post-colonial_translation

Ramanujan’s theory and practice 135
that Derrida’s Heideggerian method can work only on the
assumption that something like ‘Western metaphysics’ is such an
integrated ‘system’ that any one part of it, however small, marginal
or eccentric, necessarily and completely reproduces all the essential
properties of the whole. This methodological axiom, however,
cannot be transferred from the domain of academic philosophical
writing to that of literary textuality at large without immense
difficulty. Derrida is able to make the transfer only by making the
curiously reductive, homogenizing, essentializing and Eurocentric
avant-garde claim that all writing is equally écriture, ‘writing in
general’ – which Michel Foucault was right, though ineffective, in
criticizing as a transcendentalist move. 28 I would argue that no
literature, not even ‘Western literature’, is merely or wholly a
discursively displaced, condensed or reconfigured articulation of a
‘metaphysics’ that has been completed and systematized
somewhere outside it and that somehow survives recoverably
intact within it. That is, to use an Enlightenment trope, ‘literature’
is not just a ‘handmaiden’ of ‘philosophy’; to modulate
Wordsworth’s Romantic formulation, poetry is not merely an
extension of philosophy but opposes it actively; or, to vary
Ramanujan’s structuralist figure, while a phallogocentric
metaphysics may well insert some of its elements into the elusive
‘inner forms’ of literature, it does not completely determine or
dictate in advance what those forms will be. It is precisely at the
untranscendable disjunction between ‘philosophy’ and ‘literature’
that literature manifests its distinctive and other power to
textualize what has not been textualized elsewhere or before, just
as it is exactly in the immanence of this discord that philosophical
discourse lacks the strength to ‘exhaust’ literary writing.
To put it differently, if we are to criticize Ramanujan’s practice,
then we are obliged to examine the full range of his work. Over
nearly forty years he transcribed, translated and commented on
more than 3,000 individual poems and narratives as well as scores
of larger works composed originally in half a dozen rather different
languages. Since the great bulk of what he read and rendered had
not been treated comparatively on this scale or in this manner
earlier, neither could he know in advance then, nor can his readers
know in advance now or in the future, what this immense,
polyphonic heap of texts says, means or does. No reading of any
one piece can prepare us fully for what we will discover in other
pieces in other places in the pile, even adjacent ones. The