Monday, May 10, 2010

Night of the World Navigator

My computer briefly froze, or hiccuped, a few minutes ago while trying to download too many things at once, with Photoshop open. Here is a portion of the screen it froze on--cropped but otherwise unedited:

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11 comments:

  1. troutmanMay 10, 2010 at 9:03 AM

    Presumably your computer was doing an artistic interpretation of what you were googling:

    The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many presentations, images, of which none happens to occur to him—or which are not present. This night, the inner of nature, that exists here— pure self—in phantasmagorical presentations, is night all around it, here shoots a bloody head—there another white shape, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful, it suspends the night of the world here in an opposition. In this night being has returned.

    (Hegel from the Realphilosophie manuscript of 1805–06) http://whenhernameyouwriteyoublot.blogspot.com/2006/05/night-of-world.html

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  2. Andrei MolotiuMay 10, 2010 at 9:57 AM

    Yeah, that's what I was googling. I was trying to find various interpretations of this passage (Zizek seems to have used it a lot)--I have this theory that it has been misinterpreted/mistranslated up to now because of a specific point that none of the translators are getting--and what I found did nothing to contradict my suspicion. I suppose I'm going to have to write this up at some point.

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  3. blaumannMay 11, 2010 at 1:46 AM

    Primaprima!

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  4. Mark Staff BrandlMay 11, 2010 at 5:17 AM

    Interesting. What is the point you contend? German abstract nouns and Hegelian ones in particular can usually bear an 'overload' (or 'underload' depending on how you look at it) of meanings, so I wouldn't doubt that there are almost oppositional translations.

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  5. Mark Staff BrandlMay 11, 2010 at 5:19 AM

    Here's a nice comparative translation search machine site for German-English:
    http://www.linguee.de/

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  6. Andrei MolotiuMay 11, 2010 at 8:02 AM

    Mark--it's not so much a point of translation, but that there is a specific reference that the translators and interpreters are missing... Once you get that, it makes a lot more sense, and some of the parenthetic additions that other editions/translations add to Hegel (admittedly rough) text become unnecessary... I don't want to be more specific here, I actually want to publish this.

    I've worked with a couple of English translations, a couple of French ones, and the German original (plus my dictionary) so, umm, I think I'm beyond translation bots at this point... But thanks, it can always come in useful.

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  7. Russell MaycumberMay 11, 2010 at 9:42 AM

    Hegel comes across more as a lyricist to me than a writer? If you study his works they must be read I suppose but what if they are read aloud? Aural?
    ????Damn it Jim I'm a scribbler not a philosophy major! In the listening that certain trappings of the written language become redundant or pedestrian? More to the point...This looks like a Pueblo Indian's operating system, Hobit's might look more circular...These on this page remind me of square rain drops in a square puddle...Pueblo Hobbits mashup=cliff dweller http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GcBbb9-N3pU/SjEtklRcDUI/AAAAAAAAAFQ/89VkPTm1wjw/s400/DSC07350.JPG

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  8. Dick WhyteMay 11, 2010 at 7:43 PM

    I would love to see more experiments with this. Great work.

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  9. Dick WhyteMay 13, 2010 at 6:24 AM

    Andrei - I was wondering if it would be okay to do a short blog post on my blog about this and include the image. I would put copious links to Abstract Comics of course!!

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  10. Andrei MolotiuMay 14, 2010 at 6:13 AM

    Hey Dick--

    by all means, please do--use whatever images you need from here!

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  11. DickWhyteMay 21, 2010 at 11:05 PM

    Here it is: http://www.wayfarergallery.net/hot-images/?p=1594 All the best- Dick

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