I was poking around in violently engulfing Steiner’s book “After Babel” the other day and imagining my parody regendering of some of his more ridiculous passages. All the bits where he writes about translation as penetration and ejaculation and most particularly the “onanism” sections about how when men masturbate there’s “more” ejaculate (than what other times? haha, what?) and therefore translation, which is like sex, is less powerful than solo authoring, which is guys wanking off.
If anyone were to write… seriously… as a work of scholarly theory… something similar about women masturbating being a bold semiotic act, can you just picture the outraged backlash?
I’m going to write the nastiest, most pornographic parody…
Anyway, Steiner is a total nutjob. I prefer the lunacy of Mary Daly if I’m going to read some far-out mind-bending theory.