Calquing within Language and Subject-Calque as Forms of Transhumanist Irresponsibility

Abstract

In the proposed article I will address the issue of calquing in the Russian language from a philosophical/psychoanalytical point of view and from that of algorithmization/ cybernetization of the human culture. I will touch upon the problem of interrelationship between body and language, which underlie subjectivity and transform in space and over time. I will try to highlight structural characteristics indicative of subject’s transition to another, post-anthropological quality “by means of” calquing of one’s mother tongue. Corporate culture and the consumption of popular translated literature in a simplified language and dubbed mainstream films keep diminishing expectations from an individual in relation to his mother tongue and, hence, to one’s personality as such, while making the latter giving up on “baroque extravagances” and shifting one’s symbolic reference points from within the philology of one’s mother tongue and canonical cultural texts to a utopian “arithmetic mean” of sense-production which eliminates the idiosyncratic space of language as that which opposes translation and comprises the core of culture. On the one hand, language turns into a rudiment, a dead load, while on the other hand — into an instrument of an alienated labor of information exchange, while representing a fundamental cultural phenomenon the problematics and meaning of which I will debate here. In an attempt of exposing the symptoms of subject-calque having lost organic touch with the mother tongue and the living speech, I will turn to Jacques Lacan’s comments on the phenomenon of delusion, as well as to Boris Groys’ thoughts regarding the linguistic pathologies emerging as a result of contemporary subject’s dealing with the search engine Google.