Who or What Is Compared? The Concept of Comparative Literature and the Theoretical Problems of Translation

I. What Can Be Compared? What Compares Itself? Gulliver's or Pangloss's Wake²

Let us suppose that a seminar occurs {takes place}³ in a department of comparative literature.

Which is apparently the case.

This is a department of comparative literature; I just arrived [j'y arrive]. Like many institutions, comparative literature did not wait for me, it did not wait for us, in order to exist. Nor did departments of literature in the West and elsewhere. To exist, for an institution, is to affirm its right to existence; it is to constantly refer, more or less virtually, to a legitimacy, but to a certain type of particular legitimacy, a historical legitimacy, an entitlement that has its origin in a historical act or in historical acts of foundation. When the day comes that this act of foundation—that founds the law upon nonlaw, upon an ajuridical situation—the day this act of foundation is contested by another claim to legitimacy, or simply the day when no one feels the necessity or the possibility of referring to the foundation of the law, when no one draws authority from it any longer, then the institution dies. It can outlive [survivre à] its own death, continue to translate itself in rituals, objective behaviors, reproductive procedures, and give all the exterior signs of vitality, all the apparent guarantees of its smooth functioning, of its continuity, of its legitimacy. It can continue to pretend to have a determined, rigorously identifiable object and to relate to it in a living, renewed, effective, productive way. Even if it no longer has an object around which a living consensus can be established and can bring together a community of researchers, teachers, and students, a department in a university can long outlive the disappearance of its object and of the living consensus relating to it. It is true that, in these cases, the survival [survie], the time and the economy of survival (for example, the budget, the demographics of the institution, its region of influence, etc.) are always ruled by its inscription in a larger sociopolitical space, of which we must never lose sight.

You have already recognized the facile, worn-out, conventional schema I have been using in this preamble. It opposes not only life to death as two terms, it also exploits a reassuring belief: that an institution has a living and authentic origin, its living source of legitimacy, its intentional purpose [finalité], its grand design, its project, its telos, or its soul, and when this living purpose ceases to animate the community of subjects (here, researchers, professors, students), then there only remains, and not for long, a facade, a desiccated body, a sterile and mechanical reproduction.

Now if I proposed to call this seminar "The Concept of Comparative Literature and the Theoretical Problems of Translation," it was not in order to play the role of the latest arrival in a department, {latest arrival} whose first preoccupation—and with a taste for provocation—would be to put into question the institution that welcomes him, to ask his hosts how long they have lived here, what their ownership or rental rights are, under what conditions they occupy the premises, where their funding comes from, etc. As you can imagine, it is not at all in this spirit that I am asking my questions. Nor is it in my intentions, in my tastes {or within my means}, to organize a general and radical problematic (as my title could nonetheless lead one to believe) in order to begin with a tabula rasa and establish the basis of a new foundation, of another legitimacy.

Above all, I do not intend to inaugurate, or to criticize or to initiate.

What, then, is my intention? And why have I begun with this alternative between the living soul and the dead body of an institution, between its living source of legitimacy and the mechanical reproduction of its legality? First of all to put in place and in the spotlight (of the microscope or the telescope...