Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought (New Critical Humanities)

On what basis can we establish an alternative to the unifying of cultures brought about by economic globalization? When ideas, like objects and words, can be translated and marketed everywhere, what forms of critique are available? Straddling the fields of political philosophy, comparative literature, animal studies, global studies, and political economy, Untranslating Machines proposes to this end a weakened, defective concept of “untranslatability.” The analytic frame of Jacques Lezra’s argument is rooted in Marx, Derrida and Wittgenstein. He moves historically from the moment when “translation” becomes firmly wed to mercantilism and to the consolidation of proto-national state forms, in European early modernity; to the current moment, in which the flow of information, commodities and value-creation protocols among international markets produces the regulative fantasy of a global , coherent market of markets. In a world in which translation and translatability have become a means and a model for the consolidation of a global cultural system, this book proposes an understanding of untranslatability that serves to limit the articulation between a globalized capitalist value-system and the figure and techniques of translation. Untranslating Machines Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: This Untranslatability-Which-Is-Not-One 1 Two Dogmas of Translation 2 On Contingency in Translation 3 Nationum origo 4 Sovereignty or Translation 5 What Is Possible in Machine Translation 6 The Animal in Translation Afterword: Counter-gift Notes Works Cited Index This book explores the interrelated subjects of philosophy of translation and the critique of globalization. Taking a specifically deconstructive-Marxist approach, Lezra examines the concept of translation through the lens of political philosophy, political economy and comparative literature