To get out of the (in-)between-two-languages: translation as a practice of deconfinement

Abstract

In 1988, Derrida formulated a programmatic statement for philosophers, which is a jubilatory encouragement for translators: “Plus d’une langue!”. This paper starts from a resumption of the Derridian watchword, a re-petition that makes us gest inside a living thought, intimately linked to a challenge of translation. After giving this challenge its more extended reach, we seek to examine how, in each language, the mechanism of “Plus d’une langue” works as agenciation-deconstruction, that is, as an immanent and intensive operation of infralinguistic translation. Yet, if this internal multiplicity of languages ​​as idiomatic networks points to a potential of transmission “below” the encounter between two languages, it is this encounter between languages ​​as idiomatic singularities that traditionally defines the translation as transformative and, eventually, transgressive practice. Based on such outlook, the flip side of this reflection focuses on the paradigm of the translation as a circulation between two languages, to problematize it and evaluate if it would be possible to go beyond it. Overcoming the topology of the between, and with more than two languages, is translating still conceivable? This means attempting to force and, perhaps, to oxygenate translation theories, historically confined by Linguistics. The result of this effort, which is finally guided by the radicalization of the logic of “Plus d’une langue” through an “Encore plus de langues”, is an inquiry about translation as a translinguistic shockwave, and about the scandal of the translator's act. What remains of the art of translation when the translator “fucks off”, getting out of the sacred pact of translation and refusing, for a patent lack of relationship, any reciprocity between languages?