Ein email für japanische Geister. Yoko Tawadas Poetik am Übergang differenter Schreibsysteme

in: Yoko Tawada, Fremde Wasser. Vorlesungen und wissenschaftliche Beiträge. Hgg. v. Ortrud Gutjahr. Tübingen 2012. S. 127-143.

Tawada’s poetics arose not only from the threshold between Japanese and German, but more precisely from the transition between a pictographic script and an alphabetic linguistic system. Her text „An email for Japanese ghosts“ is interpreted as an allegory of her poetics: In the same way the computer equipped with a European keyboard often fails in its task to transform certain alphabetic units into target words of the Japanese vocabulary, Tawada’s German written texts – creatively – misread words by a systematic disfigurement of their literacy. In this way she discovers, for example, the word Ich/I within the word Nichts/nothing thus illuminating a hidden pictographic element within the German language. Since this kind of reading practice gains its semantic creativity by dealing with the tension between a semiotic system and similarity Tawada’s poetics can be analyzed in the light of Walter Benjamin’s theory of language, especially with reference to his essays “On the mimetic Faculty” and “Doctrine of Similarity” (1933). But her writings possess more then a poetic quality. By means of her ‘foreign’ view resp. her exophonic approach she illuminates the grammatical policy as a symptom of European politics. Her writings present an ethnological poetics and a critical ethnology likewise.