A tribute to Hedonismbot

Probably the most amazing joke (of the many many of them) in Futurama is the Hedonismbot: a robot that embodies all the auto-affectivity we fear in machines, such that we can't understand why the hell anyone would make him. That is, with no function other than to provide for his own pleasure, Hedonismbot is absolutely superfluous from the standpoint of man--in this he is actually the embodiment of the most mechanical aspect of the mechanical, insofar as the mechanical is only constituted in contradistinction to the human. Who knew we'd meet the mechanical as such in this: not just a machine that is autonomous, but in a machine that can enjoy itself, since his pleasure, more than his autonomy, escapes the circuit of desire as constituted both traditionally (in the history of metaphysics, especially including Epicurianism), and in modern theories of pleasure (psychoanalysis, for example, which cannot conceive of this pleasure apart from the pleasure principle that emanates and ends in itself--that is, except as the death drive). (What's also interesting is that he is the embodiment of pleasure, not just mechanicity, as such.)
And, on top of all this, HE IS HIS OWN CHAIR!

Heidegger, Affect, Performativity

It has always surprised me how little Heidegger's conception of mood or attunement (Stimmung) is used by theorists of affect. It's a very rich concept, and in fact it is one of Heidegger's most significant contributions to philosophy that he rigorously thought it out: he rescued it (with Husserl, and, in a different quarter, Bergson) from the oblivion to which epistemology-centered work had consigned it, arguing it had more significance than as an external accident of psychology.
Perhaps this is the case because the body doesn't make too many significant appearances in Heidegger (unlike Husserl and Bergson): the circuit between body and mood might have to be a bit more elaborated for them to pick it up. But Heidegger does indeed make inroads into this connection (especially in his seminars), so the problem seems deeper than this.
A clue is given from these theorists' reliance on psychology. It is as if we get that odd connection Husserl and Bergson were making between the psychology and a larger structure of existence, without Heidegger's development of it into an existential structure that depends on a real rich conception of being. That is, it is as if philosophy just before Heidegger has returned in this area with a vengeance, to the precise exclusion of Heidegger.
This proves one thing: people want to subtract being from theories of affect. This makes total sense: the proliferation of performativity as a conception of identity precisely junked being in the area of selfhood, where anticipation and historicity were, so what remains is to explain affect while junking its dependence on mood or attunement too.
I don't think this is a mistake, personally, but I do think since affect has been much more maligned as a phenomenon than selfhood, these theorists might be losing something significant. They are losing, first and foremost, an idea of the coherence or structuredness of affect--or, since coherence and structuredness get thought otherwise in performative theories of identity, I should probably say an idea of function. Affect functions. It leads you into other states. The biggest problem with studies of affect that I see is that, fundamentally, because everything is performative, there is no ability to distinguish between affects: shame might be different than anxiety, but there's no way to explain that, because in the end it all really just collapses into performativity. Again, this collapse is great--I like performativity--it's just that we're not able to explain affects (in the plural) as accurately as we seem to want by way of it.
Fundamentally, I think there is a problem of phenomenality involved. Performativity is a theory of identity that disturbs (delays and defers) phenomenality. This brings it beyond Heidegger. But this same disturbance cannot exactly take place with affect, though it should: the real interesting thing about performative theories of affect is that there should be no subordination of affect to identity, precisely as there is in Heidegger. But this occurs: not because studies of affect perpetuate the old subordination, but because if they don't do it, affect becomes performativity, as we were saying. The two have the same function--to subvert the subject. The subordination remains, then, but for a different reason.
What this does though is--oddly--to make affect function more phenomenally than identity. This leads to--and this is a real regression--the desire to want to explain certain aspects of how one really does feel like when they are sad, or anxious, or whatever. But this is to precisely undo the contribution that performativity makes to the study of identity: it doesn't matter how you "really are," because you are determined (subverted) otherwise than that--in other words, the basis of your identity is not in being, so the question of authenticity (which is the phenomenological question par excellence) isn't relevant.
I think we need, then, to turn the focus on affect around: this would bring us to consider the link between a particular affect and all performative aspects of a self, and why one in the end can't be distinguished from the other. It would bring us to the problem of how to distinguish otherwise--and it would do this precisely in opposition to the tendency to try and explain affect based on how we really feel in a situation.
And oddly, I think, this would bring us back to Heidegger. For what Heidegger has some very rigorous functions ascribed to affects--and different affects, by the way--which we can study. If we can somehow extricate ourselves from their focus on being, we might then see that what is performatively subverted in the realm of affect is precisely a certain understanding of the functions of various affects. This would seem to be closer to the real thrust of performance, as we find in Butler, for example: the issue is not exactly to constitute a self that is free of all constraints, but to have a self that does this only by deconstructing the particular understandings (that is, phenomenologies) of roles that exist.
This has been sketchy at best (especially the last part, of which I'm really not sure), but I hope to revise this over the next few days and somewhat make it all clearer. The important thing for now was outlining the path of the thought.

Translating Derrida

I think David Wills' translations of Derrida are usually very solid. They have a vivacity and a sort of "right on the mark" feeling to them that just seems to fit perfectly with the particular texts he translates. For example, Donner la mort, or L'animal que donc je suis: they both are a bit "heavier" in consistency. By this I mean that both texts have many direct and visible ramifications, but of a deep nature: they don't have their relevance exactly in the more immediate sphere of politics, but in religious and ethical issues. They therefore require a lot of serious choices which have to dispense with a lot of other possible, but meaningful alternatives. And they have to do this constantly, sacrificing a lot. Wills manages this heavy demand very well, I think.
But sometimes he just makes the weirdest choices! Here are two that have been really bugging me lately. First, "The Gift of Death" for the title Donner la mort--and I just mean the title, as Wills is usually good at sliding between the different senses of the phrase throughout the text. Now, I'm not really one to judge about French. But I do think I know a little about what Derrida is up to, because I've worked a lot with the texts. Wouldn't it just have been better to translate the title as "Putting to Death?" Here Wills displays the sort of strength or solidness I praise him for above, but I just think it is going too far. Why? Because the solution Wills comes up with really turns the shifting or modulating between the transitive and intransitive senses of the phrase into the work of what is, effectively, a noun.
At least that's how people hear the phrase, I think. No one takes his advice (which he offers in a note before the text) and hears "kiss of death" behind "the gift of death," even though this actually really is an elegant and somewhat formally identical (if people actually heard it that way) way of getting the phrase across. The little project fails--no doubt because even "kiss of death" is just too weak in comparison with the "putting to death," combined with the fact that it's just used much more rarely whereas the phase in French is much more common--and all we get is some idea that there is a gift out there, when what the French is saying is that there's something, a process, going on.
But what gets me is that Wills knows the audience Derrida has in English speaking countries: they love to turn something like supplement into a thing they can point at, a sort of handy reified concept that they don't really need to think any more about but can just use everywhere. They did this with deconstruction, they did this with hymen, they did this with the crazy Greek word parergon, for crying out loud. They even did this with differance, a word that is actually extremely amenable to being used legitimately as a noun: you can legitimately say, a differance between x and y... but people here (unbelievable!) say, instead, there we find differance--as if it were not a differance but the differance, it itself! They reified what could already be used as a noun! Go figure. The point is, though that this should make it apparent that you should really emphasize the active here. Instead, Wills' solution is to let the phrase sound like "the kiss of death," and let it get its activity from that. A good way out of the problem, especially considering how the phrase gets used in the rest of the text, but not a good translation: the two are different things, as the problems of translation are different than the translation itself. "Giving death," which gets used in the main body of the text much more than "the gift of death"--much more--would have been almost just as good. There is an odd concession to the fact that a gift needs to be thought of as a thing, as some distinct entity, and in fact as a sort of concept, as the gift, in general. That is what is disturbing to me about that, for the concession isn't really merited by the text.
But I don't have as much beef with that--people are just going to keep looking for a cheap conceptual bauble that can make them look good in class or even an article some day instead of reading what Derrida says--as I do with the next translation, more recent, in the new edition of The Gift of Death. The phrase that begins "Literature in Secret"--the essay included in the new edition that Derrida released in 1999--Pardon de ne pas vouloir dire, gets translated as "Pardon for not meaning (to say)." What's wrong with the more simple phrase, which is much more accurate--if I know my French right (not so much via my French but via my Latin)--"forgive for not meaning (to say)?" Forgiveness is so much more crucial in the context of the essay than pardoning, which is way too harsh and doesn't really get at the phenomenon (or non-phenomenon; or, as a friend and I recently quipped, a phenonmenon) that Derrida is trying to outline. What the odd concern about grammar here? Or propriety? Or whatever the odd concern that is making Wills change the sense of forgiveness into the sense of pardoning, which he goes on about in the following? "Consideration of Derrida's attention to the gift (don) and forgiveness (le pardon) recommends translating pardon de ne pas vouloir dire using "forgive" rather than "pardon." However, English would then require a personal pronoun (e.g., "forgive me for not saying"), which would anchor the phrase more than Derrida seems to want here. The reader [like he does with hearing "the kiss of death" for "the gift of death"] should therefore hear "pardon" in the sense of "forgive."" Okay, fine, I sympathize a little with the anxiety here. But how does English "require" that we hear "me" after "forgive?" That is, why does this appear to Wills as a stricture, and not as something that just adds to the complexity of the phenomenon that Derrida is getting at? For I do think the French--even though yes, Derrida doesn't want to anchor it, as Wills says--has this "requirement" in it also. The implication, I think, is that Wills doesn't think he can get away with just saying "forgive" in English, without also adding "me." That is, he thinks the phase would appear ungrammatical or something. But why this anxiety here--when you are already using a way (albeit traditional) of rendering vouloir dire that is, at best, a clunky typographical fix-up?
What I don't like about this is not so much the translation as the failure of that sort of strength or solidness that Wills usually brings and which I outlined above. For what this does is produce a text that is willing to say "fuck you" at certain points to the sort of settled way of translating various phrases of Derrida that has accumulated since the 60's. It was an exciting time when this vocabulary was still being developed: this is the one--and only--thing that makes Barbara Harlow's absolutely criminally abominable translation of Spurs (someone please, please retranslate this text!) somewhat tolerable. One gets the sense that there aren't exactly set ways in English to render certain phases of Derrida's, and this makes it a bit exciting. The better example of this is, of course, Of Grammatology. I can live with the translation of Il n'y a pas de hors- texte as "there is nothing outside the text," instead of the more accurate and interesting "there is [and I'd like to throw in parentheses here (es gibt), to get the allusion to Heidegger always operative when Derrida is talking like this] no outside-text," simply because Spivak is creating a huge set of words and concepts almost from scratch. But this all gets stale every once and a while: there get to be really clear formulas for how to render a particular phrase in Derrida and, well, all you have to do is mark the phrases that don't really conform to this code, or are, as the translations always note, "colloquial." Wills--especially with Donner la mort, which is so crucial for messing up a lot of presuppositions about Derrida that had accumulated at that time, even with his style--brings you back to the freshness of the phrasing somehow by not caring exactly how things are rendered. Again, the sheer virtuosity of the text--its sort of offhand manner, its quickness (it has been postulated that it was written on the way to the conference, and I could see that, and the result is in fact better than if it had been calculated: it is almost more calculated)--forces Wills to do this, but he also is good at being very receptive to it. Here Wills just gives into overthinking things a bit, and the result is very weird and in fact worse than if it had just been translated with the accumulated, "standard edition" vocabulary. I'll note that use this phrase because I want this post to join up with another I am writing on Freud and Strachey, but also to mark the real virtues of Wills when he is working: he resists the real danger, that I think will only become more crucial in the next decade or so, to turn the words of Derrida into a standard vocabulary, further reifying (and with him--and this is Derrida's true uniqueness--this is the direction in which the reification works) the words of his texts into concepts.
Now, again, the texts here are really, really complex, and many other problems abound in them. For example, the really tricky translation of apprendre, which means to teach, but also has the valence, philosophically, of grasping--as you would a phenomenon in phenomenology. And that odd phrase tout autre est tout autre. And in L'animal... there is the constant work going on with the "therefore," donc, that is quite complex, along with the amazing pun on ani-mal, which you have to hear running through it to get the fact that it is also a meditation on how philosophers (most significantly, Lacan) treat evil (a problematic that connects up--concerning Heidegger--with the work in Of Spirit). But, again, Wills is up to the task in most of these cases (in the latter, he smartly uses more footnotes--which would actually be a little wrong in Donner la mort, I feel, for some reason). I do suggest looking back at the French when reading Donner la mort, though, to compare, because it especially is a delicate work, more delicate I think than all the others in Derrida's entire corpus, and especially those in which there are puns and things, homonyms, etc., perhaps excepting Glas.