Translation and the poetics of the orphan: Abdelkébir Khatibi, discourse and difference

Abstract

Three works from the 1970s from the oeuvre of Moroccan writer, sociologist and theorist Abdelkebir Khatibi announce a poetics of the orphan that renounces the western metaphysics of parousia and its conservative ontology of the self that limits the potential for personal development and self-understanding. Applying the poetics of the orphan to translation, this article argues that it helps identify the ways by which the same metaphysics dominates traditional conversations about translation through, chiefly, the standard of fidelity. It traces the semiotic understanding that Khatibi brings to the poetics of the orphan, and it elucidates the ways that Khatibi’s poetics of the orphan relies on semiotic concepts from the work of Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva. Khatibi’s poetics of the orphan offers to translation theory a critical wedge to place against the force of fidelity’s – and parousia’s – at times overwhelmingly seductive imperative to authenticate origins as conceptual wholes.