Seminarium Szkoła Mistrzów/ Current trends in Humanities/Masters’ Academy 18.10.2023 g.15:00
W środę 18 października 2023 o godz. 15:00 odbędzie się pierwsze w roku akademickim 2023/24 spotkanie w ramach seminarium Szkoła Mistrzów / Masters’ Academy.
Gościć będziemy profesora Michaela Cronin.
Michael Cronin is the 1776 Professor of French in Trinity College Dublin and Senior Researcher in the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation. He has taught in universities in France and Ireland and has held Visiting Research Fellowships to universities in Canada, Belgium, Peru, France and Egypt. He is a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, an elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy and the Academia Europaea, and an Officer in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques Michael Cronin is the author of 13 monographs, co-editor of seven edited collections and the author of over 150 refereed articles and book chapters. His work has been translated into 16 languages including Polish, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Korean and Modern Greek. Among his published works are Across the Lines: travel, language, translation (Cork University Press, 2000), Translation and Globalization (Routledge, 2006), Translation and Identity (Routledge, 2006), The Expanding World: towards a politics of microspection (Zero Books, 2012), Translation in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2013), Eco-Translation: translation and ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2017) and Eco-Travel: journeying in the Anthropocene (Cambridge University Press, 2022). His research interests are in the areas of eco-criticism, travel writing, translation theory and history, Franco-Irish cultural relationships and Quebec and Acadian Studies.
Topic: Deep Time, Translation, and the More-Than-Human
In advocating for “more-than-human” histories, Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor claim that the more-than-human is “not a synonym for “nature” or the “nonhuman” but, rather, a term that highlights the primacy of relations over entities (including the “human”)” (O’Gorman and Gaynor 2020, 7). The basic principle here is “co-constitution – that organisms, elements and forces cannot be considered in isolation but must always be considered in relation” (717). There is no external “nature” or “environment” with which humans interact. They are always, already, involved in the “more-than-human.” It is not a question of demonstrating that “the “natural” is really “cultural” or to reassert a biophysical reality” (724) but to recognise the full range of participants in the more-than-human world of multispecies co-existence and non-human entanglements. In Rosi Braidotti’s interpretation of Spinoza’s monism the emphasis is not on the tyranny of oneness or the narcissism of separateness often associated with monism as on the freedom of relationality, ‚[monism] implies the open-ended, inter-relational, multi-sexed and trans-species flows of becoming through interactions with multiple others’ (Braidotti 2013: 89). Being ‚matter-realist’ to use her term is to take seriously our multiple connections to natural and material worlds. If we conceive of the notion of subjectivity to include the non-human then the task for critical thinking is, as Braidotti herself admits, ‚momentous’. This involves visualizing the subject as ‚a transversal entity encompassing the human, our genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole, and to do so within an understandable language’ (82). The emphasis on relationality begs the question as to how this relationality is to be established or understood. How is a notion of transversal subjectivity to function in a more-than-human world populated by radically different forms of ontological and epistemic expression?
Translation throughout its history has been preoccupied with the question of communication across difference, how to make the mutually unintelligible, intelligible. Traditionally confined to interlingual mediation between texts, a more ambitious understanding of translation process, drawing on Peircean semiotics (Marais 2019), can see translation as involving all forms of mediation between signifying systems. Is it possible to conceive of the more-than-human world as a ‘tradosphere’ (Cronin 2017: 70-72) by which we mean the sum of all translation systems on the planet, all the ways in which information circulates between living and non-living organisms and is translated into a language or a code that can be processed or understood by the receiving entity? Is there a sense in which our habitual sense of historical time needs to be reconfigured for these new challenges?
References
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.
Cronin, Michael. 2017. Eco-Translation. Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene. London: Routledge.
Marais, Kobus. 2019. A (Bio)Semiotic Theory of Translation: The Emergence of Socio-Cultural Reality. London, Routledge.
O’Gorman, Emily and Gaynor, Andrea. 2020. “More-Than-Human Histories.” Environmental History 25 (4): 711-735.