Translating (With) the Speculum

Abstract

Tous droits réservés © TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction -Les auteurs, 1991 Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne.https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit.Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'Université de Montréal, l'Université Laval et l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche.https://www.erudit.org/fr/ Translating (With) the Speculum Barbara GodardReading "with""With" is the operative term. In this essay, I am concerned with a theory of translation as combinatory rather than substitution as I read with Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous who analyze and set in play theories of exchange of signs, of languages and bodies. Gender as the (im)possibility of translationGender I understand to designate the apparatus of production of sexual difference as binary (asymmetric) relations. A system regulating differences, gender inflects regimes of sign relations including those of exchange. This might be rewritten as "including those of translation (transcoding)." The movement from "exchange" to "translation" takes place within semiotics when Saussure's concern with relations and his description of signification as the exchange of values within a system (Saussure, p. 115) is reworked by Hjelmslev into a "general calculus" of dependences in sign systems understood as "abstract transformation systems" characterized by "translatability" (Hjelmslev, p. 23,. Society is conceptualized in terms of a theory of communication where rules of kinship and linguistic rules, along with economic rules, set in place systems of circulation of symbolic value (Lévi-Strauss, 1967, p. 82). Through the consolidation of inner bonds, a collective identity is produced for each group differentiated through an exchange, for each clan, for each language. In an exchange under the rule of reciprocity, groups fix their interrelation as one of difference with respect to an inside and an outside. In this way, are produced 85 woman as a category within a kinship system of sexual difference and translation within a signifying system of linguistic difference. Relational terms, both distinguish and bind to a common internally differentiated identity, but are not identities. Performances, rather, in that like metaphor they deploy performatives, promising rather than giving (Derrida, 1982, p. 209).I shall attempt to explore the overlapping relational systems of gender and translation through the triad law, desire, language in various formulations -and critiques -of the rule of exogamy. Extending this line of specul(ariz)aüon, on the imbrication of interpretation, difference, translation, I want to add another figure of difference, gender. The (im)possibility of gender as the (im)possible condition of translation. Gender, like translati...

Liminaire: Access, Responsibility

“…Such a debate would be one mode of symbolic exchange between women should the "commodities" organize amongst themselves, the "goods go to market/" enter into a symbolic order, as Irigaray advocates (Irigaray 1985). This entails a new way of looking at the questions of gender and race, an abandonment of binary models grounded in an order of the same, (an order of metaphor or substitution), for an open system of exchange or field of relational differences (an order of metonymy or combination) (Godard 1991) that would attend to the processes by which relations described as "ethnic/" "racial/" "cultural/" "class/" and"gender/" intersect and interact with each other in complex and specific ways, including those of irreducible difference. These models require new methodologies to accommodate such messy situations/ often not compatible with an institutional critical discourse that values clarity, distinction, purity, over contradiction, heterogeneity.…”