Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon

1339 Pages·2014·63.02 MB·English

by  Barbara Cassin

Dictionary of Untranslatables
SERIES EDITOR EMILY APTER
A list of titles in the series appears at the back of the book.
Dictionary of Untranslatables
A Philosophical Lexicon
Barbara Cassin
EDITED BY
Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman,
TRANSLATED BY
Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski
TRANSLATION EDITED BY Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford
First published in France under the title Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles
© 2004 by Éditions de Seuil / Dictionnaires Le Robert
English translation copyright © 2014 by Princeton University Press
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton
University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
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Jacket design by Tracy Baldwin.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vocabulaire européen des philosophies. English
Dictionary of untranslatables : a philosophical lexicon / Edited by Barbara Cassin ; Translated by
Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski ; Translation
edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood.
pages  cm
“First published in France under the title Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des
intraduisibles (c) 2004 by Éditions de Seuil.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-691-13870-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-691-13870-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy--Encyclopedias. 2. Philosophy—
Dictionaries--French. I. Cassin, Barbara, editor of compilation. II. Rendall, Steven, translator
III. Apter, Emily S., editor of compilaton. IV. Title.
B51.V6313 2013
103—dc23  2013008394
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Publication of this book has been aided by the French Ministry of Culture—Centre National du Livre.
This work received essential support from CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique).
The editors thank the following for their assistance: Fondation Charles Léopold Mayer, CNPQ
(Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico), and the European program ECHO (European
Cultural Heritage Online).
For their personal and institutional support, the editors also thank Maurice Aymard and the
Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Yves Duroux, the Ministère de la Recherche and the Collège
International de Philosophie, Roberto Esposito, Avvocato Marotta and the Istituto per gli Studi
Filosofici de Naples, Paolo Fabbri and the Institut Culturel Italien de Paris, Elie Faroult and the
Direction Général de la Recherche à la Commission Européene, Michèle Gendreau-Massaloux
and the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie, Yves Hersant and the Centre Europe at
EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), Yves Mabin and the Direction du Livre
au Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Michel Marian and the Centre National du Livre, Georges
Molinié, Jean-François Courtine, and the Université Paris IV–Sorbonne.
The article “Subject” was translated by David Macey and originally appeared in Radical Philosophy 138
(July/August 2006). Reprinted with permission.
This book has been composed in Gentium Plus, Myriad Pro, ITC Zapf Dingbats Std,
Mathematical Pi LT Std, Times New Roman
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction xvii
How to Use This Work xxi
Principal Collaborators xxiii
Contributors xxv
Translators xxxiii
Entries A to Z 1
Reference Tools 1269
Index 1275
v

Preface
Philosophy in Translation coordinated and supervised the Dictionary project over
a period of eleven years. Published by Éditions du Seuil
A massive translation exercise with encyclopedic in 2004, this curious and immensely ambitious book,
reach, the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophi- weighing in at a million and a half words, was a sur-
cal Lexicon—first published in French under the title prise hit with the public. What made it unique was its
Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des attempt to rewrite the history of philosophy through
intraduisibles—belongs in a genealogy that includes the lens of the “untranslatable,” defined loosely as a
Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encylopédie (1751–66), André term that is left untranslated as it is transferred from
Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de philoso- language to language (as in the examples of polis, Be-
phie (1902–23), Émile Benveniste’s Le Vocabulaire des griff, praxis, Aufheben, mimesis, “feeling,” lieu commun,
institutions indo-européennes, Laplanche and Pontalis’s logos, “matter of fact”), or that is typically subject to
The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1967, classified as a mistranslation and retranslation.
dictionary), The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy (an Despite the redoubtable scale of its erudition and
online resource inaugurated in 1995), and Reinhart the range of its philosophical ambition, the French edi-
Koselleck’s Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (a dictionary tion of the Dictionary resonated with a heterogeneous
of political and social concept-history, 2004). Along readership: philosophers, scholars in all fields of the
another axis, it recalls Raymond Williams’s short humanities, and everyone interested in the cartogra-
compendium of political and aesthetic terms, Key- phy of languages or the impact of translation history
words, informed by British Marxism of the 1960s and on the course of philosophy. The work’s international
’70s. Unlike these works, however, the Dictionary fully reception was then enlarged by its translations (some
mobilizes a multilingual rubric. Accordingly, entries still under way) into Arabic, Farsi, Romanian, Russian,
compare and meditate on the specific differences and Ukrainian. When Princeton University Press com-
furnished to concepts by the Arabic, Basque, Catalan, mitted to publish an English edition, the editors con-
Danish, English, French, German, Greek (classical and fronted a daunting and very particular set of challenges:
modern), Hebrew, Hungarian, Latin, Polish, Portu- how to render a work, published in French, yet layered
guese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish languages. through and through with the world’s languages, into
The book was the brainchild of its French editor, something intelligible to Anglophone readers; how to
Barbara Cassin, herself a specialist of classical philoso- translate the untranslatable; how to communicate the
phy. In 1998, in the introduction to her translation of book’s performative aspect, its stake in what it means
Parmenides’s poem On Nature, Cassin had already as- “to philosophize in translation” over and beyond re-
cribed the “untranslatable” to the interminability of viewing the history of philosophy with translation
translating: the idea that one can never have done with problems in mind.
translation. In her writings on the pre-Socratics and A group of three editors supervised and edited the
the Sophists, she tethered the untranslatable to the English version: Emily Apter (a specialist in French,
instability of meaning and sense-making, the perfor- comparative literature, translation studies, Continen-
mative dimension of sophistic effects, and the condi- tal philosophy, and political theory); Jacques Lezra (a
tion of temporality in translation. Translation’s “time,” literary comparatist with special strengths in Spanish,
in Cassin’s usage, was associated with the principle of early modern literature and philosophy, contemporary
infinite regress and the vertiginous apprehension of theory, and Anglo-American philosophy); and Michael
infinitude. Wood (a British comparatist, distinguished as a critic
Working with assembled teams of scholars from of literary modernism and contemporary cinema with
multiple countries and languages, and drawing on professional expertise as a staff writer for the London
the expertise of more than 150 contributors, Cassin Review of Books). Cassin and her close associate, the
vii
viii PREfACE
philosopher Étienne Balibar, were de facto coeditors, “philosophy” in Europe. The Dictionary of Untrans-
because the U.S. editors consulted with them at every latables acknowledges this divergence between “the-
stage. The collective affiliated with the U.K.-based ory” and “philosophy” not at the expense of how
journal Radical Philosophy was also integral to the proj- the editors of the French edition defined philosophy
ect’s gestation. The journal published a special issue (which, it must be said, was already noncanonical in
devoted to the book in 2006, including English transla- the choice of terms deemed philosophical), but as
tions of selected entries by the late David Macey. We a condition of the work’s reception by Anglophone
have included Macey’s translation of the entry SUBJECT readers accustomed to an eclectic “theory” bibli-
in this volume both because it is a strong translation ography that not infrequently places G.W.F. Hegel,
and because it allowed us to acknowledge, albeit only Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Walter Ben-
indirectly, Radical Philosophy’s abiding commitment jamin, Theodore Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques
to a practice of philosophical translation that would Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva,
shake up the teaching of philosophy in departments Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, Hélène Cixous, Kojin
dominated by the normative strictures of the Anglo- Karatani, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques
analytic philosophical tradition. Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Slavoj Žižek in the same
The Dictionary of Untranslatables, like its French rubric with Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, Donna Har-
predecessor, and like the editions published or away, Henry Louis Gates, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky
under way in other languages, was a labor of many. Sedgwick, Friedrich Kittler, Gayatri Chakravorty
The translators—of which there were five (Christian Spivak, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, and Paul Gilroy.
Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Steven Rendall, Nathanael Bearing in mind, then, that the word “philosophy”
Stein, and Michael Syrotinski)—became contributors in the original French title was already an untrans-
on every level. Their queries and suggestions, along latable insofar as it defaulted to “philosophies” that
with those of the copy editors, each of whom had might line up more easily with “theory” in an Anglo-
special language proficiencies, proved crucial to the phone (and especially U.S. American) context, one of
editing process and served as a constant reminder our initial debates focused on how to translate the
that to translate is an act of rewriting, and, in this book’s title. There was a doubling of genre announced
particular instance, of assisting words in their be- in the French. Is it a “vocabulary” or a “dictionary”?
coming philosophical. A broad network of colleagues For Cassin (following Benveniste’s Le Vocabulaire des in-
and specialists generously provided corrections and stitutions indo-européennes), “vocabulary” underscored
revisions, and yet another layer of collaboration was a non-exhaustive ensemble of terms chosen for their
provided by graduate student assistants who checked common linguistic “symptoms,” while “dictionary,”
citations and compiled new bibliographies. designating an aspiration to impossible completeness,
The bibliographical revisions were by no means a was meant to stand alongside “vocabulary” as an ironic
minor part of remodeling the French edition for an complement. Together, in Cassin’s view, they posed the
Anglophone audience. In addition to English trans- problem of the form of the work as an oxymoron. Such
lations of canonical philosophical texts and stan- subtle distinctions could, however, easily be missed.
dard reference works in English on concepts and Broadly speaking, a dictionary contains an alphabetical
philosophers, we added selections from a critical lit- list of words with information about them, whereas a
erature that contributed to the Dictionary’s acknowl- vocabulary, the generic term for sets of words that per-
edgment of what is referred to in the Anglophone sons are familiar with in a language, is similarly used to
world as theory. “Theory” is an imprecise catchall describe alphabetized and explained word ensembles,
for a welter of postwar movements in the human usually for a pedagogical purpose relating to a special
sciences—existentialism, structural anthropology, field. In France, the long tradition of dictionaries could
sociolinguistics, semiotics, history of mentalités, be bracketed by Pierre Bayle’s seminal Dictionnaire his-
post-Freudian psychoanalysis, deconstruction, post- torique et critique (1697), which privileged biographies
structuralism, critical theory, identity politics, post- and historical events, and the Presses Universitaires
colonialism, biopolitics, nonphilosophy, speculative de France dictionaries covering such diverse fields
materialism—that has no equivalent in European as cinema, psychoanalysis, work, sociology, violence,
languages. What is often referred to as “theory” and the human sciences. Given, then, the relative
in an Anglophone context would simply be called interchangeability of “vocabulary” and “dictionary,”
PREfACE ix
we replaced the former with the latter in the main a shift from concept-driven philosophical analysis to
title, and added “lexicon” to the subtitle in the spirit a new kind of process philosophy, what Cassin calls
of the expression “terms entering the lexicon,” which “philosophizing in languages.”
captures (in a manner that brings out the original In promoting revivified connections among phi-
work’s underlying intention) how live languages in- losophy, translation, linguistics, and philology, the
corporate new or non-native elements. Dictionary encourages curricular initiatives in the form
Although some of us worried about a certain awk- of courses, colloquia, and cross-institutional degree
wardness in the use of the adjective “untranslatable” as a programs. The Dictionary proves useful for teaching
noun, by foregrounding it in the English title we signaled in myriad ways, especially at advanced undergradu-
its important role as an organizing principle of the en- ate and graduate levels. In an era in which countries
tire project. We also decided to eliminate the reference all over the world are adopting policies—often in line
to Europe. This was a difficult call, as the European focus with the European Union’s endorsement of English
of the book is undeniable. Removing the emphasis on as its lingua franca—that would make English the offi-
“European philosophies” would leave us open to criti- cial language of instruction in scientific and technical
cism that the Dictionary now laid claim to being a work of fields (if not the social sciences, area studies, and the
world philosophy, a tall order that it patently did not fill. humanities as well), students increasingly naturalize
Our justification on this score was twofold: so that future English as the singular language of universal knowl-
editions of the Dictionary of Untranslatables might incor- edge, thereby erasing translation-effects and etymo-
porate new entries on philosophy hailing from countries logical histories, the trajectories of words in exile and
and languages cartographically zoned outside of Europe; in the wake of political and ecological catastrophes.
and because, philologically speaking, conventional dis- In the Dictionary there is a consistent effort to com-
tinctions between European and non-European lan- municate the political, aesthetic, and translational
guages make little or no sense. Moreover, it was our sense histories of philosophical keywords. The Russian term
that the adjective “European,” often assumed to refer to a pravda, for instance, is arrayed alongside the Greek
common legacy of Christendom, humanism, and Enlight- dikaiosunê; the Latin justitia; and the English “righ-
enment principles, actually misrepresents the complex- teousness,” “justice,” “truth,” and “law”—as well as vé-
ity of identifying “Europe” culturally and geopolitically rité, droit, istina, mir, postupok, praxis, sobornost’, and svet.
at any given moment in history. The article speculates that pravda’s absence in the Rus-
Notwithstanding concerns about the global he- sian Encyclopedia of Philosophy is attributable to its being
gemony of English (and more pointedly still, about too ideologically marked as the name of the USSR’s of-
those forms of standardized, Internet-inflected, busi- ficial government-controlled newspaper. Pravda thus
ness English commonly dubbed “Globish” that are comes into its own as that which is philosophically
frequently associated with financial “outcomes” and off limits in its home country. The article also locates
“deliverables”), we assume that the book, by dint of pravda in an extremely complex semantic field, in
being in English, will disseminate broadly and reach the “hiatus” between legality and legitimacy, justice
new communities of readers. The book’s diffusion in and truth, ethics and praxis. It is traced to the short-
Asia, South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin circuiting of pardon by vengeance, and vice versa. The
America will lead, we hope, not only to more transla- word’s geo-philosophical trajectory unfurls into a nar-
tions in other languages, but also to spin-off versions rative marked by the themes of exile, solidarity with
appropriate to different cultural sites and medial persecuted minorities and refugees, Russian Saint-
forms. We hope that the English edition, in its current Simonianism, and Russophilic worldviews.
and future iterations, will help to advance experi- Though it is not set up as a concept-history, the Dic-
mental formats in research, data-mining, and peda- tionary lends itself to pedagogical approaches that ex-
gogy, as well as models of comparativism that place plicate how concepts come into existence in, through,
renewed emphasis on the particularities of idiom. and across languages. Using the Dictionary as a tool to
Philosophical importance, in this case, is accorded to teach Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des
how a term “is” in its native tongue, and how it “is” Lustprinzips), for example, reveals how important the
or “is not” when relocated or translated in another German term Lust was to the specificities of Freud’s
language. Idiomatic and demotic nuance are fully theory, better enabling comprehension of how Freud
recognized as constitutive of philosophy, prompting derived from the word constructs of the death-drive,