Chapter 4, "Manners of Speaking"

The copyist transformed his body into the spoken word of the other; he imitated and incarnated the text into a liturgy of reproduction. Simultaneously, he gave body to the verb ("verbum caro factum est") and made the verb into his own body ("hoc est corpus meum") in a process of assimilation that eliminated differences, to make way for the sacrament of the copy. The translator [...] was an operator of differentiation. Like the ethnologist, he presented a foreign region, even though he did so to give an adaptation of it by allowing it to disturb his own language. He produced otherness, but within a field that didn't belong to him any more than that other language did, a field in which he had no right of authorship. He produced, but without any place of his own, in that no-man's-land, on that meeting of the waters where the waves of language roll back upon themselves. The transcriber and the translator had the same reckless devotion, but the former more contemplatively, in a rite of identification, and the latter more ethically, in the production of otherness. The history of mystics may well have converted the “copyist” into this translator, the ascetic caught up in the other’s language and creating possibility, by means of it while at the same time losing himself in the crowd. Mystics’ manners of speaking are the product of that drifting operativity that has no domain proper