Lexicography, Terminology, and Translation: Text-based Studies in Honour of Ingrid Meyer

Chapter 8. French Theorists, North American Scholiasts

121 Anyone familiar with contemporary North American academic discourse has the sense that certain lexical items—gaze, recuperate (for “retrieve”), interpellate, to name just a few—occur with a much higher frequency in academic writing than “in the general population.” What’s more, the combinatorial range of these items can differ markedly, in academic discourse, from the pa
erns of “ordinary,” garden-variety English: certain items appear in co-texts that are well outside their etymologically determined range of collocation or frankly incompatible with their core meanings. To be sure, gaze, recuperate, and interpellate are all bona fide lexical items.Buttheiratypicalfrequenciesandcollocationalrangesinacademic writing give them the status of register markers. Their immediate French counterparts, on the other hand (regard, récupérer, interpeller), are perfectly ordinary words that continue to be used routinely in everyday discourse—even as some of them have become central to the writings of people such as Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser. One plausible explanation for the increased frequency and skewed collocational range of such items might well be that the vast majority of North American academics seem to have accessed “The Parisians”— Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Althusser, et cetera—uniquely through translations (and through each other’s scholia of morceaux choisis from these translations). While increases in frequency and narrowing of collocational range are typical of terminological formation, there may well be (at least in the humanities) a difference in kind between “home-grown” terminologies—those that emerge from CHAPTER 8 FRENCH THEORISTS, NORTH AMERICAN SCHOLIASTS BARBARA FOLKART 122 Barbara Folkart direct, hands-on involvement—and those cobbled together après coup by academics turned translators. The very fact that these lexical oddities can all be traced back to items that are widely and idiomatically used in the writings of French theorists (Lacan’s regard, Althusser’s interpeller, etc.) would seem to point to the heavy hand of translation. I propose, in this short paper, to examine one particularly flagrant case, interpellate and its fellow traveller hail, both of which owe their current visibility on the North American academic scene to one specific translation of an essay by Louis Althusser. Examples of Althusser’s assimilationintotheAcademyabound.Thediscourseofpostcolonialism, in particular, seems to be rife with hailings and interpellations, oen in co-texts that violate the semantic constraints governing the usual pa
erns of collocation: “to call or ‘hail’ or ‘interpellate’ the indigenous peoples of a colony ‘savages’ is to subjectify them as wild, uncivilized, irrational, etc.” (Robinson 1997, 23); “the Indians were ‘interpellated’ or ‘hailed’ as mystical, primitive, unreliable, mendacious, etc. by the British colonizers” (119). The collocational pa
ern to hail X as Y normally demands that Y be a noun phrase, determiner + N, where N has positive denotations: it is quite idiomatic to speak of a bystander hailed as a heroine, or leaders hailed as Ø men of great vision, or a discovery hailed as a major breakthrough, but strings such as *they were hailed as unreliable and mendacious are both grammatically and lexically anomalous. It turns out, as we will see, that the malformed pa
ernings of what I refer to as “profspeak” are oen an artifact of translation—that they bear witness, indeed, to the process through which less than competent translation entrenches itself in and ultimately informs academic discourse. Much, if not all, of this discourse claims descendence from the following snippet of Althusser, as Englished by Ben Brewster (1971, 174): I shall then suggest that ideology “acts” or “functions” in such a way that it “recruits” subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or “transforms” the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: “Hey, you there!” French Theorists, North American Scholiasts 123 It is time now that we had a look at the source text that spawned such a cumbersome and tenacious terminology in academic English. ALTHUSSER’S ESSAY: CONTENT, ETHOS, AND STYLISTICS Althusser’s “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État: Notes pour une recherche” was first published in 1970, then reprised, in 1976, in Positions (1964–1975), a collection of Althusser’s essays. The material evidence alone points to the canonical status of this essay: the University of O
awa’s copy of Positions has been in constant circulation (and invariably put on...