Against World Literature

On the Politics of Untranslatability

Emily Apter

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781844679706
• eBook ISBN: 9781784780036
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the "Untranslatable"-the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution.
In the place of "World Literature"-a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal appeal-Apter proposes a plurality of "world literatures" oriented around philosophical concepts and geopolitical pressure points. The history and theory of the language that constructs World Literature is critically examined with a special focus on Weltliteratur, literary world systems, narrative ecosystems, language borders and checkpoints, theologies of translation, and planetary devolution in a book set to revolutionize the discipline of comparative literature.

Part One

Oneworldliness

I

Untranslatables: A World-System

Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles¹ produces wide-span intellectual cartography without a hegemonic global paradigm; that is to say, through interpretive procedures that reveal philosophical world-systems in the making. The book uses untranslatability as an epistemological fulcrum for rethinking philosophical concepts and discourses of the humanities. With critical finesse, it calls into question the very possibility of naming the predicates of Western thought even as it shows how such lodestones have been and continue to be actively translated. It is an exercise in the reclamation of sophistry and logology over and against the Platonic tradition of positing truths in an absolute sense, as a kind of mathemathical intelligence unbeholden to language.² This semantic predicament is consequential for the humanities; useful in defining a translational condition that complicates nation-based epistemes and literary denominations. Using the Vocabulaire’s construct of the Untranslatable, one can construe a translational humanities whose fault lines traverse the cultural subdivisions of nations or “foreign” languages while coalescing around hubs of singularity.

With a linguistic range that includes ancient European languages (such as Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic) and modern ones (such as English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, German, Arabic), the Vocabulaire represents a unique experiment in plurilingual analysis. Though, ideally, it would have had a companion volume covering Asian, African, Indian and Middle Eastern languages, the Vocabulaire succeeds within its terms as a latter-day version of the humanist translatio studii. Each entry is cued to a multilingual complement: The subject pronoun “I,” for example, is keyed to the French je, moi, and soi; to the Greek egô; and to the Latin ego. Ipse is keyed to the German Ich; Selbst to the English me, self, and myself; and to the Italian io, se, si, and si-mismo. Right away, the alterity of signifiers is made visible, preparing the way for a more systematic presentation of concepts labeled in their native tongues and alphabets. Peter Osborne characterizes the Untranslatable as that which refers to “the conceptual differences carried by the differences between languages, not in a pure form, but via the fractured histories of translation through which European philosophies have been constituted.” Cassin, more geopolitically attuned, speaks of a “cartography of philosophical differences.”³

The Untranslatable yields a revisionist history of ideas that gives full weight to mistranslation. This way of working is especially apparent in Étienne Balibar’s entry on the “Subject”:

We know that Averroës’s Long Commentary on the De Anima is, given the current state of the corpus, fully accessible only in Latin, or in Michel Scot’s tricky translation (the Arabic original having been lost). One of the most famous statements, in which Averroës appears to introduce the notion of the subject, is the passage on eternity and the corruptability of the theoretical intellect—the ultimate human perfection. It asserts: “Perhaps philosophy always exists in the greater part of the subject, just as the man exists thanks to man, and just as the horse exists thanks to horse.” What does the expression mean? Going against the very principles of Averroës’s noetics, the Averroist Jean de Jandun understands it to mean that “philosophy is perfect in the greater part of its subject (sui subjecti),” or in other words “in most men” (in majori parte hominum). There are no grounds for this interpretation. We can explain it, however, if we recall that Averroës’ Latin translator has confused the Arabic terms mawdu [word in Arabic in original] (subject or substratum in the sense of hupokeimenon) and mawdi [word in Arabic in original] (place). When Averroës simply says that philosophy has always existed “in the greater part of the place,” meaning “almost everywhere,” Jean understands him as saying that it has as its subject “the majority of men,” as every man (or almost every man) contributes to a full (perfect) realization in keeping with his knowledge and aptitudes. “Subjectivity” does slip into Averroism here, but only because of a huge misunderstanding resulting from a translator’s error. It therefore contradicts Averroës.

For the authors of this entry (Étienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, and Alain de Libera), mistranslation is adduced to explain the historic transformation of Aristotle’s hypokeimenon (substrate, the individual substance in a given form) into subjectum (I-ness, égoité, the subject of metaphysics, the power of thought). It is shown that non-transference of medieval heteronomy (the it-ness of I) haunts modern concepts of free will, egoic autonomy, and transcendent subjecthood. Balibar demonstrates how translation error has been determinative in the genealogy of the subject. The Cartesian subject, he argues, was improperly transcendentalized by Kant, while the Nietzschean Subjekt (which contains a critique of the effects of subjective submission) was confounded by the French sujet; a term that fails to render the slide between commanding and obeying that is inherent in Nietzsche’s usage.⁴ The “subject” is thus revealed not only to have an interesting intra-European and transtemporal history but also a “global” frame of reference that puts Arabic mistranslation into dialogue with mistranslated French Nietzscheanism.

As a stand-alone term with no ready equivalent, pravda is another paramount Untranslatable. It is arrayed alongside the Greek dikaiosunê; the Latin justitia; and the English “righteousness,” “justice,” “truth”; as well as vérité, droit, istina, loi, mir, postupok, praxis, sobornost’, and svet. The article speculates that pravda’s absence in the Russian Encyclopedia of Philosophy is attributable to it being too ideologically marked as the name of the USSR’s official government-controlled newspaper. Pravda thus comes into its own as that which is philosophically off-limits in its home country. This national dislocation matches up with its semantic relocation in the interstices of non-equivalent abstract nouns. The article locates pravda in the “hiatus” between legality and legitimacy, justice and truth, ethics and praxis. It is traced to the “short circuiting” of pardon by vengeance, and vice versa. The word’s (often-colliding) gamut covers democratic cosmopolitics, the topology of exile, solidarity with persecuted minorities and refugees, Russian Saint-Simonianism, and Russophilic worldviews. Placed in apposition to slovo, pravda connotes “word,” “discourse,” “logos,” and linguistically embodied rationalism. Pravda-Dikaiosunê, we learn, is one of the names for God as well as a figure of free speech, or open relationality among free agents. Negatively qualified as nevprada, the word alludes to linguistic mystification, to misinformation spread by corrupted institutions of state power and the media (pravdophobia was apparently coined at the time of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 in response to the official media lying about its severity). The pravda entry, like many others in the Vocabulaire, allows us to grasp how an Untranslatable moves—often with tension and violence—between historically and nationally circumscribed contexts to unbounded conceptual outposts; resistant yet mobile.

The Untranslatable emerges as something on the order of “an Incredible,” an “Incontournable,” an “Untouchable” (L’Incorruptible in French). There is a quality of militant semiotic intransigence attached to the Untranslatable, making it more than just a garden-variety keyword. Often it can come off as non-sense that becomes strangely accessible through the sheer force of grammar. Marina Warner points to this form of the Untranslatable in one of the examples she gives of Mallarmé’s English in Thèmes anglais: “Who can shave an egg?” It is not strictly speaking English, but it is English nonetheless. This effect of the non-carry-over (of meaning) that carries over nonetheless (on the back of grammar), or that transmits at a half-crocked semantic angle, endows the Untranslatable with a distinct symptomology. Words that assign new meanings to old terms, neologisms, names for ideas that are continually re-translated or mistranslated, translations that are obviously incommensurate (as in the use of esprit for “mind” or Geist), these are among the most salient symptoms of the genuine Untranslatable. The Anglophone reader of the Vocabulaire might well be baffled by an extended entry on Paronyme (“derivatively named,” “denominative”), and that is just the point. Brought to an unfamiliar linguistic nomos, the reader is introduced to the language world of Boethius’s translation of Aristotle’s work on categories, and to a lost set of associations around the denominative that pinpoint an intermediary semantic zone between homonym and synonym. Semantically related to “predication,” a more universally recognized concept with a substantial philosophical literature devoted to it in analytic philosophy, paronym could in theory have been filed under predication, but that would have literally diminished its space in the geography of philosophy. The editors want it revalued as a hinge between ancient and medieval scholasticism and ordinary language philosophy. The differential weight assigned by cultures to common cognates is also registered in the distribution of pages to ideas. A word like “force,” that hardly qualifies as a philosophical concept in the Anglophone context, warrants a substantive entry in French. Grouped with dunamis, energeia, entelekheia, virtus, Kraft, Wirkung, pouvoir, puissance, force straddles entelechy, physics, bodily substance, conservation, and power. In another case, the term “sensation,” (a crux of British empiricism) shrinks in scale upon being continentalized; that is, colonized under the entries sens and sentir. Such a move reveals how Anglo-American philosophical traditions are typically negotiated, or not, within Europe. Ordinary language philosophy, along with the names of its avatars—Wittgenstein, Russell, Austin, Quine and Cavell—are duly represented in the Vocabulaire, but the imperium of English is polemically curtailed. Analytic philosophy’s inveterate hostility to its continental counterpart and its obsession with, to borrow Cassin’s expression, “deflating the windbags of metaphysics”⁵ creates a gulf of untranslatability as much cultural as it is intellectual.

Throughout the volume, chasms among discrete philosophical cultures are revealed in stark relief. Nowhere are they more evident than in the entries devoted to language names. Notwithstanding the Vocabulaire’s express commitment to undercutting national language ontologies, there is a measure of national recidivism in these entries. Portuguese becomes a hymn to the sensibility of the baroque with le fado (fate, fibula, lassitude, melancholia) its emblematic figure. German hews to the language of Kant and Hegel. Greek is pinioned by the Athenian efflorescence and Heidegger’s homage to Greek as the Ursprache of philosophy. Italian remains indebted to Machiavelli’s notion of “the effective truth of things” and Vico’s philological historicism. In tracing how French came to be globally identified as a preeminent language of philosophy, Badiou backhandedly returns national ontology to linguistic nominalism. Such ontologies are, of course, impossible to purge entirely from the names of languages, for they lend coherence to the world map of languages; they triage and circumscribe the verbal grammatical protocols that qualify for naming as a discrete language.

Even the term “translation,” which in a sense signifies language in a state of non-belonging, or nationalism degree zero, is nationally marked. The Vocabulaire entry on translation notes that dolmetschen, a “lost” verb whose origins go back to Luther’s translation of the Bible into German, describes “to translate” as, literally, “to render as German” or “to Germanize.” Schleiermacher was instrumental in replacing dolmetschen with übersetzung on the grounds that dolmetschen referred to the functional work of the interpreter while übersetzung referred to the loftier challenge of rendering thought. From this perspective, übersetzung is the name of a disavowed Germanocentrism that clings to the history of the word “translation.”⁶

Must the names for language, including the names for translation, always revert to a predicate of ethnos? Fights like the one over the nation-name “Macedonia” (which involves Greece’s allegation that the former Yugoslav republic has no legitimate claim to an appellation that also designates a Northern Greek province) suggest that they must. The Greece–Macedonia dispute shows not only that nation-names are intractable referents of regional ethnic chauvinism but also that they function as name-domains or trademarked political zones that guarantee a country’s claim to self-ownership and right to enter the fray of international power politics (which in Macedonia’s case meant access to NATO membership).

Pierre Bourdieu recognized the power of language names as incontrovertible cognates, though he worked politically toward a linguistic International. In a 1995 issue of Liber, he called for a language of the “collective intellectual” that would denationalize the dissemination of ideas and information:

To contribute effectively to the realistic internationalism that is its raison d’être, Liber has initiated two complementary strategies. On the one hand, it has sought to offer its Turkish, Greek, German and Bulgarian readers the possibility of familiarizing themselves with English, Scottish, Czech and Irish authors, works and institutions—and vice versa—and make known on the international scale particularities bound up with national traditions (this is the particular function of issues devoted to a single country, or analyses and descriptions of singular features and characteristics of a historical tradition under headings such as “Untranslatable” or “European ethnography”). On the other hand, it has set out to bring together and compare different analyses of the same particular object (in this case intellectuals) as it presents itself in different national cultures, showing in this way, against the presuppositions and stereotypes of superficial journalism, facts and effects that are to be found on all sides, invariants that are denied or ignored just as infallibly by the vague and pompous assertions of international meetings and reviews, as by descriptions limited to a single nation. By thus enabling readers from different countries to read in their own language texts that are free of the anecdotal particularities that fill national newspapers and reviews, and filled with information that on the contrary is absent because it is taken for granted by those familiar with it, we hope to contribute, patiently but constantly, to leading them out of the limits of their national universe and creating a kind of collective intellectual, freed from the idolatry of those cultural idioms that are too often identified with culture.

Bourdieu displaces language from its habitus by freeing it “from the idolatry of cultural idioms.” He imagines a neutral zone of print literacy and media dissemination capable of transcribing the political in a pure state, “outside the national universe.” Bourdieu treats the Untranslatable as a critical unit conscripted for a media commons perhaps not so distant from Habermas’s discursive public sphere. Like Cassin, Bourdieu would pose an i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Oneworldliness
• Part Two: Doing Things with Untranslatables
• Part Three: Translating “World Literature”
• Part Four: Who Owns My Translation?
• Index