Images 1march2017 talk

Translation as hinge: an abusive reading of Sophie Calle’s Prenez-soin de vous

Prenez-soin de vous, France’s contribution to the Venice Biennale, 2008

The letter from X, emailed to Sophie

Gotham Handbook, 1999. Sophie Calle

Room with a View, 2002

Some nights you can't put into words. I spent the night of October 5, 2002, in a room set up for me at the top of the Eiffel Tower. In bed.

Between white sheets, listening to the strangers who took turns at my bedside. Tell me a story so I won't fall asleep. Maximum length: 5 minutes. Longer if thrilling. No story, no visit. If your story sends me to sleep, please leave quietly and ask the guard to wake me . . . Hundreds turned up. Some nights you can't describe. I came back down in the early morning. A message was flashing on each pillar: Sophie Calle, end of sleepless night, 7:00 a.m. As if to confirm that I hadn't dreamt it all. I asked for the moon and I got it: I SLEPT AT THE TOP OF THE EIFFEL TOWER. Since then, I keep an eye out for it, and if I glimpse it along some street, I say hello. Give it a fond look. Up there, 1,014 feet above ground, it's a bit like home.

Book cover, Jones 1998

The Bride stripped naked by her Bachelors, even . . . (The Large Glass), 1915-1923. Marcel Duchamp

Thus, the abusive work of the translation will be oriented by specific nubs in the original, by points or passages that are in some sense forced, that stand out as clusters of textual energy--whether they are constituted by words, turns of phrase, or more elaborate formulations. [. . .] No doubt the project we are envisaging here is ultimately impossible: the translator’s aim is to rearticulate analogically the abuse that occurs in the original text, thus to take on the force, the resistance, the densification, that this abuse occasions in its own habitat, yet, at the same time also to displace, remobilize, and extend this abuse in another milieu where, once again, it will have a dual function—on the one hand, that of forcing the linguistic and conceptual system of which it is a dependent, and on the other hand, of directing a critical thrust back toward the text that it translates and in relation to which it becomes a kind of unsetting aftermath (it is as if the translation sought to occupy the original’s already unsettled home, and thereby, far from “domesticating” it, to turn it into a place still more foreign to itself – my emphasis) (Derrida in Lewis, 43).

Body Pressure, 1974. Bruce Nauman

Body Pressure, 2005. Marina Abramović

Before I got irritated and said, “It’s not true, I never said that.” I now rub my hands, when I’ve found something wrong. It’s another way of taking care of myself, a way of turning things around.

Instead of being upset about being misinterpreted, I go looking for it. I hope for it, wait for it. It’s the right method: turning things to my advantage in order not to suffer from them. –Sophie Calle in an interview with The Guardian, June 2007.

The destructive character has no interest in being understood.

Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunderstood cannot harm him. On the contrary, he provokes it, just like oracles, those destructive institutions of the state, provoked it. He knows only one watchword: make room, only one activity: clearing away. The most petty of all phenomena, gossip, only comes about because people do not want to be misunderstood. The destructive character tolerates misunderstanding; he does not promote gossip …

The destructive character is young and cheerful…it cheers because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed eradication, of his own condition. …The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble, not for the sake of rubble, but for the way of leading through it . . .

–Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” 1931

Works cited Benjamin, Walter, "The destructive character." Walter Benjamin: selected writings, volume 2, part 2, 1931-1934. Ed. Michael W. Jennings et. al., Rodney Livingstone and Others, Trans. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999. 8-11.

Butler, Judith, “Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory”. The Performance Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Bial. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. 154-166.

Godard, Barbara, “Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation”. Translation, History & Culture.

Eds Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere. London and New York: Cassell, 1990. 87-96.

Jones, Amelia. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.

---- . “Space, Body and the Self in the Work of Bruce Nauman.” Musée d’art contemporain, Montréal, Québec. 31 March 2010. Communication presentated at public conference.

Kristal, Efraín. Invisible Work: Borges and Translation. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002.

Lewis, Philip E. “The Measure of Translation Effects.” Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. 31-62.

Paz, Octavio. Apariencia desnuda: La obra de Marcel Duchamp. Madrid: Alianza Forma/Era, 1991.

---. “Translation: Literature and Letters.” Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida. Eds Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 152-162.

Rodríguez García, José María. “Literary Translation into Cultural Translation.” Diacritics 34.3 (2004): 2-30.