TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

Is this a rehearsal for dying? –Vilém Flusser, “The Bed”[1]

Flowers in a vase, on the dinner table, are examples of absurd life. If we wish to intuit these flowers, we can feel their tendency to sprout roots, and to push them into any soil. The rootless flowers’ tendency is the climate of groundlessness. –Vilém Flusser, “Certificate of Groundlessness”[2]

R0 [Rehearsal 0]

To rehearse
To rehearse means to “to rake over, turn over” (soil, ground)—constantly destabilizing that ground, being/feeling groundless. Rehearse comes from re- “again” + hercier “to drag, trail (on the ground), be dragged along the ground”—to be dragged along and dragging across the ground; groundless. To rehearse might also mean ‘to vert,’ as Vilém Flusser would understand and practice it—to converse—at least in the context of (self-)translation and, in that sense, (re-)writing, which are this essay’s central topics of inquiry.[3]

‘Creative Groundlessness’
What if we were to consider creative groundlessness as an act that verts, turns, flips? Or (is) inverted/converted/perverted/reverted? The previous are parts of a footnote written by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, the translator of Flusser’s Philosophy of Language.[4] In the footnote, Novaes clarifies his use of the verb ‘to vert’ when it comes to describing Flusser’s approach to ‘conversation,’ language and self-translation.[5] The multiple definitions his translator provides, interestingly, share similarities with the very etymology of the word rehearsal (e.g., to rake over, turn over), and in that sense with rehearsal as an act of conversation. It is through the latter that I suggest the examination of ‘creative groundlessness,’ attuning to Flusser’s process of translating his texts, repeatedly and in four different languages.

To “dance around” is one of Flusser’s metaphors, to collect different opinions and viewpoints—as if floating, groundlessly grounded—thus creating a palimpsest, an element most evident in his works, whose centre or core can be detected in the very act (or gesture) of writing.

& Self-Translating
Writing, in Flusser, becomes translating, and translating becomes writing. In fact, these words might as well be used interchangeably in his work, since the one nourishes the other. If we were to put it in a more schematic or ‘representational’ way: self-translation/writing would comprise the core (“the middle of the page”) and a series of ‘areas of inquiry’ would form “concentric text-circles” around it.[6] That said, from the numerous ‘areas’ one could concentrate on, I choose to rehearse metaphors:

TOUCH / HAND
ORGAN / CHEWING
SKY

I will consider these metaphors specifically under the lens of self-translation, in Rehearsals 1–2 (R1–R2) respectively, as well as in an Anti-Rehearsal, attempting a ‘dance-writing’ around Flusser’s stratigraphical and/or palimpsestic way of writing/translating, opening up the possibility of understanding creative groundlessness as a useful tool for re-reading, translating, and rehearsing his work—both a theory and a praxis; or a theory in praxis.[7]

Although in other philosophers (and writers), tracing the genealogy of terms and ideas is often typical, based on my reading of Flusser, this process could be approached through tracing and making notes, on the one hand, of the repetitions (often edited, re-written, self-translated in a multilingual life) and, on the other hand, of the ‘gaps’ created by jumping from one self-translated text to the next one.[8]

It is with that in mind that I suggest reading Flusser through a series of rehearsals—in their multiple definitions—in tracing these jumps or gaps and attempting a ‘bridging.’[9] A number of authors will aid thus the previous attempt: mainly, Svetlana Boym, Rada Ivekovic, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Anne Carson. Rainer Guldin’s precious analyses of Flusser’s (self-)translations and (re-)writings will also be employed throughout the text, which I would like to ‘metaphorize’ as a translatory textual weft of flowing fabrics [i.e., Flusserian conversations].[10]

“Go over again, repeat”
Well, to rehearse also means to “go over again, repeat.” And that is what I will attempt to do in the following pages: to go over again multiple times, and with multiple writers and artists; to expand a circle wherein self-translation and re-writing can be found;

to translate & rewrite; to transplant & im/
permanently relate;                     to touch,           chew,
        sky-write;           to feel groundlessly                   grounded;
                             to rehearse & converse the                      flowing fabric
  called    creative groundlessness.

R1:
TOUCH / HAND

In his autobiography, Bodenlos [Groundless], Flusser starts by rehearsing a number of definitions: what is groundless(ness)?[11] Setting off with the absurd, he moves onto rootless, meaningless, without reason, absurd sentences, absurd thinking. The sentence “two times two is four at seven o’clock in São Paulo” is, according to Flusser, groundless.[12] It encapsulates the “climate of groundlessness,” a hovering sensation “above the abyss, in which the concepts of ‘true’ and ‘false’ do not apply.”[13]

Those are the botanics of groundlessness; botanics paradoxically hovering above (out of touch), having possibly been in touch with the corrosive “acid of absurdity,” and then up-rooted. Flusser maintains throughout the first chapter of the book that “[w]e all know the climate of groundlessness from personal experience.”[14] There are moments where he relates that ‘ecumenical sentiment’ with loneliness, since “groundlessness is the experience of loneliness.”[15] And it is in such moments where one seeks ways of leaving the ground, ascending to (at times) dizzying altitudes, acclimating to a floating position—like “holes dug out of their entrails, floating”[16]—and looking at things from a groundlessly grounded perspective. Flusser attempts to write his autobiography from such a position—often adopted in writing his other texts—to use self-translation as a process of accumulating different points of view [floating off the ground], from which to persistently re-write.

Although groundlessness is characterized by what in Flusser appears to be an ecumenical sentiment we all know from personal experience, there are different kinds of groundlessness: imposed (by external forces) and self-imposed (by internal and/or external forces).[17] As I will argue, though, there might also be another kind of groundlessness; one that is (re)configured through and as self-translation, and that uses rewriting as a technique for reinvention and openness. I would like to call this ‘creative groundlessness.’

Having seen how groundlessness might be defined in different contexts and from different standpoints, one might ask: why ‘creative’? Well, to start, I am using the word creative to connote the openness and potentialities of adopting a groundlessly grounded approach to translating/writing. Yet, creative groundlessness is not aimed as a ‘romanticized’ concept, through which I suggest reading Flusser. What I am trying to emphasize, more than anything else, is the creative response one is called to employ, or develop, when suddenly found in acute moments of felt groundlessness. In that sense, creative also means resisting or struggling, whilst implying a momentary stillness or ‘silence’—contemplation or meditation (different temporalities). When it comes to translation in Flusser, this momentary silence might be traced in the spaces between one version of a text and another (its previous or following one), a multilingual process that, ultimately, attains the stratigraphical ‘nature’ of a resistant textual palimpsest.[18]

Creative groundlessness is becoming, thus, a coping mechanism; a way to redefine language and the self through translating/writing those silences or gaps—jumping over or bridging them. In a similar way, though, it might also become a form of commemoration; of ‘touch-writing.’ Svetlana Boym shared a similar viewpoint with Flusser, at least when it comes to the creative uncertainties of an autobiography; herself being a prolific writer, playwright, filmmaker, novelist, but also a media artist; the latter, an authorial and artistic persona she introduced at the end of her last monograph, Another Freedom (2010). However, as Cristina Vatulescu has maintained, “Svetlana’s biographies were not accidental inconsistencies but sustained exercises in self-fashioning, and lately […] self-editing.”[19] Rehearsals could relate to such sustained exercises in Flusser’s work, as well, if we follow Rainer Guldin in saying that Flusser’s “writing through translation is […] a strategy that aims to accumulate as many points of view as possible,” which is to say capturing as many “aftereffects of a floating blowball” as possible (the latter referring to Boym’s photographic work).[20] The process of multiple-translation—from one language to another, and from one version of a text to another—becomes a form of ‘editorial recycling.’[21] But: is this rehearsal a form of editorial recycling? Or: is this a rehearsal for dying?[22]

Boym spoke about (auto)biographies, acknowledging their presence and/or absence [erasure]: “There are writers with biographies and writers without biographies,” she used to say.[23] Her artworks can be seen as a source of both (creative) groundlessness and self-translating. Let us start from the latter: a term I suggest tracing in Boym’s ‘cocreation(s).’[24] In both her art and her writing/biographies, in “the beauty of the cracks, hinges, borderlines, and transit zones,” Boym maintains that cocreation is freedom.[25] And freedom might be found in creative groundlessness. Boym would probably respond using two geographical ‘referents’: one with no-exit and one with cracks, and from there exits.[26] She would call the former “a place out of place and a time out of time,” claiming that there “[w]e remained extraterritorial.”[27] And she would practice the latter in her own life: “even if just through the friction she created by comparing a literal and a figurative no-exit space.”[28] That said, cocreation, like creative groundlessness, is also surfacing as a process through which to cope; with mourning. To remember and forget. Boym cocreated Touching Writing (2004) on the day of Jacques Derrida’s death, dedicating it to Barbara Johnson, placing her hands behind a single page filled with words, putting it against the light, feeling the warmth of the hands, touch forming a “reddish aura.”[29]

It is interesting to think how text-image-hand might attain a geometrical form (“the points on a line touch each other”[30]), or that of a technical image, in which case texts-images-hands become “instruments for turning the messages of texts imaginable,” as Flusser notes in Post-History.[31] According to Guldin, Post-History might be thought of as “the most extreme example of self-translation” among Flusser’s multilingual practice[32], one that requires going back to his autobiography and rehearsing multiple re-readings and textual reorientations.[33] If there is something Flusser detects as a critical turning point, that is Auschwitz: revealing the “groundlessness of our culture,” while “chang[ing] our perception of the idea of history and progress.”[34] According to Guldin, we may trace Flusser’s obsessive re-writing of his texts in the following coincidence: “Auschwitz symbolizes also the beginning of Flusser’s own existential groundlessness.”[35] The multiple self-translations of the texts included in Post-History (essays rehearsed as lectures, as we learn in what Flusser calls a “User’s Manual”) are often without dates or indication as to the sequence of the translation process: they are somehow ‘unabridged.’ The latter is what leads Guldin to wonder: is each translation “a jump over an unbridgeable abyss”?[36] And myself, as a follow-up: is each self-translative jump over an unbridgeable abyss with or without hands?

R2:
ORGAN / CHEWING

“Are there really
specific organs that
are ‘used’ for
speaking,
just as, say, the
stomach is
used for
digestion?”[37]
Or is it, just as,
say, a matter of organ
trans-
-plantation?

In 2002, Rada Ivekovic published “On permanent translation (We are being translated),” a text I will approach a bit paradoxically: starting from the end.[38] “[E]ach individual is a translator forever translated,” Ivekovic concludes.[39] General untranslatability is not permanent translation, since “[p]ermanent translation […] is a state of being in translation oneself”; in constant, unending, that is, permanent self-translation, since it “also means that no history has been brought to a halt.”[40] It somehow becomes a matter of universes, then—being constructed by a constant ‘translative’ tension connected to the “original” text, the ultimate return to and coexistence with it, which transforms the translator/writer, and is respectively transformed by it, making (self-)translation possible—a matter of “cosmoi.”[41] Flusser speaks about a point where conversation emerges: a situation in the climate of poetry; a point where conversation is separated “from the unarticulated, the intellect from madness, the cosmos from chaos.”[42] Intriguingly, realizing a cosmos in conversation with other Selves (“selves-translating”) becomes for Flusser a negation of nothingness, which in turn becomes a negation of death, allowing us to return to the original quote: Is this a rehearsal for dying?[43] Probably not, since this is now a rehearsal for immortality, mediated by conversation.[44] Then again, this might be an encounter with the sensitivities or thresholds of ontological questioning, and therefore an “encounter with death.”[45] Although the latter does not necessarily make this a rehearsal, it implies that it might somehow be related to “the existential and ontological chasm” expressed in Flusser’s groundlessness and in what Ivekovic underlines as “the realization that there is no foundation.”[46]

It is a matter of organ transplantation. Ivekovic turns to Jean-Luc Nancy’s precious account of receiving a heart transplant, as described in his essay “L’Intrus” (2002), which includes both medical and philosophical complications. Nancy speaks of the intruder [organ/heart transplant], who “exposes me excessively. It extrudes me, exports me, expropriates me,” transforming and transliterating the “I” in/to groundlessness.[47] The latter is an “exile from the other,” a trans-plantation; it is also an exile from oneself, bringing forth the alienation of the self. If we were to turn to Flusser, this would probably be the moment when creative groundlessness would be born, and in that sense, we cannot but consider what Ivekovic notes: “this exile from the other will have to be the object of a reintegration during a painful apprenticeship called life.”[48] A heart is an organ. A heart is also “the motor, the transmission mechanism and the heart.”[49] A heart is a heart.

And, as Ivekovic reminds us, “we have all had heart transplants”; which here is used to describe forms of “ontological disturbance (ébranlement)” related to the body: giving birth, losing a loved one, encountering death, experiencing violence, war, “losing one’s footing as a result of the collapse of the world that sustained us”—that is, feeling and being groundless; rehearsing creative groundlessness.[50]

Flusser is translating the self [text], that is, chewing the self [text] away: a word at a time, a phrase, a paragraph. Chewing is here self-translating. Flusser observes:

If you lie in wait for a word at the moment it comes out of the mouth, try to catch it, to chew it before it is spit out (and that would actually be to grasp the gesture of speaking), you notice that you are always a second too late.[51]

How can we make sure, then, that chewing does not lead to us being a second too late, that the gesture of speaking does not become speaking while chewing, but chewing as in re-creating a text groundlessly, meaning without the soil setting a ground of prefigured uses of organs?[52] Perhaps if we transplanted the mouth with the heart, we could catch that word, and chew it, before it is spit out. Perhaps then, we would be a second too early; or more realistically, of that second.

Using chewing as a metaphor in Flusser’s self-translating/writing (and thus in creative groundlessness) points, here, to Flusser’s ‘reshuffling’ of words, phrases, paragraphs. Guldin offers an intriguing first analysis of that reshuffling in Flusser’s text “The Ground We Tread” (written in the early ‘70s; translated several times in the early ‘80s).[53] In comparing two textual sequences, he observes the almost tectonic movements of the single paragraphs: “textual blocks” moving around, redistributed across the text, words and arguments transplanted, altering the macro- and micro-structural stratigraphy of the text.[54]

Following the tectonic movements and the stratigraphical rearrangements in “The Ground We Tread,” what I suggest is considering the possibility of the mouth, as an organ, performing a transplanted act: that of the heart, which would pulse life into the new self-translated text (and ultimately—upon return—to the original or “final” text). However, a question, concerning both the before and the after of a transplantation, persists: what happens when the heart, the organ, fails?

I, me, my, mine, somebody, someone
seemed suddenly inadequate to account for one’s existence.[55]

In a recent ‘response’ to Nancy’s “L’Intrus,” Margarita Saona starts by sharing her own experience of heart failure. “If my heart, ‘my very own’ heart, failed, if my body was operated by machines, if I needed a heart harvested from someone else’s body in order to go on, how was this body still mine?” Saona wonders.[56] Well, first, following Nancy, we need to acknowledge the encounter with alienation; re-uttering: [it] exposes me excessively. It extrudes me, exports me, expropriates me. But how is one to move from alienation to “a form of being-with and being-in one another”?[57] And how could one take into account the previous definition of chewing as self-translating?

It is intriguing to challenge those questions by turning to two of Nancy’s “Indices” in his book Corpus (2008). First, no. 32, where he speaks about eating: “Eating isn’t incorporating,” Nancy argues, “but opening the body to the thing we devour, exhaling our insides in the tasting of fish or fig.”[58] In that sense, chewing (and thus self-translating) in Flusser is meant to express an ‘opening of the body’; both self and text [the body of the text]. Yet, “[t]here’s never any incorporation, but always exits, twists, openings-out, channelings or disgorgings, crossings, balancings”[59]; which, in Flusser, could be verts, turns, flips, gaps, bridges.

If chewing is synonymous with self-translating (being of that second), could it be that the text(s) are ‘corpuses,’ literally bodies, documenting a multilingual life comprised of textual transplants [organs] in a groundlessly grounded act of incorporation?

In no. 36 of Nancy’s “Indices” we read about the ‘Corpus’: “a body is a collection of pieces, bits, members, zones, states, functions.”[60] It is “a collection of collections, a corpus corporum.”[61] Based on this, and in verting Nancy’s previous argument—claiming, instead, that there is an incorporation, at least a groundlessly grounded act of incorporation—then in Flusser’s case that incorporation takes the form of textual bodies, of a collection of bits, pieces, members, textual transplants ultimately coming together as intrusions, though being-with and being-in one another, forming a “final” corpus: a single body of text, self-translated/re-written multiple times, with exits, twists, openings-out, channelings or disgorgings, crossings, balancings; potential elements interweaving the flowing fabric called creative groundlessness.[62]

‘ANTI-REHEARSAL’
SKY

If rehearsal is not imposing itself as a new beginning
(at least overtly),
then it is not imposing itself as a final ending
(at least covertly).
It’s only a return to the ‘original’:

As I have attempted to underline in this essay, creative groundlessness can be thought of in terms of self-translating, which in Flusser becomes writing (the act or gesture of writing itself), and vice versa. However, self-translation and, in that sense, creative groundlessness are unfolding as if gliding like a flowing fabric—that of conversation—in-between spaces and gaps.[63] Attempting Rehearsals in, or even dancing around, these gaps at times entails short or long pauses, moments of feeling enveloped in uncertainty, and others when this uncertainty becomes groundlessness; struggling, that is, to become creative groundlessness. It is exile and displacement (external or internal), the feeling of having no fixed place, that ultimately leads to self-translation: a need, more than an impulse, to keep moving. And it is in this context where looking at things, writing or being groundlessly grounded act as small transplantations of breaths, drops of water landing from the sky—a form of skywriting, as poet Anne Carson would phrase it: “For a while, I experimented with so-called skywriters, skytypers and sky dot matrix printers. They are aeronautical experts who perform all these media in little airplanes that exude picturesque white smoke.”[64] Carson declares her disappointment “in the level of invention overall.”[65]

Since this is an anti-rehearsal, though, skywriting is all but disappointing: a view opening up “to the horizon of an infinite sky. From then on, everything was possible. And with a bleeding heart, but an open spirit, one fell into such limitless possibility.”[66] Skywriting, in this anti-rehearsal, thus becomes brushstrokes of oils. “The oils were a struggle against paint, aimed at sculpting and digging hole[s] of nothingness.”[67] Self-translation is a palimpsest of struggling brushstrokes; skywriting rehearsing potentialities. Flusser would return to the original text at the end of all his translations; an end often imposed by other non-linguistic factors; an imposed “final” language as well.[68] For in Flusser the theory and practice of self-translation would often contradict each other, openly, having transformed from “an attempt to survive [… to] a way of living.”[69] If anything, it appears those imposed endings were the anti-rehearsals in Flusser’s skywriting, the ones that make rehearsals in creative groundlessness end full circle, coming back to the ‘original’: a flowing fabric groundlessly grounding.

–
Notes
[1] Vilém Flusser, “The Bed,” FlusserBrasil, http://flusserbrasil.com/arte161.pdf. [accessed: 12.02.23]; I would like to take the ‘space’ of this footnote to trace the genealogy of this text and a few phrases I will be utilizing throughout my essay: “The Bed” appears to have been translated multiple times: into German (in 1993, as “Das Bett”; perhaps originally written in German by Flusser) and Hungarian (in 1996, found under the title Az ágy [The bed], a 95-page book; also in a translation by Zoltán Sebôk, which is closer to the length/text I am using from FlusserBrasil). Added to the translations included in the aforementioned book, it is crucial to refer to the multiple typewritten manuscripts—at least two found in English—most probably self-translated by Flusser. However, if there is an element that makes the phrase I am starting this essay with more intriguing, that is the fact that it is not included in the other versions; neither in the second one in English nor in the German and Hungarian versions. Therefore, in this essay I will be returning to this phrase—which undergoing multiple layers of self-translation and re-writing ends up being ‘erased’ from (or edited out of) the “final” text—and to the verb ‘gliding,’ by which I point to ‘dahingleiten’ as is used in the German version. Other reasons for writing such an extended footnote relate to Rainer Guldin’s precious observations and analyses of Flusser’s ‘multilingual life’ and self-translation practice [palimpsest], for which I will be speaking specifically in “Rehearsal 2 [R2]” of this essay. For Guldin’s arguments, see Rainer Guldin, “Translating philosophy: Vilém Flusser’s practice of multiple self-translation,” in A. Cordingley (Ed.), Self-Translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 95–110.
[2] Vilém Flusser, “Certificate of Groundlessness,” in Groundless, ed. and trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Metaflux, 2017), 19.
[3] For the etymology of the word “rehearse,” see Harper Douglas, “Etymology of rehearse,” Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/rehearse. [accessed: February 20, 2023]
[4] For the full translator’s note concerning the uses of ‘to vert,’ see Vilém Flusser, “The Multiplicity of Languages,” in Philosophy of Language, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Univocal, 2016), 55.; Rodrigo Maltez Novaes is a Brazilian artist, translator, editor and the founder of Metaflux Publishing, where he leads the long-term project for the translation and publication of Vilém Flusser’s work from Brazilian-Portuguese into English. For further information, see Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, “Flusser Studies,” http://www.flusserstudies.net/person/rodrigo-maltez-novaes. [accessed: February 15, 2023]
[5] Ibid.
[6] With the description of the main circle and concentric circles around it, I am pointing to Flusser’s reference to the Jewish interpretative technique of ‘pilpul,’ for which I am following Guldin’s translation of the titular text written by Flusser in 1995: “‘In the middle of the page’, writes Flusser, ‘there is a word, or a few words, and around this kernel are drawn some concentric text-circles. [. . .] The circles do not only comment upon the kernel, but also comment upon each other.’” See Guldin, “Translating Philosophy,” 97.
[7] I am using ‘dance-writing’ in its literal and etymological definition, which is that of ‘choreography’ See https://www.etymonline.com/word/choreography.; A theory in praxis might indeed be challenging, if we bear in mind what Guldin notes with regard to Flusser’s use of self-translation: “theory and practice do not always coincide but very often openly contradict each other.” See Guldin, “Translating philosophy,” 107.
[8] It is important to note from the beginning that Flusser wrote (and translated) as a philosopher and not as a writer. Although this is made clear in much of the bibliography pertaining to his multilingual and plural ways of writing/translating, I would like to consider it as a creative or productive tension, at least in this essay: thinking thus if Flusser lies, indeed, in an in-between space (philosopher/writer) and how that might relate to the concept I will be proposing, ‘creative groundlessness.’
[9] Although I will be returning to the idea of “bridging” jumps or gaps (meaning, reaching a “synthesis”) in Flusser’s self-translating/writing practice, it is important to mention Guldin’s proposition for a comparative analysis of Flusser’s and Michel Serres’ work; specifically, the concluding thoughts where we read about Flusser: “[he] circles around his subject jumping from perspective to perspective. The ensuing synthesis cumulates points of view that often radically differ from each other. It is a frail and transient construction of conflicting standpoints.” See Rainer Guldin, “Thinking Plurality. Vilém Flusser and Michel Serres: A philosophical convergence,” Flusser Studies 33 (May 2022): 16, http://flusserstudies.net/sites/www.flusserstudies.net/files/media/attachments/guldin-thinking-plurality.pdf. [accessed: February 16, 2023]
[10] I will be utilizing the description of conversation(s) by Flusser as “flowing fabrics” throughout this text, along with pertinent metaphors included in “Filosofia da Línguagem” (1966).; I am specifically pointing to the translated excerpt (p. 167 in the 1966 text) quoted in Anke Finger, Rainer Guldin, and Gustavo Bernardo, “On Doubt: The Web of Language,” in Vilém Flusser: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 34. As quoted in the latter, Flusser says: “The conversation is a fabric made out of sentences that are connected by links called arguments. It is a flowing fabric, expanding constantly. At certain points in the fabric (it would be better to call them moments) the threads arguments cross. […] The conversation consists of these knots that are tied together by arguments. The conversation is the field of the intellect in which thoughts cross. It is the field of dialoguing ‘I.’ They are an aspect of the conversation.”
[11] Flusser, “Certificate of Groundlessness.”
[12] Ibid., 19.
[13] Ibid., 20.
[14] Ibid., 21.
[15] Ibid.
[16] I am appropriating a phrase here used by Flusser to describe Samson Flexor’s work. See Flusser, “Dialogue II,” in Groundless, 165.
[17] Ibid.
[18] I am referring, here, to one of Flusser’s phrases translated into English and used in-text by Rainer Guldin: “To write is, therefore, to translate, in order to create a textual palimpsest.” See Guldin, “Translating philosophy,” 98.
[19] Cristina Vatulescu, “Afterimages: Svetlana Boym’s Irrepressible Cocreations,” diacritics 43, 3 (2015): 99. Emphasis added.
[20] Guldin, “Translating philosophy,” 97.; Vatulescu, “Afterimages,” 103.
[21] Guldin, “Translating philosophy,” 97.
[22] Flusser, “The Bed.”
[23] Vatulescu, “Afterimages,” 99.
[24] Ibid, 100.
[25] Ibid, 100.
[26] Ibid., 104–5.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Here, as seen in Ibid., 102.
[30] Vilém Flusser, “Our Health,” in Post-History, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, ed. Siegfried Zielinski (Univocal, 2013), 45.
[31] Flusser, “Our Images,” in Ibid., 95.
[32] Guldin, “Translating philosophy,” 101.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid., 104.
[37] Rearranged quote from Flusser, “The Gesture of Speaking,” in Gestures, 26.
[38] I am referring to the English translation, which was published in 2002. See Rada Ivekovic, “On permanent translation (We are being translated),” trans. John Doherty, transversal texts, https://transversal.at/transversal/0606/ivekovic/en. [accessed: 20.02.23]
[39] Ibid. Emphasis in the original.
[40] Ibid.
[41] There is an intriguing overlap between Ivekovic’s text and Flusser’s method of what in my text I have been calling ‘translating/writing,’ especially when it comes to the ultimate return of the translated text to the original, and its coexistence with the original text (which, indeed, is no longer the “original” text, but a transformed/transplanted text meeting its transformed/transplanted original).
[42] Flusser, “Language as an Opus,” in Philosophy of Language, 76.
[43] Flusser, “The Verb,” in Philosophy of Language, 133.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Ivekovic, “On permanent translation.”
[46] Ivekovic highlights how “[s]ome cultures have always attempted to live with such an awareness”; referring to the awareness of having “no foundation.” See Ibid.
[47] Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’Intrus,” trans. Susan Hanson, CR: The New Centennial Review 2, no. 3 (2002): 13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949352.; Also in Ivekovic, “On permanent translation.”
[48] Ibid. Emphasis Added.
[49] Nancy, “L’Intrus,” 13. As seen in Ivekovic, “On permanent translation.”
[50] Ivekovic, “On permanent translation.”
[51] Flusser, “The Gesture of Speaking,” 27.
[52] I am pointing here to the second sentence in Flusser’s text: “Are there really specific organs that are ‘used’ for speaking, just as, say, the stomach is used for digestion?” See “The Gesture of Speaking,” 26.
[53] Guldin, “Translating philosophy,” 104.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Margarita Saona, “Carrying L’Intrus: The transport-station of an organ transplant,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 27 (2022): 547.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Ibid., 552.; Saona offers a valuable and ‘intimate’ account and a series of insightful arguments with regard not only to organ/heart transplants and alienation but also the ‘being-with’ and ‘being-in’ with others, which is eloquently expressed, at least in my opinion, as ‘caring-carrying’ following the multi-faceted work of Bracha L. Ettinger. The only reason I do not expand on the previous is because I believe an analysis of Ettinger’s terminology and Saona’s arguments would require another Rehearsal, if not a whole essay, on its own. However, I would like to note here that many of Ettinger’s terms could be considered in discussing/reading Flusser (e.g., Ettinger’s ‘borderlinking’ and Flusser’s uses of ‘bridges’/‘bridging’), and perhaps not exclusively in relation to self-translating/writing.
[58] Jean-Luc Nancy, “Fifty-eight Indices on the Body,” in Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 154.
[59] Ibid.
[60] Ibid., 155.
[61] Ibid.
[62] With “verting” I point to its definitions underlined by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes—namely to turn, to flip. See footnote 4 in this essay.
[63] With ‘unfolding as if gliding,’ I am pointing to my first extended footnote as well as Guldin’s phrase, “each new text is an ‘invitation to a dance’”; (his translation of) Flusser’s text “Retradução enquanto metodo de trabalho.” See Guldin, “Translating Philosophy,” 100.
[64] Louisiana Channel, “Anne Carson: Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” YouTube, March 14, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F9xUhaimTY. [accessed: 19.02.23]
[65] Ibid.; With “drops of water landing from the sky,” I am pointing to “They go up through the capillaries of narrow valleys, some drops project all the way up to the summits and then return laden with “news” in order to vivify the plains.” See Vilém Flusser, “Valleys,” in Natural:Mind, trans. Rodrigo Maltez Novaes (Univocal, 2013), 17–18.
[66] Flusser, Groundless, 40.
[67] Flusser speaks about Flexor’s watercolors. See Flusser, “Dialogue II,” in Ibid.
[68] Guldin highlights the existence of “other non-linguistic factors” impacting the “final” text (e.g., editors’ decisions, publishing restrictions). See Guldin, “Translating philosophy,” 104.
[69] Guldin, “Translating Philosophy,” 100.

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