Barbara Cassin - Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon

Dictionary of Untranslatables

SERIES EDITOR EMILY APTER

A list of titles in the series appears at the back of the book.

Dictionary of Untranslatables
A Philosophical Lexicon

EDITED BY Barbara Cassin

TRANSLATED BY Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski

TRANSLATION EDITED BY Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford

First published in France under the title Vocabulaire europen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles 2004 by ditions de Seuil / Dictionnaires Le Robert

English translation copyright 2014 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vocabulaire europen des philosophies. English

Dictionary of untranslatables : a philosophical lexicon / Edited by Barbara Cassin ; Translated by Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski ; Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood.

pages cm

First published in France under the title Vocabulaire europen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (c) 2004 by ditions de Seuil.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-400-84991-8

ISBN-10: 0-691-13870-2 1. Philosophy--Encyclopedias. 2. PhilosophyDictionaries--French. I. Cassin, Barbara, editor of compilation. II. Rendall, Steven, translator III. Apter, Emily S., editor of compilaton. IV. Title.

B51.V6313 2013

103dc23 2013008394

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Publication of this book has been aided by the French Ministry of CultureCentre National du Livre.

This work received essential support from CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique).

The editors thank the following for their assistance: Fondation Charles Lopold Mayer, CNPQ (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico), and the European program ECHO (European Cultural Heritage Online).

For their personal and institutional support, the editors also thank Maurice Aymard and the Maison des Sciences de lHomme, Yves Duroux, the Ministre de la Recherche and the Collge International de Philosophie, Roberto Esposito, Avvocato Marotta and the Istituto per gli Studi Filosofici de Naples, Paolo Fabbri and the Institut Culturel Italien de Paris, Elie Faroult and the Direction Gnral de la Recherche la Commission Europene, Michle Gendreau-Massaloux and the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie, Yves Hersant and the Centre Europe at EHESS (cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales), Yves Mabin and the Direction du Livre au Ministre des Affaires trangres, Michel Marian and the Centre National du Livre, Georges Molini, Jean-Franois Courtine, and the Universit Paris IVSorbonne.

The article Subject was translated by David Macey and originally appeared in Radical Philosophy 138 (July/August 2006). Reprinted with permission.

This book has been composed in Gentium Plus, Myriad Pro, ITC Zapf Dingbats Std, Mathematical Pi LT Std, Times New Roman

Characters in some languages, particularly Hebrew and Arabic, may not display properly due to device limitations. Transliterations of terms appear before the representations in foreign characters.

Contents

Philosophy in Translation

A massive translation exercise with encyclopedic reach, the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexiconfirst published in French under the title Vocabulaire europen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisiblesbelongs in a genealogy that includes Diderot and dAlemberts Encylopdie (175166), Andr Lalandes Vocabulaire technique et critique de philosophie (190223), mile Benvenistes Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-europennes, Laplanche and Pontaliss The Language of Psycho-Analysis (1967, classified as a dictionary), The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy (an online resource inaugurated in 1995), and Reinhart Kosellecks Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (a dictionary of political and social concept-history, 2004). Along another axis, it recalls Raymond Williamss short compendium of political and aesthetic terms, Keywords, informed by British Marxism of the 1960s and 70s. Unlike these works, however, the Dictionary fully mobilizes a multilingual rubric. Accordingly, entries compare and meditate on the specific differences furnished to concepts by the Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Danish, English, French, German, Greek (classical and modern), Hebrew, Hungarian, Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish languages.

The book was the brainchild of its French editor, Barbara Cassin, herself a specialist of classical philosophy. In 1998, in the introduction to her translation of Parmenidess poem On Nature, Cassin had already ascribed the untranslatable to the interminability of translating: the idea that one can never have done with translation. In her writings on the pre-Socratics and the Sophists, she tethered the untranslatable to the instability of meaning and sense-making, the performative dimension of sophistic effects, and the condition of temporality in translation. Translations time, in Cassins usage, was associated with the principle of infinite regress and the vertiginous apprehension of infinitude.

Working with assembled teams of scholars from multiple countries and languages, and drawing on the expertise of more than 150 contributors, Cassin coordinated and supervised the Dictionary project over a period of eleven years. Published by ditions du Seuil in 2004, this curious and immensely ambitious book, weighing in at a million and a half words, was a surprise hit with the public. What made it unique was its attempt to rewrite the history of philosophy through the lens of the untranslatable, defined loosely as a term that is left untranslated as it is transferred from language to language (as in the examples of polis, Begriff, praxis, Aufheben, mimesis, feeling, lieu commun, logos, matter of fact), or that is typically subject to mistranslation and retranslation.

Despite the redoubtable scale of its erudition and the range of its philosophical ambition, the French edition of the Dictionary resonated with a heterogeneous readership: philosophers, scholars in all fields of the humanities, and everyone interested in the cartography of languages or the impact of translation history on the course of philosophy. The works international reception was then enlarged by its translations (some still under way) into Arabic, Farsi, Romanian, Russian, and Ukrainian. When Princeton University Press committed to publish an English edition, the editors confronted a daunting and very particular set of challenges: how to render a work, published in French, yet layered through and through with the worlds languages, into something intelligible to Anglophone readers; how to translate the untranslatable; how to communicate the books performative aspect, its stake in what it means to philosophize in translation over and beyond reviewing the history of philosophy with translation problems in mind.