Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Homay King is Associate Professor of Art History at Bryn Mawr College.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"With" Lost in Translation," her powerful analysis of Asia as an 'enigmatic signifier' for those who inhabit 'the West, ' Homay King stages a compelling encounter between psychoanalytic theory, especially as reformulated in the texts of Jean Laplanche, and the politics of racial, national, and ethnic representation. Identifying East and West alike as sites of internal alterity, this smart, provocative, and persuasive book resists the familiar reductiveness of multiculturalist piety in order to insist on the ongoing work of finding ourselves, no less than our others, as always already in translation."--Lee Edelman, author of "No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................ixIntroduction................................1THE ENIGMATIC SIGNIFIER.....................19THE SHANGHAI GESTURE........................44THE CHINATOWN SYNDROME......................75THE GREAT WALL..............................102THE LOST GIRLS..............................138Notes.......................................171Bibliography................................189Index.......................................201

Chapter One

THE ENIGMATIC SIGNIFIER

Jean Laplanche overs a psychoanalytic theory with a diverence. That diverence is his insistence on an alterity inscribed at the very heart of subjectivity and on the absolute primacy of concrete, particular other human beings in the implantation of this alterity and the constitution of the self. In New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, Laplanche provides a rereading of Freud's theory of primal repression and the formation of the unconscious. For Laplanche, the unconscious is a repository not of taboo desires or repressed memories but rather of signifiers that are provered to an infant subject by adults. Like a traveler with only rudimentary language skills, Laplanche's developmental allegory goes, the infant simply fails to comprehend these signs. Laplanche calls these messages "enigmatic signifiers" in adapting and expanding upon a phrase first used by Lacan in "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud." A smile, a caress, a string of babble-all of these can assume the role of enigmatic signifiers because the infant is of necessity at least partially in the dark about their meaning, intention, and affective tone. A touch may be both loving and brusque; a sigh may express contentment or irritation.

Laplanche notes that he uses "enigma" (in French, l'nigme) to translate Freud's German word Rtsel, which can also be translated as "riddle." As Laplanche notes, though, this German word refers to something more than a "simple riddle" or puzzle, which in the French he calls une devinette. Unlike a simple riddle, Laplanche tells us, an enigma "can only be proposed by someone who does not master the answer." This is why an enigma divers from a mystery (mystre); the latter presumes a theological subject who holds the answer. Unlike a riddle, to which there is a correct answer or solution if only one can reason it out, and unlike a mystery, which lacks a specific answer but does have an explanation in the theological or supernatural realm, the Laplanchean enigma has no answer at all.

These signifiers are thus doubly enigmatic. Not only does the infant lack the resources to decode them, but also they are permeated with meanings of which even their senders are unaware (Laplanche calls the messages "opaque to recipient and transmitter alike"). No one, not even the most responsible parent, can retain absolute control over the multiple possible meanings that gestures or sounds may express or over the way that a child will receive her utterances. As Laplanche writes, "The adult world is entirely infiltrated with unconscious and sexual significations to which the adults themselves do not possess the code." These signifiers produce "remainders" in the unconscious, bits that are irremediably lost in translation, and they are passed in some form from generation to generation. They are neither tied to anatomy or gender nor depend on any particular structure of kinship. Rather, they are present for any subject who has ever been addressed by an other and been cognizant of the fact of being addressed, yet unsure about the precise sense of the message. Despite the universality of this experience, these signifiers are particular because they vary according to the circumstances and individuals involved in each address. The arrival of the enigmatic signifier is a foundational moment, a primal seduction that inaugurates sexuality and desire. As John Fletcher explains, "The relation to the other and his or her encrypted desire and its possible meanings is inscribed in the very constitution of human subjectivity." This inaugural moment does not happen once and for all, and neither is its trauma fully bound once the infant subject has improved her verbal comprehension or honed her ability to read body language. Rather, these enigmatic signifiers will become what Laplanche calls "source objects" of the drive. They continue to exert a pull from the unconscious throughout the course of the subject's life, thereby perpetually inviting the subject to translate and understand them. As Cathy Caruth has suggested in her studies of trauma, Laplanchean subjectivity is constituted by and through a trauma of not knowing: enigmatic signification reflects that which "resists simple comprehension ... what it is, in traumatic events, that is not precisely grasped." The traumatic originary scenario furthermore can be repeated or retriggered throughout the subject's life at any time that she receives an ambiguous message from someone else.

THE UNFINISHED COPERNICAN REVOLUTION Once upon a Time

I turn now to a work of contemporary art that is in many ways completely unlike the others that I will discuss in this book and yet is compelling for its illustration of an archetypal scenario of enigmatic signification. Once upon a Time (2002), an extraordinary installation by the British artist Steve McQueen, creates a kind of laboratory scenario for its viewers, an enactment of the transmission of an alien, ambiguous message. The piece consists of a series of 116 still photographs that are projected in sequence onto a large wall. They form a curiously ranging collection of images, strange in their selection but familiar or even banal in content: children gathered around a globe in a classroom, an illustration of the molecular structure of water with the label "[H.sub.2]O," a man with sun-burned hands eating grapes, diagrams showing international units of measurement and their conversion factors, a woman shopping in a supermarket, a smiling family seated at a dinner table, a photograph of the United Nations building in New York, and so on. The still images are edited together with slow, lingering dissolves, and the film stock is slightly grainy and a bit muted in color. The soundtrack consists of voices speaking what seems at first to be a hodgepodge of many languages. Although one strains to understand the voices, they are rich in affective tone and rhythm and they occasionally accelerate or reach a crescendo as if expressing something of great urgency. The glow of the images and the gentle dissolves between them create a soothing sensation. The darkness of the room and the vast amount of space they take up on the wall are suggestive of the cinema. The large scale auraticizes the images, thereby creating an almost religious or cosmic effect. It is as if the viewer is a guest at a planetarium or a tourist gazing up at a giant display at a natural history museum. Although the words on the soundtrack are opaque, the pairing of silent images with nondiegetic sound evokes the conventions of documentary film-in particular,...