Research Seminar with Dr Caroline Sauter (Goethe University)

Translation and Eros

Dr Caroline Sauter

Translation and Eros/eros have been closely linked since Plato’s Symposion: In Diotima’s speech, transmitted – translated – by Socrates, Eros is a being of desire, a mediator, an intermediate creature whose “business” it is to “interpret and deliver”. Departing from Plato, and drawing on theories by authors such as Lacan, Kristeva, Cassin, Apter, Derrida, or Hamacher, as well as on concrete translation examples (such as Anne Carson’s Sappho translation, or Peggy Kamuf’s translation of Hélène Cixous’ Insister), my lecture will delineate the intricate relationship between translation and Eros/eros in both theoretical and practical terms.  

Caroline Sauter, Dr. phil., teaches Comparative Literature at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. Her work focuses on translation theory and language philosophy, particularly in German-Jewish thought, as well as on the poetics of love, and on the afterlife of French and American deconstruction in literary theory. She is the author of a monograph on Walter Benjamin’s translation philosophy (Die virtuelle Interlinearversion, 2014), and the co-editor of several books (including Thinking in Constellations: Walter Benjamin in the Humanities, Kommentar und Säkularisierung in der Moderne [with Yael Almog and Daniel Weidner] and Allegorien des Liebens [with Karin Peters]). Her German translation of Jacques Derrida’s Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction “relevante”? [together with Esther von der Osten] is forthcoming with Transcript (Germany) this year (2022). She is currently completing a book-length study about the language of love in European theory from 1800 onwards, which examines thinkers’ engagement with the biblical Song of Songs, among them Goethe, Rosenzweig, Kristeva, Cixous, and Scholem. Caroline Sauter has worked academically in Düsseldorf, Paris, Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Cambridge (Mass.). In 2017/18, she held a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Harvard University.  

This event is open to all but we request that non-Durham University participants attend via registration. Registration for this event will close at 5pm, Tuesday 7th March.