In his essay ‘The Deconstruction of Christianity’, Jean-Luc Nancy identifies Christianity with the heart of the West, thus following René Girard's claim that Christianity is the religion that exposes the workings of scapegoating and mimetic violence that drive most religions and cultures. However, in On Touching, Derrida distances himself from Nancy's project, and I argue that this is precisely because he is aware that a straightforward embrace of the deconstruction of Christianity is a ruse, as it will end up in (...) a Christian victory that ultimately overcomes deconstruction. The problem, however, is that a simple opposition to Christianity is also insufficient because it gets caught in a similar trap where Christianity ultimately wins (religion will always triumph, as Lacan says). The workings of this ‘trap’ will be explored through a reading of Derrida's essay ‘What is a Relevant Translation?’ and particularly his discussion of Shylock's situation in Merchant of Venice, where Derrida recognizes the ruse of Christianity in its ability to trump Shylock's literal translation of the law, but still he ‘insist[s] on the Christian dimension’. Why? To answer this question this paper turns to another: how do we survive Christianity? (shrink)

Translation theory has faced criticism from professional translators for adopting an ivory tower stance to the ‘real world’ challenges of translation. This article argues that a case can be made for considering the challenges of translation as it takes place in the school classroom. In support of such an argument the pedagogue as translator is seen to occupy a pivotal position, such that the insights from translation theory, understanding translation as an inter-linguistic act, can be combined and bridged with the (...) burgeoning field of translation pedagogy, focusing on how the practice of (inter-linguistic) translation might be taught and learned in the school classroom. Extending the sphere of influence of translation, it is argued that the pedagogue as translator is concerned with teaching pupils in the classroom how to engage in making meaning in their respective subjects. This requires acts of translation from and with something heard or seen with respect to the subject concerned, in order to make into personal knowledge. After an initial presentation of a particular understanding of translation theory inspired by Walter Benjamin's famous essay on ‘The Task of the Translator’, examples of bridging are presented in the teaching of translation skills in two classroom subjects: teaching English as a foreign language and teaching natural science. (shrink)

This article considers the model of recognition in the Gender Recognition Act 2004 (GRA) and, through a critique of the value of stability pursued through this legislation, argues that recognition as a model is incompatible with the variety of experiences of non-binary trans-identified individuals. The article then moves on to analyse self-declaration, part of the proposed reform recently dismissed by the Government. While self-declaration contains provisions that would minimise the length of the process of recognition as well as the level (...) of intrusiveness and stigma associated with it, this analysis highlights some fundamental theoretical concerns with its over-reliance on the strict dialectical logics on recognition and its structural inability to account for and respond to the challenges posed by non-binary trans individuals. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship that Jacques Derrida and Sarah Kofman developed throughout their lifetimes, both as close friends and as philosophers who shared many common research interest...

Generally, regulation is thought of as a constant that carries with it both a formative and conservative power, a power that standardises, demarcates and forms an order, through procedures, rules and precedents. It is dominantly thought that the singularity and formalisation of structures like rules is what enables regulation to achieve its aim of identifying, apprehending, sanctioning and forestalling/pre-empting threats and crime or harm. From this point of view, regulation serves to firmly establish fixed and stable categories of what norms, (...) customs, morals and behaviours are applicable to a particular territory, society or community in a given time. These fixed categories are then transmitted onto individuals by convention, ritual and enforcement through imperatives of law (and technology) that mark certain behaviours as permissible and others as forbidden, off bounds. In this manner, regulation serves a programming (i.e., a calculable or determinable) purpose. It functions as a pro-active management or as a mastery of threats, risks, crimes and harms that affect a society and its security both in the future and in the present. Regulation for instance, will inscribe and codify what it determines to constitute crime or harm such as pornography, incitement of terrorism, extremist speech, racial hatred etc. These determined or calculated/calculable categories will then be enforced and regulated (e.g. through automated filtering) in order to ensure a preservation of public order within society. Drawing mainly from deconstruction, this article situates law and technologies within a wider ecological process of texts, speech and writing i.e., communication. In placing regulation within disseminatory and iterable processes of communication, this article complicates, destabilises and critiques the dominant position of determinability and calculability within the regulatory operations of law. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

The complicated issues surrounding translation studies have seen growing attention in recent years from scholars and academics that want to make it a discipline and not a minor branch of another field, such as linguistics or comparative literature. Writ large with Antigonick, Carson showcases the recent Western push towards translation studies in the American academy. By offering up a text that is chaotic in its presentation, she bypasses the rigid idea of univocality. By giving the text discordant images, she betrays (...) the failed efficacy of sign and signification, and by choosing a text to be performed and mutually participated in, she exceeds ideas of the individual subject as the site of authorship. Ultimately, Carson enacts a theory of translation that critically deconstructs translation itself. (shrink)

Arendt claimed that violence is not part of the political because it is instrumental. Her position has generated a vast corpus of scholarship, most of which falls into the context of the realist-liberal divide. Taking these discussions as a starting point, this essay engages with violence in Arendt’s work from a different perspective. Its interest lies not in Arendt’s theory of violence in the world, but in the function that violence performed in her work, namely, in the constitutive role of (...) violence in her thought. It argues that the concept of violence allowed Arendt to make important distinctions serving to catalyze the categories that constitute her political philosophy and, in particular, the categories of public and private. More specifically, it claims that the concept of violence in Arendt’s work is the a priori background against which both the public and private realms should be defined. (shrink)

The article seeks to advance the debate on Islam and secularism, not by thinking of secularism in terms of whether there is or should be state neutrality toward religion, but rather by proposing that we think in terms of a state neutrality that is anchored in pluralism to-come. The latter is not a future pluralism that will one day arrive but is rather characterized by a structural promise of openness to futurity which thus exposes us to absolute surprise simultaneously of (...) the best and the worst in plurality, the one never coming without opening the possibility of the other. The analysis is developed via a critical examination of the presuppositions of Abdullahi A. An-Na‘im’s book, Islam and the Secular State, supplemented with key ideas from Jacques Derrida’s political philosophy. I specifically propose to shift the debate on the question of Islam and state neutrality in two ways. First, I propose that instead of thinking in terms of secularism and its mechanism – civic reason – for sustaining pluralism in heterogeneous societies, we think in terms of a secularity and a civic reason, both of which presuppose a pluralism to-come. Second, I propose that we think not simply in terms of actual pluralism but rather in terms of an autoimmune pluralism. (shrink)

Some scholars claim that in Derrida's Of Grammatology the author presents China and its script as essentially and radically Other when compared to the West. In this paper, I argue that Derrida's discussion of Leibniz, his critique of the notions of ‘phonetic writing’ and ‘ideograph’, and the distinction he makes between ‘logocentrism’ and ‘phonocentrism’, enables him to deconstruct an essentialist conception of China or Chinese writing. However, far from conceiving China in a relativist or ethnocentric manner, Derrida also pays attention (...) to the historicity of the encounter between European philosophy and China. In order to underline the transcultural potential of deconstruction, I discuss the concept of ‘crypt’ in light of the Chinese translation of the word ‘ différance’. This allows me to reinterpret what I claim to be Derrida's problematic reference to Chinese writing as ‘outside of all logocentrism’ from the point of view of his philosophy of translation. 1. (shrink)

Hegel’s “Absolute Knowing” and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida are tragi-comic consternations. They are theatres of ethical panentheism: they present dramatic “absolute” ethical interpretations and actions, each of which is at once ungrounded and completely seeded. I start with the etymology of “consternation.” Then I discuss the comic vs. tragic interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, arguing it is a consternating tragi-comedy. I analyze the predicate “absolute” in terms of consternations, in a few passages of the book. I elaborate especially upon (...) phenomenological reasoning’s Sache selbst. In the Phenomenology, reason develops by thinking the absolute thing through culture, politics, morality, and religion, reaching completion in “Absolute Knowing.” That absolute is reason’s comprehensive insight into its phenomenological absolutes, and its own absolute sublating. Northrop Frye’s cited claim about myth can be understood in this phenomenological way. With all this in hand, Hegel’s science of experience is formally complete. But the experience of Absolute Knowing is still consternation. To capture the consternating essence of sublation – a consternation by which experience becomes something it was not before – I season this formal science with Shakespeare’s “comedy” Troilus and Cressida, revealing its structural roots to be consternations. (shrink)

This paper, a cross-cultural exploration of the Chinese text Dao De Jing, retools Derrida's différance and his questions around the ‘relevant’ translation as a way to deepen an understanding of the heterogeneous and ambiguous aspects of ‘Dao ’, ‘De ’, ‘Qian ’ and Kun. While tracing the etymological roots and evolutions of these Chinese characters that are key to the spirit of Dao De Jing, this paper highlights its polysemic ambiguity and moral productivity, in particular, and shows, with Derrida, how (...) one can benefit from paying deconstructive attention to the “body” of the text that endures the test of time such as acts of translation. (shrink)

In this article I posit translation as philosophical operation that disrupts commonsense meaning and understanding. By defamiliarising language, translation can arrest thinking about a text in a way that assumes the language is understood. In recent work I have grappled with the phrase 'ways of knowing', which, for linguistic and conceptual reasons, confuses discussions about epistemological diversity. I here expand this inquiry by considering languages in which more than one equivalent exists for the English verb 'to know'. French, for example, (...) has both savoir and connaître , and German has wissen and kennen . This interlinguistic translation thus allows for a reconsideration of the inquiry into the phrase 'ways of knowing': do problems arise with 'ways of knowing-in-the sense-of connaître ', or with 'ways of knowing-in-the-sense-of savoir ', or both? Displacement is, more generally speaking, a method used by philosophers. Shifting the concept or phenomenon under consideration into a different context or discursive register allows one to defamiliarise it and see it in terms of something else. Through translation, whether interlinguistic or interdiscursive, philosophers ask what questions and understandings become possible when we see A in terms of B. (shrink)

In taking up the question of translation as its guiding thread, this essay considers the extent to which deconstruction consists in a radical calling into question of the type of thought and practice of translation implied in what Derrida has called "the passage into philosophy." At the same time, a whole other thought of translation —of the very kind that Derrida put into practice—is demanded insofar as something like the survival of works and the very possibility of a tradition are (...) at stake. (shrink)

In this article I posit translation as philosophical operation that disrupts commonsense meaning and understanding. By defamiliarising language, translation can arrest thinking about a text in a way that assumes the language is understood. In recent work I have grappled with the phrase ‘ways of knowing’, which, for linguistic and conceptual reasons, confuses discussions about epistemological diversity. I here expand this inquiry by considering languages in which more than one equivalent exists for the English verb ‘to know’. French, for example, (...) has both savoir and connaître, and German has wissen and kennen. This interlinguistic translation thus allows for a reconsideration of the inquiry into the phrase ‘ways of knowing’: do problems arise with ‘ways of knowing-in-the sense-of connaître’, or with ‘ways of knowing-in-the-sense-of savoir’, or both? Displacement is, more generally speaking, a method used by philosophers. Shifting the concept or phenomenon under consideration into a different context or discursive register allows one to defamiliarise it and see it in terms of something else. Through translation, whether interlinguistic or interdiscursive, philosophers ask what questions and understandings become possible when we see A in terms of B. (shrink)

Since Sarah Kofman's death in 1994, many critics have investigated her friendship with Jacques Derrida, and have tried to make sense of its striking dissymmetry. Contrary to those merely deeming Ko...

This article investigates the politics of translation at work in contemporary theories of secularism. It turns to the thought of Jacques Derrida in order to challenge liberal and more critical perspectives. Without a complex analysis of translation and its ethico-political effects, the revisitation of secularism remains deficient, leaving the liberal politics of translation exclusionary and that of their critics ineffective. Pointing to the resources Derrida offers for a deeper understanding of the nature, political stakes, and implications of translation, this article (...) illuminates an understudied and yet crucial dimension of the relationship between religion and politics, and more generally of public life. (shrink)

En el siguiente ensayo intento una consideración amplia del problema de la institución fuerte a partir de la cuestión del doblez metafórico del lenguaje y su articulación metafísico-principial. Se trata de una cuestión problemática que cabría situar como un prolegómeno posible de acceso al pensamiento Jacques Lezra en torno a una cosmología heteróclita y una república material o salvaje –pensamiento según el cual el “republicanismo salvaje” dependería de producir e instituir conceptos defectivos de asociación política que den lugar a “instituciones (...) defectivas”. Para ello apunto al trabajo de Lezra sobre la trama de relaciones entre lenguaje, institución y deconstrucción en Paul de Man; a la paradigmática reductio ad unum en la institución del lenguaje y su maximización como unidad ideal del sentido y estructura lógica del mundo en la fenomenología de Edmund Husserl; a la necrofilología de Lezra como teoría materialista de los conceptos y de la inestabilidad ontológica del mundo; y, por último, a la cuestión del principio de equivalencia y traductibilidad general en la época del capitalismo global. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay reads Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice as a machine: a machine made of connectors, disruptors, reversible engines and agentive parts. Starting from a minor detail in the play...

Deconstruction is decidedly unsettling in that it destabilizes the otherwise comfortably assumed understanding of the nature of translation. What is also controversial is that it may make translation impossible, considering that it explicitly acknowledges the impossibility of translation. Yet Derrida emphasizes the necessity of translation as well, thus foregrounding the need to negotiate with the non-negotiable, and for this reason, to translate the untranslatable. Deconstruction captures and elucidates the complexity of translation in relation to the variability and complexity of its (...) nature and practice. Despite the disconcerting observation of his devastatingly relativist overtone and open-endedness, Derrida does not uphold complete free play, as is repeatedly pointed out by himself and other scholars. This paper argues that the context of translation plays a regulating role and intends to unravel what he calls translation as both possible and impossible, both respectful and abusive. Inspired by Derrida's profound contention that translation is in a way more about ‘what is not there’ than ‘what is there’, this paper will map some of the multiple implications of meaning and various modes of representation in translation, in which different meanings can be played with so as to give rise to spaces for exploring and expanding the range of translation strategies and methods. (shrink)