Translatability and Cultural Difference: Toward an Ethics of ＂Real＂ Translation

In recent years ”translation,” in the broader sense of understanding (and accepting) alterity through some form of representational transfer, has become a key term in critical discourse, one often used to define a certain cosmopolitan respect for cultural difference and cross-cultural understanding. This paper begins by questioning this trend, arguing that in this cosmopolitan stance there is an implicit, globalizing valuation that has to be analyzed and critiqued through a return to the ethical dimension of translation. To establish the relevance of ethics, this paper refers to Jacques Derrida's account of ”relevant” translation, taking it perhaps beyond Derrida's purpose, to advocate an ethical translation in terms of which translational judgment is both relativized and constrained by a sense of direction and terminality. Walter Benjamin's insistence on the ”linguistic being” of all objects and Homi Bhabha's spatializing conceptualization of multilingual competence are discussed. An ethics of the real is then proposed which, following Lacan's reading of Freud's ”Project for a Scientific Psychology” in his seventh Seminar, should remind us that to signify is not only a right but a drive, a call to return to what is silenced in the traumatic emergence of subjectivity from matter.