Calendar Event
March 26, 2010, 9:00 am to 12:00 pm
Gerhard Richter : Heidegger and Translation
304 Tolley
A light breakfast will be served.
Richter will look at the theory, practice and politics of translation as they apply to 20th-century philosopher Martin Heidegger.
Each semester the SU Humanities Center Mini-Seminar features distinguished visiting scholars who present their work in an intensive, conversational, and seminar-style format. Enrollment is limited and materials are sent to participating faculty and students ahead of time in order to inform them for the discussion with the seminar leader. Fall 2009 Humanities Mini-Seminars featured W.J.T Mitchell (University of Chicago) and Richard Dyer (Kings College, U.K.). This spring’s Humanities Mini-Seminar program has brought to campus Professor Gabriele Schwab (University of California, Irvine). On March 26, 2010 Professor Gerhard Richter (Professor of German & Director, Graduate Program in Critical Theory University of California, Davis) will be our visiting scholar. If you would like to enroll in Professor Richter's Mini-Seminar on Friday morning, March 26, please contact Kathryn Tunkel in the Humanities Center at kmtunkel@syr.edu. Space is limited to 40 participating faculty and students.
Professor Richter’s work focuses on European critical thought since Immanuel Kant; modern German literature and culture; literature and philosophy; deconstruction; the Frankfurt School of neo-Marxist social theory; and literary, cultural and aesthetic theory. Richter’s seminar is titled “Tell Me What You Think of Translation, and I Will Tell You Who You Are: Heidegger, Translation and the Politics of Carrying Across.”
Abstract of the Mini-Seminar:
The theory, practice, and politics of translation occupy a central—but often unacknowledged— position in Heidegger’s rich conceptual orbit. Even though there is no single work in which he systematically collects all his thoughts on the problem of translation, he explicitly thematizes translation in many of his essays and lecture courses. To read a single sentence by Heidegger requires us to contemplate the question of translation, whether we are “translating” it in any conventional sense or not. To the extent that any act of understanding is always also an act of interpretation and, therefore, of translation, the act and concept of translating are inseparable from the movement of thinking itself. We will be guided by the wager that one way of understanding Heidegger's work as a whole is to read it as a perpetual engagement with acts of translation—philosophical, linguistic, and experiential. These encompass the translation of traditional Western metaphysics into the task of a thinking yet to come; the translation of Greek thought back into itself; the translational relations among thinking (denken), thanking (danken), poeticizing (dichten); the relations among building, dwelling, departing, arriving; the innumerable questions raised by the philosophical need to translate specific Greek terms against the grain; and, finally, the constant requirement of engaging the production of meaning in terms of a simultaneous lack and excess of signification, one that fundamentally imbricates understanding with translating, even in one's mother tongue. To interpret and to translate is to allow something to take form in and as language. This letting-be-as-language for Heidegger is the process of interpretation as Aus-legung, a Germanic word meaning literally a "laying-out" that he privileges over the Latin term, just as common in German, Interpretation. A laying-out is the process of perpetual interpretive unfolding, a perpetual laying bare of the ways in which language means and makes its claims on us. Comparing Heidegger's insights to those of other canonical theorists of translation, including Benjamin and Derrida, we will relate the implications of these views for broader issues of aesthetics, politics, and the work of historical interpretation.
