Remember my problems with Ricœur a few months ago? Now, for my sins, I have opened Renate Lachmann’s Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism (University of Minnesota Press, 1997; tr. of 1990 German original), and before even approaching Lachmann’s text I’m tackling Wolfgang Iser’s introduction. He starts off talking about the Russian Formalists, with whom I’m reasonably familiar, and continues with the Czech Structuralists, with whom I have a nodding acquaintance, and Yury Lotman, about whom I at least know something. In short, despite the thickets of jargon and obscure references, I was not completely at sea. Then I hit this patch:
If this argument sets Lachmann apart from the aesthetics of reception launched by the Czech Structuralists, she remains equally distant from Deconstruction, in spite of the fact that the dissolution of the literary work as a self-sufficient entity makes her appear to have deconstructionist leanings. What runs as an undercurrent through all her interpretations of Russian literature comes to full fruition in her last essay, titled “Decomposition—Recomposition,” which sets out to provide a final assessment of what may be entailed in the countervailing movements to be observed in the literary text. The dually coded sign, the constant dissipation of meaning, and even the dismemberment of the patternings to which the referent texts are subjected are not to be identified as the text’s subversion of its own statements. If decomposition is disfigurement, recomposition implies working out the implicit relationships between the truncated referent texts and the manifest text. But as the referent texts do not decompose themselves, recomposition is marked by a double-sidedness: it mutilates the referent text and composes interrelationships between the fragments selected as well as between the manifest text and the cannibalized text. Thus decomposition and recomposition are interlinked by what one might call dual countering.
Such a description carries in its wake all the connotations of Martin Heidegger’s term jenes Gegenwendige, which he considered the hallmark of the artwork. Dual countering highlights the simultaneity of decomposing and recomposing, since the artwork, for Heidegger, pivots around and thus comprises what is mutually exclusive. It is this rift, as Lachmann sees it, within a composition that works through disfiguring, that makes dual countering emerge as the ineluctable condition for enabling by decomposing. With his notion of jenes Gegenwendige Heidegger stressed the rift, which he considered the origin of the artwork, whereas Lachmann emphasizes the operations through which the two basic impulses counter one another, thereby turning into a matrix of productivity. The different slant she puts on dual countering as the constitutive operation of the literary text reflects her intention to highlight intertextuality as externalized memory.
Now, I have no quarrel with things like “If decomposition is disfigurement, recomposition implies working out the implicit relationships between the truncated referent texts and the manifest text”: sure, it’s jargony, but it’s English, and if I put my mind to it I can work out more or less what’s being said. But I draw the line at jenes Gegenwendige. In the first place, it’s not English, and if you’re translating the essay, why not translate that bit? Well, OK, I can handle German, let me get out my dictionary… I worked my way up from pocket dictionaries to the huge Harper-Collins unabridged, and then turned to the internet, and I couldn’t find any entries for gegenwendig. I did find ad hoc renderings like “counterturning” and “antistrophic” and “conflictual,” but they did not help and I am deeply suspicious of them. The deutsche Wortschatz says “Es tut uns leid, Ihre Anfrage gegenwendig ist nicht in unseren gegenwartssprachlichen lexikalischen Quellen vorhanden,” but has one lonely quote: “Als nach unten gewendetes Fluggerät ist er ein Dementi aus Kunststoff, gegenwendig in sich” [Die Zeit, 02.04.1998, Nr. 15], which shows it’s been used by somebody other than Heidegger. But if someone can explain “jenes Gegenwendige” in terms that I can even vaguely understand, I will be forever grateful.
This essay by Iser explains it a bit better:
However, I suspect that in both cases, Iser—with his intense focus on reader-response criticism—is (I would say ironically, but clearly he would not) reading two much playfulness and interactivity into Heidegger’s meaning.
Thanks, that is indeed somewhat more comprehensible! I still don’t understand Iser’s determination to drag Heidegger’s (apparently untranslatable) term into an already clogged discussion.
I still don’t understand Iser’s determination to drag Heidegger’s (apparently untranslatable) term into an already clogged discussion
It is not intended to convey meaning. It is meant to show that his thought is Deep. Such flourishes are analogous to the illuminations in a mediaeval manuscript. (De gustibus …)
Renate Lachmann is apparently not “notable” enough to have an English-language wikipedia article devoted to her, and even the German-wikipedia one is little more than a stub or precis of her CV. Hath the University of Minnesota Press commissioned a translation that fell upon deaf or incurious Anglophone ears?
The odd thing about the block quote here is that I sort of infer from it that Lachmann herself does not use the Heideggerian term in her German text, even though it might have been recognized by the sort of people who read works of academic literary theory in German, but instead used some other phrasing that Iser thinks can be kinda sorta analogized to whatever Heidegger was on about. If Lachmann had used Heidegger’s turn of phrase, and it was relevant to understand that the turn of phrase had been his coinage, calling attention to it (and at least giving the German on first mention) would make more sense.
Wiki by contrast has more about an earlier Lachmann who is asserted to be “a figure of considerable importance in the history of German philology.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Lachmann
The Law man.
Yes, Lachmann and his Law have come up here more than once.
As in “fish versus bicycle marks …”
No. It’s bollocks. “Recursive looping” is not a thing where I come from. I suspect (though I certainly can’t be bothered to strain at it) they mean ‘feedback loop’ — which is a perfectly cromulent thing wrt bodies and social behaviour.
Maybe, but for me what it called to mind was skid marks, and not the kind made by tires.
Does gaming have a meaning other than “we don’t want to say gambling because it sounds bad.”
And Lionel Trilling already recognized ineluctable as as a fit symbol of pretentiousness 80 years ago in “Of This Time, Of That Place”.
gaming , n.
Similarly in any other current dictionary. “Gaming” for board gaming, computer gaming, and video gaming goes back decades (yes, that’s “gaming” by itself, not preceded by a qualifier). The paragraph by Iser uses it in the most general sense of “engaging in games”, which the OED (revised 2013) marks “now rare”, but I didn’t have a problem understanding it.
There is some challenging translation at play (yes) here:
Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre: Perspektiven literarischer Anthropologie:
The fictive and the imaginary: charting literary anthropology:
… und alles, was man weiss, nicht bloss rauschen und brausen gehört hat, lässt sich in drei Worten sagen.
Und diese drei Wörter sind sal, ber, yon und rosch. Nein, entschuldigen Sie, das sind vier Wörter. Die vier Wörter sind…
(Niemand erwartet die Philosophischen Untersuchungen!)
Und fanatische Hingabe an den Pabst….
sich gegen etwas wenden is normal German and means to turn against something/oppose something. Jenes Gegenwendige is transparently parseable as „that oppositional thing“ although Heidegger probably meant something more specific. A Gegenwende is also a compulsory figure in an ice skating program – „counterturn „, although I doubt Heidegger had that in mind.
“Als nach unten gewendetes Fluggerät ist er ein Dementi aus Kunststoff, gegenwendig in sich” [Die Zeit, 02.04.1998, Nr. 15], which shows it’s been used by somebody other than Heidegger
Looks like a conscious reference to Heidegger; Die Zeit is the kind of high-brow paper where you would expect journalists to do allusions like that and expect a good share of their readers to recognize them.
A Gegenwende is also a compulsory figure in an ice skating program – „counterturn „, although I doubt Heidegger had that in mind.
It’s just Heidegger skating across the German language, making up expressions as he goes.
A Gegenwende is also a compulsory figure in an ice skating program – „counterturn „,
So the „hermeneutischer Zirkel „ must be when the skater scrunches themselves up tight and appears to spin faster and faster. I can see I had totally misapprehended Heidegger. Sein und Zeit, quite: figure skating is all about timing. (I had an uncle who was a semi-professional back in the day/met his wife through it/they had a proud collection of cups displayed on the piano.)
My experience growing up around competitive figure skaters of all levels was that compulsory figures was officialese. The usual term among skaters and coaches was actually school figures.
Vanya: Thanks, that makes things as clear as they’re likely to get. Man, I wish people wouldn’t make up their own vocabulary just to show off…
Re “gaming,” while it indeed often is used in current AmEng as an industry-pushed euphemism for “gambling,” that doesn’t seem to be what’s going on here. I frankly don’t know if Iser wrote the introduction in English, of which he was not an L1 speaker and thus might have been idiomicity-challenged, or if he wrote it in German and there was then a perhaps sub-optimal translation. In the context of the mid-20th-century “Continental” intellectual culture that is part of Iser’s background/formation, it may be useful to think of books like Hesse’s _Das Glasperlenspiel_ and Huizinga’s _Homo Ludens_ for the sort of concept of “game” that’s in play, as it were. Or even fancy/schmancy “game theory” as developed on both sides of the Atlantic by von Neumann et seq.
As Hans says: It’s just Heidegger skating across the German language, making up expressions as he goes.
In addition to that, “jenes” doesn’t make sense without the original context, no matter what “Gegenwendige” might mean. “jenes X” is renderable as “the aforementioned X”, or “the X, which …”, depending on its actual use in the original context. It refers backwards or forwards to something. It can’t stand alone.
“jenes Gegenwendige” is not a term, but a contextual reference to a term already defined, or which is about to be defined. You wouldn’t cite “Calvin’s term aforementioned X”, but rather “Calvin’s term X”.
Contexts I can imagine:
1. Das Gegenwendige in diesem Zusammenhang ist … [50 words intervene]. Jenes Gegenwendige geht mir immer schon auf den Sack. [refers back]
2. Jenes Gegenwendige, das in diesem Zusammenhang … [50 words intervene], geht mir immer schon auf den Sack. [refers forward]
The perpetrator of “Heidegger’s term jenes Gegenwendige” is ignernt of basic German syntax.
I wondered about that!
Gothic jains may or may not have some connection with ON hinn and the current postposed definite article. I can imagine Kierkegaard making a big fuss about hint Omvendte.
But it’s also totally unmarked and cleansed of any philosophical scent to say det omvendte er [faktisk] tilfældet = ‘the converse is [actually] the case’.
I don’t know why Danish selects the neuter for this kind of abstract noun.
Heidegger’s original is probably this: “Mit dem verbergenden Verweigern soll im Wesen der Wahrheit jenes Gegenwendige genannt sein, das im Wesen der Wahrheit zwischen Lichtung und Verbergung besteht.” All I can make out of that is that it’s a forward reference, “that X which…”
OK, in English, is “that old black magic”. “That” here does not refer back or forward to something in the immediate contextual vicinity, but back to an old song about a fabled thing in the past – another country, full of dead wenches.
“Mit dem verbergenden Verweigern soll im Wesen der Wahrheit jenes Gegenwendige genannt sein, das im Wesen der Wahrheit zwischen Lichtung und Verbergung besteht.”
That’s just plain wrong. Fact is: Mit dem verweigerten Abbiegen soll in wesender Wahrheit jenes Kehrtwendige genannt sein, das in wesender Wahrheit zwischen Weiterfahren und Abbiegen besteht.
Translation: you don’t have to continue driving or take an exit. You can do a U-turn and drive back.
This kind of language always reminds me of Karl Popper’s last letter to Hans Albert (1994):
I remember having to read a text by Heidegger in school when I was 17 or 18. None of us (the teacher included) could understand it.
OK, I’ll add Heidegger to the “not worth the effort” bucket.
That’s just plain wrong. Fact is: Mit dem verweigerten Abbiegen soll in wesender Wahrheit jenes Kehrtwendige genannt sein, das in wesender Wahrheit zwischen Weiterfahren und Abbiegen besteht.
Translation: you don’t have to continue driving or take an exit. You can do a U-turn and drive back.
That made my day 🙂 Maybe you should start teaching in Freiburg*).
*) A friend of mine studied philosophy in Freiburg in the early 90s. From what I saw, the philosophy department still was infected by the Heidegger bug back then; my friend certainly caught it for a while. He gave me some Heidegger to read, and my reaction was like Popper’s (minus the “I’m too old for that nonsense” part, for which the right time hadn’t come yet for me.)
All I have to add is that Heidegger seems to have felt a constant pressing need to invent unbelievably precise terms for the exact way his brain worked, and that he raided the resources of not only Standard German but also the Swabian dialects for that purpose. Or so I’ve read. I’ve never tried to read any of his works.
It’s a bare participle used as a noun, right? Das Umgewendete? That would be neuter throughout IE where applicable.
Oh… dear.
“By ‘concealing refusal’ I mean, in the nature of truth, that against-turn-y thing that exists in the nature of truth between concealment and”… Lichtung means “clearing in a forest”, but evidently Heidegger simply ignored that and invented the same word anew to refer to shedding light on something, the opposite of concealing it.
Bingo.
@DM, and it looks like der Gegenwendige is masculine? But then it’s not a participle. I don’t know if there’s a closer equivalent in Danish. Det modsatte happens to be built with a participle as well, and as such needs a definite determiner, but maybe en modsætning?
@Lars: jenes Gegenwendige is neuter (tip: The pronoun ending -s here is cognate to the Danish neuter ending -t). gegenwendig is an adjective used as noun; the adjective is formed with the productive suffix -ig. There is a simplex wendig “versatile”, so you could translate it as “counter-versatile”.
What DM said about the use of the neuter to form nouns that express the abstract concept applies to adjectives as well as to participles; AFAIK all IE languages that have a neuter do this. (And even some that haven’t – the use of a special form of the article in Spanish in expression like lo bueno is a remnant of the lost Latin neuter.)
Just got to this, in the Translators’ Preface:
I feel for them, while also deprecating the whole idea of that kind of “playfulness.” Just say what you mean, dammit!
@Hans, I don’t know why I thought it was jener, but that was the form I looked up. Makes more sense now.
Just say what you mean, dammit!
And mean what you say !
That might be too much to ask of a scholar.