Concentration-camp language forces a translation that must always fail

Evidence

Moni, the boy whose perspective is followed in third-person narration, figures a challenge of language: He must fit the image of the Piepel, the sexual slave of “Prominents,” block chiefs and kapos. He also figures a challenge to the reader, who must read words such as “life” and “love” and translate them into “Auschwitz life” and “Auschwitz love.” Bread, in Auschwitz, is “Auschwitz bread,” and sky is ”Auschwitz sky,” and the days and the nights mark ”Auschwitz weeks” while one breathes, perhaps, ”Auschwitz air.” Yet this constant and necessary translation is predicated on a reinscription of a familiar meaning, to the point of a rupture that must, however, fail, reinscribing therefore an understanding that is as unavoidable as it is unbearable. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 726 (#expands, via linked claim)

But I don’t think the aim should be to replace capitalism’s fake anti-reification with a “real” anti-reification. Reification can’t be entirely eliminated. I take this to be one of the important lessons that Lacanian psychoanalysis has to teach. Being a speaking subject at all involves a minimal reification; the big Other is coterminous with language itself. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2077 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Translation loss is inevitable and driven by the translator’s preconceptions — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2194; Camp slang persists among survivors yet needs translation even for Germans; Behavior determines meaning, blocking radical language translation (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Auschwitz forced a total resemanticization of ordinary language that must nevertheless fail. #expands (0.95)
• Auschwitz demanded a language translation that reinscribes familiar meanings to the point of rupture #expands (0.92) — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 726
• Reification cannot be eliminated because language itself reifies #complicates (0.74) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2077