Spurred thinking
Performance, reading, embodiment, translation. Time to turn back to Foucault, or forward to him, because Foucault is always ahead of me in his Archaeology and the way it forms and unforms Knowledge.
A discursive formation does not occupy all the possible volume that the systems that form its objects, enunciations, and concepts legitimately open to it. It is essentially full of gaps, due to the systems that form its strategic choices. From this comes the fact that a given discursive formation, when taken up again, placed, and interpreted in a new constellation, may reveal new possibilities… There is a modification in the principle of exclusion and possibility of choices that results from the insertion into a new discursive constellation.
This to me is a good way to view translation’s discursive formation: insertion, gaps, constellation. There is agency in it, though it is in the background. For it is a human individual/s who “takes up again” or who spur the “taking up again,” or who make choices, even if none of these acts are transparent or innocent.
Foucault’s words above are my translation. I wanted to free myself from the undulations of the published English translation (p.75 of Archeology of Knowledge, tr. Alan Sheridan. NY: Routledge, 2002) for to me, Foucault’s French is direct. And the “essentiellement” in the beautiful phrase “essentiellement lacunaire” needed a doubling, to me, to reflect not just the sense of fundamental, but of to a great degree. In the French, too, there is only one “principle of exclusion and possibility of choices.”
It was time spent with the French original that spurred my thinking. I was only able to make my translation after my thinking had been spurred. That’s the thing with the translation market: translations are made relatively quickly for publication, and absorbing thought can take a long time—absorbing and hearing a cadence and how thought’s thought evolves from this cadence, and not just from the words. Constellatory effects, through the body of the translator/reader.
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