My work aligns translation, language, perception, seeing domination, seeing resistance, and levels or orders of political behavioral praxis. I accomplish this through a necessarily wide set of seven robust thinkers: Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, María Lugones, Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Francois Lyotard, John Dewey, and Mikel Dufrenne. Fundamentally, I am concerned with two processes: the movement from proto-linguistic epistemically justified perceptions and thoughts to formal language and sentential propositions, though not admitting their reducibility to formal logical systems (in the vein of Merleau-Ponty, where perception is the fundamental first philosophy and the always already ongoing basis of the intentionality structure); and secondarily, how a far more nuanced version of justified perceptions and statement-behaviors allows for political resistance. Necessarily, my approach prioritizes difference and autonomy while desubjectivating freedom from the neoliberal agent-subject, an I, to the we, a multiplicity of mobile subject-positions. Spinozan causation gives us further grounding to reconsider personhood as being constituted as aspectually entangled with environments and with vast fields of non-linear, zonal event-affections.
Walter Benjamin offers a view of language that is at once material, mystical, religious, aesthetic, and affective. I intend to begin with him for these reasons and move on to Kristeva, Lugones, Spinoza, Lyotard, Dewey, and Dufrenne. From Benjamin we garner rigorous accounts of history, language, and translation, ultimately revealing, always re-revealing, re-translating, experiences of the divine, of the origin of being, of pure language. Dewey will take up the relation between divine or religious experience and esthetic experience in highly helpful expository modes. Spinoza also was a “god-drunk man” and gives us an account of pantheistic mind-matter that coheres with Benjamin’s mysticism while complicating (in the productive sense) his account. Kristeva has written on “the mind’s road to God,” and Lyotard’s differend (alongside William James’s pragmatism) speaks to the necessity of new phrase regimes for accounting religious-philosophical experience. For all of these reasons and more, Benjamin gives us the best starting place, on translation. We are speaking with language; we cannot go anywhere without removing these barriers and providing an account of a critique which would undergird us behind the very words we are limited by. In fact, here I have even let my reader in on the ‘little’ secret for why my dissertation is concerned with language at all to begin with. We are limited in our thinking by it and must move into deeper regions after a critique of the modes of sentential proposition, while at the same time justifying our usage of these modes in a later instance; this is, actually, the Cartesian Circle but I cannot explain this to you here, though I hope to include it in the full breadth of this work: from clear and distinct proto-linguistic eidetic-noetic intuitions (as perceptions), to words and linguistic dialectics.
Benjamin argues in “The Task of the Translator” that translation is a mode, and thus, translatability is a central feature of certain works. One can have varying levels of difficulty in translating certain works, while some works in fact call to be translated. This call begins a fertile connection with both Dewey and Dufrenne on the exigencies of the world’s ‘objects’ to determine how the labor process autonomously produces itself. Here, labor, language, and affection are all understood to be causal processes of producing meaning and of inscribing historicities both physically and mentally. The mental inscriptions are necessary skill-building literacy for reading diverse environmental modes and relations as well as for reading practices of political domination and resistance. Kristeva on intertextuality, both of the body as text and of the text as multiplicitous body, connects here too. Benjamin’s goal in “The Task of the Translator” is to introduce the reader to pure language, which he argues all translations circle around. There are multiple levels of translation, with inter-linguistic translation being the most obvious contender, say for example from Benjamin’s native German to our native English. Benjamin argues that these translations ‘circle around’, in elliptical fashion, ever closer to pure language. However, we open up significantly better understandings of his ides on pure language when we manage to introduce multimedia translation and intra-lingual translation, with the former occurring most often in artmaking but also at work in his Arcades Project, where he was interested in architecture as formative of sense and of our horizons of political resistance. The latter, intra-lingual translation, is most obvious when one must correct for semantic drift, when words in our own native language have lost their meaning. Thus, pure language becomes simply put a henosis communion with justified epistemic perception, or what Plato calls the Good and what Plotinus later fleshes out in full dialectical richness with sensitivity to this Being as Many-One.
We find additional resources on communication, matter, language, divine revelation, and naming in “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” Therein, Benjamin argues that objects communicate to us what is communicable in themselves and that this communicability is their naming, which is a role given to us by God. He provides a Kantian-style transcendental critique which argues that in order for our naming of anything or for our use of formal language to be possible, indeed even accurate and meaningful, we must share a primordial communion with the world. Communion is here understood as direct access to a shared monistic substance or being.
Benjamin also offers an account of hermeneutics, labor, lived worlds, and historical world-making (what I call once-lived worlds inscribed in objects) in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In this third essay, Benjamin presents a notion of weak messianism which would stand in contrast to a Hegelian strong messianism. For strong messianism, the past is a necessary index of faults and failures that the present can use as a resource for eschatological restoration of what we owe to the dead. Instead, weak messianism allows the dead to speak on their own terms for themselves once more through alternate hermeneutical modes of re-interpretation, a restoration of their voices brought alive once more into the present mode, this new pure language called weak messianism. We see also then that “the flux” of pure language is multiple and dialectical rather than a mere communion with the One Good, as I explained in a connection to Plotinus’ development above. Each voice in each moment is given the freedom to be different from their causal historicities while at the same time not constraining them to any future readings that might inscribe more death.
While Julia Kristeva’s dissertation turned book, Revolution in Poetic Language, offers a technical and rigorous articulation of her advanced work in semiotics, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, which should synergized into what she calls semanalysis, understanding the text offers a foray into these three fields and therefore requires more background knowledge than we can concisely establish here. Instead, her 1974 essay from Tel Quel 57 titled “The Novel as Polylogue” looks at Phillip Sollers’s novel H[ash] as the emblematic polyphony. Although Dostoevsky is often regarded as one of the first polyphonic novelists by giving his characters truly diverse, sometimes rambling intentions, dialogues, and behaviors, often working against traditional novel-writing modes of the ‘well-made play’ or plot, Sollers’s H does away with grammar, punctuation, and paragraph breaks to rip open polylogical subject-constitution as deeply multiple, even contradictory. In this short essay, we get access to the symbolic order of meaning, which is masculine, in contrast with the playful and open-ended semiotic poetics of the feminine register. These categories are historically constructed, though it is my immediate impression that Kristeva is more gender essentialist than my position would turn out to argue. We also receive notions of the body as text(s) and of the text as bodies, where our affective historicities (drawing from Spinoza’s causal and inscribed powers of imagination and mind) allow or prohibit the horizons of meaning which we are capable of reading or writing. She shows that reading always requires a writing, in this mode of comprehension, and that thus writing involves diverse modes of reading other practices and behaviors across the Real, what Bergson refers to as a spiritual auscultation or listening to life’s innermost qualities through a long history of comradeship with its superficial manifestations, notes on the nature of being that require synthesis and holistic account. Here we have a rich definition of intertextuality. Kristeva also provides accounts of polyvalent meaning and multiple contradictory hermeneutics emanating from a Real that is truly polylogical at the base and not merely in human perception. I prefer to explain this with an analogy of my own called “the madhouse under the sky,” where we consider perceptual vantage points, historical environments, and multiplicitous, discrete “partitions of the sensible” (to quote Rancière) as all being at play in what Bergson calls “the indeterminacy of the Real,” again aligning well with recent physics on quantum mechanics and superposition. Polyvalent hermeneutics thus offer a more robust solution to the mind-body problem via process monism. Finally, the semiotic dimension of language is derived from the semiotic chora, with chora itself having a long history from Plato to Derrida and with chora fundamentally meaning “a space.” On this view, the semiotic chora is the open-ended and non-determined faculty of prophecy that is capable of turning wisdom about causal processes into discrete sentential propositional structures.
María Lugones is likewise concerned with
Lugones
translation of polyvalent behaviors
registers of domination and resistance
“world”-traveling as translation
curdle-separation as co-constitutive being
multiplicity and multiple selves as polyvalence of the body as text and reading
heterogenous worlds and polyvalent materialism
logics of purity separation and epistemic imperialism
Spinoza
affection and causation
one substance with infinite modes
no kingdom within a kingdom
prophecy and political knowledge
imagination, intellection, and revelation
sub specia aeternitatis
human freedom, emendation, and health
Lyotard
the differend
four components of communication
phrase regimes
affective behaviors
infancy/chora/material semiotics
Discourse, Figure
The Inhuman
Readings in Infancy
Dewey
artworks as a language and as a mode
media as translation
reciprocity of the production of art-statements [aesthetic objects]; exigent, autonomous worlds
specificity of color-in-context and of feeling-in-context, becoming language
language as a refinement and heightening of sense [intention as refinement of causation]
Dufrenne
world of the work
world of the aesthetic object
traveling to the world of the aesthetic object
historicity, creator, and once-lived worlds
[affect as labor inscriptions]
eidetic-noetic experience as sui generis proto-linguistic justification
Language and Philosophy
The Notion of the a Priori