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| FUSELI 3 |
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"What will this babbler say?" from Negotiations Towards a Self, 1770-1830
"Was will dieser Schwätzer sagen?"
What will this babbler say? For Füssli this may precisely be the question, but it may also be a question, a question about the precision between "a" and "the", a question of precision, of the precision of translation, of how precisely such a question, which question, may be translated? Precisely. Translated imprecisely. And because of this imprecision, the question, a question, will be about translation, translated around this imprecision, in order to surround this imprecision, but an imprecision that can never be mastered, may never be completely surrounded, but to which I can not surrender. So I translate.
What is it to be a babbler, to be of Babylon, to live the dream of Babylon, the dream of the tower, to translate "a" into "the", to translate the indefinite into the definite, to unite all tongues as one, to impose a single tongue, to make your tongue the master tongue. "If you mean to reign dictator over the arts of your times, assail not your rivals with the blustering tone of condemnation; sap with conditional or lamenting praise; confine them to unfashionable excellence; exclude them from the avenues of fame." What is it to seek this single language, this epic language, to want "to write for all times and all races, to treat of what will always exist and always be understood." What is this desire to build the tower? What is this desire not "to build a cottage, but a pyramid."
To build a pyramid, however, is to also build a crypt. A pyramid may be a place of burial, a place where a self that wishes to live may be stifled, oppressed.
Thus, the cryptic place is also a sepulcher. The topography has taught us to take a certain nonplace into consideration. The sepulchral function in turn can signify something other than simply death. A crypt, people believe, always hides something dead. But to guard it from what? Against what does one keep a corpse intact, safe both from life and from death, which could both come in from the outside to touch it? And to allow death to take no place in life?...The Inhabitant of a crypt is always a living dead, a dead entry we are perfectly willing to keep alive, but as dead, one we are willing to keep, as long as we keep it, within us, intact in any way save as living. (Jacques Derrida)
The desire to build a pyramid, to build a tower, to impose a single tongue may become a dream that buries the self within the crypt that lies within the pyramid, and that crypt holds nothing, nothing that is not already cryptic.
What is a crypt? No crypt presents itself. The grounds are so disposed as to disguise and to hide: something, always a body in some way. But also to disguise the act of hiding and to hide the disguise: the crypt hides as it holds. Carved out of nature, sometimes making use of probability or facts, these grounds are not natural. A crypt is never natural through and through, and if, as is well known, physis has a tendency to encrypt (itself), that is because it overflows its own bounds and encloses, naturally, its other, all others. The crypt is thus not a natural place, but the striking history of an artifice...(Jacques Derrida)
Cryptic, the crypt may not be within the pyramid after all, but just within.
The Self: A cemetery guard. The crypt is enclosed within the self, but as a strange, foreign place, prohibited, excluded. The self is not the proprietor of what he guards. He makes the rounds like a proprietor, but only the rounds. He turns around and around, and in particular he uses all his knowledge of the grounds to turn visitors away. (Jacques Derrida)
Does this babbler guard this crypt by babbling, using his knowledge, not as a burden, or a load, but as a way of turning away all visitors, turning away the gaze of the Other, turning away all interpretation, directing all intruders towards a self, a self that may only ever lead elsewhere?
Furthermore, what is it to live in the aftermath of Babylon, to be a babbler, condemned to an existence amongst different languages, to a life in translation, to a life of translation, to a life of and for many languages? The babbler may want to speak, but the language that comes out is not one, not the language of the epic, but a language always otherwise, a language in the aftermath of the epic, in the aftermath of Babylon, a language in translation, a language leading elsewhere….The babbler must speak many languages, and none at all. English, German, Italian, French, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. For there is no language that ends translation, and this babbler, Johann Heinrich Füssli, only will have said in translation, in a state of translation, in the temporality of delay ("will have said"), a prisoner of the prison house of language in the state of Babel, seeking the tower, like Kafka's K. seeking the castle, doubting that anyone resides within. To speak the epic language of the one, to speak the name of the One, in this world of one amongst many, is to speak Babel. Confusion.
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…The mistake is believing that Fuseli speaks a single language. The tower that Fuseli babbles about is not a tower housing a monolingual presence, but a tower built from a polylingual cacophony of discourses, a tower that subjects a self, i.e., makes a self into a subject and subjects a self to oppression. The tower formed by this multi-media, multi-linguistic regime will try to fix the indefinite "a" self, into the self, thereby transubstantiating the self into the policed subject….
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