Rhetoric And Ethics In "The Politics Of Translation"

Gayatri Spivak’s essay "The Politics of Translation", first published in1992, is the majorstatement on translation theory and practice from a major contemporary theorist, and has beenanthologized in the widely read Translation Studies Reader. Yet due to Spivak’s difficult writingstyle and eclectic use of various "post-ism" theoretical approaches, it remains inaccessible tomany students and researchers within the field of translation studies. Previous research hasfocused primarily on situating Spivak’s essay as a whole within contemporary theoreticalframeworks, or applying it in specific situations, often entirely unrelated to translation studies.The aim of this thesis is to clarify the internal structure of Spivak’s essay by examining three coreconcepts–rhetoric, agency, and surrender–and to describe their relationships to each other andtheir roles in Spivak’s work. It is hoped that by doing so, this paper will facilitate future efforts tosituate and apply Spivak’s work within translation theory. In the first section I examine Spivak’suse of poststructural literary theory and make explicit her debts to her former teacher Paul deMan. Spivak’s understanding of rhetoric and reading are shown to be derived from de Man, andtheir use within the context of Spivak’s translation theory is explained. In the second section Iexamine the concept of agency and show how it is used as a link between language and “theethico-political arena”, also with help from de Man. And in the third section I consider Spivak’sclaim that the translator must surrender to the text, and that this surrender is “more erotic thanethical.” Drawing on Judith Butler’s work in Giving an Account of Oneself, I demonstrate thatSpivak’s erotic surrender need not be considered anti-ethical, and can be accounted for within aconsistent ethical theory. While Spivak’s connection with de Man is fairly well known, therelationship between Spivak’s translation work and Butler’s writing on ethics has received lessattention, and this section thus represents a new and potentially fruitful path of inquiry.