1

In his Sur la traduction, Ricœur takes up the constitutive elements of translation,

explicating the philosophical stakes of translation in terms of mourning, treason, receptivity and
joy. Here I summarize these themes toward a clarification regarding how Ricœur’s framing of
translation dovetails with broader philosophical issues such as self-consciousness (la langue
maternelle), consciousness of the other (sa langue propre), and intersubjectivity, which perhaps
is summarized in Ricœur’s citation of Schleiermacher’s dictum that translation is a dual process
of “bringing the author to the reader and the reader to the author.”1 Indeed, Ricœur will make the
connection to ontology in chapter 2. In this sense and following the problem of hermeneutics as
beholden perhaps too much to the metaphor of the text as presented by Dr. Treanor, I ask what
the implications of this idea of translation are given the equivocation between the terms of
translation and ontology just mentioned. Is it possible to think dialogic sans textual metaphor?
Are we imposing a textual form upon a reality given without text when we make the connection
just mentioned between the terms of translation and ontology? Or does the ontology so described
precede the textual metaphor? In the language of Dr. Treanor, the question can be asked, whether
the idea that existence is a matter of interpretation can be sustained if the textual metaphor is
made derivative?
Ricœur frames translation in terms that lend themselves to discussions of ontology,
insofar as the terms of translation are, simply, identity and difference and the corresponding
drama that takes place in navigating between the dynamic of identity and difference in the act of
translation. Ricœur calls that dynamic, in psychoanalytic terms, “resistance.” Resistance is here
wed to a notion of memory, but this idea of memory is I think more aptly framed as a matter of
self-consciousness and consciousness of the other as mostly indiscrete moments of one self-same
activity of thought. I posit that the specific tension arises in translation precisely because these
moments are parsed ahead of the activity of translation itself. This leads to what Ricœur notes as
a somewhat phantasmic presupposition that a text is untranslatable, and to the more real issue of
whether a perfect translation is possible, a transcendental notion that produces both anxiety and
joy depending on how one tarries with the idea. Ricœur notes of the first phantasmic anxiety, “It
culminates in the belief that translation, because it is translation, will only be bad translation by
definition.”2 In contrast, Ricœur notes that the resistance he has in mind is the result of a real
dynamic that takes the shape of a drama in which the translator is navigating the relation between
the signifier and signified itself. While Ricœur says this dynamic is captured most clearly in the
translation of poetry, he writes that the translation of philosophy presents several problems
related to what we might call terms of art, les Grundwörter, which implicate the translator in
questions regarding the possibility or impossibility of translating context.3
This concern is captured in the second chapter, wherein Ricœur describes the two ways
of conceiving translation, as the translation of a message or as comprehension itself. Ricœur
arrives at the second way via the explication of difficulties pertaining to the first through the
description of the tensions involved in translating in chapter 1. Ricœur describes how translation
exists because language is both universal and local. Moreover, humans have the self-reflective
capacity to regionalize their own language, placing it amongst others.4 Ricœur returns to a point
made in chapter 1, writing that rather than conceiving the fact of the universal diversity of
languages as a contradiction between translatability and untranslatability, we ought to conceive

1
Paul Ricœur. Sur la traduction. Paris : Bayard, 2004. p. 9.
2
Ibid. p. 11.
3
Ibid. p. 12-13.
4
Ibid. p. 24-25.
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translation in terms of fidelity or treason. He unpacks some of the basics pertaining to the
translatability and untranslatability bifurcation before describing his own point. The assumption
that translation is impossible is based not only upon the clear fact that languages that parse time
and space differently. It is based as well on the idea that languages correspond to and make
possible visions of reality. Ricœur gives the example of the Greeks constructing ontologies
because they had the word and concept of being, whereas another group could perhaps not
comprehend the word or concept in the same way because of their own reflexive self-
understanding which follows from the act of comprehending in real-time one’s relationship to
the world.5 On the other end, translatability presupposes its possibility both from the fact that
translation occurs, implying that there are traces of an original linguistic commons that makes
the verifiably real fact of translation possible. Yet, this idea of a commons seems to run against
the empirical and historical fact of the diversity of languages.6 Where does one go from here?
Much like apophatic speech that paradoxically engenders always more speaking,7 translation
proceeds, Ricœur tells us, despite everything.8 It is with this that he makes his transition from the
“speculative” dichotomy of translatability and untranslatability to the “practical” distinction
between fidelity and treason, which takes place through a rereading of the Tower of Babel
narrative in which the fact of diversity is not lamented.9
As mentioned at the beginning of my response, Ricœur’s account dovetails with larger
discussions about metaphysics or ontology, depending on how one chooses to relate the two
concepts. Another thinker who has recently written on the tensions that Ricœur describes, and is
as the kids say having a moment, is Giorgio Agamben. In his 2016 Che cos’è la filosofia, or
Which Thing is Philosophy, Agamben notes that the entire trajectory of occidental metaphysics is
determined by the presupposition of an origin of language.10 Indeed, what we call ontology in the
Eurocentric context is the presupposition of a relation between language and the world, “the fact
that being is said and that to say refers to being.”11 Taking both Ricœur and this example by
Agamben in mind, I return now to the question I posed at the beginning regarding how we ought
to conceive the relationship between hermeneutics, or in this case translation, language, and
reality. Ricœur’s transition to a notion of fidelity or treason decides vis-à-vis the speculative
distinction he seeks to avoid – namely, that we are already so enmeshed in the tension that
speculation as to an exit does not really help when faced with the immediate fact of being so
enmeshed. In so deciding, the link that Agamben describes between language and being seems to
hold true. What Ricœur terms speculation seems equivalent to the paradox of apophaticism and
what Agamben describes as the asking after an origin from within the series engendered by said
origin, making said origin incomprehensible via-à-vis the terms of the comprehensible it
engenders.12
Given this framework, how are we able to pose the question regarding the metaphor of
the text? Is it in fact textuality that overdetermines how we conceive being? Or does being
appear only insofar as language expresses the way in which humans are.13 Here the notion of

5
Ibid. p. 28-29.
6
Ibid. p. 32.
7
See the work of Elliot R. Wolfson.
8
Ricœur. p. 33.
9
Ibid. p. 34.
10
Giorgio Agamben. Che cos’è la filosofia. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016. p. 16.
11
Ibid. p. 17.
12
Ibid. p. 15.
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being tied to the copula, which we can say is propositional following Peirce,14 is distinct from
what can, perhaps, only be described paradoxically, following Enrique Dussel, within language
as the fact of sheer presence. Ironically given the discussion of language at hand, this idea is to
my mind expressed more clearly and beautifully in Spanish than in English with the verb haber
indexing sheer presence and the verb ser corresponding to propositional being via the copula.15 It
seems to me, then, that the deep connections between what Ricœur is describing as a matter of
translation and philosophy more generally mean that the question of whether hermeneutics can
be freed from the constraints of the text necessarily involves a question like the aforementioned
regarding how we are to frame language from within language. If not text, then what is the “the”
we interpret linguistically speaking? For my part, I wonder if Ricœur gets us far as we can go
insofar as he seems to recognize a limit to the speculative endeavor of thinking language beyond
language. But this also leaves me wanting more and I think there are several troubling ableist
conclusions that can be drawn by reducing humans to language, to say nothing of what this
means for our living with non-humans.

13
Apropos of this idea, see Terrence Deacon. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.
14
Peirce, C. S. "Five Hundred and Eighty-Second Meeting. May 14, 1867. Monthly Meeting; On a New List of
Categories." Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (1865): 287-98. Accessed September 6, 2021.
doi:10.2307/20179567.
15
On this point see Enrique Dussel. La filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión FCE. Ciudad de México:
FCE, 2018. p. 54-55. “Por ello diremos que hay cosas en el cosmos; pero los entes son sólo en el mundo.”