Translation ~ Politics

Abstract

To Lance, with thanksThis article must confess to a spirit of diffidence. Its goal simply to take up and, perhaps, verify a suggestion by Jacques Ranciere: to occupy very interval between . . . two in order to open the possibility of appealing from one to other.2 Politics and equality are so proximate in Ranciere's philosophy as to be synonymous, and yet egalitarian substance of his politics hangs on a second, more discreet term: of politics as emancipation3 to say translation.Where equality has obvious political implications, translation's politics are less conspicuous, muted even, but beginning with fable-history of Joseph Jacotot's accidental epiphany in Le Maitre ignorant, concept of translation reappears throughout Ranciere's writings as activity of equality par excellence. activity of thinking he writes, is primarily an activity of translation, and . . . anyone capable of making a translation.4 To think to translate, and translating egalitarian. Equality for Ranciere not in question. His an enviable political philosophy for which equality not endpoint but a presupposition, not a thesis to be argued but a founding tenet. Politics simply that activity which turns on equality as its principle.5 Posited in this way, as a given more or less compels reader to suspend any relativization, equality scarcely seems like a promising conceptual foundation for kind of specific politics Ranciere imagines.6 However, it through concept of translation direct equation of politics and equality can carry elegant paradox of a politics both universal and idiomatic. In many ways, translation represents principle underpins egalitarian politics, praxis confirms it, and style disseminates its authority.Jacotot stumbles across his enlightened pedagogy of emancipation thanks to efforts of his Flemish students, who circumvent need for instruction when they appropriate knowledge for themselves through spontaneous activity of translation.7 The obvious pedagogic resonance of Le Maitre ignorant continues to provoke education-related discussions, and commentators rightly describe Jacotot's radical ideology of equality as foundation for Ranciere's emancipatory politics.8 Crucially, however, although it a particular literary activity makes Jacotot's story possible, translation has remained unaccountably peripheral to our understanding of Ranciere's political philosophy.9 The metonymic function of translation, I argue, facilitates Ranciere's fabular style, but also encompasses an active labour-a labour of literature and of politics. Insisting on translation as a central component of Rancierean politics an obliquely paradoxical endeavour, however, since it precisely marginal role of translation marks it as indispensable site of egalitarian politics. In spirit of intellectual adventure,10 then, this paper undertakes to think, or rather rethink11 Ranciere's concepts of politics and translation, each in terms of other. In this exchange, translation, like equality, both self-evident and controversial.Ranciere's preoccupation with literature inescapable in this process of (re)translation. Literary politics for Ranciere involves breaking out of textual altogether by engaging each of senses in redistribution of perceptible. Seeing hidden partitions, speaking miscount, and hearing mute speech each constitutes a way of imagining a type of equality. By extension, translation-as a form of literature-has capacity to rearrange political topographies. In mapping translation and politics onto one another, I therefore deliberately mirror three-layered configuration Ranciere describes as manners in which [literature] labours to develop landscape of visible.12 In what follows, I pursue Ranciere's sensory analogy through three intersecting modes of translation: its pedagogical style, its political economy, and its literary poetics. …