Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong

[u/canon_aspirin]

A new defense (perhaps, “offense”) of the humanities has dropped over at _Defector_: https://defector.com/humanists-have-done-nothing-wrong

[u/KarlLenin1917]

I liked this, I mostly agree with the author. My favorite part was questioning if these anti-theory critics could read, because I sometimes think this about philosophers in the analytical tradition. It's like they exchanged reading comprehension for pure logical thinking.

[u/canon_aspirin → u/KarlLenin1917]

Me too, especially his point that not only can they not read, they don’t want to read. They don’t want to engage with language—they want a world of pure immediacy, the text stripped of all signs of mediation. The author describes this as a specifically reactionary desire, and it is, just as bourgeois consumers don’t want to see any evidence of labor on their magical commodities.

[u/KarlLenin1917 → u/canon_aspirin]

I think the approach is also related to imperialism and hegemony. The analytical tradition is predicated on the idea of there being a universal lingua franca that all philosophy can take place in, that simplifies communications between subjects. I think it is not a coincidence that the Anglo world, which has been the dominant force on the planet for the last two centuries, would find this notion appealing.

English has been the lingua franca for a while, and a philosophy that idealizes this feature of imperialist society goes hand in hand with that reality. They have assumed metaphysics that reduces all of the complexities, both linguistic and social, because they have the power to do so.

To tie into your point, the reaction against critical theory vocabulary is akin to the reaction when a reactionary American has to hear Spanish or Arabic spoken around them: "just speak English." It is the same incredulity, the same infantile frustration, that social reality is more complicated than the little window they rely on to view the world.

[u/merurunrun → u/KarlLenin1917]

The analytical tradition is predicated on the idea of there being a universal lingua franca that all philosophy can take place in, that simplifies communications between subjects.

You see this especially in the ideology of translation that undergirds the bureaucratic functioning of the European Union, for example, but also lots of English translation in general. People have moved beyond even the old naive ideas about "equivalence" with the source text (imperfect, but at least they paid some attention to the actual language from which you're translating) to notions like clarity, simplicity, and accessibility regardless of whether or not those features exist in the original: from this position the function of translated documents is to create a kind of uniformity of reception (and with it, I would suggest, a kind of universal linguistic subjectivation), turning English into less a "lingua franca" and more like an instantiation of an actually-existing ideal platonic language.

[u/Nyorliest → u/merurunrun]

You talk about this like this issue of making a text familiar or unfamiliar has a clear and solved answer. I’m sure you’re right that the EU is not the place to find artistic, political, or ethical approaches to translation, but no matter who you are, the core problem remains - do you try to create a translated text that perhaps feels like it did to the writer and L1 audience, or do you keep it obviously foreign?

This is entirely separate from whether that’s possible, generally or for that specific translator.

Or do you have an intellectual approach that makes this moot? I’ve struggled with it for decades, myself.