'Translation is the making of a subject in reparation': Elfriede Jelinek's response to Fukushima in 'Kein Licht'

Elfriede Jelinek's play Kein Licht [No Light], published online in 2011-12, features the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima of 2011 and its aftermath as its main theme, engaging with it through a mode of what I term reparative translation. Translation is understood here in a very specific sense. It is not restricted to a technical activity of finding linguistic equivalences. Rather it is an intersubjective self-constitution process through acts of reparation, emergent from and responding to negativity. Three aspects of the work of subject-constitution through reparative translation are examined closely in Kein Licht: first, catachresis; second, the (un)knowable; and third, mourning. My analysis is informed by Gayatri Spivak's and Jacqueline Rose's readings of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's concepts of translation, reparation and subject formation.