Wednesday, July 06, 2005
(8:46 AM) | Anonymous:
Wednesday Translation Attempt: Alliez Edition
Some of our long time readers will remember when Adam was first making his way through the academic gulag of learning to translate. As jobs become more and more scarce in the humanities and people have to increasingly prove themselves over their contemporaries through somewhat ignorable work, translations offer a way to retain one's humanity and still impress admission and hiring committees. So, after two years of college level French it is time for me to pack my big-ass Collins-Robert French Dictionary and head out to the Siberia that is translation.I've chosen a book I and a few others have expressed interest in, being Éric Alliez's De l’impossibilité de la phénoménologie: Sur la philosophie française contemporaine (in Enligsh: Of the Impossibility of Phenomenology: On Contemporary French Philosophy). I had hoped, somewhat naively, to do this for publication but as I'm trying to find work and save up to move to Nottingham this appears less and less likely as I won't be able to do 8 hours of French and 8 hours of reading a day. Still, who knows, at a page a day in 116 days I'll have a first draft and it may not suck. We'll see though how the suck factor affects the progress.
Original text:
Problématique, ce motif est celui de la critique des universaux selon les trois figures successivement empruntées par la « philosophie doctrinale » (et ô combien inégalement combattues par l’une et l’autre tradition, phénoménologieque et analytique) : universaux de contemplation, universaux de réflecion, universaux de communication.
Mais n’est-ce pas aussi qu’en ces formes pures d’expression qui émargent à l’historie – ou à la géo-historie – de l’idéalisme (idéalisme objectif grec, idéalisme subjectif allemand, idéalimse intersubjectif européen) l’universal n’explique rien, et que c’est lui plutôt qui doit etre expliqué ou « déconstruit » (ce serait la véritable fonction de la déconstruction) ? Dire cela, repartir de ceci, ce n’est pas seulement rapporter l’économie d’un discours, qui aura souvent cherché l’ouverture dans le commentaire, à l’horizon critique dont il est issu : c’est définir la tâche d’une historie philosohique de la philosophie par le fait de substituter chaque fois une évaluation immanente (à l’historicité de la raison comme à la création toujours singulière des concepts) aux prétentions d’un jugement transcendant
My translation:
Problematic, this purpose is that of the criticism of universals according to the three figures successively feigned by the “doctrinal philosophy” (and oh! how unevenly it has been fought by the one and the other tradition, phenomenological and analytic): universal of contemplation, universal of reflection, universal of communication.
But is it not also that in these pure forms of expression which draw out in the history – or in the geo-history – of Idealism (Greek objective Idealism, German subjective Idealism, European intersubjective Idealism) that the universal explains nothing, and that it is rather itself that must be explained or “deconstructed” (it would be the truest function of deconstruction)? To say that, setting this out again, this is not only to bring back the economy of a discourse, which will have often sought the opening in the commentary, to the critical horizon which it is born from: it’s to define the task of a philosophical history of philosophy by making it substitute each time an immanent evaluation (with the historicity of reason as always with the creation of singular concepts) to the pretension of a transcendent judgment.
