The 'blog Larval Subjects contains a post in which critical theory devoteés are likened to victims of the Stockholm syndrome (said devoteés being, of course, the imprinting captives to the theorists' captors). My friend Rob over at popmatters.com's Marginal Utility offers these remarks.
My two cents: Of late I’ve become convinced that so much of the perceived difficulty of theory is an effect of translation. While plodding recently through a particularly wretched rendering of Derrida (The text: The Truth in Painting; translator: Geoffrey Bennington. Bad, bad, bad.), I found myself mentally correcting it much the same way I’d correct my freshman comp. students’ papers — making passive constructions active, dispelling pronoun–antecedent ambiguity — until eventually Derrida’s ideas didn’t seem so hard to grasp.
I initially thought that Bennington should know better, that he was just being lazy by not doing the obligatory translational “post-production” of tightening up the prose. But then I considered that perhaps there’s some utility or value in making a bad translation of French theory. Maybe not purging the translation of unneeded Gallicisms somehow enhances the work’s intellectual aura, the belief being that in this condition the translation preserves some of the maddening, oh-so-French intratextual dithering of the original. Problem is, this is something that is difficult to reproduce in an analytic language like English. Thus you get tortured locutions that are not at all effects of the deeply nuanced considerations being made, but of the approximations in English of French discursive tics and tendencies.
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