transversal, 06/13: A Communality That Cannot Speak: Europe in Translation (2013) [EN, DE, FR, ES, PL, SR, HU]

“What is at the core of the European crisis today? The trouble with the Euro, as the ruling elites want us to believe? Wrong! The crisis is not about the common currency, but about the current commonality. Europe not only lacks a common language to collectively respond to the crisis, or a common public space to mobilize joint democratic action against its disastrous social consequences. It fails, above all, to address the very commonality of today’s capitalist crisis that now returns to Europe after having long been displaced to other parts of the world, outsourced to those “others” who were not, and still are not, supposed to enter a truly shared sphere of commonality. Hence, when today, caught in crisis, the European modes of speaking and decision-making fall apart into a cacophony of national languages and a chaos of parallel political realities, they simultaneously keep silencing the very commonality of the question of commonality.

It has been claimed that translation can offer a solution to the enigma of linguistic and political commonalities. But what kind of translation? Certainly not the one that simply serves the communication between allegedly homolingual communities and thus reproduces the already existing regimes and imaginaries. So how can we think of another kind of translation, one that addresses a non-aggregate community of foreigners, migrants of all sorts, but also all those who are becoming increasingly foreign to their own “native” languages, cultures, societies and political institutions: a translation that evokes a new mode of sociality still in search of its political actualization?”

With contributions by Boris Buden, Naoki Sakai, Jon Solomon, Myriam Suchet, Loredana Polezzi, Peter Waterhouse, Arat, Rubia Salgado, 1. März – Transnationaler Migrant_innenstreik, Nicole Doerr.

Publisher eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna/Linz
Copyleft
ISSN 1811-1696

HTML (updated on 2020-4-18)

Lisa Stampnitzky: Disciplining Terror: How Experts Invented ‘Terrorism’ (2013)

“Since 9/11 we have been told that terrorists are pathological evildoers, beyond our comprehension. Before the 1970s, however, hijackings, assassinations, and other acts we now call “terrorism” were considered the work of rational strategic actors. Disciplining Terror examines how political violence became “terrorism,” and how this transformation ultimately led to the current “war on terror.” Drawing upon archival research and interviews with terrorism experts, Lisa Stampnitzky traces the political and academic struggles through which experts made terrorism, and terrorism made experts. She argues that the expert discourse on terrorism operates at the boundary – itself increasingly contested – between science and politics, and between academic expertise and the state. Despite terrorism now being central to contemporary political discourse, there have been few empirical studies of terrorism experts. This book investigates how the concept of terrorism has been developed and used over recent decades.

• The first empirical study of terrorism experts • Places the ‘war on terror’ in social and historical context in order to provide a new perspective on an important situation • Explains the shifting social construction of ‘terrorism'”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2013
ISBN 1107026636, 9781107026636
242 pages
via amoromar

Publisher

PDF

Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973–) [EN, PT, CZ, ES, RU]

“In The Interpretation of Cultures, the most original anthropologist of his generation moved far beyond the traditional confines of his discipline to develop an important new concept of culture. This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is ultimately about.”

Publisher Basic Books, New York, 1973
ISBN 0465097197, 9780465097197
470 pages
via Sorin Danut

Wikipedia (EN)

The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (English, 1973/2000, updated on 2021-9-23)
A interpretação das culturas (Brazilian Portuguese, 1989/2008, via Rodrigo)
Interpretace kultur: Vybrané eseje (Czech, trans. Hana Červinková, Václav Hubinger and Hedvika Humlíčková, 2000)
La interpretación de las culturas (Spanish, trans. Alberto L. Bixio, 2003)
Интерпретация культур (Russian, trans. О.В. Барсукова, A.A. Борзунов, Г.М. Дашевский, Е.M. Лазарева and В.Г. Николаев, 2004)