“This title, I chose it because I don’t understand Hebrew and because it was very short, because it was opaque and a little unbreakable, like an atomic nucleus. For the first screening of the film at the Empire Theater, George Cravenne asked me: ‘What is the title of the film?’ ‘Shoah.’ ‘What does it mean?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘But how, you must translate it! No one will understand!’ And I said: ‘It’s what I want, that no one understands.’”1The common denominator (...) of any translation is delay: this delay is a matter of time and space, a temporal displacement, a delay that exacerbates the ontological differentiation process between sign and meaning.2 Between the moment.. (shrink)

Why translation? Doesn’t this theme seem archaic in our present day? Yes, precisely. One could say that translation is an outdated topic but it also embodies an outdated mode of historical inquiry into shifting media environments and constant reconfigurations of values, beliefs and representations. It is outdated in regard to its immemorial relationship to sacred texts and its crucial role in the transnational circulation of ideas and cultural productions in a global cultural context. Yet translation – and the untranslatability it (...) elicits and sometimes implies – has come to embody a relevant ethos for the humanities and operates as a “theoretical fulcrum” across diverse discursive fields. Furthermore, if.. (shrink)

The Dictionary of Untranslatables is a lexicon of philosophical terms first published in French as Vocabulaire européen des philosophies : Dictionnaire des intraduisibles. What was the initial aim of this ongoing project? How does each translation of this philosophical lexicon enact this initial aim by displaying the issue of untranslatability in different idioms? How do you understand your editorial task in this work-in-progress? Did the English version offer a particular challenge?The initial project was philosophical and political. Philosophical: we philosophize through (...) languages; philosophy has to do.. (shrink)