Translation and Exile

Language is the house of the truth of Being - Heidegger.

Heidegger's idea of aletheia, or disclosure (Erschlossenheit), was an attempt to make sense of how things in the world appear to human beings as part of an opening in intelligibility, as "unclosedness" or "unconcealedness".

 Dasein is a being whose being is an issue for itself; every Dasein has an a priori sense of "mineness," or being one's self; Dasein is always thrown into the world, meaning it finds itself within a world, meaning no Dasein has ever been decontextualized. We are all world-bound, submerged, entangled, and engaged with our ontico-ontological surroundings through care, concern, and moods. Dasein has various modes of being-in-the-world, which are the subject of much of Heidegger's analysis in Being and Time

At the most basic level of being-in-the-world, Heidegger notes that there is always a mood, a mood that "assails us" in our unreflecting devotion to the world. A mood comes neither from the "outside" nor from the "inside," but arises from being-in-the-world. One may turn away from a mood but that is only to another mood; it is part of our facticity. Only with a mood are we permitted to encounter things in the world. Dasein (a co-term for being-in-the-world) has an openness to the world that is constituted by the attunement of a mood or state of mind. As such, Dasein is a "thrown" "projection" (geworfen Entwurf), projecting itself onto the possibilities that lie before it or may be hidden, and interpreting and understanding the world in terms of possibilities.

But what exactly is the philosophical, aesthetic, social and ethical relevance of potentiality? 

A first answer might lie in potentiality's openness. The capacity, that is, incessantly to become, incessantly to produce meaning by defining closure. This is the angle from which the book views modes of translation. 

Do you think there is such a thing as pure language, which captures the essence of meaning? 

Every language is potentially translatable into another and ultimately, back into pure language. Translation's very existence is based on this principle: translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages. (Benjamin). 

The interpreter becomes the author, or, perhaps more appropriately,  a translator whose task is to undo the work in order to retrieve the essence hidden beneath layers of words and colors, in order to reach the depth that lies at the surface of things.

If the author starts at the essence and gradually and inevitably leaves it behind in the urge to possess it and know it, the interpreter and the translator start from the fiction and erase it to know and possess the essence. These two processes are complimentary and necessary; they could not exist without each other. 

Do you agree that "the actual work is nothing other than a "death mask" of other work that has never been or will never be written?

"Non mi viene la parola;" this simple expression, so common in ordinary parlance, tells an important tale about the movement of language and also about language's original home. It implies that language leaves its home in order to reach a destination. What happens to language as it travels?

Have you ever experienced a "banishment from language"?

Language and subjectivity simultaneously move and search for one another. We can only hear language is we stop speaking language.

Exile is, like translation and memory, a mode situated at a threshold. 

WHy is it that the self potentially tends toward and yet is also repulsed by isolation and exile? Why is it that monastic life is poetically and philosophically inspiring, while exile is so feared and loathed? 

"Origin," "purity," and "home" are models and ideas that are cherished and nourished because they offer guidance and orientation. They are thought of as usual, and the familiar. As a consequence, they not only provide a sense of comfort, but also of security - the security of an identity. They are treasured because they often come to rescue us in our routine struggle against impurity, inauthenticity, and strangeness. They offer orientation and anchorage, providing the very sense of being. yet are they mere fabrications, useful tools to fight a battle that perhaps should not be fought at all? Are we ever really at home?

In translation of words, how do you understand the difference between methods of "replacement" versus "transfer"?

On The Superiority of Anglo-American Literature

What is the problem with the French?

What is the difference between grass-like and tree-like thinking?

What is the difference between flight and travel?

How do you understand "deterrioritorization"?

"there is always betrayal in a line of flight. Not trickery like the one of the orderly man ordering the future, but betrayal like that of a simple man who no longer has any past or future. We betray the fixed powers which try to hold us back, the established powers of the earth. The movement of betrayal has been defined as a double turning away: man turns his face away from God , who also turns his face away from man. (...) Thus deterritorization is traced."

What is the relationship between writing and lines of flight?

The great and only error lies in thinking that a line of flight consists in fleeing from life into the imaginary, into art. On the contrary, to flee is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon. 

The great and only error lies in thinking that a line of flight consists in fleeing from life into the imaginary, into art. On the contrary, to flee is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon. 

How can we relate Deleuze to Flusser and to Barnabe and Bartoloni?

The rhizome

Rebellion against trees