Peut-on envisager l'avenir de la traduction sans plaisir ? Pour une érotique du traduire

Abstract

Envisioned in ethical (Berman) and political terms (Venuti), translation was never successfully considered in erotic terms. Indeed, when translatologists attempted to do so, they emphasized either the viewpoint of the translator brutalizing the source-text or that of the translator subjugated to the original. The subversive power of an "erotics of translation" consists in unleashing translation's sensual activity. The relationship to the textual body is never as sterile as theoreticians posit or as crude as practitioners believe. Following Levinas, the notion of caress could be considered as a paradigmatic gesture touching lightly the textual body, a gesture whose aim is neither to possess this body nor to betray it.