Thomas De Quincey, Translation, and the “Philosophy of Reconstruction”

[...]in regarding form as parergic to sense, and in consequently spurning rhetoric as an inferior "logic of illusion" (171), Kant has cut off his philosophy from a full expression and understanding of the antinomic divisions which it first served to name: In Kant's elaboration of the term, hypotyposis specifically indicates a material presentation by means of which the mind presents to itself its own categories and ideas. Since in its apperception of this selfpresentation the subject reveals its own concepts, as described by the Critiques, the hypotyposis effectively serves as the keystone of Kantian philosophy: "the mind experiences, and feels itself as, a unity, and hence either beautiful and consequently capable of cognition, or as sublime and consequently capable of moral action. [...]a chapter upon German Rhetoric would be in the same ludicrous predicament as [a] chapter on the snakes of Iceland, which delivers its business in one summary sentence announcing that-snakes in Iceland there are none. "27 The advantage of chiasmus is that it serves to map out the dynamics of difference even as it avoids totalization.28 De Quincey and Hölderlin accordingly activate the trope of chiastic reflection in order to effect a sustained presentation of alterity rather than a reduction through sublation or synthesis: hence Hölderlin's enthusiasm for importing Greek syntax into German, or De Quincey's love of untranslated excerpts, long digressions on the precise meaning of foreign concepts, and interruptive references to Latin, Greek, or German terms.24 As the translator performs interlinguistic comparisons across the gaps laid bare by these demonstrations of difference, he affirms the irresolvable non-coincidence of the foreign and the domestic; more importantly, however, he also comes to appreciate that languages have different balances of strengths and weakness, demonstrating the value of offsetting the faults inherent in one's own idiom by switching to a foreign tongue.