Reframing the Frame of Reason : "Trans-Lation" in and Beyond Kant and Derrida

This singular book, "un livre singulier," as Jacques Derrida describes it in his foreword, cannot be placed in any traditionally established genre. It constitutes a genre unto itself, and as such is quite intentionally "eccentric." Ulrike Oudée Dünkelsbühler has created an extraordinary, multifaceted work. In it the reader will find the most rigorous interpretation of Kant's Critique of Judgment, a highly imaginative interpretation of Sophocles' Antigone, a Freudian analysis of mourning and melancholia, and a development of Derrida's reflections on the frame. Further, these texts and topoi are connected, reframed, and translated from one to the other. The result is that this work cannot be labeled as philosophical commentary, literary criticism, Freudian analysis, or a theory of translation in any ordinary sense. What can be said about Dünkelsbühler's category-defying book is that it is a performance, not a "work" as the term is usually understood (cf. the Greek term ergon). For its mode is precisely "parergonal" — "co-operating" only apparently with the "work" (ergon) of reason in a way that in fact radically displaces it. The ergon that Dünkelsbühler displaces is the framing logos of Western tradition, which not only separates the "theoretical" (philosophical and aesthetic) domain from the sphere of the political and strictly distinguishes the corresponding literary genres, but also affirms the possibility of an exact, systematic, "logical" translation between them. It thus operates by way of exclusion and incorporation in trying to assimilate the Other. Dünkelsbühler's unique performance is also a translation of sorts, but not in any obvious sense. This "trans-lation" quite literally "takes us beyond" the classic distinctions of reason and in the process helps us to discover new frames of understanding.