Cory Stockwell

Translator of Jean-Luc Nancy's *The Fragile Skin of the World* (Polity, 2021), from the French La Peau fragile du monde (Galilée, 2020). The translator's notes in this volume are philosophically load-bearing — they unpack lexical-conceptual ambiguities that the English text alone cannot register, particularly around the technique/technologie distinction (II.1), the il y a etymology (II.24), and the bord/aborder/déborder/border etymological cluster in Ch VIII (notes 1, 4, 5, 6, 7).

Key Points

  • The technique/technologie clarification (Ch II note 1, raw 1351–1353): Stockwell's longest single note establishes that French technique does not equal English "technology" in scope. Per Ellul, French technologie means "discourse on technique"; the encroachment of technologie on technique in French was already noted in the 1970s. Stockwell translates technique as "technics" (broad sense) and technique (specific manner of execution) — preserving the analytic distinction Nancy needs.
  • The il y a / qu'il y a wordplay (Ch II note 24, raw 1385): "Il y a ce qu'il y a" can be read as "There is what there is" or "There is this 'that there is'." Stockwell preserves the wordplay, central to Nancy's vanishing-ontology.
  • The à / to preposition (Ch II note 15, raw 1373): Stockwell preserves Nancy's rapport à soi as "relation to self" (not "self-relation"), retaining the prepositional à whose load-bearing work is signalled across Nancy's corpus — être-à ("being-to") in The Sense of the World and Being Singular Plural.
  • The bord / aborder / déborder / border network (Ch VIII notes 1, 4, 5, 6, 7): the nautical-etymological network central to limit-edge-shore. Stockwell makes the network's philosophical work explicit:
    • Aborder = approach / take up / board (nautical) — Stockwell translates the title "Pour aborder" as "Taking on Board."
    • Bord à bord = edge-to-edge / side-to-side (planking of a hull).
    • Déborder = overflow / disboard (depart from a ship via rowboat to reach a shore).
    • Border = put a border to / cover a ship's frame with edges.
  • The Verwirklichung / effectuation note (Ch II note 13, raw 1368–1370): preserves Nancy's effectuation (the rarer English cognate) rather than collapsing to "actualization" — because effectuation shares the etymological-conceptual link with Werk (work) and wirken (to operate, take effect) that Nancy is mobilizing.

What This Reveals About Translation as Philosophy

Stockwell's notes are not paratextual ornaments but philosophical decisions about how Nancy's etymological-conceptual style is to survive the French→English crossing. Three patterns:

  1. Preservation of homonymy: where French has one word with multiple senses (temps = time and weather; bord = edge and ship), Stockwell often picks one English translation per context but flags the homonymy in note. The reader who reads only the body text gets a partial Nancy; the reader who reads notes gets the full philosophical-figural network.
  2. Preservation of etymology: Stockwell preserves the vestire-to-invest (Ch I), creo-cresco (cf. creation-ex-nihilo-materialist), limes-as-road (Ch VIII) chains by transliteration / note.
  3. Preservation of wordplay: the peau / expeauser pun (Ch VII), the salut / salutation distinction (Overture), the il y a / il est à etymology (Ch II) — all are flagged in note where English cannot replicate them.

Connections

Sources