Comparative Literature and the Politics of Detranslation

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