ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 restages Miller’s politically controversial retranslation of the Phenomenology of Spirit (1977) with reference to historical and contemporary narratives. Comparison with previous and subsequent translations, identifies details in Miller’s retranslation of the master-slave narrative designed to resist politicisation of this text, e.g. by Marx, Kojève, Lonzi and Beauvoir. Miller’s intransigent framing of “womankind” as an agent of “perversion” in the Antigone story endorses the previous translation by J.B. Baillie (1910/1931). This contrasts with his creative and strategically inconsistent translations of aufheben/sublate throughout the Phenomenology, demonstrating the potential of translation to re-narrate a less-than-certain, pre-mature Hegel. Regarding Luise von Flotow’s intersectional reinterpretation of gender roles (2011), Miller’s masculinist performativity in this text enacts a differently situated, less fixed, remembered, age-specific identity role than in his other translations.
Strategies adopted by Miller effectively obscured liberal elements in Hegel’s political philosophy. Feminist responses to Hegel’s philosophy and aspects of feminist translation studies now suggest the possibility of “undoing” some of Miller’s defensive work to release an inherent potential for postcolonial and feminist rethinkings of Hegel.
