Other-wielding
This latter "wielding" has been one of the recurrent themes of my work on translation over the past decade. The ideosomatics of The Translator’s Turn was an exploration of the ideological regulation of individual behavior through the somatic imprinting of collective norms on the autonomic nervous system. The double binds I have elucidated in Ring Lardner and the Other and elsewhere are attempts to articulate the inward regulatory "speaking" of ideology, in all its paralyzing conflictuality, through our bodies--what I called in Lardner the "esemphonic" shaping of individual and collective behavior through the speaking-us of various sociopolitical Others. My tracing in Translation and Taboo of the displacements of taboo in the schizoid/ascetic/metempsychotic intellectual/religious traditions of the West was an attempt to narrow in on a single powerful strand of ideological regulation. My "abusanalysis" of translation in the "(Dis)Abusing Translation" chapter of What is Translation? --my discussion of the dynastic culture of abuse in the context of Philip Lewis's Derridean concept "abusive fidelity"--was likewise an attempt to untangle the complex webs by which we are taught to submit to and be shaped by abuse, both as abusers and as abuse victims (typically, and complexly, both at once).
And my initial interest in spirit-channeling as my current book project was taking shape in my mind derived from precisely this threeway isomorphism: the possession of channels by discarnate spirits, the possession of the translator by the source author, and the possession of ideological subjects by collective forces. The first had always seemed to me a rather boring fraud, not even worth looking into; the second, a normative idealization that represented everything I hated most about traditional assumptions, worth taking seriously only long enough to launch an effective counterattack. But since the third was one of my most abiding scholarly interests, the parallels between it and the other two made me take another look at them, and generated this book.
