Translating
La traversée des océans
5 May 2011
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.
Situating language, situating the stakes
24 June 2010
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.
Translation as a filter
25 March 2010
In this essay, I aim to liberate the possibility of translation from the curse bestowed on it by the view of translation organized around the image of communication: the communication of a written text from one language to another. Translation is not a task limited to the written word, but a concept which grants us the possibility of examining social action in general anew, something which offers us an invaluable gateway by which to enter an inquiry into sociality itself.
The Greeks, the Arabs and Us
Irène ROSIER-CATACH | Marwan RASHED | Alain LIBERA de | Philippe BÜTTGEN
6 November 2009
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.
Untranslatables and their Translations
14 September 2009
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.
A Politics of Philosophy since Modernity
6 November 2009
Modernity, a trigger to much opening to extra-European continents, was also the big historic rift which made translation almost impossible by making many concepts normative, and particularly that of the political. Concepts and terms of “european” origin, through a process of universalization (a “westernisation”), assumed a genealogical and etymological continuity, imposing a corresponding discontinuity on those originating in other regions and languages.
Speaking the Universal
5 November 2009
What makes a reflection on the future of “philosophy” as we knew it and practiced it (whether it will exist under the same name, separated from other scientific or social practices, etc.) at the same time urgent and confused, is among other reasons the fact that it is frequently reaching us through considerations on the geohistorical status of the association between the discourse and the institution.
Edward Said's Humanism
11 October 2009
It is a well-known fact that Edward Said was a thinker who paid particularly close attention to the political effects of representation, and he has provided important tools for analysing both the mechanisms employed in constructing images with strong Eurocentric and ‘mono-cultural’ connotations, and narratives linked to liberation and the demand for recognition on the part of oppressed and de-centralised political subjectivities. One might even venture to claim that his critical analysis focuses primarily on those culturally and politically sensitive shifts wherein, somehow or other, the problem arises of translating a cultural, political or linguistic otherness from one horizon of meaning to another.
The Tree that Reveals the Forest
5 November 2009
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?
Opening translation
5 November 2009
This article supports and contributes to the project of open translation by asking how practitioners represent their practice. I am interested not only in how open translation is performed but also in the political motivations of its proponents. Drawing on studies that question the proposition that discrete languages exist before the act of translation, I investigate how open translation figures the relation between languages. I also ask if the collective subject constructed through such collaborative translation practices is a political figure adequate to the production of the common.
The Experience of Culture: Eurocentric Limits and Openings in Foucault
5 November 2009
With the relaunching of Transeuropéennes in its new form, the journal is squarely poised to engage a prolonged reflection on one of the key antagonisms of our times: the relation between translation and cultural regions. I would like to share a line of interrogation that I recently developed in relation to a critique of Michel Foucault’s eurocentrism that may help shed peripheral light on some of the issues at stake.