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Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at a bill-signing event this month.
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On 19 May 2023 I’ll speaking at a workshop on Translation and the Archive in the Continental Tradition, organised by Henry Somers-Hall for Royal Holloway, University of London. It will be held in central London at Senate House. Registration is free, but required via Eventbrite.
The other speakers are Alan Schrift on Nietzsche, Daniel Smith and Charles Stivale on Deleuze and Julia Ng on Benjamin. My talk will be “From the Archive to the Edited Translation: Lefebvre, Foucault, Dumézil”.
We have put together this workshop to explore those aspects of the project of philosophy that are often seen as simply the groundwork or condition for the philosophical project itself, namely those processes of translating, editing, compiling, and those of the archive, both its constitution and consultation. This workshop will explore themes of the nature and operation of these processes in the continental tradition, both in terms of how they constitute the territory of philosophical thought, but also the ways in which the specificity of continental philosophy affects the process of translation, and how these projects of translation have affected the philosophical work of the translators themselves.The workshop brings together a number of internationally recognised researchers to discuss the role of these themes in their own work, both as translators and editors, and as thinkers.
The workshop will take place in Senate House, Central London, on May 19th, 2023.
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Esther Leslie, Sam Dolbear, Sebastian Truskolaski on Translating Walter Benjamin
In 1923 Walter Benjamin published The Task of the Translator, a seminal essay in which he considers what is obscured and what is elucidated through the process of literary translation.
The translators of his short stories approached the task beautifully, and their talents and insights mustn’t go uncelebrated!
“In translating Walter Benjamin’s stories, it was important to capture rhythms, cadences, the lilt of a storyteller in the market square passing on lessons for life or unfathomable mysteries that will become the talk of the town” — Esther Leslie on the task of the translator.
“If the original text defies definitive interpretation, the translator’s task has to be one principally of deferral – the transferal of the task to the reader. To bring an incomprehensible text into the realm of comprehensibility is to kill it.” — Sam Dolbear on the anxiety of the translator.
“Benjamin introduces a distinction between “what is meant” by a text and its distinctive “way of meaning it”, a relation of disjunction between what and how.” — Sebastian Truskolaski on the labours of translation.
Walter Benjamin’s book The Storyteller has just been reissued by Verso
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Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom in Florida has added a new doll to its popular attraction, 'it's a small world', which features a wheelchair as part of its design. The new addition looks to be inclusive and to build upon the ride's legacy of representing diversity. — Read the rest
Mostly, Christoph Waltz in the title role of Regus Patoff. Like an arsenic-laced Viennese cake he's deliciously dangerous and irresistibly deadly. Without giving it away, I can say he plays the "heavy"–literally. The video game studio setting is spot on, if exaggerated. — Read the rest
Listening to an interview with artist William Kentridge, he explained the origins of The Centre for the Less Good Idea, an “interdisciplinary incubator space” he started in Johannesburg.
The name comes from a Twsana proverb: “When the good doctor can’t cure you, find the less good doctor.”
From the Centre’s website:
Often, you start with a good idea, It might seem crystal clear at first, but when you take it off the proverbial drawing board, cracks and fissures emerge in its surface, and they cannot be ignored. It is in following the secondary ideas, those less good ideas coined to address the first idea’s cracks, that the Centre nurtures, arguing that in the act of playing with an idea, you can recognise those things you didn’t know in advance but knew somewhere inside of you.
The Centre hosts all sorts of events, in person and online. I was unaware, for example, that Kentridge and Walter Murch had collaborated. Here’s their recent conversation:
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Enlarge / Yet another leader behind the Dreadwolf project has left bioWare.
BioWare's Mac Walters used a LinkedIn post this weekend to announce the end of a 19-year career at the company. The move is yet another in a long line of shakeups for the leadership team behind the sprawling, long-anticipated Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, on which he served as production director.
Walters' history at BioWare was primarily focused on the Mass Effect series, where he served as a writer and designer before rising to project director for 2017's Mass Effect: Andromeda and 2021's Legendary Edition remaster. He transitioned to the Dragon Age team after Legendary Edition to serve as Dreadwolf's production director, a role he said was akin to "both producer and director" in TV/film terms.
"So you have the vision for a product you’re helping to uphold—something you and the team want to do—but on the producer side, you are also responsible for figuring out how you’re going to support the team in creating that vision," Walters said in a May interview posted on the BioWare corporate site. "And then you work with the team to actually execute that vision.”
Enlarge / Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., arrives at court during the SolarCity trial in Wilmington, Delaware, on Tuesday, July 13, 2021. Musk was cool but combative as he testified in a Delaware courtroom that Tesla's more than $2 billion acquisition of SolarCity in 2016 wasn't a bailout of the struggling solar provider. Musk was triumphant in that case, but he's got plenty more legal trouble to wriggle out from. (credit: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
If there was any doubt that Tesla CEO Elon Musk knew the company's much-watched 2016 self-driving demo was staged, emails obtained by Bloomberg should lay that to rest. "Just want to be absolutely clear that everyone’s top priority is achieving an amazing Autopilot demo drive," Musk wrote in an email. "Since this is a demo, it is fine to hardcode some of it, since we will backfill with production code later in an OTA update."
Musk saw little wrong with this strategy, saying, "I will be telling the world that this is what the car *will* be able to do, not that it can do this upon receipt," he wrote. But instead of making this clear, the video, released to the world via Musk's Twitter account, opens instead with white text on a black background telling the viewer that "the person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself."
Musk took to Twitter on the day of the video's release to tell his followers that the car could read parking signs, and it knew not to park in a disabled spot. He also claimed that someone could use the "Summon" function on a car parked on the other side of the country.
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