Dead Point of Translation

Abstract

This essay focuses on the problem of translation, which Galin Tihanov regards as the afterlife of literary theory in his book The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (2019). According to Tihanov, it is exactly through translation and translatability that literary theory continues to exist today, but it does so only as a discreet background in the contemporary discourse of world literature, linked to the contemporary processes of signifying art only through its market and entertainment value. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of exotopy as a conceptual framework, the author raises the question of literature in its resistance to the market and takes up the problem of semi-translation in Jean Laplanche through the prism of psychoanalysis. In so doing, the article introduces the problem of the incommensurability of literature and literary theory as it relates to the discourse of the other in its specific dimensions.