Politics of translation: A cosmopolitan approach Open Access

Translation has gained a central importance in recent accounts of cosmopolitanism that emphasise global interdependence and the interaction between different cultures and traditions. In this context, it becomes necessary to formulate a politics of translation that questions some idealist assumptions about translation that are present in the sociological literature, specifies translation as a fundamentally ethnocentric act, and formulates relevant strategies to confront this inherent ethnocentrism in order to open up translation to the difference of the other. This implies a broad conception of translation primarily as a social relation with foreignness, rather than merely as the transfer of meaning from one language into another. In this light, a politics of translation based on linguistic hospitality is seen as a more realistic alternative than Derrida’s notion of absolute hospitality, while also responding to problems related to the difficulty of understanding, which are minimised in a Habermasian notion of tolerance. It also connects with a philosophy that relates language to its anthropological and material roots, thus presenting linguistic hospitality as a space where a human potential based on flexibility and adaptability can flourish.

Translation is currently seen as a central process of intercultural communication in a cosmopolitan context. However, until recently, its significance has remained largely unnoticed in the social sciences. One reason for this is the widespread assumption that translation is a transparent process, which merely facilitates linguistic and cultural transfer without leaving any traces of its intervention. In the context of globalisation, and the ever-increasing quantities of information flows across the world, the assumption of transparency becomes linked to one of instantaneity which, according to Cronin, devalues the effort, the difficulty, and the time required to establish and maintain cultural connections (2003, p. 49). Thus, most approaches to globalisation have typically devoted more attention to the circulation of information, ideas, people, and goods than to the productive conditions that make it possible. This has led to assuming that global texts can automatically be received by different audiences and to obscuring the crucial intervention of translation in the production of a multiplicity of local versions (for theoretical perspectives dealing with translation and globalisation, see Bielsa, 2005; Bielsa & Bassnett, 2009; Cronin, 2003).

Whereas globalisation theory emphasises the singularity of the world, social theories of cosmopolitanism question this pretended ‘unicity’ (in Robertson’s term, 1992), underlying the multiplicity of perspectives and the interaction between different traditions (Rumford, 2008, p. 1). Paralleling this development, attention to the homogenising spread of a simplified form of global English – a lingua franca perceived as the ‘McLanguage’ of a globalised ‘McWorld’ or as the ‘Eurospeak’ of our multilingual continent (Snell-Hornby, 2000, p. 17) – has increasingly given way to a new perception of the cultural and political significance of multilingualism and its complexities. It is in this context that key theorists of what has been called the new cosmopolitanism have called attention to the central role translation plays in mediating between different modernities or traditions in our forcibly intercultural destiny. Thus, for Beck (2006), cosmopolitan competence ‘forces us to develop the art of translation and bridge-building … relativizing one’s own form of life within other horizons of possibility’ (p. 89), while Delanty (2006) argues that cosmopolitan processes ‘take the form of translations between things that are different’ (p. 43) and uses the notion of cultural translation to focus on how one culture interprets itself in light of the encounter with the other and constantly undergoes change as a result (2009, p. 193–98). There is also an increasing awareness of the significance of multilingualism and translation in key aspects of the cosmopolitan project such as global democracy (Archibugi, 2008), human rights (De Sousa Santos, 2010), transnational or cosmopolitan citizenship (Balibar, 2006), social movements (De Sousa Santos, 2005), and borders (Balibar, 2010). Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called attention to an underlying epistemological issue that is relevant to all these approaches, proposing an ecology of knowledges and intercultural translation as an alternative to a general theory that cannot grasp the infinite diversity of the world. This demands and makes it imperative to formulate a politics of translation.

If the first point of this article referred to the contention that translation is a key process of intercultural communication in a cosmopolitan context, a second step is to question our current definition of translation as the transfer of a verbal message from one language into another and to reveal its radical insufficiency to formulate a politics of translation. In this sense, Balibar has called attention to the curious reduction of what is understood by translation in our political constitutions, defending a wider conception of translation as the basic instrument for the creation of a transnational public space in a democratic sense, where ideas and projects can be debated across linguistic and administrative borders (2006, pp. 5–6). Translation thus appears as a basic paradigm of the border as a non-exclusive relationship with others that is opposed to the alternative paradigm of war (Balibar, 2010), an exemplary instance of what Rumford has approached through the concept of ‘borderwork’, emphasising the involvement of ordinary people in the construction, maintenance, and dismantling of borders (2008). For Balibar, the political importance of the practice of translation lies not in the transmission of contents but in the production of a transnational space of translation, to which he refers as ‘a multilateral and multicultural regime of translations’. Translation is conceived as the common idiom of this new public sphere, representing a form of practical universalism, as opposed to the idea of a universalised and simplified use of a shared language such as ‘international English’ (2006, p. 6). This conception of translation is based, on the one hand, on the belief that ‘the possibility of universalism lies precisely in this common capacity to reach an effective communication without possessing in advance common meanings and interpretations’ (Bauman, quoted in Balibar, 2006, p. 5). On the other hand, Balibar relies on Benjamin’s conception of translation, which insists that its function is not the transmission of contents (Benjamin, 2007). For Benjamin, translation does not play an intermediary’s role, but it primarily establishes a certain relationship with the foreign. A second, fundamental step to articulate a politics of translation consists therefore in stating that what matters about translation is not the information or the contents that are transmitted through it, but how they are transmitted and the relationship that is established with the foreign in the process; that is, to substitute what could be characterised as an instrumental view of translation for a more substantive conception of translation in its key intersubjective and social dimensions. This is the starting point for all those who propose a politics of translation against the limited dominant definition of translation, including authors such as Spivak (2000), Berman (1992), and Venuti (2008), who will be referred to in what follows. And if a definition that questions translation as the transmission of contents from one language to another may initially seem strange, it is due to the narrow concept of translation that we are used to, which considers it as a derivative act, as a mere reproduction of something the value of which lies beyond translation itself (and this is why something always seems to get lost in translation). This is a definition that reduces and depoliticises translation.

The formulation of an alternative and political conception of translation points to a necessary third step, which is to outline how ethnocentrism is a central tendency or resistance in any act of translation. This aspect of translation has not sufficiently been recognised in the recent sociological literature on cosmopolitanism, which is in danger of adopting an essentially idealist notion of translation. Thus, both Beck and Delanty simply assume the possibility of transcending ethnocentrism through translation. For Beck (2006), translation is ‘the capacity to see oneself from the perspective of cultural others’ (p. 89), while for Delanty (2009) translation provides ‘the possibility of incorporating the perspective of the Other into one’s own culture’ (p. 13). These conceptions presuppose not only a genuine openness to others, but also that incorporating the perspective of the other into one’s own culture is a relatively straightforward process, thus minimising the degree of difficulty or resistance with which one is confronted when one embarks on such a translation. However, according to Venuti, translation is a fundamentally ethnocentric act (1998, p. 10). Venuti (2008) emphasises the violence that is implied in any act of translation and defines translation as ‘ … the forcible replacement of the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text with a text that is intelligible to the translating-language reader’ (p. 14). We are calling attention to this definition of translation as an act of ethnocentric violence in order to problematise Beck and Delanty’s assumption that translation offers the possibility of transcending ethnocentrism and to underline that what is interesting about translation is rather the struggle that is established with cultural ethnocentrism in any translating act. The best theorisation of this important aspect is that offered by Berman, who reflects on the paradox that exists between the ethnocentric trends in any culture and what he describes as the ethical objective of translation, which is by necessity openness, dialogue, crossbreeding, and decentring (1992, p. 4). For Berman, a bad translation is not one which results in a loss of meaning from the original, but one in which it is not possible to perceive the foreignness of the original, a strangeness that cannot be directly assimilated into the receiving culture. This is why he refers to bad translations as ethnocentric translations, that is, those translations that carry out a systemic negation of the strangeness of the foreign work generally under the pretext of the difficulty of its transmission (1992, p. 5). Both Berman and Venuti’s approaches to the difficulties of translation can be traced back to the central notion of intelligibility. To respect the other, to do justice to the difference of the foreign text, means to resist to the highest possible degree the ethnocentric demand of intelligibility, the violence inherent in translation. However, this resistance also implies to subject the translator’s language to the strangeness of a different tongue and can lead to the production of a text that threatens to become unintelligible.

The relevance of these issues goes beyond an academic reflection on translation and necessarily implies all of us as consumers of translations. Because: are we really willing to be confronted with opaque translations that offer not a presumably transparent access to otherness (to an other who can readily be recognised and assimilated into our cultural patterns), but rather make visible the difficulty of understanding others in their strangeness? Not only with reference to the literature, in respect of which it could be argued that it is easier to accept the autonomy of art and its distance from an everyday reality we all take for granted, but also with reference, for instance, to translated news, which are our window to the world, when we cannot even perceive in them the ubiquitous mediation of translation.

A textual example from the still vastly understudied field of news translation will clarify this. Silverstone starts his book on Media and morality (2007) with a reference to an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 4 during the height of the war in Afghanistan. The interview was with an Afghani blacksmith who offered his account of why the bombs were falling on his village: ‘It was because, his translated voice explained, Al Qaeda had killed many Americans and their donkeys and had destroyed some of their castles’ (2007, p. 1). Silverstone (2007) reflects on the strangeness of the blacksmiths’ appearance on British radio, which is not only connected to the rarity of hearing the discourse of an ordinary person so far removed from us in the news, but also to what he says and how he says it, to the fact that he is offering an account of us as well as to us, that he is interpreting our reality and his in order to tell us, through his voice, ‘a translated truth, a cultural truth, and a truth meaningful for him’ (pp. 1–2). As Silverstone argues, it is the rare appearance of a stranger who penetrates through the media in our home and speaks about our misfortune as well as his. To this reflection we should add that the rarity of this presence on British radio is also due to the fact that no effort has been made to hide that translation has taken place. This contrasts with the dominant form of translation in the media, which is characterised by the privileging of fluent translations that make others speak as we would ourselves, thus clouding the foreignness of their discourse and making translation an invisible process.

It is the fundamental ethnocentrism of translation, the reductive tendency that is present in any culture, that makes it necessary to formulate a politics of translation in any cosmopolitan project; a politics of translation based on the ethical purpose of translating, which according to Berman is to open up in writing a certain relation with the other, to fertilise what is one’s own through the mediation of what is foreign (1992, p. 4). No language or tradition, however big or small, dominant or minoritised, can strive for survival by closing itself to others, by asserting the identity of what, characteristically, lacks any identity (Derrida, 1998, p. 30; for a reflection against ethnocentric translation, which can only be seen as a loss in cosmopolitan terms, as well as against its qualified defence within the discipline of translation studies, see also Bielsa, 2016, p. 78). Ricoeur has stated that translators can find happiness in what he calls linguistic hospitality, appealing to a regime of correspondence without adequacy that does not erase the irreducibility of the pair of what is one’s own and what is foreign (2006, p. 10). The fourth step in order to articulate a politics of translation of openness to the other consists therefore in invoking Derrida’s notion of hospitality and conveying its relevance in this context. We are referring here to a notion of unconditional hospitality and not of mere visiting rights, as in Kant’s version of hospitality, because even though the latter radically affirmed hospitality as a right of individuals and not of states in a cosmopolitan context, the Kantian concept of hospitality remained caught in the paradox that it only guaranteed entry into a state, but not the right to permanently settle in it (Kant, 1991). Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000) appeals instead to a notion of absolute hospitality that is beyond the law and that also demands a break with the hospitality of the law:

Absolute hospitality may be unattainable, but only linguistic hospitality understood as an absolute or unconditional hospitality that lets the strangeness of the foreign tongue arrive and does not hide it under a pretended equivalence or false familiarity will make it possible to fertilise what is one’s own through the mediation of what is foreign, thus allowing the incorporation of the perspective of the other into one’s own culture that Delanty and Beck refer to. Absolute hospitality, as Derrida points out, breaks with the law of hospitality as a right or as a duty. Beyond the obvious reason that an ethical translation of the other, that is, a translation that does justice to the difference of the other, is not contemplated in any regime of rights, one would need to approach a politics of translation based on linguistic hospitality as a responsibility and not as a right. This is a responsibility that is beyond the law and that must also be distinguished from the concept of duty (Aguilera, 1999, pp. 122–125), a responsibility that cannot be put under a general rule, but requires instead a strategic ethical and political positioning of the translator in front of a concrete situation. In many instances, this responsibility not only anticipates the law, or is even positioned in certain cases against the norm so that justice can be done, but also refers to the circumstances and conditions in which genuine communication can be established. This cannot be articulated from a rights-based approach, which approves of any type of communication as long as nobody’s rights are infringed.

This point can be illustrated with two reflections about the positioning and responsibility of the translator in a context marked not only by cultural and linguistic difference, but also by pronounced inequality and asymmetry. They refer to how the translator confronts the challenges of translation in a concrete situation which, as has already been indicated, is the only way in which a politics of translation can be articulated. The first concerns Spivak’s reflections on translation, in essays like ‘Translating into English’ (2005) and, especially, in her influential essay entitled ‘The politics of translation’ (2000). The author deals with the responsibility of the translator who translates from non-European languages into English, a responsibility which is greater because of certain geopolitical complications like the growing power of English as global lingua franca, the demand for translations from non-Western literatures as a quick way of accessing other cultures, and the non-existence of a community of polyglots in the receiving society which could judge such translations. For Spivak, only from a reflection on the ethical and political responsibility of the translator, who does not simply transmit the contents of a foreign literature but reproduces them assuming their opacity from what she calls a sense of the retoricity of language, can a neo-colonialist construction of the non-Western scene be avoided (2000, p. 399).

Global asymmetries and inequalities demand a more immediate response from the translator in the second case for reflection provided here, which refers to the context of legal interpreting. Take for instance the interpreter who clearly perceives in the accent of the man she is interpreting that he is from Morocco and not a Palestine from Ramallah as he pretends to be, but decides not to reveal this to the police so as not to jeopardise his claim that he is a refugee. As Inghilleri points out in her excellent book Interpreting justice, the principles of neutrality and impartiality contained in interpreters’ codes of practice should not be taken to mean abdication from the personal and social responsibilities in their role (2012, p. 51). In cases like the one we have referred to, the professional duty of the interpreter, which consigns her to a mere role of mediator from a supposed position of neutrality or impartiality, would not allow her to respond to power abuses or injustices that she may witness, or would even lead her to become an accomplice of these abuses. Just as justice is beyond the law, a politics of translation based on linguistic hospitality is beyond the deontological obligations of the translator, and obliges us to think in a different way.

A politics of translation constitutes an important and necessary aspect of any approach to the possibility of articulating a non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. In the cosmopolitanism debate, the issue of Eurocentrism has come to the fore not only as the consequence of postcolonial critiques of Western cosmopolitan designs (Mendieta, 2009; Mignolo, 2000; Van der Veer, 2002), but also because of the unhappiness of authors such as Chris Rumford with the centrality attributed to Europe’s role in a cosmopolitan project or, in his words, with the ‘desire to install cosmopolitanism as Europe’s “big idea”’, which he sees most evident in the work of Habermas (Rumford, 2008, p. 3). Recent contributions have also sought to call attention to the relevance of non-Western cosmopolitanisms, such as for instance Fanon’s postcolonial cosmopolitanism (Go, 2013a). Translation appears as a crucial instance through which actually existing relations between different cultural traditions can be approached, whether one insists on the interconnected nature of spaces and traditions, such as in some postcolonial accounts centred on connected histories (Bhambra, 2014, Go, 2013b), or whether, alternatively, the idea of modernity as a condition that simply spreads from the West to the rest of the world is questioned and the existence of and interaction between different forms of modernity or multiple modernities (Eisenstadt, 2000; Wagner, 2011, 2012) is recognised in the formulation of a notion of cosmopolitan modernity (Beck & Grande, 2010). However, so far, the relevance of a politics of translation has not been explored in the sociological literature, and the central importance of linguistic interconnections for any cosmopolitan project has been ignored. There is one notable exception: Delanty’s recent article (2014), where the author calls attention to the need to translate between different world varieties of cosmopolitanism as a key aspect of the construction of a critical, non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. Delanty’s views on cultural translation rely on an implicit politics of translation based on linguistic hospitality. What we are defending in this article is the importance not only of realising the crucial role translation plays in mediating between different varieties of cosmopolitanism, but also of making explicit that only certain forms of translation will enable such a possibility. Translation can be and is being used in ethnocentric and Eurocentric designs to abolish difference and to render the other falsely familiar. A politics of translation based on linguistic hospitality that assumes the responsibility of doing justice to the other must face up to multiple political, economic, and cultural impediments derived from global pressures for quick, transparent, fluent translations that can be readily consumed by publics without threatening values that are often taken for granted. Only if we are aware of the difficulties for such translations as well as of the important role they can play in a cosmopolitical direction can a politics of translation be fully enlisted to contribute to the construction of a non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism, particularly through the translation of significant forms of non-European cosmopolitanism that have been rather marginalised in the cosmopolitanism debate. This is a hugely relevant form of translation that inverts the dominant direction of global translation flows, which take place predominantly from the west to the rest of the world, and that can become a source of growth and renewal of genuinely open and globally significant cosmopolitan projects.

A politics of translation also constitutes an alternative to a politics of identity or of recognition (Taylor, 1994), which since the decade of 1970 have been at the basis of multiculturalist politics in Western democracies. This is because a political understanding of translation such as that we are defending here leads us to question certain fundamental aspects of what we understand by identity; it explodes the very notion of identity. In this perspective, the key for living together in heterogeneous societies does not lie in the recognition of identity and of cultural difference, but in the practices of cultural translation where openness to others leads to self-problematisation and change, to the perception of one’s own limits and not to the reinforcement of an assumed originary identity that emanates from old presuppositions about what cultures and individuals are. As Ivekovic (2005) maintains,

Ivekovic shares several of the ideas that have been elaborated upon in this article, starting with a political conception of translation that asserts that it significantly transforms both the original text and the translator. A similar approach to the inherently destabilising effects of translation can be found in Naoki Sakai’s critique of what he refers to as the metaphysics of communication (embodied in the conventional notion of translation as transfer and as the establishment of homogenising equivalence) and of the binary opposition between same and other that is established by a regime of translation based on monolingual address. Instead, Sakai argues for a different attitude based on the translator’s ambiguous and unstable position as a subject in transit, or a form of heterolingual address as ‘a situation in which one addresses oneself as a foreigner to another foreigner’ (2006, p. 75)

The notion of transformation, of the incorporation of the perspective of the other into one’s own culture, is diametrically opposed to what is behind that of identity, with reference both to individual self-identity and to the concept of a community with well-defined borders that is presupposed by the idea of a dialogue between cultures, which in reality serves to hide existing differences and asymmetries between them. As Ivekovic points out, identity essentialises and naturalises culture (2005, p. 5). While the main source of identity is the process of construction of alterity, translation points to the opposite process, that of a radical and reciprocal exchange between different forms of being or existing, a questioning of self in light of the difference of the other that is at the basis of a cosmopolitan notion of genuine openness to others.

This defence of a politics of translation against a politics of identity does not only refer to normative principles and philosophical issues, but also possesses an eminently sociological and empirical aspect in the sense that Beck defended in his book The cosmopolitan vision (2006). We live in a society that, in a certain sense, has been cosmopolitanised. The cosmopolitan vision enables us to perceive an already existing cosmopolitan reality, a reality of multiple belonging or cultural hybridity, of translated lives and world families, a reality that escapes and can no longer be grasped by traditional conceptions of identity, which assume a natural correlation between the identity of individuals and the place they belong to. If we take, for example, world families, a concept through which Beck and Beck-Gernsheim analyse a growing and particularly relevant case through which the contradictions caused by globalisation are manifested in the everyday and intimate life of families (2014), we realise that there is not a possible notion of identity that defines them, but a permanent struggle with the contradiction and difference that characterises them, a translation that is always provisional and therefore unfinished and infinite between different ways of existing. World families question our most familiar assumptions about what families are; like strangers, they are ambivalent figures of non-identity. In a similar way, a cosmopolitan politics of translation makes strangeness appear in the midst of what is most familiar to us, our mother tongue. And only when identity disappears, when the unquestioned immediacy of the circumstances that surround us vanishes, can we think ourselves and openly relate to others in a world that has become increasingly strange.

A notion of identity in non-identity allows us to break with the bipolarity that is presupposed by the disjunctive between either an identity as the iteration of something positive (blood, soil, language, ethnos, culture) or a fragmentation or decomposition of what lacks any identity. In this task of an identity in non-identity at a cosmopolitan level, linguistic hospitality could be key in drawing attention to a language that constitutes us and that has to open itself to everything that appears within us and outside, in the most strange forms, whether they are discursive or not, whether they come from wakefulness or dream. Derrida’s notion of hospitality has the important advantage of showing what exceeds the subject and has to be confronted with oneself and with others, especially with those who are the strangest; in that, as Levinas or Mead has demonstrated (Levinas, 1991; Mead, 1934), we are something derived from our relationship with others. We would not be ourselves had we not been taken care of for a long time by another (the mother) who unconditionally opened herself to our fragility, a condition of everything that is human, an absolute condition of its own strength and resistance, of its adulthood. There are multiple paradoxes here: another appears that is internalised as one, a fragility emerges that gives way to a stronger resistance because of the ability to adapt to the new in a context that changes with every situation. From an anthropological perspective centred on what constitutes us as human (Aguilera, 1993) or from the function of an intelligence that mobilises drives, movements, and sensations that are open to the other, the notion of Derridean hospitality wishes to account for the need of incorporating the foreign. But it demands too much because it invokes an unconditionality that is not even limited by the law. This is why a more realistic idea of tolerance that has been transformed by a notion of democracy, which Habermas establishes at the centre of the social (1998), might appear more plausible. In a cosmopolitan space or society we have to be tolerant with others, always with the possibility of understanding that presupposes dialogue as the core of a generalised democracy. The role of the social subsystems as a strange frame that limits interactions or that can colonise them must not be forgotten, but only tolerance as a condition for dialogue would allow the establishment of social relations between different cultures or forms of life. However, there still exists in this notion of Habermasian tolerance a problem that the idea of hospitality uncovers with respect to a fully human sociality: the difficulty of understanding. Habermas displaces this towards the social subsystems that operate through non-linguistic means. But the idea of hospitality incorporates the need to include others even when they cannot establish a dialogue or simply do not want to. To a certain degree, it recalls the shelter that the newly born finds within the social or family niche, even in the case of significant disabilities. Here, the key is to accept the non-intelligibility of others, to take them in as beings who cannot be reduced to understanding or recognition; not only to recognise them or to communicate with them, but also to embrace them, to care for them, allowing them to be as human beings, whether we understand them or not.

In Monolingualism of the other, Derrida developed the idea that my language, my ‘own’ language, is, for me, a language that cannot be assimilated because my language is the language of the other (1998, p. 25). This alienation constitutes us in what cannot be alienated, in what is not alienation, because it structures us and our property of language. Do we need to suggest that most intimately within us there inhabits a stranger, that within what most appears to be our own there is an ineradicable strangeness? We should respect what is strange not out of altruism or because I should love my neighbour as myself, but because love of myself requires love of the other, of the stranger. It requires an acceptance of what cannot be assimilated in what is strange, because it concerns our most intimate self. We believe that a concept of linguistic hospitality would improve on the idea of Derridean hospitality by displacing it in its deployment, removing that disturbing aspect, the terrifying principle that denies the idea of tolerance and gives it its force: openness to an absolute that could be deadly. In the unconditional hospitality that admits others and gives them shelter without asking them their names or intentions, even if they are criminals or terrorists, there exists the danger that the world that gives hospitality could be decomposed and destroyed. One could think of an antechamber to such hospitality and the absolute weight it carries with it. Linguistic hospitality would give a place to others in their language – in what remains unintelligible of their language – as a translation that does not close itself by aiming for immediate usefulness. It would give the foreign a space so that it could at least settle in the realm of our language and of what that language opens up in our intelligence and our affectivity, in our senses and movements: a strangeness that could grow in us in a non-absolute way, making possible a genuine openness to the other, their world and intentions, without having to put in danger what we are in an unconditional way, as if others were sacred. Linguistic hospitality acts as an antechamber to real hospitality, which is key for the interaction between cultures and forms of life in a cosmopolitan context, making visible not only the importance of a hospitable translation, as opposed to an instrumental one centred on communication of meaning, or even a tolerant one, but also as a first step towards the formulation of political possibilities that can take concrete shape in spaces of non-Eurocentric normativity between different cultures. It is a way of acknowledging Derrida’s perspective, which defends an absolute but not very plausible hospitality, as well as that of Habermas, which argues for dialogue in an already cosmopolitanised public space that could face up to the systemic dynamics generated by globalisation. Linguistic hospitality, which is prior to any possibility of dialogue or democratic interaction at the global level, maintains a relationship with the foreign without an absolute surrender to its form of life or intentions, as if ours was nothing or deserved to die or to put itself recklessly in danger.

A politics of hospitable translation insists on the materiality of language, beyond any reduction of the linguistic to a set of ideas that are transferred from a source to a receiver, a reductionism of language to signification or discursivity, to mere communication. It is very close to the artistic processes that are capable of taking that hospitality to other means of expression, always around the senses, movements, and drives of human intelligence capable of establishing the means and the ends for everything that is human desire, in all its variety and multiplicity. Such a conception of language is placed before a linguistic idealism that emphasises signification or discursivity, believing that the signifying means are only instruments of information or communication, which leads to underrate not only the aesthetic aspect of language, but also those languages and cultures that are apparently distant from certain lines of progressive development. It is also placed before an idealist cosmopolitanism, which minimises or does not take seriously enough the real difficulties that exist for adopting the perspective of the other in one’s own culture, ignoring the cultural resistances that emerge when one embarks on a translation that does not falsify, which attempts to offer hospitality to what is translated.

A cosmopolitan politics of translation refers to an identity that is not constituted through its closure to unconceivable, unintelligible strangeness, forgetting what made possible the very constitution of this identity with reference to socialisation, enculturation, or simple protection of one’s own necessary vulnerability as an anthropological condition of human potential. Childhood is a key model for understanding something that is no longer intelligible for the adult, as Benjamin knew when he referred to children as representatives of paradise (Benjamin, 1996, p. 1243). How could one enter language, a socialised world, by not attending prodigiously to what is strange without any resistance that does not derive from the very experience that is being articulated? The newly born as a stranger must turn strangeness itself into his or her world in order to become a member of the social world, in order to cease to be a stranger. The process that leads to adulthood does not end with a result that would reduce the living human to mere discursivity, intelligibility, or recognition. Language carries many remainders, as shown by psychoanalysis or the old cure through words, Christian confession, or psychological relief in traumas or disasters. The apparent centrality of understanding hides alienation in language, the unilaterality of the rational. Human beings conceived as premature births must find a social niche in which to complete their development, full of shortcomings when compared with other similar animals, even in what would seem most elementary for a classical anthropological philosophy (senses, movements, and drives). They receive their identity from the non-identical that constitutes them, which existed before they were themselves and continues to exist in them in a way that is not reducible to their mere individual consciousness or to those of the series of human beings who cared for them. This presupposes, at the individual and social levels, an infrastructure of rational processes that are marked by the foreign, by the non-identical, by impressions, movements, and drives. A conception of language that attends to drive and sensorimotor infrastructure allows us not only to better connect what is not identical to linguistic signification, but also to chart complex social processes that are deposited as language and that can be guided from language. Art, in its diverse material configurations (sound, visuality, movement, spatiality, and so on), reminds us time and again of these connections, of the roots of language.

To place a linguistic hospitality that anticipates and makes real hospitality accessible at the centre is to activate an an anthropological view of how language operates discursively; this includes the ways it makes both social and individual vitality possible. This not only refers us to the background of our own language, but it also makes possible to genuinely meet others with what in their language has become manageable for us. An identity that reveals a glimpse of linguistic hospitality could avoid an identity that autoimmunises itself in processes of closure, of a repetition that is assumed to be eternal but is still ephemeral and fragile, only less flexible and often less resistant and capable of survival. What at the philogenetic level distinguishes intelligence from instinct is not much more than this flexibility, which is impossible to sustain through the preservation of a dogmatic core of origins and essence that the old identitarian identity treats as an idol. There is no lasting tradition that is not renewed by the foreign. Linguistic hospitality allows for this innovation without parting blindly with what deserves to be preserved. Thus, linguistic hospitality could be the core of a politics of translation that is open to the foreign, neither closed nor absolutely open. Where Derridean hospitality would invoke a negative theology without any remaining borders, and where Habermasian tolerance would demand equality across borders, a politics of translation centred on linguistic hospitality draws a porous border in a cosmopolitan space. It really follows a perspective that led Derrida in his later work to preserve a minimal nation state in an international context, and Habermas to insist on a cosmopolitan constitution with few remaining borders. Close to real hospitality, such a politics of translation could give social shape to welcoming foreignness, conform it in language, that material of our wakefulness and dreams, of collective longing, that has modified and stirs our flesh, sending it beyond a spirit conceived as mere ideality, beyond culture as a mere symbolic game.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Esperança Bielsahttp://orcid.org/0000-0001-5882-3382