Synopsis
Within contemporary theory, the concepts of translation and universality have frequently been associated with different and even opposed philosophical and political projects: watchwords of either domination or liberation, the erasure of difference or the defense of difference. The universalizing drives of capitalism, colonialism, and other systems of oppression have precipitated widespread suspicion of any appeal to universality. This has led some, in turn, to champion the very notion of universality as antithetical to these systems of oppression. Similarly, recent scholarship has begun to grapple with the fundamental role of translation not only in forging inclusive democratic politics but also, by contrast, in violence, including imperial expansion and global war.
The present volume advocates neither for nor against translation or universality as such. Instead, it attends to their insurmountable ambiguity and equivocity, the tensions and contradictions that are internal to both concepts and that exist between them. Indeed, the wager of this volume is that translation, universality, and their relationship name irreducible yet overlapping sites of struggle for a diverse array of struggles on the Left.
Drawing from multiple intellectual traditions and orientations, with a special emphasis on deconstruction and Marxism, this volume both reveals and participates in a subterranean current of thought committed to theorizing the dynamic, plural, and ultimately inextricable relationship between translation and universality. Its contributors approach this problem in ways that challenge and unsettle dominant trends within translation studies and critical and postcolonial theory, thereby opening new lines of inquiry within and beyond these fields.
À propos des auteurs
Gavin Arnall is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research and teaching converge at the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy, with a special focus on Marxism and its (missed) encounters with Black and Indigenous radicalisms. He is the author of Subterranean Fanon: An Underground Theory of Radical Change (Columbia University Press, 2020), the translator of Emilio de Ipola's Althusser, The Infinite Farewell (Duke University Press, 2018), and the coeditor of Between Revolution and Democracy: Jose Arico, Marxism, and Latin America (Brill's Historical Materialism Book Series, forthcoming).
Katie Chenoweth is Associate Professor of French at Princeton University. She is the author of The Prosthetic Tongue: Printing Technology and the Rise of the French Language (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Her articles on Renaissance culture, media history, and deconstruction have appeared in venues such as Discourse, Montaigne Studies, Symploke, and The Comparatist. She is director of the Bibliotheque Derrida at Editions du Seuil, a collection that includes Derrida's unpublished seminars and other posthumous works. At Princeton, she is the director of Derrida's Margins, an ongoing digital humanities project dedicated to Derrida's personal library.
Ben Conisbee Baer is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and current Director of the Program in South Asian Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Indigenous Vanguards: Education, National Liberation, and the Limits of Modernism (Columbia University Press, 2019) and the translator of Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay's The Tale of Hansuli Turn (Columbia University Press, 2011). Baer's most recent book, in collaboration with Smaran Dayal, is Spider-Mother: The Fiction and Politics of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (Warbler Press, 2024). His work in the fields of postcolonial theory, Marxism, deconstruction, and South Asian literature has appeared in journals such as PMLA, boundary 2, Cultural Critique, Modernism/Modernity, Sikh Formations, and many edited volumes.
Barbara Cassin has served as the Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and as the President of the College International de Philosophie. A recipient of the CNRS Gold Medal, she is a member of the Academie Francaise and an exhibit curator. Her recent books in English translation include Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis (Fordham University Press, 2019), Google Me: One-Click Democracy (Fordham University Press, 2017), and Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? (Fordham University Press, 2016). Her editorial work includes the seminal Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton University Press, 2014). A translator herself (notably of Hannah Arendt and Peter Szondi), she is the editor of several book series including L'Ordre philosophique.
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is Professor of French and Philosophy and Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. His areas of research and publication include history of philosophy, history of logic and mathematics, Islamic philosophy, and African philosophy and literature. His latest publications in English include Open to Reason: Muslim Philosophers in Conversation with Western Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2018); Postcolonial Bergson (Fordham University Press, 2019); In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought (with Jean-Loup Amselle, Polity, 2020); African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (Other Press, 2023).
Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.
