Abstract: Is the concept of queer translation yet another recent, unexciting addition to the theoretical toolbox of queer theory and translation studies? Or does it actually make a difference and offer an opportunity for both queer theory and translation studies to reevaluate their critical practices? Employing Gilles Deleuze’s form of immanent critique, this article reconstructs a new concept of queer translation, redefined here as the minor art of desexualizing language in a repetition of difference. Understood as essentially pragmatic, problematic, and genetic, the Deleuzian critique of queer translation begins by scrutinizing two current conceptions of queer translation and their attempts at establishing the difference they make. I trace their critical impasses back to the type of thinking (or “image of thought”) that had engendered them: one that is based on a “weak” concept of difference in queer theory, and the other—on a “weak” concept of repetition in translation studies. In order to create a new concept of queer translation, I then turn to Deleuze’s concept of writing as pivot on which the theoretical concept becomes pertinent from a practical standpoint. This move not only renders the concept more coherent and effective, but also enable us, I argue, to discern existing practices of queer translation at play even in original works of literature. In the final section of the article, this argument is thus demonstrated in a discussion of French author Marie Darrieussecq’s literary technique in the novel Truismes (Pig Tales).

KEYWORDS: translation, queer, literature, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, critique.