BERNEVAL

Next entry will be devoted to translation as trafficking

This is the next entry.

In her Translator’s Preface, Catherine Porter indicates that Avital Ronell had a hand in revising the English-language draft. She “frequently made small changes in the language.” I thought these were limited to her part in the interviews collected in Fighting Theory. Turns out that she also tampered with the rendering of the interventions by Anne Dufourmantelle.

It took me a long time to understand why such prohibitions were established, for genetically modified plants, for example. Beyond the fact that they are tampered with (but everything is tampered with, and this has been true for a very long time — in antiquity plants were already being tampered with), why does this cause such anxiety all of a sudden? I finally understood that, if transgenic corn is planted in ordinary soil, the harvest is twice as resistant, and it’s certain that no disease will attack it, but the seeds don’t reproduce themselves, and the next crop has to be started from newly purchased seed. The plant exhausts the soil and doesn’t reproduce itself. Something may be gained, but at what price? When one begins to think about it philosophically, it seems completely terrifying.

“Tampered” is a strange, somewhat mutant, rendering for “trafiquer” which means to trade in. Commerce is the target. Its short-sightedness particularly.

Il m’a fallu longtemps avant de comprendre pourquoi, par exemple pour les plantes transgéniques, de telles interdictions étaient posées. Outre le fait qu’elles soient trafiquées (mais on trafique tout et depuis très longtemps, depuis l’Antiquité on trafique les plantes), pourquoi tout à coup cela soulève une telle angoisse? J’ai fini par comprendre que, si on plante du maïs transgénique dans une terre normale, la récolte est deux fois plus résistante, on est sûr qu’aucune maladie ne l’attaquera, mais les graines ne se reproduisent pas, et on est obligé de tout replanter. La plante épuise le sol et ne se reproduit pas. Si on y gagne quelque chose, c’est à quel prix? Quand on se met à y penser philosophiquement, cela semble tout à fait effrayant.

“Effrayant” also means “dreadful” which in its etymology is indeed close to “terrifying” but also connotes an aesthetic reaction as in “extremely bad, unpleasant, or ugly”.

And so for day 1452
04.12.2010

Avital Ronell intro to Verso edition of Valerie Solanas SCUM Manifesto.

Valerie Solanas, who took no prisoners, took pleasure in the injurious effects of language and, with Lacanian precision, understood that words are bodies that can be hurled at the other, they can land in the psyche or explode in the soma.

Later

Before one becomes overly confident about arresting her outrageous development in terms of psychotic aberration, it is important to note that psychosis speaks, that it often catches fire from a spark in the real, it is fuelled and fanned and remains unsettling because, as wounded utterance, it is not merely or solely demented.

Ronell points out the Solanas was taking aim at women too — as collaborators. This is a point she also expresses in an interview with Anne Dufourmantelle [in American philo]. It serves as a bridge to talking about Catharine MacKinnon.

Elle est très radicale, parfois un peu comme Valerie Solanas, mais plus universitaire et même raffinée — elle pourrait donner l’impression d’être puritaine, mais elle ne l’est pas. […] Elle a mené dernièrement une étude sur la peur du viol dans la guerre, où elle dit que, bien qu’on ne puisse pas nier que les femmes soient violées pendant la guerre, on ne dit jamais, en revanche, à quel point les hommes se violent entre eux.

In Fighting Theory where the interviews are translated by Catherine Porter, there is a bit more offered to contemplate. Porter notes in her translator’s preface: “As Avital Ronell read through my final English-language draft, she occasionally added material to clarify or extend an argument, once in a while deleted passages she had come to deem superfluous, and frequently made small adjustments in the language.” And this collaboration nets the following result:

She is gripping, sometimes in terms of insight even a bit like Valerie Solanas, but more academic and even refined — she could come across as a puritan, but that’s not what she is. […] Recently, she carried out a study on the fear of rape in war. In it she says that, even thought it is undeniable that women are raped during wars, in contrast no one ever mentions the extent to which men rape one another, performing rituals of mutual or hierarchized debasement that remain hidden from discourse of view.

In light of the revelations about Abu Ghraib, the keyword here is “extent”.

And so for day 1448
30.11.2010