Seminar on Global Society IV

The course will address the individuality of language in relation to translation and the modern world. It is designed to further explore problems concerning translation and the international world. We will survey theories and practices of translation with a special emphasis on (a) the modern international world and Eurocentricity; (b) the international co-figuration of national/ethnic languages; (c) national territory and population in the formation of the sovereign state; (d) the co-figurative schematism in the modern regime of translation.

Throughout this course, translation is not defined narrowly as a transfer of a message from one national or ethnic language into another. Translation is primarily understood to designate a practice within which to create continuity at the point of discontinuity in the social; it is an act by which to generate a sense out of a social encounter that does not make sense precisely because it is given as something incommensurate in the first place. In this respect, translation occurs at the singular point of nonsense.

When translation is understood in the modern regime of translation (conventional apprehension of translation in the modern world) the representation of translation establishes a division of two spheres (which are usually equated to two national languages, the original language and the target language) and thereby marks the limit of what can be expressed in one medium. Broadly understood, however, translation can take place not only between two national languages but also at a variety of boundaries within a single society. The course will investigate different economies of translation by which different social and cultural identities are constructed and/or transformed; it will emphasize the disappearance of multi-lingualism in the modern nation-state and the mutation of translation economies which has given rise to new ways of imagining the organicist unity of a new community called “a nation.”