Table Of ContentExorcising Translation
Literatures, Cultures, Translation
Literatures, Cultures, Translation presents a new line of books
that engage central issues in translation studies such as history,
politics, and gender in and of literary translation, as well as
opening new avenues for study. Volumes in the series follow
two main strands of inquiry: one strand brings a wider context
to translation through an interdisciplinary interrogation, while
the other homes in on the history and politics of the translation
of seminal works in literary and intellectual history.
Series Editors
Brian James Baer, Kent State University, USA
Michelle Woods, The State University of New York, New Paltz, USA
Editorial Board
Rosemary Arrojo, The State University of New York,
Binghamton, USA
Paul Bandia, Concordia University, Canada,
and Harvard University, USA
Susan Bassnett, Professor of Comparative Literature,
Warwick University, UK
Leo Tak-hung Chan, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China
Michael Cronin, Dublin City University, Republic of Ireland
Edwin Gentzler, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Carol Maier, Kent State University, USA
Denise Merkle, Moncton University, Canada
Michaela Wolf, University of Graz, Austria
Exorcising Translation
Towards an Intercivilizational Turn
Douglas Robinson
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2017
© Douglas Robinson, 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Robinson, Douglas, 1954- author.
Title: Exorcising translation : towards an intercivilizational turn / Douglas
Robinson.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Series: Literatures,
cultures, translation | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016022353 (print) | LCCN 2016038021 (ebook) | ISBN
9781501326059 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501326066 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501326073
(ePDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting--Cross-cultural studies. |
Literature--Translations--History and criticism. | Literature and
transnationalism. | East and West. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / General.
| LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory.
Classification: LCC P306.2 .R59 2016 (print) | LCC P306.2 (ebook) | DDC
418/.04--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022353
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-2605-9
PB: 978-1-5013-2604-2
ePub: 978-1-5013-2606-6
ePDF: 978-1-5013-2607-3
Series: Literatures, Cultures, Translation
Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray
Cover image © iStock
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Preface vii
0.1 Panicked Eurocentrism xiii
0.2 The Structure of the Book xxiii
0.3 Acknowledgments xxv
1 Sakai Naoki on Translation 1
1.1 Sakai’s Model 3
1.2 Implications for Civilizational Spells 25
2 The Casting of Civilizational Spells: Nietzsche as Precursor,
Bloom as Ephebe 37
2.1 Nietzsche 1: Slave Morality as a Civilizational Spell 38
2.2 Nietzsche 2: The Mnemotechnics of Pain 42
2.3 Bloom 1: The Western Canon as a Tug-of-War Between
Civilizational Spells 56
2.4 Bloom 2: The Canon as Memory as Pain 68
2.5 Nietzsche 3: Guilt and Debt 76
2.6 Nietzsche 4: The Desomatization of Somatic Codes 82
2.7 Bloom 3: The Western Canon, Universalized 92
2.8 Cofiguration? 103
3 East and West: Toward an Intercivilizational Turn 107
3.1 An East-to-West Countertradition as a Cofigurative
Regime of Translation 107
3.2 The Occidentalist Attack on “Immature, Self-Centered
Western Minds” 110
3.2.1 Kirkland on Distortions of Daoism 111
3.2.2 Problems in Kirkland’s Attack 114
3.3 Three Historical Stages of Laozi Translation 119
3.3.1 Christianity 120
3.3.2 Esotericism 125
3.3.3 Romanticism 129
vi Contents
3.4 First Conclusion: Civilizational Spells, Again 135
3.5 Second Conclusion: Eurocentrism, Decentered 140
3.6 Third Conclusion: An Intercivilizational Turn? 142
Notes 147
References 155
Index 169
Preface
The transition from this book’s main title, Exorcising Translation, to its
subtitle, Towards an Intercivilizational Turn, is apparently disjunctive—
what does exorcism have to do with civilizations?—but that is because
the subtitle is an abridgement of a longer and more explicit (but also more
cumbersome) phrasing, which made the transition clear: “Exorcising
Translation: From Civilizational Spells to an Intercivilizational Turn.”
The move towards an Intercivilizational Turn would, obviously, be the
intervention that would ideally “exorcise” the “civilizational spells”
from the global body of translation.
The inspiration for that elided transitional trope—the idea of civil-
izational spells—comes from a 2010 piece about the apparent oddity
of the collocation “Asian theorist,” where the Japanese theorist Sakai
Naoki (2010: 441) tropes our sense of that oddity supernaturally:
If not completely oxymoronic, the pairing of theory and Asia may
strike many readers as a sort of quirk or defamiliarizing trick. At best,
it can have the effect of exposing the presumption often taken for
granted in fields dealing with certain aspects of what we understand
as Asia: namely, that theory is something we do not normally expect
of Asia. Precisely because this sense of oddity invoked when theory is
associated with Asia is no more than a certain presumptive or condi-
tional reflex, neither theory nor Asia receives rigorous scrutiny, and
both are by and large left rather vague in conceptual articulations.
Rarely have we asked ourselves why we do not feel unsettled about
this feeling of incongruity, where this discomfort comes from, or how
we might possibly explicate the reasons why we take this underlying
presumption for granted. As long as this reflex remains presumptive
and refuses to be further objectified conceptually, I suspect that it
will become something which one might well call a “civilizational
spell”, and it will continue to cast a curse on us. In other words, we
will remain haunted by this presumption about theory and Asia.
(Emphasis added)
viii Preface
A spell? A curse? A haunt? The “it” that casts the spell, that curses
and haunts us, is what he calls a “reflex”: there is, in other words, a
mysterious force of some sort that makes us feel this way. We don’t
know what that force is; we don’t know where it comes from, or how it
acts on us. We can’t explain it. So we “explain” it figuratively—which is
to say, we throw metaphors at it, knowing that those metaphors don’t
really explain it, don’t really say much about it at all, but not knowing
any better way of getting a handle on the situation.
Such mysterious forces are something of a recurring interest of
mine. My somatic theory and, more recently, my icotic theory are my
attempts to trace those forces back to psychosocial processes that are
“mysterious” only because they are mostly unconscious. They work
below the level of our awareness—or, to use another metaphor, they fly
under our radar. I’ve written one whole book about the supernatural
trope of “spirit-channeled” translation—Who Translates? Translator
Subjectivities Beyond Reason (2001)—but religious and magical tropes
for such forces recur repeatedly throughout my work, from Augustine’s
eschatological perfectionism in The Translator’s Turn (1991), to the
fear of divine retribution for improperly translating sacred texts and
Schleiermacher’s invocation of witches “going doubled” in Translation
and Taboo (1996), to the mysterious “sway” wielded by norms (which
those operating under a competing set of norms may thematize as bias)
in Translation and the Problem of Sway (2011), to Laozi’s 道 dao in The
Dao of Translation (2015a), to Mengzi’s 天 tian (“heaven”) in The Deep
Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle (2016a).
What strikes me as especially interesting in Sakai’s trope, however,
is this notion that the spell is civilizational—that we are condi-
tioned to fear and respect and obey certain forces not just vaguely
by “religion” or “superstition,” and not just by secularized versions
of those forces like “ideology” or “norms,” either, but by whole
civilizations. Implicit in Sakai’s trope, obviously, is something like
“Orientalism” or “Eurocentrism,” the quite reasonable notion that
“Europe” or “the West” as a massive and perhaps even in some sense
monolithic civilization is under a spell, is cursed or haunted by some
Preface ix
kind of mysterious cultural/ideological “witch” or force that associates
theory with thought and modernity, and excludes Asia from that
association. Westerners theorize; Asians are (occasionally) the target
of Western theory. An “Asian theorist” like Sakai himself, therefore,
is a kind of category error—or else, since he lives in the United States
and holds an endowed chair at Cornell, he can be grandfathered in as
a kind of honorary Westerner.
That kind of civilizational “grandfathering” is insulting, of course.
There is no “intrinsic” or “empirical” reason (whatever that might mean)
why a Japanese scholar like Sakai should not be celebrated as an Asian
theorist. But think of it in reverse. I have lived in Hong Kong for several
years now. Upon my arrival in greater China I became interested in
ancient Chinese thought, began reading Mengzi intensively, comparing
the various translations against the Chinese original—which I couldn’t
exactly read, but had just enough Chinese to study—and then began
doing the same with Laozi. What I found in those ancient thinkers
was a deep intellectual kinship. Mengzi in particular turned out to be
a brilliant somatic theorist. He was theorizing what I had been calling
somatics more than two millennia before I was born. I felt immediately
at home in his writing. Laozi was more alien, harder to “feel” as my
intellectual kin; but the more I studied him, the more at home I felt
in his writing as well. Why? What did that mean? Was this just more
Orientalism, just more of the Western colonizer’s appropriation of
“Eastern wisdom”?
The line I want to pursue in this book runs through a challenge
to the kind of either-or thinking that binarizes East and West, draws
a big fat line between them, and derogates all apparent crossovers
between them to “ethnocentric” “appropriation.” West is West; East
is East. What the West has is the West’s and the West’s alone; the East
should keep its civilizational hands off it. What the East has is the
East’s alone; the West should not try to appropriate it either. There is
no intellectual or cultural traffic between the two “macrospatial” or
“super-national” regions, no history of cultural cross-pollination. Sakai
reading Jean-Luc Nancy (1986/2004, Conner 1991) and developing
