Wednesday, May 04, 2005
(9:34 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
My Serious Intellectual Work
As many of you know, I have a serious interest in philosophy. In fact, part of my decision-making process in choosing a graduate program was that I wanted a place that would foster an aggressively interdisciplinary approach to the study of religion. Among the options I was presented with, Chicago Theological Seminary seemed to be the best; it is also where I am about to finish up my Master of Arts degree in religious studies, for which my thesis was a translation of the abstruse theorist Jacques Derrida, specifically of a section that he added to the text that had previously been translated as The Gift of Death. I will gladly share with all of you some of my experiences thus far with attempting to get it published, so that you will learn things about how you can do serious intellectual work, like I do.First, I actually did the translation. This took a lot of my time and surely contributed to my current symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. I went through several drafts and received a lot of help -- a few Internet correspondants helped me with individual problems in translation and in tracking down references, and a well-known Derrida translator went over an entire draft and gave me many corrections and suggestions. He and another well-known Derrida translator both suggested that I talk to Fordham University Press in order to get it published as a stand-alone volume with critical commentary; I did so, was told that they would love to publish it, and got in contact with the French publishers to see about the rights. [Take note! Your first valuable lesson is coming up!] They said that they didn't think a separate volume was a good idea and that they would only release the rights if it was published in an expanded edition of The Gift of Death. So within the space of ten minutes, I had gone from being on top of the world because a prestigious press was going to publish my translation to having to go back to said prestigious press with my tail behind my legs because I hadn't done my homework.
I thought, okay, I'll contact the University of Chicago Press. I had the name of someone to contact, so I contacted him. A month later, I contacted him again. Coming up on another month later, I talked to yet another Derrida translator who informed me that the person I was attempting to contact was out of the country, terrible about keeping up with e-mail, and not the philosophy editor for U of C Press anyway. She told me the correct name, and after some legwork, I came up with a "snail mail" address. I mailed off a nice little package to him on Monday. The lesson: This is what I should have done from the beginning! Or rather, I should have first contacted the Frenchies, been informed of the terms whereby they would release the publication rights, and went through the normal channels in order to fulfill those terms to the best of my ability. Instead, because I am a good blogger and a child of the Internet, I was impatient, and I wanted to use e-mail to do everything.
I decided soon afterward that I'd like to do another translation. Asking around for suggestions, I hit upon Stanislas Breton's book on St. Paul. Badiou liked it, and it was supposedly the impetus behind the whole "Paul and philosophy" trend. I read it, and it seems worthy of translation to me, at least as a way to keep the conversation going. So this time (watch closely): I contacted the French publishers before beginning my translation. See, this time around, I don't have the guaranteed benefit of getting thesis credit and therefore an MA out of the deal, and translation is a lot of work to be doing for my own edification.
Even better: I contacted a couple American publishers first, because I need an American publisher who is willing to take this on and to pay for the rights if money is involved. I e-mailed the same woman I previously e-mailed at Fordham, told her who I was, and asked if she'd be into the Breton. She hasn't written me back. That is okay, as far as I'm concerned. That time was different, because Derrida is Derrida. This time, I need to make more of a case, so I'll eventually probably need to mail something off to them in the physical world as well. I am also looking into the possibility of translating a chapter and publishing it in a journal, at the suggestion of the third above-mentioned Derrida translator. This, apparently, is how one does things. One chapter of Agamben's Paul book has been available for like a year and a half now, for example, though the book itself is not due to come out until June.
So there you have it: serious intellectual work! Very serious. I also have three papers out for review at three separate journals, and I have one paper that I've asked an expert in the figure in question to review before I send it to a real journal, and I have one other paper lingering that I'd like to rework and send in. I have agreed to do a review of Nancy's new book on Christianity; it's my first review ever, and I'm having trouble figuring out how to get a review copy (which was the whole point of doing the review in the first place -- shipping books from France is expensive, especially since the publisher tends to be expensive generally). Beyond that, I'm co-editing a blog book, and I'm looking into ways to put together a student-run online journal at CTS.
In themselves, none of these tasks takes much time or work right at the moment, at least in terms of the bureaucratic minutae -- once the inital paper or translation is done, it's just a matter of waiting, then doing some little thing that takes anywhere from five minutes to an hour, then waiting some more. I suppose copy-editing might take longer, but I haven't gotten to that point. The problem, though, is that this creates a weird kind of background radiation in one's life, this tension of "What's going on? Do they not care? Do they not think I'm serious? Is my paper sitting in some warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant?" This is especially difficult for children of the Internet, such as me.
I hope this has been informative for everyone. And I hope I can be forgiven for being a little stressed out about this kind of stuff and not wanting to blog about every detail of every step, because if I did, I would look like a complete tool. But as it stands, no, I'm not doing a lot of creative intellectual work here on the blog. Sorry. But thanks for reading -- really, thanks.
