Liquid Modernity (review)

354 These exclusions result, presumably, from his perception of translation as textual rather than verbal or oral. But they also result from a reluctance to engage the metaphor of translation and channeling more broadly. This reluctance is surprising in that Robinson here disregards his earlier interest in what the first chapter of The Translator’s Turn refers to as “The Somatics of Translation.” Judith Butler’s recent work might prove instructive for examining the body’s relation to the postrationalist model of subjectivity that Robinson is hoping to develop. In “The Theology of the Touch: Merleau-Ponty and Malebranche,” an unpublished paper delivered at the Orr Symposium on “Religion and Culture at the Start of the Twenty-first Century” (Dartmouth College, 9 October 2001), Butler reminds us that Descartes’s adversary reimagined the scene of channeling as one of touch. Instead of interpreting cogito ergo sum as the moment of subject formation, Malebranche showed that a notion of touch allows us to overcome the rationalist bind. Functioning both mystically, as the touch of God, and secularly, as a model of intimacy, touch speaks to Robinson’s approach in a way that allows the translator’s subjectivity to channel effects somatically. This approach might allow for discussions of the role that gendered and racialized (but not essentialized) bodies play in Robinson’s theory of translator subjectivity.