ABSTRACT
This chapter is designed to lay the foundations and it does so by initiating arguments and lines of enquiry. Merleau-Ponty imagines languages as different perceptual styles, as different kinds of 'coherent deformation' of perception, and translation is the way in which one learn to inhabit them. In Merleau-Ponty's terms, in translation the author constantly 're-style' words, or 'coherently deform' their expressiveness. Traditional musical notation favours certain acoustic properties over others — pitch, duration, tempo, loudness — acoustic properties delivered by a particular set of instruments. The gradual multiplication of languages, national and textual, produces the gradual multiplication of possible texts. Overwriting is an image of irrepressible re-conception/re-perception. Time increasingly yields its impatience to the more cumbersome time of space. Overwriting, in the sense of textual excess, expresses these ambitions through the proliferation of the kinaesthetic and psycho-physiological behaviour it tries to capture.
