topic for deconstructionist polemics against Enlightenment histories of philosophy. Yet while deconstruction focuses on literary and intellectual history and relegates everyday intuitions about language and meaning to the background, this book strategically treats language as Saussurean langue, that is, as a system agreed upon within a speaker community. This strategic concession to everyday intuition may on occasion lump together various writers’ own nuanced langages with their personal approaches to language—which can also be extrapolated by reading their various paroles, or discrete performances of language. In doing so, however, it allows us to evaluate the role of specific metaphors within philosophy. Derrida has long focalized the problem of translating philosophy.72 Yet to examine individual translations as they function in a target culture would have been too large a concession to the conventional historiography whose assumption of a linear experience of time he rejects.73 With the rise of translation history as a central area of Translation Studies, and the retreat of High Theory, it is possible now to undertake an examination of the history of philosophical translation, which weds the deconstructive focus on details of language with messy historical questions of who translates how, why, and with what consequences for the target culture.

We are always already thinking in German Today, tokens of German vocabulary are well curated online for non-German-speakers to marvel at. Countless websites cite German’s “untranslatable” words for highly specific states of mind, such as Schadenfreude (“harm-joy,” pleasure at another’s pain), Fernweh (“far-pain,” the need to travel), Sitzfleisch (“seat-meat,” slang for perseverance), and Waldeinsamkeit (“forest-loneliness,” an evocatively titled poem by eighteenth-century poet Joseph von Eichendorff).74 Besides their unusual specificity, the words stand out for their creative compounding.75 These words fascinate non-Germanspeakers when presented as oddities without any socio-linguistic context; but German thought is even more evocative when an English translation draws us to the depths of the words’ meanings. For a variety of historical reasons, the global academic community must often engage with contemporary works of philosophy, theory, and critical inquiry published in English. Most of this community speaks another language besides English, and some of us even speak German. Without seeing the translation-historical channels by which German-language sources shape our English-language theoretical vocabulary, we miss the interlinguistic

18 Introduction interplay of vocabularies. Richard Rorty argues convincingly for the prioritization of vocabularies over concepts as a way of understanding the values behind different political or philosophical positions.76 As contemporary as Rorty’s constructivist argument sounds, the defense of vocabulary also recalls the Enlightenment project of standardized international terminology. Since the rise of scientific language in seventeenth century, reforming grammar has not captured the scholarly imagination to the same extent as systematizing terminology.77 Many key terms within anglophone theoretical vocabulary come from German texts, like Sigmund Freud’s de-adjectival noun “the unconscious” (das Unbewusste) for the energy that we repress in order to function, and Martin Heidegger’s much-parodied “always already” (immer schon) that describes the a priori framework for understanding existence that we fail to question because we have no respite from it. The analyses to come focus on key vocabulary mostly from the pre-war canon of continental philosophy, rather than the Frankfurt School, the Vienna Circle, or other influential philosophical programs that emerged from central Europe in the twentieth century. In doing so, I will turn to the special translation challenges associated with the German-language style of philosophizing that Paul Ricoeur famously called the “School of Suspicion.” Ricoeur specifically meant the work of Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx, whose demystifying polemics sweepingly regard “the whole of consciousness as ‘false consciousness,’” thus taking a philosophical step that makes Cartesian skepticism look comfortable. Suspicion goes beyond skepticism to doubt regarding the mind’s own judgments: “After the doubt about things, we have started to doubt consciousness.”78 Ricoeur considers Heidegger’s term “destruction” an apt description of the “suspicious” approach, which demystifies sacred dogmas so that not only religion but the very idea of personal autonomy suddenly presents itself as an aggressive illusion that mars theoretical clarity. This book’s argument relies on the nonconceptual language of French theory and the translational creativity that brought their words into the English-language theory discourse. The global significance of English is suffocatingly apparent. According to David Crystal’s estimate, there are presently 2,236,730,800 people who live in societies that require them to speak English at “a medium level of conversational competence in handling domestic subject-matter.”79 In the past few decades, a socio-linguistic debate has emerged regarding which stance to take towards English as a lingua franca (ELF). The debate has brought attention to the ways that English has become the international default language in various discourses, including most academic research fields. ELF research tends to fall into pragmatic and polemical camps. For the pragmatic contingent, like Barbara Seidlhofer, if we view learning English as a practical skill like learning to drive, then we can learn other languages purely for their poetry and beauty. For the polemical wing, the rise of English crushes everything in its wake, and its “linguistic imperialism” (Robert Philippson) is a threat to other cultures.80 What both of these

Introduction  19 discourses have in common is the tendency to see English as a force that mows down linguistic diversity, so that English becomes a kind of universal linguistic currency, whereby rich societies often differ from poor ones in how well their middle class commands English. This book approaches the topic differently by showing that English is not only famously hybrid and assimilatory but that, no matter how well texts are translated into English and concepts assimilated into Anglo-American theory, continental philosophy will remain inextricable from Germanic morphology. Meanwhile, since Translation Studies has been turning to history after the descriptive turn in the 1990s, there is now more to be learned by grappling with the evolving history of translation than by simply studying how to translate. This book has a prescriptive edge in that it favors a particular translation strategy for rendering German philosophy into English. In keeping with the Marxist current within the descriptive turn, especially visible in the work of Mona Baker, Lawrence Venuti, and Michael Cronin, this book does not present techniques in a vacuum, but sees translators as constrained by the conditions of the publishing market in which they operate.81 This perspective leads to occasional differences with some of the poststructuralist authors whose attention to textuality sometimes leads to an abstract ideal of translation removed from the constraints that reception history imposes. As constrained as translators are, their motivations deserve more attention. Much of what Theodor Zeldin writes about “intermediaries” (traders, traveling salespeople, interdisciplinary scholars) applies to translators: Most advances in science have been the result of intermediaries venturing beyond the boundaries or the paradigms of their disciplines, uniting insights which come from different kingdoms of knowledge. […] Intermediaries inject an element of the unexpected into human affairs, which can have negative as well as stimulating results […] Intermediaries follow that principle: the way for the weak to move the strong is not by force but by modifying their relationship, changing the angle of approach.82 The present book hopes to “change the angle of approach” to the history of philosophy by providing readers and translators of philosophy with a particular take on the linguistic history of philosophy, and above all an episodic, theoretically coherent approach to translation history—a growing subfield within Translation Studies. Since the cultural turn in Translation Studies around the 1990s, theories of translation have tended to assign a significant role to historical and cultural determinants of translation choices. Lavinia Heller points out that we read translations in their “place” (Platz—a term she borrows from Heidegger’s Being and Time), which means we expect them to be as immediately accessible as any other (non-translated) communication that we could encounter in the same context (reading a popular novel, for instance).83 Prior to Heller’s philosophical account of the

20 Introduction “constitutive inconspicuousness of translation,” the norm of inconspicuous translation was also widely bemoaned as a missed opportunity to reveal cultural differences. These arguments often drew directly on Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility, whose introductory chapter reads published English-language translations for signs that the translator has silenced traces of the foreign (stylistics as well as cultural practices and identity markers) so that the target text would read as if written in the target language.84 Other approaches, such as skopos theory, Descriptive Translation Studies, and post-colonial translation theory, also conceive translation as a historically conditioned relationship between the translator and her audience. In exposing the challenges involved in translating German philosophy into English, this book aims to encourage translators of philosophy to trust their insights even more, to become “sovereign translators” in Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense. In a spinoff on Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as the one who decides on the exception to the constitutional order of a political body, Nancy considers a translator sovereign when they decide on the exception to the expectation that every word is translatable.85 But translators can become sovereign not just by refusing to translate, they can also do so by refusing to offer single translations that smooth over recurrent, morphemic sticking points in the translation process. If these “untranslatables” are the significant indicators of aporia within thought that Barbara Cassin suggests that they are in the preface to her Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, then translators are indispensable agents in the construction of concepts.86 Since Blumenberg discerned rhetorical foundations in the edifice of philosophical conceptuality, one might ask to what extent the untranslatable is the same as the metaphoric? It may be that metaphor’s efficacy is revealed precisely when a sentence cannot be translated.

Chapter outline This book’s four chapters show metaphoric language moving in different configurations between the German and English languages (and sometimes French) across (mostly) twentieth-century translation history. The first chapter reads Derridean différance, Cassin’s untranslatables, and Blumenberg’s “metaphorology” as justifying the differential translation of polysemous German words in the work of Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger. If metaphors are guiding principles of philosophical thought, then translators have an impetus to maintain them alongside the literal meanings of philosophical terms, especially of semi-lexicalized metaphors haunting German terms. The second chapter shows how Blumenberg’s attempts to curtail the Heideggerian excesses of linguistic nationalism yields an admirable focus on the bridging effect of metaphors within intellectual history but obscures the transformative power of translation within that history. The third chapter looks at the question of terminology and metaphor in the translation of

Introduction  21 Sigmund Freud’s work. The last chapter examines how the translation of Heidegger came to inform translation strategies first in postwar France and then in the postmodern United States. The book expresses fascination with the legacy of Heideggerian language and leaves the translator to adjudicate over the multiplicity of anti-logical arguments it serves. The opening chapter, “When thought resists translation,” shows when a flexible approach to philosophical terminology best captures the metaphoric structures within a source text. From the beginning, the book takes a historically situated problem, the morphological directness of German vocabulary, and demonstrates its implications for translation practice. This orientation is in keeping with the translational turn in literary studies, which takes its cue from Jacques Derrida’s famous “definition of deconstruction,” that is, “brief, elliptical, economical like a slogan, I would say without a complete sentence: ‘more than one language.’”87 When confronting the problems specific to the German–English language pair, the display of a foreign word’s varying meanings in a target text (especially an English-language one) empowers translators to defy philosophy’s generic convention of selecting clear terminology and sticking with it. Translators of German philosophy into English must often select between concrete or abstract meanings for polysemous German words. In this context, Chapter 1 highlights the overlooked importance of the ways that translators have already responded and how they might respond even more constructively to passages where Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger choose words that link abstractions to images. This chapter justifies differential translation as a way of revering the sign over the signified, much in line with Barbara Cassin’s sense of translation as a fulcrum by which to question ontology and promote “logology.”88 By reference to Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, it argues that the relationship between philosophical concepts and their terminological signifiers is unstable, and that terms will vary as their meanings adjust to new contexts across the course of a philosophical text. The use of variant targetlanguage terms for a single-source language term is shown to be even more prevalent in quotations by scholars than in published full-text translations. Scholars often load several terms into one sentence (what I call “disjunctive translation”) whereas translators are more inclined to vary a translation by context. The investigation of the current use of these techniques ultimately serves to demonstrate this translation technique’s value as a response to the limits of philosophical terminologization. Chapter 2, “The supertranslatability of metaphor in Hans Blumenberg’s translation histories,” thus deals with a specific theoretical contribution to the problem of translating German philosophy. The central discovery of Blumenberg’s work on metaphor is “absolute metaphor,” which he describes in his 1960 Paradigms for a Metaphorology as “‘translations’ that cannot be rendered back into authenticity and logicality.”89 After introducing Blumenberg’s work on metaphor generally, this chapter will consider possible reasons why Blumenberg hardly ever contemplated translation

22 Introduction directly. It then introduces a Blumenbergian theory of translation to mediate between philosophical concepts and nonconceptuality. Over the course of Blumenberg’s development as a thinker, he came to regard metaphor less as a source of conceptual distortions or interpretive difficulties and more as the linguistic element that builds bridges between otherwise nearly incommensurable discourses. As a West German doctoral student, he was hardly oblivious to the fact of linguistic particularity. In fact, Blumenberg’s first academic publication from 1946, titled “The Linguistic Reality of Philosophy,” polemically forefronts translation problems— unlike any of his future writings. By 1958, Blumenberg analyzed images in language, but with minimal regard to their linguistic form. The switch may result from his rejection of Heideggerian theories of untranslatability. Chapter 3, “Retranslating Freud,” asks what historical conditions gave rise to the (from a scientific perspective) quite eccentric New Penguin Freud translations, a project that is particularly in line with the translation strategy I advocate. Selecting one particular canonical philosopher allows for an even closer analysis of the forces that encourage or impede the implementation of differential translation. As we will see, theorists and translators see consistently translated terminology as amplifying the air of rigor around unconventional thinkers like Sigmund Freud, whose status as a scientist is often called into question. On the other hand, this very line of questioning has allowed for a postmodern approach to translating Freud in a way that emphasizes his storytelling abilities. Freud’s case is exemplary of the continental philosopher’s status in English translation: such thinkers are read both as language artists and as rigorous thinkers—posing translation dilemmas around whether the translation of a technical term can, or should, be varied for the sake of achieving a more beautiful text. The next part of Chapter 3 focuses on the polyvalent term Nachträglichkeit in German–English translations of Freud’s work. French psychoanalyst and translator Jean Laplanche finds the core problem of translating Freud’s writing in identifying and rendering the terminology, which is polysemous within texts and across the history of Freud’s career. The chapter ultimately argues against Laplanche’s case for the consistent translation of the word Nachträglichkeit across Freud’s writings since doing so would conceal the ambiguity in the concept that Laplanche himself has so eloquently identified: sometimes Nachträglichkeit refers to a complex form of retroactivity and sometimes simply indicates delay. After considering the French Freud revival from a translation perspective, the final part of this chapter engages with the problems of translating psychoanalytic texts into English through the paradigmatic example of the twenty-first-century New Penguin Freud series, a set of new English-language translations of Freud’s narrative works under the editorship of Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst who, strikingly for the purposes of this book, does not claim to know German. Chapter 4, “The Americanization of a French understanding of being German,” expands the German–English focus of the book to look more

Introduction  23 closely at the role of French in the landscape of philosophy in English translation. The book thus ends with a chapter that discusses a translation history of twentieth-century philosophy. This history involves the importation of German philosophy into the anglophone humanities along the detour of French philosophy. The chapter shows how the translation of a translation does not simply mean a double loss of originality, but rather the strengthening of translation norms developed in the first translation (German–French) and utilized again in the second (French–English). The translation norms in question include precisely the kind of attention to linguistic particularity that include non-translation and differential translation. These techniques perform the insights of poststructuralism for a generation of (post)humanists who are both sensitive to cultural and historical differences, and who are never satisfied to take these on faith. Every difference must be made visible by a concrete sign, every interesting foreign word treated as a stumbling block to smooth translation. One can hardly talk about the translation of German philosophy in the twentieth century without considering the role of Heidegger reception in postwar France. Jean Beaufret, the famous recipient of Heidegger’s 1946 “Letter on Humanism,” composed effusive monographs and philologically minded translations that established Heidegger as France’s master thinker. Then, the poststructuralists’ translated Heideggerianism caught on in the United States—in English translation, of course. The chapter shows the afterlives of Beaufret’s innovations in the form of English-language Heidegger translation and their effect on French scholars like Alain Badiou who rely on Beaufret’s translations in their own work. The last word is thus not on English translation, but on the conceptual ambiguities of German philosophical terminology that call for differential translation in any language. The book thus expands outward, moving from a theory to a historical context for the theory to a translation history example to a historical context in which something as minute as a translation strategy turns out to be a microcosm for the insight at the heart of poststructuralism, comparative literature, and ultimately the contemporary anglophone humanities. A focus on one language pair exposes translation-historical questions that evaporate under a less specific approach. The points of friction between two languages reveal the ways that foreign linguistic and cultural resources evoke a world differently than those of our own language do.

Notes 1 English physician Thomas Wharton is credited with naming the thyroid gland after its shield-like shape in 1600. It was not Wharton, however, but the ancient physician Galen who selected the name “thyroid” for the nearby cartilage (the thyroid gland itself had an Arabic-derived name, botium, since Arab doctors first recognized its swollen form in goiters). What the Greeks would have heard in the word for shield (θυρεός) was the related word for door (θύρα). In short, Galen

24 Introduction saw a piece of cartilage that looked like a shield that looked like a door. Typical of English’s less vivid etymologies, the English word muted the Greek military metaphor of the shield in favor of an anatomical metonym: Wharton saw a Greek word for cartilage and applied it to a gland. Laios et al., “From Thyroid Cartilage to Thyroid Gland.” 2 The primarily teaching, rather than scientific, function of the Germanic linguistic terms is emphasized by their number. As synonyms for Verb alone, the official German Duden dictionary lists: Tätigkeitswort, Zeitwort, Tunwort, and, most folksy of all, Tuwort (do-word). Drosdowski, Duden - Deutsches Universalwörterbuch. 3 Goldschmidt, Quand Freud attend le verbe, 38. 4 Goldschmidt, Freud et la langue allemande, 40–45. 5 More nuanced “weak” versions of the linguistic relativity thesis continue to make resurgences. The reasonable starting point is the observation that language influences thought by dictating what you must say (and thus must consider how to say)—even if no particular observed language, if we bracket social context, can ever be fairly said to censors what you can say. See Pütz and Verspoor, Explorations in Linguistic Relativity. 6 This vocabulary difference may also explain why Japanese and Italian needed to invent radically new approaches to translation before those languages could produce workable translations of the German philosophical canon. On the complexity of translating Heidegger into Italian, see Heller, “Translaboration as Legitimation of Philosophical Translation.” As analytic philosopher Barry Smith puts it, a German philosopher “may unshamefacedly enjoy a living relationship to his own language” whereas Anglo-American philosophers are taught to ignore any “charm in the language with which they deal.” Smith, “German Philosophy,” 1, 4. 7 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, 227–28.   So sind die Wörter Grund (Stütze, Basis), abhängen (von oben gehalten werden), woraus fließen (statt folgen), Substanz (wie Locke sich ausdrückt: der Träger der Akzidenzen), und unzählige andere nicht schematische, sondern symbolische Hypotyposen, und Ausdrücke für Begriffe nicht vermittelst einer direkten Anschauung, sondern nur nach einer Analogie mit derselben, d. i. der Übertragung der Reflexion über einen Gegenstand der Anschauung auf einen ganz andern Begriff, dem vielleicht nie eine Anschauung direkt korrespondieren kann. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 212. 8 Kant followed architectural developments in his time and was partial to the Protestant reaction against Baroque ornamental excess. Kant would relate architecture to epistemological limit-setting: “Because [architectural] metaphors serve as justifications [for the urgency of Kant’s critical project], they most frequently appear in the prefaces of Kant’s work. They are placed outside, at the threshold of, serious philosophical discourse, but they aid in defining the inside and outside of the main argument.” Purdy, On the Ruins of Babel, 64. 9 de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” 27. A similar argument is made with a focus on mathematical language in Sarukkai, Translating the World. 10 Like De Man, Rodolphe Gasché similarly reads this passage critically: Kant overlooks the indeterminacy of philosophical in his criticisms of rhetoric. In Gasché’s view, Kant overestimates the effect of the hypotyposis in organizing cognition, “hollow moulds, or engravings that provide the general outline, the prescribed form, the model for any particular (cognitive and practical) realization.” Gasché, “Some Reflections on the Notion of Hypotyposis in Kant,” 95. Gasché sees rhetoric as inventing, rather than merely communicating, the contents of the imagination (99). 11 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 5.

Introduction  25 12 According to Cavarero, Plato draws out the meaning of λέγειν that refers to “weaving” rather than “speaking,” so that truth takes the form of the grid-like, surveyable text(ile) rather than subjectively spoken and fleetingly felt words. Cavarero, For More than One Voice. Her reading is specifically counter to Derrida’s accusation of logophonocentrism in Plato. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy.” For accounts of the importance of the visual to the history of philosophy see Jay, Downcast Eyes; Münnix, Das Bild vom Bild. 13 Franz Neumann’s notion of “racial imperialism” (and more specifically “racial proletarianism”) describes the National Socialists’ rhetorical work in reoccupying the language of Marxism and of imperial power politics to justify the violent policies of the Third Reich. See Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, 107, 188. 14 Conveniently Heidegger did not count France among the internationalist American-Jewish-Bolshevik cabal’s globalizing technologies that were fated to destroy humanity’s connection to place. Trawny, “The Universal and Annihilation: Heidegger’s Being-Historical Anti-Semitism,” 12–14. 15 This thesis is developed in Kleinberg, Generation Existential. The topic is taken up in more detail in this book’s final chapter. 16 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 14:69. 17 Heidegger, On Time and Being, 56. 18 Jacques Derrida, whose “White Mythology” set the tone for a generation of metaphor scholarship with its claim that all concepts are nothing but long recycled metaphors, began his academic career detecting metaphors in the work of Edmund Husserl as a translator of his work. 19 Studies show how Latin, French, and English are also indebted to metaphor. That is to say, the history of belated loan translation is not an explanation for German scholarly vocabulary’s metaphor-richness. Colin Turbayne has elaborately demonstrated the way that metaphors enter rationalistic discourses with great subtlety and have shaped the discourses on scientific method despite claims to the contrary, like Isaac Newton’s claim not to have invented his hypotheses (hypotheses non fingo). Turbayne, The Myth Of Metaphor, 42. 20 Translated and quoted in Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700–1775, 13. 21 The German Romantics—especially Friedrich Schleiermacher, but also Herder and the Schlegels—have been understood as the original thinkers of translation as the most productive means of enriching a culture. Berman, The Experience of the Foreign; Comay, Mourning Sickness; Buden et al., “Cultural Translation.” 22 Saine, The Problem of Being Modern, Or, The German Pursuit of Enlightenment from Leibniz to the French Revolution, 123–25. 23 Besides his debt to the German vocabulary Wolff made possible, Kant acknowledges his debt to Wolff’s whole system of thought when Kant calls Wolff “the originator of the not yet extinguished spirit of thoroughness in Germany” (Quoted in Blackall, 26, my translation). Kant had taught metaphysics using Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Wolffian textbook, Metaphysica, before publishing the First Critique, which takes down Wolff’s rational metaphysics. Arguably Kant provides his intervention against Baumgarten’s more original Aesthetica in the Third Critique. 24 Schröder, “Weltweisheit.” 25 Saine, The Problem of Being Modern, or, the German Pursuit of Enlightenment from Leibniz to the French Revolution, 142. 26 Wolff, Gesammelte Werke, §544. German Metaphysics, §544: “daß die Welt eine Reihe veränderlicher Dinge sind, und auf einander folgen, insgesamt aber mit einander verknüpfet sind.” 27 While Kant was hardly the first to challenge Wolff’s theories, Kant sought to lay the discussion to rest, but claiming that it is impossible to give a satisfactory

26 Introduction definition of the universe (considering the methods available at his time). See Camposampiero, “Infinite Regress.” 28 The earth as an inhabitable region is an important metaphorical topos for Kant’s thinking beyond the specific connotations of “world” (Welt). Predrag Cicovacki discusses the historical resonance of his image of the “island of truth” within the “ocean of illusion,” which Kant uses to characterize the narrow realm of human understanding within the universe. Cicovacki, “Pure Reason and Metaphors: A Reflection on the Significance of Kant’s Philosophy,” 10. 29 Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth”; Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator; Blumenberg, The Laughter of the Thracian Woman. 30 Kantian Idealism is long out of fashion and thus appears to be a weak ground for demonstrating the untranslatability of German. The mathematization of science has indeed refashioned philosophy in its image. In defense of the Kantian answers to the question “What can we know?”, however, contemporary philosopher Catherine Malabou argues persuasively that the concept of neuroplasticity finds the most accommodating philosophical architecture in the seemingly rigid mental structures of Kantian “transcendental” conceptuality; in the age of scientific realism, mental structures retain their “value as a passage and conductor between invariance and modification.” Malabou, Before Tomorrow, 726. Malabou regards Kant’s cognitive model analogously to epigenetic changes to gene expression or to the shifting surface of the earth, that is, as a plastic process which only appears to our consciousness as a stable structure, shaping our experience a priori. On similar grounds, this book works with the Kantian distinction between knowable concepts and unknowable ideas. The distinction offers a criterion for determining which thoughts translate invisibly between languages and which can cause a hitch. 31 Cazeaux, Metaphor and Continental Philosophy, 140. 32 As Blumenberg says about Being and Time, “Here, nonconceptuality consists in our thoroughly learning what kind of thing being is not.” Blumenberg, “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality,” 99. 33 Blumenbergian nonconceptuality, but as Martin Jay points out, portrays metaphors as generative of concepts, which occasionally regress into their metaphoric form—a tension that leaves no room for Heidegger’s conflation of metaphor and concept in the discourse of Being. Jay, “Adorno and Blumenberg,” 179. For a detailed discussion of Adorno and Blumenberg’s overlapping (if differently motivated) Heidegger-critical theories of nonconceptuality, see Tränkle, Nichtidentität und Unbegrifflichkeit. 34 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, xxii. 35 See Reiss and Vermeer, Towards a General Theory of Translational Action; Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility. 36 Rée, “The Translation of Philosophy.” 37 The canonical study on this history is Berman, The Experience of the Foreign. 38 This etymology is also one of Goldschmidt’s, which he admits is somewhat historically speculative. He points out that the semantics of the Romance languages drift more easily from their Latin origins because of the lost connection to their etymologies, so that accident in French now means an unintended misfortune (like its cognate in English) whereas the Latin sense of accidens is expressed in French by hasard. Goldschmidt, Als Freud das Meer sah, 25–26. 39 Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700–1775, 12. 40 Gottsched, Grundlegung einer deutschen Sprachkunst, 13. 41 For a more detailed account of this history, see Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700–1775, 99–140. 42 See the introduction to ibid.

Introduction  27 43 On the Enlightenment-era emphasis on simple straightforward prose in the English context, see Bennett, “The Scientific Revolution and Its Repercussions on the Translation of Technical Discourse.” 44 English polymath Robert Boyle thus writes in the preface to his 1665 essay collection that readers may be surprised at how “in almost every one of the following essays, I should speak so doubtingly, and use so often perhaps, it seems, it is not improbable and other such expressions, as argue a diffidence to the truth of the opinions I incline to, and that I should be so shy of laying down principles.” Quoted in Shapin, “Pump and Circumstance,” 495. 45 This eighteenth-century Grecophilia had a deep impact on German intellectual traditions. See Butler, The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany; Marchand, Down from Olympus. Two centuries later, Heidegger’s French advocate Jean Beaufret described the suspicion that Heidegger’s Grecophilia aroused among the French since “phil-hellenism would only be the alibi of a non-avowed ‘Germanism’, which would betray itself by a no less supposed hostility to Latin.” Beaufret, Dialogue with Heidegger, xx. Contemporary scholars like Friedrich Kittler still identify German academia with the intellectual tradition of Greek antiquity and deny the influence of American cultural studies. See Breger, “Gods, German Scholars, and the Gift of Greece,” 112–13. 46 König-Pralong, “Entangled Philosophical Ideologies the Language of Reason: From Modern French to Scholastic Latin,” 339. 47 Rivarol, De l’Universalité de la langue française, 15–16. 48 See the takedown of German literature, Frederick II, De la littérature allemande von Friedrich dem Grossen. Its ignorance of the Weimar Renaissance occurring in a nearby duchy aroused immediate offense by the patrons of that movement. See Mommsen, “Herzogin Anna Amalias ‘Journal von Tiefurth’ Als Erwiderung Auf Friedrichs II. ‘De La Littérature Allemande.’” 49 Rivarol, De l’Universalité de la langue française, 58. (My translation.) 50 Rivarol, 62. 51 Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, De l’Influence de la Scholastique sur la Langue Française, 61. 52 Austria, still ruled by the Hapsburg monarchy, did not join the newly formed German Empire, a point of contention that would erupt again in the interwar pan-Germanist movement that would facilitate the Annexation of Austria in 1938. 53 The process was much faster in the Austrian Empire. The University of Vienna has been German-language since 1783. In 1784, Joseph II instituted Germanlanguage instruction at the newly founded University of Lviv (which shifted to Polish-language beginning in 1871) and in the same year decreed that German replace Latin instruction at the University of Prague (which was split into two institutions, one German-language and one Czech-language from 1882 until 1945). Swiss universities also became German-language earlier than those of present-day Germany; the University of Basel, for instance, became Germanspeaking in 1822. 54 Campe, Wörterbuch zur Erklärung und Verdeutschung der unserer Sprache aufgedrungenen fremden Ausdrücke, VIII. 55 Campe, IX. (My translation.) 56 Typical nationalistic linguistics include the use of evaluations of the “realness” of other languages’ grammatical features by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who dismisses North America’s native agglutinative languages as lacking real grammar. See Gunn, Ethnology and Empire, 23. 57 Wahrig, Fremdwörterlexikon, 5. 58 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 47.

28 Introduction 59 Toni Cassirer, wife of the great philosopher, recalls Heidegger’s total lack of a sense of humor (sein tödlicher Ernst und seine völlige Humorlosigkeit) as that which cast him as a particularly dangerous collaborator for the Nazi cause. Cassirer, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer, 189. 60 See Adorno, “Wörter aus der Fremde.” 61 For a longer historical view of this complicity, see Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis. 62 Sluga, 78. 63 Consider the 1941 pro-German argument of the Celtic linguist Leo Weisgerber: “One often hears it said that no people feels itself more tightly and deeply bound to its mother tongue than the Germans.” Quoted in Gordin, Scientific Babel, 195. 64 For the early suspicions, see Dewey, German Philosophy and Politics; Veblen, Imperial Germany. Many books have been written about the complicity of philosophers in supporting National Socialist propaganda. See, for instance, Segev, Thinking and Killing; Faye, Heidegger, the Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935. 65 Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 1770–1870, 141. 66 Nineteenth-century philologists mastered the recursive German sentence. Take this example from Swiss philologist Johann Bachofen (1815–1887): “Dass die gynaikokratische Kultur vorzugsweise dieses hieratische Gepräge tragen muss, dafür bürgt die innere Anlage der weiblichen Natur, jenes tiefe, ahnungsreiche Gottesbewusstsein, das, mit dem Gefühl der Liebe sich verschmelzend, der Frau, zumal der Mutter[,] eine in den wildesten Zeiten am mächtisten wirkende religiöse Weihe leiht.” Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, xiii. 67 A Romantic version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis states that grammatical complexity reveals the complexity of thought present in a culture. August Schlegel exemplifies this view in his praise for Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit over Chinese and the Romance languages for the former languages’ more complexly “synthetic” grammar. Schlegel, Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. 68 Apter, Against World Literature; Cassin, Rendall, and Apter, Dictionary of Untranslatables a Philosophical Lexicon. 69 See Damrosch, “Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability by Emily Apter (Review)”; Venuti, “Hijacking Translation.” 70 Yet even Adorno defends the opacity of Hegel’s syntax and vocabulary by arguing that it communicates not just the message, but “the curve of thought.” 71 Landgrebe, Der Begriff des Erlebens, 15. 72 Derrida describes his essay on a footnote of Heidegger’s as “timid prolegomena to a problem of translation.” Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 33. 73 Arguably, the New Historicism brought the reckoning with the deconstructive critiques of temporality and interpretation into the field of history so that history retained its relevance in an academic world forever altered by (de)constructivism. 74 See for instance “Untranslatable German Words with No English Equivalent”; Michele, “203 Most Beautiful Untranslatable Words [The Ultimate List”; “17 German Words with No English Translation ‹ GO Blog | EF GO Blog.” 75 British author Ben Schott has recently written a book of plausible and hilarious German neologisms—a tribute to the productivity of German morphemes. Schott, Schottenfreude. 76 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. 77 Halliday and Martin, Writing Science, 3–7. 78 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 33. 79 Crystal, English as a Global Language, 65. 80 Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism. 81 Baker, “Narratives of Terrorism and Security”; Venuti, “Translation, Publishing, and World Literature”; Cronin, Translation and Globalization. 82 Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity, 356, 357, 359.

Introduction  29 83 Heller, Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation, 186–87. Heller’s argument extends beyond Venuti’s to encompass norm-conformist translations. Translations remain equally inconspicuous when more unusual expectations replace the “normal” expectation of fluent communication, as in poetry, multilingual texts, and heteroglossic situations, like Chinese restaurant menus, where error-prone language is so normal as to signal authenticity. Heller, 182–83. 84 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility. 85 Jean-Luc Nancy calls the choice to leave a word in the original language “sovereign translation” (à la Schmitt) since it decides on the exception to the “law of translation”—namely that everything must be translated. Nancy’s claim about the translator’s “sovereignty” would be even more interesting when thought through in the context of publishers’ conditions, which impinge on translators’ freedom to mark the “untranslatables” they encounter. For an excellent critical discussion of Nancy's argument about “sovereign translation,” see “Bodin on Sovereignty,” 246. 86 The famous definition: “To speak of untranslatables in no way implies that the terms in question, or the expressions, the syntactical or grammatical turns, are not and cannot be translated: the untranslatable is rather what one keeps on (not) translating.” Cassin et al., “Introduction,” xvii. 87 Derrida, Mémoires pour Paul de Man, 38. 88 Cassin criticizes philosophical conceptuality by philological means. She questions Aristotle’s demand that a reasonable person should be persuaded by the principle of non-contradiction (the thesis A = B and A ≠ B cannot both be true). She argues that Aristotle’s own choice of words constitutes a concession that the foundation of logic depends on nothing other than persuasion. From this point she argues for “logology” as an even more fundamental approach to reading than philosophical or philological analysis. See Cassin and Narcy, La Decision Du Sens. 89 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 3.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. “Wörter aus der Fremde.” In Noten zur Literatur I. Gesammelte Schriften, II, 216–32. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Apter, Emily S. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London: Verso, 2013. Bachofen, Johann. Das Mutterrecht. Stuttgart: Verlag von Krais und Hoffmann, 1861. http://archive​.org​/details​/Bachofen​-Johann​-Mutterrecht. Baker, Mona. “Narratives of Terrorism and Security: “Accurate” Translations, Suspicious Frames.” Critical Studies on Terrorism 3, no. 3 (December 3, 2010): 347–64. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/17539153​.2010​.521639. Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, Jules. De l’Influence de la Scholastique sur la Langue Française: Lu à la Séance publ. du 27 Juin 1840. Paris: Institut Royal de France, 1840. Beaufret, Jean. “Dialogue With Heidegger: Greek Philosophy.” In Studies in Continental Thought. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006. Bennett, Karen. “The Scientific Revolution and Its Repercussions on the Translation of Technical Discourse.” The Translator 17, no. 2 (November 1, 2011): 189– 210. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/13556509​.2011​.10799486.

30 Introduction Berman, Antoine. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. New York: SUNY Press, 1992. Blackall, Eric A. The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700–1775 With a New Bibliographical Essay, 2nd ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. Blumenberg, Hans. “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation.” In Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by David Michael Levin, 30–86. California: University of California Press, 1993. ———. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. ———. “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality.” In Shipwreck With Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, 81–102. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. ———. “Shipwreck With Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence.” In Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. ———. The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory. Translated by Spencer Hawkins. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Breger, Claudia. “Gods, German Scholars, and the Gift of Greece: Friedrich Kittler’s Philhellenic Fantasies.” Theory, Culture & Society 23, nos. 7–8 (December 2006): 111–34. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/0263276406069886. Buden, Boris, Stefan Nowotny, Sherry Simon, Ashok Bery, and Michael Cronin. “Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the Problem, and Responses.” Translation Studies 2, no. 2 (July 1, 2009): 196–219. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /14781700902937730. Butler, Eliza May. The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany: A Study of the Influence Exercised by Greek Art and Poetry Over the Great German Writers of the Eighteenth, Ninete, Reissue edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Campe, Joachim Heinrich. Wörterbuch zur Erklärung und Verdeutschung der unserer Sprache aufgedrungenen fremden Ausdrücke: Ein Ergänzungsband zu Adelung’s und Campe’s Wörterbüchern. Schulbuchhandlung, 1813. Camposampiero, Matteo Favaretti. “Infinite Regress: Wolff’s Cosmology and the Background of Kant’s Antinomies.” Kant-Studien 112, no. 2 (June 1, 2021): 239–64. https://doi​.org​/10​.1515​/kant​-2020​-0040. Cassin, Barbara, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood. “Introduction.” In Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. http://proquest​.safaribooksonline​.com​ .proxy​.lib​.umich​.edu​/book​/social​-sciences​/9780691138701​/introduction​/07​ _introduction​_xhtml. Cassin, Barbara, and Michel Narcy. La Decision Du Sens: Le Livre Gamma de la Metaphysique d’Aristote. Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1989. Cassin, Barbara, Steven Rendall, and Emily S. Apter. Dictionary of Untranslatables a Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. http://proxy​.lib​.umich​.edu​/login​?url​=http:/​/proquest​.safaribooksonline​.com​ /9780691138701. Cassirer, Toni. Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003.

Introduction  31 Cavarero, Adriana. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. A Piy Voci. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. http://hdl​ .handle​.net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015059198880. Cazeaux, Clive. Metaphor and Continental Philosophy: From Kant to Derrida, reissue edition. Routledge, 2009. Cicovacki, Predrag. “Pure Reason and Metaphors: A Reflection on the Significance of Kant’s Philosophy.” Annales Philosophici 2 (2011): 11. Comay, Rebecca. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution, 1st ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Cronin, Michael. Translation and Globalization. Abingdon: Psychology Press, 2003. Crystal, David. English as a Global Language, 2nd ed. Canto Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/CBO9781139196970. Damrosch, David. “Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability by Emily Apter (Review).” Comparative Literature Studies 51, no. 3 (2014): 504–8. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Reprint. New York, NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982. ———. Mémoires pour Paul de Man. Paris: GALILEE, 1988. ———. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In Dissemination, edited by Barbara Johnson, 61–171. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Dewey, John. German Philosophy and Politics. New York: H. Holt, 1915. http://hdl​ .handle​.net​/2027​/loc​.ark:​/13960​/t23b79726. Diehl, Carl. Americans and German Scholarship, 1770–1870, not indicated edition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978. Drosdowski, Günther, ed. Duden - Deutsches Universalwörterbuch: Das umfassende Bedeutungswörterbuch der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. 7., Überarbeitete und erweiterte Auflage. Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 2011. Faye, Emmanuel. Heidegger, the Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. Frederick II. “King of Prussia.” In De la littérature allemande von Friedrich dem Grossen, edited by G.J. Göschen Stuttgart, 1883. http://archive​.org​/details​/del​alit​ trat​ure0​0freduoft. Gasché, Rodolphe. “Some Reflections on the Notion of Hypotyposis in Kant.” Argumentation 4, no. 1 (February 1, 1990): 85–100. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/ BF00186300. GermanPod101​.c​om Blog. “Untranslatable German Words With No English Equivalent.” June 27, 2019. https://www​.germanpod101​.com​/blog​/2019​/06​/28​ /untranslatable​-german​-words/. GO Blog|EF GO Blog. “17 German Words With No English Translation “GO Blog | EF GO Blog.” Accessed September 6, 2022. https://www​.ef​.com​/wwen​/blog​/ language​/17​-german​-words​-with​-no​-english​-translation/. Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur. Als Freud das Meer sah: Essay. Deutsch: S. Fischer Verlag, 2018. ———. Freud et la langue allemande: Quand Freud voit la mer. I. Paris: Editions Buchet/Chastel, 2006. ———. Quand Freud attend le verbe: Freud et la langue allemande II. Paris: BuchetChastel, 1996. Gordin, Michael D. Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

32 Introduction Gottsched, Johann Christoph. Grundlegung einer deutschen Sprachkunst: nach den Mustern der besten Schriftsteller des vorigen und jetzigen Jahrhunderts abgefasset. Breitkopf, 1752. Gunn, Robert Lawrence. Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Halliday, M. A. K., and J. R. Martin. Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. London: Taylor & Francis, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 14. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976. ———. On Time and Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Heller, Lavinia. “Translaboration as Legitimation of Philosophical Translation.” Target: International Journal on Translation Studies, June 15, 2020. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1075​/target​.20078​.hel. ———. Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation. Berlin: Frank & Timme GmbH, 2013. Jay, Martin. “Adorno and Blumenberg.” In A Companion to Adorno, 173– 91. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2020. https://doi​.org​/10​.1002​ /9781119146940​.ch11. ———. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1922. Keohane, Oisin. “Bodin on Sovereignty: Taking Exception to Translation?” Paragraph 38, no. 2 (June 23, 2015): 245–60. https://doi​.org​/10​.3366​/para​.2015​.0161. Kleinberg, Ethan. Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. https://doi​.org​/10​.7591​ /9781501731648. König-Pralong, Catherine. “Entangled Philosophical Ideologies the Language of Reason: From Modern French to Scholastic Latin.” In Language and Method: Historical and Historiographical Reflections on Medieval Thought, edited by Ueli Zahnd, 337–56. Freiburg i.Br./Berlin/Wien: Rombach Verlag KG, 2017. Laios, K., E. Lagiou, V. Konofaou, M. Piagkou, and M. Karamanou. “From Thyroid Cartilage to Thyroid Gland.” Folia Morphologica 78, no. 1 (2019): 171–73. https://doi​.org​/10​.5603​/FM​.a2018​.0059. Landgrebe, Ludwig. Der Begriff des Erlebens: Ein Beitrag zur Kritik unseres Selbstverständnisses und zum Problem der seelischen Ganzheit. Orbis Phaenome­ nologicus. Quellen ;n.F., 2, 216 p. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. Malabou, Catherine. Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality. Translated by Carolyn Shread, 1st ed. Cambridge, UK/Malden, MA: Polity, 2016. Man, Paul de. “The Epistemology of Metaphor.” Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (1978): 13–30. Marchand, Suzanne L. Down From Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970, revised ed. Princeton, NJ/Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Introduction  33 Michele. “203 Most Beautiful Untranslatable Words [The Ultimate List: A-Z].” The Intrepid Guide (Blog), August 13, 2020. https://www​.theintrepidguide​.com​/ untranslatable​-words​-ultimate​-list/. Mommsen, Katharina. “Herzogin Anna Amalias ‘Journal von Tiefurth’ Als Erwiderung Auf Friedrichs II. ‘De La Littérature Allemande’ : Rede Aus Anlaß Der Buchpräsentation von ‘Die Entstehung von Goethes Werken in Dokumenten’ Band IV Am 16. Oktober 2008 in Weima.” Die Entstehung von Goethes Werken in Dokumenten IV (October 16, 2008). http://publikationen​.ub​.uni​-frankfurt​.de​ /frontdoor​/index​/index​/docId​/11334/. Münnix, Gabriele. Das Bild vom Bild: Bildsemiotik und Bildphänomenologie in interkultureller Perspektive, 1st ed. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2019. Neumann, Franz. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, n.d. Phillipson, Robert. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Purdy, Daniel L. On the Ruins of Babel: Architectural Metaphor in German Thought. Signale (Ithaca, N.Y.). Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2011. https:// login​.proxy​.library​.nd​.edu​/login​?url​=https:/​/www​.degruyter​.com​/openurl​?genre​ =book​&isbn​=9780801460050. Pütz, Martin, and Marjolyn Verspoor. Explorations in Linguistic Relativity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 2000. Rée, Jonathan. “The Translation of Philosophy.” New Literary History 32, no. 2 (2001): 223–57. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/nlh​.2001​.0020. Reiss, Katharina, and Hans J. Vermeer. Towards a General Theory of Translational Action: Skopos Theory Explained. Edited by Christiane Nord and Marina Dudenhöfer. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Publishing, 2013. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970. Rivarol, Antoine de. De l’Universalité de la langue française. Paris: Bailly et Desenne, 1784. https://fr​.wikisource​.org​/wiki​/De​_l​%E2​%80​%99Universalit​%C3​%A9​ _de​_la​_langue​_fran​%C3​%A7aise. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Saine, Thomas P. The Problem of Being Modern, Or, the German Pursuit of Enlightenment From Leibniz to the French Revolution. Wayne: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Sarukkai, Sundar. Translating the World: Science and Language. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. A&C Black, 2013. Schlegel. Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier: Ein Beitrag zur Begründung der Alterthumskunde. bei Mohr und Zimmer, 1808. Schott, Ben. Schottenfreude: German Words for the Human Condition, bilingual edition. New York: Blue Rider Press, 2013. Schröder, Winfried. “Weltweisheit.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, edited by Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, and Gottfried Gabriel. Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2017. https://doi​.org​/10​.24894​/HWPh​.4805. Segev, Alon. Thinking and Killing: Philosophical Discourse in the Shadow of the Third Reich. Boston/Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013.

34 Introduction Shapin, Steven. “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology.” Social Studies of Science 14, no. 4 (November 1, 1984): 481–520. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1177​/030631284014004001. Sluga, Hans D. Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Smith, Barry. “German Philosophy: Language and Style.” Topoi 10, no. 2 (September 1991): 155–61. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/BF00141336. Tränkle, Sebastian. Nichtidentität und Unbegrifflichkeit: Philosophische Sprachkritik nach Adorno und Blumenberg, 2022nd ed. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, Vittorio, 2022. Trawny, Peter. “The Universal and Annihilation: Heidegger’s Being-Historical AntiSemitism.” In Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Responses to Anti-Semitism, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Peter Trawny, 1–17. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Turbayne, Colin Murray. The Myth of Metaphor. New Haven; London: Literary Licensing, LLC, 2012. Veblen, Thorstein. Imperial Germany. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1915. Venuti, Lawrence. “Hijacking Translation: How Comp Lit Continues to Suppress Translated Texts.” Boundary 2 43, no. 2 (May 1, 2016): 179–204. https://doi​ .org​/10​.1215​/01903659​-3469952. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London ; New York: Routledge, 2008. Venuti, Lawrence. “Translation, Publishing, and World Literature: J. V. Foix’s Daybook 1918 and the Strangeness of Minority.” Translation Review 95, no. 1 (May 3, 2016): 8–24. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/07374836​.2016​.1158135. Wahrig, Gerhard. Fremdwörterlexikon. Mosaik Vlg., 1985. Wolff, Christian. Gesammelte Werke: I. Abteilung: Deutsche Schriften Band 2.1: Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt (Deutsche Metaphysik). 5. Reprint: Hildesheim 2016. Hrsg., mit Einer Einl. u. einem krit. Apparat von Ch. A. Corr. Hildesheim Zürich New York: Olms, Georg, 2016. Zeldin, Theodore. An Intimate History of Humanity. London: Vintage, 1995.

1

When thought resists translation The case for differential translation

Translators are better poised than readers or even authors to notice important differences between languages. When the publishers allow it, translators of German into English can express this knowledge through translations and paratexts that expose the reader to the robust polysemy of the German language. The most pressing justification for departing from the prevailing norm of inconspicuous translation strategies is because understanding the polysemy of keywords in a text is crucial for grasping the authors’ arguments. Beyond that, exposing polysemy also turns a philosophical text’s translatedness from a defect into an advantage. Even Mark Twain, in his otherwise surly takedown of the “awful German language,” praised the abundance of meaning that a German morpheme can express: “There are some exceedingly useful words in this language. Schlag, for example; and Zug.”1 Zug, for example, is the word for a locomotive train, a drag on a cigarette, and a quickly performed action (as in the expression, in einem Zug), as well as the root of the words for elevator (Aufzug), a move into a new home (Umzug), or reciprocity (Gegenzug). From a present-day perspective, Twain’s work reads as a defense of English’s global dominance on the supposed basis of its grammatical simplicity, but even Twain cannot deny the appeal of German’s productive word-parts.​ The “useful” polysemy of Germanic morphemes finds especial expression in philosophy. German philosophers’ tendency to exploit the polysemy of its terms has garnered criticism: arguments by etymology, for which Hegel and Heidegger are famous, sometimes partake in the sophistic move of granting mental associations with the force of truth.2 From the “analytic” side, argument by wordplay has all but disqualified these thinkers as philosophers, while leading proponents of critical theory and the history of concepts have also torn apart arguments that depend on multiple meanings to work.3 However, in the words of one of German philosophy’s most relentless non-native close readers, Jacques Derrida: “One can denounce, suspect, devalorize, combat philosophical nationalism only by taking the risk of reducing or effacing linguistic difference, [… thus making language] a medium which is neutral, indifferent, and external to the philosophical act of thought.”4 To reduce different languages to interchangeable tools is DOI: 10.4324/9781003348559-2

36  When thought resists translation

Figure 1.1 Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 1880.

so grave a loss that Derrida considers it is worth the risk of condoning certain forms of linguistic nationalism to praise the distinctions of particular languages. Since Derrida’s death at the beginning of this century advances in machine translation threaten to relegate linguistic diversity to the invisible realm of automatization, no longer a concern for human beings; as a result, linguistic differences are at risk of becoming “a new species of industrial commodity.”5 Arguments for the virtues of the German language have a new relevance not for their service to the nationalistic or Romantic arguments of the nineteenth century, but for their service to the value of linguistic diversity in the face of the commodification of all human experience, including the encounter with other languages. Let us begin by looking more closely at some generalizable lexical differences between English and German. Despite claims like Twain’s that German is “slip-shod and systemless,” its lexical building blocks are fewer and thus easier to master than those of English.6 Whether compound or simple, German words draw primarily on West Germanic morphemes. Most English words, by contrast, make a detour through Greco-Latinate etymology. While calques of Greco-Latinate origin often inspire German composita, the connotations of words resonate more loudly when we do not require the knowledge of classical languages to decipher their etymologies. German frequently builds compound words where English requires noun phrases (cf. Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung and “speed limit”), but even when accounting for that difference, English still has a greater range of total lexemes. English-language text corpora tend towards much higher word counts; if these results are taken as representative, German may contain tens of millions fewer words than English (cf. 4.2 million words and 100 million).7 If English can be said to have a greater number of lexemes, that feature could have many partial explanations, including the arrival of German

When thought resists translation  37 to the status of an institutionally recognized modern language centuries later than English. The Latinate influence on English, beginning in the sixth century, is surely also a factor. English received its biggest influx of Romance influence from the tense coexistence of an Old English–speaking populace and an Anglo-Norman–speaking nobility between about 1066–1500.8 Standard English vocabulary continues to grow by virtue of its tendency to assimilate new vocabulary from the millions of dialect speakers and billions of non-native speakers who use it daily outside of the anglophone sphere. This linguistic historical sketch could give the misleading impression that these two languages inhabit parallel universes. In many discourses, however, including philosophy, the two languages borrow from one another, and vocabulary drawn from translations of German philosophy permeates English-language discourses on a wide range of discourses in the humanities, from theodicy to anti-racist polemic.9 This chapter and the next one explore the expressive value of this translation technique. The third and fourth chapters show how the strategy reintroduced Freud to the English-speaking world as a literary stylist after that the postwar French deployment of that strategy had already profiled Heidegger as a matchless linguistic wizard. As if to compensate for its lexical constraints, German packs more different meanings into its small set of morphemes than English does. In contradistinction to English, German words often mean exactly what their etymologies indicate—among other meanings. Context is often necessary to differentiate between concrete and abstract meanings for polysemous German words. Parsing the concepts behind these words is one of the main challenges when translating German philosophy into English. This chapter examines moments in translation history, translation theory, and continental philosophy to build the case for a wider implementation of the translation technique I discussed in the introduction—“differential translation.” By this I mean the translation of philosophical terms and other frequently repeated words differently throughout the text according to context, and then either presenting a thorough explanation of the procedure in the introduction or simply placing the source text terms in parentheses after each translation (some cases call for both). Even if the value of differential translation sounds obvious, the procedure does come at a cost to clarity. To decide when that cost is merited involves examining which terms already receive such treatment in published English translations. To rely on multiple target text terms in the translation of any individual concept or term remains controversial because contemporary readers of philosophy in translation generally expect terms to be rendered one-to-one.10 Some readers trained in Anglo-American philosophy expect philosophical terms to function like mathematical variables, marking stable points in an argument, and readers of translations for the most part do not like to be reminded too disruptively that the source text was written in a different language. The problem is less marked in genres like continental philosophy, where readers expect to perform hermeneutic labor to gain a precise grasp

38  When thought resists translation of a text. The programmatic approach to this problem within translation theory begins with Walter Benjamin’s widely anthologized “The Task of the Translator” (1923), in which he argues that literary translators should not distract themselves with efforts to communicate the “message” of the original text; instead, the translator can best serve a great work’s prestige abroad by treating the translatability of the work in question as an occasion to explore “the kinship of languages” in general.11 Benjamin resorts to a variety of metaphors to express this new vision of the translator’s task, and through his own metaphors he performs his call to deviate from the strict pursuit of equivalence in translation.12 Translation theorists today regard “equivalence” as an unattainable mirage and consider linguistic creativity more fundamental to good translation work. Nevertheless, the rejection of equivalence-seeking presents dilemmas for translators: whether, for example, to choose words daringly or rely on tried-and-true linguistic intuitions, that is, whether to translate transgressively or invisibly. As Karen Emmerich stated the anti-equivalence thesis recently: “Translation has no truck with modest changes … all the words are different.”13 This may be more strikingly true when one translates between languages with different character systems, as Emmerich does between Greek and English, where even cognates have a different appearance in the target text. However, the consciousness that “translation changes everything”14—even translation between Western European languages—is still young: But, as to translating Adorno and how beyond difficult it is said to be, it’s fairly recent that the boundary between languages is held to be so drastically absolute. Wallace Stevens considered French and English one language. And if you read American philosophical literature and the sciences prior to the Second World War, you would be struck by the self-evidently confident translation of all the European languages, especially German. There were new translations all the time, of course; but languages weren’t presumed incommensurable.15 The incommensurability thesis gained traction in response to cultural relativism, which was for its part the academic opposition to the cultural hierarchies that emerged from the technocratic worldview. Unprovable as it is, the notion that different languages make incommensurable demands on their speakers can be fruitful for understanding translation history since it is indeed a story of inventions with specific purposes. The thesis has few adherents today in the wake of recent theoretical insights, such as those of Naoki Sakai,16 that the boundaries between languages are highly politicized constructions, which are quite fluid when strictly linguistic criteria are applied. Contemporary translation theories tend to be less prescriptive than the pre-modern ones because, even at their most pragmatic, they emphasize the context-specific constraints on translation practice.17 In the atmosphere

When thought resists translation  39 of this contemporary aversion to prescriptive claims, it is unusual to explicitly promote the philosophical value of a more thorough and self-conscious application of differential translation. As a translation technique, the differentiation of terms is in line with the insight that finding one-to-one terminological equivalence between languages is a quixotic goal—a view shared by both theorists of translation and practicing translators whose work aims to capture the poetic, rhetorical, or other metadiscursive dimensions of a text.18 Lawrence Venuti’s recent Contra Instrumentalism stridently accuses contemporary thinking about translation of instrumentalist reductionism: “The instrumentalist dichotomy of word-for-word vs. sense-for-sense translation locates formal and semantic invariants at the level of word, phrase, or sentence, assuming that form and meaning are immediately accessible to the translator without aggressive interpretation.”19 “Invariant” is Venuti’s polemical term for the instrumentalist semantic unit: an unchanging message that requires no interpretation. The “invariant” view assumes that the foreign origin of a text amounts to a burden to overcome. For Venuti, this view of translation does not grasp the stakes of translation work even in transactional genres, like the translation of business, medical, and legal documents, or textbooks.20 A fortiori, the expectation that one “invariant” term will convey the range of a philosophical concept plagues the translation of philosophy.

What is differential translation? Since polysemous German words can express unified concepts where the target language would normally differentiate between multiple concepts, a word’s plural meanings are often rendered best when translators find several target language translations and apply them differently by context throughout the text. To render this technique transparent, translators can either present a thorough explanation of the procedure in the introduction, place the source text terms in parentheses after each translation, or both. Including both paratextual and intertextual references to this strategy is ideal, and it is far from unheard of—as will be shown below. I call this strategy “differential translation” since it differentiates words’ dual (or various) concrete and abstract meanings. This strategy is already popular for translating terminology by difficult authors, and varying a term for stylistic reasons is popular when a repeated word does not seem to carry terminological weight, but the strategy has not yet reached its full potential as a means of informing philosophical discourse. The hope is that the technique of differential translation is useful for exposing hard-to-define concepts that are nevertheless indispensable to many discourses—what postwar German philosopher Hans Blumenberg called nonconceptual (unbegrifflich). Philosophers tend to dub words “untranslatable” on the basis of indeterminate meaning even when their contexts of use differentiate these meanings

40  When thought resists translation reasonably well.21 It is when the meanings of polysemous words shift by context within texts, however, that translation difficulties mount. Translation theorists rightly maintain that there are no “untranslatable” words; we only need more creativity in our approach.22 Differential translation displays the semantic workings of texts analogously to the way differential functions in calculus display the rate of change within physical processes, such as the changing rate at which water dissolves as its temperature increases. By analogy, the source text is to the physical process as one of its word’s changing meanings is to the process’s changing speed. Differential functions provide insights into the ways that changes occur under particular conditions, informing us about the heat-sensitivity of specific fluids, for instance. Likewise, differential translation offers a nuanced approach to translation of terms when there is semantic variation within texts. Differential translation thus registers variance in a concept’s meaning according to sentence context—over the span of a text, over the course of an author’s oeuvre, or even in the full span of a philosophical tradition. A non-terminological example from a literary work by a philosopher gives a sense of the prevalence of polysemy in ordinary German language, and the challenge it poses to translators regardless of genre. German’s productive über- (over) and unter- (under) prefixes contribute to Friedrich Nietzsche’s vivid style in Also Sprach Zarathustra. The German verb untergehen bears the etymological sense “to go under” (concrete), but it also commonly means “to meet your demise” (abstract), reflecting the crosscultural tendency to figure hardship with the “orientational metaphor” of low altitude.23 Translating different occurrences of a word (untergehen) in a text displays a word’s differentiated meanings (“descend” when Zarathustra leaves his mountain hermitage, “meet [your] demise” when untergehen signals his call to bravery).24 Translating a word differentially attempts to recreate a foreign culture’s experience of meaning. It expands the reader’s context much like glosses and annotations, the familiar academic strategies for achieving culturally mediating “thick translation.”25 Differential translation conveys linguistic difference by integrating signs of difference into the reading experience. One obvious response to my argument for differential translation might be: why not simply select the most concretely evocative term in English— like Walter Kaufman did with “go under” for untergehen—and then use it consistently? And indeed, a preference for the concrete fits well for an ostentatiously poetic work like Thus Spoke Zarathustra. When writing in German, philosophers use polysemous terms in highly abstract contexts as well, and it would be disingenuous to avoid translating them into English’s more abstract philosophical semantic field. Theodor Adorno comments on the misleading effects of German words in a programmatic essay in praise of the use of foreign loan words in German. In order to make the case that German philosophical language sometimes requires differential translation, we do not need to join Adorno in his severe disdain for the postwar German

When thought resists translation  41 “jargon of authenticity,” which he condemns as reinforcing mystical, quasireligious nationalistic norms of discourse; in his own words: “The bourgeois form of rationality has always required irrational supplements, in order to maintain itself as what it is, ongoing injustice through legality (fortwährende Ungerechtigkeit durchs Recht). Such irrationality through the rational is the working condition of authenticity.”26 Adorno’s own polemic against theologizing rhetoric utilizes a resource (etymological play with productive morphemes like -recht-) whose use he condemns when writers do it for the sake of mystifying the depths of German vocabulary. Even though Adorno does not avoid etymological play, and admires Hegel—an incorrigible punster, or, more kindly put, revitalizer of etymologies—it is not certain whether Adorno (as devoted reader of Hegel) would see the need for translations that highlight this aspect of Hegel’s prose. In fact, his preference for foreign loan words suggests that he would prefer translations that reduce the polysemy of German: Nowhere do foreign words show their merit better than when combatting the jargon of authenticity, those terms that smack so strongly of duty (Auftrag), encounter (Begegnung), statement (Aussage), and intent (Anliegen), whatever they may be called. They would all like to deceive us about whether they are terms at all. They vibrate humanly like Wurlitzer organs, for which a vibrato was created that imitates the human voice by technological means. Foreign words unmask those words by first translating the jargon of authenticity back into the foreign word that means what the word means.27 Adorno rejects the mystical “vibrations” of Germanic words and embraces foreign loan words in the hopes that these will better distinguish concepts’ meaning. Such intralingual translation would offer a simple solution for recreating the appeal of authors like Heidegger in translation. For interlingual German-to-English translations, differential translation can more thoroughly capture the oscillation between the variation in meaning of polysemous words in specific texts.28 This technique exposes the phenomenon Adorno describes: the deceptive conflation of “grasp” and “concept,” for instance, pointed to an insight latent in the German language that Kant had explicated—and which takes a differential English translation to bring out even more precisely. Before offering further examples that give an even clearer sense of this strategy’s range of uses for texts in the German tradition, I want to give an Italian-English example, which, among other things, shows that the value of differential translation is not limited to the German-English context. This example also shows how effectively differential translation can become conventionalized through well-received translations: most English-language translations of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince translate virtù differentially. Robert Adams’ translation was published in

42  When thought resists translation the—now widely reprinted—Norton Critical Edition, and it exemplifies the way that differential translation need not disappoint readers’ (or publishers’) desire for editions with consistent terms: when the foreign word accompanied the various target text words in a differential translation, the effect goes beyond just showing that a foreign word has no target language equivalent. In some cases, differential translation with the foreign word in brackets creates an unsettling effect of leading the reader onwards in pursuing an understanding of a foreign concept in its fullness. Adams’ translation of The Prince follows an august tradition of translating virtù differentially. He uses many different words for virtù and thus marks it as an indeterminate concept. After all, virtù describes a potential for royal success so vaguely defined that it is only ever visible in its results; it represents the all-encompassing character trait required for achieving and maintaining power, but it is Machiavelli’s tricky task to describe its elusive substance. Adams portrays the varieties of virtù.29 First he translates it with “strength” when contrasting it with “luck:” “I’d like to illustrate these two ways of becoming prince, by strength [virtù] or by luck” (19). Then later on the same page he translates it as “shrewdness,” a seemingly distinct trait, when describing how the military leader Francesco Sforza “used the appropriate means with great shrewdness [virtù] to become duke of Milan.” Next, in the very same paragraph, its adjectival form, virtuoso, is translated as “able” (which could indeed be a synonym for “lucky” if we include natural endowments within the concept of ability). And lastly he uses the term “effort,” which coincides with a particular reading of Adams’ other translations: they all refer to deliberately applied qualities, as opposed to passively reproduced ones. The achievement of power by virtù is more like conquest than persuasion, more like war than diplomacy, in that it has less to do with mastery of interpersonal skills than with self-mastery, which realizes its effects in society at large. The effect of this variety from one sentence to the next is that one begins to expect that the word virtù will turn over and expose itself to be the opposite of “virtue,” the English cognate that we unavoidably hear in it. Machiavelli advocates sabotaging your allies to seize authority—reprehensible measures from the standpoint of moral “virtue.” If virtù is not moral virtue for Machiavelli, then how morally deviant can virtù be? It is not Aristotelian virtue (ἀρετή, often translated as “excellence”) since its expression often requires additional “effort.” Yet it is debatable whether “effort” is equivalent to Machiavelli’s virtù—or even compatible with it. When a word does so much conceptual work, differential translation exposes that word’s movement between one concept and its others (or between monosemous focus and polysemous range), as is quite visible in Adams’ rendering of virtù, which ranges from the positive value of “strength” and “virtue” to the more neutral value of “effort.”

When thought resists translation  43

Kant (Begriff, concept or grasp?) Before discussing twentieth-century instances of philosophers whose work self-consciously plays with German etymologies, it is worth going back to the origins of the lexical bifurcation in German philosophical vocabulary, which emerged through the Enlightenment-era coinage of new German terms through loan translation from Latin. The return to Kant is especially relevant since a range of twentieth-century philosophical debates began as disputes over the legacy of Kantian epistemology.30 Attending to the problem of translating polysemous vocabulary provides a fresh lens on German philosophy in general. An instructive case is the history of the word Begriff, as it crossed intralingually from everyday German into modern philosophical usage. As a philosophical term, Begriff is exemplary of the linguistic complexity of German philosophical vocabulary. Often translated into English with “concept,” the German word’s highly transparent etymology invokes the physical process of gripping, holding, grasping.31 The Grimm brothers’ etymological dictionary (one of the great products of Germany’s Romantic linguistic nationalism) emphasizes that the verb begreifen not only has various figurative meanings, but that, among verbs for physical touch (anfassen, tasten, berühren), it most unambiguously denotes touching or grasping by hand.32 The very morphology of the term Begriff offers a vague suggestion about the nature of conceptuality: namely that the experience of understanding offers a satisfying feeling of control analogous to reaching for and grasping something. Immanuel Kant drew on the polysemy of Begriff when he used it to translate the Latin conceptus. This equivalence cannot precisely be called a loan translation since conceptus is a past participle of concipere, literally meaning “take together,” in the sense of putting disparate elements together to create something new, as in conceiving a child or “hatching” an idea. In much of Kant’s work, and especially in the First Critique, concepts (Begriffe) are explicitly linked to empirical knowledge, which makes heuristic use the German word’s reference to manual grasping. As the Dictionary of Untranslatables points out, though, one of Kant’s pre-critical “Blomberg Logic” lectures (early 1770s) restricts the use of the derived verb, begreifen, to a more subtle, non-empirical type of grasp: “to know through reason or a priori.”33 In criticizing Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777), Kant told his students: “The author wrongly translates the word comprehend [begreifen] by concipere, although concipere really means nothing more than to have insight [Einsehen].”34 Kant’s use of the verb begreifen to delineate a purely logical grasp, what he calls “the highest degree of our cognition,”35 shifts by the time he publishes his First Critique (1781). There the noun Verstandesbegriffe describes objects of empirical knowledge as opposed to the airy Ideen, which we only “know through reason or a priori.” The semantic boundaries remain blurry: Kant sometimes refers to the Ideen der reinen Vernunft as Vernunftsbegriffe, but his early relegation of begreifen

44  When thought resists translation to the realm of “pure reason” shows that he reserves the rhetorical power of the “grasp” for whatever form of knowledge strikes him as more secure at that particular moment in his intellectual development. The shift within Kant’s usage of begreifen/Begriff is emblematic: even the most consistent users of a term occasionally deviate from systematic use under the sway of etymology, and translators are well positioned to notice the resulting swerves. Begriff might be translated even better with something as visceral as “grasp” in at least some contexts of Kant’s use, like the Critiques, where it refers to knowledge of empirical, graspable objects. To justify more fully this controversial translation strategy requires further exploration of intellectual history. Beginning around 1700, Christian Wolff published influential works in theology, philosophy, and mathematics—and was one of the first authors to do so in German. At the end of these works, he included copious GermanLatin glossaries that gave mathematical meanings to ordinary words like Schwere, Kraft, Last, Ort, Bewegung, Größe, and Ähnlichkeit.36 According to German-French translator Jean-Pierre Lefebvre’s brief historical overview of the rise of German philosophical language, Wolff achieved his impact in the history of the German language in part because his philosophical coinages gave material to the first stirrings of German nationalism. The new philosophical language that Wolff employed provided material for a later generation of outspoken linguistic nationalists to regard German as unique among the European languages in its expressive potential.37 In his 1807–8 lectures, Addresses to a German Nation, Johann Gottlob Fichte (1762–1814) develops the notion of German’s superiority to French since it is more “pure,” and less etymologically hybrid. In hailing German as a “pure language” (Ursprache), Fichte joined the discourse of lexicographers like Joachim Heinrich Campe to inspire local opposition to the French occupation of Germany after Napoleon’s consequential victory at the Battle of Jena.38 Wolff advanced a new German philosophical terminology for objects of thought in the late seventeenth century, and he used Begriff and Vorstellung to differentiate two meanings of the polysemous Cartesian idée: the abstract content and the imaginative act of understanding, respectively.39 By establishing a semantic difference that Descartes himself ignored, Wolff’s terminology ingeniously provided what I would call a “differential translation” of Cartesian vocabulary. Even though Wolff gave Begriff a precise meaning, the word Begriff would remain difficult to translate because its connotation of “grasping” makes itself viscerally apparent in particular contexts of use. To think of Begriff as “grasp” would help the reader place its role in complex passages in Kant’s work, such as the following: “the deception of substituting the logical possibility of a concept (since it does not contradict itself) for the transcendental possibility of things (where an object corresponds to the concept) can deceive and satisfy only the inexperienced.”40

When thought resists translation  45 Though the question of whether to translate Begriff as grasp, concept, or conception acquired new relevance with Immanuel Kant’s complex and influential use of the term, even prior to Kant Begriff had taken on a key position in the language of Wolffian rationalism. Indeed, the foreign loan word Idee disappears after Wolff’s sporadic use and only reemerges later in eighteenth-century philosophy to indicate the specific quality of thought that distinguishes creative “genius”—also designated by a French loan word, Genie.41 In Kant’s work, the concrete connotation of Begriff as grasp becomes more significant. In the “Transcendental Dialectic” of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains that while Verstandsbegriffe (which he calls Begriffe for short) are notions whose very definitions correspond to objects of experience, Plato’s term Idee describes notions beyond experience: “our reason naturally raises itself to cognitions far too elevated to admit of the possibility of an object given by experience corresponding to them.”42 With an eye to historical usage, then, Kant selects the foreign loan word Idee, derived from the Greek ἰδέα, meaning “an object of sight,” in order to refer to the Platonic understanding of that which is not empirically graspable. As Kant differentiates the terms, Begriff draws on the semantics of tangibility, whereas Idee calls up its etymological reference to vision. And the “sighting” of ideas of pure reason (God, world, and soul) is, for Kant, a deeply indeterminate, symbolic type of vision prone to hallucination, what he terms “transcendental illusion.”43 As this book’s next chapter will discuss, Kant saw this lack of a sure grasp on ideas as prompting thinkers to resort to metaphoric language. While Plato’s impact on ancient Greek conceptuality forever linked the cognates of ἰδέα to the realm of pure abstraction, the simple fact that its etymology is not transparently represented in any English verbs for sight (see, watch, regard, etc.) severs any intuitive relation between “idea” and the Greek verb ἰδεῖν for “to see.” That etymology is obscure enough, today at least, as to be invisible to those untrained in classical philology. English words like “concept” and “idea” do not convey the sensual connotations of their etymologies because the mental detour across Latin and Greek etymologies is unwelcoming to most English speakers—if they have the training to embark on it at all. My wager is that when translating Begriff in Kant’s texts, the word “grasp” could occasionally be a better fit than “concept” in terms of rhetorical accuracy, and thus also of heuristic effect, as long as there was some way of indexing the unity of the term, such as placing the German word in brackets.44 The philosophical connotations of Begriff had been evolving over the century leading up to Kant’s work. Immanuel Kant’s development of the term Begriff stands out as an exemplary moment of German localization of philosophical discourse, and thus poses especially interesting problems for translation. Following James Sigismund Beck’s popular abridged translation of Kant’s Critiques, John Miller Dow Meiklejohn translates Begriff as “conception” throughout his 1855 translation of The Critique of Pure Reason.45 At the time, the terms were unsettled, and John Veitch

46  When thought resists translation even translates Begriff as “notion or conception” together when it refers to concrete objects, “like wood, stone, etc.”46 Most subsequent translators opt for “concept.”47 Awkward as it may sound in English, “conception” usefully reminds English speakers that Begriff is a de-verbal noun related to begreifen (to understand), etymologically “to bring under one’s clutch,” since the causative be- prefix modifies greifen (to clutch, grip, grasp), making it distinctly transitive. The word “grasp” captures the specific connotation of Begriff in German: something grasped in the hand and therefore thoroughly available, unlike abstractions, which are only ever loosely grafted onto the physical world. Furthermore, in English “grasp” can mean “intellectual hold”48—describing understanding as a mental state, rather than the understood object. Like many Germanic words, “grasp” sounds more visceral than the other terms more typical of English-language philosophy; it expresses power or mastery over subject matter, as in the haughty putdown by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “Those enormously prolix harangues are a proof of weakness in the higher intellectual grasp.”49

Phenomenology: an ideal study case Both for reasons of linguistic history and of genre, the language of German philosophy works closely with etymological figures. German-language philosophy exhibits a higher degree of polysemy than its English counterpart for three notable reasons that are discussed above. To summarize: 1) German lexica are constructed from Germanic roots, and thus their etymologies are transparent to native speakers—unlike English, where erudite vocabulary often comes from Greek and Latin lexifiers that sever intuitive, associative links between concrete (“hand,” Germanic) and abstract (“dexterous,” Latinate) concepts. As a result, many ordinary (and specialized) German words present native speakers with a greater number of easily registered connotations than English ones; 2) the total number of lexica available in English is greater than in German, with the result that German words often denote more different concepts than English ones; 3) German philosophy has a history of self-consciously exploiting the polysemy of its vocabulary. This tendency to utilize the various meanings of words is nowhere more evident than in the discourse of phenomenology, a philosophical subfield inaugurated primarily in Germany and Austria, which focuses on phenomena that are notoriously difficult to define, such as time, subjectivity, and other general features of experience. In light of this difficult task, twentieth-century German phenomenologists often offer various justifications for utilizing the suggestiveness of German etymologies to illustrate their abstract concepts. Martin Heidegger is known for his unusual persistence in exploiting etymological figures that expand German vocabulary with multiple meanings. Adorno’s criticisms of the “jargon of authenticity” hinge on his distrust of Heidegger’s capacious use of key terms including eigentlich, Ereignis, Dasein, and Grund. The following section will

When thought resists translation  47 show why etymology also matters when translating work by field-defining phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, whose rhetorical styles and theory of languages are ostensibly more regular than Heidegger’s. By then turning to Heidegger in the section after that, I show how the texts of these two phenomenologists link abstractions to images: by presenting existence as foundational and ground-like (gründlich) and time as fluctuating and fluid (strömend). Canonical German philosophers often develop concepts with a wider range of meanings than English-speaking philosophers do because the German language imbues its fewer words with more meanings through transparent etymology. This situation contributes to readers’ frustration with English translations of German philosophy. Translators can relieve some frustration by exposing ambiguous lexica. For Blumenberg, etymology suggests a logic of images related to the logic of the argument but separate from it.50 As Antoine Berman puts the problem of translating figurative associations within a text, those associations form a “dimension of argumentation,” which translators omit at the cost of the “destruction of underlying networks of signification.”51 Translators of such texts have the double task of presenting overt claims while also registering keywords’ suggestive polysemy. Both Husserl and Heidegger multiply the suggestive concrete meanings of Strom and Grund, respectively, by exploiting the productivity of German word-compounding and the language’s polysemous morphology. Husserl selects a compound word to designate the ever-changing content of consciousness: the “stream of consciousness” (Bewußtseinsstrom). Strom denotes a surging force, and only in this compound does it refer to the abstract idea of consciousness’s fluctuating content. Heidegger names the lack of rationale for the fact that something exists (rather than nothing) with a topographical image: the “abyss of Dasein” (Ab-grund des Daseins). Etymologically, Ab-grund means an absent ground, and the hyphen emphasizes Ab-grund as separate from grounds, thus without rationale, since it is sunken and removed from transparent thought. While Husserl embraces the term metaphor for Strom, Heidegger deemphasizes the concrete image of the “abyss”—a giant hole in the ground—since it could give his speculation about existence the sound of imprecise metaphor. Furthermore, the two different metaphors derive from different semantic fields. Abgrund suggests a mystical force and Strom a natural one. Christian theology preserves connotations of “abyss” dating back to the mythical Chaos of Hesiod, the abyssal origin of the world and the site of punishment in the afterlife. Heidegger’s language often alludes to archaic or religious images of suffering, sacrifice, and apocalyptic revelation.52 In both cases, English cognates of the German words translate the image (ground and stream), whereas Latinate words convey the abstraction (reason and flux). The different images around which these philosophers orient their work also suggest different theories of mind. In the case of Grund, the image

48  When thought resists translation suggests that knowledge is possessed by the mind. Just as people can claim ownership of land, people can claim the figurative “grounds” that give their arguments validity. Heidegger, whose first academic training was in medieval Scholasticism, treats knowledge as predicative: we can possess knowledge of objects because objects possess nameable properties. Not so with Strom: here knowledge happens to the mind. Streams move, and when Husserl uses the streaming of time consciousness as the image for the subject, object, and process of knowledge, he makes knowledge into a timebound event that occurs independently of the knower. Knowledge occurs to the mind only to evaporate unpredictably, just as streams bring water from elsewhere and then carry it away. While these two concepts are seldom thematized together, they are among the paradigmatic metaphors that structure continental philosophy. They also get lost in English translation when their denotative meaning is expressed without conveying their image content.

Grund, ground or reasons? (Heidegger) This section isolates a translation problem that different translators of Heidegger approach very differently: expressing the polysemy of Grund. Heidegger’s use of Grund is difficult to translate because he draws on suggestive connotations of the word while disavowing the use of metaphor and expressing contempt for the distorting effects of translation. Translators and scholars have discussed Heidegger’s difficult style and developed innovative strategies for translating it, some even resembling differential translation.53 Before discussing these strategies, it is important to discuss the complicating effect of Heidegger’s stance on metaphor and translation. Heidegger disavows metaphor because he claims that metaphors imply that abstract and concrete concepts are essentially different, and metaphor is therefore complicit with the mistake of metaphysical dualist thinking. Yet he assigns abstract meanings to concrete images, which reads very much like metaphor making. It is difficult to avoid reading Grund as metaphoric in the contexts discussed below, but differential translation leaves it to the reader to evaluate the coherence of Heidegger’s claim. In Heidegger’s lecture on the principle of sufficient reason, Der Satz vom Grund (1955–56)—the main focus of this chapter’s Heidegger section—he goes into extensive philological considerations of the meaning of Grund. Heidegger argues that the philosophical use of Grund derives historically from the Greek λόγος, whose translation into the Latin ratio Heidegger regarded as catastrophic in its consequences for the history of thought. Andrew Benjamin’s book on translation and philosophy quite correctly diagnoses a disdain for polysemy behind Heidegger’s disdain for translation, since Heidegger imagines that Greek words such as λόγος and φύσις first functioned not as unstable signifiers, but as expressions of the Greeks’ openness to the unknown.54 On Heidegger’s account, polysemy resulted from a subtle, intralingual, almost Babel-like event (around 600 BC) in which the

When thought resists translation  49 articulation of philosophical insight resulted in the splintering of signifier and signified, opening philosophical vocabulary up to pragmatic problems of misinterpretation. The descriptive power of those words was forgotten as they splintered into unstable plural meanings.55 The concealment of the origin and the proliferation of new meanings were both exacerbated by these words’ later translation into Latin. In his Parmenides (1942–3) and Heraclitus (1944) lectures, Heidegger carefully considers translations of each word within those authors’ fragments while only tentatively arriving at full reconstructions of their sentences. Although Heidegger would perhaps not accept this solution, he also builds many of his arguments around a lexical translation problem (while finding grammatical differences between languages less remarkable). Heidegger discusses the resistance to translation of the lexeme Grund in Der Satz vom Grund. Heidegger’s text, originally a lecture from 1955–6, offers a corrective interpretation of the so-called “principle of sufficient reason” (der Satz vom Grund, etymologically translated as “the setting of the ground”). This principle states that nothing is without a reason (or ground). Leibniz understands the principle to mean that causal explanations both exist and may be discovered for all physical and psychological phenomena (ratio fiendi) as well as for metaphysical truth (ratio essendi). Heidegger counters that rational explanations fall short of explaining existence.56 The phenomenal world exists, but Heidegger considers this fact inexplicable by causal explanation, which is limited to accounting for rational phenomena. Heidegger thinks of the Grund for existence as a quasi-physical ground, not as a cause. As Heidegger scholar Nicholas Rand puts it, “Heidegger treats words as repositories of unseen or submerged meanings.”57 And as one translator of the 1955–6 lecture explains: “Heidegger wants us to hear this principle ‘in a different key,’ and for this we must hear it as the principle of ground.”58 Inspired by a similar insight, the translator Richard Taft uniformly renders Grund as “ground” (never “reason”) in translating Heidegger’s 1929 lecture.59 But to treat “ground” as the equivalent for Grund would overlook a rhetorical dimension of Heidegger’s text. In doing so, we miss the moments of shifting meaning that Heidegger effects between the one understanding of Grund and the other. Such processes of shifting meaning across a text are precisely what a technique like differential translation exhibits. In efforts to grapple with the indeterminacy of Heidegger’s language of “grounding,” two translators have published translations of the 1955–6 lecture with different titles: The Principle of Ground and The Principle of Reason.60 Der Satz vom Grund confronts the polysemy of Grund at length: besides meaning causal “reasons”—causes behind effects (ratio fiendi) and reasoning behind claims (ratio cognoscendi)—Grund also refers to the ground, the sea floor, and (in the “Allemanic-Swabian” dialect that Heidegger sometimes uses) to “heavy, fertile soil.”61 Importantly for his interpretation of “the principle of reason” (discussed below), Heidegger

50  When thought resists translation traces the etymology of the German word Grund back to the Latin ratio, which had a different polysemy—both the faculty of reason and reason in the sense of causal force. Ratio is often used as a translation of the Greek λόγος, which Heidegger understands not as speech, but as “let[ting] something appear.”62 Grund is thus a historical derivative of the Greek λόγος, where the former’s meaning as “grounding” captures something kindred to the meaning of the latter as “letting appear.” With so much focus on etymology in this lecture, it is appropriate that here Reginald Lilly translated the word Grund with an especially effective form of differential translation. He translates the full lecture text under the title The Principle of Reason and varies the translation of Grund between “foundation,” “ground,” “grounds,” “reason,” and “reasons”; when the ambiguity is too essential to allow to the reader’s recollection of the polysemy being evoked, the disjunctive “ground/reason” is selected: “Being qua being remains ground-less (grundlos). Ground/reason (Grund) strays from being, namely, as a ground/reason that would first found being, it stays off and away.”63 Lilly’s disjunctive translation shows the dualism operating within Heidegger’s term, but it would likely disorient the reader if the number of meanings in disjunction exceeded two. In fact, Lilly need not put the word Grund in brackets since we know from his translator’s preface that this is the only word he translates differentially and that we are dealing with the same word twice when we read: “The principle of reason (Grund) as the ground/reason (Grund) of the principle – this confuses our ordinary cognition.”64 Differential translation can also register compound words containing Grund. When Heidegger explores the topographical evocations of Grund in Being and Time, he produces a paradoxical image where Being is at once Grund and Abgrund (abyss): “The meaning of Being can never be contrasted with entities, or with Being as the ‘ground’ (Grund) which gives entities support; for a ‘ground’ becomes accessible only as meaning, even if it itself is the abyss (Abgrund) of meaninglessness.”65 In Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation of Being and Time, they mark this untranslatable moment with a footnote: “Notice the etymological kinship between ‘Grund’ (‘ground’) and ‘Abgrund’ (‘abyss’).” Beginning in his earliest lectures, Heidegger emphasizes the etymology of Abgrund as an expression of Being’s relationship to Grund by hyphenating the word as Ab-grund. “Ab” is a prefix, whose spatial connotations include distant position and downward sinking movement whereas the “a” in the English “abyss” is privative (from Greek a + byssos, “without depth” through Middle English)—although the alpha privative here augments depth rather than negating it, as in “a bottomless pit.” This hyphenation is so difficult to express in English that filmmaker-to-be Terrence Malick paraphrases the single word Ab-grund with a six-word paraphrase: “freedom is the abyss of Dasein, its groundless or absent ground. (Freiheit [ist] der Ab-grund des Daseins).”66 Malick’s translation is published with facingpage source and target texts. This format lets bilingual readers compare more

When thought resists translation  51 choices easily, but even bilingual readers might have benefited if the translation had exploited the more explicative effects of differential translation when translating terms containing the tricky morpheme -grund-. As indicated above, philological annotations may not suffice to show readers how ambiguously some concepts function. While disjunctive translation works well in cases where only two alternatives exist, Lilly resorts to something like differential translation to show how the meaning of Grund changes in the text. Facing-page bilingual editions offer much to language students and philologically minded readers, but they do not isolate translation choices. Malick’s translation includes reflections on Grund and Abgrund in the appendix, which prioritizes discretion over the clarity of pointing out difficult decisions where they occur. Consistently translating Grund (and related composita such as Abgrund) with image-rich translations (like Richard Taft does) obscures the move between concrete and abstract meanings. Differential translation is more difficult to justify when translating Husserl since he openly embraces concrete metaphors, so that a translator does not have to wonder whether the abstract or concrete meaning is more central. Yet Husserl, too, offers occasions for differential translation when he slips unannounced meanings into his terminology.

Strom, stream or flux? (Husserl) Though metaphoric language does not plague translators of Edmund Husserl’s work as insistently as it does those of Heidegger, Husserl builds his terminology for describing time consciousness around a central hydrological metaphor: the fluctuating content of consciousness that enters and leaves in a stream-like flow. Husserl evokes the physical properties of streaming water to describe how consciousness spans time, just as Heidegger links the unknown reason for the world’s existence with the image of solid ground. Etymology opens up associations between these philosophers’ terms and the objects they evoke. Husserl not only likened so-called “internal time consciousness” to a moving current (Strom), he also pursued its semantic implications: the present as headwaters, self-reflection as a shore, and conscious experience as swimming.67 In Husserl’s case, the word Strom could also be translated as “flow” or “flux,” which would signify a process of frequent, unpredictable change, whereas “stream” conveys an image: electricity or liquid surging forth while its surroundings remain stationary.68 Differential translation is only occasionally necessary when translating Strom in Husserl’s writings since Strom usually functions for Husserl as a concrete image. This section will focus on Husserl’s use of Strom, his metacommentary on the term, and why translating Strom passes for unproblematic in contrast to translating Heidegger’s “jargon.” Husserl explains in the 1905 lecture series on internal time consciousness that describing consciousness as a “stream” (Strom) is a deliberate catachresis; that is, he applies a familiar word to signify an inadequately

52  When thought resists translation designated concept. Since Husserl’s “stream” metaphor is deliberately chosen as a metaphor, and not as a fixed term, accuracy obliges translators to accentuate the aquatic character of Strom. In contrast to Heidegger’s historical-etymological ruminations, Husserl was committed to describing acts of consciousness in the best-defined language possible, and thus every metaphor had to be marked as such. Husserl introduces catachresis only when no names are adequate in his 1905 lecture: It is absolute subjectivity and has the absolute properties of something to be denoted metaphorically as “flux,” (eines im Bilde als “Fluß” zu Bezeichnenden) as a point of actuality, as a primal source-point, from which springs the “now,” and so on. In the lived experience, we have the primal source-point and continuity of moments of reverberation (Nachhallmoment). For all this, names are lacking (Für all das fehlen uns die Namen).69 John Brough’s translation misses the point of Husserl’s choosing Fluß in this paragraph; Husserl wants us to see consciousness as a river (Fluß), not just a “flux.”70 We are to picture a flowing shape, not just a process of fluctuation. Time’s fluid nature has no basis in empirical experience, according to Husserl, but time consciousness resists more precise description. The connotations of flowing liquid are invited. For instance, the cohesion of water particles in a stream offers an implicit, provisional model for the cohesion of intentional moments we experience as sequential. In the quote above, Husserl provisionally designates inner time consciousness (inneres Zeitbewußtsein) as a river (Fluß) (elsewhere as stream, or Strom), but in his later work the image of flowing water becomes crucial for understanding Husserl’s concept of self-reflection. The Cartesian Meditations describe reflection as the “splitting of the Ego” where “the phenomenological Ego establishes himself as ‘disinterested onlooker,’ above the naively interested Ego.”71 In the first meditation, for instance, Husserl would extend the “stream” metaphor to include a metaphorical “island,” which would also allow “the possibility of imagining the streaming of the stream of consciousness as observable” (116). Self-reflection is figured as a view on the stream where the viewing self identifies with the stream. In the fifth Cartesian Meditation, where he introduces the concept of “intersubjectivity,” the streaming self occupies a fixed position as the I-pole across from other non-I-poles, just as rivers have fixed geographic indices relative to the land they border. The self remains fixed in its difference from things and others, just as a river remains different from the shore and from other rivers. Yet in the 1905 lecture, the metaphor of streaming time still primarily refers to a simple change of content. Thus Husserl describes the cluster of past moments that accompany every Now: “Constantly flowing (ständig fließend), the impressional consciousness passes over into an ever fresh

When thought resists translation  53 retentional consciousness.”72 If there is one argument for differential translation in Husserl’s use of Strom, a case for translating Husserl’s lexicon of streams and rivers without hydrological lexica, it would be in quotes like the one above where “constantly in flux” might better show that here Husserl also constructs non-hydrological images for time consciousness. The pages around this passage utilize a variety of images for time consciousness: fluid movement, but also the path of a comet, peripheral vision, and the resonance of a musical tone. In cases where the image matters, the translator who selects “flux” over “stream” masks the problem that Husserl’s use of Strom suggests an object as well as a process. A metaphor cannot be proven; it either persuades or it does not. The stream-of-consciousness image assists Husserl in conducting the descriptive method announced already in Logical Investigations: to narrate internal experience through “descriptive and genetic analyses” that reveal the structures preceding the experience of logical judgment.73 Heidegger avoided these difficulties by abandoning Husserl’s image of fluid consciousness and selecting an image that resembles the language of logical categorization: consciousness abides in a fixed position. Fluidity is incompatible with Heidegger’s notion that human individuals and collectives are fixed in their exterior relationship to Being. As Blumenberg describes it, Heidegger’s “consciousness” does not flow, it stands. It also does not stand by itself, nor perched over itself; it is outside itself, as it finds itself to be pre-given in being-always-already with what it is not: the world. The unavoidability of expressing the time concept in a spatial metaphorics—which is in no way avoided in [Husserl’s] metaphorics of the stream—receives a fundamentally static character.74 While Husserl figures the process of fluctuation with river imagery, Heidegger models “existential spatiality” without qualifying his use of positional imagery as metaphorical. Husserl cautiously marks his metaphors for experience as catachreses so that translators know to look for concrete English equivalents. By contrast, Heidegger’s synthesis of concrete and abstract language spurs translators towards strategies such as differential translation. In both cases, the translator does best to pay attention to the actual use of imagery, and not to be seduced by the author’s claims about what the lexica do or do not connote.

Against philosophical terminology Theodor Adorno was aware that terminology is not only inextricable from philosophical thinking, but also inherently misleading: “every philosophical term is the closed-up scar of an unsolved philosophical problem.”75 He then goes on to explain that Husserl was exceptionally unattached to specific

54  When thought resists translation terms—using them only as “titles for problems”—a testament to his questioning spirit and his refusal to take past thinkers’ answers to philosophical questions as even provisionally true.76 Adorno is clear, however, that Hegel introduces a trick into philosophy, which Heidegger exploits: the claim that individual-subjective truth is somehow more true (which should be a claim about the limits of knowledge), but somehow this claim is used to argue that subjective judgments like the accuracy of word definitions have a kind of universal finality. When Heidegger introduces the concept of Being as a “hypostasis formed out of philosophical necessity,” it is thus disingenuous of him to turn it into a topic of ontology: “I think you will have learned some distrust against making a principle out of philosophical necessity, which emphasizes something that is not derivable from its own principle, and thereby to elevate underivability itself into a principle of derivation.”77 If the situation is half as grave as Adorno claims, then translators must have a role in highlighting such sleights of hand before they bamboozle readers in other languages. This book’s proposal of differential translation as a general strategy for translating polysemous language may strike some readers as parochial. In arguing this way, I fall back on a methodological constraint articulated by Kant: “a full and clear definition ought, in philosophy, rather to form the conclusion than the commencement of our labours.”78 A sophisticated theory of translation should allow for a proliferation of strategies to represent different translators’ perspectives on different projects, rather than simply dubbing method A superior to method B.79 That being said, differential translation has an obvious downside. Exposing the shifting meanings of words across texts and reminding readers that they are reading a translation surely interrupts any immersive plaisir du texte and replaces it with a joltier jouissance.80 A text can rarely offer both at once, and while it could be argued that continental philosophy texts are difficult enough without drawing attention to such minutiae as untranslatable lexica, the purpose of differential translation is not to make translation visible for its own sake, but to expose the functioning of polysemy in the formation of philosophical concepts. When an author makes explicit claims, translators of philosophy are expected to reproduce those claims first and foremost. Only afterwards can they express the meaningful connotations that form what Berman calls “underlying networks of signification.”81 But German philosophers often utilize the persuasive force of these networks to the extent that if a translation severs these networks, we cannot justly evaluate an author’s work. Even if translators do wish to capture the rhetorical dimensions of texts, they may undervalue the role of a particular word’s suggestive etymology or polysemy when philosophers do not thematize a suggestive word as worthy of special attention. This is the case because it remains unconventional to show special attention to non-literary language that is not specifically marked as terminology.

When thought resists translation  55 The theorist of terminology Pamela Faber discusses scientists’ rhetorical habit of employing verbs morphologically related to their abstract terms.82 The German terms Grund and Strom evoke verbs with differing lexical aspects: the accomplishment “to found” (gründen) and the atelic (or, nongoal-oriented) action “to stream” (strömen). But does this covert dimension of meaning work more or less powerfully when our conscious attention to the word is diminished because the word is not a term? The translation question is whether to mask or to reveal this dimension of analytical language, that is, whether to translate technical terms consistently in order to mark them as such or to do so differentially in order to exhibit their polysemy— and furthermore whether only those words marked clearly as terms deserve this special attention. Twentieth-century phenomenology relies extensively on “de-lexicalization”—as Paul Ricœur describes the defamiliarization of familiar words by evoking suggestive etymology.83 Translations should ideally exhibit explicitly terminological metaphors, such as Husserl uses, and de-lexicalized dead metaphor terms, such as Heidegger uses. The translator may express these images by many routes: annotations, paraphrases, foreign words in brackets, and with the above techniques accompanied by differential translation of recurring polysemous words. It might make for a distracting reading experience if too many words were treated this way, but this at least presents the surest strategy for showing how much German philosophy depends on the German language. Bracketing foreign words is widespread among translators working from English into other languages, where English terms are presumed to be better known than the source language words, but combining the foreign word with translations that vary at each occurrence—differential translation—is hardly a standard translation practice. Encountering more differentially translated terms would challenge future scholars to evaluate the unity of the concept behind the word. Yet with no criterion for locating the words that deserve this special kind of translation, translators have to contend both with the force of target-language terminological norms and with their own intuitions in order to decide which words bespeak concepts yet to be fully articulated in the target language’s framework of meaning. As discussed in the introduction, the recent discourse around philosophical “untranslatables” prompts a question: by which criteria can we determine which words deserve translators’ special attention? For Barbara Cassin, an “untranslatable” arises in the translation process when a word “creates a problem, to the extent of sometimes generating a neologism, or sometimes imposing a new meaning on an old word.”84 Cassin defines untranslatables as significant moments in the travel of philosophical vocabulary across languages. The most interesting of these moments take the form of provisional words that accumulate and shed meanings along their translation histories, but any word that sets a translator into aporia meets her basic criterion for the designation “untranslatable.” As we see in the above cases, translation problems can arise through the imagistic connotations of

56  When thought resists translation abstract vocabulary because source language terms can have more transparent etymologies than those in the target language.85 Beyond assigning criteria for the discovery of untranslatables in source texts, translators must find a way to mark untranslatables conspicuously so that readers can reflect on problematic words.

Differential translation and ontological indeterminacy Differential translation’s precision lies in its expressiveness of the instability of terms both across a text and across the history of ideas.86 One meaning may eclipse another in one sentence, but the other meaning may reemerge later in another context—even within the same published text. This exemplifies the problematic that Jacques Derrida calls différance, his coinage for the manner in which terms contain their own distinctions: “Within the system of language … there are only differences,” which result from historical processes of which words bear traces, and from which abstract concepts can never be fully purified.87 And Derrida, whose first major works included extensive commentaries on Husserl’s concepts of time, gives a Husserlian account of the way in which a word’s meaning cannot be isolated in a moment, but is in constant flux: It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called “present” element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element […]88 By using a term like element, which recalls Ernst Mach’s analysis of sensations as the “elements” of empirical experience and of theoretical knowledge, Derrida inserts his analysis of language into a foundational phenomenological discourse. But his broader point is to argue that semantic “elements” are as difficult to isolate as moments in time. Derrida relates the phenomenon to Nachträglichkeit (recently made known in France through Lacan’s reading of Freud) and to “forces” (as conceived in Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche). In short, Derrida’s text presents the indeterminacy of words and concepts as what German philosophy has been talking about all along. Since a single French verb différer means “to differ” and “to defer,” but the noun form simply means “difference,” Derrida spells différance with an “a” (instead of the standard spelling with an “e”) to reflect a familiar and a novel meaning simultaneously within a single word (not entirely unlike the effect Machiavelli achieves through his novel use of the word virtù, which has the familiar sense of virtue and special senses, like cunning). Derrida’s claim is that every conceptual opposition (difference) is accompanied by some form of temporal lag (deferral) in the thinking or

When thought resists translation  57 reading experience, as well as in semantic history. Derrida is explicitly thinking with authors like Nietzsche, who, in Genealogy of Morals, argues that the proud aristocrat’s self-designation as “good” historically preceded the derisive “bad” used to describe everyone who was not them, and thus inferior. In the lag between this use of the concept and the later Christian moralized use of “good” as opposed to “evil,” the first concept does not disappear but gains in importance as a foil for the opposed concept. Even if the opposed term appears irrelevant, it is poised to emerge later in the text (or thought process, or history) or in a future related one. This account describes the process of waiting for meaning that happens any time we read or hear a sentence—especially a German sentence, where the innocent verb “to bring” can suddenly mean “to kill” if the separable prefix um appears at the end of the sentence. The word différance is an aptly irregular sign to designate conceptual disunity since the word’s very morphology exemplifies the problem: it requires some knowledge of Derrida’s work if we are to hear more than simple “difference” and to understand its reference to meanings deferred across texts. Critical theorists have followed Derrida’s suggestion and applied this notion broadly to conceptual binaries at the heart of philosophical and everyday language, to conceptual opposites such as true and false, good and bad, and right and wrong, as well as to social distinctions, such as male and female, white and non-white, student and teacher, adult and child. This movement between a concept’s self and other is what Derrida means when he writes that différance itself is not a concept. It is rather “the origin and production of differences,” a mental activity which generates differences between valued and unvalued, marked and unmarked terms, signifier and signified, what is and what is not—every conceivable difference.89 Much influential work in critical theory, such as that of Franz Fanon, Judith Butler, and Edward Said, focuses on the unsettled nature of race, gender, and national differences by considering how opposites structure one another in fluid ways. In this way, the notion of différance has acquired critical implications for ethical judgments, subject–object relations, and geographic and social boundaries. Derrida’s insight—that the problem of indeterminacy can only be observed over the span of temporal processes like linguistic history—is extremely relevant to the problem that makes differential translation necessary: reading and writing are temporal processes, the experience of a text is time bound, and therefore the terms change meaning during reading. Différance is a useful paradigm for understanding the rhetorical effect of differential translation if we follow Derrida’s Husserlian claim that the categories of logic cannot be separated from the temporal experience of fluctuating meaning. For Derrida, meaning only coalesces belatedly into self and other when we pass judgments on past experiences, that is, while reflecting on past instances of freely varying meaningful impressions.90 Derrida shares

58  When thought resists translation Husserl’s fascination with the cumulative processes of sense-making, which Husserl applies to narrate experiences as mundane as noticing objects in a room. And yet one obvious criticism of Derrida’s theory is that it does not apply equally to all utterances. Some concepts arrive relatively easily at their meanings, without a noteworthy delay, while others demand the patient curiosity of their readers. Despite this critique, Derrida is not demanding a more rigorous turn to word history since origins are only ever imagined retrospectively anyway, according to his post-Freudian application of the concept of Nachträglichkeit. There is one area, however, where the effects of différance can be observed: when differential translations of polysemous vocabulary make us wait until further reading for meanings to emerge. This also means resisting the eagerness of translation theorists to lump together various translation conundra. The translator Ronald Végső has recently avowed, for instance, that translation practice must remain a “parapraxis,” a word he borrows from James Strachey, who in turn coined it to translate Freud’s Fehlleistung, which means something like a revealing mistake.91 Translation must produce revealing mistakes because (as Végső puts it) “the human being invents essentially unrealizable projects,” of which translation is one particularly clear instance. That is to say, he thinks that translation attempts must necessarily fail in a way that accidentally exposes unconscious wishes. If he is right, translations of philosophy are most likely to betray an unphilosophical impatience in the form of the wish to reduce différance and to arrive early at certainty by glossing over conceptual ambiguities. Végső’s pessimism presumes that a translator has no choice but to offer inadequate equivalents. However, translators are in the best position to avoid such Freudian slips, since no one is better positioned than a translator to notice the banana on the floor and thus not to step on it. Translators might not even translate—at least for one productive moment of hesitation—when they encounter the kind of philosophical language worthy of the epithet “untranslatable.” Of course, reflective hesitation need not amount to nontranslation; anomalous translation strategies could serve best to call attention to the reasons why certain words resist translation. Conspicuous translation choices direct a reader to an area of thought for future study. Both differential translation and disjunctive translation exert this guiding influence in different ways: emphasizing a word’s changing meanings or its density of meanings, respectively. Translations that mark out new terms as sites for the reevaluation of a philosopher’s claims can reorient our understanding of texts. And such reorientation is the basic move of philosophy: to notice and then to question beliefs that had formerly passed for self-evident. If translation will always arouse suspicions of inaccuracy, my claim is simply that—rather than avert these suspicions by finding more acceptable terminological equivalents—we should make more revealing “mistakes.” We should redirect readers’ suspicions to the problems hidden in philosophical language, where no problem had been noticed before.

When thought resists translation  59

Notes 1 Twain, “The Awful German Language,” 610. 2 The early sophists of antiquity pioneered this technique. Through a mind-bending conflation of being and beings, Gorgias is able to prove that not only does “nothing without being have being” but that even “something with being does not have being.” Waterfield, The First Philosophers, 232. 3 See, for instance, Adorno, “Wörter aus der Fremde”; Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity. A glance through the Archiv der Begriffsgeschichte shows an embrace of Heidegger’s use of imagery, alongside those of other philosophers and scientists, but they simply dismiss Heidegger’s own justification of his use of images as non-metaphorical language descriptive of existential truths. See, for instance, Gipper, “5. Muttersprachliche Wirkungen Auf Die Wissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung Und Ihre Folgen.” 4 Derrida, “Onto-Theology of National-Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis),” 23. Daniel Hoffmann-Schwarz quite rightly sees Derrida’s thesis performed in Heidegger’s etymological interpretation of the word fremd (foreign) in its etymological sense as fram (“onwards to elsewhere”), so that foreignness is now fully appropriated into Germanness and “only the German who understands that fremd is fram is really properly German.” Hoffman-Schwartz, “‘Étranger,’ Ou Plutôt ‘Fremd,’” 5, 6. This bit of philosophical devilry illustrates so many dilemmas raised by thick translation. 5 David Gramling and Bethany Wiggin have put this problem eloquently: “Algorithmic machine translation technologies, though seeming to promote intercultural communication and planetary exchange, take the global creditdebit system as their model in reifying and securitizing language as a new species of industrial commodity: that of the translated word, concept, or trope.” Gramling and Wiggin, “The Fall, or the Rise, of Monolingualism?,” 458. 6 Twain, “The Awful German Language,” 601. 7 Based on the comparison of the Leipzig/BYU Corpus of Contemporary German and the British National Corpus. Cf. Jones and Tschirner, A Frequency Dictionary of German, 2–3. Other tabulation methods yield numbers as low as 185,000 in German and 500,000 in English. Cf. Polizzotti, Sympathy for the Traitor, 55. However, a comparison of the largest English and German corpora on the Leibniz Corpora Collection shows that with over 30 times more total English words (tokens) under analysis, there are only three million more unique words (types) in the English corpus than in the German one. Cf. “Leipzig Corpora Collection.” These proportions might suggest that German has more unique words than English, but English probably more unique lexemes than German given its high prevalence of Greek, Latin, and Germanic word roots. 8 Blake, A History of the English Language, 107–11. 9 Lexica that have come from Continental philosophy and acquired general use in humanistic scholarship (especially after being adopted by post-Heideggerian thinkers such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway) include: “problematic” (Kant), “lifeworld” (Husserl, Habermas), and the gerunds “Being” and “Becoming.” (Heidegger). The influence of Germanophile French philosophers gives German another route of entry into English language discourses. 10 Duncan Large comments on the fact that linguistically experimental writers like Heidegger inspire translations that are exceptions to the rule: “Generally speaking, thought, the kind of fireworks available from Krell or Emad and Maly [translators of Heidegger] are not available for other philosophers, and because of the nature of the subject matter, philosophical translations have tended to prioritise terminological precision and consistency above all else.” Large, “The Translation of Philosophical Texts,” 318.

60  When thought resists translation 11 Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task,” 156. 12 Many of the metaphors personify the texts (while depersonifying the human agents involved in writing, translation, and reading): “The translation calls to the original within, at that one point where the echo in its own language can produce a reverberation of the foreign language's work.” Benjamin, 159. The effect is to elevate translation into a force of nature—operating through an energy all its own with minimal human intervention. 13 Emmerich, Literary Translation and the Making of Originals, 3. 14 Venuti, Translation Changes Everything. 15 Hullot-Kentor, Zwarg, and Durão, “‘Back to Adorno’ Thirty Years Later.” 16 Sakai, “Translation and the Figure of Border.” 17 See de Pedro, “The Translatability of Texts.” See also the introduction to the new edition on Schleiermacher translation, which claims that one of the biggest corrections to Schleiermacher by recent scholarship is to show that no translators (including Schleiermacher himself) successfully adhere to his demand for no middle path between translations that leave the reader or the source text “in peace.” 18 A 2019 review of recent translation theory books by Rosemary Arrojo, Karen Emmerich, and Lawrence Venuti points out that all three authors attack the “instrumentalist” assumption that a literary translation can ever be faithful or accurate. Reeck, “Translation’s Burden.” Philosophical translation follows different norms, of course. For one of the most in-depth discussions of this problem, see Heller, Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation. 19 Venuti, Contra Instrumentalism, 11. 20 While Venuti’s “Translation Polemic” does not discuss medical or legal translation industries, he argues that his thesis is about language itself and is not restricted to literary examples: “all translation, whether the genre of the source text is humanistic, pragmatic, or technical, is an interpretive act that necessarily entails ethical responsibilities and political commitments.” Venuti, Contra Instrumentalism, 6. 21 Le pain for Benjamin, to season for Derrida, cheese for Jakobson, and gavagai for Quine only require one ambiguous occurrence each to exemplify translation problems. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens”; Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?”; Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”; Quine, Word and Object. 22 Beals, “Alternatives to Impossibility” and Koller, “Untranslatable Words – Translatable Texts? Or, Translatable Words – Untranslatable Texts?” argue through readings of Paul Celan and J.R. Ladmiral respectively that “untranslatables” are no longer impediments to translation when these authors’ works are studied at the level of text rather than lexeme. 23 Lakoff and Johnson, “The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System,” 196. 24 Walter Kaufmann translates untergehen consistently as “to go under.” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 10, 15. His choice produces a reader-friendly text, but differential translation would even more clearly show Nietzsche’s imaginative wordplay. 25 Appiah, “Thick Translation,” 817. 26 Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, 444–45. 27 Adorno, “Wörter aus der Fremde,” 221–22. 28 The idea of a concept extending so that it overlaps with other concepts is dubbed “extensional” in Kamlah and Lorenzen, Logische Propädeutik, 93. 29 The polysemy of the cognates of “virtue” have reflected the history of European ethical ambivalences. When Latin authors used virtus to translate Aristotle’s

When thought resists translation  61 ἀρετή, “excellence” in one’s role, they immediately imported the etymological link to “manliness” found in the Greek ἀνδρεία, meaning “bravery.” Church use of virtus came to represent both Aristotelean and Christian senses. Machiavelli may be said to have discovered the tension between these concepts: a prince’s ruthlessness is his excellence, and his piety is explicitly not. Marquis de Sade would take Machiavelli’s anti-Christian stance on virtue even further. If Machiavelli considered opportunistic virtù a necessary counterpart to fortuna, Sade’s Justine portrays a lack of opportunism as a direct cause of misfortune. Again and again, her refusals to accept complicity in various crimes enrage her abusers: “En n’acceptant pas le crime qu’on me proposait, je risquais beaucoup pour mon compte.” Sade, Justine ou Les malheurs de la vertu, 106. 30 Two major works on the fissure between continental and analytic philosophy focus on debates within early twentieth-century neo-Kantianism and the positions taken by Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger on Kantian questions of knowledge in their famous debate in Davos, Switzerland in 1929. See Friedman, A Parting of the Ways; Gordon, Continental Divide. 31 The metaphorical nature of “grasp” in English-language philosophy by Colin Murray Turbayne: “If a philosopher thinks that the mind acts to grasp what it only comprehends, that is, if he thinks that the act of comprehending a universal or abstract idea is a special sort of action and that grasping with the hands is another sort, then he is engaged in sort-trespassing, while to the etymologist just mentioned, he takes a metaphor literally.” Turbayne, The Myth Of Metaphor, 25. 32 Grimm and Grimm, Deutsches wörterbuch, 1307. 33 Cassin, Rendall, and Apter, Dictionary of Untranslatables a Philosophical Lexicon, 90. 34 Kant, Lectures on Logic, 107. 35 Kant, 106. 36 Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700–1775, 29. 37 Lefebvre, “Philosophie et philologie: les traductions des philosophes allemand,” 170. 38 Fichte’s use of the term Ursprache in the lectures is especially interesting when we consider that he had used the term in an essay in his 1794 essay “On the Linguistic Capacity and the Origin of Language,” to refer to the primitive original human language, whose only value is to remind us that all humans are united in their desire to form bonds through communication. The idea that an Ursprache bears distinct advantages for conducting philosophy and therefore that German’s relative purity gives it a spiritual advantage over other languages can be read either as a strategic argument in a moment of need, or, as Andrew Fiala argues, a sign that he was developing a more nuanced account of empirical languages. Fiala, “Fichte and the Ursprache,” 189–90. 39 Ricken, “Wie Wurde »Idee« ein Deutsches Wort? Zur Begriffsgeschichte Der Deutschen Aufklärung Im Europäischen Kontext.” 40 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A244/B302. 41 Müller and Schmieder, Begriffsgeschichte und historische Semantik, 34. 42 Kant, Die Drei Kritiken, Erste Kritik, 221. 43 Of course, “transcendental illusion” is not the last word on ideas: “deontological ideas” are equally non-empirical, but provide the foundation of ethical deliberation and aesthetic experience. 44 Kant himself has it both ways by putting the Latin translation conceptus in brackets at several points in the work. See, for instance, Kant, Die Drei Kritiken, Erste Kritik: Des ersten Buchs der transzendentalen Dialektik: Erster Abschnitt. 45 Meiklejohn criticizes Beck for passing some of his own commentary off as translation, but is otherwise satisfied with Beck’s terminological choices. As a theologian, contemporary with Meiklejohn, notes: “nothing is said against

62  When thought resists translation ‘Beck’s Principles’ itself. There is (implied) praise; because no fault was found— where evidently fault-finding, with everybody else, in the shape of translator (saving Mr Semple), of commentator or expounder, or even of ordinary critic, was the order of the day.” Gillespie, The Necessary Existence of God, 451. 46 Quoted in Gillespie, 448. 47 The rejection of conception after Meiklejohn is easily traced in contrastive studies. See, for instance, Scarpitti, “Adventures in Translation,” 30–31. 48 “Grasp, n.” 49 Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 50 Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist enterprise draws heavily from the latent metaphors in Husserl’s work and in Heidegger’s, such as Husserl’s figuration of primary phenomena as inner voice, and existence as being there in Heidegger. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs; Of Spirit. Derrida claims that these images reveal moments where these thinkers covertly insert empirical evidence into claims about structures (consciousness or Dasein) that are supposed to function a priori. 51 Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign,” 292–93. 52 See Stellardi, Heidegger and Derrida on Philosophy and Metaphor, 159. 53 The series Contributions to Phenomenology recently published a volume on philosophical questions surrounding the translation of Heidegger. Schalow, Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking Essays in Honor of Parvis Emad. A monograph argues that Heidegger must be translated with attention to the word, not the sentence, following the “paratactic method” that Heidegger uses to translate Parmenides. Groth, Translating Heidegger. Laurence Venuti claims that translating Heidegger benefits philosophers’ “translatorly selfconsciousness as well as … their own philosophical research.” The Scandals of Translation, 119. 54 Translation and the Nature of Philosophy, 25–31. 55 Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 1, 149. 56 In his dissertation, Schopenhauer had put forth the argument that the principle of sufficient reason cannot be proven with one argument for reasons and causes (as Leibniz had attempted), but must be argued separately depending on whether justifications or mechanical stimuli are under discussion. Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. (Thank you to Martin Jay for this reminder and for the elegant explanation of the distinction.) 57 “The Political Truth of Heidegger’s ‘Logos,’” 437. 58 “The Principle of Ground,” 207. 59 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. 60 Heidegger, “The Principle of Ground”; Heidegger, The Principle of Reason. 61 The Principle of Reason, 96. In such idealization of the land, it is hard not to hear the Nazis’ elevation of Blut und Boden as justifications for imperial war. 62 The Principle of Reason, 107. 63 The Principle of Reason, 111; German added. 64 The Principle of Reason, 14; German added. 65 Being and Time, 193–94. 66 The Essence of Reasons., 129. 67 In his lecture series on internal time consciousness, the headwaters, or “original source” (Urquelle) of internal time consciousness, is the “primal impression” (Urimpression) that “constantly rises up” in the present moment (quoted in Tymieniecka 2006, 367). In a posthumously published note, Husserl describes the lifeworld as “the living stream in which I swim” (quoted in Blumenberg 2010a, 38). In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl develops the metaphor of the shore or island as a figure for the ego that observes its own stream of consciousness.

When thought resists translation  63 68 Dorian Cairns, a student of Husserl’s, lists “flow” after “stream” as an acceptable translation for Strom in Husserl’s work (1973, 108). Colin Smith translates Fluß as “temporal flux” in a reference to Husserl from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, but leaves the verb for “streaming in” untranslated in the English as it appears in source text: “(they sich einströmen, as Husserl says) …” (Merleau-Ponty 2002, xv). 69 Husserl, Shorter Works, 286. Derrida notes this concession to indeterminacy in Husserl but finds it unpersuasive (Derrida 1973, 84 f.9). According to Derrida, the present moment could be understood through its difference from other moments—rather than through its enmeshment in a subject–object relation. This expands on Heidegger’s case that Husserl’s phenomenology has merely replaced the Cartesian God with the transcendental ego and thus covertly endorses metaphysical assumptions. 70 James Churchill translates this word the same way. Husserl, Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, 100. 71 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 35. 72 Husserl, Shorter Works, 280. 73 Husserl, Logical Investigations, 49. 74 Blumenberg, Quellen, Ströme, Eisberge, 126, my translation. 75 “Oder lassen Sie mich es so formulieren, daß jeder philosophischer Terminus die verhärtete Narbe eines ungelösten philosophischen Problems sei.” Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, 10–11. 76 “Titel für Probleme” Adorno, 11. 77 Adorno, 25. 78 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 445. 79 See Robinson, The Translator’s Turn. 80 I take Roland Barthes’ distinction between plaisir and jouissance to mark the difference between entrancing and startling reading experiences. Barthes, Le Plaisir du Texte. Translators of philosophy may feel ambivalent about which experience to promote. For instance, David McLintock, the recent translator of Freud’s “The Uncanny,” uses in-text annotations even more interruptive than differential translation would be for Freud’s untranslatable unheimlich (eerie, uncanny, unhomely). And he apologizes for the words “inserted tiresomely often in square brackets.” Freud, The Uncanny, lxiii. 81 Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign,” 292–93. 82 Faber, “Frames as Framework for Terminology,” 18. 83 The Rule of Metaphor, 292. David Charlston advocates translating Hegel’s doppelsinnig consistently with “ambiguous” so that the reader notices that Hegel develops this concept as a term. Charlston, “Translating Hegel’s Ambiguity: A Culture of Humor and Witz,” 35. Differential translation would reveal more: the etymology of doppelsinnig suggests “double-sensed,” whereas its ordinary denotation is “ambiguous,” which suggests indeterminate meaning rather than multiple senses. 84 Dictionary of Untranslatables a Philosophical Lexicon, xvii. 85 A similar insight is the basis of a recent encyclopedia of metaphors in German, also the product of Continental philosophers: Konersmann, Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern. 86 On the impossibility of speaking of one concept across history, see the entries in Müller, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte / Begriffsgeschichte im Umbruch. 87 Derrida, “Differance,” 286. 88 Derrida. 89 Derrida, 283. 90 Germs of this notion can be found in Graham, Difference in Translation. 91 Végső, “The Parapraxis of Translation.”

64  When thought resists translation

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When thought resists translation  65 ———. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, 1st ed. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1991. ———. “Onto-Theology of National-Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis).” Oxford Literary Review 14, no. 1/2 (1992): 3–23. ———. “Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs.” In Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. http://hdl​.handle​.net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015046363563. ———. “What is a “Relevant” Translation?” Translated by Lawrence Venuti. Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (January 1, 2001): 174–200. Emmerich, Karen. Literary Translation and the Making of Originals. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017. Faber, Pamela. “Frames as Framework for Terminology.” In Handbook of Terminology, edited by Hendrik J. Kockaert and Frieda Steurs, 14–33. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2015. Fiala, Andrew. “Fichte and the Ursprache.” In After Jena: New Essays on Fichte’s Later Philosophy, edited by Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, 183–200. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/j​ .ctv4cbh2m. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Edited by Hugh Haughton and Translated by David McLintock. London: Penguin, 2003. http://www​.penguin​.co​.uk​/books​/the​ -uncanny​/9780141930503/. Friedman, Michael. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. Chicago: Open Court, 2000. Gillespie, William Honyman. The Necessary Existence of God, 2nd ed. London: Houlston & Wright, 1863. Gipper, Helmut. “5. Muttersprachliche Wirkungen Auf Die Wissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung Und Ihre Folgen.” Archiv Für Begriffsgeschichte, no. 9 (1964): 243–59. Gordon, Peter E. Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, reprint ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Graham, Joseph F. Difference in Translation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. http://hdl​.handle​.net​/2027/[u]: uc1.32106018499779. Gramling, David, and Bethany Wiggin. “The Fall, or the Rise, of Monolingualism?” German Studies Review 41, no. 3 (2018): 457–63. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/gsr​ .2018​.0061. “Grasp, n.” In OED Online. Oxford University Press. Accessed August 19, 2019. http://www​.oed​.com​/view​/Entry​/80877. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches wörterbuch. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854. Groth, Miles. Translating Heidegger. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Reprint. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008. ———. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Translated by Richard Taft. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997. ———. Nietzsche, Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art, Vol. 2: The Eternal Recurrance of the Same. Translated by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperOne, 1991. ———. The Essence of Reasons. Translated by Terrence Malick. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy. Evanston,

66  When thought resists translation IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969. http://hdl​.handle​.net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015004078393. ———. “The Principle of Ground.” Translated by Keith Hoeller. Man and World 7, no. 3 (August 1, 1974): 207–22. https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/BF01248755. ———. The Principle of Reason. Translated by Reginald Lilly. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996. Heller, Lavinia. Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation. Verlag: Frank & Timme GmbH, 2013. Hoffman-Schwartz, Daniel. ““Étranger,” Ou Plutôt “Fremd”: Philosophical-Poetic Nationalism in Derrida’s Geschlecht III and Beyond in Advance.” Philosophy Today 64, no. 2 (2020). https://doi​.org​/10​.5840​/philtoday2020427334. Hullot-Kentor, Robert, Robert Zwarg, and Fabio Akcelrud Durão. ““Back to Adorno” Thirty Years Later: A Discussion.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 69–70 (September 1, 2018): 310–17. https://doi​.org​/10​.1086​/701528. Husserl, Edmund. Husserl, Shorter Works. Edited by Peter McCormick and Frederick. Elliston, Notre Dame, IN/Brighton, Sussex: University of Notre Dame Press ; Harvester Press, 1981. http://hdl​.handle​.net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015004676303. ———. Logical Investigations. Translated by Dermot Moran. New York: Psychology Press, 2001. ———. Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Edited by Martin Heidegger. Translated by James S. Churchill, 1st ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964. Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In Selected Writings: Word and Language, 260–64. Walter de Gruyter, 1971. Jones, Randall, and Erwin Tschirner. A Frequency Dictionary of German: Core Vocabulary for Learners. London: Routledge, 2015. Kamlah, Wilhelm, and Paul Lorenzen, eds. Logische Propädeutik: Vorschule des vernünftigen Redens, 3rd ed.Stuttgart Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Die Drei Kritiken. Köln: Parkland Verlag, 1999. ———. Lectures on Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Koller, Werner. “Untranslatable Words - Translatable Texts? Or, Translatable Words - Untranslatable Texts?” FORUM - International Journal of Interpretation and Translation 2, no. 2 (2004): 59–72. Konersmann, Ralf. Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. “The Metaphorical Structure of the Human Conceptual System.” Cognitive Science 4 (1980): 195–208. Large, Duncan. “The Translation of Philosophical Texts.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Philosophy, edited by Piers Rawling and Philip Wilson, 307–19. London: Routledge, 2018. Lefebvre, Jean-Pierre. “Philosophie et philologie: Les traductions des philosophes allemand.” In Encyclopedia Universalis 2, 170–72. Paris, 1990. https://nd​.illiad​ .oclc​.org​/illiad​/IND​/illiad​.dll​?Action​=10​&Form​=75​&Value​=1129318. Leipzig Corpora Collection. “Leipzig Corpora Collection - German.” Accessed October 17, 2019. https://corpora​.uni​-leipzig​.de​/en​?corpusId​=deu​_newscrawl​ -public​_2018.

When thought resists translation  67 Müller, Ernst. Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte/Begriffsgeschichte im Umbruch, Vol. 1. Hamburg: Meiner, 2005. Müller, Ernst, and Falko Schmieder. Begriffsgeschichte und historische Semantik: Ein kritisches Kompendium. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2016. Nancy, Jean-Luc. Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith, 1st ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Pedro, Raquel de. “The Translatability of Texts: A Historical Overview.” Meta: Journal Des TraducteursMeta/Translators’ Journal 44, no. 4 (1999): 546–59. https://doi​.org​/10​.7202​/003808ar. Quine, Willard van Orman. “Word and Object.” In Studies in Communication. Cambridge, MA: Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960. Rand, Nicholas. “The Political Truth of Heidegger’s “Logos”: Hiding in Translation.” PMLA 105, no. 3 (May 1, 1990): 436–47. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​ /462893. Reeck, Matt. “Translation’s Burden.” Public Books, August 8, 2019. https://www​ .publicbooks​.org​/translations​-burden/. Ricken, Ulrich. “Wie Wurde Idee ein Deutsches Wort? Zur Begriffsgeschichte Der Deutschen Aufklärung Im Europäischen Kontext.” Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Planervorträge 1990, December 14, 1990. https:// www​.saw​-leipzig​.de​/de​/plenum​/plenarvortraege​_1990​_1999​/plenarvortraege​ -1990. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Robert Czerny. La Métaphore Vive. English. Toronto, Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977. http://hdl​.handle​ .net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015035318974. Robinson, Douglas. The Translator’s Turn. Parallax xviii, 318 p. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. http://hdl​.handle​.net​/2027/. Sade, D.A.F. Justine ou Les malheurs de la vertu. Le Livre de Poche 3714. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1993. Sakai, Naoki. “Translation and the Figure of Border: Toward the Apprehension of Translation as a Social Action.” Profession 2010 (November 1, 2010): 25–34. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/41419858. Scarpitti, Michael A. “Adventures in Translation.” Semiotica 119, nos. 1–2 (1998): 23–76. Schalow, F., ed. “Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking Essays in Honor of Parvis Emad.” In Contributions To Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media B.V., 2011. http://dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1007​/978​-94​ -007​-1649​-0. Schopenhauer, Arthur. On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Other Writings, reprint ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Stellardi, Giuseppe. “Heidegger and Derrida on Philosophy and Metaphor: Imperfect Thought.” In Philosophy and Literary Theory. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000. http://hdl​.handle​.net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015046407659. Turbayne, Colin Murray. The Myth of Metaphor. New Haven; London: Literary Licensing, LLC, 2012.

68  When thought resists translation Twain, Mark. “The Awful German Language.” In A Tramp Abroad. Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1880. https://www​.cs​.utah​.edu/​~gback​/ awfgrmlg​.html. Végső, Roland. “The Parapraxis of Translation.” CR: The New Centennial Review 12, no. 2 (2012): 47–68. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/ncr​.2012​.0063. Venuti, Lawrence. Contra Instrumentalism: A Translation Polemic. Lincoln: NEBRASKA, 2019. ———. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London; New York: Routledge, 1998. ———. Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 2013. Waterfield, Robin, ed. The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

2

The supertranslatability of metaphor in Hans Blumenberg’s translation histories

If polysemous vocabulary poses a practical problem familiar to translators of German philosophy, translation in general poses a phenomenological problem that is widely discussed within translation theory: readers of translated works rarely reflect on those works’ status as translations. It has become a core methodological concern within Translation Studies to account for the disparity between readers’ indifference to translatedness and translation theorists’ emphasis on it.1 This chapter applies insights from metaphor studies to reflection on the inconspicuousness of translation. Translation’s tendency to go unnoticed recalls a key observation that German philosopher Hans Blumenberg makes about metaphor, whose Greek etymology means the same as the Latinate derivation of translation: something carried (-latio/-φορά) across (trans-/μετα-) some figurative space. Blumenberg painstakingly demonstrates how metaphor structures philosophical texts, in that he discovers patterns that authors themselves pass over in silence, as if unconscious of metaphor’s role in their work. If authors themselves can lack insight into their metaphor use, then metaphor use can be inconspicuous both on the level of production and of reception, whereas translation work must take place consciously and deliberately. Recipients of translations are in a position to overlook a work’s foreign linguistic pedigree entirely.2 This chapter examines these phenomena through a common hermeneutic lens to show that translation history displays covert dynamics akin to those Blumenberg distills from metaphor history. Blumenberg was acutely aware that translation literally sets the terms for the history of philosophy, as revealed in his very first published work in 1946. The piece reads Edmund Husserl as the great linguistic innovator in a history of philosophy hitherto indebted to the Latin translation of ancient Greek vocabulary. Husserl had coined new vocabulary (e.g., Protention, the element of the experience of the present moment made up of anticipation of the next moment, as Retention does with past moments), and repurposed many everyday German, Greek, and Latin words (e.g., Strom, Epoche, and Intention), in efforts to articulate universal features of the experience of being conscious. Nevertheless, Blumenberg points out in the essay that DOI: 10.4324/9781003348559-3

70  The supertranslatability of metaphor language has inherent limits in its capacity to describe the external world and inner experience.3 Despite the applicability of Blumenberg’s insights into metaphor’s role in the history of philosophy for understanding translation history, to downplay the hermeneutical questions posed by translation history may have constituted a matter of intellectual integrity for Blumenberg. Martin Heidegger’s fixation on the superior expressive potential of the German language had tainted the case for linguistic particularity within German philosophy of Blumenberg’s time. Heidegger’s status as the foremost National Socialist philosopher made it difficult but necessary to curtail his work’s influence on postwar West German philosophy. Blumenberg’s typically short and dismissive comments on Heidegger reveal his consistent wish not to be perceived as blindly absorbing any of Heidegger’s views.4 In this vein, Blumenberg normally avoids linguistic or philological comments on the transmission of metaphors from ancient to modern languages in rejection of Heidegger’s fetishization of the link between German and ancient Greek. Yet Blumenberg’s metaphorology shows how metaphor and translation both routinely suffer inconspicuousness: when translations pass as “authentic” and when metaphors pass as concepts.5

Metaphor and translation As the first chapter showed, latent metaphors haunt the etymologies of polysemous German words like der Begriff—where the vivid connotations of grasping compete with its cerebral denotation. That chapter worked with examples of metaphorically laden words whose resistance to translation recalled Blumenberg’s claim that some metaphors function as “‘translations’ (Übertragungen) that cannot be rendered back into authenticity and logicality.”6 The scare quotes suggest that Blumenberg dubs these metaphors “translations” (Übertragungen, suggesting free, poetic translation) somewhat ironically: philosophy’s most foundational metaphors are figures for nothing, translations with no originals. Words like Begriff, Grund, and Strom stymy attempts at smooth translation because their metaphoric targets resist attempts at neat decipherment. By the late 1950s, Hans Blumenberg had started developing a method of metaphor analysis, a “metaphorology,” in which he demonstrates how specific metaphors change their function over the course of history. Blumenberg rarely focuses on the idiomatic metaphors that plague translators; instead, his studies usually analyze extended metaphors within short narrative scenes of observation: Aesop’s absentminded astronomer falls down a well while watching the stars (and is overseen doing so), Plato’s cave dwellers watch the deceptive shadows (whereas the philosopher beholds the sun), Paul and Augustine of Hippo see the light of divine truth, and, for Lucretius, a shipwreck symbolizes a tranquil mind only when the shipwreck is observed from the safety of the shore.7 These observation narratives

The supertranslatability of metaphor  71 explicitly draw attention to the metaphorical value of the experience of observing visually compelling objects (stars, shadows, the sun, “the light,” and shipwreck). Blumenberg’s studies suggest that ancient authors crafted these short visualizations of the human condition so effectively that later authors could draw on their imagistic reservoirs. Investigating the historical reception of these ancient metaphors occupied much of Blumenberg’s prolific career. Blumenberg argues that the “absolutization” of metaphors is motivated by the “realism” of the metaphysical claim that invisible entities exist independently of sensible beings, and that an invisible God acts within the historical, material, “real” world. For Blumenberg, late scholastic theologians and early modern scientific thinkers successfully de-absolutized metaphysical metaphors. Blumenberg’s 1957 essay “Light as a Metaphor for Truth” ends by claiming that the last centuries’ ever more thorough electrical illumination of human-built spaces has humanized light itself and reduced its potential as a metaphor for a higher power.8 Similar to Heidegger, Blumenberg regarded metaphysical dualism as dependent on the power of metaphoric language, but he would not follow Heidegger in claiming the converse: that metaphor use necessarily entails metaphysical dualism. Blumenberg thus cannot endorse Heidegger’s account that metaphor is inherently complicit in metaphysics. Heidegger’s later ontology hinges on the argument that European society has lost the capacity for an encounter with Being—a long-lost experience that Heidegger finds documented in its fullness only in the pre-Socratic philosophers’ fragments. Blumenberg also argued that Plato inaugurated the use of metaphors to represent metaphysical reality (e.g., the metaphor light = truth), but Blumenberg’s stance differs from Heidegger’s in two major points. First, he argues that the Neoplatonists, followed by the Church Fathers, were the first to take Platonic metaphors literally. In other words, there was an historical hiatus between the introduction of metaphysical dualism into European philosophy and the inclusion of metaphors in metaphysical claims. Second, rejecting metaphysics does not lead Blumenberg to adopt any ontological position (he advocates neither the early Heidegger’s monistic understanding of Being through individual beings nor the late Heidegger’s openness to experience Being as a transient event). Instead, Blumenberg identified his project with the “tradition of skepticism (which is mostly below the surface and only occasionally flares up).”9 Blumenberg traces his radically constructivist skepticism back to the Sophistic Enlightenment, from which he learns that not only metaphysics but also ontology is impossible, or at least grounded in rhetoric. Like his friend and fellow skeptic Odo Marquard, Blumenberg rejects the dogmatism in systematic philosophy. His aversion to the faintest whiff of dogma may have been partly a response to National Socialist persecution (due to his mother’s Jewish ancestry), which barred him from university enrollment in 1938 and forced him into hiding in 1945. Like so many

72  The supertranslatability of metaphor post-Heideggerian thinkers, Blumenberg borrows Heidegger’s insight that we can overturn traditional interpretations of an author by reinterpreting a single sentence of their work while opposing the provincial, nationalistic service to which Heidegger put his insight.10 This chapter thus gives an overview of Blumenberg’s engagement with metaphor while diagnosing his avoidance of linguistic-translational issues that he brackets from his “metaphorology”—his term for the analysis of historical modifications in the impact of metaphors, especially at two turning points in European intellectual history: the spread of monotheism in ancient Rome and, much later, the advent of secular modernity.11 Blumenberg demonstrates metaphors to be eminently translatable despite long-standing anxieties, for instance, around the translation of sacred texts. Occasionally Blumenberg draws attention to the linguistic specificity of a metaphor, as when he introduces the concept of “background metaphor” (Hintergrundmetapher), a coinage from 1960 and among his most cited concepts in the German-speaking world. Blumenberg credits “genuine thinkers” with the production of “background metaphors,” which “keep their ‘systems’ in vital orientation” while other writers recycle metaphors as a matter of “academic routine,” which in turn “uproots concepts and suspends them in an idiosyncratic atomism.”12 Blumenberg cites the cognates of “machine” as an example of a creative background metaphor. Hellenistic authors used machina to indicate “a cunning maneuver or ‘machination’, a deceitful trick, a startling effect.”13 The Latin phrase machina mundi and its French cognates established a widespread background metaphor (world = machine). This metaphoric sense of machina disappears, however, once the word comes to name contemporary mechanical and electrical machinery. Blumenberg’s concept of “background metaphorics” inspired Lavinia Heller’s application of the concept to the metaphoric functions of translatio in Latin, which haunt contemporary concepts of translation and are beholden to “the idea of transfer and the implicit notion of the invariance of what is transferred.”14 As in Blumenberg’s analysis of machina, Heller notes translatio’s travel between languages to show that the background metaphorics of transportation suggest that translation conveys invariant content. This background metaphor encouraged generations of scholars to perceive translation as historically uninteresting. The banausic connotation of translation as transportation (translatio) makes it sound unworthy of analysis. By contrast, Aristotle inaugurated a compelling metaphor for metaphor itself by evoking the mind’s fascinating capacity for inner vision. To explain why metaphor is “an indication of genius,”15 Aristotle explained that the producers of metaphor see something that the rest of us do not, namely the relationship between dissimilar objects, as if extraordinary powers of vision let them see across vast distances. Aristotle’s description inspired Emanuele Tesauro’s 1654 account of metaphor and wit (argutezza) as “the Aristotelean telescope” which carries us to aesthetic insights beyond mere knowledge.16 At this point, we can even diagnose Blumenberg’s relative

The supertranslatability of metaphor  73 apathy towards translation history as an effect of translatio’s retreat into inconspicuousness through the effect of the background metaphor of mere “transportation” within interdisciplinary work in the humanities. We can take Blumenberg’s claims about metaphor’s discoursestructuring effects even further: metaphor works not only on the large scale of grand images, but also at the subtle scale of connotation. Metaphor’s etymological and conceptual cousin, translation (both words etymologically mean “something carried across, transferred”), arguably plays a similar role in intellectual history. Blumenberg’s point about metaphor could also be made about translation: a translation can pass as an original, just as a metaphor can pass as a literal description. Both metaphor and translation can transform a topic: making things sayable that were formerly unsayable. Since metaphor and translation both involve deviating, “moving away from” an original sentence, these modes of language are often figured as movement (epiphora).17 Translation often plays a covert, transformative role in intellectual history just like metaphor, and the suitability of Blumenberg’s work for understanding this point can be demonstrated even though Blumenberg tends to assume easy translatability between languages. The first chapter applied Blumenberg’s claim that metaphors structure concepts on the morphemic level, a test case for the theory of “background metaphorics.” The classical metaphors that Blumenberg traced most meticulously (including, as already stated, seeing the light, witnessing shipwreck, stargazing) were vividly woven by classical authors into the grand tapestry of the Western philosophical discourse. Not only these classical images but everyday metaphors too, in Blumenberg’s words, “have a history in a more radical sense than concepts.”18 The domain of “absolute metaphor”— the metaphors that make history by being taken literally—are not only the metaphors that authors elaborate through allegories or analogies. They also occur on a morphological level: we mutter the Greek phrase “upon a day” (εφ᾽ ἣμερον) every time we say “ephemeral,” which roots transience in the experience of a day’s brevity. While Blumenberg tended to focus his analytical energy on elaborate, metaphysically resonant images, his insights into metaphor apply equally well to figures embedded in word origins. Familiar metaphors—especially lexicalized, or dead, metaphors—are so undisruptive that their familiarity conceals their own ambiguity. This tendency of metaphor offers the strongest analogy with the tendency of translation to go unacknowledged as such; in both cases, a nonmetaphorical or untranslated text comes across as a more authoritative source (more unambiguous, more original). Yet metaphor and translation often complete the communicative effect of language, and their denigration serves to conceal the “metakinetics” of intellectual history (Blumenberg’s terms for the larger workings of this historical process), “the revenge upon philosophy taken by contexts” as one scholar describes it.19 I see the translation analogy as an argument manqué within Blumenberg’s work on metaphors in philosophy: if the effects of metaphor are as context-sensitive as Blumenberg reveals

74  The supertranslatability of metaphor them to be, then the movement of a metaphor across languages must at least sometimes effect a significant shift in these effects. In the context of the major historical shifts that interest Blumenberg, translation almost always marks a moment when a text, concept, or metaphor speaks to a new audience. And very often, interlingual translations show no sign of their foreign roots—just as Blumenberg claims that absolute metaphors often show no sign of having once been creative associations. Blumenberg’s final major work claims to discover a historically productive metaphor for metaphor. Posthumously published as Die Nackte Wahrheit (The Naked Truth), it argues that features of particular languages, like grammatical gender, have a bearing on the metaphors by which we conceive of the idea of truth. The last part of this chapter analyzes examples from that book of how linguistic differences affect our thinking about truth itself. Before that, we must understand Blumenberg’s theory of absolute metaphor, which provides such untapped resources for translation theory. But first it is worth understanding his initial interest in translation around 1946, before his interest turned decisively towards metaphor.

Young Blumenberg on translation When he was still a doctoral student in West Germany in 1946, Blumenberg produced his first academic publication, titled “The Linguistic Reality of Philosophy.” It puts translation problems front and center—a status that they would not retain in subsequent writings. However, even here he takes two clear swipes at Heideggerian linguistic particularism: first, he posits that while the translation of philosophy does introduce misunderstandings, the situation is not so dire as it is for poetry where “no translation (Übersetzung) can replace (ersetzen) the encounter with the original document.”20 Later in the piece he credits Husserl’s neologisms (not Heidegger’s) for ending the millennia-long reliance of philosophy on translations from Greek, which he laments for the lack of “innovations and primordial approaches [to] the conceptual language of philosophy.”21 By 1958, Blumenberg would never again emphasize language choice in the history of philosophy, and that disregard is entirely in line with his rejection of the Heideggerian claims to the untranslatability of pre-Socratic Greek insights. Even if his early text agrees with Heidegger’s claim that philosophical concepts have got lost in translation from Greek to Latin, he still never claims that we moderns have missed out on some experience of wisdom that was lost with the rise of Platonism, as Heidegger does in his many comments on pre-Socratic philosophy. “The Linguistic Reality of Philosophy” argues that the philosophical insights of ancient Greek thinkers were expressed in everyday Greek language, and that modern philosophical terminology derives from the translation of these everyday words into Latin. “[T]he concepts that were adopted and

The supertranslatability of metaphor  75 translated from Greek entered Western philosophy’s bifurcating lineages of thought as fixed ciphers (feste Chiffren), so that despite being based on diametrically opposed world pictures (Weltbilder) and understandings of being (Seinsverständnisse), they appeared in identical linguistic shape.”22 The notion that the Greek language contained a distinctively original vocabulary became a template for German Romantic philosophy, linguistics, and poetics. Blumenberg nonetheless avoids Heidegger’s dire claim that translating Greek vocabulary obliviated the Greek insight into the experience the Being of beings.23 Heidegger laments the lost experience only available in Greek words in “The Origin of the Work of Art:” The process begins with the appropriation of Greek words by RomanLatin thought. Hupokeimenon becomes subiectum; hupostasis becomes substantia; sumbebekos becomes accidens. However, this translation of Greek names into Latin is in no way the innocent process it is considered to this day. Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation, of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding equally authentic experience of what they say without the Greek word. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation.24 According to Heidegger, more than the meaning of Greek words, but also certain thinkers’ “authentic experience” itself, became lost in Greco-Latin translation. Heidegger’s lament is consistent with his phenomenological training; after all, phenomenology defines its primary task as describing inner experiences. However, these inner processes are bound, in Heidegger’s view, to a whole realm of communal experience through which language expresses “ownness” (Eigenart) or “foreignness” (Fremdheit). While Heidegger’s translation theory explicitly calls for openness, for participation in the “ownness of the foreign,”25 Blumenberg must have bristled at the view of language as the exclusive possession of a particular tribe. While the spread of Latin literacy may have struck Heidegger as an erasure of the particularity of ancient Greek insights, Blumenberg describes the translation of Greek concepts into Latin as successfully proving the relevance of Greek thought—and more importantly of the Greek image repertoire—to new intellectual-historical contexts. The linguistic particularity of philosophy is shown to be relevant again in the eighth chapter of Paradigms for a Metaphorology, “Terminologization of a Metaphor: From ‘Verisimilitude’ to ‘Probability’,” which discusses Cicero’s translations of Plato’s language around “truth.” Not even Heidegger goes into such text-specific detail in assessing the linguistic shifts from Greek to Roman philosophy, despite the important position that this problem occupies in Heidegger’s narrative of the forgetting of Being. In a

76  The supertranslatability of metaphor personal letter, Blumenberg’s doctoral advisor Walter Bröcker (himself a former advisee of Heidegger) questioned Blumenberg’s reading of this translation history: Probability seems to me (scheint mir) to be a seeming metaphor (scheinbare Metapher). You seem to think (Sie scheinen zu meinen) that it is a light-metaphor. But it seems to me that it only seems that way, and that this appearance only comes about through a double translation. (Aber mir scheint, daß das nur so scheint und daß dieser Schein durch eine zweimalige Übersetzung entstanden ist.) The verisimile (just like its Greek predecessor) is not a metaphor, but rather a completely nonmetaphorical designator of what is not actually true but is similar to the true (dem Wahren ähnlich). That is the vraisemblable in French, semblable = similis. But to us sembler = scheinen because of a second translation into German: wahrscheinlich. And that only looks like it is a metaphor that refers to the shining of light. (Und das sieht nun so aus, als sei das eine Metapher, die auf dem Schein des Lichts Bezug nimmt.)26 Bröcker questioned the basis for Blumenberg’s claim that ancient metaphors for truth included metaphors of shining light. To emphasize the point that the power of light metaphorics are no more than an accident of the German language, Bröcker fills his letter with derivatives of the German word scheinen (which means both “to seem” and, in the last sentence, “to shine”). Bröcker aptly notes that the German wahrscheinlich connotes shining light much more so than do probabile, verisimile, and their Romance cognates.27 Gert König explains the source of the German conflation in his entry on Wahrheitsähnlichkeit (literally “truth-similarity”) in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie.28 König explains that the “probabilistic revolution” in the late eighteenth century elicited the disappearance of the term wahrheitsähnlich in favor of wahrscheinlich in German dictionaries over the course of the nineteenth century. He then writes that wahrheitsähnlich shortly afterwards took on a pejorative sense of “the mere appearance (Schein) of truth or even of a deceptive image of the truth” in French and English.29 For König, the morpheme Schein was not even required in German to render the concept of “appearance” under the metaphor of a visual distortion of truth. In the passage in question, Blumenberg states that Cicero uses verisimile to translate Plato’s notion of εἰκός (likeness), which the latter defines as τὸ ὅμοιον τῷ ἀληθεῖ (similar to the truth) in Phaedrus. He then claims that Cicero uses the same word to translate the “Academic” (i.e., Platonic) concept of πιθανόν (persuasiveness). Blumenberg means here to emphasize the metaphorical value of this word, which suggests physical resemblance, even when it is sometimes used to indicate the abstract concept of probabile. Rather than lamenting the distorting effect of Latin terms as he did in 1946, Blumenberg wants to show in his 1960 work that the Greek counterparts of Latin concepts were selected precisely for their metaphoric suggestiveness.

The supertranslatability of metaphor  77 In response to his advisor’s letter, Blumenberg praises Bröcker’s talent for finding “the weakest points of an opus,” but also insists that “the metaphorics connected with the use of verisimile are optical.”30 The chapter on Wahrscheinlichkeit does indeed begin with unstated suggestions that work heavily with luminous connotations of the German scheinen. The problem of terminology is so central and vexed here that Robert Savage turns to disjunctive translation (listing three alternate translations) at the first mention of the German word in question: “‘verisimilitude,’ ‘truthlikeness,’ or ‘probability’ [Wahrscheinlichkeit].”31 After giving the German word in brackets, Savage annotates this sentence to announce that he will be resorting to the strategy I have called differential translation to deal with this termin-the-making: “My translation of the term varies depending on context.” Polysemous concepts often result from such interlinguistic histories, which in turn call for differential translation.

Absolute metaphor in translation To do justice to Blumenberg’s stance on translation we must understand the effects that Blumenberg was looking for when he hunted through the history of philosophy in search of remarkable metaphors. The absolute metaphors that interested Blumenberg usually exhibit two features and exert one hypothetical function. In most cases, absolute metaphors are: (1) recurrent images or anecdotes (2) used by thinkers with different philosophical commitments.32 Such recurrent and pliable metaphors are useful for (3) marking the perplexed incapacity to conceive of a thought, idea, or topic within the logic of conceptual language. The most controversial claim is (3), and indeed that is the one Blumenberg casts doubt on and revises most often. Absolute metaphors are historical non-answers to transhistorically unanswerable questions, but in his 1960 treatise their phenomenological value was secondary to the practice of detecting them—and the insistence that they will always recur. An illustrative image can work as a metaphor for a long time before it is taken for truth when imagery stands in place of explanation in a text. For instance, Blumenberg claims that Plato’s “background metaphor” of the cave was not “fully taken” as an “absolute metaphor” until the work of the Neoplatonists. For Plato, cavernous conditions bear a likeness to the state of ignorance. For Porphyry, the cave explains the state of all who exist in a world cut off from the transcendent.33 An “absolute metaphor” can illuminate or obfuscate a concept depending on the context, and Blumenberg is typically more generous towards premodern pioneers than towards contemporary self-styled prophets. He is critical of Heidegger’s “rhetorical extravagances”—perhaps thinking that the fellow critic of metaphor should know better.34 Yet he praises the inventiveness in Heraclitus’ famous aphorism that a person cannot step into the same river twice. “It is an absolute metaphor and as such is one of philosophy’s earliest successes: that

78  The supertranslatability of metaphor no one can grasp reality, because it is not what appears when it appears to us.”35 In Heraclitus’ time, philosophy was still generating its foundational metaphors. As we will see in a later section, the metaphor of the “naked truth” is a metaphor to which Blumenberg attributes a transhistorical function similar to the river of Heraclitus. Blumenberg examines those metaphors that he takes for historical proving grounds in the ongoing rivalry to capture universal features of human experience. In doing so, Blumenberg takes up explicitly a project that Immanuel Kant mentions offhandedly in the Third Critique, namely the understanding of the role of symbols (including metonyms and other figures) that enable philosophers to think about ideas beyond our concrete understanding. As I quoted in the introduction, Kant writes: “This business [of metaphor in philosophy] has as yet been little discussed, much as it deserves deeper investigation.”36 For Blumenberg, the history of metaphor invention and reinterpretation impacts and reflects the most important turning points in intellectual history. Technological or cultural changes often radically change a metaphor’s valence. For instance, divine “light” symbolized absolute knowledge for millennia, but since the advent of artificial lighting, nature has gone “dark,” and streetlights, city lights, and other forms of “lighting” signal an object or area marked by humans for human attention.37 Blumenberg’s theory of “absolute metaphor” describes the translationlike movement between unconscious mental images and conscious knowledge in language. Blumenberg traces metaphors through specific genealogies, as if only metaphysical discourses were sufficiently focused on the so-called big questions to exhibit absolute metaphors. As translation theorist Lavinia Heller shows, the Western concept of translation is interpenetrated with the metaphor of “building bridges” (die Brückenbau-Metapher).38 By defining how we think about translation, this metaphor also defines how we understand translational competence: translation is always already a matter of bridging. This background metaphor makes the interpretive work of translation less visible because it forefronts the notion that translation primarily serves to construct the bridge across which others’ ideas will travel.39 Yet once we take note of this “background metaphor,” to use Blumenberg’s terminology, we can see its malleable character. In this case, the manner in which a figurative bridge is constructed between author and reader will give the text a particular character. Driving across the crimson-colored Golden Gate Bridge with its majestic towers, perfect view of the San Francisco skyline, and location across from idyllic Marin County is a different experience than traversing the sleek, but comparatively functional-looking nearby Bay Bridge, which overlooks less monumental parts of San Francisco and connects to the Port of Oakland, a major container ship facility. As aesthetic reference points to the word “bridge,” these two concreta express something entirely different about the very act of “bridging.” These two reallife bridges are as aesthetically different as the King James translation of

The supertranslatability of metaphor  79 the Bible, a monument to aesthetic language at its inception in 1611, whose archaisms have aged into the epitome of anglophone religious language, and the New International Version, first published in 1978 and acclaimed for its accessibility to the growing population of English-speakers across the globe. Preserving metaphoric effects is crucial in translations of texts within the tradition of continental philosophy. Authors in this tradition treat polysemy as a resource. I became aware of the tenacity of latent metaphors in philosophical German while I was translating Blumenberg’s The Laughter of the Thracian Woman into English. Blumenberg encourages this line of thought when he argues that absolute metaphors express insights that cannot be expressed otherwise—which implies that adequate translations should let at least certain metaphors proliferate. The difficulty is in determining which images to emphasize. Reading philosophy as a translator means seeing where the often-unannounced presence of terms makes every word a potential term—and thus discourages differential translation of any word. This is one of the biggest differences between literary fiction and philosophy—a difference that applies even for philosophy texts written in a conspicuously literary style. Many theories of metaphor focus on the kinds of meaning created through metaphor. Blumenberg takes this line of questioning further and asks whether there is anything that can only be expressed in metaphor: if so, he would call this an “absolute metaphor.” In Paradigms for a Metaphorology, he described “absolute metaphors” as “‘translations’ that cannot be rendered back into authenticity and logicality.”40 This description highlights the kinship between translation and metaphor, namely the way that both have “sources” that may or may not be recoverable. But why should absolute metaphors refuse reverse translation? A speculative answer is that they describe experiences that did not command attention in the first place. As cited earlier, Blumenberg insists that historical metaphorology investigates what authors could not have known since they “could not have possessed a metaphorology of their own.”41 Compatible theories of metaphor help fill out Blumenberg’s theory, as I have argued elsewhere.42 A metaphoric sentence, according to Roger M. White, requires “bifurcated construal,” that is, we read two sentences in one: a primary and a secondary sentence.43 To illustrate bifurcated construal with an ancient metaphor example: pratum ridet, “the field is laughing” can be separated into sentence A (“the field looks invitingly beautiful”) and sentence B (“A happy person laughs”). In other words, a metaphor is two sentences in one, and through this bifurcation it embeds an image in an unrelated semantic context. Analogously, a translation is a bifurcated text; each sentence in it has a corresponding one in a separate source text. The difference is that translators read both sentences, but readers of translations do not. Unlike for readers of metaphors, the source text is usually not accessible alongside the translation. Accordingly, ignorance of the text’s source language bars most readers from a multi-layered interpretation. While metaphors

80  The supertranslatability of metaphor generally make comparisons explicit, text comparisons only occur in the case of translations within the much-neglected genre of translation criticism. Although Blumenberg’s first publication (1946) is concerned with translation problems, and his 1947 dissertation is heavily indebted to Heidegger (for whom languages, images, and concepts are inextricable), Blumenberg completed his qualifying second dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) in 1950 on Husserl’s less linguistically oriented phenomenology; then, in the 1971 publication “Beobachtungen an Metaphern” he developed the view that the untheorized “lifeworld” provides the source domain metaphors. (In most of Husserl’s accounts, this is the “lifeworld” of “self-evident,” “pre-predicative”—i.e., nonverbal—working knowledge). A decade later, Blumenberg had produced thousands of notecards on the history of metaphors, most of which downplay their linguistic form. His interest in metaphor had completely supplanted his youthful interest in translation. Comparing Blumenberg’s mature work with his early thoughts on translation, we see a complete shift of focus from the translation-resistant polysemy of concepts to the translation-friendly polysemy of metaphor. Nevertheless, his scattered thoughts on translation across the rest of his career add nuance to this claim.

Metaphorological miniatures The following sections provide an overview of the moments when translation emerges as a concern in Blumenberg’s mature work. Blumenberg’s last decade was extremely prolific, and his style more fragmentary. Unsurprisingly, his references to translation do not amount to a grand theory, but he does tend to regard translation as transforming a text’s meaning as radically as ancient metaphors change their meanings to align with new historical contexts. Blumenberg did not develop theoretical claims about interlinguistic translation again after the discussions of Wahrscheinlichkeit and machina detailed above.44 After Paradigms, Blumenberg mostly relegates his considerations of translation to short essays where he tells an anecdote about a translation choice or translation event whose intellectual value speaks for itself. Blumenberg could express his wit masterfully in such micro-essays, a genre familiar to him from his writing for the feuilleton column of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Relegating the topic to short, somewhat whimsical, pieces does suggest a reduced appreciation for the historical and philosophical significance of translation. Nevertheless, these pieces are worth reviewing in the context of his thought on translation since they present translation as a central node of change in the history of concepts— and thus supply helpful materials in constructing a more robust theory of translation based on Blumenberg’s metaphorology.

The kamikaze translator In a posthumously published piece, Blumenberg uses the tools of metaphorology to debunk the naïve view of translation as the carrying across of

The supertranslatability of metaphor  81 invariant material.45 He slyly criticizes Heidegger’s faith in Greek’s untranslatable, perfect expression of insight in a short piece published posthumously in the volume The Seductibility of the Philosopher. The volume consists of many short reflections on Heidegger’s rhetoric, his blind spots, and his attractiveness to so many of Blumenberg’s colleagues in postwar German philosophy departments. Heidegger, we learn, was very concerned about foreign language translations of his own work. Blumenberg paraphrases a 1977 “memorial edited volume” by Hans A. Fischer-Barnicol: Heidegger said that he could never know what the Japanese have done with his philosophy, but that he was unwilling to accept blind pupils: in so foreign a language, his thoughts could not mean the same thing. Now, though, he has proudly declared that someone is currently making a second translation of Being and Time. What makes him expect that this new translation could approach more closely what he had wanted his own language to say?46 Blumenberg answers his rhetorical question by describing Heidegger’s excitement upon learning that his newest translator had been a kamikaze pilot during World War II who had miraculously survived his suicide mission due to a positioning error. “Unintentionally, we have ‘Being-untodeath’ in figura,” by which Blumenberg means that the image of the pilot’s plunge towards certain death graphically depicted a moment of forced confrontation of the finitude of human existence, precisely the insight that conditions authentic existence in Being and Time: Against all probability, now someone had survived, as if the world spirit—alias: Being (das Seyn)—had wanted it so, so that Heidegger would be fully understood and could be translated into his language in a completely other world. A translation not just into Japanese, but into authenticity. After this flourish of bitterly ironic messianic zeal, Blumenberg gives a characteristic deflation; he explains that Tsujimura, the supposed kamikaze pilot, was shortsighted and was only assigned to be on the ground personnel in a kamikaze unit. In a cruel twist, a visual impairment relegates the prospective translator back to the lowly status of “blind pupil,” like everyone who speaks a language unrelated to German. Blumenberg does “not tell this with Schadenfreude,” but rather to expose the inescapable influence of images on thought. Heidegger claims that language weds sensation to abstraction, but Blumenberg doubts that language is a necessary ingredient in this image’s effect.47 Here the image of the once-suicidal translator had an impact that did not require an accomplished translation to count as a philosophical accomplishment. In criticizing Heidegger’s naïve enthusiasm for the authentic translator, Blumenberg exposes two oversights in the realms

82  The supertranslatability of metaphor of metaphor and translation at once: 1) metaphor taken literally (i.e., literal near-death-experience as the condition for understanding the concept of “being unto death”) and 2) ability as a translator taken for granted (i.e., life experience taken as adequate for the ability to translate German philosophy in Japanese). When Blumenberg argues that the very idea of an authentic translation requires Heidegger to conjure the image of a kamikaze-survivor translator, this argument bears the same substance as his claim that metaphor is ineradicable from philosophical thought. In both cases, Blumenberg is skeptical that language can ever be free of metaphor, and therefore that philosophical language can ever hope to pursue “the Cartesian teleology of logicization.”48 Blumenberg believes that certain obstinate metaphors (“absolute metaphors”) will always stymy the goal of developing a philosophical language rigorous enough to translate into propositions in logical syntax—precisely because there are no “absolute translations” of “absolute metaphors.” There are “ideas” more perceptual than rational which hold sway over us and often erupt into our prose: streams and shipwrecks may sometimes only serve to illustrate a claim that can be parsed in logic, but when they illustrate ideas about “consciousness” or “the world” they end up overriding the logic of our claims with their internal logic as images. Blumenberg does not share Heidegger’s view that pre-dualistic thinking finds perfect expression in great texts and that such texts therefore cannot be translated. Blumenberg would argue instead that thought in images always establishes a ground for philosophical dispute. Every iteration of an image is an opportunity to attach new meanings to it and to co-opt it for different claims.

The talking sword Because Blumenberg is too skeptical a thinker to assent to either a decline or a progress narrative of history, mistranslations are hardly ever moments of catastrophic or irreversible damage in his narrations. As when a metaphor is endowed with new meanings, new translations make opportunities for new meaning, not merely losses. His sporadic discussions of translation after 1946 typically take the form of discrete case studies. In one case, Blumenberg notices that an instance of wordplay from a fable, as versified by the Roman poet Phaedrus, sounds better when translated from Latin into German. The entry is short enough to translate here in its entirety: A sword in the dust Among the fables of Phaedrus, who claimed that he could even make trees speak, there is one where a sword speaks: Gladius et viator. It is understandable that translators have a hard time keeping a sword’s language sharp and concise.

The supertranslatability of metaphor  83 The traveler finds a thrown away sword on his path and asks it: quis te perdidit? The sword answers: me quidem unis, at multos ego! Now there is sharp wit. The translator must struggle since there is no word [in German] with the double meaning of the Latin perdere: to lose and to destroy. He renders the dialogue as follows: Who lost you? – One person lost me, but through me many were lost. Wer hat dich verloren? – Mich hat einer verloren, aber durch mich waren viele verloren. The German master has ruined both the sword and the poet. Might German be better equipped to represent a speaking sword from ancient tradition than Latin is? As follows: Who let you fall? – One let me, I let many. Wer ließ dich fallen? – Mich einer, ich viele. What makes this 1981 text so interesting from the perspective of translation theory is that Blumenberg manages to find a polysemic translation equivalent that works on a different instance of polysemy than the original. The Latin perdere means “to lose” and “to destroy” while the German fallen means “to fall” and “to die.” That poetic wit can operate in the space between a pair of meanings corroborates a central claim of this book: unintuitive thoughts tend to be expressed using polysemous words—which in turn become sources of translation problems. As I will show through the upcoming reading of Die nackte Wahrheit, wit turns out to be indispensable to the historical function of metaphor.49 This type of translation problem, however, is less bound up in private experience than those that Heidegger raises. Instead of trying to claim that concrete sensation and abstract thought originally belonged in one undifferentiated domain (as expressed in the Heraclitan philosophy of “rising and passing away”),50 Blumenberg acknowledges the interplay of two domains in language.

The banality of the creation Blumenberg’s mature discourse on translation consistently reflects his skepticism that language can ever achieve definitions stable enough to withstand

84  The supertranslatability of metaphor shifts or reversals over time. This skepticism becomes striking in later works, such as his posthumous Begriffe in Geschichten, based largely on previously published newspaper editorials. The short section on “Literality” (Wörtlichkeit) deals entirely with the translation history of the first word in the Hebrew-Aramaic text of Genesis: b’reschit, commonly translated as “in the beginning.” Blumenberg discusses the conflicting opinions that different religious and philological traditions have expressed about the translation implications of this word. He cites an unspecified “Hebrew teacher” who says: “‘b’reschit’ does not mean ‘in the beginning’ literally translated, but rather ‘in a beginning.’ That is how, at one point, God selected a beginning for the world.”51 Blumenberg criticizes this interpretation since, he argues, most claims to literal translation are meretricious when theological arguments are at stake: “That is designated as a solid literality, for Hebrew knows no definite article, and it is [indeed] lacking here. Except that Hebrew [also] does not know the indefinite article, so that cannot be translated, but only implied from the lack of the definite one.” Next, Blumenberg offers a discursus on the superfluous definite article in the opening words of the Gospel of John: “in the beginning was the word” (en archè èn ho logos): “John wants no other grammar for this higher quality of beginning. … He wants the indistinctness or ambiguity of ‘en archè.’”52 Blumenberg claims that John the Apostle wants to imply that God’s beginning occurred before the world began. “But how do we want to translate that?” Here he turns to Swiss Hebraist Otto Eißfeldt’s philologically informed translation of the first line of Genesis, which Blumenberg calls “a masterwork of the literal approach.” Eißfeldt’s translation uses a non-idiomatic German preposition for the phrase “in the beginning” (Im Anfang) and thus achieves a “sacral tone.” But ultimately, Blumenberg rejects even this. As Faust revises the gospel in Goethe’s drama (“In the beginning was the deed”), Blumenberg leaves theological considerations aside and hears how the words “literally” sound to him. He understands the plurals of “god” and “heaven” to mean “of the sort of”: “Sometime, (someone like) gods instituted (something like) the heavens and this: the earth.”53 Even philologically sensitive translators cannot fail to express their reverence or irreverence for God’s power. Blumenberg follows his translation with “if I may!” (Halten zu Gnaden), or, more closely translated, “By your grace!” Blumenberg thereby emphasizes the impiety of his “literal” translation and suggests that most biblical translators are more concerned with exhibiting devotion than achieving literal translations.54 In that sense, piety becomes an impediment to receiving God’s word. In the case of Blumenberg’s criticisms of Heidegger’s faith in authentic translation, of a too literally translated Latin couplet, and of biblical translators’ dogmatism, it is clear that Blumenberg sees in translation what he sees in the transmission of metaphors: a moment of transformation. In such moments, morphemes and images serve texts’ functions in the background, building new connections between disparate semantic fields, in what Mark

The supertranslatability of metaphor  85 Turner calls “semantic blending.”55 All too often, “absolute translations” emerge, which, like “absolute metaphors,” serve their rhetorical goals best by passing as authentic, original, and unquestionable. Forgetting translation history should be as objectionable to the skeptical metaphorologist as taking metaphor literally.

Metaphors for the naked truth Blumenberg generally downplays the role of specific affects like humor in the success of metaphors.56 Yet it is undeniable that the selection processes, by which myths and metaphors become widespread, which Blumenberg discusses in Work on Myth, require the kinds of satisfaction often provided best by humor.57 In Sigmund Freud’s discussion of jokes, he acknowledges that harmless, innocent jokes rarely provoke uproarious laughter. Where a joke is not an end in itself, i.e., innocuous, it puts itself in the service of two tendencies only, which can be merged into a single viewpoint; it is either a hostile joke (used for aggressive, satire, and defense), or it is an obscene joke (used to strip someone naked [Entblößung]).58 Sexuality and the various forms of identity are among the taboos of polite society that make up the topoi of many jokes. And the naked truth has provided philosophers with opportunities for—often misogynistic—sexual humor. This section drives home the case that a philosophical history of metaphor must include translation history. The historical persistence of metaphors for metaphysical absolutes (truth, God, etc.) often depends on humor, and successful humor generally demands language-specific wordplay as crucially as it demands the violation of taboos. Deciphering the metaphor of the “naked truth” demands a translatorly metaphorology. The taboos around nudity elicit moments of humor in the references Blumenberg cites in his posthumous work on the metaphorics of equating truth with nakedness, entitled Die nackte Wahrheit (The Naked Truth). But what happens when the metaphor of the naked truth is presented in a dry, non-humorous (non-risqué) way? Translation, like metaphor, is never fully transparent: its effects are so deeply imbued with interpretive moves that the idea of denuding it, reducing it to transparency, is the central metaphor for disambiguating the interpretive choices it raises. Blumenberg’s most profound contribution to the historical theory of metaphor was not published during his lifetime: the idea of a nonmetaphorical absolute truth can only be expressed metaphorically. In the manuscript of Die nackte Wahrheit nudity functions as a metaphor for absolute truth, whereby clothing becomes the metaphor for metaphor itself. The paradox of absolute metaphor is thus evident in coded form whenever authors assert a view on “the naked truth.” This book indeed makes good on Blumenberg’s promise that this

86  The supertranslatability of metaphor mature study work will replace his early Paradigms for a Metaphorology (as written, in a letter to his translator Robert Wallace).59 In Paradigms, Blumenberg posits as a premise of metaphorology that “the witnesses [of absolute metaphor] did not possess, and could not have possessed, a metaphorology of their own.”60 But Die nackte Wahrheit shows that, even if authors did not possess a metaphorology of their own per se, they were indeed writing precisely (in the language of nudity metaphors) about the limits of metaphor itself. The directness with which this metaphor gets to the heart of the problematic of metaphor itself makes this manuscript the perfect case study for investigating the extent to which translation and linguistic particularity have a bearing on the absolutization of metaphor. There are big implications for translation in Blumenberg’s argument that metaphors often refer to widely shared working assumptions and unquestioned practices—in a word, to the “lifeworld” which is the background for all philosophical questioning. The argument suggests that translations must expose the imagery implied by etymologies rather than to settle for wordfor-word equivalents. The first chapter of the present book discussed how English translations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Blumenberg handle words that blend metaphorical and conceptual meanings. In the cases explored there, the image and the abstraction are both thematized, and I thus advocated translation choices that do not efface the occurrence of abstract terms, but which do preserve imagery when possible, in order to establish the expression of the lifeworld in these texts. The obvious downside to this practice is the obtrusiveness of constantly reminding the reader that a translation is at hand; but if the technique is successful, then the result may be to preserve the humor in translation. The humorous function of metaphor is precisely the value Blumenberg will place at the core of metaphorology in Die nackte Wahrheit. The German Literature Archive gives some insight as to where Blumenberg himself saw Die nackte Wahrheit within his broader oeuvre. In 1985, Robert Wallace was in the process of translating several of Blumenberg’s longest works for MIT Press. Wallace then wanted to write a scholarly monograph on Blumenberg’s work and translate Paradigms for a Metaphorology into English. In a letter Blumenberg wrote to Robert Wallace on May 2, 1985, Blumenberg explains why he does not want Wallace to translate Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Blumenberg claims that translating Paradigms now would mislead English-speaking readers, since his most representative work had yet to be published. Furthermore, Blumenberg declares, Paradigms is “not only long outdated, it is also bad.” Blumenberg explains that a translation of Paradigms would distract from the trajectory of his late work; he intended to publish Höhlenausgänge (Cave Exits) in 1986, Quellen, Ströme, Eisberge (Springs, Streams, Icebergs) in 1987, and “finally the great complex of truth metaphors” in 1988. “After that it will be possible to assess the theoretical sum of these works and to definitively replace Paradigms.”61 Höhlenausgänge appeared during Blumenberg’s lifetime and was his last

The supertranslatability of metaphor  87 major work published in his lifetime while the latter two were published posthumously in 2012 and in 2019 respectively. The archive contains three drafts of “The Naked Truth,” the longest being 153 typed pages. Blumenberg’s statement above sounds as if it is calling this work his “final” metaphor study, and the only one to bridge metaphorology and ethics. “The clothed/naked truth” is, however, by Blumenberg’s account, the most compelling metaphor for metaphor itself: “For Kant as well, the metaphorics of the naked truth are the metaphor for the problematic of the need and use for metaphors themselves in philosophy.”62 He explains that for Kant, we cannot simply throw off the exterior and hope to expose reality underneath it: “Kant’s thesis—that even to inner experience only appearances are given—proves to be of the highest significance and to affect everything else,” according to Blumenberg’s analysis.63 This position is known as Kantian transcendentalism, the notion that knowledge is never about the world, but we only ever know what we know relative to our human faculties. Blumenberg finds Kant expressing this view not in its locus classicus, the First Critique, but in Kant’s posthumously published notes for the preparation of an essay on the progress of metaphysics (written for a contest held by the Prussian Academy of Sciences). Before continuing to show how Blumenberg’s own position on truth metaphors draws on Kant’s, it is worth noting how he differs from Jacques Derrida in “White Mythology,” a well-known text that also argues by developing a metaphor for metaphor. In this work, Derrida’s ruling metaphor is the sun; the tertia comparationis between sun and metaphor are that the sun is both quintessentially natural (as opposed to artificial light), and it is quintessentially a generative source (thus standing apart from the order of nature), and therefore mimics the ambiguous position of metaphor within the signifying order.64 The difference between Blumenberg’s text and Derrida’s—even between their two master metaphors, sun and nudity— shows why Blumenberg’s work is even better suited than Derrida’s to represent the problem of the translation of metaphor (even though Derrida, unlike Blumenberg, explicitly addresses questions of translation in his published work). Derrida speculates about why the sun as a phenomenal object is well suited to this metaphoric function whereas Blumenberg recovers a philosophical history of anxiety about defining truth—and the ways that verbal clothing both obscures and reveals it. Derrida dismisses the very idea of philosophical metaphorology due to the complicity of metaphor in all language: metaphor remains in all its essential features a classical element of philosophy, a metaphysical concept. It is therefore involved in the field which it would be the purpose of a general “metaphorology” to subsume. It is the product of a network of elements of philosophy which themselves correspond to tropes and figures and are coeval with them or systematically bound to them.65

88  The supertranslatability of metaphor As the sun illuminates all in its path, Derrida’s notion of metaphor sees its infiltration of discourse as all-pervading, fatally contaminating the work of metaphorology. Against the idea of metaphorology as impossible task, Blumenberg’s isolated analyses of specific metaphoric effects show that the “systematic bonds” between metaphor and philosophy can be isolated and analyzed historically. Likewise, translation must be studied historically if we hope to overcome the difference between translation’s invisibility to readers and its excessive visibility to theorists.66 Blumenberg’s historical metaphorology could refute Derrida’s claim that metaphorology is impossible. Derrida might have to concede that a “metaphorology” would not amount to the rigor of say “biology” (or even “ontology”) but would at least yield the value of determining which metaphors serve as historically provisional limits in the search for knowledge whereas Blumenberg could clench the argument for historical metaphorology by acknowledging a point that would seem resonant with Derrida’s position: the dependence of metaphoric effects on specific languages. Blumenberg’s disagreement with Derrida’s ban on metaphorology is even more apparent when we consider the Kantian epistemological arguments for the necessity of metaphorology that emerge in Die nackte Wahrheit. After reconstructing an argument whereby Kant derives moral responsibility from skepticism, Blumenberg shows the rhetorical difficulties of expressing such skepticism through the traditional metaphor of truth as unveiling. Blumenberg highlights Kant’s advocacy for ironic wit through an example of such wit, as demonstrated in Kant’s letter to Moses Mendelssohn of April 8, 1766. In a previous communication, Mendelssohn accuses Kant of employing an irony that makes it unclear whether he is criticizing metaphysics or defending necromancy in his Dreams of a Ghost Seer. In his reply, Kant confesses that he does not always say what he thinks and that he is tearing off the garb of the previous scientific views in the name of skepticism. Blumenberg draws attention to Kant’s use of a metaphor that he had previously disavowed: “We would not expect, after all of this, from the metaphor of tearing off the dogmatic clothing that there would be nothing under it but the naked truth,” but Blumenberg does not think that this would be beyond Kant’s irony: “We see that the path from the point where one does not say what one thinks to the other, where one says what one does not think, is not as far as it seems in Kant’s oath of honesty (Wahrhaftigkeitsbeschwörung) to Mendelssohn.”67 In other words, Kant seemingly breaks his own methodological rules here, but he does so explicitly in the name of wit. He considers wit the only option when discussing matters that no rigorous thinker should feel entitled to discuss earnestly— topics such as ghosts, where skepticism is the most rational framework. Ironic wit becomes the rhetorical figure through which a skeptic can demonstrate moral responsibility. Already in 1960 Blumenberg locates the exact moment when the longsought immediate experience of truth transforms into an affirmation of rhetoric as the indispensable, though inevitably contaminating medium

The supertranslatability of metaphor  89 for transmitting “truths” in modernity, an affirmation that became especially prevalent among late Enlightenment-era philosophers. This discussion occurs in the fourth chapter of Paradigms for a Metaphorology, entitled “Metaphorics of the ‘Naked’ Truth.” Even though Thomas Aquinas had already acknowledged the possibility of truths existing that God would never reveal to humanity, early Enlightenment thinkers like Francis Bacon revived the theological promise of attaining immediate access to Paradise on earth by articulating and spreading truth as “the common property of the human race.”68 In the same chapter, Blumenberg concludes that historicism and mathematical science reformed the very concept of truth, even among modern mystics like Simone Weil, who anticipates an encounter with the naked truth, but only after death. It is at once the negation of the metaphor and its renewal in a different direction: the ‘disguises’ of truth now [in the scientific age] no longer issue from the poetic imagination and the need for rhetorical ornamentation [as for Pascal]—they do not represent fashion accessories, so to speak, that could be cast off without further ado—but are themselves constitutive of the way in which truth manifests itself.69 Naïve applications of “naked truth” metaphorics are thus hard to find in the late modern period. When Blumenberg returns to the topic in Die nackte Wahrheit, his sympathies are decidedly with Kant’s advocacy for the ethical urgency of truth metaphors. The ethical implications of studying metaphor histories become clearest in Die Nackte Wahrheit, when Blumenberg hints at an ethics of skepticism, again in the chapter on Kant. Humorous, ironic use of metaphor has the ethically vital function of opening a middle position between overvaluing and undervaluing the meaning-making value of metaphor. The extreme positions could be called narcissism, on the one hand—an ethically reckless overapplication of mythic thinking that mistakes meaningfulness for truth70—and, on the other hand, total allegiance to scientific rationalism at the expense of all other forms of knowing and meaning-making. Kant’s First Critique denies the knowability of totalities beyond experience—a skepticism extended further in the Third Critique to encompass aesthetic phenomena. The Second Critique however gives “transcendental illusions” a function as “regulative ideas” that allow us to conduct ourselves as morally free subjects (a function extended to the aesthetic realm in the Third Critique insofar as the beautiful symbolizes “moral goodness” itself). As Blumenberg notes, the last university lecture that Kant delivered in his lifetime, in 1796, discusses the role of “productive wit” as a “vehicle or encasing for reason its work with moral-practical ideas.”71 As it appears, Kant finds in wit a form of expression for symbols that is practically applicable and does not run into the grand errors of Wolffian rationalist metaphysics, which he so systemically refuted in the First Critique.

90  The supertranslatability of metaphor An ironic or witty use of a symbol does not succumb to the traps of transcendental illusion, nor does it abide with the total skepticism of theoretical thought. An original example of Blumenberg’s wit in a particularly Kantian vein is evident in a different corner of the archive. In a witty “Prayer of an Atheologian” (Atheologe, portmanteau word of the German words for “atheist” and “theologian”), a fragment from Hans Blumenberg’s unpublished manuscript Götterschwund (Disappearance of the Gods), God loses all referential potential: Prayer of an Atheologian God, I thank you for not existing. If you were out there, I would suffer from the horrible embarrassment of having to condemn you, curse you, and, yes, even wish for your non-existence. You have saved me the effort by deciding not to be there at all.72 By ironically addressing God as one does when praying, “God” is exposed as a placeholder, a mere symbol for the unknown absolute. The “prayer” denies God’s existence while addressing God with the gratitude typical of prayer as a genre. The wit of the prayer comes from its reversal of Anselm of Canterbury’s “ontological proof” of God’s existence. For Anselm, existence is a necessary feature of the concept of a perfect God; the concept of a perfect God exists in Anselm’s mind, and therefore God exists. For Blumenberg, the non-existent God expresses his perfection through non-existence. Rather than justifying evil, or claiming limits to divine power, God gets out of the way completely by simply not existing. That God decides on the existence or non-existence of entities by bringing potentiality into actuality is an early modern theological notion that Aquinas defended against Averroes, and which Duns Scotus denied—a denial that would become a prerequisite for modern skepticism about metaphyrical claims generally. It is exemplary of what Blumenberg calls “reoccupation” that, in this paradoxical parody, God decides not on the existence of being, but against his own existence.73 The joke prayer does not posit God as real; instead, as a rhetorically convenient phantom, the idea of God exists to structure the experience of contemplating the non-existence of God. The address to a non-existent entity, who nevertheless still functions as a construct, amplifies the Kantian notion of the “regulative idea.” God spontaneously takes on a symbolic function when a new regulative idea is needed. When we arrive at an airport in an unfamiliar place and do not have a way to understand how it is different, whatever we notice—a family that looks particularly happy or unhappy, the presence or absence of air conditioning, the design of the toilets—becomes a symbol for the country. Likewise, atheists may pray in moments of desperate pain—thereby positing a momentary, metaphorical God who exists to respond to our felt loss of control. Such metaphors arise in ordinary experience, whether we articulate them or not. Wit like Blumenberg’s exposes the precarity of such momentary symbols.

The supertranslatability of metaphor  91 The various chapters of Die nackte Wahrheit show that the Heideggerian model of truth as “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit), far from being a lost feature of pre-Socratic wisdom, has fully come of age in modernity.74 However, most modern thinkers condemn the effort to disrobe the truth for a variety of reasons. Following Pascal, it might be for reasons of piety, or, following Nietzsche, a sense of resignation at the search for ultimate truths that have no ultimate core and only seem ultimate when they confirm clichés.75 After Kant, such a position could derive from the insight that we can only grasp certain truths ex negativo, and it is extremely difficult not to put our trust in claims that overstate what we can reasonably claim to hold in that negative grasp. A notable exception here is Freud, whose dogged rhetoric of truth-seeking Blumenberg interprets as a disingenuous intellectual vice. Blumenberg does not touch on Heidegger in this manuscript, but he would likely deride the latter’s perspective on the clearing of Being as thoroughly unmodern. Across its chapters, Die nackte Wahrheit puts human ingenuity back in the center of the universe, where Heidegger had wanted to posit the depersonalized “meaning of Being.” The translator of Heidegger’s Basic Concepts explains that Heidegger does not intend “guidewords” (Grundbegriffe) to be rhetorical devices that perplex us through their ambiguity. That is, we are not supposed to take them as aesthetic offerings or dialectical spurs, but rather as “an opening into the fundamental experience of being itself.”76 This is the powerfully seductive promise (familiar in the afterlives that are promised in many religious traditions) that after decentering the human, stripping away the social, biological, and economic conditions of human life, a special form of experience will nevertheless remain available for humans. More recently, object-oriented ontology makes a similar appeal to our desire to put down the heavy burden of human consciousness in order to participate in the universe the way inanimate objects do.77 Blumenberg would stoically deny the basic principle that truth is more accessible outside of human consciousness. In a short text written for a university newsletter, he describes retention of the human perspective as the one thing that all academic research (Wissenschaft) has in common. He describes Wissenschaft’s effect as rendering its practitioners harder to seduce.78 How appropriate, then, that his favorite philosophers articulate reasons not to be seduced by the risqué rhetoric of truth as nudity—and that they counsel their readers to accept that final truths exist only in their mediated forms, dressed in metaphoric “clothing.” Die nackte Wahrheit goes on to show where the metaphor of naked truth itself quickly turns darkly humorous when it takes up the issue of sexuality. Blumenberg points out that the Artemis and Acteon myth touches on naked truth metaphorics, but above all that it blends meanings: “Two moments have run together here: the erotic one of seeing a naked goddess, and the mythic one of seeing a god as he is, and not as he wants to reveal himself.”79 When the nudity of anthropomorphic gods is figured explicitly, the mythographer punishes the transgressive encounter with naked divine truth with fitting severity. Then, in a one-page section of Die Nackte Wahrheit, entitled

92  The supertranslatability of metaphor “Reversals” (Umkehrungen), Blumenberg explains how the metaphor of the naked truth is not fundamentally anthropomorphic since it must only convey the mechanical removal of obstructions that obfuscate the kernel of a matter, but that the “Armenian satirist Jerwand Otjan” sexualizes the metaphor of the naked truth to make a callous joke: “Why is the truth raped so often? Because she is always naked.”80 Without registering the misogynistic connotations or rape-shaming perspective in this joke, Blumenberg writes off the joke’s personification of the truth as an unnecessary supplement to the metaphor’s effect of presenting truth as desirable in naked form. Like many representations of gender intended to amuse, this one has the disturbing effect of naturalizing sexual violence as a normal condition of gender relations. But for that effect, it must first personify “truth” as an entity with a violable body. The comedian, Blumenberg claims, can only feminize truth in the first place because of the accident of the word’s feminine grammatical gender in German (die Wahrheit). As with the discussion of the Artemis myth, he considers the reference to sexual violation an accidental interference of the nudity metaphor’s semantic links. Metaphor’s tendency to suggest taboo sexual content, I would argue, is similar to the “tendentiousness,” or tendency to provoke controversy to which Freud dedicates a chapter of Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. One of the social functions of metaphor is to introduce double-entendre, overlaid sexual meanings—think of French euphemisms like grimper aux rideaux (climbing the curtains) to evoke wild sex or la petite mort (the little death) to describe orgasm. As linguist Mark Turner notes in his discussion of metaphor: “One of the cognitive advantages of a blended space is its freedom to deal in all the vivid specifics […] of both input spaces.”81 The most “vivid specific” feature of nudity is its associations with human nudity—whose semantic field includes arousal of the beholder and the vulnerability of the nude.

Conclusion In a provocative analogy from the opening of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche pictures truth as a coy, hotly pursued woman. The comparison cannot be translated into English if the interference of German grammatical gender is what naturalizes the metaphor of personified truth’s female gender. Like the pseudo-religion of Blumenberg’s “Prayer of an Atheologian,” these jokes deal with topics that convention sets off limits. But as shown at the end of the last section, not all sex jokes about “the naked truth” are emancipatory—humor (like other discourses around sexuality) often serves a demeaning and exclusionary function, as seen in casual reference to the rape of truth. It may be mere coincidence that truth is feminine in Greek, Latin, and most Romance languages,82 as well as in German. In all these cases, it is not a semantically specific attribution, but rather the fact that all the words for truth have standardized de-adjectival noun suffixes that

The supertranslatability of metaphor  93 make the noun feminine. Yet authors have read significance into the gender of “truth” in these languages as confidently as Heidegger saw significance in the etymology of ἀλήθεια, where the α-privative negates λήθη, meaning “forgetting,” “concealment,” or “oblivion,” so that “truth” becomes the opposite of forgetting. We cannot even write the word truth without introducing a language-specific set of metaphors through the accident of the concept’s lexical sign. For Blumenberg, metaphor transmits language from an imagistic type of non-understanding into comprehensible discourse. Translation does the same, and the famous invisibility of translation makes it tend even more than metaphor to “absolutization” wherein its derivative nature goes unacknowledged. Recurringly throughout his work, Blumenberg indicates that translation is the tool by which philosophical metaphors are transmitted. In 1946, Blumenberg’s insight aligns with Heidegger’s discussion of preSocratic philosophy: translation into Latin obscured the potency of many ancient concepts. But the similarity ends there. Where Heidegger refuses to call this potency “metaphor,” instead opting to see a perfect unity (Gleichursprünglichkeit) of image and idea in Greek thought, Blumenberg regards metaphoric images as equally manifest in Greek, Latin, and other languages in the history of philosophy. And while Blumenberg would go far to avoid giving the impression that he supports any kind of linguistic nationalism, that very aversion may have led him to downplay the role linguistic specificity plays in the transmission of metaphors. Yet anyone who has performed even a little translation of non-fiction knows that metaphors that seem merely ornamental or incidental (as the result of a word’s polysemy) are stripped away to the detriment of a text’s full meaning in the course of a “rigorous” translation. Translation, like metaphor, has a transformative effect on the circulation of ideas. If metaphor is often presented as a double-edged figure—both veiling the truth and making truth available in language—then translation performs a similar function: it conceals one version of a text in the act of presenting another. If the specifics of language, like the female grammatical gender of die Wahrheit, can give rise to a gendered metaphor, then translation into a language without grammatical gender like English or Persian, will at the least obscure the inspiration behind such a metaphor. Indeed, the metaphor will only survive translation at all if the text explicitly presents one, as in the famous opening of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “Supposing truth is a woman.”83 If metaphor conveys the affective core of philosophical thought, then translators lose much by overlooking it, even at the expense of spoiling the wit of the source text and creating cumbersome translations that are excessively freighted with philological commentary. To bend to the norm of consistency in the translation of etymologically rich terms would risk missing the opportunity to convey the imagistic “substructure of thought.”84 A metaphorological approach to the translation of philosophy reveals the layers of meaning that may not even

94  The supertranslatability of metaphor have been evident to the authors themselves. At its best, metaphorology is not a game of catching authors at their least self-aware; it is a matter of reading more comprehensively in order to understand authors in the fullness of their own embeddedness in linguistic, cultural, and discursive history.

Notes 1 Lavinia Heller uses the word “inconspicuous” (unauffällig) to describe the issue; she draws on Gideon Toury’s argument that Translation Studies can only proceed “descriptively” (not prescriptively) since the reader is so much less conscious than the translation theorist of the fact that a given text is a translated one. Even translators are mostly only required to cater to the norms of the target language. Heller, Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation, 71. The problem is akin to the famous “translator’s invisibility” that Lawrence Venuti diagnoses in the anglophone context in Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility. 2 A large-scale case of forgotten linguistic context is postmedieval reception of the medieval translations of Arabic commentaries on Plato and Aristotle into Latin. On this history, see Montgomery, Science in Translation. 3 For a short and subtle reading of this publication, see Bajohr, “Ein Anfang mit der Sprache.” 4 Blumenberg regards Heidegger’s work as excessively influential on postwar German philosophy and repeatedly takes him down by dismissively accusing him of obscurantist legerdemain. At one point, Blumenberg complains about “the insecurity that his indeterminacies unleashed” among his students. Blumenberg, The Laughter of the Thracian Woman, 118. He criticizes Heidegger’s style elsewhere for offering “a Dorado for the urge to parody.” Blumenberg, “Die Suggestion des beinahe Selbstgekonnten,” 91–92. He even chalks up the popularity of Heidegger’s “Being-unto-Death” to the morbid atmosphere of interwar Germany. Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, 92–93. 5 In the mid-twentieth century, leading English- and German-speaking philosophers (I.A. Richards, Hans Blumenberg) and literary theorists (Max Black, Hugo Friedrich) theorized metaphor’s role in linguistic meaning production. In the late twentieth century, cognitive theories of the metaphor (George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner) found in metaphor a capacity to express foundational intuitions about the world. Around that time, translation theory gained visibility in the anglophone sphere through George Steiner’s After Babel (1975), but the polemical opening chapter of Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibilty (1995) introduced American scholars to a discipline developed especially in Germany, the Netherlands, and Israel. 6 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 3. 7 These are the central motifs analyzed in Blumenberg, The Laughter of the Thracian Woman; Blumenberg, Höhlenausgänge; Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth”; Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator. 8 Blumenberg, History, Metaphor, Fables, 168. 9 Blumenberg, “An Anthropological Approach to Rhetoric,” 433. 10 The critique of ontology occupies Blumenberg throughout his work, as in his programmatic claim that we cannot eradicate metaphors because they emerge from questions posed “in the ground of our existence.” “Absolute metaphors ‘answer’ the supposedly naïve, in principle unanswerable questions, whose rel-

The supertranslatability of metaphor  95 evance lies quite simply in the fact that they cannot be brushed aside, since we do not pose them ourselves but find them already posed in the ground of our existence.” Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 14. 11 Blumenberg’s reputation in the United States has been linked to his defense of secular modernity for the nearly three decades between Richard Rorty’s review of Robert Wallace’s translation of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983) and Robert Savage’s translation of Paradigms for a Metaphorology (2010). Rorty, “Against Belatedness”; Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology. 12 Blumenberg, 62–63. 13 Blumenberg, 63. The word even transforms, once, with translation history when Maschine “enters the German language in the seventeenth century as a purely technical term for the tools used in siege warfare and fortress construction.” 14 Heller, Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation, 158. 15 Aristotle, Poetics, 32. 16 Garin, History of Italian Philosophy, 557ry o 17 Paul Ricoeur sees this feature of Aristotle’s definition of metaphor as crucial for understanding metaphor as a cognitive act, reducible neither to its rhetorical effects nor to its aesthetic ones. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, 17–19. 18 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 5. 19 Blanton, “Reoccupying Metaphor,” 12. In Blumenberg’s own words: “for the historical transformation of a metaphor brings to light the metakinetics of the historical horizons of meaning and ways of seeing within which concepts undergo their modifications” Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 5. The concept is especially developed in Müller-Sievers, “Kyklophorology: Hans Blumenberg and the Intellectual History of Technics.” 20 Blumenberg, History, Metaphor, Fables, 33. 21 Blumenberg, 37. 22 Blumenberg, 36; Blumenberg, “Die sprachliche Wirklichkeit der Philosophie,” 430. 23 Heidegger’s focus on the expressive potential of individual words struck Paul Celan, who took keen notice of his favorite authors’ word choices, including Heidegger. Celan underlined the sentence from page 209 of Der Satz vom Grund: “Der Satz vom Grund sagt: Nichts ist ohne Grund. Nunmehr spricht jedes Wort des Satzes auf seine Weise.” Celan, La Bibliothèque philosophique, 339. 24 Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 23. 25 See Heidbrink, “Das Eigene Im Anderen: Martin Heideggers Begriff Der Übersetzung,” 363. 26 Walter Bröcker to Hans Blumenberg September 24, 1960. 27 The dérives of derivation are precisely what Julia Kristeva plays on when she writes: “Le sens vraisemblable fait semblant de se préoccuper avec la verité objective.” In French, etymology invites not light metaphors but the personification of meaning as an entity capable of engaging in deceptive behavior. Kristeva, “La productivité dite texte,” 61. 28 This dictionary’s founding editor, Erich Rothacker, oriented his whole approach to conceptual history on Blumenberg’s methods of metaphor history, as shown in their correspondence and in their interactions during the meetings of the Senate Commission of Conceptual History. See Kranz, “Begriffsgeschichte Institutionell,” 152. 29 Ritter and Eisler, Historisches Wörterbuch Der Philosophie., Vol. 12, 172. 30 Blumenberg to Bröcker, October 14, 1960. 31 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 80. 32 The inadequacy of such a criterion strikes, for instance, historian Alexander Demandt who notes that Kant, Marx, and Hitler all relied on nature imagery to describe world history: “but what does this bespeak? Linguistic indices only rise

96  The supertranslatability of metaphor to the level of symptoms in a totalizing theory, as shall not be achieved here and cannot be achieved. Within such a theory, these indices would simply never be lacking ….” Demandt, Metaphern für Geschichte, 435. 33 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 79. 34 Blumenberg, The Laughter of the Thracian Woman, 122. 35 Blumenberg, Zu den Sachen und zurück, 12. 36 Quoted in Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 5. 37 Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth.” 38 Heller, Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation, 144. 39 Heller, 179. 40 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 3. 41 Blumenberg, 14. 42 See Hawkins, “Theory of a Practice.” 43 White, The Structure of Metaphor. 44 In the posthumously published manuscript on truth metaphorics, he even explains that the staying power of fables may simply have to do with the fact that their brevity made them ideal translation and versification exercises. Blumenberg, “Die nackte Wahrheit,” III:122. 45 As discussed above, that naïve view of translation can be read as an effect of “background metaphorics.” Cf. Heller, Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation, 158. 46 Blumenberg, Die Verführbarkeit des Philosophen, 94. 47 For a full exposition of Heidegger’s case about the inextricability of thought and perception, see chapter one, section “Grund—ground or reason?” 48 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 3. 49 On the importance of Witz for German thought, see Hill, The Soul of Wit. 50 It has been argued that Heidegger borrowed Walter F. Otto’s vision of the lost authenticity of a time before the rational-sensation dualism. In The Gods of Greece (1929), Otto described the capacity to witness the emergence of Being that got lost in the Greek-speaking world after the emergence of the Homeric stories about anthropomorphic gods. Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, 7. 51 Blumenberg, Begriffe in Geschichten, 242. 52 Blumenberg, 244. 53 Blumenberg, 247. 54 And this is very much confirmed when we consider that Eugene Nida, one of the foundational theorists of translation, developed the concept of “dynamic equivalence,” that is, adapting the text to cultural differences between the early Christians and contemporary readers, especially in the world’s indigenous cultures. 55 Turner, The Literary Mind. 56 The exception is The Laughter of the Thracian Woman. It seems clear that the humor in the anecdote recommended it as “a protohistory of theory” to be retold over two millennia. Nevertheless, in a posthumously published note, Blumenberg laments “the misfortune of the ‘protohistory’ at play that it lacks some seriousness.” “Afterword” in Blumenberg, The Laughter of the Thracian Woman, 158. 57 Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 162. 58 Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, 94. 59 Letter to Robert Wallace of May 2, 1985. The same letter is quoted in Rüdiger Zill’s afterword to Blumenberg, Die nackte Wahrheit, 2019, 189. 60 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 14. 61 Letter to Robert Wallace of May 2, 1985. Qtd. In Blumenberg, Die nackte Wahrheit, 2019, 189.

The supertranslatability of metaphor  97 62 Blumenberg, “Die nackte Wahrheit,” III:110 italics added. Blumenberg, Die nackte Wahrheit, 2019, 133. 63 Blumenberg, “Die nackte Wahrheit,” III:113. Blumenberg, Die nackte Wahrheit, 2019, 136. 64 Metaphor is evaluated in an ambiguous way: it is at once regarded as a sign of intuitive genius, as Aristotle says in Poetics, but it is also a deviation from the truth itself, as he assigns it a role within oratory (which thus means deviant from philosophy for Aristotle) in Rhetoric. Derrida describes the ambiguity of metaphor’s originality through the image of the sun, which is both object and somehow exterior to objects: If the sun is already and always metaphorical, it is not completely natural. It is already and always a lustre: one might call it an artificial construction if this could have any meaning in the absence of nature. For if the sun is not entirely natural, what can remain in nature that is natural? This object which is the most natural in nature has in itself the capacity to go out of itself; it joins with artificial light, it suffers eclipse and ellipse, has always itself been other: the father, seed, fire, the eye, the egg, and so on, all of them so many further things, providing the measure of good and bad, or clear and obscure metaphor […] Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” 53. 65 Derrida, 18. 66 This problem has been central to descriptive translation studies. See Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, 70–86. 67 Blumenberg, “Die nackte Wahrheit,” III: 119–120. Blumenberg, Die nackte Wahrheit, 2019, 143–44. 68 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 47. 69 Blumenberg, 48. 70 Blumenberg diagnoses this dangerous mythic thinking as solipsistic, especially in the case of Hitler’s supposed claim that when he dies, he will take “a world” down with him. Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, 80–85. 71 Blumenberg, Die nackte Wahrheit, 2019, 130. 72 Blumenberg, “Götterschwund (Manuskripttitel).” Gebet des Atheologen Gott, ich danke dir, daß du nicht existierst. Gäbe es dich, käme ich in die schreckliche Verlegenheit, dich anklagen, dich beschimpfen zu müssen, ja deine Nichtexistenz zu wünschen. Das hast du mir erspart, indem du dich entschlossen hast, nicht da zu sein. The “atheist’s prayer” (Atheistengebet) from the same file: Lieber Gott, sollte es dich geben, laß mich wissen, ob ein Gott Humor hat. Ich muß es wissen, damit ich weiß, ob ich wünschen soll, daß es dich gibt. 73 Blumenberg develops and returns to the concept of reoccupation, which he defines most clearly with regard to the twelfth-century Enlightenment in Legitimacy of the Modern Age. “What mainly occurred in the process that is interpreted as secularization, at least (so far) in all but a few recognizable and specific instances, should be described not as the transposition (Umsetzung) of authentically theological contents into secularized alienation from their origin but rather as the reoccupation (Umbesetzung) of answer positions that had become vacant and whose corresponding questions could not be eliminated.” Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 65. 74 Blumenberg usually expresses his differences with Heidegger indirectly. In “The Naked Truth,” for instance, he writes: “Nature loves to hide, the dark Heraclitus supposedly said. It will be a long history leading up to the awful, comprehensive thesis after the end of philosophy, Being itself goes into hiding of its own volition. The Enlightenment had this problem to some extent; for it had to try to

98  The supertranslatability of metaphor explain why Enlightenment had been lacking for so long.” Blumenberg, “Die nackte Wahrheit,” I:125. Blumenberg, Die nackte Wahrheit, 2019, 150. 75 Blumenberg traces a progression in Nietzsche’s discovery of the function of art as the veil of truth after he became disillusioned with truth. As a young reader of Schopenhauer, he believes that Schopenhauer gives up too easily on truth, and admires the French moralists’ insights, but wonders if they go too far in presenting truths about human psychology that are disconcerting (WW VIII 61). Then, as a young philologist, he admits that “pure pleasure in studying the ancients” is rare, and that the work is actually “revolting” (letter to Gersdorff, April 6, 1867). Later, he accuses Goncourt and Zola of writing about ugly things out of “love of ugliness”—although the whole reason “we have art [is] so that we do not destroy ourselves with too much truth (an der Wahrheit zu Grunde gehen)” (WW XIX 228–9). Blumenberg explains that truth must be left veiled for Nietzsche because “seeing through the transient net and the last veil—that would be total exhaustion and the end of all creative work” (XIV 15). Blumenberg calls Nietzsche’s insight the “nullity of possessing truth” since pursuing truth results in nothing more than a waste of the time that could be spent regarding the beautiful concealment: “nakedness distracts from the casings that fall off with it” Blumenberg, “Die nackte Wahrheit,” I:10, 12. 76 Heidegger, Basic Concepts, xiii. 77 Harman, Tool-Being. 78 Blumenberg, Schriften zur Technik, 137. 79 Blumenberg, “Die nackte Wahrheit,” I:86. Blumenberg, Die nackte Wahrheit, 2019, 50. 80 Blumenberg, Die nackte Wahrheit, 2019, 50. 81 Turner, The Literary Mind, 61. 82 Anomalously, Romanian uses a neuter corruption of the Latin phrase ad de verum. 83 Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, 1. 84 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, 5.

Bibliography Aristotle. Poetics. Edited by Richard Janko. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing, 1987. Bajohr, Hannes. “Ein Anfang mit der Sprache. HANS BLUMENBERGS ERSTE PHILOSOPHISCHE VERÖFFENTLICHUNG.” ZfL BLOG (blog), August 13, 2018. https://www​.zflprojekte​.de​/zfl​-blog​/2018​/08​/13​/hannes​-bajohr​-ein​-anfang​ -mit​-der​-sprache​-hans​-blumenbergs​-erste​-philosophische​-veroeffentlichung/. Bambach, Charles R. Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Blanton, C. D. “Reoccupying Metaphor: On the Legitimacy of the Noncon­ ceptual.” Humanities 4, no. 1 (March 2015): 181–97. https://doi​.org​/10​.3390​ /h4010181. Blumenberg, Hans. “An Anthropological Approach to Rhetoric.” In After Philosophy: End or Transformation, edited by Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas A. McCarthy, translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. ———. Begriffe in Geschichten. 1. Aufl. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1998.

The supertranslatability of metaphor  99 ———. Die Lesbarkeit der Welt. 1. Aufl. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981. ———. Die nackte Wahrheit. Edited by Rüdiger Zill. Originalausgabe. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2019. ———. “Die nackte Wahrheit.” Marbach am Neckar. HS.2003.0001. Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. Accessed August 26, 2017. https://www​.dla​-marbach​ .de​/katalog​/handschriften/. ———. “Die ontologische Distanz : Eine Untersuchung über die Krisis der Phänomenologie Husserls.” Habilitationsschrift. Kiel, 1950. ———. “Die sprachliche Wirklichkeit der Philosophie.” Hamburger Akademische Rundschau 1, no. 10 (1946): 428–31. ———. “Die Suggestion des beinahe Selbstgekonnten.” In Ein mögliches Selbstverständnis : Aus dem Nachlass. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1997. ———. Die Verführbarkeit des Philosophen. 1st edition. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005. ———. “Götterschwund (Manuskripttitel).” Marbach am Neckar, etwa] - 1991 1985. Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. ———. History, Metaphor, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader. Translated by Joe Paul Kroll, Hannes Bajohr, and Florian Fuchs. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. http://www​.pdcnet​.org​/oom​/service​?url​_ver​=Z39​.88​-2004​&rft​_val​ _fmt=​&rft​.i​​muse_​​id​=gf​​pj​_20​​19​_00​​40​_00​​01​_00​​19​_00​​30​&svc​_id​=info​:www​ .pdcnet​.org​/collection. ———. Höhlenausgänge. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989. ———. Lebenszeit und Weltzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986. http://hdl​ .handle​.net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015011704940. ———. “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation.” In Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by David Michael Levin, 30–86. California: University of California Press, 1993. ———. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. ———. Schriften zur Technik. Edited by Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler. Originalausgabe. Berlin: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2015. ———. “Shipwreck With Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence.” In Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. ———. The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory. Translated by Spencer Hawkins. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. ———. Work on Myth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. ———. Zu den Sachen und zurück. 1 Aufl. [Frankfurt am Main]: Suhrkamp, 2002. Celan, Paul. La Bibliothèque philosophique/Die philosophische Bibliothek. Paris: Ed. Ens, 2004. Clark, Kenneth. The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. Folio Soc edition. The Folio Society, 2010. Demandt, Alexander. Metaphern für Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historisch-politischen Denken. München: C.H. Beck, 1978. http://hdl​.handle​.net​ /2027/[u]: mdp.39015014177292. Derrida, Jacques. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” New Literary History 6, no. 1 (Autumn 1974): 5–74. Freud, Sigmund. The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. Translated by Joyce Crick. New edition. London; New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 2002.

100  The supertranslatability of metaphor Garin, Eugenio. History of Italian Philosophy. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. Harman, Graham. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. First edition. Chicago: Open Court, 2002. Heidbrink, Ludger. “Das Eigene Im Anderen: Martin Heideggers Begriff Der Übersetzung.” In Übersetzung Und Dekonstruktion, edited by Alfred Hirsch. Suhrkamp, 1997. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Concepts. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998. ———. “Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, 17–86. His Works. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Heller, Lavinia. Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation. Berlin: Frank & Timme GmbH, 2013. Hill, Carl. The Soul of Wit: Joke Theory From Grimm to Freud. First edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Jones, Karen Sparck. “R.H. Richens: Translation in the NUDE.” In Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, edited by W. John Hutchins, Vol. 97, 263. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000. https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​ /sihols​.97​.24jon. Kranz, Margarita. “Begriffsgeschichte Institutionell: Die Senatskommission Für Begriffsgeschichte Der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (1956–1966) Darstellung Und Dokumente.” Archiv Für Begriffsgeschichte 53 (2011): 153– 226. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/24361886. Kristeva, Julia. “La productivité dite texte.” Communications 11, no. 1 (1968): 59– 83. https://doi​.org​/10​.3406​/comm​.1968​.1157. Montgomery, Scott. Science in Translation. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2000. https://www​.press​.uchicago​.edu​/ucp​/books​/book​/chicago​/S​/bo3623837​ .html. Müller-Sievers, Helmut. “Kyklophorology: Hans Blumenberg and the Intellectual History of Technics.” Telos 2012, no. 158 (March 26, 2012): 155–70. https:// doi​.org​/10​.3817​/0312158021. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good & Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989. Ricoeur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Robert Czerny. La Métaphore Vive. English. Toronto ; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1977. http://hdl​.handle​ .net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015035318974. Ritter, Joachim, and Rudolf Eisler. Historisches Wörterbuch Der Philosophie. Basel: Schwabe, 1971. http://hdl​.handle​.net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015014314499. Rorty, Richard. “Review of Against Belatedness, by Hans Blumenberg and Robert Wallace.” London Review of Books, June 16, 1983. https://www​.lrb​.co​.uk​/the​ -paper​/v05​/n11​/richard​-rorty​/against​-belatedness. Schatzki, Theodore R. “Early Heidegger on Being, the Clearing, and Realism.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 43, no. 168 (1) (1989): 80–102. Toury, Gideon. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Benjamins Translation Library; Vol. 4 viii, p. 311. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub., 1995. http://hdl​.handle​.net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015049624250. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

The supertranslatability of metaphor  101 Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London; New York: Routledge, 2008. White, Roger M. “The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor Works.” In Philosophical Theory. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.

3

Retranslating Freud

At our historical moment, the basic questions of science are subject to ever new reformulations within scientific discourses themselves and simultaneously subject to popular distrust of scientific expertise on topics like pandemics and vaccines, even on the shape of the earth, and—most dangerously—on the urgency of fast action to forestall the effects of climate change. In debates where the legitimacy of scientific thought is at stake, translators are interlocutors not only in the history of science but in the conversation on what counts as science at all. Throughout the twentieth century, psychoanalysis was such a polarizing “scientific” field, which explains why translators of Freud felt that so much was riding on their translation choices. In postwar France, Jean Laplanche was among the most prominent defenders of Freud’s ongoing scientific relevance for practicing psychoanalysts. When discussing his own translations of Sigmund Freud’s works into French at a 1993 conference in São Paulo, Laplanche assures his Brazilian interlocutors that the foundational insights of psychoanalysis are fully translatable, at least into French: “Our choice is to put the French reader in the same position as the German reader. When a passage is ambiguous, we leave it just as ambiguous in French.”1 If anyone could put this conceptually ambitious plan into practice, it would be Jean Laplanche, the post-Lacanian psychoanalyst most concerned with the linguistic problems raised by the translation of Freud’s writings. In 1969, Laplanche published a translation of Freud’s essay “On the Introduction to Narcissism,” his first translation of Freud into French, as part of a collection of translated essays on sexuality.2 Not only does Laplanche theorize and practice the translation of Freud, he also defines the concept of the unconscious as the product of children’s attempts at “translation” of adult experience. It is hardly unsurprising, then, when Laplanche, co-author of a volume on The Language of Psychoanalysis along with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, adamantly claims that Freud was not just a seductive writer, but a systematic thinker whose use of terminology must be carefully traced and examined. He quotes Freud in the same interview, saying “People say that there is no technical language in Freud. That is not true. He says, ‘our termini technici, our technical terms, DOI: 10.4324/9781003348559-4

Retranslating Freud 

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unsere Fachsprache, our language of the expert, gives limits. It limits words that are overly loose.’”3 The multi-lingual, appositive translations of the words “technical terms” might simply reflect Laplanche’s embarrassment at having initially resorted to Latin, or they might betray his belief that the very concept of technical language is linguistically or situationally specific. The translation history of Freud’s vocabulary into French and English betrays the situated interests of postwar thinkers in recuperating Freud; and the fact that this recuperation involved the call for more terminologically precise translations is one of the starting points of this chapter. As it unfolds, this chapter contextualizes more deeply the challenge of representing the polysemy of German-language vocabulary when translating into highly Latin-lexified languages. Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt would argue that Freud’s work consists of a kind of meditation on the crystal-clear German language through the entirely cryptic language of the other.4 Although Laplanche observes this problem closely, he refuses to treat translation as an opportunity to expose readers to the complexity of concepts through differential translation. In fact, Laplanche expresses embarrassment at the chaotic use of terminology in the widely read translations by Vladimir “Serge” Jankélévitch, the first French translator of Freud, who was less terminologically consistent than his British counterparts even though both were working under Freud’s blessing. For instance, Jankélévitch claimed in the introduction to the 1927 Essais de psychanalyse that he was treating Freud as much like a scientist as Freud viewed himself, greeting a new conceptual system with a new terminological apparatus. Despite his scientific intentions, though, Jankélévitch translated the German adjective “unconscious” (unbewusst), arguably the core concept of psychoanalysis, differentially: sometimes as inconscient and elsewhere as sans s’en rendre compte.5 The 1968 edition of the Essais, revised for the Petite Bibliothèque Payot, attempted to iron out some of these inconsistencies and align the terminology with that encountered in the evolving discourse around psychoanalytic practice. While inconsistencies could be justified on the grounds that Freud did not always use his own terms in their terminological sense, the Lacanian school roundly rejected such liberties. The standardizing zeal of the Lacanian school had an even bigger target after the Editions de Gallimard commissioned translations of Freud’s work involving at least 24 different translators—a decision that introduced rampant inconsistencies in their uses of psychoanalytic terms. Against Laplanche’s calls to standardize terminology in his interviews and publications (such as the programmatic translators’ field report Traduire Freud and the lexicon Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse), translation theorist Antoine Berman defended the early French Freud translations for their terminological variety.6 Berman’s defense would not decide the matter, however, and the Presses Universitaires de France took action to combat the excesses of these early translations, under the direction of the same group that published Traduire Freud: Laplanche served as the main

104  Retranslating Freud editor along with the Germanist André Bourguignon and psychiatrist Pierre Cotet. A leading figure in French psychoanalysis, Laplanche completed a medical degree so that he could work with patients suffering psychosis and learned German so that he could read Heidegger. He then wrote a dissertation on Hölderlin—a poet who both suffered psychosis and was Heidegger’s favorite German-language writer. Laplanche’s approach to translation is more medical than Heideggerian: while acknowledging inconsistencies, nuances, and developments in Freud’s thought, he treats terminology as diagnostic instruments, not to be modified for the sake of a more readable, interesting, or even more accurate sentence. As shown below, nearly the exact opposite movement—from prioritizing terminological consistency towards prioritizing literary effects over terminology—occurred between the two major Freud translations in the United States. Very different views prevail about the status of the Freudian corpus: whether it is a quasi-biblical text whose terms are more immutable than scientific ones can ever be; or a philosophically brilliant, but scientifically outdated, starting point whose value for psychotherapeutic research and practice lies primarily in its thought-provoking style. These views lead to radically divergent approaches to the question of whether equivalents must be found for his terms. The concept of equivalence has been controversial in translation theory ever since the first phases of the discipline. When Walter Benjamin wrote his programmatic “Task of the Translator” (1923), which ends by claiming that interlinear translations of the Bible comprise the ideal of all translation, he was inspired by Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber’s philologically precise translation of the Jewish scripture. Buber and Rosenzweig published their translation at a time when anti-Semitic rhetoric in Germany was shifting from religious intolerance to outright racist hatred. Rosenzweig set the translation’s focus on capturing the dictionary definitions of each classical Hebrew word even at the cost of syntactic coherence—much like Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles. As Martin Jay describes it, the Rosenzweig–Buber translation’s prioritization of “equivalence” polarized readers: Gershom Scholem found the diction too precious while Siegfried Kracauer disparaged its literalism as fundamentalist.7 Sacred texts have inspired word-for-word translation strategies ever since the time of Jerome of Stridon. When translators focus on the word-level of meaning, however, their work risks polarizing readers because it frustrates the general expectation that linguistic meaning is construed in contexts from the sentence-level to the norms of the genre or discourse. In 1947, Eugene Nida wrote an influential treatise on biblical translation, in which he introduced the thesis that even a sacred text like the Bible must be understood as communicative and thus translated idiomatically.8 This stance represented a radical departure from the long-held tradition that gave maximal value to ad litteram translation methods. By 1969, Nida argued that the untenable goal of lexical equivalence should be replaced by

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context-sensitive forms of equivalence—what he called “functional” and later “dynamic equivalence.” Later translation theorists (like Bassnett, Van Leeuwen, and Venuti), who challenge Nida’s claims, depart even further from literalism. Venuti finds in Nida’s Bible translation theory a dogmatic view of the source text’s intelligibility across time, language, and culture such that Nida betrays his assumption of a “transcendental concept of humanity that remains unchanged over time and space.”9 Venuti sees dogmatism in the ahistorical approach to conceptuality that underlies Nida’s more elastic concept of equivalence. Even when translators attend closely to word meanings, fundamentalist assumptions about the text’s authority are as deleterious to nuanced translation when reading the Freudian corpus as when reading the Bible. While Laplanche does not explicitly demand literalism in translation, he believes that French and English can incorporate a version of Freud’s German. Such a project must at least be attempted, he thinks, since, like poetry, psychoanalysis “does not just work with ideas, but with the expression of ideas in language.”10 Laplanche’s theory of terminological translation sacrifices conceptual nuance for a form of textual loyalty to Freud, the maître de penser.11 As a result, the terminological consistency that Laplanche seeks effaces some historical and semantic motifs from the Freudian corpus. That erasure can be seen as a missed opportunity considering that Laplanche conceives of his translation theory as coincident with advocacy for Freudian psychoanalysis. Laplanche dubbed the process of coming to terms with one’s desires a form of “translation,” a figure that Freud developed. In Freud’s figurative use, “translation” (Übertragung; also translated as “transference” in anglophone psychoanalysis) reformulates unconscious material to facilitate its becoming conscious. To give one example of the central role of “translation” in Freud’s writings, it is helpful to turn to his account of the dreaming mind. The principle biological purpose of dreams—according to Freud—is to prevent repressed unconscious material from disturbing our sleep.12 The waking mind expends a great deal of energy repressing shameful thoughts and feelings, but the dreaming mind cannot afford the energy required for full repression, so shame is translated into elaborate wishes, which are then fulfilled in the dream. Dream content is then translated again into the memory of the dream (which further reduces the risk of the unpleasant experience that the dreamer might become conscious of the repressed wish). Subsequent dream interpretation involves translation once more in the retelling of the dream (“secondary revision”) and yet again during its final interpretation (and this interpretation must yet again be translated by the analysand into their own understanding of the dream’s significances). Freud sees forms of “translation” in “dreams; generalized hysterical, obsessive, and phobic symptomatology; parapraxes; fetishes; the choice of suicidal means; and the analyst’s interpretations.”13 In Freud’s language, “translating” statements, actions, and dreams also comprises the analytic process. As a key metaphoric source

106  Retranslating Freud for Freud’s conceptualization of psychoanalysis, translation has always mattered to Freudians. Building on a recurrent metaphor for psychic processes throughout Freud’s work, Laplanche draws on the figure of translation to describe the child’s struggle to understand adult behavior. When asked whether he sees a link between interlingual translation and his psychoanalytic use of the term “translation,” Laplanche demurs: You are pressing me to go into a point that I have still to elaborate. The question raises two related issues: first, my own tasks as a translator of Freud’s work into French, and secondly, Freud’s own use of the term, “translation” to describe human existence as a series of translation attempts. In this latter sense, of course, it is not just words that are translated. So I do not want to jump into making a synthesis of the two senses here: rather, to put them each in their own perspective. They are both quite separate, and one has to say that there can be theoretical conflicts involved in trying to create a synthesis. In both cases, though, that is, the activity of the analyst and that of the wordtranslator, both must beware of interpretation (or “constructions” in analysis).14 In keeping with this response, Laplanche does not compare the unconscious with language; in fact, his insistence that the unconscious cannot differentiate between signifiers (and is thus un-structured and nothing like a language) is one of his main disputes with Lacan’s work. However, if one were to discern similarities between interlingual translation and intrapsychic translation, in spite of Laplanche, then untranslatability would surely be the tertium comparationis. After all, Laplanche characterizes psychic acts as “translation attempts” rather than as satisfactory translations. There is only space here for a brief sketch of Laplanche’s deployment of the concept of Nachträglichkeit to characterize the child–mother relationship as a translation problem. It is the point of overlap between Laplanche’s interest in interlingual translation and other forms of translation. According to Laplanche, adult motivations perplex a child in the same way that difficult terminology perplexes a translator. The “enigmatic signifier” is the child’s interpretation of caregivers’ motivations. Laplanche sees the child’s attempt to make sense of adult motivation as part of the entry to erotic life that Freud called “primal seduction,” an unconscious account of the foreignness of adult desires that forms the basis of the child’s own unconscious: “The ‘attentions of a mother’ or the ‘aggression of a father’ are seductive only because they are not transparent.”15 John Fletcher describes Laplanche’s theory of the “enigmatic signifier” as the children’s attempt to translate adult minds into terms comprehensible to a child: “the seductive excitations of the other’s desire as it bears on the subject [constitutes] … the ‘à traduire’, the (always yet?) to be translated.”16 Therefore, both the

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child who confronts the enigmatic signifier and the translator who confronts polysemous terminology engage in interpretation processes.

Translating Freud’s Nachträglichkeit In “The Signification of the Phallus,” Jacques Lacan had criticized translations of Sigmund Freud’s work for their lack of care with terminology, especially with the concept of “belatedness” (Nachträglichkeit), which the Stracheys had translated unsystematically as “belatedness” and “deferred action” among other morphologically unrelated choices. Since Laplanche’s developmental theory made strong use of Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, he made translation recommendations for the term, suggesting that it should be translated it as après-coup in French and “afterwardsness” in English.17 Like Lacan, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis also lament the inconsistency with which French and English translators have translated Nachträglichkeit, since such inconsistency makes it “impossible to trace its use.”18 Delineating Freudian language as terminology has the associated drawback of concealing its evocative connotations. Like other German terms, nachträglich is an ordinary word for “after the fact.” The psychoanalytic sense may draw on the verb form nachtragen, which the Grimm brothers define as in animo retinere aliquid, “to keep something in mind.” They also explicate its related meaning, “to begrude”: “to hold in memory an event that happened or struck a person in word or deed, in order to secretly grumble about it or to let the agent know from time to time, to avenge oneself for it.”19 If we replace “secretly” (heimlich) with “unconsciously” and the “agent” or “cause” (Urheber) with “the ego” or “conscious mind,” then “begrudging” (nachtragen) provides a good account of Freudian Nachträglichkeit. It is the polyvalent kind of concept that Barbara Cassin could have ranked among “the untranslatables.”20 The concept designates the potential of memories to trigger symptoms of mental illness when they are activated and reworked belatedly. Because symptoms only emerge post hoc, it remains indeterminate whether the traumatic moment was the early event that is remembered or the later point in time when the recollection takes place. Despite their differences, both Lacan and Laplanche see the unconscious as a reservoir of repression whose emergences into conscious life are characteristically untimely. The sense of “arriving too late” in the word “belated” captures something of the disruptiveness when the unconscious erupts into ordinary life: typically, in the return of early childhood trauma as late childhood or adult phobia, neurosis, or psychosomatic illness. Freudian “belatedness” is not better late than never, as the expression goes, because when what is retained in animo returns “after the fact,” the trauma acts like a grudge returning for vengeance, often to the detriment of the patient’s well-being. The late return of latent trauma disrupts our functioning by

108  Retranslating Freud interrupting our sense of continuity within the fabric of our experience, and, in the case of psychological symptoms that impede our normal functioning, the discontinuity undermines our sense of autonomy and self-knowledge. Jacques Lacan considered latent, traumatic memories to be “revised or even constituted for the first time” after later experiences, and that paradigm became a cornerstone of French psychoanalysis.21 Laplanche’s understanding of Nachträglichkeit begins with Freud’s prepsychoanalytic work. Laplanche locates Freud’s first articulation of the concept in the 1895 manuscript “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” where childhood experiences first become traumatic in hindsight (après-coup). [T]rauma consists of two moments. … First, there is the implantation of something coming from outside. And this experience, or the memory of it, must be reinvested in a second moment, and then it becomes traumatic. … You find [this theory] very carefully elaborated … in the famous case of Emma.22 Emma complains to Freud of a phobia of entering shops alone, a symptom that began in adulthood after she saw two shop clerks laughing—one was staring at her clothes whereas the non-staring other “had pleased her sexually” (by which Freud means that she found him attractive). She left the shop in a panic. Under analysis, it is discovered that she had been abused as a child when a shopkeeper had touched her vagina through her clothes and smiled. She later returned to the man’s shop alone (without incident). Four associations with the (still repressed) memory triggered the repressed traumatic response: sexual response, clothing, expression of amusement (smiling/laughter), and her being unaccompanied in a shop. “It might be said that it is quite usual, as happens here, for an association to pass through unconscious intermediate links until it comes to a conscious one.”23 According to Freud, the laughter in that context evoked the repressed memory of her abuser’s smile and thus brought on a traumatized response. The formerly repressed psychic pain became unpleasant for new reasons since it combined with her adult sexual feelings and accompanying sexual shame. Adult experience connected her repressed childhood abuse with sexuality for the first time, but, according to Laplanche, when she was abused as a child she was already struggling with disturbing enigmatic messages concerning adult sexuality.​ Once one learns the formula, belatedness becomes the source of narrative suspense in psychoanalytic case studies. Manfred Pfister defines suspense as the psychological consequence of receiving a high quantity of futureoriented information about a situation with a likely negative outcome.24 The “return of the repressed” is the negative outcome, and suspense mounts around a question of how bad the symptoms of trauma will be and how effectively psychoanalysis can manage it. Freud’s later, longer “History of an Infantile Neurosis” (better known as the Wolfman case) demonstrates

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Figure 3.1 Sigmund Freud, Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse: Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, Abhandlungen und Notizen aus den Jahren 1887-1902, 1856-1939.

how dramatically belatedness can work in Freudian case history. There Freud develops his notion of “screen memories,” memories of seemingly inconsequential childhood events that the conscious mind preserves vividly to bolster the repression of temporally proximate traumatic events. Screen memories function belatedly; they are internalized in response to his patient’s initial trauma and, in the Wolfman’s case, they serve as signs of repressed childhood encounters with adult sexuality. He can recall the memory of seeing his family’s housekeeper scrubbing the floor on her knees and urinating at the sight (which Freud interprets as an attempt to seduce her). But the “primal scene” of his neurosis, which he cannot recall, is that as an infant he oversaw his parents have sex a tergo (his mother bent over, in the same position as the housekeeper) when he was in his crib and his parents allowed “a siesta on a hot summer’s day to evolve into tender relations,” as the new translation has it.25 Later again, a dream “reworks” the repressed material; the memory surges out of his unconscious disturbingly in a dream about wolves with bushy tails—as if they were compensating for the castrationlike loss of their original (less bushy) tails—and the dream unconsciously persuades him against trying to seduce his father. In Freud’s words: We have to assume that during the dreaming process he understood women to be castrated, having a wound in the place of the male member which serves the purposes of sexual intercourse, and that castration was thus the condition of female identity; under the threat of this loss he repressed the feminine attitude towards the male and awoke in fear of his homosexual raptures.26

110  Retranslating Freud Then, even later, events in adulthood trigger full-blown neurosis (events as simple as seeing a grandfather clock in Freud’s office that reminds him of a fairytale about wolves). Once wolves were associated with the repressed memory, any thought of wolves could activate the repressed material and trigger awful symptoms, including enema addiction, phobia of sex, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. How have English-language translators approached this concept? In the most recent published translation of the Wolfman case, Louise Adey Huish translates one occurrence of nachträglich thus: “The effectiveness of the scene has been postponed [nachträglich] and loses none of its freshness in the interval that has elapsed between the ages of 19 months and 4 years.”27 Her translation was published in Adam Phillips’ New Penguin Freud series—whose postmodern premises I discuss later in this chapter. By including the German word in brackets, Huish made it trackable, but without heeding the Lacanian school’s call for standardized translations of that term. The passage prioritizes immediacy over scientificity: despite her passive voice, she makes her prose stylistically elegant by picking a verb where possible: “postponed” implies the trauma’s potential but not absolute determinism (after all, an event may be postponed indefinitely). Putting the German word in parentheses meets Laplanche’s criterion since it allows the reader to trace the word’s use—the concern that rashly drives Laplanche to his parochial preference to select one term “afterwardsness” to render Nachträglichkeit in English. Let us explore Laplanche’s reasons for regarding Nachträglickeit as a standard term even though he was aware that Freud himself did not think the same. As a starting point, it is notable that Laplanche discovers two special features of Nachträglichkeit, both of which have implications for the translation of this word, even though he does not think that Freud’s writings display conscious knowledge of either: 1) belatedness can operate in two temporal directions, and 2) the reverse direction does not even require an original event, trauma, or primal scene in order to work. While the Stracheys often translate Nachträglichkeit as “deferred action,” the German word is open to interpretation as to which direction in time matters (the past determining the future, or future reflection revising our understanding of the past). As Laplanche explains: Because even après-coup in French, and “afterwards” in English, have these two meanings. For instance, I can say, “the terrorists put a bomb in the building, and it exploded afterwards.” That's the direction of deferred action. And I can also say, “this bridge fell down, and the architect understood afterwards that he did not make it right.” That’s an after-the-event understanding; the architect understood afterwards. These are the two meanings.28 Laplanche avers that Freud did not fully develop the concept of “belatedness” because, after he developed his theory of childhood sexuality, developmental

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problems always explained future symptoms, when in fact Laplanche’s readings of Freud show that symptoms occur when we belatedly revise our memories from the past. Laplanche’s reading of Freud insists on an ambiguity: “So for Freud there were two ways of explaining afterwardsness, but I don't think he ever saw that there must be some synthesis of those two directions.”29 The importance of the reverse direction is crucial to the psychoanalytic therapeutic model of consciously revising unconscious memories. As stated above, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis reject differential or “inconsistent” translations of Nachträglichkeit, since such an approach makes it impossible to trace its use. In a short essay called “Notes on Afterwardsness,” Laplanche discusses several possibilities for translating Nachträglichkeit into English or French.30 He settles on coining “afterwardsness” because an “interpretative translation” like “deferred action” eclipses its other meaning for Laplanche: “retrospective revision.” “So either one decides to split up and divide the term in translation, or one chooses a term that will allow the readers to stay with Freud’s term and reinterpret it for themselves.” He rejects inconsistency without explanation: the only way of absolutely “staying with Freud’s term” would be not translating at all, and once one departs from the term one might as well split the term to match contexts. Besides, differential translation, with the source language word appearing in brackets, does not stop the reader from “reinterpreting” the term. If performed without the original word in brackets and without explanation, then it is a strong interpretation by the translator. But performed with these precautions, differential translation has the advantage of continuing the philosophical work of the source text. It performs precisely what Laplanche desires when he explains that Nachträglichkeit has two meanings. Differential translation (with source words in brackets) preserves and revises old meanings in light of time’s passage and of the translator’s experience of rewriting thoughts in a language with different expressive resources than the language in which the thoughts were first expressed. Without even putting the German word in parentheses after each use, Louise Adey Huish translates differentially in her twenty-first-century translation of the German compositum Nachträglichkeit in Sigmund Freud’s Wolfman study. Huish demonstrates this indeterminacy by translating Nachträglichkeit four different ways in the Wolfman study’s fourth chapter (“The Dream and the Primal Scene”). First, it appears as “belatedly” when describing the child’s gradual understanding of the “complicated event” he had witnessed when he saw his parents engaged in coitus a tergo.31 While “belated” emphasizes the later moment, Huish elsewhere emphasizes the memory’s potential by translating the word as “postponed” when describing how the scene “lost none of its freshness” when the unconscious memory became meaningful at a later age.32 She uses “reworked” elsewhere— again denoting the later moment—but where Strachey uses his consistent,

112  Retranslating Freud univalent term “deferred” to describe “another instance of deferred action,” Huish substitutes the more open-ended “postponed.”33 If she had also included the German word in brackets in every instance (as she does the first time she translates it as “postponed”), then the reader could follow the complex movement of thought that engages the translator of such ambiguous passages. Yet Laplanche’s insistence on preserving ambiguities in Freud’s language is not free of interpretation. Although the choice lets the reader decide on what kind of temporality Freud is discussing by context, the introduction of a relatively neutral term forces the reader to interpret where interpretation may be unmerited. The differential translation of the term allows for broader possibilities: sometimes neutral (“afterwards”), sometimes negative (“belated”), sometimes with forward temporal valence (“deferred action”), sometimes with reverse valence (“retroactive revision”), or sometimes otherwise as required by context. There might even be a context when punning on the German called for an etymological calque (“carriedover-ness”) or when terminological fixity called for pretentious Greek or Latin coinages (where “hysterophor” or “postportment” might have been inventible). However, the use of one neutral word reduces conceptual complexity and thus deprives the reader of Laplanche’s insight into the bidirectionality of the concept.34 Maurizio Balsamo writes that Italian translators of Freud often translate nachträglich with the Latin phrase a posteriori and then include not the German but après-coup and afterwards in brackets. He explains that this cites not just a source, but an area of dispute: “the linguistic indecision, the translational plural is the result of the existence of several metapsychological languages, of several approaches, and this plural gives us a chance to reflect on our divergences …”35 Balsamo’s “translational plural” is a version of what I call “disjunctive translation”; it gives the reader a choice of translations for a particular passage. Such an approach performs the interpretive opening of possibility even more elaborately than differential translation does. Balsamo points to another reason not to settle on one translation: different foreign words in brackets function as citations of different schools of thought. As one American psychoanalyst points out, “afterwardsness” might express the bidirectionality of Nachträglichkeit “but at this point après-coup as an English word has been well established” among analysts.36 Translators must make decisions about the degree of ambiguity to showcase in any given passage. This sometimes requires us to sacrifice consistency and to dare interpretations. “Can philosophy systematically cultivate the equivocal?” asks Paul Ricoeur in the context of reflecting on Freudian speculative methods.37 The translation of philosophy can cultivate the equivocal in a systematic way: it can foreground polysemy by translating words to match context, and thus relegate terminological fixity to a whisper (with brackets or annotations). After all, as Kant says, mathematics begins with definitions, but philosophy aspires to arrive at them.38 Let us arrive at

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the comforts of terminology not at first sight, but on reflection, a posteriori (nachträglich).

Retranslating Freud While any retranslation project promises to generate a superior result to its predecessor, not every critic trusts the promise when it comes to retranslating Freud’s work. Translation Studies scholar Xu Jianzhong complains that five different Chinese translations of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in the span of a decade and declares retranslation of such “scientific texts” a “waste of resources” in printing costs and in translators’ abilities.39 But readers of retranslations rarely read a text for the same reasons that its first audience read it. A once-scientific text need not always remain so. Adam Phillips, the editor for the New Penguin Freud translation series, did not want to conceal Freud’s scientific ambition, but writes in summary of his series: Ideally, I thought, the translators would be people who had previously translated literary texts, and need not have previously read Freud: Freud could then be given a go as the writer he wanted to be, and is, as well as the scientist he wanted to be, and might be.40 Literary translation does not require a literary source text, only that the target text could be read as literature.41 But does literary translation experience facilitate translating Freud as “literature”? A contented review of the new translations thinks so: “these literary translations do an admirable job of focusing our attention on Freud’s use of narrative structure.”42 But still, what translation choices effect such a refocusing of attention? What choices might have obscured Freud’s “use of narrative structure” in the Standard Edition, and why privilege narrative structure over argument when reading the great analyst’s work? The work of retranslation is closely analogous with the work of psychoanalysis insofar as psychoanalysis is concerned with modifications to human states of mind, as they are reprocessed again and again over the course of childhood development, adult experience, and in therapy. Analogously with the patient who admits that she is not in control of her own actions, translations are texts that openly lack autonomy, because they are informed by one particular previous act of writing. And just as a person’s actions are iterative, each one building on a pattern established through past actions, the dependence of retranslations on the first translation can never be fully established. As Paul Ricoeur describes, retranslated texts offer hope for insight into the motivations behind interlingual translation more generally: “It should perhaps even be said that it is in retranslation that we most clearly observe the urge to translate, stimulated by the dissatisfaction with regard to existing

114  Retranslating Freud translations.”43 The retranslator’s task need not produce a narrative of rival rhetorical purposes between the first translators and retranslators, where the retranslator struggles to achieve the most intimate relationship to the maternal source text. As Şebnem Susam-Sarajeva points out, retranslations of theoretical texts need not claim to be the most accurate interpretation of the source text. Retranslation can be mediated more by criticism of the first translation than by reinterpretation of the source text.44 One example of this is Robert Hullot-Kentor’s retranslation of Christian Leenhardt’s version of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, in which Hullot-Kentor excoriates the publishers of the first translation for adding chapter headings and paragraph breaks: “The device provided a steady external grip on the book while causing it to collapse internally.”45 Yet a retranslation of a theoretical text need not pursue greater accuracy to differentiate itself from prior translations. Following Susam-Sarajeva, several Turkish retranslations of Barthes were regarded as an opportunity not to outdo past translations but to invent a more authentically Turkish (and less French-influenced) theoretical lexicon. In another case, the English retranslators of Hélène Cixous’s work do not cite past translations, but rather cite the perceived impossibility of adequately translating Cixous, which adds to the mystifying obscurity around her theory outside of France, and ultimately to a preference for autochthonous feminist theory in Englishspeaking lands.46 When greater accuracy is not the goal, the desire to create a translation with a different function than the first translation can motivate retranslation more than a publisher’s new vision of the source text.47 When new translations do compete with old ones for esteem, the rivalry to control markets might lead publishers to promise improvements in quality to consumers. Sharon Deane-Cox discredits this possibility, however, in her 2014 book Retranslation. The rivalry model, she argues, relies on the suppositious “Retranslation Hypothesis,” which states that retranslations generally approximate source texts better than previous translations.48 She traces the genealogy of this hypothesis from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Antoine Berman, and then points out that translations are automatically perceived as derivative when they age, and are thus perceived to need improvement even if they do not have any supposed failings.49 Translation theorist Douglas Robinson suggests that what triggers a retranslation may be an unconscious “ideosomatic drift,” a visceral discomfort when reading texts that do not evoke emotions as contemporary discourses do. We misinterpret that discomfort as a sign that translations have drifted from their original meanings. The “felt/perceived slippage between the original and the old translation(s)” begs for retranslation.50 Of course, not every literary retranslation exists to capitalize on the aging of prior translations. The range of motivations corresponds to the range of publishing activities and the types of publishing behavior. In a similar line of inquiry, Deane-Cox turns to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory that symbolic and economic capital can be exchanged, but that—like any investment—they

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need not be liquidated. One kind of capital need not be spent on the purchase of another. Thus, Deane-Cox argues, for the case of British retranslations of Madame Bovary, “The hierarchies of the British literary field and its interaction with the source literary field should bring to light struggles over economic and symbolic capital and legitimization which might impact the hows and whens of retranslation.”51 It is crucial to inquire into the bids for legitimacy that motivate retranslation projects. We can assess motivation not through close reading, but by interpreting the protocols, constraints, and paratexts revealed along with the retranslations. Retranslations may correct errors, but this begs the question of which kinds of errors merit retranslation. In the case of the New Penguin Freud, the act of retranslation aims to shift the genre of Freud’s writing from science to literature to achieve new readership. Let us take up this question by examining the historical circumstances surrounding the publication of the new translation project.

A genre problem in translating Freud The genre of Freud’s work has been recategorized repeatedly during and after his lifetime. Only rarely do people think of Freud as contributing to the field of his training, medicine, but in fact his early work is closely informed by his training.52 His mentor, renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, and colleague, the theoretically imaginative rhinologist Wilhelm Fliess, were “hard scientists” with little interest in the talk therapy that Freud developed while working with Josef Breuer, his mentor at the University of Vienna hospital. Recently, an author has made the case for Freud’s status as a “reluctant” philosopher, given his sustained engagement with the problem of developing a speculative model of the mind, and the evidence that, while pursuing his medical degree, his only non-medical courses were six courses with Franz Brentano, the proto-phenomenologist philosopher of mind.53 Another author has described him as an antiphilosopher for rejecting the very foundations of logical analysis and empirical methods.54 A recent Guardian article has reevaluated Freud’s insights as a therapist since longitudinal studies show more lasting effects from psychoanalysis, with its focus on the individual’s complexity, than with therapy that only targets the patient’s self-observed thoughts and habits (as the much less time-intensive cognitive-behavioral approach does).55 Freud himself was not unaware of the difficulties that his work caused for disciplinary classification. In his early Studies in Hysteria, he writes: I have not always been a psychotherapist. Like other neuropathologists, I was trained to employ local diagnoses and electro-prognosis, and it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science. I must console myself with the reflection that the

116  Retranslating Freud nature of the subject is evidently responsible for this, rather than any preference of my own. The fact is that local diagnosis and electrical reactions lead nowhere in the study of hysteria, whereas a detailed description of mental processes such as we are accustomed to find in the works of imaginative writers enables me, with the use of a few psychological formulas, to obtain at least some kind of insight into the course of that affection. Case histories of this kind are intended to be judged like psychiatric ones; they have, however, one advantage over the latter, namely an intimate connection between the story of the patient's sufferings and the symptoms of his illness—a connection for which we still search in vain in the biographies of other psychoses.56 In other words, Freud had discovered a domain of problem-solving that made use of literary storytelling, and thus found a use for the types of insights for which “imaginative writers” (Dichter) had long been celebrated. Becoming a psychotherapist meant discovering a domain where understanding the mechanics of stories—what events made stories meaningful, or why a storyteller would focus on seemingly meaningless minutiae—mattered more than ever before. Writing at a moment in the history of German-speaking intellectual culture when scientific positivism had crushed most of the speculative historical absolutism of the Hegelians, the notion of the Wissenschaftler was steadily coming to coincide more narrowly with the empirical-mathematical– oriented “scientist”—a sense aligned closely with Anglo-American forms of scientific realism dating back to Francis Bacon’s New Organon.57 Seeing the English models in ascendance, the ambitious Freud devoted himself to applying evolutionary theory to psychology. He drew lifelong inspiration from Darwin’s theories of selection, and if it were not for the hardships of World War I, he would have written a treatise in support of Lamarckian models of inheritance (which makes an appearance in his claim in Moses and Monotheism that Jews today still bear a repressed, hereditary memory of killing Moses).58 It is no surprise that Freud explicitly vied to position himself as a scientist. Stripping Freud’s own career goals away to reveal his accomplishments as a writer, the editors of the New Penguin Freud translation series advocate a literary approach to Freud. Some readers of the new translations celebrate the way that the texts present “a more inexact, uncertain, metaphorical, and nuanced Freud than we had experienced”— features that draw on his literary expressiveness.59 The most interesting cases of retranslation involve a text’s change in status due to institutional developments around it (when ancient texts become philological objects, when entertainment becomes canonical literature, or as in this case, when science writing becomes something else). The developments in psychiatry have marginalized Freud the scientist. Critical theorists are more poised to learn from his hermeneutics of suspicion than are empirical psychologists. Overt meanings, for Freud, conceal motivations

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that are not just embarrassing but seemingly completely unrelated to the meaning at hand. These surprising interpretations give Freud’s writing its suspense. In the “Wolfman” case history, for instance, Freud discovers the basis for an adult’s sexual phobias and addiction to enemas in the childhood experience of having seen his parents have sex. As Freud explains, such things are not direct causal effects: the latent memory was only activated later when the memory fused with later castration anxieties. Freud’s case histories produce explanations for psychic disturbances, but they also exhibit “intrigue” (Paul Ricoeur’s translation for mythos in Aristotle’s Poetics—also translated as “narrative emplotment”),60 that effect of literature that disturbs our normal focus on our own life stories and draws us into curiosity about completely unrelated events. Medical texts are, of course, also narrative-based genres, where, instead of characters, there are bodily functions in crisis (“crisis” being the ancient Greek medical term for a major change in health status).61 Diagnosis and treatment can be substitutes for recognition and catharsis, as they are not without dramatical potential. Likewise, literary intrigue and the drama of illness and cure both invite us into a reality that need not conjoin directly with our own immediate life situation. Freud’s writings exceed the conventions of medical narrative and engage with the complexity of intentionally, or unconsciously, withheld information that has always made fiction more exciting and culturally influential than medical narratives. Since at least 1979, scholars have been commenting on the literary acuity with which Freud plots the events of the Wolfman case history, a perspective which places his quest for patterns in psychic life within the tradition of nineteenth-century detective fiction.62 Yet Freud also subjects his most intriguing narrative elements to metanarrative analysis. He reflects on the uncertain timing of the psychic event when his patient linked the image of his overbearing governess scrubbing a floor to the supposed infantile trauma of seeing his mother in a similar bent-forward posture during sex with his father. It would be difficult for any translation or interpretation of Freud to do justice to the tension between intrigue and rationality when Freud presents and comments on these sequences of events.

Alix and James Strachey discover Freudian German Alix and James Strachey, the couple who translated the Standard Edition— the authorized English translation of Sigmund Freud’s complete works— have been criticized for betraying the rhetorical richness of Freud’s German.63 In stark contrast to the image of the Stracheys as furthering Ernest Jones’ mission to present Freud’s work as both incontrovertible and thoroughly scientific, the Stracheys—especially Alix—prove to be subtle thinkers of the German language. On the one hand, their close readings of Freud’s work earned them citation by Freud in the 1924 edition of “Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis.”64 On the other hand, neither was supremely

118  Retranslating Freud confident in their spoken German. In a letter to James from October 18, 1924, Alix describes her struggles working with a German conversation practice partner.65 James, the front man of the translation team, noted that his German was “weaker” than his merely “satisfactory” French in 1916, five years before James received his first translation assignment from Freud in 1921, “A Child Is Being Beaten.”66 The correspondence between James and Alix Strachey reveals a couple deeply involved with psychoanalysis, both having been analyzed by Freud, and both extremely close readers of Freud’s work. In a letter dated March 26, 1925, Alix Strachey describes a surreal repetition of the famous dream narrative about Irma’s injection after herself receiving medical treatment by Freud’s friend Wilhelm Fliess. (“Is it really the Fliess?” James asked upon learning about the appointment on March 24.) Alix describes a moment when Fliess evokes his much-maligned theories of hereditary death and fertility cycles.67 Yes, he is the great Fliess. He’s very charming & old-fashioned, almost a dwarf with a huge stomach, but otherwise not fat. Much more like a Viennese, with a beard. Dellisch says he is a Jew. His only interest was, had I any relations ( + myself) who’d been born or had died at this time of the year—for he thinks there’s a connection between that & one’s illnesses.68 Alix had already experienced relief from her “at-death’s-doorness” when the abscess in her throat burst before Fliess arrived, but he examined her and demanded that she return to him later so that he can “remove (he says it’s not painful(?)) any ‘eiternde Pfropfen’ (‘crypts’?) he may see.”69 Emblematic of her correspondence with James, her stories contain a translation question: she comes up with a creative and bizarre translation of eiternde Pfropfen, which refers to infected and puss-filled blood clots. It is unlikely that she simply did not look up this medical term so pertinent to her own case. Throughout their correspondence, questions about how to translate specific phrases of the German language provide an occasion to think about meaning in general. On October 24, 1924, James opens a conversation about whether it is necessary to translate the word auch, in the text of Freud’s Wolfman case in the phrase heißt auch when describing how the word God (Gott) also signified feces (Kot) for Freud’s patient during a pious phase of his youth. As James notes, Ernest Jones had translated heißt auch periphrastically—“means, among its other meanings.”70 James questions Jones’ emphasis: “But surely the ‘auch’ is simply an expletive here?” Alix’s answer shows enormous subtlety in that she acknowledges that the word is both crucial and untranslatable in an unusual sense: translating it adds nothing. She agrees that the auch need not be translated, and yet she writes on October 27, 1924: “‘Auch’ is what the whole paragraph is about, i.e. that ‘Gott-Kot’ is not only hostile & contemptuous but also –‘auch’—an

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expression of love.”71 The care to recreate Freud’s inclusive logic through a single adverb reflects the belief in the semantically oriented methods of psychoanalysis at the movement’s founding moment—when empirical psychiatry did not have its stranglehold on most of the cultural, social, and monetary capital involved in prestigious and profitable psychological research and in forms of therapy amenable to insurance companies. New translations could never recreate the rigor born of enthusiasm at the beginning; a new translation needed new rhetorical goals.

The “Freud Wars” and the New Penguin Freud A long history of discontent led to the New Penguin Freud. In the postwar period, German exile psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim levied excoriating criticism against the English Standard Edition of Freud. Bettelheim claimed that Freud’s work can be read as either “spiritual” or “pragmatic” (Venuti would describe the same polarity as “therapeutic” and “analytical”); Bettelheim goes on to accuse English-language translators of isolating the pragmatic side of Freud because it fits more easily into the British mindset, which is most at home with “positivism,” the type of philosophy (which started in Austria but enjoyed the longest influence in Britain and the United States) which modeled all knowledge pursuit on the natural sciences.72 The Strachey translation has had defenders too: British psychoanalyst Emmett Wilson warned in 1987 that a flood of corrective translations would appear after 1989 (when the copyright on Freud’s German works expired); the desire to outdo the Stracheys showed an obsession with an ideal English version—as if every translation did not repress some aspect of the original.73 After 1989, Venuti challenged Bettelheim’s case by claiming that the “fundamental discontinuity” between technical science and therapeutic humanism in Freud’s writing is emphasized, even if accidentally, in the scientizing translation of the Stracheys—which invites the reader to discover the tension in the original.74 Geoffrey Hartman goes even further in his review of the New Penguin series by refusing the application of a scientific-literary binary to Freud’s oeuvre. This retranslation exemplifies the Freudian focus on belated recognition, which is never a negation of prior perspectives, but rather an accumulation of new meanings. Several decades before the New Penguin Freud translations, the editors of Penguin Press were already working to make Freud accessible to new readers through selective editorial work on existing translations. “The Penguin Freud Library (formerly The Pelican Freud Library) is intended to meet the needs of the general reader by providing all Freud’s major writing in translation together with an appropriate linking commentary.”75 In other words, Albert Dickson, the new series’ editor, abridged Strachey’s commentary and excluded the translations of early work on neurology and neuropathology. But simply republishing the Standard Edition without the more specialized texts did not address complaints about Freud’s style.

120  Retranslating Freud The New Penguin Freud responds to discontent over the scientific tone of the Standard Edition. The 24-volume translation of Freud’s complete works by James and Alix Strachey, known as the Standard Edition, has shaped anglophone perceptions of Freud, and its masterful critical apparatus makes it prized even for German readers.76 Ernest Jones, a British neurologist and psychoanalyst and close acquaintance of Freud’s, began translating Freud well before the Stracheys. Along with James Putnam and A.A. Brill, Jones inaugurated many of the translation choices that made the Standard Edition sound technical: coining connotation-poor neologisms that sacrificed Freud’s implicit metaphors, regulating idiosyncratic syntax, and replacing Freud’s narrative present tense to describe dreams and case histories with a more accurate-sounding, less dramatic past tense. Since many psychoanalysts see their work as a quasi-literary explanation of personal narratives, they lament the Standard Edition’s scientific tone. Just before the start of the twenty-first century, the British psychoanalyst and irreverent essayist Adam Phillips was appointed general editor of the largest Freud retranslation project since the Standard Edition appeared. Phillips’ controversial way of preserving Freud’s complexity in translation is to commission a team of different translators who he wants to come to “no consensus about technical terms, each of the translators writing a preface in which they might say something about choices made …”77 This strategy of highlighting the text’s aesthetic, humanistic value thus hinges on abandoning the old terminology, but with “no consensus” the translators are in fact free to uphold Strachey’s terminology—and some did. Proponents of the New Penguin translations, like Andrew Pollock, praise them for achieving a more literary style. Pollock claims that Freud’s narratives (which he rates alongside novels like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) portray the “real drama” of the development of the treatment and the cure.”78 One element of the new translations that reveals a lack of consensus about which Freudian jargon might be a problem is the appearance of the word “id.” While the Stracheys’ jargon (parapraxis, anaclitic, and cathexis, to name a few) can seem to lack concrete connotations, translation theorist Lawrence Venuti notes that the combination of scientific-medical–sounding language with Freud’s deeply personal storytelling makes the Stracheys’ translations more exciting since it reads as science and literature: “it discloses interpretive choices determined by a wide range of social institutions and movements.”79 Kristy Hall, a British psychoanalytic theorist, disagrees with the editor of the New Penguin Freud that the old translations suffered from unreadability.80 Displaying a lack of sympathy for the project, she asks rhetorically whether it is “a fashionable postmodern idea” or just laziness (and ignorance of the German language) that motivates Adam Phillips not to coordinate terminological choices between the series’ translators.81 This exemplifies the difficulty of deciding when a translation is “literary.” When Freud is explaining the Wolfman’s superstition that he is unlucky because he was born with the embryonic caul covering his face, he interprets

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the patient’s complaint as a wish to return to the state before birth: Sie ist zu übersetzen: Ich bin so unglücklich im Leben, ich muß wieder in den Mutterschoß zurück. The Stracheys translate the line thus: “It can be translated as follows: ‘Life makes me so unhappy! I must get back into the womb!’” (100). In Louise Adey Huish’s translation for the New Penguin Freud series, it reads: “We might translate it thus: my life is so unhappy that I must go back to my mother’s womb” (298). These translations differ in modality (can/might), subordination (so unhappy [exclamation point]/so unhappy that), and in the introduction of the first-person plural to replace the impersonal construction in the older translation (it can be/we might translate). The overall effect is of a more contemporary English-sounding sentence, but not a more “literary” one. This kind of “localizing” translation is typical of translations seeking to reduce the authoritarian tone of German academic language—which often creates obscurity and authority through impersonal constructions that sound like the voice of revealed truth—rather than representatives of a discourse. But both translations have “literary” value; the new one creates the readable effect of a “page turner” in this passage, whereas the Standard Edition sounds more like nineteenth-century literature that rewards careful reading. Among the editions in the New Penguin Freud, the one that appears to deal the most conspicuously with the anxiety of the Standard Edition’s influence is the translation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings by John Reddick. Reddick’s introductory comments are emblematic of the new series’ ethos as well as its shortcomings. He describes himself as “liberating” the text in a translation that revives the “struggle” to understand human motivations in Freud’s work and which aims to dispel the “dogma” about Freud encouraged by the Standard Edition.82 Yet in doing so he preserves one of the Standard Edition’s most reviled choices of terminology, The Ego and the Id, instead of the more suggestive English equivalent The I and the It. Reddick’s choice reads as a missed opportunity since the Latinate words “ego” and “id” deplete these words of their pronominal connotations. By putting definite articles in front of German pronouns, Freud’s das Ich and das Es suggest—so importantly for Lacan and Laplanche—that the unconscious is a foreign intruder in our conscious lives, as unlike the conscious self as an inanimate thing is unlike a person. James and Alix Strachey only consented to translate das Es as “the id” under heavy pressure from Ernest Jones; they objected that “the id” sounds too similar to “the Yidd” to designate a central concept from a thinker who was already a target of anti-Semitism.83 Yet “the it” would be difficult to pull off since Freud also uses “it” as a pronoun referring to the ego. Even New Penguin translator Nicola Luckhurst—who controversially translates das Ich as “the self” to differentiate Freud’s early use of the term before his tripartite topography of the psyche—kept das Es as “id.”84 Though Reddick bows to the weight of tradition in his title and his renderings of the words throughout the text as “ego” and “id,” his

122  Retranslating Freud corrective annotations put a twist on their original connotations, as he argues with Strachey over particular passages in the footnotes. For instance, he writes that “The Standard Edition argues that this ‘its’ means ‘the ego’s’—but both logic and the grammar of Freud’s German suggest that he means ‘the id’s.’”85 Reddick departs sharply from the Standard Edition by ending a terminology-heavy sentence with a whimsical turn of phrase: “The philosophers would then suggest that we describe the Pcs and the Ucs [Reddick borrows Strachey’s abbreviations for “the preconscious” and “the unconscious”] as two forms or levels of the psychoidal—and hey presto, harmony would reign between us.”86 But Reddick’s footnotes indicate that his ambition is not a “literary” monument, but a more accurate translation, as when he replaces Strachey’s “word-presentation” with “word-notion” to better approximate the German Vorstellung in this context.87 While conceding that “improvements” did emerge as a result of the new translation approach, British psychoanalytic theorist Kristy Hall concludes that Adam Phillips’ decision not to have his translators coordinate a systematic approach to terminology was overall a missed opportunity. For Hall, new translations should use consistent vocabulary, and, to express Freud’s literary flair better, it would have sufficed to “flag the foreignness of the original.”88 By seeing the importance of flagging the foreignness of the original, Hall implicitly praises those translators among Phillips’ team who committed to some form of differential translation, whereby a term is translated by sentence context, but some consistent morpheme (such as the foreign word in brackets) marks the continuity. Anthea Bell, for instance, engages in a clearly fruitful differential translation when she replaces the Standard Edition’s translation of Fehlleistung as “parapraxis” with slip and then adds different words by context: slip of the mind, of the pen, of the tongue, etc. In Bell’s translation, slip is the consistent term that does the work of the foreign word in brackets. This demonstrates that, with some such marker of terminology in place, the translator can put forward creative, helpful interpretations. Reddick’s preference for neutrality of connotation (by selecting the semantic specificity of ego and id compared to I and it) matches that of Jean Laplanche, who prefers to avoid the misleading connotations of Nachträglichkeit, even at the cost of masking the source word’s connotations. Research on terminology shows that terms’ connotations gradually infect scientific discourses as people use words morphologically related to the selected term: for instance, if you are writing about the “ego,” you may be tempted to use “egotistical” or “egomaniac.” If you use “the I,” you may slip into the first person.89 The best way to preempt this kind of slip is by differential translation, making the foreign word the term, and offering a stream of varied translations, each one dictated by the context. By comparing translation choices between the New Penguin Freud and the early translations of Freud into English, we can see what was gained in loosening the terminological hold of Ernest Jones’ neologisms (popularized

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by the Stracheys), like cathexis and parapraxis, as well as his Latinizations of ordinary German words, like id, ego, and superego.90 Faced with the choice to preserve or modify these terms, several Penguin-commissioned translators found differential translation with the German word in brackets the only way to straddle approaches that aim to capture both terminology and literary intrigue. It will be sufficient to focus on a few words; the first is emblematic of the intersection of the untranslatable with the unconscious that I have already discussed above: Nachträglichkeit, the delay between two linked moments, which cannot simply be reduced to cause and effect.

Nachträglichkeit Freud the narrator works masterfully by recreating the gradual revelations of information that give psychoanalytic case histories a suspenseful quality. As the “recognition” always comes (too) late in classical tragedy, so, in Freud, we can only read the unconscious in latent forms, which means belatedly, since these forms first become manifest in the time-intensive work of psychoanalytic treatment. Several forms of belatedness operate in Freud: the belatedness of psychological processes, whereby we become attached not to events but to memories of events, the belatedness of the cure, whose late and unpredictable arrival constitutes “the drama” of the cure, and finally the belatedness of aesthetic response to a work conceived as science. A first translation, like repression itself, was able to constrict and limit this aesthetic response to some extent. But the work’s literary quality will demand, it seems, a lack of interference from political motivations, such as—in the case of Freud—the movement to legitimize the medical value of psychoanalytic techniques. That said, just as no organism can survive without boundaries to the outside word that serve to “repress” the excess of stimuli, as Freud speculates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the new translation could not have this effect without the success of the earlier, repressive first translation. The strikingly medical tone is sharper in a terminologically consistent translation. Perhaps the difference between the translations for those who read Freud as narrative will amount to the difference between a jarring or an immersive reading experience, the difference Barthes called that between a texte de jouissance and a texte de plaisir. And just as a narrative reading of Freud does not allow us to prefer the cure to the trauma, since it is all part of the story’s intrigue, it would be salubrious to read the two translations together as part of the therapeutic “treatment” that has rehabilitated Freud’s texts as art in the age of pharmaceutical psychiatry and cognitive-behavioral therapy. Even if we grant the importance of using terms consistently in translation, translators will not always agree on which philosophically weighty morphemes constitute terms. Translators tend to treat nouns as terms more consistently than verbs because verbs usually elicit more concrete, everyday

124  Retranslating Freud meaning than nouns do. We might say that verbs are also difficult to pin down because they are always in motion. As Paul Ricoeur notes, movement is the most enduring feature of Aristotle’s ancient definition of metaphor: metaphor is a movement (epiphora) between meanings. A metaphor that stands out as such will not easily become a term. The notion is foundational to the reception of Freud’s work; hence Laplanche’s attempts to contain the translation problems around the word Nachträglichkeit. Das Ich, however, introduces some terminological impasses that are important for understanding the stakes of differential translation.

Das Ich, das Es The German pronoun, ich, is capitalized, given a definite article, and used as a term for the part of the self that mediates between perceptions and memories and permits consciousness. Since the Jones-Strachey translation era, “ego” and its cognates (egotistical, egomaniac) have become ubiquitous in English. Prior to Freud’s first mentions of das Ich in 1895, though, the American psychologist William James had already used an even more capacious vocabulary to taxonomize the self. In his chapter on “The Self” from his 1890 Principles of Psychology, James develops the concepts of “the I” and “the Me,” while also using the words self and ego less systematically. Freud’s Ich includes both James’ “I,” the seat of self-aware thought, deliberation, and will, and James’ “Me,” which encompasses all self-images. (In Freud’s Das Ich and das Es, the Über-Ich is also a subsection of the Ich; the ideal self is also part of the self). James sees the “I” as believing that its “Me” is itself: “The identity found by the I in its Me is only a loosely construed thing.”91 In arguing that the “Me” appropriates memories into a concept of Self, James argues against the existence of a “pure Ego,” a source of accurate insight into one’s own mental processes (a concept James explicitly draws from the use of the term Egoist by pre-Freudian German psychologists).92 Practical considerations made English translators avoid calling the “id” the “it” since “it” is an even more common pronoun in English than in German (since gendered pronouns can also refer to inanimate antecedents in German). But the strong suggestion that the unconscious is not assimilable to the “you” that you know is suggested by contrasting a first person and a third person pronoun: “I” and “it” in German. The Latinate translation also conceals the animate/inanimate distinction—ingrained in German and in English grammar—das Es in German evokes an inanimate yet powerful part of us, and metaphorically describes how not only can we not identify the unconscious as our self but we cannot “live” it out at all since it is inanimate. “The I” and “the It” produce that effect in translation, but a translator could also alternate between them and the Latin words, “ego” and “id,” to help readers familiar with Strachey’s now ubiquitous choices. Such a destabilization of terms would demonstrate what Laplanche writes about Freud’s notion of the I in his Life and Death in Psychoanalysis.

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There are two ways of understanding the I: either as metonym or metaphor for the self. The concept of the self would be tantamount to the concept of the ego if the ego’s content was nothing but conscious or preconscious material, like moods, perceptions, and a sense of reality. But in the 1895 text, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Freud develops a notion of the ego which is entirely depersonalized and constituted by neurons and quantities, not even quantities of energy as we consciously experience energy (alertness, exuberance, etc.), but of some “pure quantity without any element ‘qualifying’ it.”93 The ego emerges as a kind of transistor, a network of neurons that inhibits excesses of these quantities. The resulting network provides a metaphor for the self as an organic unity: “the model of a form set off against a background evokes the relation of an organism to its surroundings, an organism which is defined by a limit circumscribing a region in which a certain energy circulates at a constant average level, an energy level higher than that of the external world in relation to which it is set off and against which it maintains itself.”94 Laplanche insists that we cannot reduce this distinction to a development between early and late Freud. He claims that the concepts of narcissism, melancholia, and masochism take a view of the ego “as not being a subject: it is neither the subject in the sense of classical philosophy, a subject of perception and consciousness […] not the subject of wishing and desire, that subject which addresses us psychoanalysts.”95 In the case of narcissism, for instance, the ego (das Ich) is the object, and Laplanche claims that the object is “the site of a permanent stasis of energy.”96 The peculiar advantage of narcissism is the parity between input and output: the libido can “love” the ego with the right quantity of energy (as a shorthand, Laplanche names the quantity “energy”). Despite the insights enabled by this “metaphoric” concept of das Ich, Laplanche does not deny that das Ich is often an I for Freud. A translator could approach this distinction by alternating between terms as I have done in this paragraph—thus undermining the false unity of a fragmented concept. The metonymic Ich as topographical or structural self is “the I.” By contrast, the metaphoric Ich is alien enough from the conscious self to deserve another name; we can translate das Ich in the contexts that evoke the economic or hydraulic mechanics of the neuronal transistor with “the ego—or leave the word Ich untranslated to mark its inaccessibility to consciousness.”

Besetzung Nicola Luckhurst, the translator for the New Penguin edition of Freud’s Studies in Hysteria, keeps “ego” and “id,” as well as keeping Strachey’s “cathexis” as the translation of Besetzung. Since cathexis is a common noun rather than a pronoun, its terminological force is stronger. However, this term is so multivalent that at one point, Luckhurst paraphrases Besetzung in order to capture what she describes elsewhere as “its latent electrical, economic, and military connotations.”97 She writes: “an idea is cathected—that

126  Retranslating Freud is, charged, invested, and occupied—with unresolved affect … it will always bring with it … incompatibility with new cathexes.” Here she conveys the vividness of the clash between new and old cathexes. The only downside of such a paraphrasing translation is just that it cannot be done every time; nevertheless, a few such instances can spark the reader’s imagination. In the Penguin Freud translation volume titled Essays on Love, translator Shaun Whiteside chooses “investment”98 for Besetzung, in keeping with romance language translations of Freud’s term, a choice which sets up an implicit analogy between affective energy and money. The ambivalence around the translation of this term reflects the way that the concept itself describes a flight from oneself to one’s objects, not unlike an affective version of the intentionality whose elusive definition occupied Husserl for his whole career. Besetzung names the way that the libido fixates on objects; it is what makes it so difficult to decide consciously whom to love. Like the ego/I dilemma, the cathexis/investment/occupation translation dilemma reflects the range of Freud’s models of (or metaphors for) the psyche. While cathexis sounds the most structural, the most like an abstract relation between unrelatable psychic objects, investment and occupation have strong economic and topographic connotations in ordinary language.

Zwang The Stracheys translate the morpheme Zwang- differently depending on context. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, they translate it as “compulsion” in the compound word Wiederholungszwang, the compulsion to repeat. But they are inconsistent when they translate Zwang- as “obsessive” in Zwangsneurose (obsessive neurosis). We should note that Zwang- has every mark of a specialized term, that is, 1) Zwang is an important concept within Freud’s ideas, and 2) it is used fairly consistently to mark actions controlled by unconscious and regressive forces. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “repetition compulsion” is “the desire to return to an earlier state of things.” Freud associates this with the death drive, that is, the desire to return to the state of rest that our physical matter enjoyed before our conscious lives began. He gives examples of people repeating painful experiences, which would be inexplicable through the pleasure principle alone. A child throwing a favorite toy out of his crib or a woman marrying man after man, each of whom died after several years. His “metapsychological,” and controversial, hypothesis is that the unconscious desire to relive our individual pasts expresses our paradoxical wish to “relive” our non-existence before our birth. Compare the “compulsion” there with the “obsessiveness” discussed in Freud’s 1913 conference paper delivered in Munich, called “The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis,” According to that earlier paper, “obsessive neurosis” comes from an incomplete “regression of sexual life

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to the pregenital sadistic and anal-erotic stage.” In the case he reports, obsessive hand washing results from the repression of these regressive desires. The socially damaging and taboo desires that Freud associates with that stage (namely inflicting pain on the self and others, and a fixation on anal pleasures), are, like repetition compulsion, regressive desires “to return to an earlier state.” In this case, the earlier state is the sexual developmental stage before the discovery of the genitals as the socially legitimate source of sexual arousal—in the case of repetition compulsion even longer before that stage. Thus, the comparison between obsessive neurosis and repetition compulsion can be sharpened: both want to return to a pre-socialized state, but in both cases the behavior that results is both unconscious and non-adaptive. Freud’s theory of “compulsion” is relevant to his theory of belatedness: before publishing any of the writings under discussion here, Freud had already deviated from his earliest theories that “the choice of neurosis” depended on the degree of active involvement that a child experienced in his or her traumatic early exposure to sexuality. In a letter to Fliess written on November 14, 1897 Freud wrote that “Choice of neurosis… probably depends” on an event that occurs after a trauma and “transforms a source of internal pleasure into one of internal disgust.” While Freud later devoted more attention to “revisions” that occur later in life to traumatic memories, he does not explicitly thematize the concept of “belatedness.” The concept of “compulsion” is always associated with the unconscious irruption of a less formed—even an unlived—past into the present. Similarly, it was not Freud himself but a later commentator, the linguistically oriented French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who first noted that “belatedness” had a consistent conceptual valence in Freud’s work. If compulsion derives from origins prior to ego-life, the particularity of a compulsive or otherwise neurotic behavior derives belatedly.

Must a retranslation oust its predecessor? A retranslation is a form of belated revision. While all verbal expression brings meaning to the unformed manifold of inner experience, it is fruitful to think of retranslation as particularly akin to the “secondary revision” (sekundäre Verarbeitung) that Freud produces in The Interpretation of Dreams, when discussing the translation of silent memories into discourse. This movement highlights the foundations of the concept of the self: the identity of the subject and the unity of the subject’s actions. The primary revision, the translation of experience into memory, is so selective that it inevitably yields messy, fragmentary results. As Andrew Benjamin observes, Freud describes these psychological processes as analogous with interlingual translation since memory and experience are non-equivalent yet inseparable.99 In translation the target text is inseparably bound to the source without being its equivalent.

128  Retranslating Freud Although interlingual translation can a movement from one discourse to another, this movement’s invisibility is most easily broken by the appearance of a retranslation. Retranslation lends itself much better than translation to a metadiscourse on translation. When analyzing retranslations, it is always tempting to narrate the motivations of the new translators, who did not see the old translation as adequate. The existence of rival translations attracts a discourse of the mediation of desire. The discourse focuses on retranslators’ efforts at “acquiring legitimacy,” a stable legitimacy in which the established text must be pushed out in order to make room for the retranslation.100 In the case of philosophy texts, the pursuit of legitimacy depends on the theoretical climate into which a text enters. A contemporary Anglo-American theory reader may be more attuned to translation concerns than past readers were. The act of retranslating theoretical works need not produce a rivalry between authorized translators and retranslators, fighting for the most intimate position of knowledge regarding the source text.101 The new Freud translations take psychoanalysis out of the realm of the history of science; they replace an all but outmoded scientific model with reinvigorated storytelling; in doing so, they establish the importance of a metadiscourse on theory which does not pigeonhole its function in one institutional form, such as ethical or medical advice.

Notes 1 Laplanche, Traduzir, 32:50. (My translation) “Notre option, ç’est de placer le lecteur français dans la même position que le lecteur allemand. Quand un passage est ambigu, nous le laissons ambigu également en français.” 2 Freud, La vie sexuelle. 3 Laplanche, Traduzir. (My translation) “On a dit qu’il n’y a pas de langage technique de Freud. Ça n’est pas vrai. Il dit, ‘unsere termini tecnici, nos tèrmes techniques, unsere Fachsprache, notre langage de technicien […] ç’est de limiter. Les mots qui sont trop flous, il les limite.” 4 Goldschmidt, Als Freud das Meer sah, 73. 5 Banoun, Poulin, and Chevrel, Histoire des traductions en langue française, 1617. 6 Banoun, Poulin, and Chevrel, 1628. 7 For a thorough analysis of the historical emergence and effects of this translation, see Jay, “Politics of Translation.” 8 Nida, Bible Translating. Cf. Porter, “Eugene Nida and Translation,” 12. 9 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 22. 10 Laplanche, Traduzir. 11 I discuss the history of this concept within Parisian philosophy in more detail in the final chapter. 12 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, 71. 13 Mahony, “Freud and Translation.” It is worth noting that in Freud’s careful analyses of jokes, he does not call his explanations “translations,” perhaps because the meanings of jokes are obvious enough not to require psychoanalytic interpretation and thus paraphrasing their meanings does not constitute psychoanalytic “translation.”

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14 Laplanche and Fletcher, Jean Laplanche, 14. 15 Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, 128. 16 Fletcher, “The Letter in the Unconscious: The Enigmatic Signifier in the Work of Jean Laplanche,” 112. 17 Lacan and Laplanche are aware that they are refining a concept that remained latent in Freud’s own work; in other words, the concept of Nachträglichkeit emerged belatedly, that is, nachträglich: “If ‘deferred action’ (Nachtrag), to rescue another of these terms from the facility into which they have since fallen, renders this effort impracticable, it should be known that they were unheard of at that time.” “The Signification of the Phallas” Lacan, Ecrits, 215. 18 Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 111–12. 19 “durch wort oder that geschehenes, einem widerfahrenes im gedächtnis behalten, um darüber heimlich zu grollen oder es den urheber gelegentlich empfinden zu lassen, sich dafür zu rächen.” Grimm and Grimm, Deutsches wörterbuch, 13, 206. 20 While Cassin’s dictionary cites Laplanche’s discussions of the unconscious, drive, imago (eidôlon), and gender, it did not take on nachträglich. Barbara Cassin et al. (2014). 21 Lee, Jacques Lacan, 43–44. While popular in the poststructuralist humanities, neuroscientists note that the term “belatedness” overestimates the necessity that a traumatic memory is encoded in the first place. Many neuroscientists now believe that the “failure” to recall may as likely be a failure of encoding as of repression. Gibbs, Contemporary American Trauma Narratives, 11. 22 Laplanche, An Interview with Jean Laplanche. 23 Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950 [1895]),” 353. 24 Pfister, The Theory and Analysis of Drama, 98–102. 25 Freud, The Wolfman and Other Cases, 235. 26 Freud, 277. 27 Freud, 239. 28 Laplanche and Caruth, “An Interview with Jean Laplanche.” 29 Laplanche and Caruth. 30 Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 263. 31 Freud, The Wolfman and Other Cases, 236. 32 Freud, 239. 33 Freud, 242, 245; Freud (1918: 71). 34 The impracticality of Laplanche’s single proposed English translation is attested when Jeffrey Mehlman opts for “after the event” instead of “afterwards”—in Mehlman’s translation of Laplanche, no less. We read: “And yet it is clear that the repression of the fantasy can drag along with it into the unconscious the memory itself, a memory which after the event [après-coup] takes on a sexual meaning …” Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 102. Notice that Mehlman does not dispense with the foreign word while translating it differentially (here “after the event,” but elsewhere “afterwards”). This has the powerful and useful effect of putting the translation in an interpretive tradition. 35 Balsamo, “Comment traduit-on Nachträglichkeit en italien ?” 36 House and Slotnick, “Après-Coup in French Psychoanalysis: The Long Afterlife of Nachträglichkeit: The First Hundred Years, 1893 to 1993,” 686. 37 Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 41; See also Tauber, Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher. 38 “Introduction” Transcendental Dialectic Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. 39 Jianzhong, “Retranslation.” 40 Phillips, “After Strachey: Translating Freud.” 41 Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond, 11. 42 Pollock, “Freud in America.”

130  Retranslating Freud 43 Ricoeur, On Translation, 7. 44 Susam-Sarajeva, Theories on the Move Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories, 139. 45 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, xii. 46 Susam-Sarajeva, Theories on the Move Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories, 164. 47 Susam-Sarajeva, 139. 48 Deane-Cox, Retranslation, 4. Isabelle Desmidt explains it: “At a later stage, when [the target culture] has become familiar with the text (and author), the target culture allows for and demands new translations – retranslations – that are no longer definitively target oriented, but source text oriented.” And “one wonders if and to what extent the retranslation hypothesis also holds for rerewriting [sic] in general.” Desmidt, “(Re)translation Revisited.” In other words, Desmidt observes similar concern for the source text in the editing of existing translations. 49 She cites a distinction made by Enrico Monti that the “wrinkles” of the original are considered charming, whereas the translation’s signs of age become grotesque. Monti et al., Autour de la retraduction, 16 in: Deane-Cox, Retranslation, 6. 50 Robinson, “Retranslation and the Ideosomatic Drift.” 51 Deane-Cox, Retranslation, 34. 52 On this see: Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, 161. 53 Tauber, Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher. This view is shared by Eric Matthews: “Freud’s work should be seen as a contribution to philosophy, rather than to experimental psychology.” Matthews, “Revisiting Freud,” 245. 54 Clemens, Psychoanalysis Is an Antiphilosophy, 6. 55 Burkeman, “Therapy Wars.” 56 Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II (1893–1895), 159–60. 57 Bennett, “The Scientific Revolution and Its Repercussions on the Translation of Technical Discourse.” 58 Slavet, Racial Fever, 81. 59 Kirsner, “Fresh Freud,” 664. 60 Dowling, Ricoeur on Time and Narrative, 1. 61 Cooper, “Numbers, Prognosis, and Healing,” 46. John Forrester makes the fascinating argument that “thinking in cases” brings science away from grand abstractions of theory towards the lived ethical experience of acting in highly contingent circumstances. Forrester, Thinking in Cases, 48–55. 62 Brooks, “Fictions of the Wolfman,” 75. 63 The most famous being the claims that the Stracheys downplayed Freud’s humanist element, made most elaborately in Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul. 64 Freud, Collected Papers, Vol. 3, 348–49. 65 Strachey and Strachey, Bloomsbury/Freud, 92. 66 Strachey and Strachey, 28, 30. 67 Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind, 165. 68 Strachey and Strachey, Bloomsbury/Freud, 242. 69 The volume includes a glossary, which translated the phrase “suppurating emboli,” but it also very questionably translates “Er möchte” as “He would.” Strachey and Strachey, 337. 70 Strachey and Strachey, 95. 71 Strachey and Strachey, 97. 72 Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul, 44. 73 Wilson, “Did Strachey Invent Freud?” 74 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 28.

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75 Freud, Origins of Religion, 7. 76 Holroyd, Lytton Strachey, xiii. 77 Phillips, “After Strachey: Translating Freud.” 78 Pollock, “Freud in America,” 117–18. 79 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, 25. 80 Hall, “Where ‘Id’ Was, There ‘It’ or ‘Es’ Shall Be,” 358. 81 Hall, 350. 82 Introduction to Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “Freud’s writing is to be presented not as a hot and sweaty struggle with intractable and often crazily daring ideas, but as a cut-and-dried corpus of unchallengeable dogma.” 83 Strachey and Strachey, Bloomsbury/Freud, 221–22; Hall, “Where ‘Id’ Was, There ‘It’ or ‘Es’ Shall Be,” 352. John Murray Cuddihy brilliantly expresses an actual resonance between “id” and “Yidd”: the shame and solidarity of Jewish identity makes it similar to the crude id within all of us: “In psychoanalysis, the ‘id’ is the functional equivalent of the ‘Yid’ in social intercourse: on the train, the discovery of a shared ethnicity legitimates abandoning the later-acquired, ‘higher,’ more ‘refined’ forms of Gentile social intercourse.” Cuddihy, Ordeal of Civility, 22. 84 Freud, Breuer, and Luckhurst, Studies in Hysteria, xxiv–xxv. 85 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, 257. 86 Freud, 106. 87 Freud, 111. 88 Hall, “Where ‘Id’ Was, There ‘It’ or ‘Es’ Shall Be,” 357–59. 89 José Manuel Ureña Gómez-Moreno, “A Cognitive Sociolinguistic Approach to Metaphor and Denominative Variation.” 90 Parapraxis/slip is one of the problems cited in the criticism of Strachey’s scientism: “The greater the empirical content and predictive power of a conjecture the better. In the case of slips of the tongue, Freud discovered that small seemingly unconnected acts made sense — they were ‘failed acts,’ ‘acts which missed their mark’ (rather than Strachey's neologism, ‘parapraxes’). In the case of slips, Freud began from the conjecture that these acts are meaningful, that they have a sense or intention when taken in context.” Kirsner, “Fresh Freud,” 644. 91 James, Psychology, 72. 92 James, The Principles of Psychology, 321. 93 Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 55. 94 Laplanche, 62–63. 95 Laplanche, 66. 96 Laplanche, 73. 97 Freud, Breuer, and Luckhurst, Studies in Hysteria, xxxvii–xxxviii. 98 Freud, Whiteside, and Johnson, The Psychology of Love, xxviii. 99 Benjamin, Translation and the Nature of Philosophy, 146. 100 Deane-Cox, Retranslation, 32. 101 This manner of modelling literary rivalry is thought out of Harold Bloom’s early work: Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. A&C Black, 2013. Balsamo, Maurizio. “Comment traduit-on Nachträglichkeit en italien ?” Revue française de psychanalyse 73, no. 5 (February 25, 2010): 1453–56.

132  Retranslating Freud Banoun, Bernard, Isabelle Poulin, and Yves Chevrel. Histoire des traductions en langue française: XXe siècle. Lagrasse: Editions Verdier, 2019. Benjamin, Andrew E. Translation and the Nature of Philosophy: A New Theory of Words, Vol. 193. London; New York: Routledge, 1989. http://hdl​.handle​.net​ /2027/. Bennett, Karen. “The Scientific Revolution and Its Repercussions on the Translation of Technical Discourse.” The Translator 17, no. 2 (November 1, 2011): 189– 210. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/13556509​.2011​.10799486. Bettelheim, Bruno. Freud and Man’s Soul. London: Chatto & Windus, 1983. http:// hdl​.handle​.net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015007154654. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Brooks, Peter. “Fictions of the Wolfman: Freud and Narrative Understanding.” Diacritics 9, no. 1 (Spring 1979). http://search​.proquest​.com​/docview​ /1297857879​/citation​/A96685DB82A45E2PQ​/1​?accountid​=8623. Burkeman, Oliver. “Therapy Wars: The Revenge of Freud.” The Guardian, January 7, 2016, sec. Science. http://www​.theguardian​.com​/science​/2016​/jan​/07​/therapy​ -wars​-revenge​-of​-freud​-cognitive​-behavioural​-therapy. Clemens, Justin. Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. http://search​.ebscohost​.com​/login​.aspx​?direct​=true​&db​ =nlebk​&AN​=603161​&site​=eds​-live. Cooper, Glen M. “Numbers, Prognosis, and Healing: Galen on Medical Theory.” Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences 90, no. 2 (2004): 45–60. Cuddihy, John Murray. Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle With Modernity. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. Deane-Cox, Sharon. Retranslation. London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. Desmidt, Isabelle. “(Re)translation Revisited.” Meta: Journal des traducteurs 54, no. 4 (2009): 669. https://doi​.org​/10​.7202​/038898ar. Dowling, William C. “An Introduction to Temps et Récit.” In Ricoeur on Time and Narrative. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. http://www​.jstor​ .org​/stable​/j​.ctvpj7gg4​.4. Fletcher, John. “The Letter in the Unconscious: The Enigmatic Signifier in the Work of Jean Laplanche.” In Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives: A Dossier. 1st edition. London: Ica Editions, 1993. Forrester, John. Thinking in Cases. 1st edition. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2016. Freud, S. “Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950 [1895]).” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume I (1886–1899): Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts, Vol. I, 283–94. London: Hogarth Press, 1966. http://www​.pep​-web​.org​.proxy​.lib​ .umich​.edu​/document​.php​?id​=se​.001​.0281a​#p0352. Freud, Sigmund. “Aus Der Geschichte Einer Infantilen Neurose.” In Gesammelte Werke: XII, 3–343. London: Imago Publishing Co., Ltd., 1918. http://www​.pep​ -web​.org​.proxy​.lib​.umich​.edu​/document​.php​?id​=gw​.012​.0054a. ———. Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings. Translated by John Reddick. Penguin, 2003. http://www​.penguin​.co​.uk​/books​/beyond​-the​-pleasure​ -principle​/9780141931661/.

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———. Collected Papers. Edited by James Strachey. Translated by Joan Riviere. 1st American Edition edition. Hogarth Press, 1925. ———. La vie sexuelle. Translated by Denise Berger and Jean Laplanche. 13th edition. 5ème tirage. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2011. ———. Origins of Religion: “Totem and Taboo” and “Moses and Monotheism.” New Ed edition. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1990. ———. The Wolfman and Other Cases. Translated by Louise Adey Huish. New York: Penguin Classics, 2003. Freud, Sigmund, Josef Breuer, and Nicola Luckhurst. Studies in Hysteria. New York: Penguin, 2004. Freud, Sigmund, Shaun Whiteside, and Jeri Johnson. The Psychology of Love. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2007. Gibbs, Alan. Contemporary American Trauma Narratives. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur. Als Freud das Meer sah: Essay. S. Fischer Verlag, 2018. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches wörterbuch. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854. Hall, Kirsty. “Where “Id” Was, There “It” or “Es” Shall Be: Reflections on Translating Freud.” Target 17, no. 2 (January 1, 2005): 349–61. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1075​/target​.17​.2​.08hal. Holroyd, Michael. Lytton Strachey: The New Biography. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. House, Jonathan, and Julie Slotnick. “Après-Coup in French Psychoanalysis: The Long Afterlife of Nachträglichkeit: The First Hundred Years, 1893 to 1993.” Psychoanalytic Review 102, no. 5 (October 2015): 683–708. James, William. Psychology: The Briefer Course. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961. ———. The Principles of Psychology. London: Macmillan, 1890. Jay, Martin. “Politics of Translation: Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin on the Buber–Rosenzweig Bible.” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 21, no. 1 (January 1, 1976): 3–24. https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/leobaeck​/21​.1​.3. Jianzhong, Xu. “Retranslation: Necessary or Unnecessary.” Babel 49, no. 3 (January 1, 2003): 193–202. https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/babel​.49​.3​.02jia. José Manuel, Ureña Gómez-Moreno, and Pamela Faber. “A Cognitive Sociolinguistic Approach to Metaphor and Denominative Variation: A Case Study of Marine Biology Terms.” Review of Cognitive Linguistics 12, no. 1 (2014): 193–222. https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/rcl​.12​.1​.07ure. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kirsner, D. “Fresh Freud: No Longer Lost in Translation.” Psychoanalysis & Psychology 24 (2007): 658–66. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Laplanche, Jean. “An Interview With Jean Laplanche. Interview by Cathy Caruth, 2001.” http://pmc​.iath​.virginia​.edu​/text​-only​/issue​.101​/11​.2caruth​.txt. ———. Essays on Otherness. London; New York: Routledge, 1999. ———. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. Reprint edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

134  Retranslating Freud ———. New Foundations for Psychoanalysis. Translated by David Macey. Oxford, UK; New York, NY: Basil Blackwell, 1989. ———. “Traduzir.” Interview by Haroldo De Campos, September 10, 2015. Https://vimeo​.com​/138854565​. Departamento de Psicanalise do Instituto Sedes Sapientiae & Nucleo de Psicanalise Cinema e Video. https://vimeo​.com​ /138854565. Laplanche, Jean, and Cathy Caruth. “An Interview With Jean Laplanche.” Postmodern Culture 11, no. 2 (2001). https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/pmc​.2001​.0002. Laplanche, Jean, and John Fletcher. Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives: A Dossier. Edited by Martin Stanton. Y First edition. London: Ica Editions, 1993. Laplanche, Jean, and J. B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. International Psycho-Analytical Library, No. 94, p. 510. London: Hogarth Press, 1973. http://www​.pep​-web​.org​/document​.php​?id​ =ipl​.094​.0001a. Lee, Jonathan Scott. Jacques Lacan. Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. Mahony, Patrick J. “Freud and Translation.” American Imago 58, no. 4 (2001): 837–40. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/aim​.2001​.0022. Matthews, Eric. “Revisiting Freud.” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 20, no. 3 (2013): 243–45. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/ppp​.2013​.0046. Monti, Enrico, Peter Schnyder, Jean-René Ladmiral, and Institut de recherche en langues et littératures européennes (Université de Haute-Alsace). Autour de la retraduction: Perspectives littéraires européennes. Paris: Orizons, 2011. Nida, Eugene A. Bible Translating. American Bible Society, 1947. Pfister, Manfred. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. Translated by John Halliday. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Phillips, Adam. “After Strachey: Translating Freud.” London Review of Books, October 4, 2007. Pollock, Andrew. “Freud in America.” Radical Society 30, no. 3/4 (December 2003): 113–20. Porter, Stanley E. “Eugene Nida and Translation.” The Bible Translator 56, no. 1 (January 2005): 8–19. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​/026009350505600102. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970. ———. On Translation. New edition. New York: Routledge, 2006. Robinson, Douglas. “Retranslation and the Ideosomatic Drift.” In Retranslation: When and Why?, 2009. Slavet, Eliza. Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2009. http://site​.ebrary​.com​/lib​/alltitles​/docDetail​.action​?docID​ =10365061. Strachey, J. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II (1893–1895): Studies on Hysteria. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. http://www​.pep​-web​.org​.proxy​.lib​.umich​.edu​/document​.php​?id​=se​.002​ .0000a. Strachey, James, and Alix Strachey. Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, 1924–25. Edited by Perry Meisel and Walter Kendrick. First edition. New York: Basic Books, 1985.

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Sulloway, Frank J. Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Susam-Sarajeva, Şebnem. “Theories on the Move Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories.” In Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories. Amsterdam; New York, NY: Rodopi, 2006. http://site​.ebrary​.com​/lib​/umich​/Doc​ ?id​=10380419. Tauber, Alfred I. Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. https://proxy​.bilkent​.edu​.tr​/http:/​/search​.ebscohost​.com​/ login​.aspx​?direct​=true​&db​=e000xww​&AN​=331287​&site​=eds​-live. Toury, Gideon. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Benjamins Translation Library, Vol. 4 viii, p. 311. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: J. Benjamins Pub., 1995. http://hdl​.handle​.net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015049624250. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London; New York: Routledge, 2008. Wilson, E. “Did Strachey Invent Freud?” The International Review of PsychoAnalysis 14 (1987): 299–315.

4

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German

A 2007 Web of Science study quantified the moment that may have been the peak of French theory’s ascendency in the global humanities: the three most-cited authors in humanities publications, with over a thousand more citations than number four, were Michel Foucault (2,521), Pierre Bourdieu (2,465), and Jacques Derrida (1,874).1 Times Higher Education published a comment on the fact that all of the top three were French: “the most telling indicator of current trends is the high ranking of three French scholars born between the two world wars – Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze.” To grasp the phenomenal rise of French theory THE recommends consulting François Cusset’s book from 2003 on the topic, which points out that while French theory is globally ascendant, it is also widely hated.2 Cusset describes the theory advocates of the aughts as wanting to dethrone technocratic values, like efficiency, self-enrichment, and “progress,” in their call for patient engagement with the explicitly unsolvable questions of text interpretation. In Cusset’s account of the matter, the disdain for theory unites all who believe that intellectuals should address “more urgent issues,” whether those critics be liberals, Marxists, or “neoconservative watchdogs.”3 Cusset insists however that French theory does address politically urgent questions, but that this dimension of it has simply failed to translate into the American context. According to Cusset’s negative assessment of the American appropriation of French theory, its Americanization tamed the political aspects of French theory to give a veneer of postmodern rebellion to underdeveloped critiques of American capitalism and militarism. Perhaps the most prominent spokesperson for this pessimistic assessment from the right was Allan Bloom, writing in defense of traditional classical education. Bloom decried the “Nietzscheanization of the left,” which had made the humanities into a haven of politically escapist intellectual flights of fancy claiming to replace the old focus on classics.4 In a similar vein, at the dawn of the new millennium Herman Rapaport diagnosed the damage wrought by critical theory on an institutional level: its drive to destabilize all systems colluded with academic one-upmanship to create a competition to destabilize the most basic norms by which academic work could be evaluated—further damaging academia’s ever-shaky reputation in the public eye.5 DOI: 10.4324/9781003348559-5

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  137 Rather than prescribing that American scholars should invent their own autochthonous theory (or should all become pragmatists or analytic philosophers), Cusset calls for a renewed engagement with French theory as a way of standing up to the currently ascendant “neo-Kantians and abstract universalists […] still advising governments, still appearing on prime-time TV, still filling up the nonfiction bestseller list […] with their unquestioned essentialism and their daunting vision of an apocalypse of civilization.”6 Cusset proposes that Americanized French theory was depoliticized to fit its source material into the increasingly profit-oriented American university model.7 This chapter begins by examining the rise of French philosophy as the intellectual point of reference for the Anglo-American humanities in recent years. The important backstory to that phenomenon is the translation history of German philosophy into the French intellectual system. The ultimate effect of this double history is the movement of philosophical language between Germany and the United States, with French acting as a kind of interlingua. During the nineteenth century, American university administrators explicitly turned to the German research university as a model. In the twentieth century, the philosophical effects of mediation by French theory account for much of how the Anglo-American humanities became more thoroughly—and almost unconsciously—Germanized.8 French theory still maintains its intellectual authority within the anglophone humanities. Jason Demers has persuasively argued that this began at the 1966 conference “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” at Johns Hopkins, which marked the first major wave of the translation of French poststructuralist thinking into a US context. The conference was a francophone Gipfelgespräch; it involved many of France’s intellectual luminaries, including, among others, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, René Girard, Jean Hyppolite, and Jean-Pierre Vernant.9 Cusset may be correct that the political meaning of Derrida’s cosmopolitan notion of hospitality was lost in translation, but Demers stands on firm ground when claiming that the Americanization of French theory, which started in 1966, was already near completion by the Schizo-Conference of 1975 and that, in the first issues of Semiotext(e) in the 1980s, American humanists were not just parroting that French generation’s associative rhetorical style: its rhizomatic root structure had thoroughly extended into the American academic system.10 Meanwhile, the French “polysystem”11 had drawn its axioms from a selective appropriation of German thought—one which largely excluded the Frankfurt School and other leftist thought, and which cherished the non-German anti-Cartesian ally they found in Spinoza (especially among theologically inclined scholars).12 There are many explanations for French thinkers’ fascination with German thought in the twentieth century. A (self) perception of France as a society past its prime had been developing over the prior couple of centuries. The stereotype was familiar enough to Hannah

138  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German Arendt to inspire a sweeping remark on French post-imperial retreat to the domestic in The Human Condition: Since the decay of their once great and glorious public realm, the French have become masters in the art of being happy among “small things,” within the space of their own four walls, between chest and bed, table and chair, dog and cat and flowerpot, extending to these things a care and tenderness which, in a world where rapid industrialization constantly kills off the things of yesterday to produce today’s objects, may even appear to be the world’s last, purely humane corner.13 While the claim that France has lost its “public realm” sounds hard to justify (what other society holds vociferous protests as often?), Alain Badiou also describes France’s cultural vitality as having gone the way of its longlost imperial glory. And he points to its neighbor to the east as the most eligible source of revitalization: [W]hat I’d like to see is the fusion of France and Germany. One single country, one single federal state, and two main languages—that’s quite possible. France is an old country, crushed by the weight of its history, shriveled up and conceited for no reason. Germany, on the other hand, is a very uncertain country. It doesn’t know what it is; it’s desperately looking for itself, and always has been. If we were to fuse France and Germany we would put an end to dear old France and give Germany a real youth.14 Such a wish may reject claims to French cultural superiority, but in doing so it expresses confidence that the robust spirit of French culture will thrive even under conditions of increased cultural hybridity. Such a thirst for Germanic rejuvenation could explain postwar French philosophers’ embrace of Heideggerian philosophy to the point of idealization. Whatever the reason, turning to German phenomenology was becoming a French tradition around the turn of the century. Before Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) ended the Cartesian grip on French thought by inaugurating the existentialist and later the poststructuralist discourses, theologian Désiré Mercier saw Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900) as buttressing the emerging Frenchlanguage neo-scholastic movement.15 Perhaps the revolutionary and the staid elements in French intellectual culture are interdependent; perhaps the French perceive their nation’s social stability as so robust that it can easily reject outmoded institutions without risk of economic collapse.16 Historians tend to explain the globally influential creativity of postwar French philosophy as a response to the hyperadministrated state of French thought up until that moment. The perception of intolerable stagnation was at a high point among intellectuals in interwar France where the poststructuralists were educated. Leon Brunschvicg

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  139 was at the head of the jury d’agrégation, where he determined the curriculum of an entire generation of humanists: to master the work of Plato first, then Descartes, and finally Kant.17 Even when Bergson resisted the scientific rationalism of the neo-Kantianism that had become the establishment view under Brunschvicg, his theory of the intelligence of nature still did not clash with the curriculum’s republican optimism.18 The global appeal of French philosophy can in turn be explained, at least in part, by the international resonance of the “68ers’” largely student-led rebellion against the deep institutional conservatism that had hitherto defined French academia, a Brunschvicgian optimism concerning the Enlightenment that had its roots in the administrative state.19 The ideals of centralized governance that had defined the modern French state since the thirteenth century was mirrored in an educational culture of preserving the great ideas of dead masters, an approach perceived in the 1960s as having hampered the previous generation from developing original philosophical insights. The postwar generation thus turned to German sources (like Freud, Nietzsche, and Heidegger) that produced pessimistic views of history as a doomed cycle or as a decline from a long-lost Golden Age—quite at odds with the French state’s self-aggrandizing historical progress narrative. When the success of this generation resulted in the francocentrism of global citation practices in the social sciences and humanities, that result also shows the entrenched power of the European tradition and the challenges involved in efforts to decolonize academia.20 Furthermore, two of the most significant non–European-born postcolonial theorists in the canon of progressive theory, Édouard Glissant and Franz Fanon, grew up in the larger sphere of Francophonie, namely on the Caribbean island of Martinique, still today an overseas department of France. As their dates show, 2007’s most-cited scholars Foucault (1926–1984), Bourdieu (1930–2002), and Derrida (1930–2004) are not only all French, but were all born around the same time, and their greatest twenty-first-century fame was posthumous. Their peers also include Gilles Deleuze (1925– 1995) and Félix Guattari (1930–1992), and many of the thinkers that they interacted with were also closely in dialogue with German phenomenology: for example, Jean Piaget (1896–1980), Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), Roland Barthes (1915–1980), and Louis Althusser (1918–1990). The poststructuralists were also often classmates: Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze all studied under Jean Hyppolite (Deleuze at the lycée level, the others at the university level as normaliens). Hyppolite prepared them for the leftist climate of postwar intellectual culture through his revolutionary leftist interpretations on Hegel. Understanding this French theory generation, which historian Ethan Kleinberg refers to as “the Generation of 1933,” has inspired monographs by US-based humanists for more than four decades. Kleinberg’s designation is more precise than lumping them in with the “68ers,” since these men all had different kinds and degrees of involvement with the radicalism of that era of protest and disruption to French university norms.21

140  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German While the reception and transmission of German philosophy in postwar France is complex and multifaceted, the rest of this chapter will focus on the reception of Heidegger in France because of its fascinating impact on the translation history between French, English, and German. Heidegger reception had a strong start during the Occupation with Sartre’s 1943 Being and Nothingness, and an equally strong second wind after the war. Heidegger planned well for posthumous influence by having his unpublished writings and lectures released at periodic intervals after his death. This process took an abrupt turn in 2014 with the publication of the Black Notebooks, diaries that show how Heidegger related his tribalist, anti-Semitic, National Socialist militarism to his better-known public argument that life-changing, modern technologies “enframe” the world and thereby undermine a society’s chances of authentically encountering Being. In the Black Notebooks, Heidegger buys into many anti-Jewish stereotypes, as in that the whole global Jewish diaspora has acted in concert, in an inherently Jewish way, by working to usher in the current technocratic era, in which new military and communication technologies create a globalized world that catastrophically cuts humanity off from a rooted understanding of Being. Ultimately, Heidegger claims that Jewish technophilia expresses a lust for self-destruction. Slavoj Žižek summarizes the anti-Semitic core argument of the Black Notebooks as follows: “In short, the Nazis, in organizing the technological annihilation of Jews, merely turned the ‘essentially Jewish’ stance of Machenschaft against the empirical Jews themselves.”22 Žižek here draws out the violent apocalyptic element in the Notebooks (what Peter Trawny calls the “apocalyptic reduction”).23 Even in the Black Notebooks, Žižek looks past the racist conspiracy theories and highlights the notebooks’ timely critique of Machenschaft (read as “machinization” rather than its usual conspiratorial meaning, “machination”), which calls to mind transhumanist fantasies of the self-destruction of humanity in favor of a technologically mediated new form of life about which no one can say whether it will be better, worse, or even commensurable with life as we now value it. The notebooks show Heidegger’s political weaknesses, but other passages show his prescience in recognizing how technology was transforming society. When one considers how important Jewish thinkers were to Heidegger’s thinking (Husserl, especially, but also Jaspers, Cohen, and Arendt), it is arguably a disservice to the legacy of Jewish culture to ignore Heidegger’s insights and legacy—even though one must also acknowledge his moral recklessness.24 In 2007, Editions de Seuil released a French translation of a carefully curated (literary-estate–approved) selection of the correspondence between Martin Heidegger and his wife Elfriede. Barbara Cassin and Alain Badiou wrote an introduction, which was rejected by the estate, perhaps because it drew attention to Heidegger’s frequent infidelities, which Cassin and Badiou characterize as “a provincial and German response, as it were, to the French and Parisian Sartre-Beauvoir couple” (famous for their open marriage).25

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  141 Yet even as it examines Heidegger’s personal life critically, the introduction by Cassin and Badiou is more adamant in admonishing those who would disparage the role that Heidegger has played in French philosophy: [T]he whole of French philosophical production between the 1930s and the 1970s, which it would not be an exaggeration to say was world renowned and at times dominant, had a fundamental, even if critical, relationship with Heidegger’s project. Suffice it to mention, to confine ourselves to those who are no longer alive, Sartre, MerleauPonty, Lautman, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Lacoue-Labarthe (with Deleuze being the exception, something that actually provides food for thought) to understand what this means. To attack Heidegger with the utmost ferocity was also, and even above all, to settle scores with that glorious period of philosophy, a time when there was a strong relationship between intellectual work and revolutionary politics in all its forms. There was a petty, vindictive aspect, combined, as is often the case, with a reactionary impulse, to the delight that some critics took in ferreting out the thinker’s worst faults.26 It was precisely Heidegger’s radical anti-dualist thinking, which fundamentally rejects the notion that ideas exist outside of the material world, that inspired politically inclusive philosophical projects among the poststructuralist thinkers.27 Meanwhile Heidegger’s own apolitical self-positioning after World War II only facilitated this new appropriation. Cassin and Badiou acknowledge that Heidegger gave an intellectually disappointing but personally understandable evasion of questions about his association with Nazism, which they consider at least more honest than feigning regret. “Repentance is not a virtue,”28 Cassin admiringly quotes Spinoza (another influential ontological monist), to convey that a self-serving apology is arguably less respectable than simply not mentioning an appalling deficit. In another admiring takedown by a French luminary, Pierre Bourdieu observes that Heidegger concealed the conservative politics at the heart of his philosophy through rhetorical sophistication: first, he persuades the reader of the novelty of his concepts, through his knack for appending an unfamiliar suffix to a word, like Entdecktheit, or putting the word in a new context, like Dasein—which had previously indicated any “entity,” while the word’s connotations already made it a good candidate for describing the existential state of humanity.29 On Bourdieu’s reading, Heidegger ingeniously addressed the rhetoric of conservative revolution to the growing academic proletariat, as universities had recently cut pay for lecturers and humanities professors, who were in turn bitter over the loss of their economic privilege due to Germany’s hyperinflation and their loss of social status due to the role reversal between the natural sciences and humanities following the Scientific Revolution.30

142  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German The appeal of Heidegger’s German can thus be read politically, but Heidegger did everything rhetorically possible to keep the focus on language itself. Bourdieu encapsulates his reading thus: Heidegger is close to the spokesmen of the “conservative revolution,” many of whose words and theses he consecrates philosophically, but he distances himself from it by imposing a form which sublimates the “crudest” borrowings by inserting them in the network of phonetic and semantic resonance which characterizes the Hölderlin-style Begriffsdichtung of the academic prophet.31 By leaving his political stances vague but including keywords that make them recognizable to the likeminded (called “dog-whistling” when politicians do it), Heidegger created language that could be utterly recontextualized in translation. Bourdieu witnessed the peak of that translational success in France, which may have led him to overstate the case for the reactionary implications of Heidegger’s politics.32 While Bourdieu does not analyze the effects of Jean Beaufret’s translations, Bourdieu considers Beaufret’s Marxist interpretation of Heidegger a paradoxical move that could only have happened under the conditions of French academia, which rewards intellectual excellence by crowning it politically just—irrespective of the work’s actual political implications.

Jean Beaufret: Heidegger’s most loyal French champion The discussion of the role of translation in the French reception of Heidegger is not complete without discussing the translation and cultural mediation work of Jean Beaufret. The discussion of Beaufret’s Heidegger cannot be reduced to a nationalistic deployment of translation as a way of enhancing the target language’s cultural prestige—though this has been a powerful motivator for European translators and translation theorists at least since the German Romantics.33 The translation of Heidegger emboldened French academics to apply Heidegger’s method for showing that any word or object’s meaning depends entirely on its context. The results increased the prestige of French intellectual culture, which in turn achieved monumental influence on international thought, in fields including linguistics, architecture, anthropology, history, classics, and literary studies. As with Walter Kaufmann’s rehabilitation of Nietzsche in the postwar United States through linguistically brilliant translations and a depoliticizing biography, Jean Beaufret’s translations and scholarship rehabilitated Heidegger in postwar France, and Beaufret’s enthusiasm for the hidden depths of the German language was an indispensable part of his argument’s pathos. The Generation of 1933 owes its access to Heidegger largely to Beaufret’s readings and translations of Heidegger’s texts, especially the letter “On

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  143 Humanism,” originally addressed to Beaufret. During the 1930s, Beaufret had taught philosophy at lycées in Grenoble, France and in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. In the early 1940s, Beaufret began working with another reader of Heidegger, Joseph Rovan, whose German was better than his. The two claim not to have seriously suspected Heidegger of Nazism or anti-Semitism. Rovan was Jewish, and both he and Beaufret had previously been arrested for involvement in the “Service Périclès,” an armed Resistance group inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution and opposed to Nazism, Communism, and Anglo-American imperialism.34 If Heidegger and Beaufret had overlapping political convictions, a shared suspicion of nefarious internationalist formations might have united Beaufret’s secret wartime anti-fascism and Heidegger’s private wartime anti-Semitism—the extent of which was first revealed in 2014 with the publication of the Black Notebooks.35 Beaufret met Heidegger after the two began corresponding in 1946. Historians criticize Beaufret for being an uncritical French mouthpiece to Heidegger’s self-orchestrated postwar rehabilitation: “Beaufret’s writings present an accurate, insightful, and wholly uncritical statement of Heidegger’s own self-interpretation.”36 Beaufret even expressed sympathy with Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson in a letter where Beaufret suggests in 1978 that he himself had previously made anti-Semitic statements in private.37 Some have interpreted his views on the Holocaust as further consequences of Beaufret’s fealty to Heidegger.38 Instead of criticizing Heidegger’s unapologetic complicity in National Socialist discriminatory laws and racist ideology politics, Beaufret absurdly defends Heidegger’s hope that the Nazi invasions of 1937 would thrust the German and French into a reasoned and articulate “conflict” as opposed to the bloody “atrocity of combat without conflict” that actually transpired. As Beaufret argues, Heidegger saw wars as mere distractions from the “secret history” of Being: It is from you [Heidegger] that we know this: the vindictive era of planetary combats in which men clash in view of the domination of the earth […] still leaves us at the surface of a secret history of which the visible history is only the foreground.39 Nevertheless, the vices that make for an uncritical reader arguably made for a popular and influential translator. Besides spreading the gospel of Heideggerianism, Beaufret’s legacy derives from his ear for the poetry of the German language. In one of Beaufret’s several introductory texts on Heidegger, he describes Heidegger’s way of “deeply exploiting the German language” to yield such descriptive words as Dasein, for which he considers the translation realité-humaine inexpressive of the German’s performance of presence. In the word Dasein, Beaufret hears the exclamation, “Me voilà!” Beaufret considers any translation of that performative word insufficient: “If German has its resources, French has its limits.”40 In the very same essay,

144  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German Beaufret translates Dasein as realité humaine de presence in a sentence from Das Wesen des Grundes.41 Beaufret thus mobilizes differential translation as a way of performing Dasein’s untranslatability. Even if Beaufret never goes so far as to affirm Heidegger’s nationalistic defense of the German language, he too endows it with a distinctive poetic authority. Decades later, Cassin and Badiou note how inextricable Heidegger’s Nazism is from the aura Beaufret creates around Heidegger’s German: It is very difficult to determine what sounds Nazi in the German, in Heidegger’s German, and what comes from the French translation, which was done by a disciple, not a German specialist. It is an overtranslation, steeped in the Heideggerian thesis on language and translation, as if German itself were Heideggerian. Isn’t the French translation of Heidegger a non-Nazi rehabilitation that is even more Nazi than Nazi for us (for the Emmanuel Faye slumbering in each of us), the way German is even more Greek than Greek for Heidegger? Cover that Nazism, which I cannot bear to see, and it bursts into full view.42 By reinforcing Heidegger’s theses that universal pronouncements can only be thought by means of the insights afforded by the German language, Beaufret enhances the mystique around Heidegger’s German linguistic nationalism. In defending Heidegger’s case for the wisdom of the German language, Beaufret was performing the reverse of the operation that the German Romantics had performed when building an empire of culture by means of translation and comparative linguistics during an era when their lands were under French sovereignty. In both cases, fascination meant outdoing the other by appropriating their cultural achievements. Beaufret’s translations enhance the mystique that Heidegger already casts around Germanic vocabulary like Dasein and Grund. Take the case where Heidegger implicitly asserts the untranslatability of Grund by providing three translations of it in apposition in a passage I cited in the introduction from “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens.” (Bold font marks specific phrases for comparison with the translation.) Denn das Sein des Seienden hat sich seit dem Beginn der Philosophie und mit ihm als der Grund (ἀρχή, αΐτιον, Prinzip) gezeigt. Der Grund ist jenes, von woher das Seiende als ein solches in seinem Werden, Vergehen und Bleiben als Erkennbares, Behandeltes, Bearbeitetes ist, was es ist und wie es ist. Das Sein bringt als der Grund das Seiende in sein jeweiliges Anwesen.43 Beaufret’s translation multiples this effect through further repetition, as if to outdo the master at his own technique. Heidegger’s evidence of untranslatability proliferates in other sentences, where Beaufret performs the difficulty of finding a French word for Grund:

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  145 Car l’être de l’étant, depuis le début de la philosophie et dans ce début même, s’est manifesté comme Grund, (ἀρχή, αΐτιον, principe). Le Grund, le fond ou fondement, est ce d’où l’étant comme tel, dans son devenir, sa disparition et sa permanence, est ce qu’il est et comme il l’est, en tant que susceptible d’être connu, pris en main et élaboré. En tant qu’il est le fondement, l’être amène l’étant à son séjour dans la présence.44 The first sentence sounds like a straightforward translation except for the conspicuous choice to leave Grund untranslated. With the very next occurrence of Grund, however, Beaufret replicates Heidegger’s translational gesture “Grund, (ἀρχή, αΐτιον, principe)” by juxtaposing the German with two more French translations “Grund, le fond ou fondement.” Finally, the multilingual effect is enhanced with a canny periphrasis: where the German simply appends an adjectival phrase to the subject, “Being as the ground,” (Das Sein […] als der Grund), Beaufret’s sentence explicitly defines Grund as fondement, not raison (as it would be translated from any other German philosopher’s writings): “To the extent that being is the foundation” (En tant qu’il est le fondement), that is, in the context of Heidegger’s argument, which defines Being as the ground upon which beings stand. Beaufret enhances the text’s reflection on translation here, not in a footnote or even in parentheses, but simply by adding further translations. Crucially, Heidegger describes Lichtung as a site of passive experience absent of the human encounter with the forest. Heidegger leaves the creators of clearings unnamed. It is not always floods or tree death by natural causes, but sometimes the woodsman, who logs areas of the forest for lumber; in the same way, human actors can be said to create the conditions by which we encounter the natural environment—and “the world” generally. Heidegger leaves the anthropogenic element of nature vague, and Beaufret’s translation understands not to emphasize this human dimension of the text—just as no human agendas interfere with the speaking of language itself. Beaufret’s translation (which preserves many foreign words) allows languages themselves to proliferate to an extent where foreign words become dense woods, and the sparse treeless regions become harder to locate. According to Heidegger’s own reported research, Lichtung entered German as a loan translation of clarière.45 Beaufret’s choice to keep the German word Lichtung in the French keeps the lights dim wherever there is human activity in the forest. For as the Grimm’s authoritative Deutsches Wörtbuch reports: Lichtung explicitly refers to forest areas cleared by logging (ausgehauene Waldstelle) from the verb lichten, which the Grimms define as a forestry term for making a forest thinner by logging.46 Only by downplaying the contingency of human activity in the forest can Heidegger transmit the image of a forest as given space. If we think the image too far, it undermines Heidegger’s claim that the history of being precedes our historical encounters with beings. Heidegger’s essay establishes midway through that the etymology of Lichtung derives from an old word for leicht (that is, lightweight), not Licht

146  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German (light as opposed to darkness). The opposite of Lichtung is Dickung (something like Dickicht), a dense patch of forest, as opposed to a dark patch in the forest. And yet Heidegger clings to the morphological coincidence that a Lichtung lets light (Licht) into the forest: “This is to be observed for the difference between openness and light. Still, it is possible that a factual relation between the two exists.”47 It is as if the word calls light to itself through the sheer force of homonymy. Das Licht kann nämlich in die Lichtung, in ihr Offenes, einfallen und in ihr die Helle mit dem Dunkel spielen lassen. Aber niemals schafft das Licht erst die Lichtung, sondern jenes, das Licht, setzt diese, die Lichtung, voraus. Indes ist die Lichtung, das Offene, nicht nur frei für Helle und Dunkel, sondern auch für den Hall und das Verhallen, für das Tönen und das Verklingen. Die Lichtung ist das Offene für alles An- und Abwesende. 48 Light can stream into the clearing, into its openness, and let brightness play with darkness in it. But light never first creates openness. Rather, light presupposes openness. However, the clearing, the opening, is not only free for brightness and darkness, but also for resonance and echo, for sounding and diminishing of sound. The clearing is the open for everything that is present and absent.49 The second sentence of the 2002 English translation by Joan Stambaugh is the most interesting for this translation comparison. The rest of the passage conveys the difference in tone between the English passage and the German passage, in which Heidegger describes humanity’s encounter with Being in terms of a forest clearing, the entry of light into the forest. Stambaugh repeats Beaufret’s move (quoted below) of translating Lichtung as “openness.” The French translation even more demonstratively prefers the language of openness to the language of clearing, despite Heidegger’s German. Beaufret utilizes a slew of techniques including the non-translation of Lichtung and a rich periphrasis of the German’s simple third-person possessive pronoun ihr with en ce qu’elle a d’ to alert the reader to the difficulty of finding words for the epistemology-cum-ontology of the woodland in the idea of “opening,” which defies attempts at knowing and naming: La lumière peut en effet visiter la Lichtung, la clairière, en ce qu'elle a d’ouvert, et laisser jouer en elle le clair avec l’obscur. Mais ce n’est jamais la lumière qui d’abord crée l’Ouvert de la Lichtung; c’est au contraire celle-là, la lumière qui présuppose celle-ci, la Lichtung. L’Ouvert, cependant n’est pas libre seulement pour la lumière et l’ombre, mais tout aussi bien pour la voix qui retentit et dont l’écho va se perdant, comme pour tout ce qui sonne et qui résonne et dont le son s’en va mourânt. La Lichtung est clairière pour la présence et pour l’absence.50

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  147 In the last above-quoted sentence, Beaufret primarily translates das Offene as clarière, and Lichtung as l’Ouvert. Later in the text, however, Beaufret mixes l’Ouvert and clairière as translations of Lichtung. Der Lichtstrahl schafft nicht erst die Lichtung, die Offenheit, er durchmißt sie nur. Le rayon de lumière n’est pas ce qui d’abord produit l’Ouvert, il ne fait que parcourir en la mesurant la clairière. The beam of light does not first create the opening, openness, it only traverses it.51 Translation passages like the above are exemplary of Beaufret’s technique— and its resonance in Stambaugh’s English. Beaufret stays close, more or less, to Heidegger’s lexical choices, but his priority is to maintain variety of diction. Joan Stambaugh in her 2002 translation, like Badiou in his 2003 lecture, is writing around the peak of French theory’s influence in American—and global—academia. Both latch onto the primacy of the “openness” to truth over the image of the forest “clearing” for understanding Heidegger’s argument about the determinism of truth. That interpretation can be read as part of Beaufret’s legacy. Beaufret meets the ideal of the faithful translator insofar as his idealization of Heidegger sets the parameters of his own philosophical ambition. But his works were stately belles infidèles in that they exhibited a creative élan for demonstrating the untranslatability of Heidegger’s language precisely by translating those terms inconsistently. Here the target culture norms, in this case, a French norm of aesthetically gratifying lexical variety—perhaps not entirely unrelated to the norm of creative modifications in the translation of ancient texts for which the name belles infidèles was coined in the seventeenth century—influenced the habitus, in which Beaufret was formed, at the very same time that Beaufret sought to position himself as Heidegger’s most faithful reader.52 Beaufret’s creativity goes beyond alternating between l’Ouvert, clarière, and sometimes clarière de l’Ouvert as translations of Lichtung. To see how he comes to the particularly innovative l’Ouvert-sans-retrait as a translation of Lichtung, we must first summarize the argument at the end of Heidegger’s essay where Heidegger explains why the meaning of the concept of “truth” is so seldom understood by other philosophers. At the closing of the essay under discussion, Heidegger returns to a favorite topic: the meaning of the ancient Greek word ἀλήθεια, commonly translated as “truth.” In his earlier work, Heidegger had translated Parmenides’ use of this word as Unverborgenheit (literally, unconcealment), a translation he then justified in lectures throughout the 1930s. In the present circumstances, though, he concedes that as far back as Homer the word only ever refers to honest speech in ancient Greek: “we must acknowledge the fact that aletheia, unconcealment

148  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German in the sense of the opening of presence, was originally only experienced as orthotes, as the correctness of representations and statements.”53 Heidegger of course offers an explanation for the fact that even the Greeks missed a truth hidden in the etymology of their own word for “truth”: because truth paradoxically conceals its own revelation. It hides its own unconcealment such that: “If this [tendency of truth] were so, then the opening would not be the mere opening of presence, but the opening of presence concealing itself, the opening of a self-concealing sheltering.”54 (“Wenn es so stünde, dann wäre die Lichtung nicht bloße Lichtung von Anwesenheit, sondern Lichtung der sich verbergenden Anwesenheit, Lichtung des sich verbergenden Bergens.”)55 The English quotation that I have just quoted (Joan Stambaugh’s from 2002) goes even further than Beaufret in preferring to translate Lichtung as “opening” rather than “clearing.” Let us look back at Beaufret’s influential choice to understand why he might have preferred “opening” to “clearing,” even though it is a closer semantic equivalent in French. Beaufret’s creative translation emphasizes Heidegger’s point that the unconcealment of Being occurs only in a brief opening, or window of time, to put it more idiomatically. Beaufret renders the adjective ἀληθής with a hyphenated periphrasis: “the opening without withholding,” l’Ouvert-sansretrait. The translation is slightly perplexing since Heidegger specifically states that the clearing does withdraw. In a footnote, Beaufret himself notes that this is a bit of translator’s creativity, before going on to say that he agrees with the argument here, that truth is not a category of knowledge.56 But what is in fact sans retrait about this opening in Heidegger? The word retrait captures the hasty temporality of this ever receding, only momentarily available opening, but when Beaufret’s footnote insists that the opening stays put, he seems to be thinking of the stationary nature of a clearing in the forest—trees do not always grow back quickly, sometimes not even within a human lifetime.

Alain Badiou: thinking Heidegger in French Writing a generation after Beaufret and the poststructuralists, iconoclastic Platonist and communist philosopher Alain Badiou (1937–) will follow Beaufret’s insight and use it against Heidegger when he argues that the truth does not appear in a sustained moment (nor a fleeting one for that matter), but rather only becomes evident after the fact. For Badiou, subjects first encounter the reality of events once those events have had time to sink in. On that basis he rejects Heidegger’s messianic expectation of a momentary encounter with truth, the kind of naïve belief in mystical knowledge through experience that Derrida also criticizes as “metaphysics of presence.”57 Beaufret’s differential translation of Lichtung ultimately made it easier for Badiou to pin Heidegger to a particular argument and to reject him on

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  149 that basis. Accessibility may not always be in an author’s interest; this very accessibility opened Heidegger’s mystical rhetoric to Badiou’s attack. Following Beaufret, Badiou uses the words “the open” (l’Ouvert) and “clearing” (la clairière) interchangeably, whereas they are closely related but not explicitly interchangeable in Heidegger’s essays. Without asserting the two terms’ identity or reducing them to one single term, Beaufret’s translation managed to efface any distinction in their meanings by preferring the more abstract term generally and varying them so often as to make the difference look like a primarily stylistic choice. Heidegger has an explicitly anti-Enlightenment interpretation of the Lichtung (which usually refers to a clearing in the forest); after all, the morpheme licht in Lichtung comes from an old German adjective meaning “sparse” and has nothing to do with light and dark. Thinking of truth as happening in a pure space—regardless of visibility—has philosophical consequences, as Heidegger himself describes: All philosophical thinking which explicitly or inexplicitly follows the call to the thing itself is already admitted to the free space of the opening in its movement and with its method. But philosophy knows nothing of the opening. Philosophy does speak about the light of reason, but does not heed the opening of Being.58 Crucial to Heidegger’s monism is a dispelling of false distinctions: Being reveals itself whether noticed or not. Not only does Heidegger think of the human without regard to sexual differences (“Dasein would not be sexed” as Derrida once observed with respectful incredulity),59 but Heidegger likewise refuses to differentiate between the conceptual and the metaphorical in passages like the one quoted here. He explains this refusal at the greatest length in The Principle of Reason (1955–6), where he lays out the argument that the use of metaphorical language is complicit in maintaining the illusion of metaphysical dualism.60 In refusing to count his own imagery as metaphors, Heidegger extracts a thin tertium quid from the Lichtung—treelessness within the forest—marginalizing even the light, and thus voiding any of the visual immediacy of that image. Badiou summarizes plausibly the abstract core of Heidegger‘s neutral, barely lit Lichtung: “This entire montage presumes that one can imagine philosophy as something historically conditioned by something more originary, namely, by the radical possibility that being occurs as thinking, that thinking manifests on the ground of openness.”61 On this basis, Heidegger can (quite unintuitively) argue that Being’s own ever shifting degree of accessibility, and not human action, has decided the path of human history thus far. Generally, for Heidegger, Being is always on the retreat: it began concealing itself to European society with the pursuit of knowledge in Greece, of imperial power in Rome, and in the all-encompassing embrace of an empiricist worldview in late modernity.

150  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German However, Badiou employs these terms differently in his lectures than Heidegger does in the essays, “Die Kehre” (1949) and “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens” (1964). Badiou’s source is the first translation (especially of the latter German essay), conducted by Jean Beaufret. Although the essay appear in the fourteenth volume of the Gesamtausgabe in 1976, it was first published in German in 1964, and Beaufret’s French translation was published in 1966. Beaufret read his translation aloud at the UNESCO conference, “Kierkegaard vivant” in 1963, leading one attendant to complain that Beaufret “read a text that had nothing to do with Kierkegaard and never cited the Danish philosopher” at what generally proved to be an “immensely Parisian and profoundly antiKierkegaardian” conference.62 The essay’s first publication was in the conference proceedings.63 The most striking difference in the French translation is how much more frequently the vocabulary of “openness” occurs than it does in Heidegger’s German. Badiou disagrees with Heidegger’s view that we must regard truth as requiring openness to its event character; instead, Badiou sees truth as an emergent effect of belated reflection on the past (a conscious, empowering variation on Freudian Nachträglichkeit). Besides this different stance regarding the temporality of truth, Badiou also sees a difference in the object of openness. The Beaufretian Heidegger’s concept of “the open” catches Badiou’s critical interest in part because it is so radically depersonalized. Heidegger describes openness towards a what rather than a whom: “We ask: openness for what? We have already reflected upon the fact that the path of thinking, speculative and intuitive, needs the traversable opening. But in that opening rests possible radiance, that is, the possible presencing of presence itself.”64 Badiou explains that openness is one of the most central terms in contemporary philosophy—and that when Bergson, Agamben, and especially Levinas use it, “the open” concerns our position relative to others in our world.65 It is thus a convenient opportunity for Badiou that Beaufret’s translation has made Heidegger speak of truth as “the open” (rather than the already depersonalized forest “clearing”) since Heidegger seems to miss what is out in the open, so to speak, for every other philosopher who thinks through the concept of “opening,” namely, that when we open up our consciousness, we knowingly or unknowingly open it up to “the other.” Badiou borrowed Beaufret’s explicit linking of Lichtung and das Offene, of clearing and the open, through a genitive into “the clearing of the opening,” in order to claim that “the open” is one concept and that it is “the concept that comes up most frequently in both texts [“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” and “The Turn”].”66 Badiou’s interpretation of das Offene as the condition of philosophy is reinforced by the French translation of Heidegger’s etymological translation of ἀλήθεια: “das nicht entzogene Offene” (l’ouvert sans retrait), an innovation on Heidegger’s already quite evocative Unverborgenheit. Badiou offers further thoughts on this translation: “The philosophical truth for Heidegger is the opening of

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  151 the open, the withdrawal of the open as such; the open sends itself as the open in the withdrawal of the open.”67

Martin Born: bringing French Heidegger home Above, I showed where Jean Beaufret enhances Heidegger’s own differentiations in the use of the term Grund. Here I would like to introduce a case where the value of differential translation is on especially clear display. In the case under discussion, it is not a matter of making two target text terms out of one source text term; rather, it is about embracing the freedom to treat two source text terms as if they were interchangeable. Beaufret’s translatorial play of différance exemplarily comes back to haunt German philosophical discourse in 2014 when Martin Born published his translation into German of Alain Badiou’s 2001–4 lectures Images du Temps Présent. Born noticed that in these texts Badiou follows Beaufret’s use of the two key terms das Offene and die Lichtung. In the appendix to Born’s translation of Badiou, he describes the creativity that Beaufret required to translate Heidegger’s German: In Jean Beaufret and François Fédier’s translation, the Heideggerian terms are not translated in a uniform way. Das Offene is typically rendered l’ouvert. Yet l’Ouvert (capitalized) also serves as one of several translations of Heidegger’s concept of Lichtung; the latter is generally translated with clairière (Heidegger’s preferred translation) or clairière de l’Ouvert. In some passages, where the German speaks of das Offene, the French has clairière. The concepts seem to be used as near synonyms. The present translation attempts to follow Badiou’s distinctions and to translate these back into the Heideggerian concepts (l’ouvert/l’Ouvert with das Offene, clairière with Lichtung and clairière de l’Ouvert with Lichtung des Offenen). We must keep in mind that Badiou’s use of Heideggerian terminology draws on the French translation and thus cannot always be exactly equated with the German concepts.68 The translator may sound like he is confessing to laziness here when he announces that he will stick with Badiou’s terms rather than going back to the German source and correcting Beaufret’s excesses. Born did his research, however, to arrive at a just decision: he compared Beaufret’s translations with Heidegger’s German and found that the translations are flattening the distinction between clarière and l’ouvert. It is possible that Heidegger also did not intend to make a conceptually precise distinction here. This translation of Badiou ends up creating a new German version of Heideggerian terminology; these translation choices help the reader understand (and question) Badiou’s interpretations. On the other hand, the justification for Born’s choice rests on a core value of philosophical translation since he has preserved the texture of Badiou’s text.

152  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German In many instances, Jean Beaufret prefers not to choose between la clairière or l’Ouvert when translating Lichtung. Instead, he often opts to present both terms together in phrases like la clairière de l’Ouvert,  recalling Heidegger’s description of Lichtung as the peaceful space opened up by the presence of truth,69 Beaufret will write this phrase where Heidegger simply writes Lichtung, as in: “Le coeur en paix qu’est la Lichtung, clairière de l’Ouvert” for “Das ruhige Herz der Lichtung.”70 First, Beaufret presents Lichtung untranslated. The French periphrasis for Lichtung that Beaufret uses becomes Badiou’s as well—and is kept intact within Born’s translation— through the German phrase die Lichtung des Offenen, which Heidegger himself occasionally uses in German. However, the French phrase’s prominence clearly owes more to nine repetitions in the French translation— not counting variant reversals (“l’Ouvert de la Lichtung”) or expansions (“l’Ouvert de la retrait de la clairière”)—than to its single occurrence in Heidegger’s text.71 One English translation takes the Beaufretian transformation of clearing into opening even further, by translating Lichtung des Offenen with a figura etymologica: “opening of what is open.”72 In bringing these moves back to German, Born shows that, through translation, not only is the dissemination of a text into other languages prey to the effects of new iterations, but even Heidegger’s canonical German becomes subject to redaction when a historic translation like Beaufret’s comes to usurp the original.

Competing or compatible Nachträglichkeiten? Badiou’s engagement with Heidegger in his 2003 lecture culminates in his departing from Heidegger’s messianism in order to argue that truth can only be encountered after the fact (après coup). This notion is also present in Heidegger’s discussion of technology, which he sees as exaggerating the presence of the beings it enframes. “The Greek thinkers already knew of this,” claims Heidegger, “when they said: That which is earlier with regard to the arising that holds sway becomes manifest to us men only later.”73 It seems, indeed, that Heidegger wants to chart out, not a messianic return of being but rather an acceptance of the unreachability of presence, and this is precisely the acceptance of this unreachability that Derrida calls “the other side of nostalgia” and “Heideggerian hope” in the conclusion of his essay on différance.74 After showing that what unites Hegel, Freud, and Nietzsche is their thinking of conceptuality as the infinite deferral of presence, Derrida concludes by showing that “Heidegger also says that difference can never appear as such.”75 Unlike Derrida’s différance, Badiou’s notion of Nachträglichkeit has a more pointedly post-Marxist aim and thus prioritizes active love and action over passive hope and patience that Heidegger’s woodland image reservoir implicitly calls for. By relying on Beaufret’s translation, Badiou can draw on a more abstract Heideggerian language—where “openness” (l’Ouvert) lets us

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  153 think of truth as bearing some relationship to “open-mindedness,” rather than the non-human “clearing” that makes up part Heidegger’s call for a return to the question of Being. When Beaufret performs the untranslatability of Lichtung, his translation simultaneously enhances Heidegger’s own description of Lichtung as “opening” in a way that enshrines the translation clairière de l’Ouvert in French theoretical discourse. The enshrinement is so complete that it obviates any motivation for Badiou to read Heidegger in German.76 Born’s translation of Badiou amplifies the range of German Heidegger by refraining from censoring Badiou’s faithfulness to French Heidegger. When Beaufret’s Heidegger appears in German translations like Born’s, it shows that—at least in the context of one argument—Beaufret’s Heidegger has become timelier than Germanlanguage Heidegger even for those reading in German. Rather than criticize Beaufret’s translational variations as oversights or misreadings, we should consider to what extent these were more than just accommodations to the target text reader or “domestications” of the source text—as Lawrence Venuti describes this easy way out of translation difficulties, in reference to Schleiermacher’s call to craft challenging translations that will ultimately edify the target culture. Beaufret shows that Lichtung conveys two meanings for Heidegger, both the visuals of a bright space in the forest and the more general abstraction of “opening.” Since Beaufret’s translation pinpoints Heidegger’s claim that we are waiting for an opening in which to act, Badiou can more decisively disagree in the name of constant engagement: “There is no Lichtung des Offenen, there is only the absoluteness of inconsistent plurality.”77 The ultimate effect of Badiou’s reliance on Beaufret is an ability to strip Heidegger’s “open” of its silvan metaphorics in order to discern and critique its messianic promises. The clearing in the forest is an actual concrete phenomenon, based on ecological realities. It is difficult to evaluate the aptness of that image as a way of understanding the intersection of epistemology and ontology that Heidegger finds in the image. Badiou can, however, speak clearly about “the open,” and he revises the concept so that it is not something that one can anticipate in any manner. It is a very subtle reading indeed that Heidegger sees “the open” as something that one can anticipate since he associates it primarily with the first encounter with the truth of existence as a form of arising and falling away that was available only before the metaphysical categories of Platonic philosophy divided being into material and abstract realms. Badiou agrees with Heidegger that correspondence theories of truth leave out their event character: “I too believe that a truth depends on the openness of the true.”78 For Heidegger, the image of the forest clearing only works to give a sense of “naturalness” to the notion that truth happens as opposed to existing, but it is an odd choice since a clearing remains before and after the encounter. The challenge of thinking with this odd image makes it more difficult to assess the argument that truth is an event, and what implications that argument brings with it.

154  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German

Heidegger and the canon of continental philosophy While French discussions on the translation of the Freudian oeuvre were certainly not very influential on the New Penguin Freud (as shown in the last chapter), French Heidegger translation established a discourse that caught on internationally. To demonstrate that a term is untranslatable is an unprovable thesis, but Beaufret performed the untranslatability of Heidegger's work by not translating Heideggerian terms. In doing so, he established a norm. As Anselm Haverkamp notes, the “French Connection” is often the source from which the anglophone world has received its European thought.79 More was received than ideas and methods—a multilingual writing style redolent of Heidegger’s own pessimistic view that translation is inherently reckless towards words’ meanings. While anglophone translation theory is indeed deeply indebted to French theory for many of its working methods, it also makes notable departures from the orthodoxy of its French masters. The French approach to translating German has constituted a major difference between the francophone and the anglophone reception of Heidegger. French translators of Heidegger are caught between the historical problem of taking a position on Heidegger’s postwar rehabilitation and the linguistic problems of a language with relatively few Germanic cognates. Many anglophone Heideggerians at first took on the French rehabilitation of Heidegger uncritically;80 however, the linguistic problems they confronted in reading, translating, and commenting on Heidegger’s thought were very different. For instance, the English-language discourse on Heidegger translation often abstracts the thinker from his historical moment and focuses on how to coin a lexicon as arrestingly concrete as Heidegger’s own. The notion that adequate translation is primarily a matter of adequate grasp of the source text constitutes the main question of the entries in the Festschrift Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking.81 Frank Schalow ranks Heidegger among “the greatest philosophers” alongside Immanuel Kant, whose originality dislocates them from their historical moments.82 The volume’s implied translation theory is then fittingly unrooted from history and linguistics. The entire Festschrift comes across as polemically ahistorical; various passages affirm Heidegger’s own habit of bracketing “facticity”—concrete events in their contingency. Through this move, the scholars writing about translation mimic Heidegger’s own ahistorical, existential account of historicity. Translation history as practiced today demands a more situated approach even if we believe that we are translating ideas that will speak to future generations. The American philosophy of translating Heidegger bears signs of influence from French readers of Heidegger like Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, but the societies on each side of the Atlantic have differences in approach as well. The American school is concerned with capturing the image-content of Heidegger’s language, while the French school is far more concerned with the conceptual content. Heidegger’s French translator Rudolph Boehm, who refused to be Heidegger’s research fellow (Assistant) in 1948,

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  155 also eventually quit the project of translating Sein und Zeit in 1964. In a later piece, however, he articulated the approach that prevailed in his translation work. He says that the project was “to make French oblige to utter the phenomena evoked in German,” but to do so without creating “a second German.” For example, Zuhandenheit is rendered être-disponible rather than être-à-la-main. For translating into English, however, English’s West Germanic vocabulary is a handy resource indeed (if you excuse the pun). It is more tempting to repeat the morpheme -hand- when your language contains an exact cognate.83 This would explain why German-English translators often select evocative Germanic cognates (involving being “on hand”) over abstract Latinate ones (like “available”). Furthermore, as discussed in Chapter 1, Latinate vocabulary has tended to serve to name more abstract concepts in English than Germanic vocabulary. As authors like Goldschmidt and Beaufret are quick to admit, the Romance languages are not free of this limitation: the morphological principles of Latin structure Romance-language vocabulary in a way that native speakers can only access if they are classically trained. One may know that a- and en- are directional prefixes in French, but there is no verb vertir on which avertir is built, and no voyer to illustrate the meaning of envoyer.

Notes 1 “Most Cited Authors of Books in the Humanities, 2007.” When GoogleScholar was still young (its beta launch was in 2004), the Web of Science was the go-to source for monitoring academic citation rates. 2 This insight is connected to more recent work on the question of “transatlantic theory transfer.” A recent issue of New German Critique was dedicated to the topic (with a focus on German critical theory and Hans Blumenberg, especially). See Kinder, “Narratives of Theory Transfer”; Fleming, “Verfehlungen”; Jay, “Against Rigor.” 3 Cusset, French Theory, xii. 4 Bloom, “The ‘Nietzscheanization’ of the Left or Vice Versa: ‘The Closing of the American Mind.’” Ironically, Bloom’s critique recalls Karl Marx’s critique over a century earlier of the reckless disregard for policy discussions in German Idealist philosophy. Marx, The German Ideology. 5 Rapaport, The Theory Mess, xiv. 6 Cusset, French Theory, xix. 7 Cusset’s j’accuse does not account for the fiercely leftist strain within humanistic faculty culture in the United States, which takes pride in its stance of solidarity against “the neo-liberal university administration.” The academic/business tension is one of the main topics in discourses about university management. Summarized generally, 40 years ago professional teaching staff outnumbered professional administrators at universities, but now it is not only the other way around, the salaries of administrators also greatly outpace those of educators, especially as a growing number of teaching positions are low-paid contract work. See Ginsberg, “Administrators Ate My Tuition.” 8 The notion that an unconscious has formed in this movement between languages receives a fuller treatment in the prior chapter where I discussed Jean Laplanche’s

156  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German model of the formation of the unconscious out of communicative misunderstanding. Laplanche has miscommunication between parents and children in mind, people whose different horizons of experience derive from the utterly different consciousness that they inhabit. However, the model also illustrates the way that linguistic difference becomes marginal enough to discourse that it engenders the kind of forgetting of history Cusset describes: forgetting that norms in different societies derive from significantly different historically mediated horizons of experience, where different anxieties and sources of pride respond to different economic and educational institutions, national traumas, and different taboos. German and French conservatism offered very different defenses for their different forms of imperial or economic success. 9 Roman Jakobson, Gerard Gennette, and Giles Deleuze couldn’t make it, but they did not decline the invitation entirely: they had papers read in their absence. Cusset, French Theory, 29. 10 Demers, The American Politics of French Theory, 4. 11 “Polysystem” is Itimar Even-Zohar’s once popular term for the culturally hybrid byproducts of translation, which often come just in time when cultures are young or stagnating and in need of foreign rejuvenation: see the Hittite appropriation of Sumerian and other indigenous Mesopotamian cultures, the Andalusian synthesis of Arabic, Jewish, and Spanish cultures, and the massive translation projects involved in the modernizing of Turkey and the founding of Israel. In the French case, less recent non-German influences, like Spinoza’s monist philosophy, also influenced the emergence of poststructuralist theory. Even-Zohar, “Polysystem Theory.” 12 See Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology. 13 Arendt, The Human Condition, 52. 14 Badiou and Nancy, German Philosophy, 4. 15 Historian Edward Baring traces the neo-scholastic movement back to Pope Leo XIII’s ascension in 1878 since that pope saw modern society as requiring old solutions to the new fragmentation. Under Mercier’s leadership, Leuven, Belgium became a major hub of the neo-scholastic movement—which argued that the modernity of French made it a better choice for publication than Latin (which other neo-scholastics preferred). Baring, Converts to the Real, 24, 27. Husserl’s next major publication Ideas (1913) revealed his transcendental turn, incompatible with any defense of “the real” as a legitimate object of philosophical inquiry (crucial for the neo-scholastics), so that they gradually rejected him and celebrated Heidegger, especially for his explicitly neo-scholastic beginnings in the 1910s (and later Max Scheler as well). Baring, 68, 114, 119. 16 That would explain the observation that “from time to time political problems prompt patriotic Frenchmen to suggest with perfect equanimity that it may be time to establish a Sixth Republic.” Rohr, “French Constitutionalism and the Administrative State,” 226. 17 Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 5. 18 Kleinberg, 8. 19 Unlike American constitutionalism, “French constitutionalism is seen as a tradition not a text,” to quote one political theory account of different political selfunderstanding within that much older nation. Rohr, “French Constitutionalism and the Administrative State.” 20 Of course, the intergenerational conflict is far less prominent in France today than the transatlantic conflict—the effort to recapture some of the intellectual capital successfully hoarded by Anglo-American journals, universities, professoriate, and the English language. 21 At the extreme end, Foucault and Derrida signed a petition to legalize sex between adults and minors as young as 12. Henley, “Calls for Legal Child Sex Rebound on Luminaries of May 68.”

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  157 22 Žižek, “The Persistence of Ontological Difference,” 189. 23 Trawny’s term draws from Husserl’s similar coinages, like the “eidetic reduction,” which allows us to see the structures of consciousness through a return to their most elemental form. Trawny, “The Universal and Annihilation: Heidegger’s Being-Historical Anti-Semitism,” 8. 24 In a witty formulation typical of Žižek, he explains how we should not waste the opportunity to learn from morally despicable people: “When I asked a Heideggerian Jewish friend of mine how Heidegger could remain a key reference for him in view of his anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathies, he mentioned an old Jewish piece of wisdom according to which there are some deep traumatic insights that can only be formulated by a diabolical person.” Žižek, “The Persistence of Ontological Difference,” 191. 25 Badiou and Cassin, Heidegger, 48. 26 Badiou and Cassin, 37–38. 27 Knox Peden has even argued that Deleuze’s interest in Spinoza’s monism— which, like Heidegger’s notion of immanence, denies a separation between the sacred and mundane worlds—derives less from his Spinozist theological examiner Ferdinand Alquié, but from the obligatory engagement with Heidegger among his generation. Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology, 195. Žižek persuasively notes that Heidegger deviates from Spinoza by positing Being as the principle uniting reality where Spinoza posits God: for Heidegger, God is no totality, but rather Being is the void that we exclude from thought when we take the sum of what is for totality. Žižek admires the non-hierarchical symbiosis between the ever-retreating void and imperfect reality that Heidegger discerns over Spinoza’s hierarchical positing of a higher power that completes imperfect reality (since the latter presumptuously gives the unknown a “substance”). Žižek, “The Persistence of Ontological Difference,” 194. 28 Badiou and Cassin, Heidegger, 53. 29 Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, 75. Dasein did have a proto-existential meaning before Heidegger: “leben in seinem ganzen umfang, das wesen, die existenz, den zustand der dinge” according to the Grimm Brothers’ German Dictionary. 30 Bourdieu, 13–14. 31 Bourdieu, 54. 32 Hans Sluga accuses Bourdieu of an overdetermined reading: Bourdieu’s argument demands that every philosopher take a political stance, thus reading Heidegger’s work as conservative because it is not open about its political stance. Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis, 248. Hannah Arendt’s critiques of Heidegger as lacking the capacity for political thought seem a more fitting way to connect the biographical and philosophical aspects of the man. See her radio address given on Heidegger’s eightieth birthday in Neske and Kettering, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, 216. 33 Buden et al., “Cultural Translation.” 34 Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 161. 35 Heidegger criticizes “international Jewry” (a term central to Nazi propaganda) for being “utterly unattached” and thus gravitating towards the delocalized universality of science and mathematics as to the technologies of war, travel, and communication—which uproots humanity by making distant places accessible so that we overlook the encounter with being as event. Trawny, “The Universal and Annihilation: Heidegger’s Being-Historical Anti-Semitism,” 11. 36 Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy, 112. 37 Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, 287. 38 Sharkey, “Beaufret, Beckett, and Heidegger,” 114–15. 39 Beaufret, Dialogue with Heidegger, xxii.

158  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German 40 Beaufret, De l’existentialisme à Heidegger, 15–16. Recall the similar sentiments of Georges-Arthur Goldschmit cited in the introduction. 41 Beaufret, 20. 42 Badiou and Cassin, Heidegger, 56. 43 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 14:69. 44 Heidegger, Questions III et IV, 282. 45 Heidegger, On Time and Being, 65. 46 Interestingly, the Grimms quote Jean Paul, who writes that the holy forest patches of religion were thinned (gelichtet) and disbanded—equating the emergence of the Lichtung with the deficient piety of human industry—rather than of openness to pre-given truth. Grimm and Grimm, Deutsches wörterbuch, Vol. 12, Entry 893 and 880. 47 Heidegger, On Time and Being, 65. 48 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 14:80. 49 Heidegger, On Time and Being, 65. 50 Heidegger, Questions III et IV, 295. 51 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 14:81., Heidegger, Questions III et IV, 296., Heidegger, On Time and Being, 66. 52 On the historical contingency of the notion of adequate translation, see Simeoni, “The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus.” 53 Heidegger, On Time and Being, 70. 54 Heidegger, 70. 55 Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 14:88. 56 Heidegger, Questions III et IV, 298. 57 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 61. 58 Heidegger, On Time and Being, 66. “Alles Denken der Philosophie […] ist auf seinem Gang, mit seiner Methode schon in das Freie der Lichtung eingelassen. […] Die Philosophie spricht zwar vom Licht der Vernunft, aber achtet nicht auf die Lichtung des Seins.” Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 14:82. 59 Derrida, “Geschlecht,” 66. 60 Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, 48. 61 “Diese ganze Montage setzt voraus, dass man sich die Philosophie als etwas vorstellt, das historisch durch etwas Ursprünglicheres als sie selbst bedingt ist, nämlich durch die radikale Möglichkeit, dass sich das Sein als Denken ereignet, dass das Denken auf dem Grund der Offenheit zum Vorschein kommt.” Badiou, Logik der Revolte, 172. 62 Brun, “Review of Kierkegaard Vivant, Coll. « Idées »,” 211–12. 63 Beaufret, Dialogue with Heidegger, xiii; Unesco, Kierkegaard vivant. Beaufret’s translation was written in collaboration with his pupil François Fédier. 64 Heidegger, On Time and Being, 68. 65 Badiou, Logik der Revolte, 170. 66 Badiou, 170. 67 Badiou, 176. 68 Badiou, 218–19. In der Übersetzung von Jean Beaufret und François Fédier sind die Heidegger’schen Termini nicht einheitlich übersetzt. Das „Offene“ wird in der Regel mit „l’ouvert“ wiedergegeben. Allerdings fungiert „l’Ouvert“ (mit großem Anfangsbuchstaben) auch als eine von mehreren Übersetzungsvarianten für Heidegger’s Begriff „Lichtung“; dieser wird aber ebenfalls mit „clairière“ (was Heidegger selbst nahelegt) oder „clairière de l’Ouvert“ übersetzt. An einigen Stellen, wo im Deutschen vom Offenen die Rede ist, steht im Französischen wiederum clairière. Die Begriffe scheinen also nahezu synonym verwendet zu werden. Bei der vorliegenden Übersetzung wurde versucht, Badious Differenzierungen zu folgen und diese in die Heidegger’schen Begriffe zurückzuübersetzen („l’ouvert“/“l’Ouvert“ mit das „Offene“, „clairière“ mit

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  159 „Lichtung“ und „clairière de l’Ouvert“ mit „Lichtung des Offenen“). Man sollte sich darüber im Klaren sein, dass sich Badious Verwendung der Heidegger’schen Terminologie auf die französische Übersetzung bezieht und daher nicht immer exakt den deutschen Begriffen entspricht. 69 Heidegger, Questions III et IV, 298; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 14:84. 70 Heidegger, Questions III et IV, 299; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 14:84; Badiou, Logik der Revolte, 176. 71 Heidegger, Questions III et IV, 295, 304; Badiou, Logik der Revolte, 171. 72 “What does the word about the untrembling heart of unconcealment mean? It means unconcealment itself in what is most its own, means the place of stillness which gathers in itself what grants unconcealment to begin with. That is the opening of what is open.” Heidegger, On Time and Being, 68. “Was meint das Wort vom nichtzitternden Herzen der Unverborgenheit? Es meint sie selbst in ihrem Eigensten, meint den Ort der Stille, der in sich versammelt, was erst Unverborgenheit gewährt? Das ist die Lichtung des Offenen.” Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 14:83–84. 73 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, 22. “Jenes, was hinsichtlich des waltenden Aufgehens früher ist, wird uns Menschen erst später offenkundig. ” Heidegger, Die Technik Und Die Kehre, 22. 74 Derrida, “Differance,” 159. 75 Derrida, 158. 76 The replacement of translation by original recalls the replacement of commentary by author when Derrida quotes Gille Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy instead of quoting Nietzsche directly. Derrida, 148. 77 “Es gibt keine Lichtung des Offenen, es gibt die Absolutheit der inkonsistenten Vielheit” (175). 78 “Ich glaube auch, dass eine Wahrheit sehr wohl an die Offenheit des Wahren rührt” (178). 79 Haverkamp, “Nothing Fails like Success Poetics and Hermeneutics—A Postwar Initiative by Hans Blumenberg.” 80 It is a crucial caveat here that many Heidegger scholars and translators (most prominently Thomas Sheehan, Richard Wolin, and Michael Zimmerman) have become critical of his politics in recent decades, especially after the publication of the Black Notebooks in 2014. 81 Schalow, Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking Essays in Honor of Parvis Emad. 82 Schalow, Departures, 7. 83 During a 1985 lecture at Cornell, Jacques Derrida, in his commitment to hearing interlingual resonances, regrets that the manual aspect of Handwerk is lost in French translation when discussing Heidegger’s claim that “[Denken] ist ein Handwerk”: “Métier, in German, is said, Handwerk, handiwork, Handwerk, work of the hand, handiwork, handling, if not maneuver. When the French must translate Handwerk by métier, perhaps that it, uh, that it is legitimate and cannot be avoided, but it is a bad maneuver, a poor craft of translation, because in it the hand is lost (we have no hand; Handwerk is lost in métier).” Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand.”

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Badiou, Alain. Logik der Revolte: Bilder der Gegenwart II. Seminar 2001–2004. Edited by Isabelle Vodoz and Peter Engelmann. Translated by Martin Born. 1st edition. Passagen, 2019.

160  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German Badiou, Alain, and Barbara Cassin. Heidegger: His Life and His Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Badiou, Alain, and Jean-Luc Nancy. German Philosophy: A Dialogue. Edited by Jan Völker. Translated by Richard Lambert. Cambridge, Ma: The MIT Press, 2018. Baring, Edward. Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Beaufret, Jean. “De l’existentialisme à Heidegger: Introduction aux philosophies de l’existence et autres textes.” In Problèmes et controverses. Paris: J. Vrin, 1986. ———. “Dialogue with Heidegger: Greek Philosophy.” In Studies in Continental Thought. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006. Bloom, Allan. “The “Nietzscheanization” of the Left or Vice Versa: “The Closing of the American Mind.”” Quadrant 32, nos. 1–2 (January): 14. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Brun, J. “Review of Review of Kierkegaard vivant, coll. « Idées », by J.-P. Sartre, Jean Beaufret, Gabriel Marcel, Lucien Goldmann, Martin Heidegger, Enzo Pací, Karl Jaspers, et al.” Revue Philosophique de La France et de l’Étranger 165, no. 2 (1975): 211–12. Buden, Boris, Stefan Nowotny, Sherry Simon, Ashok Bery, and Michael Cronin. “Cultural Translation: An Introduction to the Problem, and Responses.” Translation Studies 2, no. 2 (July 1, 2009): 196–219. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​ /14781700902937730. Cusset, François. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Demers, Jason. “The American Politics of French Theory: Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault in Translation.” In The American Politics of French Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. https://null/view/title/557396. Derrida, Jacques. “Differance.” In Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, translated by David B. Allison. Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. http://hdl​.handle​.net​/2027/[u]: mdp.39015046363563. ———. “Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference.” Research in Phenomenology 13 (1983): 65–83. ———. “Heidegger’s Hand.” September 11, 1985. https://ecommons​.cornell​.edu​/ handle​/1813​/43419. ———. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass. Reprint. New York, NY: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982. Even-Zohar, Itamar. “Polysystem Theory.” Poetics Today 1, no. 1/2 (August 1979): 287–310. Farías, Víctor. Heidegger and Nazism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Fleming, Paul. “Verfehlungen: Hans Blumenberg and the United States.” New German Critique 44, no. 3 (132) (November 1, 2017): 105–21. https://doi​.org​ /10​.1215​/0094033X​-4162262. Ginsberg, Benjamin. “Administrators Ate My Tuition.” Washington Monthly, August 28, 2011. https://washingtonmonthly​.com​/magazine​/septoct​-2011​/ administrators​-ate​-my​-tuition/.

The Americanization of a French understanding of being German  161 Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Deutsches wörterbuch. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854. Haverkamp, Anselm. “Nothing Fails Like Success Poetics and Hermeneutics—A Postwar Initiative by Hans Blumenberg.” MLN 130, no. 5 (April 29, 2016): 1221–41. https://doi​.org​/10​.1353​/mln​.2015​.0083. Heidegger, Martin. “Die Technik Und Die Kehre.” In Unveränderter Nachdruck Edition. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002. ———. Gesamtausgabe. Vol. 14. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976. ———. On Time and Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ———. Questions III et IV. Translated by Jean Beaufret. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. ———. The Principle of Reason. Translated by Reginald Lilly. Indiana University Press, 1996. ———. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New York: Garland Pub, 1977. Henley, Jon. “Calls for Legal Child Sex Rebound on Luminaries of May 68.” The Guardian, February 24, 2001, Sec. World News. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/ world​/2001​/feb​/24​/jonhenley. Jay, Martin. “Against Rigor: Hans Blumenberg on Freud and Arendt.” New German Critique 44, no. 3 (132) (November 1, 2017): 123–44. https://doi​.org​/10​.1215​ /0094033X​-4162274. Kinder, Anna. “Narratives of Theory Transfer.” New German Critique 44, no. 3 (132) (November 1, 2017): 21–37. https://doi​.org​/10​.1215​/0094033X​ -4162214. Kleinberg, Ethan. Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. https://doi​.org​/10​.7591​ /9781501731648. Marx, Karl. The German Ideology: Including Thesis on Feuerbach. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1998. Neske, Günther, and Emil Kettering. Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers. New York, NY: Paragon House, 1990. Peden, Knox. Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism From Cavaillès to Deleuze. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Rapaport, Herman. The Theory Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Rockmore, Tom. Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism, and Being. London: Psychology Press, 1995. Rohr, John A. “French Constitutionalism and the Administrative State.” Administration & Society 2, no. 24 (August 1992): 224–58. Schalow, F., ed. “Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking Essays in Honor of Parvis Emad.” In Contributions to Phenomenology, 0923-9545; 65. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media B.V., 2011. http://dx​.doi​.org​/10​ .1007​/978​-94​-007​-1649​-0. Schalow, Frank. Departures: At the Crossroads Between Heidegger and Kant. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. http://HAN​.onb​.ac​.at​/han​/deGruyterEbooks​/dx​.doi​ .org​/10​.1515​/9783110291384. Sharkey, Rodney. “Beaufret, Beckett, and Heidegger: The Question(s) of Influence.” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 22, no. 1 (October 1, 2010): 409–22. https:// doi​.org​/10​.1163​/18757405​-022001028.

162  The Americanization of a French understanding of being German Simeoni, Daniel. “The Pivotal Status of the Translator’s Habitus.” Target 10, no. 1 (January 1, 1998): 1–39. https://doi​.org​/10​.1075​/target​.10​.1​.02sim. Sluga, Hans D. Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Times Higher Education (THE). “Most Cited Authors of Books in the Humanities, 2007.” March 26, 2009. https://www​.tim​eshi​gher​education​.com​/news​/most​ -cited​-authors​-of​-books​-in​-the​-humanities​-2007​/405956​.article. Trawny, Peter. “The Universal and Annihilation: Heidegger’s Being-Historical AntiSemitism.” In Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Responses to Anti-Semitism, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Peter Trawny, 1–17. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. UNESCO. Kierkegaard vivant: Colloque organisé par l’Unesco à Paris du 21 au 23 avril 1964. Gallimard: UNESCO, 1966. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Persistence of Ontological Difference.” In Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: Responses to Anti-Semitism, 186–200. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. https://doi​.org​/10​.7312​/mitc18044​-015.

Conclusion

In the foregoing chapters, I have objected to the clichéd view that a translator who respects an author’s ideas must translate that author’s terminology consistently. In making that case, I have taken on an even more prevalent cliché, namely, that the literary qualities of a text are necessarily lost in translation. A reader’s fear of missing out on the beauty of the original can escalate to hopelessness about getting any value from reading the text when the text in question is written by an author known for their distinctive— even “untranslatable”—writing style, especially if the translator presents their primary obligation as rendering the text’s arguments and not its literary qualities. The idea has been prevalent in modernity, dating back at least to Gilles Ménage’s 1654 quip that literary translation may be beautiful or faithful but not both.1 The kernel of truth in a third cliché helps explain why we can dispense with these first two. As Joni Mitchell voices it in “Big Yellow Taxi” (1970): “you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone.”2 We often do not know we have got a translation in front of us, not because no one told us, but because most translations meet our expectations so perfectly. This everyday phenomenon—the general human tendency to grant little attention to positive and neutral experiences, but instead to fixate on problems—is called “negativity bias,” a cognitive bias resulting from the fact that negative experiences compel our attention on their own whereas paying attention to positive ones requires effort on our part. Fear of failure or rejection due to others’ negativity bias is not only the basis of various forms of performance anxiety, but also of the axiom that a translation should read like an original and not burden the reader with disruptive reminders of linguistic difference.3 Mitchell brandishes the cliché as a warning to treasure the natural environment before we lose it due to overdevelopment, but in the case of terminology in translation, we should welcome the loss since knowing what you’ve got is more important than holding onto it in a state of false consciousness. To “know what you got” when you read a translated term, it is first necessary to dispel the interconnected notions that terminology must be more unambiguous than other forms of language and that translations should be as easy to read as other texts written in your preferred language. DOI: 10.4324/9781003348559-6

164 Conclusion Once a translation exposes the polysemy inherent in an author’s use of a term, the conceptual clarity that is normally expected from a technical term is indeed “gone.” In the place of this former innocence, though, is knowledge of the complexity (and fallibility) of the translated author’s conceptual system. When a translation presents a term’s ambiguity, the translation becomes harder to read: indeed, one could even argue that you don’t know that you have a translation in your hands until it defies conventional translation norms, in which case a common reaction is to blame the translator for the disruptive reading experience. Furthermore, readers are unlikely to realize that a translated technical term contains polysemous morphemes in the source language unless that term has been translated differentially. Martin Heidegger’s name comes up in every chapter of this book because his language is exemplary of the fallible and complex kind of (non)conceptuality that earns a philosophical term the prestigious title “untranslatable.” By writing “untranslatably,” Heidegger performs his insight into the existential basis of the negativity bias in human beings, which he elaborated in the greatest detail in Being and Time (published in 1927, long before the theory of cognitive biases came to prominence). There he systematically explains why “you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone”: as he so vividly describes, we only ever notice objects when they interrupt our activities by malfunctioning, going missing, or standing in our way.4 Heidegger developed this argument to challenge the assumption of metaphysical dualism, which he saw as having led the entire history of philosophy astray, since we cannot claim that consciousness is separate from objects if we spend most of our waking hours being conscious, but we only become conscious of objects on the sporadic occasions when they fail in their context of use. Pointing out our ordinary non-differentiation of self and object is part of Heidegger’s elegant theory of Zuhandenheit, translated variously as “availableness” (Dreyfus, Cerbone), “readiness-to-hand” (Macquarrie and Robinson), or “handiness” (Stambaugh).5 We have no reason to notice many of the objects in our environment during our normal, routine behaviors because objects are always already “handy,” insofar as they function according to expectations. Subject–object differentiation is the exception within human experience, and its precondition is not noticing objects while getting by in the world. Lived experience, as the early Heidegger argues in Being and Time, presents us with nothing like a Cartesian self that encounters a material world full of separate objects; instead, human beings (Dasein) experience the world as having always already preceded the self. The experience of the world elicits concern with outcomes and prompts future-oriented activity, and material objects serve as the tools at hand by which one achieves those outcomes. Heidegger’s theory of handiness helps explain why readers generally have no occasion to notice whether the book they are reading is a translation. Lavinia Heller explicates the way readers do not notice that a text is translated unless it contains linguistic idiosyncrasies, like mistakes or unexpected departures from genre norms. Heller observes that even Gideon Toury’s

Conclusion  165 “descriptive” approach to translation history “cannot take up translation in its availability (Zuhandenheit)” for most casual readers, only in its conspicuousness (Vorhandenheit), “which can be determined by experts looking for specific characteristics” of texts.6 Translations are not only invisible for cultural reasons, like the tendency of English-language translations to go unmarked as such, Venuti’s polemical point in The Translator’s Invisibility. Rather, it is because fluently written translations are “handy” (zuhanden) and thus do not defy the expectations we have about the experience of reading.7 The theory of handiness also explains the expectations surrounding the translation of terminology. A technical term ostensibly comprises an especially well-defined point within the otherwise ambiguous system of language. However, a term ceases to be “handy” as soon as its connotations interfere with our understanding of its meanings. For example, how seriously can you take the legal term for harm by neglect, “torts,” if it reminds you of buttery desserts? The term is perfectly usable, but not without an effect of distraction. The problem with translating terms univocally can be expressed in late Heidegger’s language as well: privileging the accessibility of well-defined terms and fluent translations for the sake of easier understanding can close off the semantic complexity of philosophical concepts. When Heidegger made his famous postwar “turn” towards a more poetic explanation for human beings’ alienation from the concreteness of the material world, he developed the theory of “the openness of the clearing” that is discussed in Chapter 4. Only when translators distract us from our fluent reading experiences do terms within translated texts open up, or “enter the clearing,” where they show themselves not as reliable tools, but as fragile linguistic entities rife with the ambiguity characteristic of all language.

Translating German concepts, theorized in French, into English Historical factors decide to a large extent when translations must be readerfriendly, and when they can break the spell of accessibility in the name of greater precision. The postwar French reception of German philosophy often favored the latter approach and inaugurated a creative traffic in foreign words, such that a rhetoric of conspicuous foreignness emerged even in non-translated texts. The linguistic turn in French theory, with its roots in postwar structuralist theories that sought the kinds of conceptual distinctions found in language in all areas of life, was only strengthened by poststructuralist thought. The poststructuralist innovations made the concept of language a fluid rather than a “structured” one but did not displace the centrality of language in French theory, which has today become a norm in the francophone and anglophone humanities.8 This focus on language has often led to differential translation in the practice of translating German philosophy into French, and has even occasionally led theorists to remark on differential translation as a practice. Etienne Balibar notably observes that Pierre Coste did not “translate ‘consciousness’ by the expected ‘con-science’” in a particular passage

166 Conclusion of his French translation of John Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding: “[Locke’s] statements seem to suggest that up to that point, partial equivalents (such as ‘knowledge’, ‘sentiment’ and ‘conviction’— connaissance, sentiment and conviction) might suffice, but that afterwards they were incompatible with theoretical exactitude (in a work of ‘pure reasoning’).”9 In a typically poststructuralist comment, Balibar praises Coste’s sensitivity to the semantic nuance of Locke’s writing, despite the cost to logical clarity. Balibar thus formulates a justification for modifying one’s approach to the translation of a particular term in the context of translating a particular work. There are of course other ways of emphasizing the complexity of a term besides differential translation—including non-translation. The choice not to translate a term evokes the pathos of linguistic particularity by making it seem like there is more interesting language happening elsewhere—just not in the target language, narrowly defined. Modern pioneers of translation theory like George Steiner and Antoine Berman treat translation as the paradigm for communication across differences in identity, not just in language, and authors who conspicuously evoke foreign words perform translation in the extended (often intralingual) sense when they work to bridge cultural divides.10 Frequently, first translations of philosophical thinkers prove more ambitious in thinking beyond conceptual equivalence. Enhancing that primacy effect, pre-twentieth-century translations are often the ones to utilize differential translation, which is then abandoned by later translators in the name of philological rigor.11 As Haun Saussy has recently noted, critical theorists bestow the name “translation” on various processes that facilitate further acts of communication. But some of these processes, such as foreign word borrowing or computerized information conveyance, do very little to offer new meaning: processes that leave no place for the reader’s understanding as a step in the mediation amount to no more than “transliteration,” that is, rewriting according to a code (as in John Searle’s Chinese box thought experiment).12 Perhaps transliteration is the absolute beginning in the translation process, but while the practice of transliteration constitutes the empty ideal of transferring foreign meaning, it does little to make foreign genres and text traditions legible.

Metaphor-rich translation Differential translation—translating a single word multiple ways according to context—constitutes a refusal to select one translation, and yet it has nearly the exact opposite effect of refusing to translate a word at all. This book’s defense of differential translation centers on the insight it provides the reader into the complexity of philosophical vocabulary. One of the main translation problems addressed in this book arises when a translator stumbles on a polysemous lexeme and suspects that the source text is utilizing both (or more) meanings in its argument or exposition. On the surface,

Conclusion  167 such a play with polysemy seems to point towards sloppy thinking in a philosopher’s work. As we have seen, the bidirectionality of Nachträglichkeit, ignored by Freud, becomes the basis for Jean Laplanche’s criticism that Freud’s later work regresses and fails to live up to some of his own earliest insights. However, there are also cases where philosophers turn deliberately to ambiguous terminology, as in Martin Heidegger’s Der Satz vom Grund, where Grund refers to both foundation and causality, and uses the image of ground as topological surface to develop a more intuitive—and perhaps anti-rationalistic—notion of foundation itself. If Heidegger openly relies on several meanings of Grund in his writing, then we may be right to translate such words differentially, but we cannot claim to have caught Heidegger getting away with a false conflation on the sly. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), associated in recent decades especially with his insights into the dynamics of political revolution,13 has such an opaque writing style that anecdotes circulate that many Germans prefer to read his work in English translation. The translation of Hegel into English is thus a topic worthy of a book of its own.14 Recent translators of Hegel, for instance, sharply deviate from his early translator Sir James Black Baillie’s choice to translate key terms in the text inconsistently. In Baillie’s footnote from the section of Phänomenologie des Geistes entitled “Geist,” he presents his differential translation as a conscious strategy to differentiate Hegel’s use of Geist in different parts of the work: “The term ‘Spirit’ seems better to render the word ‘Geist’ used here, than the word ‘mind’ would do. Up to this stage of experience the word ‘mind’ is sufficient to convey the meaning. But spirit is mind at a much higher level of existence.”15 David Charlston’s comparative lexical analysis confirms Baillie’s account: earlier in the text, Geist is translated as mind, and later as “spirit,” while “Spirit” is capitalized in the last chapter to express its triumph in “the human journey … towards full spirituality.”16 This strategy creates, in Charlston’s words, “a translatorial structuring of this cohesive chain running through the text.” While Charlston plausibly reads Baillie’s choices as the imposition of a particular “translatorial hexis”17 on the text, Baillie’s interpretive choice marks the complexity of problems around the translation of terminology and implicitly warns against the naïveté of claiming to have discovered a single-equivalent solution.18 Even while criticizing Baillie’s impositions on Hegel, Charlston highlights the value and bravery of Baillie’s translation strategy by denying that consistent terminology translation would somehow be hexis-neutral. Charlston explains the backlash against Baillie’s differential translation in terms of arbitrary, changing fashions: for instance, Charlston historicizes the rigor of Terry Pinkard’s recent translation of Phenomenology of Spirit 2008: The high level of terminological consistency of Pinkard’s translations of every occurrence of Geist (spirit) and aufheben (sublate) makes it considerably easier for a modern reader to follow Hegel’s argument. … The translation does not offer unmediated access to Hegel’s thought; it

168 Conclusion too is an interpretation as well as a rendering of the language. … [The result is] a more subtle but nonetheless will-driven strategy for reappropriation and repoliticization of Hegel’s text specifically for use in the modern, neoliberal, largely Anglophone academy.19 The utility that derives from consistently rendering terminology comes at the price of no longer “threading” foreign words’ meanings into a translation that recreates the experience of polysemy in approaching a foreign text. While both approaches have their advantages, Charlston rightly notes that the restriction of meaning that comes from selecting one target-language term creates a strong interpretation, and only seemingly provides a more “objective” approach to translation. Indeed, Charlston quotes Pinkard justifying his choice to translate aufheben with “only two meanings: negate and preserve. Forget about raising up.”20 This fits Pinkard’s reading, because the implicit metaphor of elevation has associations with readings of Hegel that Pinkard rejects, ones with “ethically negative connotations, for example, of elitism, ethnocentrism, and totalitarianism.” Our investment in ethical positions is not, however, an adequate justification for papering over metaphoric layers in translation, and the exposition of Hegel’s metaphoric subtext is arguably diminished through Pinkard’s achievement of consistent terminology.

Translation strategic conclusion Translators and philosophers both confront the difficulty of translating polysemous terminology. Some philosophical arguments rest on a case that a specific term is untranslatable, like Heidegger’s claim that the principle of sufficient reason (often formulated in the negative: Nihil est sine ratione, “nothing is without a reason”) is indeed true on an ontological level in Greek and in German, but becomes false in Latin, since Grund (like λόγος in its supposed meaning of “appearing”) completes that sentence without the pretence to explain existence, unlike the word ratio understood as cause (see Chapter 1). As David Gramling remarks, arguments about untranslatability have not at all enhanced philosophers’ solidarity with professional translators: “Untranslatability is often asserted among philosophers and philosopher teams as being at the core of their work, though they frequently do not acknowledge the centrality of professional translators for their formation and productivity, thus creating competing underdog discourses.”21 While philosophers criticize the inadequacy of specific renderings of terms in published translations, many translators of philosophy prefer not to translate one source-text term with one single target-text term. To confront the problem of non-equivalence head on, translators can render terms differentially according to sentence context, as when Reginald Lilly translates Grund with “ground” and “reason” in Heidegger’s lecture The Principle of Reason (1955–6) or when English-language translators of Machiavelli’s The Prince select five or more renderings of virtù. This

Conclusion  169 technique, which I have been calling differential translation, treats translation as a space for the performance of Derridean différance (the “play of differences within the language” as well as between temporal and textual moments within language) by showing that every attempt to fix a concept’s meaning can at most reflect a moment of grasping for an ever-receding absence.22 Compared to leaving foreign-language terms like Grund or virtù untranslated or selecting one equivalent, differential translation offers readers a chance to place philosophical untranslatables in a more familiar and perhaps more meaningful context. However, given that translators are hardly ever sovereign in their choices and must instead bow to conventions and impositions, it is worth couching the case for differential translation in terms of historical contingency. Beyond its heuristic value, differential translation can be read as the crowning step in a dialectic of possible translation strategies.23 After all, to translate differentially meets Hegel’s demand that the result of the dialectic will be “a concrete universal”—it will express both the particularity of content and do so for the entire set of meanings that pertain to the polysemous term. Non-translation makes an abstraction out of the target word, emptying it of semantic value, whereas differential translation endows it with a particular target-language value and thus concretizes its meaning. Of course, untranslated foreign words do not remain foreign for long; but if repeated enough they eventually add to the vibrancy of the target language and can even introduce exotic new sounds and accidental resonances with familiar sounding target-language words. By contrast, a word that is already familiar echoes with particular connotations and images, not to mention the particular semantic register that ensures the word’s familiarity. A word like Dasein on its own resembles a foreign proper name and, as such, echoes whatever impression the reader has of Heidegger’s name and reputation, while “existence” sounds severe, like “an existential threat,” and “being there” evokes mindfulness and simplicity. In this instance, translation risks overdetermining a foreign concept and misleadingly categorizing it as either existentialist or New Age. While preserving a foreign word gives wide latitude, different translations can evoke meaning with poignant specificity. Differentiating meaning by context deliberately indexes a foreign word’s polysemy without attempting to express it singularly in one equivalent or masking it under the exotic veil of a foreign word. Non-translation does not confront us with a word’s plural meanings, but rather uses foreign morphology to remind us that we are reading a translation. Interspersed foreign words become the most abstract types of signifiers, whose meanings are related to their function and whose content becomes the sovereign exception to the rule that every word must be translated. It is precisely such abstract signification without functional specificity that Hegel designates the “abstract universals,” such as the color “red,” while “concrete universals” are particular entities, such as “a red pen.”24 It is not tenable to argue that

170 Conclusion differential translation is a superior form of translation for all philosophical terms; rather, it is a risky deviation from the norm of consistently translating terminology that pays off when it conveys the particularities of the abstract concept of foreignness to readers of translations. Differential translation alone will not suffice to convey terms in their complexity: footnotes, translators’ introductions, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and philological essays on the evolution of words are all necessary to explicate translation problems. While an individual translation strategy is just one element in a translator’s toolkit, the one advocated in this book has been covertly transformative of discourses throughout the translation history of philosophy. Translation strategies that render foreign words conspicuous materialize problems of meaning that are fundamental to philosophical concept formation; a technique like differential translation shows precisely where and how concepts function within texts and helps us keep track of their volatile relationships to new expressive contexts.

Notes 1 Menage meant this as a criticism of his contemporaries’ stylistic embellishments when translating various ancient myths into French alexandrines. For a thorough study on Ménage’s famous criticism of d’Ablancourt’s translations: “Elles me rappellent à une femme que j’ai beaucoup aimée à Tours, et qui était belle mais infidèle,” see Jell, Die belles infidèles - Funktion, Form und Entwicklung dieser Übersetzungsmethode. 2 Joni Mitchell, Ladies of the Canyon. 3 The resistance to this norm has a long history going back to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s treatise in defense of what would later be called hermeneutic translation: Venuti, “Genealogies of Translation: Schleiermacher and the Hermeneutic Model.” 4 Heidegger, Being and Time, 2008, §43. 5 Dreyfus and Wrathall, A Companion to Heidegger; Cerbone, “Availableness (Zuhandenheit)”; Heidegger, Being and Time, 2008; Heidegger, Being and Time, 1996. “Handiness” makes a thing so useful as to become unnoticed, as if part of ourselves or part of the framing of reality. Heidegger would probably have appreciated both the origin and meaning of the pseudo anglicism das Handy, the German word for “cellphone” derived from a term for walkie-talkie used by the occupying American army in West Germany. 6 “Das trotz seiner Distanzierung von AT-ZT-orientierten Ansätzen noch stark textgebundene Verständnis von Auffälligkeit macht das Erkennen von Translation voraussetzungsvoll und führt dazu, dass Toury nicht an Translation in ihrer Zuhandenheit anknüpfen kann, sondern erst an Translation in ihrer Vorhandenheit, die anhand bestimmter Eigenschaften von ‘Experten’ bestimmbar ist.” Heller, Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation, 115. 7 Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility; Heller, Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation. 8 Badiou is one of the few major French theorists who resists this view of language. In his philosophy of truth as excess of the situation, lived situations reveal “truths,” not just constructions. A concise introduction to this theory (first devel-

Conclusion  171 oped in his 1988 L’être et l’evenement) can be found in Brockman, No Longer the Same, 145–61. 9 Balibar, Identity and Difference, 8. 10 See Steiner, After Babel, 27; Berman, The Experience of the Foreign, 183. Berman attributes this argument to the German Romantics. He cites examples like Novalis’ letter to Friedrich Schlegel, in which he argues that the latter’s translation of Shakespeare has elevated Shakespeare’s work beyond its English origin: “The German Shakespeare is ‘better’ precisely because it is a translation” and for the Romantics translation and commentary (writing reviews) took part in a “movement of potentiation” that “represents a superior echelon of the life of the original.” Berman, 104, 109. 11 Take the cases of Max Müller’s differential translation of “Erscheinung” by context in his translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, J.B. Baillie’s with “Geist” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, and Pierre Coste’s with “consciousness” in John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It is very heartening to see these translators’ choices taken seriously as strong, informative interpretations in the recent analyses: Scarpitti, “Adventures in Translation,” 57–60; Charlston, “Translatorial Hexis”; Balibar, Identity And Difference, 1–17. 12 Saussy, “Macaronics as What Eludes Translation,” 226. 13 See Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History; Comay, Mourning Sickness. 14 David Charlston has written a stunningly thorough one: see Charlston, Translation and Hegel’s Philosophy. 15 Quoted in Charlston, “Translatorial Hexis,” 15. 16 Charlston, 15. 17 Hexis is a Bourdieusian term (borrowed from Aristotle’s ἕξις, literally “possession,” referring to a person’s disposition) that refers to the outward behavioral aspects of habitus, or socially determined habits of mind and behavior. See Bourdieu, Structures, Habitus, Practices. 18 In his monograph, Charlston makes it clear that submitting to one’s hexis does not negate the possibility of bravery in one’s translation choices: “It can be thought of as a defiant flourish of translatorial hexis (Charlston 2013); an example of exploratory male gender performativity (Flotow 2011); and a brave attempt by an exotic, heterodox, vagabond philosopher to convert embodied (inter)cultural capital into much needed cash.” Charlston, Translation and Hegel’s Philosophy, 104. 19 Charlston, “Translatorial Hexis,” 17. 20 Charlston, 20. 21 Gramling, “The Affront of Untranslatability: Ten Scenarios,” 93. 22 Derrida, “Differance,” 146. 23 I have presented a more tendentious explanation for this claim in Hawkins, “Figures for Non-Translation: A Dialectical Theory of the Translation of German Philosophy into French and English.” 24 Stern, “Hegel, British Idealism, and the Curious Case of the Concrete Universal,” 132.

Bibliography Balibar, Etienne. Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Con­ sciousness. Translated by Warren Montag. 1st edition. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013. Berman, Antoine. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. New York: SUNY Press, 1992. Bourdieu, Pierre. Structures, Habitus, Practices. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

172 Conclusion Brockman, D. No Longer the Same: Religious Others and the Liberation of Christian Theology. 2011th edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Cerbone, David R. “Availableness (Zuhandenheit).” In The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon, edited by Mark A. Wrathall, 78–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. https://doi​.org​/10​.1017​/9780511843778​.019. Charlston, David. Translation and Hegel’s Philosophy: A Transformative, Socio-Narrative Approach to A.V. Miller’s Cold-War Retranslations. 1st edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2020. https://doi​.org​/10​.4324​ /9781315181806. ———. “Translatorial Hexis.” Radical Philosophy, no. 186 (August 2014). https:// www​.radicalphilosophy​.com​/article​/translatorial​-hexis. Comay, Rebecca. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. 1st edition. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Mark A. Wrathall. A Companion to Heidegger. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy  29. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005. Hawkins, Spencer. “Figures for Non-Translation: A Dialectical Theory of the Translation of German Philosophy into French and English.” In Traduction et philosophie, edited by Claire Wrobel. Paris: Editions Pantheon-Assas, 2018. https://www​.lasardinealire​.fr​/livre​/9782376510017​-traduction​-et​-philosophie​ -claire​-wrobel​-collectif/. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Reprint. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008. ———. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein Und Zeit. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996. Heller, Lavinia. Translationswissenschaftliche Begriffsbildung und das Problem der performativen Unauffälligkeit von Translation. Berlin: Frank & Timme GmbH, 2013. Jell, Anna. Die belles infidèles - Funktion, Form und Entwicklung dieser Übersetzungsmethode. GRIN Verlag, 2010. Joni, Mitchell. Ladies of the Canyon. Reprise Records, 1970. Saussy, Haun. “Macaronics as What Eludes Translation.” Paragraph 38, no. 2 (June 23, 2015): 214–30. https://doi​.org​/10​.3366​/para​.2015​.0159. Scarpitti, Michael A. “Adventures in Translation.” Semiotica 119, nos. 1–2 (1998): 23–76. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Stern, Robert. “Hegel, British Idealism, and the Curious Case of the Concrete Universal.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 15, no. 1 (February 1, 2007): 115–53. https://doi​.org​/10​.1080​/09608780601088002. Venuti, Lawrence. “Genealogies of Translation: Schleiermacher and the Hermeneutic Model.” In Un/Translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures, edited by Bethany Wiggin and Catriona MacLeod, 45–62. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London; New York: Routledge, 2008.

Index

ἀλήθεια 93, 147, 150 ἀρετή 42 αΐτιον 6, 144–145 ἀνδρεία 61n29 ἀρχή/arche 6, 84, 144–145 ἰδέα/ἰδεῖν 45 λόγος 48, 50, 168 πάθος 2 a priori 18, 43 abstractions 8–9, 21, 46–47 abuse: child 108; memory of 108 addiction 110, 117 Adorno, Theodor 15–16, 38, 40–41, 46, 53–54, 114 Aesop 70 aesthetics 72, 78–79, 89, 91, 120, 123, 147 Americanization 136–137 anti-Semitic 140, 143; rhetoric 104 Arendt, Hannah 137, 140 Aristotle 72, 117, 124 Bacon, Francis 11, 89, 116 Badiou, Alain 23, 138, 140–141, 144, 147–153 Baillie, James Black 167 Balibar, Etienne 165–166 Barthes, Roland 114, 123, 137, 139 Beaufret, Jean 23, 142–155 Being 8, 50, 53–54, 71, 81, 91, 140, 143, 145–146, 149, 153; of beings 6, 75; clearing of 91; depersonalized meaning of 91; forgetting of 75; nature of 15; unconcealment of 148; understanding of 140; -unto-death 81; see also das Sein/das Seyn belatedness 3, 14, 107–110, 123, 127; concept of 107, 110, 127; Freudian 107; theory of 127; see also die

Nachträglichkeit/der Nachtrag/ nachtragen/nachträglich Benjamin, Andrew 48, 127 Benjamin, Walter 38, 104 Berman, Antoine 47, 54, 103, 114, 166 bifurcated construal (metaphor) 79 blending: blended space 92; semantic blending 85 Blumenberg, Hans 3, 5, 8–9, 20–22, 39, 47, 53, 69–93 Born, Martin 151–153 Bourdieu, Pierre 114, 136, 139, 141–142 b’reschit 84 Brill, Abraham A. 120 Brunschvicg, Leon 138–139 Campe, Joachim Heinrich 2, 12–14, 44 Cassin, Barbara 3, 16, 20–21, 55, 107, 140–141, 144 causal: causality 3, 167; effects 117; explanations 49; force 49; reasons 49 Charlston, David 167–168 Cicero 75–76 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 46 conceptuality 45; ahistorical approach to 105; fragility of 6; nature of 43; non- 3, 22, 164; philosophical 13, 20; thinking of 152; see also der Begriff/begreifen conscious 105, 108, 125, 164; attention 55; experience 51, 69; knowledge 78, 110; life 107, 121, 126; mind 1, 107, 109; pre- 125; self 39, 121, 125; strategy 167; variation 150 consciousness 3, 18, 38, 47, 51–53, 82, 124–125, 150, 164, 165; false 18, 163; fluid 53; human 91; impressional 52; internal time 51–52; 

174 Index retentional 52; stream of 47–48, 52–53; time 51–52; see also das Bewusstsein/bewusst continental philosophy 16, 18–19, 37, 48, 54, 79, 154 Coste, Pierre 165–166 Cusset, François 136–137 Deane-Cox, Sharon 114–115 deconstruction 4, 6, 17 Deleuze, Gilles 56, 136, 139, 141 De Man, Paul 4 Demers, Jason 137 Derrida, Jacques 17, 21, 35–36, 56–58, 87–88, 136–137, 139, 141, 148–149, 152, 154 developmental (psychology) 107, 110, 127 différance 20–21, 56–58, 151–152, 169 differential translation 9–10, 20–21, 23, 37, 39–42, 44, 48–51, 53–58, 77, 103, 111–112, 122–124, 144, 148, 165–166, 169–170; application of 39; defense of 166; effective form of 50; implementation of 22; –psychology 167; purpose of 54; rhetorical effect of 57; technique of 39; value of 10, 37, 41, 151; see also die Übersetzung; die Übertragung dream 105, 109, 111, 118 dualism 50; metaphysical 71, 149, 164 ego 52, 83, 107, 121–122, 124–127 Emmerich, Karen 38 empiricism 11 English as a lingua franca (ELF) 18 enigmatic signifier (psychoanalysis) 106–107 Enlightenment 2, 6, 17–18, 43, 89, 139; anti- 149; Sophistic 71 epiphora 73, 124 equivalence (translation) 10, 38, 43, 104–105; anti- 38; concept of 104– 106; dynamic 105; lexical 104; non168; rejection of 38; terminological 9, 39 ethics 9, 87, 89 etymology 14, 35, 44–45, 47, 50–51, 54–55, 93, 145, 148; German 2; Greco-Latinate 36; Greek 69; transparent 43, 47 Europe 4–5, 10–12, 15–16, 18, 20, 38, 44, 71–72, 139, 142, 149, 154; Eurasia 10

existential: account 154; basis 164; existentialism 5, 138, 169; spatiality 53; state of humanity 141; threat 169 Faber, Pamela 55 Fanon, Franz 57, 139 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 2, 11–12, 15, 44 fixed ciphers (feste Chiffren) 75 Fliess, Wilhelm 115, 118, 127 Foucault, Michel 136, 139, 141, 154 Freud, Sigmund 1–3, 17–18, 21–22, 56, 58, 85, 91–92, 102–113, 115–128, 139, 150, 152, 154, 167 Goldschmidt, Georges-Arthur 1–2, 103, 155 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 43, 107, 145 Hall, Kirsty 120, 122 Hegel, Gottfried Wilhelm Friedrich 2, 35, 41, 54, 139, 152, 167–169 Heidegger, Martin 2–3, 5–6, 20–21, 23, 35, 37, 41, 46–51, 53–55, 70–72, 74–76, 80–83, 86, 91, 93, 139–154, 164–165, 167 Heller, Lavinia 19, 72, 78, 164 Huish, Louise Adey 110–112 humanities 16, 23, 37, 73, 136–137, 139, 141, 165 humor 14, 85–86, 89, 91–92 Husserl, Edmund 3, 16, 20–21, 47–48, 51–53, 55, 58, 69, 86, 126, 140 Hyppolite, Jean 137, 139 interpretation 39, 49, 84, 105–106, 110, 112, 114, 117, 122, 147, 150–151, 168; anti-Enlightenment 149; corrective 49; dream 105; Marxist 142; mis- 49; multi-layered 79; processes 107; re- 78, 114; revolutionary leftist 139; self143; strong 111; text 136; traditional 72 invariant content (translation) 72 irony 88 James, William 124 Jankélévitch, Vladimir “Serge” 103 Jay, Martin 104 Jones, Ernest 117–118, 120–122, 124 judgment 18, 57; ethical 57; logical 53; negative 163; subjective 54

Index  175 Kant, Immanuel 2–5, 7–8, 20, 41, 43, 45, 54, 78, 87–89, 91, 112, 139, 154 Kantian 90; epistemology 43, 88; neo- 137, 139; notion 90; thought 9; transcendental illusion 89; transcendentalism 87 Lacan, Jacques 56, 102–103, 106–108, 110, 121, 127, 137, 139, 141, 154 Laplanche, Jean 22, 102–108, 110–112, 121–122, 124–125, 167 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 2, 7–8, 13, 49 Lilly, Reginald 50–51, 168 linguistic 11, 14, 22, 75, 127, 142, 154, 165; approaches 16; arguments 11, 15; comments 70; comparative 144; complexity 43; creativity 38; criteria 38; cultural- 12, 15; currency 19; differences 4, 11, 35–36, 40, 74, 163; diversity 19, 36; features 16; foreign pedigree 69; form 22, 80; historical 5, 10, 37; history 19, 46, 94; imperialism 18; indecision 112; indiosyncrasies 164; innovator 69; inter- 17, 77; intuitions 38; maturity 1; meaning 104; nationalism 20, 43– 44, 93, 144; oriented phenomenology 80; particularism 74; particularity 22–23, 70, 75, 86, 166; problems 102, 154; process 2; relativism 2; resources 13, 23; shifts 75; sign 4; socio- 16–18; specificity 72, 93, 103; traditions 16; translation 80; translational issues 72; turn 5; wizard 37; works 103 logology 21 machina 72, 80 Macquarrie, John 50, 164 Malick, Terrence 50–51 Marx, Karl 18 Marxism 25n13 Meiklejohn, John Miller Dow 45 metaphor: absolute 21, 73–74, 77–79, 85–86; analysis 70; background 72–73, 77–78; complicity of 87; dead 55; definition of 124; engagement with 72; function of 83; gendered 93; historical study of 5; history 69, 78, 85, 89; humorous function of 86; hydrological 51; implicit 168; imprecise 47; -laden 3; light- 76;

limits of 86; linguistic specificity of 72; negation of the 89; orientational 40; polysemy of 80; productive 74; recurrent 106; stream 52; studies 8, 69; supertranslatability of 21; theories of 79, 85; traditional 88; translation of 87; see also die Metapher metaphorology 20, 70, 72, 79–80, 85–88, 94 modernity 2, 15, 72, 89, 91, 149, 163 morphemes 2, 3, 13, 16, 37, 84, 123; Germanic 1, 14–15, 35–36; polysemous 164; productive 41 Napoleonic Wars 5, 12 narcissism 89, 125 nationalism 2, 12, 35, 43–44, 93, 144 Nazism 5, 15, 141, 143–144 negativity bias 163–164 neurosis 107, 109–110, 126–127 Nida, Eugene 104–105 Nietzsche, Friedrich 18, 40, 56–57, 91–93, 139, 142, 152 nonconceptuality 3, 22; see also der Begriff/begreifen, die Unbegrifflichkeit ontology 9, 21, 54, 71, 88, 91, 146, 153 openness 3, 48, 71, 75, 146–147, 149–150, 152–153, 165; see also die Lichtung Paracelsus 8 Phaedrus 76, 82 Phenomenology 46, 55, 75, 80, 138–139 Phillips, Adam 22, 110, 113, 120, 122 philosophy 7–9, 11–12, 17, 23, 35, 37, 44, 48, 54, 58, 73–74, 78–79, 81, 87–88, 112, 119, 128, 141, 143, 149–150; American 154; Anglo-American 37; beginning of 6; classical 125; conceptual language of 74; contemporary works of 17; continental 3, 16, 18–19, 37, 48, 54, 79, 154; eighteenth-century 45; English-language 46; European 71; French 5, 23, 137, 141; German 2–4, 7, 9–12, 15–16, 19–21, 23, 37, 43, 46–47, 55–56, 69–70, 75, 81–82, 137, 140, 165; Heideggerian 138; Heraclitan 83; history of 10,

176 Index 19, 23, 69–70, 74, 77, 93, 164, 170; indigenous 11; linguistic particularity of 75; metaphors in 17, 73, 78; Platonic 153; pre-Socratic 93; rigorous 7; scholastic 11; systematic 71; translating 17, 39, 58, 74, 93, 112, 168; translators of 19–20, 54 Pinkard, Terry 167–168 Plato 5, 45, 70–71, 75–77, 139 polysemous 22, 42, 44; concepts 77; language 54; lexeme 166; morphemes 164; morphology 47; terminology 107, 168; terms 40, 169; vocabulary 43, 58, 69; words 9, 16, 20–21, 37, 39–41, 55, 70, 83 polysemy 7, 9, 15–16, 35, 40–41, 43, 46–50, 54–55, 79–80, 83, 93, 103, 112, 164, 167–169 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 102, 107, 111 post-colonial theory 20 poststructuralists 5–6, 19, 23, 137–139, 141, 148, 165–166 pratum ridet 79 provincialism 5–6 psychoanalysis 102–106, 108, 113, 115, 118–119, 124, 128 Putnam, James 120 rationalism 45, 139 Reddick, John 121–122 relativism: cultural 38; linguistic 2 repression 105, 107, 109, 123, 127 retranslation 9–10, 113–116, 119–120, 127–128 Ricoeur, Paul 18, 55, 112–113, 117, 124, 139 Rivarol, Antoine de 11–12 Robinson, Douglas 114 Romance languages 2, 12, 14, 37, 92, 126, 155 Romantics 142, 144 Rorty, Richard 18 School of Suspicion 18 sexual 108; arousal 127; content 92; developmental stage 127; differences 149; feelings 108; homo- 109; humor 85; intercourse 109; life 126; meanings 92; phobias 117; response 108; shame 108; violence 92 sexuality 85, 91–92, 102, 108, 127; adult 108–109; childhood 110 skepticism 7, 18, 71, 83–84, 88–90 skopos 10, 20

Stambaugh, Joan 146–148, 164 Strachey, Alix 107, 110, 117–121, 123–124, 126 Strachey, James 58, 107, 110–111, 117, 119–126 Susam-Sarajeva, Şebnem 114 symptomatology 105 Taft, Richard 49, 51 theology 6–7, 10, 15, 41, 44, 47, 71, 84, 89–90, 137–138 Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) 10 Thomasius, Christian 7, 11 Times Higher Education (THE) 136 Toury, Gideon 164 translation: abstract ideal of 19; analogy 73; authentic 82, 84; challenges 18; choices 19, 51, 58, 86, 102, 112, 120, 122; competence 78; concepts of 72; creativity 18, 148; criticism 80; difficulties 8, 39; disjunctive 21, 50–51, 58, 77, 112; history 3, 16–17, 19–21, 23, 37–38, 55, 69–70, 73, 76, 83, 85, 103, 137, 140, 152, 154, 164; image-rich 51; inconspicuous 20, 69; intercultural 10; interlineal 104; interlingual 74, 80, 106, 113, 127–128; interpretative 111; intralingual 41; intrapsychic 106; invisibility 88, 93; literal 84; literalism in 105; loan 2, 4, 7, 10, 14–15, 43, 145; machine 36; perspective 22; philosophical 17, 74, 151; poetic 70; practice 21; process 20, 166; resistance to 70, 80; sensefor-sense 39; strategy 19–20, 23, 35, 44, 58, 167–170; terminological 105; theory 9, 19–20, 22, 37–40, 54, 58, 69, 74–75, 78, 80, 104–105, 120, 142, 154, 166; transformative power of 20; translatio 72–73; Translation Studies 17, 19–20, 69, 113; wordfor-word 104; see also differential translation transparency 1–2, 14–15, 85 trauma 107–110, 117, 123, 127 Twain, Mark 85, 92 unconscious 1–2, 17–18, 69, 102–103, 105–109, 114, 117, 121–124, 126–127, 137; German 1; material 105; memories 111; mental images 78; wishes 58 UNESCO 150

Index  177 untranslatability 3, 9, 22, 74, 106, 144, 147, 153–154, 168; translatability 16, 21–22, 38, 73 Venuti, Lawrence 19–20, 39, 105, 119–120, 153, 165 verisimile 76–77

virtù 42, 56, 169 Wallace, Robert 86 Wolff, Christian 2–3, 7–8, 44–45, 89 Wolfman case 108–111, 117–118, 120 Žižek, Slavoj 140

German terms

abhängen 4 auch 118, 146 aufheben 167–168

-hand-; die Vorhandenheit/vorhanden 165; die Zuhandenheit/zuhanden 155, 164–165

der Begriff/begreifen 43–46, 70, 84; Begriffsdichtung 142; greifen 46; Grundbegriffe 91; die Unbegrifflichkeit/unbegrifflich 39; der Vernunftsbegriff 43; der Verstandesbegriff 43, 45 die Besetzung 125–126; die Umbesetzung 97n73 das Bewusstsein/bewusst: der Bewußtseinsstrom 47; das Unbewusste/unbewusst 18; das Zeitbewusstsein 47 die Brückenbau-Metapher 78

das Ich 121, 124–125 die Idee 43, 45 immer schon 18

das Dasein 2, 15, 46–47, 50, 141, 143–144, 149, 164, 169 durchsichtig 1–2 eigentlich 46 eiternde Pfropfen 118 der Egoist 124 Ereignis 46 das Es 121, 124 die Fehlleistung 58, 122 Fernweh 17 der Fluß/fließen 4, 52 das Fremdwörterbuch 13–14 der Geist 167 der Grund 4, 6, 15, 46–51, 55, 70, 144–145, 151, 167–169; der Abgrund/Ab-grund 47, 50–51; gründlich 47; der Satz vom Grund 6, 48–49, 167



Lehrgebäude 13 das Leid 2; die Leidenschaft 15; das Mitleid 1–2 das Licht 145–146 die Lichtung/licht 15, 145–153; die Lichtung des Offenen 152–153; das Offene 146–147, 150–151 die Machenschaft 140 die Metapher 76, 80; die Brückenbau-Metapher 78; die Hintergrundmetapher 72 die Nachträglichkeit/der Nachtrag/ nachtragen/nachträglich 22, 56, 58, 106–108, 110–113, 122–124, 150, 152, 167 die Nackte 74, 89, 91 die Nacktschnecke 1 der Schachtelsatz 16 die Schadenfreude 17, 81 der Schein/scheinen/scheinbar 76–77 das Sein/das Seyn 6, 81, 144–145, 155 der Strom/strömen 47–48, 51–53, 55, 69–70; der Bewußtseinsstrom 47 die Substanz 4 die Übersetzung/übersetzen 74, 76, 121 die Übertragung 70, 105 untergehen 40

Index  179 die Unverborgenheit 91, 147, 150 die Ursprache 12, 14, 44 die Vorstellung 44, 122 die Wahrheit/wahr 74, 83, 85–86, 88–89, 91–93; die Wahrhaftigkeitsbeschwörung 89 die Wahrscheinlichkeit/wahrscheinlich 76–77, 80

die Welt 7–9; die Weltweisheit 7 die Wissenschaft 91; der Wissenschaftler 116 der Zufall 10 der Zug 35 der Zwang 126; die Wiederholungszwang 126; die Zwangsneurose 126