Abstract
In questioning what remains identical in the translation of images between writing and drawing, this chapter develops a theoretical argument for the necessary intervolution of concepts—visuality, legibility and verbality—that are commonly used to categorise and differentiate the two graphic practices. Jacques Derrida’s im/possible law of translation and his writing on identity are employed to interrogate critically semiotic assumptions about the equivalences and relations between translated texts and pictures. The fluid movement of images through pictures and words is found to indicate a heterogeneous and self-different identity that is structured by a complicated entanglement of the usually oppositional notions of content and form. The chapter therefore shows the non-exclusivity of the verbal and the pictural, and the indivisibility of the practices of writing and picturing.
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- 1.
The increasingly obsolete term ‘pictural’ is used here to describe pictures as graphic depictions (i.e. literally ‘of or relating to pictures’) as a necessary differentiation from verbal images, which are ubiquitously evoked as ‘pictorial’ texts. This usage corresponds to translations of Derrida’s French texts, as well as some related commentary (cf. Derrida 1981, 1987; Brunette and Wills 1994a; James 1981).
- 2.
As Derrida points out, repeatability with alteration also bears on iterability itself. The notion of any concept of iterability suggests an ideality of meaning, a meaning that a concept could have unto itself. In this way, any concept is an ideal concept, but as a functioning concept its meaning can necessarily not be limited to itself. Iterability thus demonstrates the failure of such pure singularity but also indicates Derrida’s attempt to think the idea of a concept beyond concept (1988, 119–20; cf. 2001, 118).
- 3.
In Benjamin’s German original, “Übersetzung verpflanzt also das Original” (1923, xii).
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Reifenstein, T. (2019). Ideal Identities and Impossible Translations: Drawing on Writing and Writing on Drawing. In: Riquet, J., Heusser, M. (eds) Imaging Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_5
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