Comparative Literature and the Politics of Detranslation
Virtual Session
Description
In his return to and rereading of Freud’s early writings on the interpretation of dreams, French psychoanalyst and translator of Freud, Jean Laplanche, makes the provocative claim that psychoanalytic theory went awry shortly after its inception, as a freer and more inventive approach to the unconscious was codified into a body of knowledge through the development of interpretive codes and schematizations, Oedipus being only one among them (“Psychoanalysis as Anti-hermeneutics”). By contrast, he writes, Freud’s initial discovery of the analytic method was anti-hermeneutic rather than hermeneutic, “detranslating” rather than translating, unlocking, or decoding its material according to an already existing interpretive scheme. In Laplanche’s writing, detranslation as analytic method reopens the “enigmatic message,” his way of describing one’s earliest encounters with the mystery of the social world.
The language of the enigma has been compelling for literary and cultural criticism that seeks to contest the sedimentation of social norms. Consider, for instance, Judith Butler’s reading of Laplanche on gender and sexuality: “To be called a gender is to be given an enigmatic and overwhelming signifier; it is also to be incited in ways that remain in part unconscious. To be assigned a gender is to be subject to a certain demand, a certain impingement and seduction, and not to know fully what the terms of that demand might be” (“Seduction, Gender, and the Drive,” 123). What other forms of “incitement,” demands to perform particular identities and desires, or unwanted/unwitting inheritances might we “read” by way of detranslation?
Amidst what some have called a return to psychoanalytic thinking in the humanities at present, what lessons might Laplanche’s account of detranslation as method offer scholars of comparative literature who aim to avoid reinstituting psychoanalytic language as a code of interpretation to be applied or instrumentalized? And by the same token, what methods, tools, and critical priorities in comparative literary studies might be best suited to sustaining the cultural labour of detranslation today?
This seminar invites papers that take up detranslation as a practice of reading, a theoretical intervention, and an ethical orientation to making meaning. Possible lines of inquiry, suggested in an anti-hermeneutic spirit, might include:
Sexuality, gender, and kinship vis-à-vis Laplanche’s revision of the Freudian scene of seduction
Indigenous and anti-colonial literary practices and the enigma of colonial inscription
Detranslation as method and the status of immanent critique in the neoliberal university
Productive failures in literary translation, revision, and adaptation
The politics of address in global and/or transnational literary studies
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Rusaba Alam is a PhD candidate and contingent faculty at the University of British Columbia. She writes about kinship, subjectivity, and the politics of knowledge in contemporary ecological thinking.
Speaker Bio
Speaker Bio
Torin McLachlan is a full-time regular instructor at Capilano University in North Vancouver, on the stolen lands of the Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam peoples. His research and teaching focuses on “exhaustion” modernist and contemporary fiction and critical/comparative literary studies.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Madeleine Reddon is an assistant professor of Indigenous literature in the Department of English at Loyola University of Chicago and a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta. She recently co-edited the creative writing anthology, Carving Space: The Indigenous Voices Awards, with Jordan Abel and Carleigh Baker.
Speaker Bio
Annalisa Ciano is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of California Santa Barbara. She specialized in Philology (University of Rome La Sapienza), Italian Studies (Paris-Sorbonne Université), and Comparative and Postcolonial Literatures and Translation Studies (University of Bologna). Her research explores the political implications of translation and rewriting in 20th-century theatre, with a focus on mythocriticism, postcolonial discourse, and transnational implications.
Speaker Bio
Jenny Paul (she/her) is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She works in critical theory, psychoanalysis, and anarchist/communist thought. Her primary literatures are medieval Christian mysticism, contemporary horror film and literature, and pornographic literature.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sheila Giffen is an instructor at Capilano University in Vancouver, Canada. Her research traces the turn to spiritual figures across a transnational archive of anti-colonial texts written in response to pandemic crisis and modern biopolitical subjection. Her writing appears in the Journal of Medical Humanities and the Journal of Intercultural Studies.
Speaker Bio
Bobby is a master's student in the English Department at Simon Fraser University interested in cultural studies and psychoanalytic thinking.
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Claudia Grigg Edo is a PhD candidate in English & Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she is affiliated with the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, and the Psychoanalytic Studies Program. She previously taught in the Critical Studies department at CalArts. Her work is supported by the Incite Institute's Doctoral Grant. She won Columbia University's 2024 Étienne Balibar Prize in Cultural and Political Thought.