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Notes
Merleau-Ponty (2012).
Original translations thus stand to expression as certain kinds of perspective paintings, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, stand to a tradition that they transmute only by studying and repeating it: they make the workings of expressive institution manifest from within that institutions forms of expression. Also, a recreative translation could open an “access definition” of expression, in Heidegger’s sense.
This is, I hope, a radical- or hyper- reflection, in the sense that the experience of what I am reflecting on is integral, initiative of, and ingredient in the reflection. That is, this is the sort of reflection that would never have occurred prior or apart from the experience that engenders it, and what I am trying to do here is have the reflection stay true to and be shaped by its roots in that which alone engenders reflection as its condition.
The story is collected in Borges (1964).
It’s also about writing and publishing, since the writing and publishing of the book that records Don Quixote’s adventures, become a theme of that very book, and, notoriously, the second part begins by inveighing against the publication of false sequels to the first part. Quixote is a book that from start to finish is very much about books, and about this very book itself. (It’s no accident that Borges hinges his story on the Quixote and not some other novel.) Here it is also worth observing that for its readers, Quixote probably falls into the class of books that you either you can’t get through, or read over and over again, or can no longer read because you’re too old and know it too well and can no longer actually read what’s on the page, or can no longer bear being drawn into its rigours—that is, it is very much like a philosophy book.
Merleau-Ponty (1962), translated by Colin Smith. Smith’s translation is at a basic level solid and robust, although it was in need of correction in many places, some of which were made over its various editions, but it also inherently suffered by having been made at an early stage in the reception of Merleau-Ponty’s work, and without the benefit of subsequent scholarship that has worked through the key concepts, so as to point out, e.g., that body image and body schema (cf., e.g. Gallagher (1986)) should not be conflate, and other imprecisions or infelicities.
Landes (2013b).
Seldom has a philosophy book suffered so many misfortunes in its publication: the Smith translation has, e.g., over its various editions, been reissued with a typo on the spine, Phenomenonology of Perception (I have a copy as a collector’s edition), and in 2002 with new typesetting and pagination that upsets all prior references in English scholarship. Similarly, in 2005, Gallimard printed a French edition with new typesetting and pagination (prior to 2005, the preface was paginated with Roman numerals with Arabic numerals thereafter; post 2005, the preface begins on Arabic page 1). The Landes edition is an advance since it now includes French pagination, of the post 2005 French edition, which might now become a scholarly standard—if publishers do not change it again. Still, an English Merleau-Ponty scholar really needs 5 editions (3 English, 2 French) to be able to follow all the page references in the literature (but see my online concordance for an aid).
References
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Fóti, Véronique M. 2013. Tracing expression in Merleau-ponty: Aesthetics, philosophy of biology, and ontology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Gallagher, Shaun. 1986. Body image and body schema: A conceptual clarification. Journal of Mind and Behaviour 7: 541–554.
Kristensen, Stefan. 2010. Parole et subjectivité: Merleau-ponty et la phénoménologie de l’expression. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.
Landes, Donald A. 2013a. Merleau-Ponty and the paradoxes of expression. London: Routledge.
Landes, Donald A. 2013b. The Merleau-Ponty dictionary. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of perception (trans: Colin Smith). Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: The Humanities Press. Original edition, 1945.
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Slatman, Jenny. 2003. L’expression au-delà de la représentation: Sur l’aisthêsis et l’esthétique chez merleau-ponty. Leuven: Peeters.
Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2000. The paradox of expression. In Chiasms: Merleau-ponty’s notion of flesh, ed. Fred Evans, and Leonard Lawlor, 89–102. Albany: SUNY Press.
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Morris, D. The paradoxes of translation: reflections on expression in Don Landes’s Recreative translation of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception . Cont Philos Rev 49, 371–382 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9384-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9384-2