What culture for the post-national subject? Understanding the nation through translation

Abstract

The central question guiding this project asks: what are the possibilities of conceptualizing a political subject beyond the national cultural boundaries? In order to answer this question, I undertake, from the perspective of conceptual history, a historical reconstruction of the meaning of cultural translation, as a process that frames the integration of designed cultural minorities into the national, majoritarian community. This paper evaluates the possibility of political theory to oppose cultural racism, from neither a normative nor absolute point of view, but from the movement beyond cultural assimilation suggested by a redefinition of cultural translation.

Keywords:

• translation
• nation
• the Indian question
• the Jewish question
• postcolonialism
• multiculturalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This paper summarizes one of the theses on translation treated in my PhD. It was written in Paris (2011–2014), where I had inspiring intellectual exchanges with Iveković and Balibar. I also thank the CSPRP, especially Etienne Tassin, Seloua Boulbina, and the PhD lecture group ‘Histoire et Politique’ for their comments. Thanks go also to my friend and colleague Robert Best for his encouragement and his ability to translate my ideas.

2. This is the main perspective taken by Western contemporary political theory. See, e.g., Fraser and Honneth (2003); for the need of international institutions, see Nagel (2005); for a discussion on cosmopolitan communication and values, see Habermas (1998).

3. I make reference to the important Hobbesian tradition that thinks of society as the annihilation of community (see Tönnies, 2001). More well known, Hobbes, who Leo Strauss names ‘the father of modern politics’, places not collective but individual rights as the point of departure for theorizing society.

4. According to conceptual history, what makes the singularity of the concept is the range of meanings and usages that it may contain (Richter & Richter, 2006, p. 345). This statement is based in Reinhard Koselleck's (2006) Begriffsgeschichte.

5. The historicity of the asymmetric opposition between the concepts of national/non-national has been analysed by Koselleck, who works out a reconstruction of the citizen's concept in Aristotle from the Antique to the twentieth century (Koselleck, 2006, pp. 393–401), and by João Feres Júnior, who analyses the relationship between the concepts not only from a semantic perspective, but also from a epistemological point of view (Feres Júnior, 2003, p. 14).

6.With With regard to Algerian migration in France as an example for this internal and cultural distinction in citizenship, see Mancheno (2011).

7. The notion of republics representing culture had already been presented by Immanuel Kant (2006) in his Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, where he engages in a description of the cultural differences among the economically more important European nations of the time: Germany, France and Spain. It is interesting to note that Kant's negative conclusions about Spanish culture have been paraphrased by Premier Minister Angela Merkel, who has accused Spaniards of possessing a natural tendency to laziness not present in the other named European nations (Faigle, 2011).

8. Honig draws attention to the fact that the hostile category of terrorist is treated as a foreign – in opposition to domestic – danger that jeopardizes the moral commitments of hospitality (Honig, in Benhabib, 2006, pp. 118–119).

9. I make reference not only to the colonial paths traceable in geographic migratory routes but also to the intellectual movement of the ‘autonomy of migration’ that sees in migration the expression of a social movement (see Mezzadra, 2007).

10. For a critical historical analysis about the riots in the Parisian Banlieues, see Mancheno, 2011.

11. In her book Multicultural Paradoxes, Randi Gressgård (2010) offers a similar diagnosis from the perspective of the history of sociological theory.

12. Buden exemplifies the multicultural paradox in one of the greatest cultural products, literature:

This is why, from a multicultural perspective, we cannot talk about a world culture as ‘world literature’. Instead, we would talk about a ‘German’, ‘French’, or ‘white’, ‘black’, or ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘gay’ literature including also a combination of these identitarian features like ‘white male’, ‘black female’, or ‘Latin-American-black-female’, etc. (Buden, 2006a)

13. Their description of ‘the division of humanity within a single political space’ echoes Frantz Fanon’s description of the world after colonialization as the division between the ‘zone of being’ and the ‘zone of non-being’ (see Fanon, 1986).

14. Despite the revolts which took place in Haiti at the beginning of the sixteenth century, (where Las Casas had also settled), he proposed to Carlos V in 1516 that every colonialist should possess four slaves: two men and two women (Almeida de Souza, 2006).

15. A system based on the concession of land and compulsory labour. The encomendero was the beneficiary of Indian forced labour and received tribute or personal service. In exchange, he was supposed to provide religious education. Due to the precarious situation in the encomiendas, the indigenous population declined considerably (Almeida de Souza, 2006).

16. For Sepúlveda, see the article of the Spanish contemporary historian José-Manuel Pérez-Prendes (1993). For Las Casas, see the book of the French Philosopher Nestor Capdevila (1998).

17. Being a current concept in the social sciences within Latin American discourse, acculturation stands for the phenomenon of renouncing one's own culture in order to adapt to an alien one which is considered dominant (Mujica Bermúdez, 2002). This process presupposes the annihilation of the culture which is being translated.

18. An important exception is Wendy Brown's (2006) work.

19. The protectionist affect is directed against incoming ‘waves of refugees who supposedly destroy native culture and standards of living’ (Habermas, 1998, p. 81).

20. I owe this play on words to Marc Redfield (1999) in his article ‘Imagi-nation. The imagined community and the aesthetics of mourning’.