Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference

Translation, Biopolitics, Colonial Difference, the fourth book in the Traces series, focuses on the problems of translation and the political dynamics surrounding multiplicity — linguistic, regional, transnational, and civilizational — today.

The international group of authors deal, both theoretically and empirically, with the historical obstacles and future opportunities offered by an emerging global order that is still struggling with the legacy of the previous four centuries of Eurocentric capitalist development. The authors amply illustrate that the concept of translation is far from being singularly determined, and how extremely difficult it is for philosophy to be distinct from translation. Here translation is regarded as a general concept, by which the Eurocentric framework implicit in the existent academic practices of comparison is problematized and according to which old questions are transformed into new ones and articulated to one another across disciplinary boundaries and regional or national borders.

This book shows how the emerging global order might be viewed once we have been liberated from the Eurocentric perspective; it includes sociological inquiries into the system of international security networks and an analysis of the consequences of the transformation of the nation-state; it deals with the foundation of international law and its unalienable connection to modern colonial violence, and the foundational complicity between modern sovereignty and biopolitics. On an empirical note, the essays in this major volume deal with the various practices of translation in multiple locales, the belated constitution of anthropological language, philosophical discussion on translation, and the sexual aspects of translational politics.

The relations between economics, ontology, and politics together form the crossroads at which the authors in this volume meet. As such, the volume will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience of readers in the Humanities concerned with the intersections among politics, economy, philosophy, postcoloniality, and translation studies, and would above all attract interest from the emerging readership in biopolitics (under the field of comparative literature).

Contributors: Serena Anderlini-d’Onofrio, Jacques Bidet, Didier Bigo, Brian Holmes, Yoshihiko Ichida, François Laruelle, Takaaki Morinaka, Yann Moulier Boutang, Jean-Luc Nancy, Brett Neilson, Frédéric Neyrat, Osamu Nishitani, Sathya Rao, Tobias Warner, Hiroaki Yamada, Ichida Yoshihiko

Naoki Sakai is a professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies, Cornell University. Jon Solomon is an assistant professor in the Graduate Institute of Future Studies and the French Department, Tamkang University, Taiwan.