The watershed of Modernity

Translation and the Epistemological Revolution

Bibliographic Data

ID5830283
AuthorsRada Iveković (corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume11
Issue1
Pages45-63
Publication date2010-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueInter-Asia Cultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-9373 • E-ISSN: 1469-8447
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14649370903403561
OpenAlexW2059422813
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited15

From Modernity on, there has been continuity for the 'West' and interruption for non-European cultures, histories and languages, for which indeed there is supposed to be only discontinuity with their own antiquity. Their own past counts as 'premodern' or 'traditional', and thus as belated compared with universalised Modernity. This is so because Modernity itself is normative, and it is normative because it was universalised. The norm of Modernity and the dignity of the modern 'political' has been spread through western idioms: through the western normativity of the political, such concepts as democracy, revolution, state, republic and the like will have their patterns in 'Europe' and in the 'West', while all other political concepts and terms, when contributed to a world dictionary of political terms, will denote merely exceptions. Modernity has been one of the great splits or disjunctions that froze some norms in history, making them become patterns: from that time on, western modernity (first western, then 'western' and finally 'universal'...) has constructed an unbroken genealogical origin for its own concepts and episteme as 'universal', and has proposed/imposed them to the planet. The patterns of selection, exception and exclusion of Modernity, which posit the subject as an 'autonomous' figure mirrored and complementary of (state) sovereignty - while referring it to the hegemonically dominant model - have not altogether disappeared today. They are merging and mutating into, and coextensive with, configurations of multiple power vectors within non-transparent networks of blurred and crossed hierarchies with novel, and maybe more volatile, forms of production, of integration and of institution, where again, although in a completely new way, collective action, the sharing and federation of knowledge transcend individual subjectivity while reaching out to both old and new forms of association. Keywords: Indian philosophyepistemeepistemologymethodologytranslationsubjectivationnormativity of conceptsthe politicallanguagemodernity Acknowledgement The present article draws, besides my other work, on papers given at two conferences: 'Translating borders', at the Social Science Research Council's Inter-Asian Connections Conference, Dubai, 2008 (workshop: 'Border Problems: Theory, Culture, and Political Economy', wonderfully organised by David Ludden, Julie Mostov and Dina Siddiqi), and 'Subjectivation, translation and the bifurcation of Modernity', given at the International Conference at the National Chiao Tung University, Hsin Chu, Taiwan, on 'Biopolitics, Ethics, and Subjectivation: Questions on Modernity', June 24-28, 2009. I thank the organisers of both conferences for giving me the opportunity to present my work and, as for the second one, i thank in particular Joyce C.H. Liu, Yuan-Horng Chu and Kuan-Hsing Chen for a long term faithful collaboration. Notes 1. I have been trying to call myself 'i' and not 'I' for two basic reasons: one is that the capital letter of putting oneself above the 'you' or 'they' looks so exaggerated and self-centered and in keeping with an assertive subject. The other is the lesson learnt and the fact that i have an intellectual debt to Asian philosophies which avoid any emphasis on the 'I', the subject, or the prevalence of oneself over others. In some languages it is even rude to over-use the first person singular of the personal pronoun. 2. Čedomil Veljačić, alias Bhikkhu Ñânajîvako (1915-1997), was a philosopher at university in the former Yugoslavia before he retired to Sri Lanka as a Buddhist monk. He is the author or a number of important studies on Asian philosophies, mainly Indian, and on comparative philosophy, which he took for granted. We also co-authored one book. Most of his work was published in Serbo-Croatian, some of it in English, and some in German. 3. See Bhikkhu Ñânajîvako (Citation1970, Citation1983) and Čedomil Veljačić (Citation1958, Citation1978, Citation1982), as well as other books by the same author, Bhikkhu Ñânajîvako being Veljačić's Buddhist monk's pseudonym. An incomplete but fairly abundant bibliography in different languages can be found on: http://www.yu-budizam.com/texts/veljacic/bibliografija.html. 4. I have been driven to and by translation through the fact that i worked on 'Indian' philosophy, but also content-wise, by Buddhist studies and Buddhist linguistic scepticism. The circumstances of life made it so that i have always had to mediate between several languages and cultures as scholar, teacher and editor in the former Yugoslavia and in France, that i was also thematically interested in language and translation theories, and over the past almost two decades, that i have been on the editorial board of Transeuropéennes (www.transeuropeennes.org), a multilanguage journal of critical thought. 5. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson have been calling the 'method itself a border', which has the advantage of underscoring the uncertainty of any positive knowledge; it also has the advantage of stressing the impermanence, the indecisive and provisional character of the parallel sequences of contents/objects of knowledge on the one hand, and of the knowing or learning process itself. It is also critical and deconstructive of 'method' as such, which may in itself be welcome. But borders do not seem a method to me, though i can see how they can influence one. When saying that borders are a method, we probably mean that they are a metaphor. We need a 'method', indeed, showing that borders operate also in our minds, not only in the things out there our thoughts refer to. This is precisely the reason why Mezzadra and Neilson want to use the same term for both (Neilson and Mezzadra n.d.). We really need a philosophy of the borders that explains how they operate starting from reason and the mechanisms of thinking. This philosophy is that of the partage of reason (Iveković Citation2007a). 6. In Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra's paper 'Borderscapes of differential inclusion' (2010) as well as in his accompanying mail to me on May 9, 2009 on differential inclusion and their paper. 7. A 'hierarchy' is coherent within its own scaled logic. By calling a hierarchy 'coherent', i am not expressing a judgement of value, at least not at this point: i am describing. 8. Some inequalities (but not all) end up as historic injustices - we can help compensate for these to some extent. 9. At the time of writing this piece, i was not aware of the many coincidences between my work and that of Kuan-Hsing Chen, whom i read only later. 10. Partage de la raison: i have developed this notion in much of my published and still unpublished work over the past years in several languages, although mainly in French (Iveković Citation2005b, Citation2006, Citation2007a). 11. The authors rightly insist on the multiple genealogies of the concept, which is in any case one of the fundamentals in feminist theories. Aihwa Ong too, on the other hand, through her observation of 'flexible citizenships', deals with it (Ong Citation1999). 12. See Bartolomé Clavero (Citation2005), and other writing by this author. Also see R. Samaddar (Citation2005); and see the whole issue of the journal Diogène dedicated to 'Conflicts and constitutions'. 13. Neti - neti, 'not that - not that', Sanskrit, is a well known saying appearing in several of the classical Upanishads to disclaim any possible particular identification to the self, atman, as well as to suggest on the side and as a corollary, the absence of any substance, or importance, to the ego. 14. See Sakai's work in general, as well as Sakai and Jon Solomon (Citation2006, Citation2007), and Solomon (Citation2007). 15. For Héritier, there is no doubt about this. 16. The insistence on reducing politics to ethics which takes place in a lot of English language philosophy, the switching from a vocabulary of state sovereignty to that of governmentality and biopolitics, all serve the purpose of depoliticising the other and are unable to account for the political, i.e. for the partage de la raison. When the language of sovereignty is replaced by that of governmentality, the two are usually constructed into a sequence and the two paradigms are generally made incompatible, which they are not. The two coexist even today, and the two patterns traverse each other, in the same way Modernity and Post-Modernity and globalisation do. 17. My concept (R.I.) appearing in my French writing (citoyens manquants) (Iveković Citationforthcoming) and constructed in analogy to the Indian sociological concept of missing women (Sen Citation1990). When you name a category, you make it visible. Missing citizens (missing to Europe in particular, besides missing to themselves) are all those migrants and refugees who lost their lives in trying to reach Europe. You could also count as missing citizens in a larger sense all those who, although present on a territory, are either deprived of their rights or do not exercise them for different reasons. 18. Dongchao Min shows good Chinese language examples of such utilisation of concepts in her paper 'Translation as Crossing Borders. A Case Study of the Translations of the Word "Feminism" into Chinese by the CSWS' (Min Citation2007). 19. See also Mezzadra's other writings. 20. The movie by Sophia Coppola. 21. Professor Dongchao Min at the University of Shanghai, said this at a conference in Paris in Citation2007; see her paper 'Translation as Crossing Borders. A Case Study of the Translations of the Word "Feminism" into Chinese by the CSWS' (Min Citation2007). 22. See papers by Jon Solomon (Citation2007) and by Sandro Mezzadra (Citation2007

Contemporary Cultural and Social Studies · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

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