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Radical Translation and Interpretation

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Radical Translation and Interpretation

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Donna Zugar
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Laura PAVEL

Faculty of Theatre and Television, Babeş-Bolyai University

Cluj, Romania

Email: [email protected]

RECLAIMING RADICAL TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION:


THE TRANSLATOR’S CHARITY

Abstract: The present essay addresses the ideas of radical translation and
radical interpretation advanced by celebrated analytic philosophers such as W. V. O.
Quine and D. Davidson, attempting to show their relevance for translation theory
and, more broadly, for the corpus of literary theory. I aim to reassess the debate over
the translatability or untranslatability of a literary or cultural text, taking it beyond
the politics of translation and multicultural studies and placing it within the
framework of hermeneutic theory. Here, one should take into account the specifier
“radical” associated with “interpretation,” which challenges the too rigid
interpretable/uninterpretable dichotomy. The comparative reenactment of notions
such as “untranslatability,” “radical translation” and “radical interpretation” may lead
to a mutual critique of their interpretative power and limits. I also reconsider the
concept of “charity” in connection to the translator as an interpreter, in the context
of Davidson‟s arguments on “radical interpretation.” The rather dry rationale
underlying a theory of truth and interpretation, as upheld by analytic philosophers,
can gain in conceptual liveliness and even in literary relevance if one privileges an
ethical/anthropological approach to the translator‟s “charity” towards his/her reader,
as well as towards the delegated authority of the author.
Keywords: radical translation, radical interpretation, truth-for-the-alien,
charity, apparatus, W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson

The Role of Conceptual Personae: James Joyce and the Radical Interpreter

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In a highly acclaimed essay, “James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” philosopher


Donald Davidson proves more inclined to write in an almost aestheticized, quasi-
fictional manner than in the rather ascetic analytic tradition of logic-based theories of
language and meaning-making. He adopts a fascinating rhetorical style that involves
the use of person deixis (we, us), as if he were less interested to prove the
truthfulness of his statements than eager to stir our empathy and our emotional and
rational participation. Referring to Joyce‟s Finnegans Wake, Davidson contends that
the text reveals to us, its bewildered readers, the very origins of communication, as if
our identity were hereby built anew, from scratch: “He [Joyce] puts us in the
situation of the jungle linguist trying to get the hang of a new language and a novel
culture, to assume the perspective of someone who is an alien or exile” (Davidson
1991, 11). The posture that Davidson confers to Joyce and, finally, the condition it
claims for us, both his and Joyce‟s listeners/readers, is an unexpectedly distanced
position, that of being mere outcasts:

“As we, his listeners or readers, become familiar with the devices he has
made us master, we find ourselves removed a certain distance from our
own language, our usual selves, and our society. We join Joyce as outcasts,
temporarily freed, or so it seems, from the nets of our language and our
culture” (Davidson 1991, 11).

We are supposed, then, to “join” the novelist in this linguistic and anthropological
type of adventure, as radical translators (to use Quine‟s notion, which inspired
Davidson) and radical interpreters, by plunging into a totally other language and by
facing our somewhat alien selves in the process. We are, thus, made to assume
Joyce‟s linguistic chaosmos,1 as Eco famously described it, as exiles or outcasts.
Moreover, we are challenged to interpret Finnegans Wake‟s linguistic and fictional
alterity, whereby we can actually translate ourselves into an entirely new language
and into a radically different worldview. This whole argumentative narrative about

1 See, in this respect, Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce,
translated from the Italian by Ellen Esrock, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. For Eco,
the possible worlds of Joyce‟s novels comprise their own poetics, and Finnegans Wake actually
performs and accomplishes a “continuous poetics of itself.” (p. 62).

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RECLAIMING RADICAL TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION: THE TRANSLATOR’S CHARITY

how we are “temporarily freed” needs further analysis, which I will resume a little
later.

If one were to reassess the consequences of Donald Davidson‟s analytic


philosophy of language for both literary theory and translation studies, one might
assume the ironical stance of dwelling on the innumerable footnotes in other
interpreters‟ glosses over the topic rather than commit to a fully argumentative text of
their own. However, a few decades ago, the theses of American analytic philosophers,
with their propensity for logic and scientific grounds, had only fragile echoes in the
field of literary studies. Thus, up until the late 1980s, Austin and Wittgenstein had
been quoted within the field of literary theory, but mainly with their less “technical”
philosophical approaches. In his turn, Richard Rorty was usually praised for his
contention that philosophy is to be seen more “as a kind of writing” (to quote the title
of his essay on Derrida from 1978) than as a consistently logical search for truth.
The core of contemporary literary studies is still, to a certain extent, obviously
influenced by Continental thinking and especially by Derridean deconstruction. In
this context, the relevance of such accurately analytic philosophers as Davidson and
Quine for literary discourse is difficult to reassess, since their applicability within the
field might seems rather limited. Richard Rorty, whose own philosophical discourse
deploys a narrative and rhetorical mode of writing, as well as an ironist‟s vocabulary,
has revealed how Davidson‟s ideas on language and meaning accommodated some of
the challenges posed by literary interpretation. An entire volume has been dedicated
to the wave of Literary Theory after Davidson (edited by Reed Way Dasenbrock
1993), in which literary theorists explore the dense web of Donald Davidson‟s
philosophical propositions so as to forge hermeneutical keys for their own critical
approaches and aesthetic standpoints. On the other hand, according to Kalle
Puolakka, another subtle commentator of Davidson‟s philosophy, over the past few
years

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METACRITIC JOURNAL FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES AND THEORY 2.2 (2016)

“there has been a growing interest in investigating the ways in which


some fundamental elements of Davidson‟s philosophical views overlap
with those that are at the heart of hermeneutics, particularly Gadamer‟s
philosophical hermeneutics.” (Puolakka 2011, 8).

However, Gadamerian hermeneutics is only one of the Continental theories and


philosophical methodologies that can be associated with Davidson‟s theses, as the
divide between analytic and Continental traditions of thought has indeed started to
be bridged.
Several concepts advanced by Davidson, such as his celebrated formula
“radical interpretation,” echoing W. V. Quine‟s equally powerful notion of “radical
translation,”2 the complementary syntagm “jungle linguist,” and his “principle of
charity,” could rightly be seen as theoretical landmarks in the process of translating
or interpreting the words and the nonverbal performance of the cultural and
linguistic Other. Translation qua interpretation seems to imply not only a linguistic,
but also a cultural and an anthropological transgression. Davidson‟s assertions on
meaning and interpretation can actually be “translated” into a type of vocabulary
familiar to the Continental body of philosophy and cultural theory, in such a way as to
maintain their accurately analytic inflexions and argumentative power. Thus, Deleuze
and Guattari‟s conceptual personae could be considered a sufficiently generous
notion to accommodate both the process of radical interpretation and its agents, the
radical translators or interpreters, since

“for their part, conceptual personae are philosophical sensibilia, the


perceptions and affections of fragmentary concepts themselves: through them
concepts are not only thought but perceived and felt” (Deleuze & Guattari
1994, 131).

2 The following excerpt is relevant for Quine‟s theory of “radical translation,” based on the notion of
the indeterminacy of translation (and also the inscrutability of reference): “We saw in our
consideration of radical translation that an alien language may well fail to share, by any universal
standard, the object-positing pattern of our own; and now our supposititious opponent is simply
standing, however legalistically, on his alien rights. We remain free as always to project analytical
hypotheses and translate his sentences into canonical notation as seems most reasonable; but he is no
more bound by our conclusions than the native by the field linguist‟s.” See Willard Van Orman Quine,
Word & Object (1960), new edition, foreword by Patricia Smith Churchland, preface to the new edition
by Dagfinn Fǿllesdal, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2013, p. 224.

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RECLAIMING RADICAL TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION: THE TRANSLATOR’S CHARITY

If we are to give in to the temptation to deterritorialize and to reterritorialize some


of the concepts of analytic philosophy, so as to have them mirrored by a few notions
of Continental theory, then several terms deserve being invoked, as far as Davidson‟s
theory of interpretation is concerned. Besides Deleuze and Guattari‟s conceptual
personae, I also resort to their term deterritorialization, from L’anti-Oedipe/Anti-
Oedipus (1972), which can be called upon as a rather loose method of comparing,
displacing, negotiating meanings and of reappropriating diverse entities, topoi and
conceptual nuances within the heterogeneous fabric of today‟s cultural analysis.
Another term that could reflect and explain some of Davidson‟s sentences on the
literary discourse of Joyce is a commonplace obsession of anthropology, otherness
and alterity, and, last but not least, the interdisciplinary, all-pervasive notion of
performativity ‒ understood here as the action of performing linguistic and
anthropological interpretation/translation. But the possible equivalent “translations”
of Davidson‟s theory on “truth” in interpretation are not limited to these notions,
since others also symptomatically come to mind in this context: let us reconsider the
term “dispositif,” or “apparatus,” as used by Foucault and revalued by Giorgio
Agamben. According to Agamben‟s interpretation of “un dispositivo,” language itself
is “perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses.” (Agamben 2009, 14).
The apparatus of language, for instance, like any type of “dispositif", produces
its own “processes of subjectivation,” if we follow Agamben‟s argument. Thus, in
trying to read and “translate” Davidson‟s own statement about radical interpretation
through the subjectivation of the interpreter, the specifier “radical” is all the more
powerful, since it alludes to an almost irreducible gap in communication and
translation, as well as to a sort of de-subjectivation. At this point, in order to name
the rupture between self-identity and the position of interpreting radical otherness
(as it is to be found in Joyce‟s Finnegans Wake), Davidson introduces, in his
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, “the alien,” as yet another key character, or
as a conceptual persona of sorts:

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METACRITIC JOURNAL FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES AND THEORY 2.2 (2016)

“What he must do is find out, however he can, what sentences the alien
holds true in his own tongue (or better, to what degree he holds them
true). The linguist then will attempt to construct a characterization of
truth-for-the-alien which yields, so far as possible, a mapping of
sentences held true (or false) by the alien on to sentences held true (or
false) by the linguist. Supposing no perfect fit is found, the residue of
sentences held true translated by sentences held false (and vice versa) is
the margin for error (foreign or domestic).” (Davidson 2001, 26)

There are at least two threads of his rich argument about the “truth-for-the-alien”3
that deserve a deeper exploration. One is the apparent presence of the interpreter and
of the speaker in the same time and place, the presentness and immediacy of their
flux of shared experience. Once we accept, beginning with the turning point of
“James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” that Joyce “takes us back to the foundations and
origins of communication,” this privileged and somehow strange situation we are
driven into becomes a particular experience in between, say, Joyce and us, evincing a
back-and-forth dynamics or a feedback loop of mutual exile and self-distancing.
Hence, this is first and foremost an experience lived by us, one that belongs to us, the
readers and interpreters of his literary and linguistic alterity and of our own remote
position towards our old, “usual selves.” A whole narrative about this adventure gains
shape, based on the anthropological experience of becoming another self, almost an
alien one, which might be called a self-for-the-other. It is an act of interpreting the
other and oneself altogether, a process that is pervaded by a certain degree of verbal
and nonverbal performativity. On the other hand, the already mentioned conceptual
construction that Davidson calls “truth-for-the-alien” is to be reached, as he
contends, due to a “principle of charity.” This notion implies such a dense knot of

3The alien character of the linguist was also highlighted by Quine. It is to be understood in connection
with his theory on the indeterminacy of translation and with his notion of ontological relativity. As
Roger F. Gibson points out, Quine‟s thesis “is not that successful translation is impossible, but that it is
multiply possible. The philosophical moral of indeterminacy of translation is that propositions,
thought of as objectively valid translation relations between sentences, are simply non-existent.” See
Roger F. Gibson. “Chapter 29: Quine,” in Robert L. Arrington, ed. The World’s Great Philosophers,
Malden & Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p. 258.

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RECLAIMING RADICAL TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION: THE TRANSLATOR’S CHARITY

conceptual nuances that it cannot be easily grasped by analytic and semantic


approaches alone.

Introducing Charity. Translation beyond Meaning and Belief

The idea that radical translation and radical interpretation require the
acceptance of a “principle of charity” is actually what makes Davidson‟s arguments go
beyond a truth-semantics, as well as beyond a philosophy of language. Once the
interpreter is seemingly endowed with “charity,” radical interpretation comes to be
associated with different other theoretical stances: a hermeneutic theory, an ethical
theory, and an anthropological approach on the intelligibility of the other, on his/her
more than linguistic, I would say, otherness. Such an otherness encompasses the web
of alien, estranged beliefs and meanings, be they individual or communal. All of these
are nevertheless embedded into an aesthetic, perceptual perspective on the speech of
the other. Both the speaker and the interpreter perform linguistic statements and
have reversible authority positions in relation to one another. In “A Nice
Derangement of Epitaphs,” for instance, an essay from 1986, the posture of the
speaker and his/her expectations from the part of the interpreter are as important as
the capacity of the hearer to “translate” his/her utterances. A speaker, then, is
supposed to “have the interpreter in mind,” since “there is no such thing as how we
expect, in the abstract, to be interpreted” (Davidson 1986, 170). Moreover, in his book
Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, the philosopher argues for a specific
“requirement of learnability [of a language], interpretability” (Davidson 2001, 28),
which conveys the social factor of the encounter, on the basis of a shared intelligible
agreement. Such a requirement is what enables the interpreter to avoid “Humpty
Dumpty” meanings, e.g. those utterances that, as in the case of Lewis Carroll‟s
character Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found
There, mean, whatever he intends them to, without taking into account Alice‟s own
intentions to “read” his mind. Humpty symptomatically pretends that “glory” would

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mean “a nice knockdown argument,” and no wonder that his extravagant verdict
leaves Alice quite bewildered.
Still, interpretability is intrinsic to the principle of charity, which “prompts the
interpreter to maximize the intelligibility of the speaker, not sameness of belief”
(Davidson 2001, XIX) and opens up the hermeneutic stance towards an ethical
theory. The interpreter comes to acknowledge, in the proximity of the translatable
text or speech, the set of values and beliefs of the other. To perform charity towards
the meanings and the self-consistency of the other can be a paradoxical task for the
radical translator as interpreter:

“Charity in interpreting the words and thoughts of others is unavoidable


in another direction as well: just as we must maximize agreement, or
risk not making sense of what the alien is talking about, so we must
maximize the self-consistency we attribute to him, on pain of not
understanding him” (Davidson 2011, 26).

In fact, the act of charity has a clearly performative nature, as it is continuously


related to the conditions of speech, to an act of speech in praesentia, happening
between the interpreter and the speaker. In other words, charity demands, in order to
be activated, the performance of speech and its interpretation, the presentness of an
act of interpretation and translation, say, from one‟s own idiolect to another‟s
singular, apparently irreducible mode of speaking a language. 4 In fact, charitable

4 Literary theorist Gerald L. Bruns has taken on the task of demonstrating that Davidson‟s philosophy
of language is convergent with Continental thinking and with the literary turn in philosophical
discourse. He discusses the conditions which allow two languages to displace each other, so the
principles of radical interpretation and of charity are necessarily invoked: “It might seem an open
question as to whether any two natural human („earthly‟) languages meet the standard of mutual
alienation that the word „radical‟ is meant to suggest, but Davidson thinks that because we speakers of
the same language each have our own unique way of speaking it (each our own idiolect, each evidently
his or her rich repertoire of such things), we are sufficiently alien to one another for the principles of
radical interpretation (e. g., the principle of charity) still to apply.” See Gerald L. Bruns, “Donald
Davidson among the Outcasts,” in Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy. Language, Literature,
and Ethical Theory, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1999, p. 42.

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RECLAIMING RADICAL TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION: THE TRANSLATOR’S CHARITY

interpretation could be considered to presuppose an acknowledgement of the other‟s


access to a certain level of belief and meaning altogether, which goes beyond our
ability to understand and translate this level of otherness for ourselves. Commenting
on Quine‟s notion of radical translation, Davidson concludes that we are actually not
able to know what the speaker means unless we know what he believes, and vice
versa: we have to know what someone believes in order to we know what he means.
And he immediately adds a statement about the benefices of charity being embedded
in radical interpretation:

“In radical interpretation we are able to break into this circle, if only
incompletely, because we can sometimes tell that a person accedes to a
sentence we do not understand.” (Davidson 2001, 26)

This position might involve a sort of hermeneutic self-restraint upon ourselves


as interpreters, since we are willing to accept that “a person accedes to a sentence we
do not understand…” It is as if we, the interpreters, remain within the boundaries of
an under-interpretation, instead of running the risk of over-interpreting otherness.
Then, our charity is expected to reveal the borders of what is apparently
untranslatable, mostly in the sense of uninterpretable, or rather of what cannot be
exposed to us in view of being interpreted. In other words, it brings forth a knot of
meaning and belief which is not to be grasped by cognition, but merely acknowledged
by a certain understanding of the relativity of truth conditions. Performing charity in
interpretation calls for the duality truth-for-the-alien/ truth-for-oneself. And maybe
this paradoxically charitable and radical interpretation also calls for an implied third
party and for an educated openness to translation, due to the conscience of being on a
linguistic and cultural threshold.
Being on the threshold between two different meanings and truths and having
to accept their mutual alienation and their mutual act of charity means “break[ing]
the circle” and emphasizing the “self-consistency” of the other, while accepting

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his/her access to sentences and contents that are not always transparent for us.
Reading the other from the liminal position of outcasts, as made exemplary by
Joyce‟s language, entails following him into a “world of verbal exile.”5
Beyond the dual assessment of what is translatable and interpretable, on the
one hand, and what otherwise seems untranslatable or alien to us, the role of the
translator as interpreter undergoes a certain relativization, as it is not based on a
claim of power and authority, but grounded in the very principle of charity. The term
“radical” itself is set under critical scrutiny and somehow relativized through
“charity.” To abide by a principle of charity is to always question, from the point of
view of the interpreter/reader/listener, the conditions of translatability of cultural
identities, ideas and discourses. Translation seen as performance of charity probably
contains a key to how one could engage in a hermeneutic experience, as well as in an
anthropological rite of passage. To act charitably towards the inhabitant of a
distanced cultural community means realizing that his or her presumably
untranslatable words and notions – in fact, those “truths-of-the-alien” – operate
beyond their discursive status and that they pertain to the communal traditional
beliefs, as well as to the web of aesthetic energies which pervade them.

A “Dispositif” for the Translator/Interpreter: the “Passing Theory”

The reader of Davidson‟s text on interpretation can promptly associate his idea
of charity with some of the claims of European moral philosophy, namely with the
ethics of responsibility towards alterity, formulated by Emmanuel Lévinas. Still, I
prefer to invoke another concept derived from the Continental body of thinking, in
order to pass as through a more familiar filter Davidson‟s theories: “le dispositif”
(Michel Foucault), or apparatus, which I have briefly mentioned in the beginning of
this essay, a concept that I would adopt, albeit in light of its reinterpretation by
Giorgio Agamben. Thus, it is not so much disciplinary or power-oriented “dispositifs”,

5 The verbal exile that Joyce provokes, through the displacement of familiar languages, is once again a
metonymy for the process defined by Davidson as radical interpretation: “…Joyce provokes the reader
into involuntary collaboration, and enlists him as a member of his private linguistic community.
Coopted into Joyce‟s world of verbal exile, we are forced to share in the annihilation of old meanings
and the creation ‒ not really ex nihilo, but on the basis of our stock of common lore ‒ of a new
language”. See “James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” in Philosophy and the Arts, p. 11.

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as understood by Foucault, which would be of interest here, as a certain instance that


Agamben6 metaphorically defines as follows: “At the root of each apparatus lies an
all-too-human desire for happiness. The capture and subjectification of this desire in
a separate sphere constitutes the specific power of the apparatus” (Agamben 2009,
17). Representing a strategic device, an institution, a power system, the whole canvas
of social discourses, or the network of language of culture, the “dispositif" is seen in
its capacity to capture “all-too-human” desires and, therefore, to provoke processes of
either subjectification or “desubjectification.”7
However skeptical and critical Agamben might seem towards “dispositifs”,
when he states that emancipated subjects result from the fight between living beings
and apparatuses, one could argue that his own conceptual scheme qualifies as just
another philosophical apparatus. In Davidson‟s analytic philosophy of language,
there is one particular syntagm, i.e. the “passing theory,” which comprises a set of
very intriguing arguments about cultural and linguistic translation and
interpretation, understood as a non-obstructive and even emancipatory type of
apparatus. As compared to the interpreter‟s “prior theory,” which refers to his
expectations about what a certain speaker means by his/her utterances, a “passing
theory,” by contrast, “is not a theory of what anyone (except perhaps a philosopher)
would call an actual natural language” (Davidson 1986, 169). He adds a few more

6 Here is a significant part of Agamben‟s all-encompassing definition of apparatus: “…I shall call an
apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept,
model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only,
therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, judicial
measures, and so forth (whose connection with power is in a certain sense evident), but also the pen,
writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and--
why not--language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses-one in which thousands
and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing
the consequences that he was about to face.” See Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?,” in What is an
Apparatus? And Other Essays, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009, p. 14.
7 Agamben refers here to a disciplinary society, as conceived by Foucault, in which the apparently

“free” identity belongs to subjects caught up “in the very process of their desubjectification.” See
Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” p. 20.

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clarifying sentences about the processual, performative, practice-based and non-


conventional nature of the passing theory:

“‛Mastery‟ of such a language would be useless, since knowing a passing


theory is only knowing how to interpret a particular utterance on a
particular occasion. Nor could such a language, if we want to call it that,
be said to have been learned, or to be governed by conventions”
(Davidson 1986, 169).

Davidson‟s surprising option for the free practice of speech and for the
continuous revision of prior theories and linguistic regulations, for acknowledging
the particularities and the context of every singular utterance, creates a sort of
flexible “dispositif" of interpretation. Understanding and communication between a
speaker and an interpreter or hearer should not be based solely on linguistic
conventions and rules: they should also rely on the clues given by speakers to
interpreters, on the convergence between their intelligible ways of uttering true
sentences, and on the plausible “passing theory” improvised by the receiver. The
passing theory is therefore situated beyond power positions and it is clearly open to
the “principle of charity.” Literary theorist Gerald L. Bruns argues that, “instead of
multiplying languages, Babel-like, Davidson buries the idea of language in the
everyday, second-to-second practice of constructing passing theories.” (Bruns 1999,
51).
The question of translatability and that of mutual interpretability are linked,
for Donald Davison, with an adaptable, performative apparatus for everyday speech,
which conveys “the ability to converge on passing theories from utterance to
utterance.” (Davidson 1986, 172-173). His dynamic – philosophical and
communicational – “passing” “dispositif" exposes several conceptual personae, such
as the radical interpreter or Joyce himself, who is regarded as a metonymical master
figure that makes us feel estranged, for a while, from our own language and from “our
usual selves.” And this is exactly “the perspective of someone who is an alien or exile,”
a paradoxically charitable posture. Since we have no other choice but to “join Joyce as

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RECLAIMING RADICAL TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION: THE TRANSLATOR’S CHARITY

outcasts,” this means both a hermeneutic and an ethical stance, which he acts out in
front of us and for us.

References

Agamben, Giorgio, “What is an Apparatus?,” in What is an Apparatus? And


Other Essays, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2009.
Bruns, Gerald L., Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy. Language,
Literature, and Ethical Theory, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press,
1999.
Dasenbrock, Reed Way (ed.), Literary Theory after Davidson, University
Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.
Davidson, Donald, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” in Philosophical
Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends, ed. Richard E. Grandy and
Richard Warner, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.
Davidson, Donald, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, second edition,
Oxford: Clarendon Press 2001.
Davidson, Donald, “James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” in Philosophy and
the Arts, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein,
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991.
Davidson, Donald, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2001.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, translated by Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Eco, Umberto, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James
Joyce, translated from the Italian by Ellen Esrock, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989.

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METACRITIC JOURNAL FOR COMPARATIVE STUDIES AND THEORY 2.2 (2016)

Puolakka, Kalle, Relativism and Intentionalism in Interpretation.


Davidson, Hermeneutics, and Pragmatism, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011.
Rorty, Richard, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” in
Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972-1980), Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1982.

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