Translator

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.

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?

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 photographs do not show the people themselves, nor does the text present the locations. But the people’s words are marked by the places, in the same way that the places, though empty in the images, are marked by the people. And the work grew out of this joint presence, or what the sociologist Abdelmalek Sayad would have called a "double absence".

The interferences between historiographical procedures and the personal memory of the historian are a familiar problem for the historiography of the present time. The two cases of such interferences analysed in the present text are interesting in that, as contemporaries, they remember more than their scientific apparatus is capable of integrating. The incapacity to integrate into their presentations and historiographical analyses certain processes and practices that are nevertheless important in their time (and for that reason well remembered by the historian as subject), exposes the historian to the risk of suffering the effects of spontaneous or manipulated politics of memory, arising from the epoch in which he writes his narrative. Starting from the “excess of memory” in the texts of two eminent historians, we hope to be able to tackle some difficulties in the history of Yugoslavian socialist self-management.

Contemporary history reveals unforeseen patterns to us, in which the walls erected between individuals and nations create unequal territories. Under the indefinite movement of a humanity in transit, the contemporary political and economic order has engendered space without place: a space that shatters the sense of a place, defines it as a territory for the deracinated: a topos deprived of people who have put down roots there. In this context, figures that are intimately associated with a territorial space – the displaced, refugees, the exiled, the errant – are re-created there.

The People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen was the only regime in the Arab world that genuinely identifying itself as Marxist. During its short existence, from 1970 to 1997, it became a base for Soviet influence in the region and the capital for Arab liberation movements, most notably those of Palestine and the Arab peninsula, and for Middle-Eastern communist organisations. Aden, its capital, which Westerners associate most readily with the myth of Rimbaud or the figure of [Paul] Nizan, author of Aden-Arabie, thus gave up its status as a free zone so as to become a laboratory for socialist experience in the poorest country on the peninsula.

Situating language, linking it to the internal processes of translation that, between Greek, Latin, Slavic and Ottoman influences have made it, is to pose the political – and not just linguistic – stakes of the translation into Romanian of the European Vocabulary of Philosophies (EVP). The first section of the logbook is based on the notes that were prepared for the working seminars on the translations of the Vocabulary at the Fondation de Treilles (Var) in September 2009 and at the University of Rio de Janeiro in November 2009.

This article is the text of a lecture given by Etienne Balibar as the introduction to a debate that took place at Panteion University in Athens on the evening of 14^th June 2010. Participants in the round table discussion included Etienne Balibar, Costas Douzinas, Pavlos Klavdianos (from the journal Epochi), Yannis Millios (from the review Thesseis), Vanghelis Bitsoris (Aletheia), and Vicky Skoumbi (Aletheia ). The event was chaired by Dimitris Vergetis.

Since January 14^th, when Ben Ali “scarpered”, since February 10^th, when Mubarak resigned, a feeling of joy and a powerful raising up of hope has animated the struggles of Tunisians, the Egyptians, Arab intellectuals and militants – and all those who have, for a long time, stood by them - for dignity, freedom, justice, democracy in their countries, at great cost.

Human overflow is not that of a volcanic magma; it flows from the springing up of a new perception, a sudden breaking of sense, a fulgurating desire that sets passion, language, representation going. We must think this “suddenly” that designates, in language, “what comes without being seen” and which, in a brief lapse of time, turns submission – at least, the apparent submission – into the flagrant and generalised insubmission of the same subjects.

Toute rencontre de langues et de cultures, toute transmission, tradition, transport, traduction sont d’abord le fait de rencontres occasionnelles suite aux envies des individus. La traduction, tout comme la philosophie, est au début une affaire d’amis et d’amour – philía. Sans cet élan commun vers le grec, et vers les philosophies qui s’y sont produites, toujours à nous séduire et hanter, le portugais n’aurait peut-être pas été abordé dans le premier moment de l’élaboration du Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies, en France.