polity
First published in French as Avant demain. Épigenèse et rationalité
© Presses Universitaires de France, 2014
This English edition © Polity Press, 2016
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9154-1
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Tomorrow, the order of precedence between program and its translation will be inverted.
Catherine Malabou
With every new Malabou translation comes a fresh understanding of my practice and another translation manifesto. Working with her – especially this time, where for over a year the author has been the translator’s partner in transforming her text – translation has assumed its plasticity, its change, its accident, and, now, its epigenetic function. As Malabou analyzes the epigenesis of Kant’s notion of rationality in Before Tomorrow, I am led to consider how, in translation, her own texts undergo a process of epigenesis: that is, the biological process of cellular differentiation. Which parts are sloughed off and which undergo maturation? How does Malabou develop in her arrival in English? Does the move into the Anglophone context allow for a development of that which is premature or impeded in French? Where else is she going? Who will retranslate her work tomorrow?
In the sinews of her rigorous and unrelenting tracking of Kantian philosophy, Malabou proposes that “critique itself, from the Critique of Pure Reason to the Critique of the Power of Judgment,” is subject to “epigenetic development” (156). Drawing again on the sciences that other continental philosophers have turned their backs on, she finds the most exciting movements of our era and brings to life biology. She confronts the moment when Kant is to be relinquished by speculative realists by uncovering in his work the resources she needs to open “the chink of a farewell” (xiii). She will bring in the life force of new frontiers in biology, for “the time has come to say it: transcendental epigenesis is epigenesis of the transcendental itself” (158). That which we thought was set in stone will be rocked by a new focus, shattered, then regrounded, differently: “The transcendental is subject to epigenesis – not to foundation” (158).
Beyond all the trying genetic investigations, always in search of a lost, inaccessible, founding origin, Malabou’s book on Kant acknowledges frankly that “epigenesis can produce” (50), even if it builds on moving grounds. For our part, as translation theorists, we have been thinking translation in genetic terms and therefore failing to account for, or recognize, epigenetic productivity. Yet translation is epigenesis. After the afterlife and after survival, the plastic life of the text. As translators, “we now all have a new word”1 for our art, something to help us explain how it is that texts are not complete until they are translated. How it is that texts bear the program to translate, the need to develop their parts in translation. That translation is generative, not as “a succession or connection of events taking place in a linear fashion starting from a given, identifiable point” (175), but rather, more holistically, as “the temporality of a synthetic continuum within which all of the parts are presented together in a movement of growth whereby the whole is formed through self-differentiation” (178). Translation is that process in which the text self-differentiates and thereby grows, develops, matures.
Malabou deploys new biological paradigms to read Kant, and in turn, reading her, I propose that we adopt epigenesis in translation studies to better describe the plasticity of the translating process. But is this any different from the multiplicity of metaphors that the discipline has already developed? The proposal and contestation of metaphors is integral to our field, from Lori Chamberlain’s foundational “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation” (1988) to James St André’s recent essay collection, Thinking through Translation with Metaphors (2014).2 Analogical thinking seemingly corresponds to our relational practices. But epigenesis is different. Just as Malabou is sensitive to the fact that her argument rides on being more than a “rhetorical artifice,” that her parsing of Kant’s phrase in paragraph 27 of the Critique of Pure Reason, “as it were a system of epigenesis of pure reason,” must be more, for “if it turns out that epigenesis is only an image with nothing other than an exoteric, pedagogic, or illustrative role, then my entire elaboration is meaningless” (181). Indeed. To say what is goes far beyond as it were, and at this point, translation studies, too, must go beyond analogy to talk mechanics, life systems.
The slow seismic shifting or the shock of the quake. The moment in a translation when words slip, leap, echo, fly. Epigenesis: is that what translation is? Is that how we rid ourselves of the genetic paradigm that has shackled us to the original? Is it here, again, translating Malabou, that I find an answer to my questions about how to frame translation? It is – and I don’t think it’s just a translator’s conceit. Even as the authors’ closest readers, we, translators, work at the surface, determined to achieve the moment where “their difference disappears right into their contact” (157). We translate and retranslate, conscious that “epigenesis marks the current valency of the meeting point between the old and the new, the space where they reciprocally interfere with and transform one another” (158). Epigenetics describes how specific genes are activated or deactivated in response to environmental variants – the gene expression that is the transcription and translation of genetic code. The epigenesis of translation is about how texts turn off and on to speak to their audience, to react to their specific contact point. And so here, with a translation that is at once biological and textual, I find that epigenesis, then, is the meaning in translation.
Carolyn Shread
Epigignomai: (1) to be born after (oi epigignomenoi, the descendants); (2) to arise, to take place; (3) to add.
All evolution is epigenetic.
Georges Canguilhem1
Hence natural things which we find possible only as ends constitute the best proof of the contingency of the world-whole.
Immanuel Kant2
Why write another book on Kant? Why add to the already extensive list of dissertations, monographs, and articles written on him even today?
Quite simply, because, working behind the screen of all this recognition and celebration, my plan is to trace out the opposite, namely the chink of a farewell. A break with Kant is in the works in contemporary continental philosophy. Under the banner of “speculative realism,” a new approach to the world, thinking, and time puts into question a number of postulates considered untouchable since the Critique of Pure Reason: the finitude of knowledge, the phenomenal given, the a priori synthesis as the originary relation between subject and object, the entire structural apparatus said to guarantee the universality and necessity of the laws of both nature and thought, in a word, the “transcendental.” And the rallying cry of new post-critical thought is relinquish the transcendental.
This relinquishing has been on the cards for some time. Initiated by Hegel, it marched on unrelenting until we reached the destruction and deconstruction of metaphysics. From Hegel to Heidegger, then from Heidegger to Derrida and Foucault, the transcendental was interrogated on the grounds of its rigidity, its permanence, its purported role as the condition sine qua non of thinking. To bring time, as did Heidegger, or history, as did Foucault, into the transcendental was already a way of relinquishing it. But that’s not all. The neurobiological revolution of the late 1980s, which must at last be acknowledged, and which brought to light a set of questions that are not entirely germane to the analytic tradition, also undermined any notion of the transcendental. Recent discoveries about how the brain functions have, in their own way, challenged the supposed invariability of laws of thought.
How, then, should we situate speculative realism, given that it views itself as even more radical than the deconstruction of metaphysics and cognitivism? And amidst all these upheavals, what happens to Kantian philosophy, or, for that matter, philosophy itself?
I believe that it is important to formulate a response to these questions by presenting a panorama of the ultra-contemporary philosophical landscape, where several major readings of Kant are being staged in terms of three questions: time; the relation between thinking and the brain; and the contingency of the world.
Of course, the indispensable counterweight to this exploration is the response of Kant himself to his own posterity.
I have constructed this response here around epigenesis, a figure that Kant summons in the Critique of Pure Reason in reference to the gestation of the categories. In biology, epigenesis designates the growth of the embryo through the gradual differentiation of cells – as opposed to preformation, which assumes that the embryo is fully constituted from the start. I develop the thesis that, far from being simply a rhetorical artifice, epigenesis applies to the transcendental itself. The transcendental grows, develops, transforms, and evolves. This evolution is such as to ensure that it spans the centuries separating the epigenetism of the eighteenth century from contemporary epigenetics.
Thus, the transcendental begins life anew.
After The Future of Hegel, 1 the time has come to write on Kant’s future. The next task will be to return to the relation between epigenesis and dialectic.
*
I wish to thank Monique Labrune and John Thompson, my publishers in France and the UK, for their patience and confidence. I also thank Øystein Brekke for his invaluable aid, both philosophical and bibliographic; this book owes much to our exchanges between Paris and Oslo. Étienne Balibar also provided me with books that were nowhere to be found, and I would like to express my gratitude and enduring friendship to him here. Lastly, I am deeply grateful to my translator and friend Carolyn Shread, and to Steve Howard, from Kingston University, who so generously reread the translation. Without their scrutiny and expertise, this project would not have come to light.