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)