Thingness of the Work of Art: Reflections on the Ontology of Untranslatability
Sounak Das
Publication: Volume 5 Issue 1
Abstract | The paper begins by disclosing untranslatability not as a given fact, but as a consequence resulting from a certain epistemological attitude towards the work of art. A subjectivist outlook towards art and translation encounters the work in its thingness that eventually resists its reification. Taking cue from the insights of phenomenological thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, and Ricoeur, this paper seeks to elaborate on the etymology and ontology of the thing while distinguishing it from the notions of aesthetic object and selfhood that have percolated through time since Kant. Thereafter, the approach to the thing as the hermeneutic event of projection is shown as the crucial break from subjectivity, one that leads to a fresh understanding of the literary experience in terms of becoming. This shift absolves untranslatability from the negative connotations of hindrance, and the irreducible otherness of the thing becomes instead the sole enabling condition of the infinitude of our engagement with it. Communication and conversation as modes of being liberate the thing from the delusional specter of untranslatability, shifting translation from being an act of transfer of identity towards a movement
generating difference.
Keywords | Untranslatability, Thingness, Other, Event, Ontology
Sounak Das (sounakdas.ju@gmail.com) is a PhD scholar at the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, India. His research seeks to understand the phenomenon of worldliness as implicated in the event of reading, focusing on the novels of Marcel Proust and Robert Musil. His literary interests are directed toward investigating the ontology of the work of art, especially in the context of the European Modernist novel, and how that relates to experiences that inform it.