“Unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language as a whole, taking an individual work in an alien language as a point of departure–but it is a different effort altogether.”
– Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator
I want to mark Viveiros de Castro as a translator. He proposes anthropology (as philosophy) as the translation of anthropologies. Viveiros de Castro writes “good translation succeeds at allowing foreign concepts to deform and subvert the conceptual apparatus of the translator such that the intentio of the original language can be expressed through and thus transform that of the destination” (87). Translation transforms as the shaman transforms between perspectives (60): it is a transformation that expands boundaries, redefines the referent (74), enriches homonymy (74), interrogates limits, provokes excess interpretation–equivocation (90). In The Task of the Translator, Benjamin writes that “…the language of a translation can–in fact, must–let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself as its own kind of intentio” (79). Harmony, a resonance between a kinship of notes, and I echo against Cusicanqui’s resonant homonyms. Difference (différance) is necessary to translation because it is the core component of transformation. The difference in myths, bundles of relations, bundles of affects that constitute a body are understood through différance. These resonating forms of différance and personify through translation: “the form of the Other is the person” (61). Translation is transformation. The constant translation of the perspectivist is a constant transformation, an endless series that knows no original. Extended, Viveiros de Castro’s shamanist ideal, “to know is to personify” (60), becomes “to translate is to personify”.
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As I read Cannibal Metaphysics, I keep drawing Jesusa Rodriguez’s step and curl diagram and circling the point of transition/transformation at the linear-curvilinear joint. The curl, the “turn of the screw” of perspectivism (88). The joint, “finds in myth a geometrical locus where the difference between points of view is at once annulled and exacerbated… Myth, the universal point of flight of perspectivism, speaks of a state of being where bodies and names, souls and actions, egos and others are interpenetrated, immersed in one and the same presubjective and preobjective milieu” (68). The point of transition, the relief of transforming the body in the moment of “ah” as one moves from sitting to standing, is this a cannibalist location?
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In “Dead Capital” Taylor writes, “transformation here does not mean coming into presence as subject, or being in motion as a process of individuation. Rather the “phantom guides” come into being as anonymous, faceless beings through the systemic process of ninguneo, or denial of subjectivity” (7). Bom Retiro 958 metros teases Viveiro de Castro’s “to know is to personify” and instead offers that, perhaps, to capitalize is to thingify. The performance as described by Taylor offers an anthropology of capitalism’s “things,” a window into their transformational process, their myths, their kinships. Does this mean the shamans of dead capital, the “phantom guides” transform (translate) between thing and no-thing… nothing… ninguneo (7)? Andrade writes “the spirit refuses to conceive of the spirit without a body” but I wonder does a thing have a body (93)? Can it make a body? Maybe in becoming nothing the thing becomes no-thing. A different kind of resistance, a thing and a no-thing.
de Andrade, Oswald. "The Cannibalist Manifesto." Third Text 13. 1999. 92-95. Taylor, Diana. "Dead Capital: Teatro da Vertigem, Bom Retiro" . . : , 2018. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. Cannibal Metaphysics: For Post-Structural Anthropology. Trans. Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2014. Print.Benjamin, Walter. "The Task of the Translator" Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. United States: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1968. 69-82. Print.