“The Interpretation Zone”: European Geopolitics and the Interpretive Body

Abstract

The interpretive body has been overlooked in geopolitical scholarship despite its central role as a linguistic and cultural intermediary in geopolitical knowledge production and transmission. Interpreting comprises multiple acts designed to capture, represent, and reproduce geopolitical knowledge in all of its uncertain complexities. Drawing on assemblage thinking and embodiment, this article exposes the emergent and uncertain ways in which interpretation and geopolitics collide and reveals the struggles by political and interpretive bodies as they try to not only fix the intent behind geopolitical knowledge transmission but also simultaneously limit its uncertainty. It argues for an embodied geopolitics. Using empirical materials on the lived experience of interpreters in the European Union, the article discloses the experiences that result from the interpretive body’s engagement with geopolitics, episodes that create a consciousness of feelings and trigger emotional responses. I show particularly how the interplay between interpretive and political bodies in the coproduction of geopolitical knowledge can be profoundly unsettling in emotional terms. By uniquely connecting embodied interpretation with geopolitical knowledge production and transmission, the article therefore makes a key contribution to recent scholarship on embodiment in geopolitics.