ABSTRACT

Theories of cultural translation implicitly bear on psychoanalytical concepts. This study highlights their bearings on a theory of the ‘uncanny’. The translator is one of the many possible embodiments of a ‘figure of the third’, which has been conceptualised both by an older speech-act theory of irony and by social philosophy (Simmel). First of all, the analysis will outline why this ‘figure of the third’ becomes uncanny when there is doubt about its ‘neutral transparency’. Another approach will then ask how specific theories of cultural translation have hitherto been associated with the uncanny—and whether these references can be interpreted by the concept of a ‘figure of the third’. Quotations from an anonymous text will accompany and illustrate this train of thought. The study will conclude by examining the uncanny aspects in these quotations, reading them as unforeseeable expression of a very specific ‘figure of the third’.