Translating

What makes a reflection on the future of “philosophy” as we knew it and practiced it (whether it will exist under the same name, separated from other scientific or social practices, etc.) at the same time urgent and confused, is among other reasons the fact that it is frequently reaching us through considerations on the geohistorical status of the association between the discourse and the institution.

The question of the European "we" has recently been tied to several controversies over translation and the transmission of knowledges. These debates at first seem learned, distant, specialised. It is a matter of knowing what part the translations of Arabic scientific and philosophical works have taken in the diffusion of these works within Mediaeval West. After a century of work on the subject, certain people wish to recalculate the size of this part and to diminish it. The Latin [supposedly] did not need the Arabic channel; the Arabs would never have been able to appropriate Greek knowledge. General considerations on the essence of religions and "civilisations" are linked together, a "Judaeo-Christianity" that is open and welcoming toward the Other versus a closed and aggressive Islam. The fear of the Arabs and of Islam has entered into science. One settles the score with Islam by saying that one has no 'debts'. The West is Christian, one proclaims, and as pure as possible.

The point of departure for these notes is a work, the European Vocabulary of Philosophies. Dictionary of Untranslatables, which Transeuropéennes has decided to accompany in its transformations. So that a logbook of translations of untranslatables might  be maintained by many hands, with everything that a journal can have of the trivial and the thoughtful, the well-stitched and the incoherent - a Denktagebuch as far as is possible.

Modernity, a trigger to much opening to extra-European continents, was also the big historic rift which made translation almost impossible by making many concepts normative, and particularly that of the political. Concepts and terms of “european” origin, through a process of universalization (a “westernisation”), assumed a genealogical and etymological continuity, imposing a corresponding discontinuity on those originating in other regions and languages.

It is a well-known fact that Edward Said was a thinker who paid particularly close attention to the political effects of representation, and he has provided important tools for analysing both the mechanisms employed in constructing images with strong Eurocentric and ‘mono-cultural’ connotations, and narratives linked to liberation and the demand for recognition on the part of oppressed and de-centralised political subjectivities. One might even venture to claim that his critical analysis focuses primarily on those culturally and politically sensitive shifts wherein, somehow or other, the problem arises of translating a cultural, political or linguistic otherness from one horizon of meaning to another.

But what is surprising in this story, which often served as a prologue to our discussions and which fell like a verdict, is that one can rediscover - I rediscovered, at least - all the elements of a Babylonian myth of the origins of psychoanalysis in the Arab world, and a phantasmatics of loss: golden age, drama, dispersion. What of this drama then, if one takes the translation of the terminology of the founder of psychoanalysis as a telling example?

This article supports and contributes to the project of open translation by asking how practitioners represent their practice. I am interested not only in how open translation is performed but also in the political motivations of its proponents. Drawing on studies that question the proposition that discrete languages exist before the act of translation, I investigate how open translation figures the relation between languages. I also ask if the collective subject constructed through such collaborative translation practices is a political figure adequate to the production of the common.

With the relaunching of Transeuropéennes in its new form, the journal is squarely poised to engage a prolonged reflection on one of the key antagonisms of our times: the relation between translation and cultural regions. I would like to share a line of interrogation that I recently developed in relation to a critique of Michel Foucault’s eurocentrism that may help shed peripheral light on some of the issues at stake.