Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability

Abstract

It is surely a mark of some kind of success when a movement begins to be attacked by its own participants. We may recall the surrealist debates of the 1920s, with their rival manifestos, counterblasts, and excommunications, or Roland Barthes's irritated insistence in the mid-1970s that he was not after all a structuralist. Emily Apter's new book suggests that the resurgent study of world literature has achieved a comparable standing today. Herself a leading figure in the opening up of comparative literature toward global perspectives, notably as author of The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006), as contributor to several collections on world literature, and as a founding board member of Harvard's Institute for World Literature, Apter is well situated to assess the field from within. In Against World Literature, she offers a bracing critique of the politics of translation in American literary studies. All too often, she argues, scholars and teachers of world literature assume a ready transferability across open linguistic and political borders, and she aims to complicate these matters, both linguistically and politically.Apter's book ranges widely across the landscape of contemporary literary studies, philosophy, art, and politics. As she says, rather than offering a comprehensive or programmatic narrative, the volume provides “an array of loosely affiliated topoi—oneworldedness, literary world-systems, terrestrial humanism, checkpoints, theologies of translation, the translational interdiction, pedagogy, authorial deownership, possessive collectivism” (16). If the book eschews any progressively developed argument, it does have a distinct point of origin, in Apter's work as coeditor of a paradoxical project: an English translation—or untranslation—of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2006), edited by the Parisian philosopher Barbara Cassin. Focused on the vexed translation history of philosophical terms, the Vocabulaire's essays proved to need extensive reworking to become legible for an American audience. Six of Apter's eighteen chapters take up and build on aspects of Cassin's project. Like Cassin, Apter takes a post-Heideggerian approach to language, building on Derrida to argue against Heidegger's linguistic ontology in order to counter a too easy evocation of a world of open communication and the free play of the imagination, speciously unified via a Euro-universalism projected onto the globe at large.Branching off from this philosophical base are chapters arguing against ideals of an independent world republic of letters, whether in French debates on littérature-monde or in a good deal of American scholarship and pedagogy of World Literature (she uses capitals to signify the field of study). The book includes chapters on the work of Franco Moretti and Erich Auerbach together with an essay on Edward Said's “terrestrial humanism” and discussions of the translation theories of Jacques Derrida and of Abdelfattah Kilito, and ends with essays on the challenges for art and for criticism in a violent and dystopian world.Running through Apter's sometimes stark critique of an “entrepreneurial, bulimic” World Literature (3) is a parallel critique of the field of translation studies, both fields having become “too pluralistic, too ecumenical” while still remaining rooted in Eurocentric approaches and “unable to rework literary history through planetary cartographies” (8). World Literature and translation studies too readily take translation “to be a good thing en soi—under the assumption that it is a critical praxis enabling communication across languages, cultures, time periods, and disciplines” (8). Both fields, in Apter's view, have largely been blind to the recurrent realities of translation failure and the challenges of untranslatability, and so their practitioners have generally (even “inevitably”) fallen short of their cosmopolitan project of fostering international communication and understanding (7–8).Throughout her book, Apter makes a forceful case for the need to understand the “world” in World Literature as both politically and linguistically fraught, and she echoes Gayatri Spivak and others in arguing that World Literature's “ethic of liberal inclusiveness … often has the collateral effect of blunting political critique” (41). As she says in a chapter on “Dispossessive Collectivism,” World Literature needs to be more than a project of “curatorial salvage,” a mere museum of words without borders that “gathers up swaths of literary culture deemed vulnerable to extinction and performs preservational intervention” (326). Her pursuit of these themes takes Apter from the novels of Pynchon and DeLillo to the work of the Palestinian/American conceptual artist Emily Jacir, and the volume includes a cautionary essay on “Checkpoints and Sovereign Borders” (99–114) and a brief but suggestive chapter on the problematic extension of European historical categories to areas far beyond Europe (“Eurochronology and Periodicity,” 57–69). In terms of translation studies, Apter offers a counter-narrative to the celebratory accounts by practitioners such as Edith Grossman or David Bellos (19–20), giving extended exegeses of work on translation theory by Derrida and several thinkers in his wake, and exploring case studies including the complex history of an English translation of Madame Bovary by Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor, later revised by Paul and Patricia de Man.As in The Translation Zone, Apter frames her argument in terms of a wider political concern, seeking to foster humanistic interventions in a world of insurgency and counterinsurgency, surveillance and countersurveillance, “Paranoid Globalism” (chapter 4) and “Planetary Dysphoria” (the title of her concluding chapter). As she says at the opening of her conclusion, “I have tried to wean World Literature from its comfort zone” (335).There is much to admire in Against World Literature, but I often found myself wishing that Apter had developed her arguments further by opening out more beyond her own cultural and theoretical comfort zone. Throughout her book, “World Literature” is taken to be a unified entity, practiced largely in translation by American academics; no mention is made of the ambitious publication projects undertaken in Japan over the course of the past century, in China since the end of the Cultural Revolution, or in countries as varied as Estonia, Poland, Portugal, and South Korea in more recent years. Within English-language scholarship, Apter rarely discusses work published in the past decade, even though scholars of world literature increasingly focus on complexities of translation and on the cultural politics of transmission and reception. No mention is made, for instance, of Mads Rosendahl Thomsen's Mapping World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2008), Ursula Heise's Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford, 2008), Djelal Kadir's Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability (Stanford, 2010), or Jacob Edmond's A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (Fordham, 2012). A treatment of untranslatability from a broad temporal and cultural perspective can be found in Ronit Ricci's remarkable book Islam Translated (Chicago, 2011), which opens with a chapter on “‘Translation’ and its Untranslatability,” exploring the implications of the fact that the very term “translation” has no direct translation in Arabic, Tamil, and Javanese, the languages at the heart of her study.Little engaged with current scholarship in world literature, Apter's book is equally selective in its reference to translation studies. Derrida's work in this area is certainly important, and there is no reason why a problem-centered book would need to survey the full range of translation theory, but Apter neglects major figures whose work could enrich her argument at many points. A broader view of the politics of untranslatability, for example, could supplement Derrida's brief essay “Des tours de Babel” with the hermeneutic theory of George Steiner's After Babel (Oxford, 1975). Only cited for a comment on Eleanor Marx's Flaubert translation (283), Steiner could have provided valuable insights on the resistance of language to translation, which he sees as stemming from cultures' desire to protect their “alternities” from outside eyes. At least Steiner gets a passing glance. Apart from a string citation in a single footnote (4), Against World Literature nowhere discusses or even mentions such seminal figures in the “cultural turn” of contemporary translation studies as Susan Bassnett, André Lefevere, Gideon Toury, Harish Trivedi, or Lawrence Venuti, even though from the 1980s onward these theorists revolutionized a previously formalist field to address issues of power, inequality, and the thorniness of language.Apter's disengagement from most of the work now being done in World Literature and in translation studies suggests that her real focus lies elsewhere. Though she presents her book as intended “to ford the divisions between World Literature and Theory that have led to unproductive rifts” (5), over the course of the book it increasingly appears that her primary concern is with rifts within the field of Theory itself. And not necessarily to heal them: running through her chapters is a pattern of dismissal or outright occlusion of theoretical perspectives that she finds uncongenial. Thus she details Derrida's mocking critique of the Sinologist and comparatist René Etiemble (236–37), but Etiemble himself can't get a word in edgewise. For a proponent of “planetarity,” it might have been useful to take a serious look at the author of Ouverture(s) sur un comparatisme planétaire. Apter does directly discuss Franco Moretti on World Literature and the global spread of the novel, but ends by assessing his work as “precritical in the sense that it shakes off the influence of decades of metatheory, hermeneutics and deconstruction” (55). Surely there are few more critically acute scholars active today than Moretti, whose work is deeply informed by world-systems analysis, grounded in Marxist and also evolutionary theory, and bolstered by engagement with such non-Western theorists as Roberto Schwarz and Masao Miyoshi. Yet by a rhetorical sleight of hand, Moretti's post-deconstructive work here becomes “precritical.” Moretti and a variety of other scholars sidelined by Apter are theorizing the world in a global perspective, but from sociological and economic standpoints rather than a base in Continental philosophy.Apter views Continental philosophy itself through a selective lens. Symptomatic is a page-long listing of influential translations of Continental works, inviting “reflection on the full impact of translation on the making of cross-continental philosophy and theory” (247). “In each instance,” Apter notes, “the translator plays a pivotal role in the history of theory in his or her own right” (248). Her examples of these pivotal translations are: Derrida's French translation of Husserl, followed by English-language translations of Derrida, of Lacan, and of Derrida again; then of Foucault, of Derrida again, of Kristeva, of Irigaray, and of Derrida yet again—twice—and then of Deleuze, Agamben, Rancière, Malabou, Badiou, Lacan, and again Badiou, ending with Judith Butler in French (248). Neither here nor anywhere in the book do we find Lukács, or Bakhtin, or Gadamer, or Gramsci, nor even a full range of French theory: no Saussure, no Lévi-Strauss, no Girard, no Ricoeur, no Althusser. In place of any of these figures, we have Derrida six times.Having just devoted a chapter to “Derrida's Theologies of Translation” (228–46), Apter follows this list with a further exegesis of Derrida's seminal role in highlighting the issue of translation in deconstructive thought (249–53). She then moves on to discuss Abdelfattah Kilito's elegantly ironic book Lan tatakallana lughati (Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language Syracuse, 2006)—a work whose linguistic interdiction hasn't prevented it from receiving rapid translations into French and English—before closing the chapter with further comments on Derrida. It is refreshing finally to find some discussion of a theorist based outside Paris or the United States, and yet like many Moroccan intellectuals, Kilito does much of his critical writing in French, appearing in such journals as Poétique; he recently published in Paris a kind of sequel to his 2002 volume, Je parle toutes les langues, mais en arabe (Actes Sud, 2013). In discussing the work of a Moroccan theorist who holds a PhD from the Sorbonne, recipient in 1996 of the Prix du rayonnement de la langue française of the Académie Française, Apter has not moved so far from the Rive Gauche after all.The world is a large and various place. Those wishing to chart new planetary cartographies are finding many languages to study beyond the French–German–English triad that long dominated Western comparative studies, and they are developing new methods appropriate to the expanded scope of our field. The tough linguistic and political analyses that Emily Apter rightly wishes comparatists to pursue will best be carried forward by widening our cultural and linguistic horizons, and by employing the full variety of critical and theoretical approaches that can be included in our cartographic toolboxes today.