This is a finely conceived, elegantly written, and exquisitely executed work. At its center, there is Naoko Saito ’s creative appropriation of one of Cavell's most fecund suggestions—philosophy is first and foremost an activity and, as such, it is either akin to or, more strongly, identifiable with practices of translation.1 Everything I have to say concerns translation, if only implicitly. Moreover, I offer everything as a friendly amendment. That is, I take my reflections on her book to be in accord with both the spirit and, in most instances, even the letter of her texts. Whether or not she receives my remarks as such is, of course, her prerogative. My intent regarding these suggestions is one thing, their reception another.What is the scope of translation? Given its centrality, it is appropriate to consider whether translation is adequately conceived here. Specifically, it is worthwhile to ask whether Roman Jakobson's threefold distinction is relevant to the task at hand (see especially “On Linguistic Aspects”). He distinguishes (as does Saito) intralingual from interlingual translation and (as she does not) both from intersemiotic translation (“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” [Jakobson 233], or even simply that signs of one system, linguistic or otherwise, into those of another system, e.g., music into dance or images into music). Does not her own interest in translation extend to this third and even wider senses of this word (e.g., translating inchoate feelings into articulate emotions and, in turn, such emotions into action)?The terms by which we identify the various phenomena of everyday life are, of course, of the utmost importance. These phenomena range from the minute to the momentous, the barely perceptible interstices of our quotidian engagements to affairs as enveloping as chattel slavery and its continuing legacies. Anxiety? Skepticism? Nihilism? Some other words or expressions? As philosophers and educators, we ought to pay more attention to the actual conditions by which the consciousness, sensibility, and attitudes of human learners and inquirers are shaped. Saito's book is explicitly framed in reference to the global economy and, more generally, to questions pertaining to what Thoreau calls “economy in living” (Standish and Saito 234; Saito 148). John Dewey noted: “The economic aspect of human association decides the conditions under which human beings actually live, etc.” (LW 15:218; cf. LW 4:225–26). Cavell wrote of Thoreau: “The opening visions of captivity and despair in Walden are traced full length in the language of the first chapter, which establishes the underlying vocabulary of the whole book. Economy turns into a nightmare maze of terms about money and possessions and work, each turning toward and joining the others” (Cavell, Senses of Walden 88).2 There is, accordingly, a sense in which the question of investiture (i.e., the question of economics), quite concretely, the investiture of one's time, energy, and ingenuity into one or another undertaking, is the controlling question of the perfectionist project (cf. Cavell, Senses of Walden 89).3 How do I translate my talents, circumstances, and time into nothing less than a work of art? (see, e.g., Thoreau 61; also, Saito, American Philosophy in Translation chap. 8).4Allied to this consideration, I wonder if Saito's language captures fully enough the range of phenomena, especially the depths of the experiences, with which she is concerned.5 Yes, anxieties of inclusion abound. These certainly deserve to be highlighted. But are the stakes greater than such an expression conveys? She quotes a passage from Emerson in which he refers to “inner death” (Saito 5): We adorn the victim with manual skill, his tongue into language, his body with inoffensive and comely manners. So have we cunningly hid the tragedy of limitation and inner death we cannot avert. Is it strange that society should be devoured by a secret melancholy which breaks through all its smiles and all its gaiety and games? (qtd. in Saito 5)Saito appears to accept William Deresiewicz's diagnosis (Saito 5–7), but rejects his prescription (Saito 7–8). Emerson's words, however, cut deeper than this contemporary commentator on elite universities in the United States appreciates. The juxtaposition between epigram and section is rather jarring. The very lives of students at these institutions are themselves translations of “a secret melancholy,” as unmourned as it is hidden, are they not?In any event, let us never lose sight of the phrase “inner death” (Emerson qtd. in Saito 5). What is at stake is the willingness to sacrifice one's life for one's livelihood or, even less than this, just for the prospect of a livelihood.6 What Emerson and Thoreau mourn, most of all, is the all-too-common tragedy of the unlived life. Saito knows this as well as—if not better than—I do. Should she not make the full force of the passage quoted on page 5 felt by her readers? The issue is nothing less than annihilation and, inseparably linked to this, nihilism (cf. Cornel West). When Cavell confesses that “I carry chaos in myself. Here is the scandal of skepticism with respect to the existence of others: I am the scandal” (Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow 151), this needs to be appreciated as a realization of the extent to which his life is, as all of ours are, complicit in the annihilation of others. There is something murderous about each one of us. What he is calling skepticism is indeed complexly related to what others call nihilism. One point of intersection is the subtle and not so subtle ways in which lives and selves are snuffed out, however “cunningly hid” such annihilation is (Emerson qtd. in Saito 5)Demands for inclusion need to be translated into (need to be heard as) affirmations of one's being. For they are at bottom self-affirmations, demands to be oneself in the context of becoming other. In a dramatic way, this happened at Harvard and other universities in the late sixties and early seventies. It is worth stressing that Cavell did the Deweyan thing in response to the demands of African American students at his university—he championed curricular reform. His assistance in translating the requests of students into a reconstruction of an institution with which his identity was bound up might properly fall under the rubric of philosophy as translation, might it not? Please note: I am not putting words into Cavell's mouth. The table of contents of Little Did I Know indicates this regarding a section of Part 13: “Jack Rawls and I present to an emergency meeting of the Harvard faculty a translation of a petition from the Afro-American (so-called in the late 1960s) students for the establishment of a Department of Afro-American Studies” (Cavell, Little Did I Know xx; emphasis added; see 508–12). We honor Cavell's accomplishments by savoring the fruits of these reforms, by deriving sustenance from the writings of, say, Eddie Glaude, Jr. (see Steve Fesmire's comments in this issue of The Pluralist), do we not?The largely sterile debate concerning whether Rorty got Dewey right still tends to eclipse the much more pressing one regarding whether he got America (not pragmatism) “right,” that is, whether his insights into our culture are as deep-cutting as anything found anywhere else (Senior).Fascism “may be,” he suggested, “America's future” (Rorty, Achieving Our Country 89).7 “Members of labor unions, and unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported.” They are not in the least oblivious to what is in their interests. “At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed them and start looking around for a strongman—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, trick lawyers, and postmodern professors will no longer be calling the shots. . . . For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen” (Rorty, Achieving Our Country 90). One thing that will happen is that the gains made by, for example, blacks and gays will be jeopardized. Have the words of any contemporary American philosopher proven to be more prescient than these? Does not such prescience call for far greater appreciation than Rorty is accorded, especially in such associations as SAAP? Is Rorty here not an exemplary instance of the American scholar, a thinker adept at reading the signs of the times?I often despair of professional philosophy, since we so often play it safe and, while America and other cultures are imploding, engage in what arguably is little more than hermeneutic chitchat (Is X fair to Y in saying this?). The everyday phenomena, including the unquiet desperation of citizens who feel they have nothing to lose and everything to win by tearing down the institutional frameworks of government, education, and medicine (though for those on the right, not those of the traditional family or nationalistic religion), call for interpretation, critique, and transformation far more than canonical texts. What if we primarily read America itself in light of texts such as Cavell's This New Yet Unapproachable America, Rorty's Achieving Our Country, or West's Democracy Matters, rather than playing the professorial game?8 And what if, when we read these texts vis-à-vis one another, we do so in a more generous and charitable manner? What if we read Cavell's This New Yet Unapproachable America and Rorty's Achieving Our Country together—moreover, what if we who are sympathetic to Cavell engaged with Rorty's “Cavell on Skepticism” less polemically than has been our wont (Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism)? What if we translated Rorty's doubts (his skepticism) about aspects of Cavell's skepticism into the candid reflections of an anti-foundationalist sibling engaged in a family quarrel about how best to go on (cf. Wittgenstein), now that the rug has been pulled out from under us (though this is likely not quite the right metaphor: better, now than the very ground beneath our feet has been exposed as thin ice, in numerous places)? What if we greeted them not as claims to be refuted but as doubts to be entertained, better, doubts to be lived, at least for a time? Recall that Cavell presented lectures at Princeton. His recollection is itself worth recollecting: “The manuscript underwent specific changes as a result of discussions at Princeton with Amelie Rory and Richard Rorty” (Senses of Walden viii; MacIntyre 71).The title of Rorty's Achieving Our Country is drawn from James Baldwin.9 In the wake of January 6, Baldwin's concern is all the more pressing. If anything, we have “grown” into an even more dangerously adolescent country. Achieving our country requires renouncing this adolescence, especially in its masculinist guises. Those who appreciate this better than anyone else are such African American thinkers as Cornel West, Eddie Glaude, Jr., Paul Taylor, on the one side, and such feminists as Naomi Scheman, Nancy Fraser, and Sabina Lovibond, on the other. On this occasion, I especially wonder to what extent West's understanding of nihilism (see chap. 2 in West) might be translated into Cavell's understanding of skepticism. Much might be learned about both and, beyond this, about America itself, by endeavoring to translate familiar conceptions into somewhat alien terms. Of course, translations will break down at various points, but these junctures will be, at least, as illuminating as the more commensurable parts of our bilateral (or multilateral) translations.At the very end of her book, Saito returns to a theme sounded at the outset and indeed woven into discussions throughout her text—the deep-cutting reach of the far-reaching economy in which we are implicated. Her call is for higher education to “open its boundaries to larger sectors of society, including industry, without subjugating itself to the global economy” (Saito 149–50; emphasis added). Is what she recommends possible, even remotely possible? Is not the global economy in place one of inescapable subjugation? The active resistance to the nihilistic ethos of this global economy must be just that—an active and relentless resistance. As Frederic Jameson has noted, it is easier for many of us today to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (1994, xii). Such is the death grip of global capitalism on the contemporary imagination that the collapse of capitalism is, without exaggeration, unimaginable, while the death of the Earth is in many quarters simply taken for granted. Our children, including our adult children, are anything but “excellent sheep.” To begin to fathom the depths of their despair and anxiety, we need to join West's analysis of nihilism to Rorty's observations about our culture, moreover, to join Rorty's insights to Cavell's and those of countless others. Part of the office of the scholar, as envisioned by Emerson, is to read the signs of the time (Emerson, Selected Essays 101–05) and to translate them into a language, at once traditional and innovative, forcing us to front them with the urgency, hope, and resolve that our moment requires.Saito has demonstrated in detail how this task must be carried on. Her achievement cannot be gainsaid. My hope is simply to have suggested some ways, in deep accord with her perfectionist project, in which aspects of her endeavor are foregrounded to an even greater extent than they have been in American Philosophy in Translation.“We are now faced,” Martin Luther King, Jr., observed decades ago, “with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now” (162). At this juncture, however, tomorrow is almost yesterday (so belated and arrested has been our response to climate, immigration, institutional, educational, and other crises). Tomorrow is almost yesterday; such is the fierce urgency of our now. Translating this sense of urgency into action, personal and collective, defines responsibility at this moment.