The Jean-Jacques Repasfroid Translation Project

In an exciting 3-part essay to tie in with the ongoing Olympic and Paralympic Games in London, Professor Salvatore Ramsbottom recalls Jean-Jacques Repasfroid’s pivotal role in the organization of various ceremonial aspects of the 1976 Games in Montréal. Salvatore was then a post-doctoral student at the Université de Montréal, and was responsible for the administrative side of proceedings, as four prominent philosophers attempted to collaborate on the crucially metaphoric process that is the organization of an Olympic opening ceremony.

  In Part 1, Salvatore amusingly recollects some initial teething problems.

  The 1976 Olympic Games in Montréal remain best remembered for the first and last appearance of the zero-gravity high jump. Whilst our thoughts remain with the families of that event’s participants, the zero-g high-j should not become synecdochic for what proved to be an intriguing Games.

  Before the competition started, we were treated to a truly path-breaking opening ceremony. I was fortunate enough to be involved in an administrative capacity, and would like to share my recollections of the construction of this remarkable event.

  The Université de Montréal had been entrusted with the organization of the ceremony, and opted to invite a panel of distinguished international philosophers for its conceptualization. After much deliberation, a panel of four was chosen, and arrived in Montréal for the academic year 1979-80, in order to work on this collaborative opus. The four philosophers were: Jean Baudrillard, Harold Bloom, Colin McGinn and Jean-Jacques Repasfroid.

  Immediately, there was an academic outcry. Judith Butler, then young and relatively clear in her argumentation, made the eminently reasonable objection that the panel was exclusively male. McGinn argued that this only obtained given a prima facie idea of the ‘male’, and said something about Wittgenstein that I cannot remember (McGinn was quite irritable at this time because he hadn’t seen his friend and principal review-writer Oliver Sacks in several weeks, and had had to throw away the ‘Best Friends Forever’ carrot cake he had baked for him). Other feminist thinkers joined the debate when it was revealed that Harold Bloom had choreographed an elaborate three-hour sequence during which female graduate students from the Université would strip naked to reveal full-body tattoos of dust-jacket praise for The Anxiety of Influence. This idea was eventually vetoed by the rest of the panel, but the controversies had left their mark: Bloom was replaced by a large bowl of fruit, and vowed he would never visit Canada again.

  Jean Baudrillard caused a delay to proceedings when he attempted to send a fully sentient simulacrum of himself to Montréal in his stead. Unfortunately, the Baudrillax Omega-tron was equipped with laser-guided weaponry which, although reportedly intended for ‘self-defence’, was frequently deployed pre-emptively. When the Omega-tron began to create replicants of itself in the University’s physics laboratory, it was deemed a threat to national security and cryogenically frozen until 2012.

  When Baudrillard eventually arrived, there was a brief contretemps between he and McGinn, who had almost lost several of his limbs when the Omega-tron adjudged his cup of coffee to constitute Probable Cause. Baudrillard responded to the effect that a little less Colin McGinn may not necessarily affect the world in a negative way, and I had to prevent them from coming to blows, pacifying McGinn with the promise of a new briefcase (his was a relic from his school days, with ‘Shirley You’re My Girlie’ scratched into it). As a parting shot, McGinn said something else about Wittgenstein: I do not appear to have recorded it in my minutes.

  Then Jean-Jacques Repasfroid spoke up for the first time, and everything changed.

By Jeanne-Jacqueline Repasfroid.

The patronym ‘Repasfroid’, meaning ‘cold meal’ in French, entered my family’s genealogy four generations ago, when Aloysius Riposte-Fwah, an English aristocrat who had arrived in Luxembourg for a peasant hunt, married my great-great-grandmother, Albert Albertibôt. Aloysius’s gout, endemic to his class, reached such a level of chronicity while he was wooing my great-great-grandmother that he was unable to eat anything other than bread soaked in sweetened water. The local community, amused by this alimentary restriction, reconfigured his surname as ‘Repas-froid’, and the epithet gained sufficient purchase so as to confuse the clergyman who married them.

  My father would often masticate upon this nomenclative curio:

‘No proper noun is safe from the corruption of the somatic. The history of philosophy, which would seek to distinguish the mind and its naming properties as itself distinguished, must recognize this. In the case of my own proper name, what is testified to is precisely that name’s impropriety, and a fortiori the permeability and permutability of any nominal gesture. The sovereign genealogy of the title always has a decrowning double chiefly comprising deposits of sodium urate.’

  Some thought this inappropriate subject-matter for an address commemorating the Normandy Landings, but my father was always interested in pointing to the residues of salt – on the beach, on the name, in the collective cellar of occidental consciousness – whose desiccation he viewed as attendant on the desecration of philosophy. While Derrida was announcing that we should account for the histories of coffee and tobacco in our literature, Repasfroid claimed instead that we ought to reckon with salt: the reste, or remainder par excellence of what has been called ‘Western civilization’.

Introduction and translation by Humphrey Squirter, Reader in Pop-up Books at the University of Blackpool.

  The following is a translated transcript of Jean-Jacques Repasfroid’s plenary address at FestPeranto, the world’s first music festival featuring only Esperantophone acts. Taking place in 1991 at the opening of the Pierre Werner Cricket Ground in Luxembourg and lasting nine and a half weeks, FestPeranto drew an estimated 2,500 spectators. Although not a resounding commercial success, it remains the only festival of its linguistic type, and is still frequently invoked as the sine qua non of Esperanto as a politico-cultural hybrid.

  Unfortunately we have as yet not succeeded in finding a recording of ‘Isn’t It Byronic?’, Repasfroid’s own paean to Romantic poetry in the style of Alanis Morissette. If you were present at FestPeranto and have any footage of his performance, we would be very grateful if you could contact us.

  *

  Ladies and Gentlemen, we live in an age of ages: an epochally-obsessed meta-era which is not only taxonomic but taxeconomic: the naïve, hump-backed taxaneconomy of a certain Romanticism will have been shown to itself by the tinted, accidental mirror of a televisual hyper-discoursive event.

  And yet things are never so simple.

  We must accept that any and all bios is henceforth inhabited by a certain spatio-temporal remote control: the time is fast approaching where no event will be conceivable without an attendant panoptic visuality.

  Music has the most to lose here – what is at stake in the taxeconomic epoch is the new inability of music to participate in the thrownness of Dasein. It will henceforth accompany, palliate, be otherwise rendered incidental to a visual tropo-logic. Soon all speakers will be auxiliary; all woofers, sub-.

  If this deprivation is inevitable, this does not mean that music must go quietly. And Esperanto seems to us the most voluble and comprehensive semantic space in which to tap our dragging feet.

  Whilst I would be at a loss if requested to choose my favourite act to appear over the coming eighty four and a half days, there are one or two events of special significance to me:

  The Bellicose Tiddlers, made up of former members of Fairport Convention and the Wurzels, are Britain’s first Esperantophone folk band. In a country which bands erect on the de facto commercial, academic and militaristic superiority of its so-called ‘mother tongue’, the Tiddlers represent a brave, obversive thorn.

  Alonzo Nashe and the Smugglers were some years ago exiled from their native Mexico on a completely unfounded suspicion of drug trafficking. Their improvised acid jazz ‘pictograms’ of the Esperanto words they have learnt so far constitute a legitimate musico-linguistic coming-into-being.

  Twat Velcro [Esperanto for ‘Pacifists Unite’ – trans.] fly the flag for universal tolerance in an era of militant individualism. Their musical approach, which is to unfavourably compare their own songs with those of others, is an auto-deconstructive critique of the unthinking ipseity of the sales-governed musical marketplace.

Our thanks to Noah A. Wimoweh, curator of the ArchLives project, for permission to post this here. 

  Jean-Jacques Repasfroid's interview with June Parper of the Daily Mail was conducted two years prior to his linguistic conversion to Esperanto. As such, it is part of what some critics have labelled the 'Esperanterior' phase of his academic career. Repasfroid had arrived in London for a conference about technological advance called The Beginning of the Future? A Conference About Technological Advance. His own paper, 'The Television Electronic Disk and the Jewish Question', was set to be the keynote, but an electrical fire sadly meant that the event was abandoned after only seven minutes. 

Repasfroid's arrival in London coincided with the end of the Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly; he is asked to give his thoughts on this historical terminus, on the nature of war and peace, and to speculate on the future of the academy.

DAILY MAIL: Dr Repasfroid, we gather this is your first visit to London. The ethnic minorities notwithstanding, are you enjoying your stay?

REPASFROID: Very much so. Did you know that in the Roman Empire, London was where all the eggs were kept? It is an incredibly important settlement, and 'Eggs London' is a delicious lunchtime treat, enjoyed throughout Europe.

DM: You recently published a book, Fixations, which is a history of furniture in literary works. There are chapters on Proust's bed, C.S. Lewis's wardrobe, B.S. Johnson's candle, Charles Bukowski's bar-stool and Ralph Waldo Emerson's collection of fridge magnets. Why do no English writers feature?

 R: B.S. Johnson was English.

DM: You recently published a book, Fixations, which is a history of furniture in literary works. There are chapters on Proust's bed, C.S. Lewis's wardrobe, B.S. Johnson's candle, Charles Bukowski's bar-stool and Ralph Waldo Emerson's collection of fridge magnets. Why does only one English writer feature?

R: There was no axiomatics of nationality at work in this text. If you look again, you'll see that I do not discuss women writers. Nor do I discuss male writers over six feet tall. For these demographics, the history of furniture charts a very different, although not unrelated, course. It is a question of what has been called différance.

DM: Here in Princess Diana's England, there has been some resistance to what you might call 'French ideology' in our universities. Five years ago, a young Cambridge boffin called Colin MacCabe was denied tenure there, for bringing a book he'd bought in Paris into a lecture theatre. To add insult to injury, he also refused to participate in the time-honoured Cambridge tradition of singing a George Herbert poem each morning whilst swallowing baked beans without chewing. Have you experienced any resistance to your ideas in England?

 R: You are talking about two things: resistance from the other, and resistance from others. On the first score, I would say that any and all ideas must experience a certain auto-resistance, a resistance to themselves, if they can in good faith be called ideas. The sphincter muscle is an anatomical model I'd choose here: it is the means by which feces are expelled and brought into the light, but it is also the device which would chop them in half, or retain them altogether. An idea comprehends the sphincter/feces dynamic by which the body philosophic regulates itself. 

In terms of resistance from others, I did recently find out that Louis Althusser had a file on me at the ENS in the 1960s. Along with Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Lacan, I was being closely monitored by his Marxist cellule within that university. In the end, I found out that he just liked my haircut but was too proud to come right out and ask me the name of my barber.

 DM: As you will know, the Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War ended this month. The Netherlands and the Isle of Scilly finally made peace after over three centuries of continuous, and absolutely uneventful, war. What does this tell us about conflict in the late twentieth century?

R: If you read Thomas Malory, you will see that his idea of combat is a total evacuation of affect. Malory's knights mechanically present us with the artifice of conflict, with few exceptions. In the case of the Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War, there were no exceptions. What was preserved was the memory of a contested frontier, a memory of something that did not take place. Samuel Beckett closely followed this war, and wishes for the war within his self to surpass it - he told me this once in Bucharest. We were at a museum of trams. 

What does a war become when it is devoid of violence, fatalities, soldiers, propaganda and technology? Could the Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War be said to become ironic? Might we one day encounter a book entitled The Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War Did Not Take Place? I would say it is almost a certainty. But nothing is less certain than this. There is also a rather more recalcitrant ethical question: that of whether we should compare wars. To point to putative 'deficiencies' in terms of the Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War's quota of the constituents of what is called 'war', we also bring to light an entire topology and tropology of war: we map the territory of war, articulate its frontiers. And this is a myopic gesture, given the evasive axes of stealth whereupon modern wars, increasingly, operate.

DM: Who was your favourite Beatle?

R: The Chinese one.

DM: You're here in London for a conference about the technologies of the present and future. How do you see your own field, 'philosophy', developing in the coming decades?

R: Negligibly. Does one wish to 'develop' a field, or merely to tend it? There is very much a sense in which philosophy needs to keep order in terms of the wider academic community - and it will have difficulty doing this if it is disordered itself. We must address the continuing divide between the expectations for philosophy in the English-speaking world, and their counterparts in continental Europe - and this keeps in view only the West. Roger Scruton recently tried to have a fight with me at a bar in New York, and John R. Searle's dog defecates on my lawn with suspicious frequency. An envelope arrived for me from Raymond Tallis recently; I do not dare open it. Philosophical vendettas such as these detract from the real issues at stake. There is a very fine Slovenian philosopher called Slavoj Žižek who last month told me that he intends to publish his next book in English. Thus disseminated to a broader audience, his evenhanded and consistent style will, I hope, take the first steps towards reconciling the 'continental' and 'analytic' traditions.

 DM: You have been very generous with your time, Dr Repasfroid. As a final question, what do you like best about England? Our readers at the Daily Mail would balk at the idea of identifying only one thing, but try your best!

R: My favourite aspect of England is the unchallenging interview technique which seems to underpin all ideas of 'personality' in this country.

By Jeanne-Jacqueline Repasfroid.

You could say that my father, Jean-Jacques Repasfroid, was a father to many. Many of his ‘children’ never met him. Many were older than him. Most regarded him as a curiously recondite be-quiffed guru, addressing them only through the gnomic pronouncements of his utterly singular philosophy. But DNA tests do not lie. 

For more people still, he was a metaphorical father, a stony-faced idealist who adored his subject and the music of the Mamas and the Papas. ‘All the leaves are brown,’ he would intone each autumn, ‘except coniferous ones.’ The changing of the seasons fascinated him, but Esperanto does not distinguish between the seasons (because they are geographically relative) and so he was unable to say why.

His mind was shaped like a brain. His brain, like the calf muscles of a tall man. 

When I was a little girl, he used to call me Jamesdean, which is Esperanto for ‘little friend.’ This led to a retrospectively amusing furore when he announced, at a 1975 Film Theory conference in Indiana, ‘Jamesdean drives me around the bend sometimes.’ Of course, the irony is that ‘James Dean’ can be translated into Esperanto as ‘misunderstanding’! 

Writing this biography is a painful but vivifying exercise. Painful, because I have in-growing fingernails; vivifying, because it is a work of momentary resurrection, which will grant readers the company of my father. Even if they only glimpse him for a second, they can be reassured by the knowledge that many of his children only ever saw him on the July 1991 episode of the South Bank Show.

By Gordon Pigs.

When, in 1987, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Repasfroid declared that he was henceforth going to lecture and publish only in Esperanto, more than one eyebrow was raised by the epicranial muscles of international academia. Repasfroid made this announcement in Esperanto at an English-speaking conference at Cornell University, and was immediately required to repeat it in English. Undeterred by this performative contradiction, Repasfroid was true to his Botto, or word, and until his death in May 2010 used the language exclusively. 

Repasfroid contended that Esperanto marked the first step toward a realization of Kant’s cosmopolitan Universitas, claiming that it was destined to provide a Universalmedicin for the often acrimonious linguistic divides which marked the terrain of twentieth century thought. His first published venture in the subject, the article ‘EsperanToto’ (PMLA, 1988) was a dramatic rereading of The Wizard of Oz, which considered L. Frank Baum's text as an apocalyptic vision of linguistico-philosophical divide. There is not time to do justice to Repasfroid’s startlingly original thesis here, but its basic premise is that the novel's four witches (of the East, North, South and West) are unable to engage in the dialogue which would bring about perpetual peace because of the non-contemporaneity attendant on any ideological dissemination or translation. ‘oZmosis’ is the name he gives to this constitutive différance, underscoring the mutation involved in any communication across frontiers, and a fortiori any articulation of said frontiers.

Borrowing from Lacan, Repasfroid formulates the quest structure of the text’s narrative as the fetishization of the lost objet a. The courage desired by the Cowardly Lion, the heart desired by the Tin Woodman, the brains desired by the Scarecrow and the return home desired by Dorothy are all manifestations of this objet a. However, Repasfroid’s groundbreaking contention is that the objet a is Esperanto itself. Courage, heart, brains and home are, in Esperanto, all represented by the word Wellaszbatamm. Wellaszbatamm can also refer to the canned entrails of a pig, which, Repasfroid deduces, is what is desired by the canine Toto. 

Repasfroid points to the etymological genealogy linking ‘Esperanto’ and ‘hope’ as evidence for such a psychoanalytic reading. He concludes that when Toto knocks over a screen, revealing the Wizard of Oz in all his inglory, the self-regarding frontiers of Philosophy are fleetingly transcended in a moment of linguistic communion. Repasfroid points to an early draft of The Wizard of Oz, in which the ‘Wizard’ is heard to exclaim, in Esperanto, ‘You’ve knocked over my fucking screen, you bastard dog,’ as the definitive articulation of Esperanto as the id of a universal philosophy enchained by an egological screen which has fractured it into factions at the four corners of the world. 

‘EsperanToto’ enjoyed a mixed response from those able to read it. One reader praised its Wellaszbatamm, whilst the other described it as ‘inexplicable propaganda.’ Taking the latter as a compliment, Repasfroid continued his studies of L. Frank Baum’s work with an ethnography of Munchkins, translated from Esperanto into English as Munchkins by Proxy. The book’s marketing campaign, which promised first edition buyers the use of a dwarf for a week, caused a minor controversy. 

Until recently, Munchkins by Proxy was the only Repasfroid work to enjoy a wide readership. Its popularity, especially amongst fantasy fiction enthusiasts and pro-wrestling fans, ensured that Repasfroid was able to support himself financially as the world’s only Esperantophone academic. Shortly after his death, however, his estate granted the undertaking of a vast translation project to bring his oeuvre to light for English speaking readers. Although this labour of translation may fall short of the linguistic universalism dreamt by Repasfroid itself, it will provide a valuable resource both for scholars across a range of disciplines, and for the general reader. 

This website will act as a sort of ‘trailer’ for the translation project. Periodically, we will post sections of works being translated, and also scholarly essays which aim to visibilize the themes underpinning the work of this quixotic, but oddly quintessential, philosopher. Repasfroid’s daughter, Jeanne-Jacqueline, has kindly offered to share instalments of her forthcoming biography of Repasfroid – Jean-Jacques Repasfroid: Father, Husband, Great-Uncle – which promises to be an invigorating read. 

We hope you are as excited as we are about this new chapter of the endlessly surprising book that we call philosophical history. Welcome! Or, in Esperanto, Chuffo!