UC Irvine

This article takes a moment of intercultural exchange, first reported as "The Writing Lesson" by Claude Levi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques & later explored by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology, as the occasion for further reflection on the role played by the aesthetic in what it terms intercultural transference. Transference occurs whenever unconscious desires, fantasies, or patterns of being & relating are enacted in an interpersonal or intercultural encounter, including the indirect encounters between literary or artistic objects & their recipients. It emerges as a largely unconscious operation designed to bridge, close, fill, or deny the inevitable gaps in knowing another person or another culture, & to manage the affects such gaps bring forth. Intercultural transference provides a framework to read "The Writing Lesson" differently & suggests a theoretical model able to account for the complex performances of intercultural transference that enter any exchange or translation between cultures. Adapted from the source document.