Parts, Patches, Processes

Nathalie Stephens At Alberta.

We are invited to partake of the morcellement of language.

Translation, from the Latin, translates, for 'carried across'. What we carry must be lifted and borne. What we carry risks further disintegration in the course of its passage. (Further because, before even we arrive at the threshold of the text, on a verge of translation, the process of decay is already begun. It precedes us and exceeds us). None of it remains intact. Not the text from which we borrow, not that which we maim. Nor the body, our own, and the many others, that fall to pieces as we come into contact with them.

How out of this falling to pieces, this disintegration to dust, is one to come upon an ethics of translation (as is the goal of the essay)? Stephens introduces a self-organising element. The pieces trace a circuitry.

However ironically, these dislocations, these strange temperaments and temptations, actually enable encounter; they enable the expression of desire, which traverses the body into the text, through innumberable interchangeable intersecting circuits that entangle one with other, such that in touching through text to the other, we touch, not just ourselves — onanistically, sometimes self-destructively — but the untouched untouchable part that awaits, seductively, undecidably.

And I am left to ponder the links between infinite regression, apophenia and the emergence of consciousness. How very like a piece is a connection. Object relations.

And so for day 354
03.12.2007