普及贴：那些还健在的大思想家都长啥模样？

 普及贴：那些还健在的大思想家都长啥模样？
2015-04-17

    作者：九月虺


现在还健在的大思想家们究竟长什么样？在这里做一个普及贴，大家自己评价

1.齐泽克，他上镜率太高估计不会认错的



斯拉沃热·齐泽克(Slavoj Zizek)(1949.3.21~)，斯洛文尼亚卢布尔雅那大学社会和哲学高级研究员，拉康传统最重要的继承人，他长期致力于沟通拉康精神分析理论与马克思主义哲学，将精神分析、主体性、意识形态和大众文化熔于一炉，形成了极为独特的学术思想和政治立场，成为20世纪90年代以来最为耀眼的国际学术明星之一，被一些学者称为黑格尔式的思想家。现任教于伦敦大学伯贝克学院，担任伯贝克学院人文研究所所长。


齐泽克在家中是独子，十几岁时就热衷电影和书籍。他在卢布尔雅那大学的硕士毕业论文着重考察了拉康、德里达、克里斯蒂瓦以及其它欧陆哲学家的著作。尽管这篇论文才华横溢，但齐泽克还是无法获得硕士学位，直到他同意增加一个附录，对上述哲学家的著作进行充分的马克思主义批判。尽管修订了论文，学校还是认为齐泽克不适合任教，于是他只好前往法国，在拉康的女婿和知识继承人雅克－阿兰·米勒（Jacques-Alain Miller）的指导下学习，跟着米勒进入了精神分析领域。


齐泽克说，面对斯洛文尼亚的独立，他内心充满了矛盾：从理论上讲他反对独立，但又接受独立带来的政治利益。他花了很长时间平息内心的不安，然后开始竞选斯洛文尼亚四人总统委员会中的一个席位。那是1990年，这个国家第一次举行民主选举。他最后获得的是光荣的第五名——对他而言，到目前为止这是最好的结果；或许对于斯洛文尼亚来说，这也是最好的结果，因为，如果他真的当选了，他的第一个行动或许就是辞职。"我觉得占据那个位置意味着你每周都要开会，随之而来是影响和权力——不过我不稀罕，那是个一天要工作24小时的职业，承载着愚不可及的社会义务。"


2.巴迪欧 ，现在人老了，也胖了




阿兰·巴迪乌（又译为：阿兰·巴迪欧；阿兰·巴丢）（Alain Badiou，1937-），法国当代著名哲学家，受过数学和心理学的训练，关注哲学、政治及现实问题，前巴黎高等师范学校哲学系主任、教授，现任位于瑞士的欧洲研究院（EGS）教授。

第一个贡献是巴迪乌通过两次根本性转变寻找左翼政治的可能性，一次是通过毛主义而摆脱阿尔都塞无主体过程的非政治性悖论，进而把政治学奠基于拉康式的主体理论视域中；另一次是通过数学转向而摆脱毛主义所具有的不计后果的政治性。因此，巴迪乌既坚持左翼革命政治的可能性，又在西方左翼理论中保持了一份难得的冷静与沉着。这既是巴迪乌对左翼理论界作出的独特贡献，又是巴迪乌在理论上不随波逐流，勇于坚持信仰的体现。第二个贡献是巴迪乌以数学和诗为手段，以复兴真理为目标拯救摇摇欲坠的哲学，进而以一种冷静的眼光对当代的一些重大理论现实问题进行了深入的哲学思考。通过对《存在与时间》及其相关文本的研究，揭示出海德格尔哲学及其延伸出来的当代解释学、当代分析哲学和后现代一后结构主义在对当代社会重大理论和现实问题上的误判，凸显出柏拉图所开创的数学转向在当代仍然具有重大的理论和现实意义。巴迪乌告诉我们，后现代只是哲学家们误判时代特征的结果，我们仍然处于现代性的范围内，无论是哲学还是政治在当代尚未终结，并且永远不会终结。



3.阿甘本，也是七十岁的大叔了



吉奥乔·阿甘本博士(1942- )是欧洲研究生院（EGS）巴鲁赫·德·斯宾诺莎教授，意大利维罗拉大学美学教授，并于巴黎国际哲学学院教授哲学。

在攻读博士后阶段，阿甘本参与了弗莱堡由马丁·海德格尔主持的研讨会，并主持了瓦尔特·本雅明意大利译本的翻译工作。阿甘本独特的对文学理论，欧陆哲学，政治思想，宗教研究以及文学和艺术的融会贯通，使他成为我们时代最具挑战性的思想家之一。他也是巴黎一些大学的客座教授，同时于美国数所大学，如UC伯克利，洛杉矶，埃尔文，圣克鲁斯和西北大学等学校任教。

海德格尔和本雅明对阿甘本的影响十分重大。1966年，阿甘本编辑过本雅明的意大利文版的选集，他认为本雅明的思想是"让其从海德格尔思想中存活下来的解毒剂"。1981年，阿甘本在法国国家图书馆的档案馆里发现了几篇本雅明散佚的重要原稿。在本雅明自杀之前离开巴黎的时候，他将这些原稿交给了乔治·巴塔耶（Georges Bataille）。与阿甘本自己后来的研究关系最密切的是本雅明的《论历史的概念》一文。90年代，阿甘本参加了一个对德国法学家卡尔·施密特的政治著作的讨论会，而在这次讨论的影响下，阿甘本写作了《例外状态》（Stato di Eccezione）。他的近期作品也涉及到福柯的概念，对于福柯，他说道"近年来，我从他那里受益良多的学者"。



4.朗西埃，来过中国，还不错



雅克·朗西埃（Jacques Rancière，1940年－），法国哲学家。主要领域有存在学、知识论、伦理学、美学、艺术哲学、政治哲学。

前任巴黎第八大学哲学系系主任，早年即与阿尔都塞合著《读资本论》（Lirele Capital，1965）。八○年代先后以"哲学教育"、"历史性"及"诗学提问"的研究著称，90年代初开始整理其自身的理论系统，专注于美学－政治的研究上，提出"歧论"（Mésentente）。

随后在德里达（JacquesDerrida, 1930-2004）创立的国际哲学研讨会里主持美学讲座，主讲"艺术表现的美学制域"（Régime esthétiquedes arts），提出"感性分享"（Partagedu sensible）的概念，引发美学界讨论；他的论述主要涉及文学、电影与政治等哲学思考，论及概念思考、书写形式与艺术表现如何在十八、十九世纪之后产生深刻的连结，并在今天展现出我们所看到的多样互动（《美学中的不适》（Malaisedans l'esthétique, 2004）））。



5.让-吕克·南希



让-吕克·南希(Jean-Luc Nancy)，当代欧洲著名哲学家，斯特拉斯堡大学教授。他的哲学研究推进了当代法国思想，有着深远的影响力。已发表近五十部著作，很多都已被译为德文、英文和意大利文。

南希1962年毕业于巴黎索邦大学哲学系，而后在斯特拉斯堡大学担任助理教授。1973年在知名哲学家保罗·利科(Paul Ricœur)的指导下取得博士学位。1987年获国家博士学位，答辩人有德里达、利奥塔等知名哲学家。1988年开始担任斯特拉斯堡大学哲学系教授直至2002年退休。南希曾在1991年接受过心脏移植手术，这段经验对于其后的思想有着巨大的影响。



6.安东尼奥·奈格里



安东尼奥•奈格里(Antonio Negri, 1933 - ) , 意大利著名马克思主义哲学家，也是当代世界最重要的马克思主义思想家和活动家之一。早年在帕多瓦大学受教育, 毕业后在大学任教, 36岁任正教授。奈格里1956年加入意大利工人社会主义党, 20世纪60年代转向马克思主义, 是意大利工人自治运动的领导者和思想领袖。1978年到1997年间，奈格里先后在巴黎第八大学和哲学国际学院任教, 与德勒兹、福柯和德里达等人共事。

奈格里试图把马克思主义与法国后结构主义传统及斯宾诺莎哲学相结合。他与Michael Hardt合作撰写的《帝国》（Empire, 2000）一书描述了全球资本主义条件下民族国家主权形式的衰落和一种新的全球帝国的出现，这本书在全球范围内引发了巨大的争论，齐泽克称这本书旨在为21世纪重写《共产党宣言》。在《帝国》之后，奈格里又与哈特合作出版了三部曲的后两部《诸众》（Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire，2004）和《大同世界》 （Commonwealth, 2011）。奈格里其他主要著作有: The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty - first Century (1989) ，Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse ( 1991 ) ，The Savage Anomaly: the Power of Spinozaps Metaphysics and Politics ( 2000 ) ，Time for Revolution (2005) 等。



7.贝尔纳·斯蒂格勒



贝尔纳·斯蒂格勒（英语：Bernard stiegler，1952年4月1日－），法国哲学家，解构主义大师德里达的得意门生。早年曾因持械行劫而入狱，后来在狱中自学哲学，并得到德里达的赏识。1992年在德里达指导下于社会科学高级研究院获博士学位，其博士论文《技术与时间》亦同时出版。于2006年开始担任蓬皮杜中心文化发展部主任。



8.茱蒂丝·巴特勒



茱蒂丝．巴特勒，国际当红的后结构女性主义者、酷儿理论学者、哲学家。犹太人，现任美国加州大学柏克莱分校（UC Berkeley）比较文学系主任、修辞学与比较文学教授。除了她的哲学思想，片中也描述她的童年，如何在一个饱受性别规范暴力的犹太家庭中成长。事实上，《性别麻烦》中的理论，正是她从小时候家庭成员的互动中观察而来。片中呈现巴特勒幽默风趣的谈吐，以及过人的机智与魅力。


9.茱莉亚·克里斯蒂娃



茱莉亚·克里斯蒂娃（ Julia Kristeva 1941年6月24日 ），法国思想家、精神分析学家、哲学家、文学批评家、心理分析学家、女性主义者。1969年，克利斯蒂娃出版其第一本书《Semeiotikè（符号学）》之后，在当今的国际批评分析、文化理论和女性主义领域开始产生影响。她著述广泛，包括书籍、随笔和建筑意义出版物的序言（译注一），其中包括有关互文性、符号学和屈辱性的见解，覆盖语言学、文学理论及批评、精神分析、传记及自传、政治和文学分析、艺术及艺术史。她的著作在后结构主义思想中也有重要地位。



10.南希·弗雷泽



南茜·弗雷泽（Nancy Fraser，1947——），美国社会研究新学院哲学与政治学系（Departments of Philosophy and Politics New School for Social Research）教授，是当代著名的政治哲学家、批判理论在美国被公认的主要代表。弗雷泽与目前德国法兰克福研究所所长霍耐特同属西方"1968"年一代人，也是法兰克福学派在德国和美国两大支脉在哲学上的主要代表。她的哲学思想和政治思想具有激进主义传统，其硕士博士均就读于具有左翼传统的纽约城市大学。弗雷泽也是美国新马克思主义女性主义的代表人物之一。



11.保罗·维利里奥



保罗·维利里奥(Paul Viritio,1932—)是1970年代以降最富原创力的法国哲学家之一,同时也是著名的城市建筑家、随笔作家。1963年,维利里奥与建筑师克罗德·巴朗(Claude Parent)成立"建筑原则"(Architec-ture Principe)团体,并发行同名刊物,宣扬建筑的"倾斜功能"(水平与直角被彻底弃绝),曾先后完成两栋建筑作品。1973年起执教于巴黎建筑专业学校(ESA),直到1999年退休。维利里奥的哲学著作围绕着一系列以科技、速度、城市、虚拟、事件、意外及失序为核心的概念群,代表作有《领土的不安》《速度与政治》《消失的美学》《战争与电影》《解放的速度》《事件的风景》等。



12.巴里巴尔



艾蒂安·巴里巴尔是当今法国著名的马克思主义哲学家，曾是法国马克思主义理论代表阿尔都塞的学生和最重要的合作者。本书对欧洲哲学史传统中重要的唯物主义代表斯宾诺莎的几大基础文本做了细致的解读，力图呈现出斯宾诺莎与现代革命思想之间的深刻联系，特别是提供了阿尔都塞学派自身的知识密码，既是阿尔都塞学派政治哲学史研究的代表作品，也开创了当代左翼思想家解读斯宾诺莎的先河。



13.皮耶尔·马舍雷



皮埃尔•马舍雷（1938— ）西方著名马克思主义理论家阿尔都塞的弟子,"结构主义的马克思主义"一派的中坚力量，其代表作有《文学生产理论》及《论作为一种观念形式的文学》等，对现代文学理论的研究与发展都起到了重要作用。



14.让-吕克·马里翁（马礼荣）



让-吕克·马里翁(Jean-Luc Marion)，1946年出生于法国，曾先后就学于巴黎第十大学和巴黎高师，现在索邦大学和芝加哥大学任教。

马里翁是当代法国最知名的哲学家之一，是法国现象学运动第三代的代表人物，也是现象学的神学转向的主要推动者。



15.哈贝马斯，90多岁的老人家了，看他能不能打破列维-施特劳斯的记录



尤尔根·哈贝马斯（Jürgen Habermas，1929年6月18日—），是德国当代最重要的哲学家之一。历任海德堡大学教授、法兰克福大学教授、法兰克福大学社会研究所所长以及德国马普协会生活世界研究所所长。1994年荣休。他同时也是西方马克思主义中法兰克福学派第二代的中坚人物。

由于思想庞杂而深刻，体系宏大而完备，哈贝马斯被公认是"当代最有影响力的思想家"，威尔比把他称作"当代的黑格尔"和" 后工业革命的最伟大的哲学家。" ，在西方学术界占有举足轻重的地位。



16.彼得·斯洛特戴克



彼得·斯洛特戴克是当今欧洲哲学中最有意思，多产且极富争议性的思想家之一。他在哲学、历史学和文学领域颇有建树，而起初他只是一个自由作家，近十年里，他成为了德国卡尔斯鲁厄艺术设计大学的教授，1992年以来，他就在那里他获得了哲学和媒体理论的教椅。1983年，因为他的《犬儒理性批判》（Kritik der zynischen Vernunft）而使得他名声大噪，1988年这本书被翻译成英文。自那时起，他成为了德国乃至欧洲思想界举足轻重的思想家，尤其在法国和西班牙为甚。他在德国电视二台（Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen）的节目"玻璃房：哲学季"中获得了良好的媒体形象。他同时还是著名的报纸专栏作家。



17.霍奈特，法兰克福学派新掌门



德国法兰克福大学社会研究所所长阿克瑟尔·霍奈特(Axel Honneth, 1949-  )是社会批判理论的新一代继承人。他是战后年青一代的德国社会哲学家，他的重要贡献是发展了法兰克福学派的社会批判理论，以对当代社会政治、经济、文化及社会制度的重新考察研究为基础，提出了以揭示"社会承认"和"理性病理"为核心的社会政治哲学，集中分析当代社会的"物化"(Verdinglichung)问题，重新诠释黑格尔哲学，吸收美国以米德为代表的象征论社会学的成果，创建了符合当代社会实际状况的新型"承认哲学"(Philosophie der Anerkennung)。

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提姆·克莱恩：翻译哲学

提姆·克莱恩：翻译哲学

2015-04-09 13:44

 　　这本非同寻常的巨著收录了很多语言的哲学术语，是法国 哲学家芭芭拉·卡桑(Barbara Cassin)2004年首次出版的《欧洲各国哲学术语：无法翻译的词汇辞典》(Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles)的英译本。如果原书是个悖论的话，那么该英译本就是双重的悖论了：不仅是无法翻译的词汇辞典而且是对该辞典的翻译。编辑们 不是对自相矛盾的自我引用观念感到绝望，反而对此乐此不疲。事实上，将"无法翻译的"这个词放在英文标题的开头就不无自豪地比法语版原著更强有力地确认这 个悖论，它成为英文版编辑艾米丽·阿普特(Emily Apter)所说的"整个工程的组织原则"。

　　阿普特在序言中显然没有反讽味道地评论说"只是在我们认识到直接了当地将法语版转变成英语版根本行不通的时候，我们的翻译任务才变得清晰了。" 当然，她是对的：翻译从来不是开门见山的转换。难怪翻译成为哲学探索的肥沃土壤。就像哲学中的很多东西一样，将翻译(当然也包括相关的意义概念)理论化始 终徘徊在两个并不讨人喜欢的极端之间。一个极端是，翻译被视为意义的字面对等;另一个极端则认为翻译根本不可能。正如雅各·德里达(Jacques Derrida)所说，"在某种意义上，没有东西是不可译的;但在另一个意义上，任何东西都是不可译的。我总是能很容易地坚持这两个夸张的观点，它们在本 质上一模一样，总能相互翻译。"

　　德里达的两个极端或者夸张说法在本质上一模一样的要点等于说：认为翻译不可能(第二个极端)的唯一理由是它必然要求意义的字面对等(第一个极 端)，但这显然是不可能的。第一个极端(编辑称为"映射或同构"的翻译概念)不可能的理由是对等可以转变，而翻译不可以。换句话说，如果翻译要求意义对 等，那么如果甲翻译乙，乙翻译丙，那么甲和丙在意义上就是对等的。但是只要稍微想一想就明白这是不对的：英语"城堡"(castle)可以被译成德语"城 堡"(Schloss)，德语城堡可以被译成法语"城堡"(château)，但是法国著名水上城堡舍农索城堡(the Château de Chenonceau)在任何人的书中都不是城堡。翻译不是意义对等。所以我们在显示没有意义对等时并没有显示翻译是不可能的。德里达说的没错。

　　不过，当我们拒绝翻译的映射概念时，不夸大其辞很重要。多亏了算法的力量和数据挖掘的强大威力，谷歌翻译确实起作用，其翻译质量越来越好。谷歌 翻译并没有提供意义的对等，但它的确给出了逐字逐句的机械性翻译。当然，谷歌翻译在翻译诗歌或者翻译这本无法翻译的哲学术语时注定走不了多远。本书中无法 翻译的术语被定义为"在从一种语言转变为另一种语言时留下不翻译的词汇"或"通常被误译或重译"的词汇。如果依据这个标准，正如莱米·布拉格( Rémi Brague)在精彩的词条"欧洲"中所说，"哲学"(Philosophy)这个词本身"就是优秀的无法翻译的术语"，它在被翻译成希腊语之外的语言时 就保留不译。只有荷兰语创造了一个词"哲学"(Wijsbegeerte)。在词源学上，它是希腊语"哲学"(philosophia)的仿译(事实上， 匈牙利人也创造了一个词(bölcselet)，不过基本内容仍然保持不变)。

　　《辞典》中的很多其他词语与此类似。一个著名的例子是海德格尔的术语"此在"(Dasein)，在德语里的意思是存在，但是其精确的哲学意思是 没完没了的争论的话题，因此很少被翻译出来(除了笨拙地用连字符重构成"Being-there")。丹麦人对他们的词汇" hygge"的不可译性感到自豪，这个词表达了一种令人宾至如归的舒适氛围，可以用来描述一个地方或者社交活动，比如你在和家人或朋友共处的时间，在温暖 的房间享受美味佳肴。这里我已经告诉你它的意思了。海德格尔的此在与此类似，只不过需要更长的话来解释而已。

　　翻译从来不是开门见山的转换，难怪它成为哲学探索的肥沃土壤。

　　其他哲学词汇通过新词创造、误译或者重译的过程而获得了意义。就哲学而言，有时候用太多的细节考虑这个过程将产生虚假的问题。英语"意识" (Consciousness)是法语词汇"良心"(conscience)(意大利语是coscienza，西班牙语是conciencia)。虽然 "意识"和"良心"在词源学上有关系，但是在英语中它们已经表达完全不同的概念多个世纪了，这些概念在其他语言里也是用不同的词表达的。哲学家艾蒂安·巴 里巴尔(Étienne Balibar)的词条"意识"就探讨了意识和良心之间的概念和历史联系;但是对英语读者来说，这个麻烦是没有必要的假象，只因为原词条是法语词汇 (conscience)而已。

　　这个例子说明了《辞典》不能真的被用来作为通常意义上的哲学辞典，如指导学生用辞典帮助他们弄清楚复杂的概念。其中有些内容是不准确的。在有关 "认识论"的词条中，凯瑟琳·舍瓦莱(Catherine Chevalley)做出了非常怪异的评论，"在法语中谈论贝叶斯主义Bayesianism(有关概率的认知理论，源于18世纪英国牧师托马斯·贝叶斯 (Thomas Bayes))的进口或者对概率概念的不同解释仍然非常困难。"如果舍瓦莱查阅过让·皮埃尔·克莱罗(Jean-Pierre Cléro)关于"概率"的词条，她就会发现那里有关于贝叶斯和对概率的不同解释的详细讨论(当然，最初是法语写的)。在这场辩论中的核心问题是对一个事 件的概率的讨论是有助于赋予事件本身一种性质(如硬币落地正面朝上的概率是50%)还是它只不过表现出了某种程度的主观确定性或无知(我50%地相信硬币 落地时正面朝上)。第一种概率是客观性的;第二种概率则是主观性的。这种区分并非鸡毛蒜皮的小事，有人认为它与区别对待量子力学作为现实的不可简化特征的 概率性质还是将其视为体现我们无知(如在所谓的'隐蔽变量'理论)有关。克莱罗区分了客观解释和主观解释，称前者是"概率"(probability)， 称后者是"偶然性"(chance)。不幸的是，当今英美哲学界的每个人都使用"chance"这个词指代客观概率，用没有修饰语的 "probability"指主观的或客观的概率(克莱罗没有提及1975年之后出版的任何一部著作)。

　　最好的文章---其中有杰出的哲学史家布拉格或者艾伦·利比亚(Alain de Libera)的文章，它们梳理了欧洲语言之间意义和词源学之间的复杂关系。但是词条的选择和相对篇幅大小十分怪异。我们看到有"demos"这个词条却 没有"democracy";而差别很大的"描述"(description)和"描绘"(depiction)却是同一个词条;词条"idea"占了半 页，词条"Imagination"也是如此。而"Event"只占了一页的四分之一，但"Ereignis"(海德格尔的术语)则占了一页半。 "Perception"和"Apperception"(莱布尼茨的术语，意思是自我意识)组成一对，作者米歇尔·菲尚(Michel Fichant)把这个话题的历史追溯到19世纪中期的费希特(Fichte)。历史材料非常有价值，但是这个词条应该被称为"从莱布尼茨到费希特的感知 (Perception)和自我意识(Apperception)。

　　如果这是一本辞典，就更接近皮埃尔·培尔(Pierre Bayle)(1697)或者约翰逊博士(Dr Johnson (1755)的著作。在1300页的篇幅中，它向读者呈现了对哲学中的某些核心概念及其历史和词源学的认识。许多词条让人大开眼界，但本书最令人痴迷的地 方是透过哲学词汇的剖析而揭示出的对欧洲文化片段的片面认知。布拉格注意到用欧洲世俗语言进行哲学探索开始于13世纪西班牙哲学家拉曼·卢尔(Ramon Llull)用加泰罗尼亚语Catalan写作。但是经过了一段时间后哲学话语才拥有了民族身份，这归功于拉丁语和法语扮演的国际思想交流工具的作用。最 伟大的德国哲学家莱布尼茨从来没有使用德语撰写哲学著作。到了海德格尔宣称"只有我们德语才拥有与希腊语匹敌的深刻和创造性哲学特征"，情况才发生变化。 虽然本书对海德格尔的关注很突出，但编辑们肯定有所顾虑。因为《欧洲各国哲学术语：无法翻译的词汇辞典》毕竟是法国哲学家眼中对哲学的赞美。编辑对此毫不 隐讳：阿普特说本书是"对英美分析哲学传统的直接挑战，英国思想的霸权受到策略性地遏制。"这种"被扭曲的着重点分配"被描述为"法语原作论述的存在理由 (raison d'être)的重要角色。"

　　当然，英语哲学(与英国思想不同)的缺失非常惹眼。所谓的"普通语言"哲学家是奥斯汀(J. L. Austin)、斯坦利·卡维尔(Stanley Cavell)、吉尔伯特·赖尔(Gilbert Ryle)、维特根斯坦(Wittgenstein)等人，此外很少有其他人。布拉格的长词条"欧洲"在谈及英国的时候只用了三句话。但是无论喜欢与否， 英美分析哲学在英国美国澳大利亚和欧洲大陆很多地方的哲学系占支配地位是不争的事实，无论喜欢与否，卡桑的书体现的法国哲学研究途径在全世界处于衰落之 中。看待《辞典》的方法之一是将其视为对法语作为"支配性哲学语言"的衰落的延长版的挽歌，其思想背景是英语已经成为阿普特所说的"唯一揭示普遍性知识的 语言"。

　　任何一个熟悉20世纪欧洲哲学演变过程和笼统的20世纪历史演变的人都明白这种情况是如何发生的，因而明白《辞典》的原版为什么被描述为对法国的"意外打击"。人们担忧的不是其法国中心主义特征，而是其偏狭的地方主义可能误导那些不了解世界其他地方的人。

　　《欧洲各国哲学术语：无法翻译的词汇辞典》毕竟是法国哲学家眼中对哲学的赞美。

　　但是，在著名哲学家阿兰·巴迪乌(Alain Badiou)有关把法语作为哲学语言进行了引人注目的赞歌的"法语"词条中，法国中心主义被置于自我嘲弄的高度。显然像编辑一样对英语的语言帝国主义感 到沮丧，这位哲学家直言不讳地宣称"法国哲学中的主要创造性人物如笛卡尔、柏格森、萨特、德勒兹(Deleuze)、拉康等都认为，用本族语写作的权利是 语言自由和权利。"考虑到没有人阻止任何人用母语写作的事实，我们很难明白宣称这种自由权利的意义何在。当然，当今全世界的学者尤其是在某些学科领域都面 临一种用英语写作的压力。在自然科学界，如果不用英语写作要取得成功几乎是不可能的。但是这个事实与柏格森等人宣称的语言自由权利没有任何关系，无论是否 令人感到遗憾，巴迪乌也没有明确讨论这个事实。

　　但是，情况变得更糟糕了。巴迪乌宣称哲学语言法语是"女性和工人阶级的语言而非科学家的语言。"在法语中，哲学是"激烈辩论性的，忽略共识，仍 然反对学界人士对公众讲话而不是对同行讲话。""用法语写成的哲学具有政治性"的事实应该是语言事实："从笛卡尔到现在的法语使用中的潜在普遍主义完全依 靠这样一种信念：语言的本质在于其句法。"正如乔姆斯基所说，语言的本质或许在于句法，但是这并非法语所独有，而且与政治自由没有任何关系。这种将语言与 观念扯在一起的怪异做法达到了高潮，当巴迪乌宣称笛卡尔将其《哲学原理》献给波西米亚的伊丽莎白公主(Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia)是"现实中的基本民主意图，将哲学话语转向讨论和诱惑，转向爱神维纳斯(Venus)而不是智慧女神密涅瓦(Minerva)，尽可能远 离科学或学术堑壕。"

　　伏尔泰和拉康的法语哲学著作之间到底发生了什么变化，这是很好的问题，但无论巴迪乌还是《辞典》的其他任何人都没有深入探讨。阿普特在序言中或 许带着某种尴尬地详细讨论了巴迪乌的词条。她说，"严格说来，民族本体论对巴迪乌来说是一种诅咒。"这个"严格说来"肯定包含了更多信息，尤其是考虑到法 语"接近成为巴迪乌的属性的亚当的语言。"这意味着什么呢?阿普特论述到"它让位于逻辑形式主义、公理、规则、普遍原则。对巴迪乌来说，最重要的是法语有 助于表达的政治化，通过替换操作和提出紧迫问题的艺术剥夺谓语的地位。"

　　当然，巴迪乌本人是提出紧迫问题的大师。但是他有关法语的言论让人想起维特根斯坦有关法国政客的笑话，这个政客"写到词汇按照人们思考的顺序写 出来是法语的特征。"事实上，因为巴迪乌本人曾写过一本论述维特根斯坦的书，所以这就更加值得玩味。或许它是故意为之;巴迪乌是在嘲笑在哲学写作中竭力追 求简洁和清晰的"盎格鲁撒克逊人"，嘲弄法语的"晦涩难解"吗?是关于"盎格鲁撒克逊人"和"英国思想霸权"的玩笑吗?我们不知道。正如芭芭拉·卡桑本人 注意到，"没有什么比翻译俏皮话更困难的了。"

　　作者简介：

　　提姆·克莱恩(Tim Crane)，剑桥大学哲学教授，《泰晤士报文学副刊》哲学编辑。

　　本文评论的书《欧洲各国哲学术语：无法翻译的词汇辞典》普林斯顿大学出版社

　　Barbara Cassin, editor

　　DICTIONARY OF UNTRANSLATABLES

　　A philosophical lexicon

　　Translated by Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein and Michael Syrotinski

　　Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood

　　1,297pp. Princeton University Press. £44.95 (US $65).

　　978 0 691 13870 1

　　译自：The philosophy of translation by TIM CRANE

　　http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1512220.ece

The philosophy of translation

TIM CRANE

Barbara Cassin, editor
DICTIONARY OF UNTRANSLATABLES
A philosophical lexicon
Translated by Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein and Michael Syrotinski
Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood
1,297pp. Princeton University Press. £44.95 (US $65).
978 0 691 13870 1

Published: 28 January 2015

"Pears and Grapes on a Table, Céret" by Juan Gris, 1913 Photograph: Promsied gift from the Leonard A. Lauder cubist collection

We hope you enjoy this free piece from the TLS, which is available every Thursday in print and via the TLS app. This week's issue also features Thomas Pynchon adapted for the big screen, a necessary reappraisal of Mo Yan, a new poem by John Ashbery, Lisa Hilton's Good Queen Bess – and much more.

This extraordinary book, a huge dictionary of philosophical terms from many languages, is a translation of Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, originally published in 2004, the brainchild of the French philosopher Barbara Cassin. If the original project was paradoxical, then the present version is doubly so: not just a dictionary of untranslatable words, but a translation of that dictionary. Rather than despair at the self-undermining self-referentiality of the whole idea, the editors rejoice in it. Indeed, moving the word "untranslatable" to the beginning of the English title proudly asserts the paradox even more forcefully than the original French title does, and forms what the English-language editor Emily Apter calls "an organising principle of the entire project".

In her preface, Apter comments (apparently without irony) that "the extent of our translation task became clear only when we realised that a straightforward conversion of the French edition into English simply would not work". She is right, of course: translation is almost never a straightforward conversion. This is why it is such a fertile subject for philosophy. Like so much in philosophy, theorizing about translation (and, of course, about the related concept of meaning) lurches between two unappealing extremes. At one extreme, translation is conceived of in terms of literal identity of meaning; at the other, it is simply impossible. As Jacques Derrida put it: "In a sense, nothing is untranslatable; but in another sense, everything is untranslatable . . . it is easy for me always to hold firm between these two hyperboles which are fundamentally the same, and always translate each other".

Derrida's point that the two extremes or hyperboles are "fundamentally the same" amounts to this: the only reason for thinking that translation is impossible (the second extreme) is that it must require literal identity of meaning (the first extreme), and this is clearly impossible. One reason why the first extreme (which the editors call the "mapping or isomorphic" conception of translation) is impossible is that identity is transitive, and translation isn't. In other words, if translation requires identity of meaning, then if A translates B and B translates C, then A and C are identical in meaning. A moment's reflection shows this cannot be right: "castle" can be translated as Schloss, and "Schloss" as château, but the Château de Chenonceau is not a castle in anyone's book. Translation is not identity of meaning. So we do not show that translation is impossible by showing that there is no identity of meaning. Derrida was right.

However, it is important not to exaggerate when we reject the mapping conception of translation. Google Translate does work, and it is getting better every day thanks to the strength of its algorithms and the sheer brute force of its data-mining. It does not provide identities of meaning, but it does give word-by-word translations, and it does this mechanically. Google Translate will not get very far with translating a poem, of course, or with the untranslatables of this dictionary. An untranslatable is defined here as either "a term that is left untranslated as it is transferred from language to language", or one that is "typically subject to mistranslation and retranslation". By these criteria, as Rémi Brague points out in his excellent entry on "Europe", the word "philosophy" itself is "the untranslatable par excellence . . . . 'Philosophy' itself remained transcribed rather than translated into languages other than Greek. Only the Dutch language coined a word Wijsbegeerte which was a calque of the etymology of philosophia" (actually, Hungarian invented one too – bölcselet – but the basic point remains).

Many other words in the Dictionary are like this. A famous example is Heidegger's Dasein, which in ordinary German means existence, but whose precise philosophical meaning is the subject of endless debate, and so is rarely translated (except by clunky hyphenated constructions such as "Being-there"). The Danish are proud of the untranslatability of their word hygge – a word conveying an atmosphere of welcoming cosiness, applied to a place or social event, as when you spend time with friends and family, eating well in a warm room. There: I've told you what it means. Heidegger's Dasein is like that; it will just take a bit longer to explain.

Translation is almost never a straightforward conversion. This is why it is such a fertile subject for philosophy

Other philosophical words have gained their meanings through a creative process of neologism, mistranslation and retranslation. Sometimes considering this process in too much detail can give rise to spurious questions, as far as philosophy is concerned. "Consciousness" is conscience in French (coscienza in Italian, conciencia in Spanish), and these French, Spanish and Italian words can also be translated into the English "conscience". Although "consciousness" and "conscience" are etymologically related, they have for centuries expressed completely different concepts in English, and these concepts are expressed by different words in other languages. Étienne Balibar's entry on "consciousness" struggles with the conceptual and historical connections between consciousness and conscience; but for the English reader, the struggle is an unnecessary artefact of the original entry's being about the French word conscience.

This example illustrates that the Dictionary cannot really be used as a dictionary of philosophy in the usual way – something to which you might direct students, for example, to help them get clear accounts of complex concepts. And some of its content is just inaccurate. In an entry on "Epistemology", Catherine Chevalley makes the odd comment that "it remains difficult in French to discuss the import of Bayesianism [a dominant contemporary probability-based theory of knowledge, deriving from the eighteenth-century English cleric Thomas Bayes], or different interpretations of the notion of probability". If Chevalley had consulted Jean-Pierre Cléro's entry on "Chance/Probability", she would have found there an extensive discussion of both Bayes and different interpretations of probability (written originally in French, of course). One central question in this debate is whether talk about the probability of an event is attributing a property to the event itself (for example, the probability of a coin landing heads is 50 per cent) or whether it is just an expression of a degree of subjective certainty or ignorance (I am 50 per cent sure that it will land heads). The first is probability in the objective sense; the second, the subjective sense. This distinction is not a trivial one: some see it as connected to the distinction between treating the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics (say) as an irreducible feature of reality, and treating it as an expression of our ignorance (as in the so-called "hidden variable" theories). Cléro distinguishes between objective and subjective interpretations, calling the first "probability" and the second "chance". Unfortunately, everyone in contemporary anglophone philosophy uses the word "chance" for objective probability, and the unqualified "probability" for both the subjective and the objective (Cléro does not refer to a single work published after 1975).

The best articles – among them those by historians of philosophy of the calibre of Brague or Alain de Libera – tease out the complex relations of meaning and etymology across the languages of Europe. But the choice and relative sizes of entries are eccentric. We have "demos" but not "democracy"; the very different ideas of "description" and "depiction" get a shared entry; "idea" gets half a page, "Imagination" the same. "Event" gets a quarter of a page, but "Ereignis" (as used by Heidegger) gets a page and a half. "Perception" is paired with "Apperception" (Leibniz's word for self-consciousness), and the author Michel Fichant takes the history of the subject only as far as Fichte in the mid-nineteenth century. The historical material is valuable, but the entry should have been called "Perception and Apperception from Leibniz to Fichte".

If this is a dictionary, it is closer to those of Pierre Bayle (1697) or Dr Johnson (1755). In 1,300 pages it presents a certain conception of some central terms from philosophy and their history and etymology. Many of the entries are illuminating, but what is most fascinating about the book is its partial vision of a fragment of European culture, through the dissection of its philosophical vocabulary. Brague observes that philosophizing in the vernacular in Europe began with Ramon Llull writing in Catalan in the thirteenth century. But it took some time for national identities to impose themselves on philosophical discourse, because of the international intellectual role of Latin, and then of French. Leibniz, one of the greatest German philosophers, wrote no philosophical works in German. Things had changed by the time Heidegger pronounced that "only our German language has a deep and creative philosophical character to compare with the Greek".

Despite the amount of attention paid to Heidegger in this book, the editors would surely demur. For the Dictionary of Untranslatables is, more than anything, a loving celebration of philosophy as conceived by French philosophers. The editors are explicit about this: Apter says that the book is "a direct challenge to the preeminence of Anglo-analytic philosophical traditions . . . the imperium of English [sic] thought was strategically curtailed". This "skewed distribution of emphasis" is described as "clearly an important part of the polemical raison d'être of the French original".

Certainly, English-language philosophy (not the same as "English thought"!) is conspicuously absent. The so-called "ordinary language" philosophers are here (J. L. Austin, Stanley Cavell, Gilbert Ryle, Wittgenstein) but very little else. Brague's long entry on "Europe" devotes only three sentences to English. But like it or not, "Anglo-analytic" philosophy dominates university departments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australasia and many parts of Continental Europe; and like it or not, the French approach embodied in Cassin's book is on the decline worldwide. One way to see the Dictionary, then, is as an extended lament for the decline of French as a "preeminent language of philosophy", in an intellectual context where English has become what Apter calls "the singular language of universal knowledge".

Anyone familiar with how philosophy in Europe developed in the twentieth century, and with twentieth-century history more generally, will understand something of how this came about, and also therefore why the original edition of the Dictionary has been described as "a surprise hit" in France. The worry is not so much that it is Francocentric, but that its provincialism may mislead those who do not know anything about what the rest of the world thinks.

This Dictionary is, more than anything, a loving celebration of philosophy as conceived by French philosophers

The Francocentrism is brought to self-parodic heights, though, in Alain Badiou's entry on "French", a remarkable paean to the French language as a language of philosophy. Obviously as frustrated as the editors are by the linguistic imperialism of English, he remarks plaintively that "the major creative figures in philosophy in French, Descartes, Bergson, Sartre, Deleuze, and Lacan, all claimed the right to write in their native language, in sum, the right to freedom of language". It's hard to know what claiming this right consisted in, given that no one was stopping any of these people from writing in their native language. Today, of course, there is pressure on scholars worldwide, in a huge number of academic fields, to write in English. In the natural sciences, it is simply impossible to succeed without writing in English. But this fact – regrettable or not, and not explicitly discussed by Badiou – has nothing to do with whether Bergson et al were claiming a right to freedom of language.

But it gets worse. Badiou claims that philosophical French is "a language of women and the working class rather than of scientists". Philosophy in French is "violently polemical . . . ignoring consensus . . . still opposed to the academy it speaks (politically) to the public and not to colleagues". The fact that "philosophy in French is political" is supposed to be a fact about the language itself: "the latent universalism of any use of French, from Descartes to the present, rests entirely on the belief that the essence of language is syntax". The essence of language may be syntax, as Chomsky has argued, but this is not specific to French, and has nothing to do with political freedom. This bizarre association of ideas reaches its climax in Badiou's claim that Descartes's dedication of his Principles of Philosophy to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia "is in reality a basic democratic intention that turns philosophical discourse towards discussion and seduction, towards Venus rather than Minerva, moving it as far as possible away from academic or scientific entrenchment".

It's a good question what happened to French philosophical prose between Voltaire and Lacan, but it is not one that is addressed by Badiou, or by anyone else in this Dictionary of Untranslatables. In her preface, Apter discusses Badiou's entry at length, perhaps with a little embarrassment. "National ontology", she says, is "strictly speaking, anathema to Badiou". A lot must be contained in that "strictly speaking", especially given that French is "close to being an Adamic language in Badiou's ascription". What can this possibly mean? Apter struggles: "it lends itself to logical formalism, axioms, maxims and universal principles. Above all, for Badiou, the French language is conducive to the politicisation of expression, unseating predicates through the play of substitutions and the art of the imperious question".

Certainly, Badiou himself is the master of the imperious question. But his remarks about the French language bring to mind Wittgenstein's joke about the French politician who "wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them". In fact, this is all the more odd because Badiou himself has written a book on Wittgenstein. So perhaps it is deliberate; could Badiou be making fun of those "Anglo-Saxons" who strive for simplicity and clarity in their philosophical prose and mock the "obscurantism" of the French? Is the joke on the Anglo-Saxons and the "imperium of English thought"? It's hard to tell. As Barbara Cassin herself observes, "nothing is harder than to translate a witticism".

Tim Crane is Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and the Philosophy editor of the TLS.

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Robert Cremins on Dublin: The Making of a Capital City

Robert Cremins on Dublin: The Making of a Capital City

Whose Dublin?

April 7th, 2015 reset - +

I THOUGHT I KNEW the history of my hometown, Dublin, and then I read David Dickson's wise and stylish book. The experience has been akin to learning the ennobling backstory of someone you have taken for granted as an eccentric character. In another great (albeit much shorter) book about the city, Dublin: A Portrait (1967), written by V.S. Pritchett, a sympathetic Englishman long acquainted with the town, we come face to face with that character:

If I were to write an account of my education, the city of Dublin would have to appear as one of my schoolmasters, a shabby, taunting, careless, half-laughing reactionary. His subject? History, of course.

The schoolmaster's own history began well over a millennium ago, on the banks of the River Liffey. "This first chapter," Dickson writes, "is still very opaque, but what is clear is that there were several nodes of settlement […] and, as [fellow historian] Howard Clarke has shown, such duality is not untypical of many embryonic towns in the Europe of the Dark Ages."

What is notable about Dublin is that this duality, as Dickson subtly instructs us, remains the key to the city's identity, from its muddy beginnings to its world-stage present. It's there in the very signs pointing you toward the place. The name "Dublin" derives from the Irish Dubh Linn — the dark pool — beside which one of those original nodes of settlement formed. But the Irish you'll see on the bilingual road signs is Baile Átha Cliath: the town of the ford of the hurdles, another riverside node.

The adoption of Baile Átha Cliath as the city's official Irish name probably dates back to the Gaelic Revival of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when, as the struggle for Irish independence gained steam, Dublin was "a capital in waiting." Dickson mentions municipal government's "partial adoption c.1905 of bilingualism on the city's letterheads and on new street wall-plaques." Áth Cliath is arguably the older name, and it also has better indigenous credentials, as Dubh Linn was the phrase taken up and modified by the Viking and Anglo-Norman colonizers: Dyflinn, Dubline, Dublin.

The new lords of Ireland used the burgeoning town as "the bridgehead and primary conduit through which [they] sought to influence or control much or all of the island." These projects of dominance were often accompanied by policies of ethnic and religious exclusion. The names of ancient suburbs memorialize this intermittent apartheid: Oxmantown for descendants of the Vikings, Irishtown for the Gaels.

But, thankfully, something in human nature, or in that dark Liffey water, meant that any attempt to impose cultural "purity" on Dublin was doomed to fail. "[I]ts population from the earliest Norse era," Dickson writes, "was a mix, a genetic and cultural melting-pot, to a greater extent than anywhere else on the island." In the course of 563 narrative pages, he provides many vivid examples of this fruitful and sometimes unexpected blending. Reaching beyond the usual literary suspects (though Joyce, Yeats, and Swift have their say, of course), Dickson directs our attention to intricate figures on the margins, such as the "popish" teacher Seán Ó Neachtain. He lived in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when the anti-Catholic Penal Laws were in their most oppressive phase. But it's hard to keep a good writer — and a community of writers — down:

In its multilingual punning (in Latin, English and Irish) and linguistic hybridity, [Ó Neachtain's] memoir catches something of the transitional yet cabalistic cultural world of these teachers, for apart from their own circle very few in the city could read such material. Yet in no sense were they isolated. […] [T]hey had some contact with the world of high learning in the city, notably in the friendship between Tadhg Ó Neachtain [Seán's son] and Anthony Raymond, a [County] Meath Church of Ireland [Anglican] cleric, a friend of Swift and former fellow of [Trinity] College, thanks to whom old Irish treasures in the Trinity library, notably the Book of Ballymote, were leant out to Ó Neachtain.

Yes, that's Dublin — a city of loans and borrowings, some of it cultural, much of it economic. Far more Dubliners knew the rag-and-bone shop as a fact of harsh reality than as a Yeatsian metaphor for the heart. Dire poverty is the tenacious villain of Dublin's story; the fight against the notorious tenements, abandoned aristocratic housing that splintered into slums, was still going on into the 1960s, decades after Irish independence. Dickson notes that "the very poor are themselves almost voiceless in the historical record," but, nevertheless, he manages to make them present in his text, such as when he offers us this surreal image: "Some 2,000 registered beggars were marched through east-side streets one day in September 1818 to shock affluent householders into supporting the 'Mendicity [Association].'"

That demonstration of poverty to prosperity occurred, therefore, during the city's celebrated Georgian era, when Dublin wore, to borrow the title of a book Dickson edited in the 1980s, a "gorgeous mask." The latter half of the 18th century was in many ways the high point of Dublin's history — "in 1750 […] the city was […] the ninth largest in Europe […] more populous than Madrid or Berlin" — and the chapters on this half-century are the high point of the book.

These were the years in which Catholics began to emerge from the shadow of the Penal Laws and the Protestant Ascendancy was in its most enlightened and creative phase. The city became itself. Architect James Gandon transformed the riverscape with his monumental Four Courts and Custom House, as well as the first version of the Carlisle (later O'Connell) Bridge. The Wide Streets Commissioners Haussmannized the city center without Parisian heartbreak; they created new thoroughfares but did not make the town unrecognizable. Dublin Corporation splashed out on an extravagant mayoral coach, as Dickson puts it, "its bare-breasted goddesses glistening in the rain as they attested to Hibernia's fortunes rising under Dublin's protection."

But in 1801, with the Act of Union, the protector became the protected; the Irish parliament voted itself out of business, sending a reduced cohort of MPs to London. The imposing parliament building on College Green, amplified by Gandon during the boom years, became a bank.

The conventional wisdom about the Union is that it was an immediate and unmitigated disaster for Dublin, as money and influence drained out of the city and across the Irish Sea. Dickson has a more nuanced, but still distressing, story to tell. In everything from the production of textiles to books, there was a "hollowing-out process." (Well, not quite everything: "Guinness was a real beneficiary of Anglo-Irish union.") The distress was at its most intense during the Great Hunger of the 1840s, as the sick and starving tramped in from the country. Dickson doesn't dwell on the failures of officialdom to deal with the catastrophe (these have been well documented and analyzed in books on the Famine); instead, he highlights the vigorous efforts of the city's medical community to provide relief as well as individual heroics:

Asenath Nicholson, the Vermont "penny-philanthropist," who travelled the country in 1847, spent six months as a penurious lodger in Cook Street during the peak of the Famine crisis, dividing her meager income between gifts of bread to all comers and the hand-outs of fuel, rent and cooked gruel to the most desperate twenty families she could find.

Better times lay ahead for the city in the second half of the 19th century, but that stability threw into sharper relief a long-running drama: the "hundred-year-long contest over ultimate control of the city's destinies between predominantly Protestant interests and predominantly Catholic ones — in local government, business, welfare provision, education and high culture." In this regard, the title of Dickson's chapter on the fin de siècle city — "Whose Dublin?" — is a question that resonates throughout the entire book.

The answer the 20th century seemed to give was that Dublin "as a capital reborn" was essentially Catholic and Nationalist, the metropolis of the Gaels, an Irishtown writ large. Storied events appeared to confirm this outcome: the handover in early 1922, after the convulsions of the Easter Rising and War of Independence, to Michael Collins (whose signature on the Anglo-Irish Treaty read Mícheál Ó Coileáin) of Dublin Castle, "the ancient and defining symbol of English royal authority in Ireland"; the spectacular piety of the 1932 Eucharistic Congress and 1979 Papal Mass in the Phoenix Park; Archbishop John Charles McQuaid's "intervention in plans for the 1958 Dublin Theatre Festival […] with objections to a proposed stage version of Ulysses and to parts of a new [Sean] O'Casey play."

This clerical attempt at bowdlerization led not only, as Dickson notes, to the festival's "entire cancellation" but also moved Samuel Beckett, in Parisian self-exile from his native city, to take action: "he banned [temporarily] all further Irish productions of his work: 'As long as such conditions prevail in Ireland I do not wish my work to be performed there.'"

My own family lore backs up Dickson's contention that the theatre festival controversy "was indeed unusual in being a very public display of the power of the crozier which was usually exercised covertly, and the customary invisibility of his methods was one reason why they were normally so effective." My paternal grandfather had been a civil servant of middling rank before independence. The native takeover of the Castle did not bring about the egalitarian society envisioned by "democratic programme" of the First Dáil (autonomous parliament), but it did shatter a glass ceiling; Irish Catholics like my grandfather moved rapidly through the ranks after 1922. He became head of the department responsible for communications and broadcasting; my father remembered Archbishop McQuaid phoning the house for "little chats" with his dad. This was sotto voce theocracy.

But whether it was in public view or behind the scenes, the conditions that upset Beckett did not prevail. The sea-facing city could not resist outside influences. Dickson beautifully captures this orientation with an image late in the book: "during the 1950s [British TV] signals were picked up via the tens of thousands of aerials that now brushed the Dublin skyline." The hybridity was back.

And it had never really gone away. Time and again, reading Dickson's eloquent book, I was reminded of poet Louis MacNeice's 1939 rumination on the city, simply entitled "Dublin." Like Pritchett, the Belfast-born MacNeice was a perceptive outsider. He drank in the duality with his Guinness:

She is not an Irish town
And she is not English […]

Augustan capital
Of a Gaelic nation,
Appropriating all
The alien brought […]

By the time I read the poem in school in the 1980s, one of its stony images, "[Lord] Nelson on his pillar / Watching his world collapse," was out of date; in 1966, in their own loud tribute to the 1916 rebels, for the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the IRA blew up the pillar. This left the city's main thoroughfare, O'Connell Street (Sackville Street under the ancient regime), without a focal point. Eventually, early in the present century, the pillar was replaced by a "stainless steel spire […] claimed to be the world's tallest sculpture." Dickson's book was teaching me things about my hometown until almost the very last page, because I never knew the Spire's official name was "the Monument of Light." Dubliners do a good line of jokes about public art, so I had heard it referred to as "the Why in the Sky," a nickname that captures an uneasiness that Dickson picks up on: "To some, it suggested a city without a past."

The answer to this anxiety of erasure? History, of course. Dublin: The Making of a Capital City is a fine remedy.

¤

Robert Cremins is the author of the novels A Sort of Homecoming and Send in the Devils.

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诗的神经与文明的孩子(王敖)

2013-12-23 08:01:50

诗的神经与文明的孩子

王敖

诗歌中的语言剧变，对很多人来说，就像大海深处的地震，经过时间的过滤，慢慢波及到他们的时候，已经缓和成了用来按摩情绪的小韵律，那一点点诗意的小闪光，原本是遥远天空下纵横变幻的极光。下文的讨论将告诉读者，我为什么要以这样的比喻开篇。

在 上个世纪的诗歌历史上，最不可思议的事件也许就是艾略特的崛起和迅速经典化。对《荒原》等诗篇的写作，修改与编辑的过程有了具体的了解，对诗人的特殊精神 状态有更多的认识之后，我越发觉得诗歌史本质上是一种极具荒诞感的神秘戏剧。用批评家大卫•布朗维奇的话说，艾略特的爆发是一种历史上偶尔出现的很邪乎的 事故，似乎可以专门用来挑战人们头脑中的决定论。

艾略特原本很容易就会沦入隐匿或晦暗的领域，跟那些诗歌史无法吸收的怪异诗人们为伍。本 •琼森曾提示过，写邓恩那种诗要冒被忽视的危险，尤其是在推崇明晰风格的时代。其实艾略特也是如此。简单的解释是，他经历的时代刚好是大战爆发，帝国秩序 瓦解，让精神崩溃的他能够在文学的战场上孤注一掷，并意外地乱中取胜——这也是一个让历史决定论与偶成论妥协的解释。然而，这无法完全解释一个例外如何会 转身就成为主流，并顺便统治了批评界，最终被塑造成一个其形象与其诗歌无法互证的经典例外。随着对艾略特研究的不断深入，在各种重构语境的努力下，对这一 突发事件的准确还原仍是困难的。威廉•卡洛斯•威廉斯曾用核武器来形容艾略特诗歌的强大力量（这也符合我前面关于地震的比喻）；即使是威廉斯这样的大诗 人，几乎一辈子都纠结于针对艾略特的虚拟竞争，哈特•克兰，史蒂文斯，概莫能外。艾略特的同代人对《荒原》既不知所措又难以释怀，各种批评上的误判，以及 借此增生出的相关的文化阐释，就是放在震中的地震仪，在测量的过程中也被它摧毁了。文学史有时候就是不断被摧毁后的废墟。

对现在的读者来 说，艾略特已经是经典化之后地位相对稳定的诗人。新批评之后他不再是批评界最关注的诗人和精神导师，但他在各种读者评测的榜单上仍然经常占据最显著的位置 ——英国人对他的热爱至今仍超过任何其他现代诗人，他甚至比拉金更受普通读者的欢迎。世界各国的现代诗人，包括我们大部分读过书的新诗作者都很难绕开他。 在近二三十年汉语诗歌的领域里，艾略特经常被看作是一位文化的诗人，他以一种高度抽象，非个人化的权威声音来充当西方文明的代言人。这当然没有错，因为这 本身就是作为评论家的艾略特急于想留给读者的印象，它被新批评的诗人批评家们有力地加强之后，让艾略特成为更高的精神存在的现世附体———还有什么，能比 这样的形象塑造更适合我们的"知识分子"诗人呢。有时候我甚至觉得，所谓"知识分子"诗人包括其部分朦胧诗的前辈，绝大多数都变成了也写诗的文化名流。不 管他们表面上多么推崇里尔克，保罗•策兰或庞德，在实际的文化生产的场域里，他们所沿袭的更多的是艾略特的方式。

在很多西方人和中国当代 诗人的阅读中，有一位过度"文明化"的艾略特，具体点说，他也是一位被过度新批评化的艾略特，其中的自相矛盾经常明显到让人习焉不察的程度。举一个宏观的 例子，艾略特所说的"历史感"，或者他所代表的高级现代主义者所支持的"历史想象"，实质上是一种非常反历史的诡辩术，在诗歌领域内表现为一种虚拟历史的 神话，其现实政治功能则是为逝去的帝国梦想招魂。《火诫》里"莱芒湖畔"的哭泣，《水中死亡》里溺死的腓尼基人，《四个四重奏》里陷入黑暗深渊的"戈塔年 鉴，证券交易所周报，英国主要股份公司董事指南"，这些都是一个在解体的帝国核心处的诗人／银行从业人员的恶梦。艾略特在银行里用了八年的时间来为国际货 币的兑换率发愁，在分管殖民地业务的部门里目睹梦想中的现代罗马还没建立就毁在了钱上。在诗歌的系谱学上，他却发明出一种强力的历史神话，其核心是所谓的 "感受力的分离"。在早期的批评文字里，艾略特仍然承认这其中存在假设的成分。在1926年的克拉克讲座中，他直接用这种理论构画出诗歌史上的四个时期， 即所谓"玄学时代"：但丁的时代，17世纪英国玄学派诗人的时代，19世纪法国诗人拉福格的时代，以及在这个三级跳之后，艾略特本人和现代主义者们代表的 时代。这是"传统与艾略特的个人才能"真正的应用。尽管艾略特后来对此理论有过修正，正如法兰克•科默德所说，任何修正都没有这种近乎神话的观念强大。我 甚至觉得大概只能用"文化战略"这样的帝国语言才能形容其雄心，但其核心不是任何文学史，而是他自己的诗歌思维。不管艾略特的诗歌理论在具体细节上有多少 谬误，它都能直指他的诗的秘密：在一个特殊的历史时刻，诗人肩负起积极扩大人类经验与情感的任务，采取的方式是极端的，而且是最深入的。要深入到什么程度 呢，艾略特说，即使是"心灵深处"都不够，"要看到大脑皮层，神经系统和消化道的下面。"

这到底是什么意思呢？在十多年前对艾略特的阅读 和后来的印象中，我曾一直以为他是在使用比喻。"心灵深处"一般来说就是诗人和作家们向内探索的场所，而艾略特用这个关于深度的比喻来指示一个更高的层 次，说到底就是更深的心灵与精神的未知层面。但事实并非如此。导致这种误读的部分原因是艾略特写诗歌批评的语言和思想风格。跟他的新批评后继者不同，艾略 特并不用"细读"的方式来分析前人的诗歌，即使在新批评的领域里，"细读"也是一个较晚出现的读诗方法。艾略特也避免解释他自己的诗，如果有人请他解释 《荒原》中的某段，他会把那段诗再读一遍。在《J•阿尔弗雷德•普鲁弗洛克的情歌》这首里，他已经提示过，"不要问指的是什么"，这种做法并不是逃避或故 弄玄虚。在讨论别人的诗的时候，他只是引用部分的诗节，或者就是一两句诗，他擅用的手段是进行有机的类比，或者说是制造一种认知性的比喻。比如，在《玄学 派诗人》里，他提出诗人在感受思想的时候有一种直接性，应该"就像感觉玫瑰花的香气一样"。以这样的方式，思想与情感将融合成新颖的感受力。说的当然有道 理，而且在现代诗歌的观念史上已经属于老生常谈。但实际上，艾略特指的不止于此。认知性的比喻并非只是建立在相似性基础上的修辞形式，它也是一种在不同的 认识领域间穿梭往还的，互动式的思想方式。"大脑皮层，神经系统和消化道的下面"不仅是在比喻的意义上成立，它本身就是艾略特在物质/身体层面上的关注 点，也是他用来颠覆传统诗歌观念的杠杆。在《J•阿尔弗雷德•普鲁弗洛克的情歌》里，他早就用诗句明确地提醒过，"不可能说清楚我究竟是什么意思！但正像 一盏幻灯把神经的图案投射在银幕上"。没错，这是个比喻，但也是实指。

真正的属于悠久文明的现代诗人，不论对此是否有明确的自我意识，正 是那些致力于卸掉所有文明的重负，回到神经与脑电波的原点，从物质的层面进行触底反弹的诗人，而不是布罗茨基有意区分过的"文明化的诗人"。在曼德尔斯塔 姆那里，所谓文明之子的工作来源于其头脑中"发声的模块"。再一次，我们不能仅仅把它看作比喻。神经科学的一个基本假设是思想与情感的物质性，如果我们暂 时不纠缠到底应该怎样定义物质，只要实验手段足够精密，人脑的复杂反应从理论上讲都可以进行图示和重演。这是让任何诗人都会感到头痛的思路，因为它预示着 看上去无论多么独特的诗歌都可以用科学方法模拟出来，这可以说是一种关于人文创造的科幻小说。这要比宣扬"原始本能"，"身体写作"或者"反文化"更具有 颠覆性，更有对写作者自身的神话进行釜底抽薪的打击的可能。但这种极端的方式也意味着一种对创造力的激发与呈现。因为它既能利用文化，又在很大程度上削减 了已经沉重僵化，以至朽坏的文化中介，在神经的回路上用情感穿透思想，用思想重塑情感，然后投射到意识的墙上，像艾略特做的那样，让莎士比亚也能演奏来自 圣路易斯的爵士乐。

艾略特不解释他的诗，或者反对流行的对他的诗的文化阐释，其根源就在于此。他的诗不是针对任何文化危机进行的，那种有 学问的意象图解。他告诉读者，即使你不懂，这些诗也已经在跟你交流。艾略特最具创造力的诗，是他在精神崩溃的时刻见证的那些炸得粉身碎骨的意象，以及它们 在神经反应的海洋里重新变幻组合的现场过程（在他脱轨走偏的时候，庞德替他扳回）——它要直接表达的就是这个激发性的运动，而不是什么历史意识，他传达的 内容拥有意义也积极地涵盖了历史，但更重要的是他模拟了意义重新生成的过程，把它转译成神学语言就是拯救与复活。这种诗就像在黑暗中冲击大陆的海潮，天明 之后你可以看到文化阐释的礁石间留下的痕迹，摔碎的贝壳和仍然存活的游鱼。是的，它们都是我们能看到的，文化被诗歌的浪潮冲击后的那些无可辩驳的，但又很 有限的证据，就是这些东西充当了制造文学史的原材料。这决不是说艾略特的诗反对文化，而是说这就是他用来更新文化的机制，我们即使没完全理解，也已经接受 了其后果。艾略特说《荒原》里只有三十行好诗，也许这正好证明了诗歌的能量引发之后到底是什么样的数量级，用三十行诗的重击就可以改变文学的地貌。

当 然，艾略特并非这种做法的始作俑者，他把自己的谱系上溯到但丁（包括之前的维吉尔），在英语诗歌里则追认邓恩等诗人为前导。近年来，一些对邓恩研究尤其肯 定了他的诗与神经科学的关联。比如，作家A.S. 拜厄特利用神经科学的成果来解释邓恩的诗歌效果，提出诗歌中有一种"智能/身体"的想象力，能够在复杂的比喻中制造高强度的感性。邓恩本人确实对人体的内 部构造非常感兴趣，并吸收了庞杂的中世纪关于早期身体科学的遗产。然而，他毕竟不是一位神经科学的开拓者。有可能启发过艾略特的近现代人是德国作家毕希 纳。在毕希纳去世之后，悼念他的同代人主要把他看作一位很有前途却过早去世的科学家。在他的眼里，人的身体存在于永恒的暴力之中，而神经系统就是真正的屠 场。那些在惊骇中凝注的瞬间，那些词语滑出时的振颤，就是诗歌与神经元互相轰击的激战。在《丹东之死》中，他借革命家之口说，"要互相了解吗，我们只能砸 开头骨，从对方大脑的神经里把思想撕扯下来。"后来，这位"嘴唇上也长眼睛"的丹东又说，"在我们被造出来的时候有个错误，缺少了某些东西，我不知道它的 名字，我们永远无法去别人身上搜索枯肠地发现它，那为什么还要互相剖开身体来寻找它呢？"

当代德国诗人格伦贝恩对这两段话有一个精彩的评 论，在它们之间"一个深渊张开了。那是让身体消失于其中的深渊。从下面升腾起了新的，可怖的亮光，历史就出现在这中间的阶段，最后的动物遇到了最初的人： 这个人正是那个最后的动物。在启蒙的黑暗里，在理性的睡眠深处……毕希纳看到了这个生物。"我尚未读到关于毕希纳和艾略特在这方面的比较研究，但我觉得， 艾略特多年关注并写作现代诗剧，他不熟悉毕希纳此类思想的可能性是微乎其微的。格伦拜恩所描绘的人兽之间的，正在从血肉中发明思想的生物，看上去有点类似 阿甘本讨论过的"homo sacer"的变体：他既是神圣的人，也是受诅咒的人，一种"怪物般的人与动物的杂合"。在诗歌上，这也许是艾略特这种现代诗人的某个原型。然而，艾略特 在政治与神学的问题上完全是另有方向，跟毕希纳的差别极大，这让艾略特更倾向于从象征派诗人那里找更明确的师承。他在撕开跳动的神经之后，花了几十年来把 自己缝合，垫高，膨化成一个文化巨人。这是导致我们很容易按照他的希望来误解他的原因。与他的诗相比，那些写性，写毒品和放纵的诗算什么呢，那些传播点反 文化情绪的布考斯基，那些基本不懂诗的卡佛，看上去更像是些会分行的道德说教家。他们写的是诗，但就像《肉蒲团》不能算杰出的小说一样，这些诗只能如数家 珍地展示已经都麻木了的感官反应，再撒上一点反道德的道德，当然我们可以说这样做也聊胜于无。

在此，我绝对无意把艾略特重新塑造成一个崇 尚身体高于文化的诗人。诗人超凡的能力表现在他能够拥有深厚的文化积累，也能将其瞬间穿透。我想要强调的是，所谓"诗人是文明之子"本身是一个很有活力的 隐喻，我们不要把它错误地理解成"诗人是被文明化的后果"。诗人是文明的发明和更新者，没有他文明会有危险；而不是相反，文明层层包装造出了一批做诗人状 的木偶陈列品。当代中国诗的一个明显问题就是搞错了先后关系，或者说只认后者，很多诗人按照既有的文化阐释去把自己复制成高价的赝品到处展览，这是让大部 分知识分子诗人雄心勃勃，却越写越不堪的原因。那些欧阳江河，西川们，怎么看都像是打扮成庞德或史蒂文斯的朗费罗。

我也无意用神经科学的 进展去比附出关于诗歌经验的一般理论。因为这种思路本身颇有启示性，却并不解决诗歌问题；它发挥到极致的时候，也许能模拟诗歌写作与阅读时的神经反应，但 最终那不就是我们在做的事情吗？刘慈欣的小说《诗云》则从计算机和统计学的角度提供了另一种有趣的否定。而且，神经科学与诗歌理论的互相激发，也许只是一 个更大的气候下的两片云团擦出电火花。在后现代主义之类的批评理论逐渐退朝之后，西方的批评界出现了向物质主义和经验科学偏转的动向。比如近年来不断引起 争议的Affect理论，它结合了认知科学与伯格森，德勒兹等人的哲学思路，在人文和社科领域里提出了若干有启发性的话题。

按照理论家马 苏米（Brian Massumi）的说法，发展这种理论的目的在于不通过任何中介就能把物质归还给文化唯物主义。简单说就是要重新把物质绝对化，用其尖利的棱角去刺透各种 庞大的意识形态身上的厚皮。我觉得，从诗歌上讲，可以说从卢克莱修到雪莱都做过类似的事情。马苏米等理论家刚好是在批评界出现理论真空的时候来横插进一 刀，结果导致这种物质主义的回潮迅速扩散，在多种学科分支里都出现了应用和变形。按照马苏米的说法，意识形态和各种用于给文化现象定位的法则都只是在特定 的领域里才谈得上准确性，其具体正确与否并不是问题的关键，关键是它们划分了各自的应用领域。马苏米并不反对这些文化理论，就好像我前面说的艾略特并不反 文化一样，只是要保证物质与身体的特性不被文化淹没。正是在这个意义上，马苏米认为自己的做法在伦理和政治上具有一种维护思想生态的积极作用。

神 经科学，认知科学，语言科学，人类演化研究等学科的发现提示了一个问题，人体的基本反应中拥有深不见底，甚至神秘莫测的可供探索的疆域，它们是不能用人文 学说完全解释清楚的。Affect 理论中最有名的例证之一是所谓"失去的半秒钟"，它为人的神经反应划分出一个自治的领域。根据一些尚未被科学界验证的认知理论，人（或者说这种被称为人的 生物）在接受刺激之后半秒钟左右的时间里处于一种高强度的应激状态，看上去却似乎是无意识的，这就是我们所谓的"此刻"，它太快，转瞬即逝。这种高强度的 直感就是所谓的affect，它主宰了人们之后的喜怒哀乐，我们意识不到它的存在，或者误以为它是看似空壳的瞬间，实际上是因为它过于充满，过于奔溢，以 至于可以激发出各种意义。我们称之为"感情"（emotion）的东西，只是事后辨认出来的结果，是部分可以进行理解和诠释的残余物，我们会用智能和经验 来继续处理，反思它们。实际上，我们的身体具有一套拥有自治权的，根植于基因的硬件，或者说它们是文化符号生产与交换背后看不见的硬通货，是人文领域无法 独自进行探索和估价的。这种新物质主义的看法可以说比各种关于"本能"的理论更强调本能，本能不过是它的一个极为有限且使用过度的比喻，对无意识的解剖则 需要依靠真实的解剖，读到这里请回顾前面对毕希纳的讨论。

马苏米显然预见到了人们会对这种观点的反应。所以他说，爱因斯坦的理论并不意味 着牛顿力学就没用了，只是让它有了更清楚的应用范围，Affect理论跟以往的文化理论的关系类似。近年来，从基本命题，论证过程到具体实验等各方面，这 种翻新的物质主义都受到了质疑，攻击和否定，尤其以鲁丝•雷斯（Ruth Leys）2011年的批评为最，而且这个过程仍在继续。但马苏米提前的自辩仍是有作用的，而且这种理论本来也没自命真理。在知识与思想的生产中，我们面 对的是无限复杂的对象和没有清晰边界的情境。从理论上讲，任何论断的反论早晚也会成立。有人说A，就有人说-A；就有人指责你们为什么不说B。争论到下一 代人，也代替不了莎士比亚的一句诗。关键不在于谁能活到世界终结的那一刻来做总结发言，而在于这就是我们作为一种智慧生物用来认知并存活的一种方式。

马苏米强调过，他的思想路径在哲学里是有谱系的，但是在文学思想的领域里还是很缺乏，请再次回顾毕希纳。然而，这种思路的好处在于，它可以帮助我们反驳一些关于文学或诗歌的套话，也可以让我们在看待诗歌的时候多一种警醒，不要随便拿文化理论去附和反诗歌的错觉。

比 如，在社会批评理论和大众文化研究的基础上，我们可以看到社会阶层对文学品味的建构和区隔起到多么大的作用，这无疑对拿文学艺术当绝对的超越性的表现，或 者当宗教替代品的文化人来说是一种有效的去魅。但如果在讨论诗歌的时候把这种观念的手臂伸得过远，就有可能造成脱臼。比如，关于诗歌在当代沦为"小众艺 术"的说法就是一个例子。很多大诗人都反复在说一个简单的道理，诗是个人的声音，也就是小众中的小众，诗人跟自我在同一时间内或不同时间内的各种变形进行 对话，所以佩索阿能不断制造出"异名"，并沿着它们反向造出一个跟现实世界互相包蕴的诗歌世界。同时，诗歌也是个人对任何人都可能的发言，你拿到了曼德尔 斯塔姆的漂流瓶，你就可能看到他在另一时代向你招手，你没看见那还会有别人。如果你从来没拿起一支海螺倾听，那就不要轻易地指责听到里面有响动并把它比作 潮水声的人。

对于诗歌的阅读和写作来说 ，在特殊的个人和任何人之间有太大的伸缩空间，能够扩张极度的个人性，也能容纳艾略特所推崇的非个人性。这种变幻的诗歌疆域在某一时段能用可量化的读者群 来粗略地替代，但并不能就此推出关于诗在整个时代里的一般性结论。伟大的诗歌尤其不受这种限制，用精英与大众的对立模式也不能解释它的产生和流传，其写作 者在某个历史时刻里是被闪电击中的例外，如前文所说的艾略特，他们经常存在于社会学的误差之中。

再举一个现代诗歌历史上有名的例子，让我 们从Affect的角度来看待诗歌阅读中的反应 。威廉斯的短诗《这就是说》，俗称"便条"。这首诗的不分行的翻译就是一小段话，"我吃了你放在冰箱里的梅子，它们也许是你留作早餐用的，原谅我，它们很 好吃，那么甜，那么凉。"在原文里，它分成长短错落，节奏轻巧的三小节，用很简洁的方式突出了跟诗里描绘的感觉相衬的语感。在1934年，威廉斯这样写是 具有一定的实验性的，他对具体的日常经验点到为止，但让更多的暗示随着阅读挥发出来，也就是让人"玩味"——体会那么凉，那么甜所造成的效果，再回头去想 "请原谅我"这个表达里到底蕴藏了多少意味。这种关于"味道"，"偷吃"，"请求原谅"的意义组合，很容易让读者回顾"偷吃禁果"的古老母题，性的暗示也 被凸显出来，我们被告知这个便条是诗人留给妻子的。这种诗可以说是一个小型的感官实验室，读者共享的关于味觉的体验是我们对某种直感的回忆，经过意义的组 合与筛选，可以促成一个比较有效的阐释。显然，这个阐释本身是次要的，所谓的语感是成就这首诗的关键，亲密低语中的清甜的愉悦感，轻柔的微颤的吐气间的羞 惭唤醒了读者的感官，并在神经的反应中轻捷地制造出一个瞬间的回路，让我们一次次地跟随它的挑逗，让意义在重演的过程中呈现变化的姿态。

这 首诗被文学理论家用来示范所谓的"文学性"，或者用来强调形式的重要性，这都有一定的道理 。如果用这种诗来代表一种反对隐喻，反文化的写作方向，那就搞错了。据说威廉斯的这首诗是与艾略特代表的现代主义诗歌是背道而驰的，甚至是一种后现代诗歌 的先驱。从诗歌流派对立共生的策略来看，这也许成立。从准确地刺激感官反应，推动意义发生的角度看，它却跟艾略特的诗并无本质区别。我们甚至可以说，这首 诗不过是对艾略特的一句诗有意无意的改写或呼应，"我到底敢不敢吃一个桃子"（《J•阿尔弗雷德•普鲁弗洛克的情歌》）。这种诗是独自可以成立的，也是可 以有效地组织进更大的诗歌架构。但它在当代中国还有一个功用，就是去跟完全不懂现代诗的读者进行趣味上的互虐。可以是诗的东西，是否能做诗的最低标准，纠 缠吧。

我想，理论家称之为Affect 的东西，放在批评理论里可以继续研究下去，但也许永远无法得出理想中普遍的图式和清晰的界限。诗人们一直能够意识到这个领域的存在，那就是他们见证崇高， 体验虚无，目击永恒的无限放大的圆点。他们用自己特殊的语汇来表达置身其中的情境， "我所有思想的飞腾都来自于我的血"（里尔克），"诗人是看不见的东西的大主教"（史蒂文斯），"我不死不活，什么都不知道"（艾略特），"上千个梦在我 体内轻轻燃烧"（兰波），"如果我身体上能感到似乎自己头顶洞开，我就知道那是诗"（迪金森），"那种背后轻微的颤抖，确实是人类在发展出纯粹艺术与纯粹 科学时所获取的最高情感"（纳布科夫）——他们其实是Affect 理论的传染源，翻新的物质主义是他们的想象力掉进理论的人工湖的结果。

诗 歌所测量的领域，随着测量的进行而扩张，所以那叫无限。用史蒂文斯的话说，哲学家证明了他们是哲学家，而诗人享受了存在。对诗人来说，享受存在的最佳形式 就是诗，"生活中的生活"（臧棣）。在历史标记出的某个时刻里，史蒂文斯正在保险公司忙碌，刚从银行下班的艾略特觉得自己身在炼狱。传记资料和新出版的书 信集一起叹气，艾略特那些年过的是些什么日子啊，他几乎就没有写诗的时间。等到在疗养期间写出了《荒原》，为了凑够篇幅出版单行本，他为这首诗补上了经常 故意让读者误解的注释。时而真诚的读者，希望你也是我的诗人同行，我的兄弟姐妹，在下一次误解的时刻，希望我们都多一点微妙。

2012.4

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Use good words, not bad ones

Use good words, not bad ones

Mar 25th 2015, 22:07 by R.L.G. | BERLIN

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"WRITE with nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs" is a traditional bit of style advice. The aim is to get young writers picking a few words that tell, rather than bulking out their prose in the hopes of convincing by sheer mass.

But does good writing really prefer nouns and verbs over adjectives and adverbs? Mark Liberman of the Language Log blog and the University of Pennsylvania tried a brief experiment, choosing several pieces of "good" writing (both fiction and non-fiction) and "bad" writing (such as two winners of the "Bad Writing Contest" competition and an archetypally purple novel of 1830, "Paul Clifford", which begins with "It was a dark and stormy night"). The surprising result was that the "good" selection had relatively more verbs and adverbs, and the "bad" writing, relatively more nouns and adjectives.

How can usage-book writers have failed to notice that good writers use plenty of adverbs? One guess is that they are overlooking many: much, quite, rather and very are common adverbs, but they do not jump out as adverbs in the way that words ending with –ly do. A better piece of advice than "Don't use adverbs" would be to consider replacing verbs that are combined with the likes of quickly, quietly, excitedly by verbs that include those meanings (race, tiptoe, rush) instead.

Why would good writers use more verbs? One reason is that if unnecessary words are reduced, the verb-percentage goes up as a mathematical necessity. Ordinary sentences require a verb, whereas they do not require any other part of speech. Imperatives need no subject (Run!), and sentence fragments can make sense without explicit subjects: Woke up. Got out of bed. Dragged a comb across my head. By contrast, it is hard to write without verbs. So "use verbs" is not really good advice either, since writers have to use verbs, and trying to add extra ones would not turn out well.

What about nouns? There is a likely culprit for the high percentage of nouns in Mr Liberman's counts in "bad" prose: "nominalisations", also known as "zombie nouns". Abstract words are necessary for any language: you cannot have just rocks and trees and water, but need a few phenomena and increases and observations. But too many have a narcotic effect. Judith Butler, in the essay that won the 1997 Bad Writing Contest, uses account, relations, ways, hegemony, relations, repetition, convergence, rearticulation, question, temporality, thinking, structure, shift, theory, totalities, objects, insights, possibility, structure, conception, hegemony, sites, strategies, rearticulation and power—all in a single sentence. It is not much clearer with the other words added.

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Part of the reason why such writing bamboozles is that no one has ever seen or stubbed a toe on a rearticulation or a temporality. Abstract words make the brain do hard work. This is not always a bad thing—some good writing is difficult. But, by and large, a good style will at least dole out "metaconcept" words—words about ideas—either in manageable sentences, or broken up with more concrete nouns.

That leaves us with the adjective. The key, again, is to choose wisely. "Paul Clifford" begins like this:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Through one of the obscurest quarters of London, and among haunts little loved by the gentlemen of the police, a man, evidently of the lowest orders, was wending his solitary way.

This is not the purplest prose of all time, but note how many adjectives are useless. Does "dark" add to the night? "Violent" to a sweeping gust of wind? If "a man" is wending his way, must we be told that it is a "solitary" one? Trying as a rule to eliminate adjectives will lead to some odd writing. But as with all words, they are best if they tell you something you didn't already know.

There is a lot to criticise in journalistic writing. But in one way, it is good training: print journalism forces writers to put complex stories into a box defined by an editor and competing stories. Every journalist moans about favourite phrases, sentences and whole stories cut from articles. But keeping to a tight word count forces the writer to think about which words absolutely have to be there, and makes it less likely that the editor will kill the writer's darlings. So while simple formulae such as "write with nouns and verbs" may not be brilliant style advice, one short piece of advice is worth taking: edit.

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Why Do We Need the Humanities?

By Rod Dreher • March 19, 2015, 8:41 AM

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At The New Republic, four former university presidents offer short reflections on why the humanities are relevant to college education. An example of the reasoning on offer:

In my experience, business leaders and employers recognize the value of this marriage and look for it in our graduates. It is clear that to thrive in a society where they may have up to six different careers, business and STEM graduates need also to be curious and creative, to be critical thinkers and good communicators.

Mark Bauerlein at First Things says this instrumental justification for the humanities is a big part of the problem. Excerpt:

Unfortunately, even if true, those affirmations will not increase the popularity of humanities courses. What sophomore will be drawn to a course in Renaissance sculpture because it will enhance her critical thinking skills?

Only the actual materials will sustain the humanities, but we have to believe in them enough to say so. We need more conviction than this. We need to be able to say to incoming students, "In this course, you are going to encounter words and images and ideas that are going to change your life. We've got Hamlet and Lear, Achilles and David, Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Bennett, Augustine's pears and Van Gogh's stars—beauty and sublimity and truth. If you miss them, you will not be the person could be."

I think that's true. As you will no doubt tire of hearing between now and the time How Dante Can Save Your Life plays itself out, reading The Divine Comedy in a time of great personal crisis gave me a new vision of life, and brought me out of that crisis. My experience of the Commedia was exactly what Bauerlein describes above. Granted, I am ideologically predisposed to agree with Bauerlein, but it took a life-changing experience with this great work of art to make the principle real to me.

I did not come to Dante in an instrumental way, thinking that reading a Great Book would be edifying. I came to it because Dante's plotting and language set the hook in me hard. I quickly came to see that this 14th-century poem about a lost and broken man's pilgrimage to healing and wholeness had an enormous amount to do with me. Dante taught me to see myself, my world, and my God in a new light. I could have read all the moral, psychological, and theological principles at work in the Commedia in a nonfiction book. But they would not have affected me in the same way. As I write in the book, there is now neuroscientific research showing that our brains are wired to receive information more effectively if it is conveyed in the form of a story, and not only that, but if the story is conveyed in a way that we find beautiful. We are built to experience the world as story, as revelation; beauty really is a gateway to truth.

I have told the story of my life-changing experience with Dante as a story, for precisely this reason. How Dante is not really a book of literary analysis (though there is some of that), and it's not a connect-the-dots instruction book. Rather, I'm trying to imitate to some degree Dante's strategy: instead of telling you "do this," I'm showing you how "doing that" worked in my experience, and, I hope, encouraging you to do the same.

I didn't really know what I was doing at the time. I quickly became aware that I was reading the Commedia like a man lost at sea clings to a piece of driftwood, hoping it will carry him to dry land. But I didn't start it thinking, "Ah, this Great Book will make me a better person, so I shall endeavor to read it for the sake of character building." The trick, I think, was to have opened myself wholly to the story instead of sitting back from a certain distance, experiencing it as a literary artifact. The poet seduced me, and I willfully suspended belief and read it as if it were an account of something that actually happened. This is what we always do when we really get into a novel. I think that's how Dante worked his magic on me.

To go back to Bauerlein's point: I agree that we won't get very far if we try to tell students that they should study the humanities because they will learn skills that will make them more effective at their jobs. How could you ever prove such a thing? And even if you could, it seems to me that some business school professor could come back and offer a course in Critical Thinking Skills that would cut through all the literary and aesthetic business to get right to the practical point.

It seems to me, based on my personal experience, that the better approach is to present the humanities as a romantic adventure in the search for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. I had a pretty spotty humanities education, so you can imagine how thrilling it was for me to study The Odyssey with my 12 year old son, and to encounter it for the first time. It was adventure, it was joy, it was deep. And it was all a surprise to me, even though it ought not to have been.

I suppose one reason that it's hard for colleges to teach the humanities in this way is that so many in the academy have murdered the humanities to dissect them for the sake of exposing how they're all about power relationships and so forth. It's like going to a liturgy led by a priest who doesn't believe in the religion, and who uses his sermons to disenchant the congregation.

But I think it's also true that we as a society have lost the sense that within the study of art, literature, and the humanities, there are things vital to shaping our souls, and to discovering and taking into ourselves what it means to be fully human. That Homer, Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Michelangelo, and all these great men saw more deeply into the human experience than almost any other, and came back to tell us what they learned, and to help us see what they saw. In the end, I think it comes down to a deadening of the soul among our people — that is, a sense that there is no need to learn or to experience anything beyond what we desire to learn and experience, because our desires are self-justifying, and do not need cultivation.

We keep returning on this blog, in various threads, to an argument in which a number of people sincerely don't understand why so many of us traditionalist-minded folks see the present moment as a time of darkness, or at least not a time of uncomplicated enlightenment. After all, we are healthier and wealthier than at any time in history, and many of the indicators of social well being (e.g., the crime rate) show that we are safer and more at peace, and no generations have had more personal liberty to define their own lives as do Americans living now. How can this not be enough?

Well, let me ask you: there may be no healthier (in terms of the body), wealthier, safer, more peaceful, and free than Beverly Hills. Would you describe the people living there as at the pinnacle of human history? The Kardashians have it all; they are so rich and free that one of their number is changing his sex, because he can — and some call it, without irony, and in fact with enthusiasm, a superb example of the American Dream. I think there is something to that description, insofar as America has become all about liberating individual desire from the chains of the past, of prescription, of limits, of tradition, of any bounds.

But that is a nightmare to me, and not because I think it's yucky for Bruce Jenner to choose to become a woman. It's a nightmare for the same reason that Ulysses's inspiring speech to his crew in Inferno XXVI is such a deadly deception, cloaking something base in the rhetoric of nobility. It's the oldest lie in the world: Ye shall be as gods. To read Dante is to become aware of how the human heart deceives itself, and the mind's eye loses its ability to see.

To immerse oneself in humanities is to become deeply acquainted with the most enduring wisdom of our species, to encounter what is best and what is worst in man, to learn to place ourselves within the Great Narrative of humanity, and to discover how we can and should write our own chapter, not as passive barbarians — rich in health, wealth, and liberty thought we may be — propelled through life by our own disordered desires, but rather as intelligent men and women who aspire to live by the better angels of our natures.

You know what I hope? That How Dante Can Save Your Life is a success, and opens the door to many others, both students and older people, to reading the Commedia. And more than that, I hope it inspires other people write similar books about how going deep into Shakespeare, or Homer, or Milton, or the Italian Renaissance, and so forth, liberated them from the shackles of mundanity, and delivered them from the oppression of thinking, "Is this all there is?"

No, this is not all there is. The great humanists saw farther and deeper than you and I do. They have so much to show us. But first, we have to make a leap of faith in which we give ourselves over to their visions. We are all like Dante at the beginning of the poem, standing in a dark wood, unsure whether we can trust anybody. Put yourself in the pilgrim's shoes, standing there looking at the ghost of an ancient poet, a man whose work you revere. As I write in How Dante:

The shade of an ancient poet appears and promises to deliver you from your misery but says that the road ahead is going to be arduous, even horrible. A reasonable man would have said to the ghost, "Wait a minute, you died ages ago. I must be having a hallucination. How do I know you are who you say you are? I have to think about this." But the pilgrim did not say that.

Nor did he say, "Thanks, but I'll wait here; things might get better." He didn't say, "How can I trust that you know the way out? Maybe you are wrong. Maybe you will lead me to ruin." And Dante didn't say, "Show me the whole picture, the entire map ahead, and then I will follow you."

He said none of those things. He simply said, "I trust you, and I will follow you." That was a leap of faith.

Though Virgil had been sent by God, via his messenger Beatrice, on a mission to save Dante, the master didn't lay it all out for the lost pilgrim in their first meeting. Dante was in no condition to see the whole picture. All Dante knew in that moment was that if he stayed where he was, he would suffer and die—and that before him stood an authority figure he trusted to lead him to safety.

Reading those opening lines, it struck me: I am Dante, and Dante is offering to be my Virgil.

Note well that Dante the pilgrim didn't choose to follow Virgil because he thought all that walking would do him good, or because it sounded like fun. He didn't follow Virgil because he knew exactly where the journey was going to lead in the end. Dante gave himself over to Virgil because he knew that he could no longer stay in the dark wood, for he would die, and because he trusted the older man to take him to a better place, in the end. The Commedia is really a journey into our own hearts.

If academicians would present the humanities as romance, as mystery, as passion-filled voyages of discovery, as opposed to the dull, technocratic rationales given by these college presidents, maybe they would find more young people coming to embrace their study. If professors would rediscover why they fell in love with art and literature in the first place — the wonder of it all! — maybe they would convert others.

If the professionals approached the humanities not as scientists, but as witnesses, maybe the humanities would live again. Great works of art and literature are ghosts who appear to us in the dark wood, and offer us a way to enlightenment. But first you have to believe that enlightenment is both possible and desirable. I don't know, I'm probably hopelessly naive here, but all I can tell you is this: I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see — and I owe much to Dante Alighieri and his miraculous poem.

It can happen to you, too.

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Comment dit-on "liberté" à Pékin ? Les 7 notions-clés de la pensée chinoise

C'est comme une table de correspondance. A gauche: les grandes notions de la pensée européenne. A droite: leurs équivalents dans la pensée chinoise. Une sorte de dictionnaire, aussi soucieux d'expliquer que de mettre en valeur la différence.

Par exemple, la rationalité européenne, dont nous nous glorifions tant, est fondée sur l'idée de «causalité»: un effet est dû à une cause. La Chine, elle, pense en termes de «propension»: un objet donné aura tendance à évoluer d'une façon donnée. Causalité ou propension: voilà l'écart, en apparence bénin, mais en réalité très profond, où se joue la différence entre deux visions du monde. Avec son «Lexique euro-chinois», François Jullien permet au lecteur non-spécialiste la saisir avec une précision fascinante.

François Jullien est une figure singulière dans la philosophie française. Normalien, agrégé, il décide en 1975 de partir en Chine pour y apprendre non pas le maoïsme, comme c'était la mode à l'époque, mais la pensée chinoise classique.

D'une immense érudition, maîtrisant les grands textes de l'empire du Milieu, il aurait pu se contenter d'être un passeur entre deux civilisations aussi puissantes qu'ignorantes l'une de l'autre. Il a fait encore mieux: cette connaissance de la Chine, il n'a cessé de la retourner vers l'Europe et de s'en servir pour mettre à jour les présupposés de la pensée occidentale. On ne trouvera rien chez lui qui ressemble à de l'exotisme ou de l'orientalisme; le dialogue entre les deux façons de pensée est immédiatement égal, et au profit des deux parties.

Dans « De l'Etre au Vivre. Lexique euro-chinois de la pensée», Jullien nous propose une vingtaine de doublets: «liberté/disponibilité», «volonté/ténacité», «cohérence/sens», «révélation/régulation», «vérité/ressource»…

Au fil des pages, le philosophe montre la fascination de l'Europe pour «l'être» et en particulier pour le «sujet» supposé libre, singulier, autonome, posé en surplomb du monde, «maître et possesseur de la nature», selon la formule de Descartes. Et il met en regard une vision chinoise où l'individu tire sa consistance du collectif et de tout ce qui l'entoure, pleinement immergé dans le monde, «partie prenante» d'un réseau de choses et de tensions dont il ne saurait se détacher.

Jullien illustre cet écart par la peinture : là où la tradition européenne propose des «paysages» qui placent l'observateur à l'extérieur, la peinture chinoise peint des «montagne-eau» («shan-shui», traduction de paysage en chinois) qui plongent celui qui les regarde au beau milieu des forces de la nature en action (la montagne puissante, l'eau qui ondoie...).

Souvent, Jullien suggère que la pensée chinoise est une incitation à la «déprise», à la fluidité, à l'ouverture. L'Occident apparaît alors engoncé dans son désir, son obsession de la volonté et du contrôle, sa passion de la raison. Mais le philosophe met en garde: la pensée chinoise n'est pas le remède-miracle aux pathologies de l'Occident. La «déprise» chinoise est un merveilleux antidote à l'abus de rationalité… tant que l'on n'en abuse pas à son tour.

Notre capacité à observer le monde en nous plaçant à l'extérieur a été, souligne-t-il, à l'origine de formidables progrès techniques, politiques et éthiques. La Chine a autant à apprendre de nous que nous d'elle :

Il ne s'agit pas de se convertir à une autre culture ou de chercher un quelconque compromis. Je tiens aux valeurs des Lumières et je ne vais pas en Chine pour penser la liberté, car ce n'est pas leur point fort. J'y vais pour m'ouvrir à une autre façon d'être dans le monde.

Pour BibliObs, François Jullien présente ici sept «correspondances». Le principe est simple : dans chaque doublet, le premier terme est une notion européenne, le second est son «répondant» chinois.

Causalité →  Propension

La causalité est au départ de toute la pensée occidentale. Nous ne décrivons pas la chose qui est devant nous, nous l'expliquons. Et nous l'expliquons en sortant de la chose pour en trouver la cause à l'extérieur d'elle-même. Les Grecs étaient à la recherche de la "cause première", par exemple Dieu; et "cause" et "chose" ont la même racine en latin. Saisir la chose par la cause: ce schéma est au fondement de la "science".

La Chine, quant à elle, raisonne moins en termes d'explication que d'implication. C'est que je propose de nommer la "propension": il s'agit de ne plus séparer la chose de la façon dont elle évolue. La notion de propension vaut alors pour le savoir comme pour l'histoire (notion de shi).

Lorsque les historiens chinois relatent la naissance de l'empire, ils ne recherchent pas des causes, mais décrivent la propension globale de la société chinoise à tendre vers cette forme de gouvernement. En Occident, le concept de propension est resté marginal; mais peut-être le modèle de la causalité a-t-il trouvé sa limite.

Initiative du sujet →  Potentiel de la situation

Dans la philosophie européenne, tout commence par le "je" (Descartes). L'homme est pensé comme "sujet", qui conçoit et qui veut, qui est sujet d'initiative, en se posant au début des choses.

La pensée chinoise préfère partir de la situation en explorant son potentiel. Le moteur de l'action, mais qui n'a plus besoin alors d'être une "action", n'est pas tant "l'initiative du sujet" que le "potentiel de la situation" (même notion de shi)

Le stratège, figure éminemment chinoise, n'est pas celui qui établit des plans, ou compte sur un "coup de génie" (notons cette passion paradoxale de l'Occident pour ces trous dans sa rationalité...). Le sage-stratège chinois est plutôt celui qui discerne les facteurs favorables pour infléchir la situation à son profit.

Liberté →  Disponibilité

Obsédé par la causalité, l'Occident n'a cessé de se demander comment l'individu peut s'en affranchir. Ne pas obéir à nos déterminations est un idéal auquel on a donné le nom de "liberté". Le moi-sujet est d'abord doué de liberté: c'est là sa qualité première et d'où vient sa valeur.

Les Grecs ont opposé la liberté à la servitude et ont affirmé leur exigence de liberté face aux Perses, avant d'en faire l'idéal de la cité, puis de la vie intérieure. La Chine n'a pas connu cette expérience politique, mais a développé en revanche ce que j'appellerai la disponibilité.

La liberté implique un choix; la disponibilité revient à dissoudre toute position, à ne plus prendre parti, à être entièrement "ouvert", à ne projeter aucun a priori, ce qui permet de ne rien rater. Confucius disait que le sage est "sans nécessité, sans idée, sans position, sans moi". Freud entrevoyait-il une telle disponibilité lorsqu'il expliquait que l'analyste doit se mettre en position d'"attention également flottante"?

Néanmoins, il ne faut pas se leurrer : être disponible, c'est aussi rester soumis à l'autorité. Car, en politique, on est toujours d'un côté ou de l'autre, et ne pas prendre position revient à de l'inféodation. On comprend pourquoi le lettré chinois n'a pas su dire frontalement "J'accuse".

Sincérité →  Fiabilité

En Occident, nous avons proscrit le mensonge. D'Augustin à Kant, il est absolument interdit de mentir, quelle que soit la situation. Derrière est la figure de Dieu, qui voit au fond des cœurs. C'est oublier que le mensonge est situationnel, se fait toujours à deux : si mon fils me ment, c'est que je ne sais pas entendre sa vérité – voilà le genre de situation où la notion de "sujet" autonome touche sa limite.

En Chine, l'importance est moins la transparence que la confiance, ou la "fiabilité", xin, qui se bâtit peu à peu. Il y faut du processus. Quand on est parvenu à cette confiance, il n'est même plus besoin de le dire. Pour Confucius, l'impératif est moins de dire ce qu'on pense que de faire ce qu'on dit. Certes, on peut être choqué par ce qui ressemble à de la dissimulation. Mais sait-on vraiment ce qu'on pense, et faut-il en faire un dogme? Les Chinois soulignent à juste titre qu'ils n'ont jamais fait de guerres de religion.

 

Frontalité →  Obliquité

Notre espace politique est organisé autour de l'affrontement. A Athènes, à la guerre comme à l'assemblée, c'est du face-à-face que doit venir la décision: la bataille rangée ou discours contre discours, thèse et antithèse. La Chine préfère l'obliquité, l'indirect, le biais, qi. Dans un rapport frontal, on se détruit l'un l'autre, il y a perte. En Chine, la critique politique est contrainte à l'indirect du fait de la censure; mais aussi les lettrés chinois en ont fait un art, d'autant plus dangereux. 

Déjà, l'un des tous premiers textes chinois consacrés à la poésie conseillait de garder le sens tamisé à travers l'image, afin de ne pas risquer sa tête. Et voyez comment récemment, avec la démaoïsation, le Parti communiste chinois a été capable de se transformer radicalement, mais par transformation silencieuse de son discours, en laissant sous-entendre progressivement son évolution plutôt que d'ouvertement dire le contraire. Il faut toujours compter sur un processus.

Révélation → Régulation

La Révélation, et son double laïque la Révolution, structure notre perception du temps et de l'Histoire. Il nous faut toujours un avant et un après. En Chine, on évite la rupture dans le continuum temporel et l'on préfère la régulation à des règles ou normes fixées d'avance. La régulation signifie que l'équilibre se maintient à travers le changement: que parce qu'il ne dévie pas, le cours des choses peut se renouveler. Ce que les Chinois révèrent dans la notion de Ciel, tian.

Contrairement à la règle, la régulation ne se modélise pas, elle ne se décrète pas. Ainsi la médecine chinoise est-elle une médecine de la régulation, plutôt que de l'opération. Plutôt que de combattre la maladie, mieux vaut d'abord réguler la santé en évitant la déviation.

Au-delà → Entre

Les Grecs ont promu l'au-delà et ils y ont logé le Bien, le Juste, le Vrai… C'est là tout le sens de la métaphysique. Ils ont dédoublé le monde, en distinguant l'ici-bas de la réalité empirique et l'au-delà des idéalités. La vérité est toujours au-delà, à l'extrémité. D'où leur goût des dichotomies et des oppositions tranchées.

Ce dispositif a eu son efficacité, non seulement en théorie mais dans l'Histoire. C'est grâce à lui que l'intellectuel s'est imposé comme figure et sujet autonome: face au pouvoir, il pouvait se réclamer de ce monde de l'idéalité.

Mais du coup les Grecs ont négligé l'"entre" des choses, tout ce qui est médian et par là indistinct. Aristote sait définir le blanc et le noir, mais non le gris. Car l'"entre" n'a pas d'en-soi, pas de nature propre: il n'a pas d'essence. Mais c'est à travers ce vague, ce flou de l'indéterminé, que passe la vitalité du monde, le flux de la respiration. L'idéogramme qui signifie "entre" illustre bien cette idée, jian : il est composé des deux ventaux d'une porte sous laquelle passe un rayon de lune.

Propos recueillis par Eric Aeschimann

De l'Etre au Vivre. Lexique euro-chinois de la pensée,
par François Jullien, Gallimard, 312 p., 18,90 euros.

Les 1ères pages de "De l'Être au Vivre" 

De l'Être au Vivre. Lexique euro-chinois de la pensée
publié par editions-gallimard

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