Ng, Julia. 2023. '[Keynote lecture] “Of Translational Justice.”'. In: Afterlives of an Essay: 100 Years of Benjamin’s Task of the Translator.. University of Warwick, United Kingdom 29 - 30 September 2023. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin argues that the “pure transcendental" language of translation “germinally or intensively realizes” the grounds of possible experience not determinately but in anticipation of an other that it can represent only through anticipation. Translation, Benjamin writes, therefore harbors “one of the most powerful [gewaltigsten] and fruitful historical processes,” one however that can be discovered only in an intralinguistic relation that is prior to every cognitive-propositional function and that Benjamin denotes as “the becoming of languages” [das Werden der Sprachen]. During the period Benjamin was translating Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens for which the “Translator” essay served as the preface, he also wrote “Toward the Critique of Violence,” in which he speculates that the anticipation of a kind of violence [Gewalt] that relates “somehow differently” to just ends than as either legally justified or unjustified means “would throw a light on the strange and initially discouraging experience of the ultimate undecidability of all legal problems (which in its hopelessness can perhaps be compared only with the impossibility of deciding conclusively on what is ‘correct’ or ‘false’ in evolving languages [werdende Sprachen]).” This talk speculates on the relation of this undecidability to the unimpartible “end” towards which translation moves languages. It postulates that translation’s “powerful [gewaltige] and only ability” (“Translator”) is to recover from the flux of one “situation” to the next (“Critique of Violence”) a new and higher “right” [Rechte] (“Translator”)—of language as of existence—to be freely affected, in the moment of auto-affection, by an unprecedented other, and explores what a “germinally, intensively realizable,” that is, translational justice might look like.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Keynote)
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	English and Comparative Literature > Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought
Dates:	Date Event 30 September 2023 Completed
Event Location:	University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Date range:	29 - 30 September 2023
Item ID:	34142
Date Deposited:	02 Oct 2023 13:26
Last Modified:	02 Oct 2023 13:26
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/34142

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