![]() ![]() The diffusion leaves a trace along the path those ideas have taken. A genealogy of ideas would trace, in detail, the paths of idea diffusion, if there are any such paths in a given case. And this is exactly what we need for the mind: instead of a history of ideas, as that discipline has been practiced, we need a genealogy of ideas that is as gray and patient and meticulous as the research that Foucault imagines (and which he in fact pursued) in reference to more familiar topics of history.Įqually obviously, I cannot do anything to even approach this in the space of a blog post, except to point out the need for such an approach, and to observe the relationship that a genealogy of ideas would have to the idea of idea diffusion as an historical process. These are obviously the principles and practices by which Foucault pursued his scholarly research. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp. It opposes itself to the search for “origins.” Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It’s “cyclopean monuments” are constructed from “discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method” they cannot be the product of “large and well-meaning errors.” In short, genealogy demands relentless erudition. Genealogy… requires patience and a knowledge of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times… ![]() Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. In his essay “Nietsche, Genealogy, History,” (collected in the volume Language, Counter-Memory, Practice) Foucault wrote: “Genealogy” in this sense comes from Nietzsche’s use of the term and his implementation of the idea, but it is Foucault who brought this kind of Nietzschean genealogy to maturity. What we need is perhaps, rather than the traditional history of ideas, is a genealogy of ideas. A suitably detailed treatment of idea diffusion and its place in the history of human experience would run to volumes. Ultimately, If Babel Had a Form illuminates the demanding force of even the slightest sameness entangled in the translator’s work of remaking our differences.Previously I discussed idea diffusion in Civilization and Idea Diffusion, but even as I posted that short contribution, I realized the inadequacy of it. The conclusion returns to the deconstructive genealogy of recent debates on translation and untranslatability, displacing the axiom of radical alterity for a no less radical equivalence that remains- pace Fenollosa-far from easy or exceptional. The book’s transpacific readings glean those forms of equivalence from the writing of Fenollosa, the vernacular experiments of Boxer Scholar Hu Shi, the trilingual musings of Shanghai-born Los Angeles novelist Eileen Chang, the minor work of the Bay Area Korean American transmedial artist Theresa Cha, and a post-Tiananmen elegy by the exiled dissident Yang Lian. Yet the writers studied in this book veered from those ways of knowing to theorize a poetic equivalence: negating the colonial foundations of the concept, they ignited aporias of meaning into flashpoints for a radical literary translation. As a concept, equivalence has been rejected for its colonizing epistemology of value, naming a broken promise of translation and false premise of comparison. The result, Tze-Yin Teo argues, saw translators cleaving to the sounds and shapes of poetry to imagine a translingual “likeness of form” but not of meaning or kind.Īt stake in this form without meaning is a startling new task of equivalence. Transpacific translation breached the regulative protocols that created those very differences of human value and cultural meaning. In twentieth-century intersections of China and Asia with the United States, translations did more than communicate meaning across politicized and racializing differences of language and nation. “The likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences,” writes the American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa around 1906, “renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy.” If Babel Had a Form asks not if his claim may be true, but what its phantasmic surprise may yet do. ![]()
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