When we examine Rolle’s practice in
the Name of Jesus cult through the lens of medieval Christograms, we arrive at
a truly demanding juncture of translation, (non-subjectivist) ethics, and the materiality of language—all facets of Blanchot’s own
philosophical project that undergird this project. Throughout the Middle Ages, the late
(originally mistransliterated) Latin
inscription IHS was used both to refer to the Greek transliterated name ΊΗΣΟΥ̃Σ [or Ίησου̃ς, Iesous] as well as to
abbreviate various Latin phrases such as Iesus Hominum Salvator [“Jesus,
Savior of Humankind”], in hoc signo (vinces) [“in this sign (shalt thou
conquer)”], and in hac salus [“in this (cross is) salvation”], among
others. We have also heard it used as an
English abbreviation for “in His service.”
Such multivalency and polysemy can inform our understanding of IHS
not only as invocation of Jesus’s name but also as appellation (qua Iesus
Hominum Salvator), advocation (qua in hoc signo), and the resulting (and
seemingly necessary) equivocation.
Christograms, in general, are more than examples of linguistic
literalism, however: devotees would
embroider them on their clothing as an indication of their faith, thereby
turning IHS into a doubly literal
sign, particularly when we cross the ascender of the lower-case h. This monogram-cum-sign designates the
disseminated possibilities of meaning inscribed upon the clothing of
the faithful, thereby marking, quite literally (that is, with letters, with the material
of language) the faith of its wearer.
With this invocation of Rolle, who
not only gave us the first (and most common) definition of the term translation but also exposed us, at such
an early date, to the problems of polysemy, especially as read across the
literalness of Christograms, we wish to further problematize translation’s
relationship to ethics. We human beings
are thrown forth into the doubly vexing, twin problems of ethics and
translation, and we must try to unravel the questionable questionability as
well as the radical radicality of these problems. The statement ethics haunts translation radicalizes our understanding of these
terms in that translation, haunting, language, and ethics—at
least how we want to understand what is at issue here—are but various modes of one another. That is, for example, translation can be best
understood as language grounded within an ethics (as ή̃θος) that haunts us.[1] Here, our hauntology bespeaks the haunt that
is our language, where we find ourselves (and the fact that we exist).[2] Language haunts us, too, in that it brings to
mind that which is no longer present, the trace of that which does not
remain. Each term, then, actively
translates and stands as a consequential translation of the other,
fundamentally reflecting and refracting the rootedness of these terms in the
same phenomenon and by way of the event of translation. Of course, we, too, are acknowledging the play
inherent in such terms as radical—this
term that speaks of the rootedness and common root of language and ethics. It is by way of language and the ensuing
necessity of translation that we human beings come to understand ourselves (and
perhaps each other) ethically as beings with and within language,
wherein—according to Heidegger’s estimation—being itself resides. Also from this deployment and play, it
hopefully becomes clear that we do not employ the term ethics to mean merely normative directives by which a translator is
capable of transferring meaning from a source language to a target
language. For example, ethical
translation does not necessarily occur when a translator chooses the best word
in the new language to semiotically refer back to, correspond to, or to represent an original
idea or thing. We will come to see later how Walter Benjamin overturns our traditional conception of this mode of
translation. Not surprisingly, the
ontological turn in twentieth-century hermeneutics that we have already
examined will also deeply inform this conception of ethics. We can see this Heideggerian and
post-Heideggerian deployment of ethics as
another translation of language and translation themselves—that is, ethics not as instructions about how to
behave toward one another, but rather as a mode of our own being, how we find
ourselves within a world that necessitates dialog and understanding. Translation, then, activates and makes
manifest an ethics grounded upon a foundation informed by the Heideggerian
notion of Mitdasein, of
being-there-with. To be within a there [sein da] necessitates a resonance with the ethical demands of
finding oneself mooded and thrown within a shared world of others, among other
Dasein(e).
[1] See Martin Heidegger, “Über den Humanismus” (Frankfurt am
Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000). Martin
Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, ed. William McNeill
(New York: Cambridge University Press,
2005).
[2] For more on hauntology,
a portmanteau of haunt and -ology and near-homophone with ontology, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning
and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
No comments:
Post a Comment