Estética de la ambigüedad y política en la antipoesía de Nicanor Parra.
Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos.
Vol. 44 Núm. 3 (2020)
“Beauty is a Thing of the Past. The Monster, the Idiom, and the Health of our Disciplines”
In this article, I will make a case for the ethical need to translate the animal, which is perhaps another way to think what J.M. Coetzee’s character, Elizabeth Costello, understands is the writer's role as a "secretary of the invisible." Translation, in this context, names a form of response to difference that involves an ethical attitude, that I like to compare, by opposition, to what Barbara Cassin explains it is the attitude towards the “barbarian”, this is, those who don’t speak our language and are, consequently, not considered part of “us”. I will reconstruct an itinerary of textual references, a conversation that begins with Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, passes through Descartes and Heidegger, and ends with Derrida on the topic of human's relation to speech and its role in determining the human and its other: the animal. The scholarship on Coetzee's work has paid sufficient attention to the shapes ethics take in Coetzee's fiction and its implications, yet an insignificant portion of these efforts are directed to ground this attitude in a practice. Translation offers the conceptual frame to ground Coetzee's ethical attitude into an ethical practice.