斯皮瓦克 || 翻译与后殖民研究的传承

本文载于ICL Vol.4 No.3 Autumn 2021

作者简介：佳亚特里 · C. 斯皮瓦克，哥伦比亚大学校聘教授，主要著作包括《在他者的世界：文化政治论集》《后殖民理性批判》《别样的亚洲》和《全球化时代的美学教育》。她目前正在撰写有关 W. E. B. 杜波依斯、安东尼奥·葛兰西与塔吉娅娜、朱莉娅·舒赫特姐妹狱中对谈的论著。斯皮瓦克教授曾被授予“日本京都奖”、由印度总统颁发的公民荣誉奖“莲花装勋章”、2018年度美国现代语言学会终身学术成就奖，以及法兰西艺术与文学骑士勋章，并获选美国人文与科学院院士和英国不列颠学会会员，拥有多伦多大学、伦敦大学、欧柏林学院、巴黎第八大学、加尔各答总统大学及耶鲁大学等多座高等学府的荣誉学位。她不仅在学术研究上涉猎广泛，兼涉从法律到艺术策展等众多领域，还是一名为农村教育、生态农业和发展中的底层群体积极奔走的活动家。

摘要：本文指出殖民主义理论中的独立概念是由与普通民众毫无接触的阶级群体提出的。由这一群体强制推行的民主制度因此极其脆弱而倾向于分崩离析，更为古老的前殖民结构乘虚而入，从而使政体进一步瓦解。印度的后殖民主义便是一个典型案例。文中给出的解决方案是推进针对广大选民的全面教育，尽管目前还只能视其为一种梦想。文章接着探讨了塔拉勒·阿萨德的《世俗的翻译》一书：阿萨德将人类学田野调查作为深入接触他者的一种有效方式，更将每场古兰经的诵读升华为翻译。本文将这一升华过程同认识论联系起来，并将其解读为超越学科视角的人文实践。这里提供的解决方案仍然是以底层和精英阶层为目标，推行想象行动主义的全面教育。本文紧接着引用了笔者在大阪被授予“日本京都奖”后所作的一篇演讲——演讲认为，翻译是一种实践活动而非仅仅是一种方便沟通的手段。文末借爱德华·格里桑和加里·奥基希洛之口试读了历史的“混杂性”，并倡议从民族主义的语言思维到群岛思维的转变：我们逐渐理解世界是一个岛屿；而在全球范围内，通过类比，意识到我们皆身处语言的孤岛之上，漂泊在踪迹的海洋之中。

关键词：传承；后殖民研究；翻译

I have been asked to speak on the heritage of postcolonial studies. I separated myself from postcolonial studies in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, published in 1999. I am still separated from it. But “separation” is, of course a relationship; and there are kinds of separation. But perhaps this relationship constitutes itself by way of the fact that, in the country of my citizenship, the heritage of the postcolonial is dubious.

Can we use India’s example for the general postcolonial predicament? I do not believe so. Yet some details can be shared.

It is well-known that Lenin rethought anti-colonialism by emphasizing the role of the bourgeoisie in working out a national liberation. Rosa Luxemburg, like Marx, had emphasized that “the true [eigentlich] task of bourgeois society is the establishment of a world market, at least following its outline, and a production resting upon the basis of this world market.” Today, with the globe financialized, we are aware of the truth of this. (We remember of course that for teutophones like Marx and Luxemburg, “bourgeois” is Bürgerlich—citizen-ly—and does not carry only a negative connotation.) Competitive nationalisms are still being used to ideologize the self-determination of capital. We are complicit in this.

Lenin suggested that national struggles which were, in part, generated by the development of capitalism, and whose content and goals were bourgeois-democratic, were nevertheless in an important sense anti-capitalist. In fact, it has to be taken into account that sometimes these struggles were led by representatives of decayed feudal cliques. In other words, Lenin did not consider the possibility that the nationalism of even an oppressed country might be in some sense reactionary. At the second meeting of the Communist International [Comintern] Congress in 1920, M. N. Roy (a pseudonym assumed to avoid punishment by the British colonial government of India), attended as a delegate for the newly formed Communist Party of Mexico. Roy was encouraged by Lenin to present his views in the form of theses. The theses Roy drafted urged that the Comintern support the revolutionary movement of workers and peasants in the colonies in preference to the bourgeois nationalist movement. Roy argued that the former movement, which according to him was developing with great rapidity at the same time that it was separating from the merely bourgeois nationalist movement, would combine the struggle for national independence with a struggle for social transformation. Lenin forced major changes to Roy’s theses in the Colonial Commission of the Congress, in particular deleting all those references where the nationalist movement and the revolutionary class movement were counterposed to each other. Lenin then recommended that Roy’s theses be adopted in their amended form as “Supplementary Theses” to his own. They were so adopted but were ignored in subsequent discussions of the colonial question.

Roy was no doubt somewhat overenthusiastic about the rapid development of the movement of workers and peasants everywhere. Yet the work of the capitalization of land (the simplest definition of “originary [primitive] accumulation” making way for full-fledged industrial capitalism offered by Marx) now with direct access to the world market is not finished. The Amazon forest is of course the greatest example. Closer to home, accessible to my activist experience, is the example of Nigeria, and the agriculture of West Bengal. Threatened by the postcolonial national bourgeoisie, who tempt the poorest sharecropping farmers by way of a localized nationalism, who can be tempted only by a localized call in a language native to the region which they understand, but not to the central state, which is the language of the tempters:

—a handful of rice, a poetic stand-in for the intimacy with the peasants not felt by the national party except for the purpose of votes as body count.

In the Indian case, the negotiated independence (1947–49) was brought in for the most part by activists belonging to the feudal-bureaucratic classes that were out of touch with the underclass, and the peasant, with the subaltern at the bottom. One of them, famously, had to “discover” India, and the India that he discovered did not really represent what was going on in the country. It is a great orientalist dream text. Of course, they made sacrifices, and spent a lot of time in jail. I am not trying to be mean. But having inherited their legacy, I am proposing that they taught us that national liberation is not a revolution. Khushwant Singh, in his novel Train to Pakistan, rather different from his other writings, captures the distance between the mind-set of the liberators and that of the general public. Gandhi, who was certainly a grand political strategist, took off the suit he had put on when he went to Britain and South Africa, and donned the high dhoti and chador that staged him as a man of the people internationally. A good deal has been said about his prejudice against black Africans, a tendency quite strong in India today and therefore part of our postcolonial heritage in spite of the acceptance of progressive bourgeoisie such as Du Bois, Joseph Appiah, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Kofi Awoonor, respected by the national liberators and their ideological descendants today.

From a more “traditional” and less Westernized upper-middle-class family from a mid-level caste, living in one or another of princely states that were ruled by local potentates who acknowledged British suzerainty in return for local sovereignty, Gandhi was thus removed from India as such. The Gandhi family had fairly close contacts with the British administrators, with no social contact at all. Thus in the impressionable time of childhood and adolescence, Gandhi’s intuition of a relationship with the British might have been described as “strategic.” His four years in Britain, training as a barrister, was unaffected by racial prejudice because, outside of his classes, he lived under the auspices of the Vegetarian Society and the Theosophists. He thus developed what may be described as a canny relationship to the upper class (his fellow students at the Inner Temple) and, outside his classroom with the socially liberal British, developed the knack of how to dress and behave in an acceptable way. His first book, although unpublished, was his “Guide to London,” “drafted . . . during his first year in South Africa, when he hoped still to make a career as an Anglicized barrister in Bombay . . . [It] was a paean to English education and English manners, written, appropriately, in English. ”

To this combination—steady strategic behavior with the ruling British in India and admiration and assimilation to dress code and acceptable behavior with regard to the British in Britain—was added the experience of the open prejudice and despotism of British policy in a British colony when he went to South Africa to represent Indians living there. This extended combination of his sense of the British was operative in his participation in the national liberation in India. In South Africa, immediately before his final arrival in India, however, he operated with the strongly held assumption that Indians and the British, unlike the culturally insufficiently advanced “natives,” were “different members of the Imperial family in South Africa [and] would be able to live in perfect peace in the near future.” He fought for the British, as the sergeant-major of an East Indian Ambulance Corps during the Anglo-Boer War in 1906. Pace Hind Swaraj, as he staged himself in costume as a kind of liberated Hindu saint, wittingly or unwittingly, he was also able to embarrass the British in Britain by breaking the dress code completely and turning up at Buckingham Palace and at formal dinners at the roundtable conference in dhoti-chador and thick sandals. This embarrassment led to the international moral outrage already stressed by the Americans, speaking of the superiority of their Constitution, that would not outrage an Indian renouncer. So far, the freedom struggle in India had been marked by armed guerrilla attempts, most strikingly taken up in Bengal, by young men and women who had none of the strategic relationships with the ruling British, nor the in-house relationship with the liberal British. They had simply been punished by law, and deported or hanged. Gandhi turned it into a different kind of nationalism by “discovering” ahimsa or non-violence in the Hindu tradition and shaming the British once again through passive resistance and truth-seeking spectacular boycotts into a negotiated independence that ensured the victory of a Labour government. His first twenty years in India and his own inclinations after his return from South Africa did not allow him to get to know and gain the support of the common people of India, although he certainly gained a species of cultic devotion. His cohorts were mostly conscientized business folks like the Sarabhais. His politics of shaming and moral embarrassment on the subcontinent often took the form of emotional blackmail—hunger strikes against his own cohorts, most remarkable at the Poonah Pact of 1932 which obliged Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, representing the out-castes and tribals on the new Indian constitution, to renounce his motion to establish a separate electorate (already in existence for Muslims and Sikhs) for the out-castes and the tribals, today called the Dalits.

The other leaders of the national liberation movement were from a liberal to traditional background, more or less progressive, but just as certainly out of touch with the peasants and working folks of the country.

Because of the lack of connection between the national liberators and the country at large, the old structures slowly re-established themselves. The largest sector of the electorate is illiterate or semi-literate (I know something first-hand of the production of statistics in this context) and exists within a structure of feeling that may be described as feudal, looking to be led. Democracy became theocracy. Hindu nationalism easily took hold. But with the help of Narendra Modi’ s crowd[1]pleasing charisma, its software growth, embracing Silicon valley, its cheap good hospitals (way beyond the reach of the Indian poor, of course), its Bollywood and art cinema, the fantastic literature in English produced by Indian diasporics, and its many art galleries, India has become internationally popular. Given the general Islamophobia in the world today, the virulence of Indian Islamophobia is perhaps underestimated. Yet in the domestic sphere a number of critical journalists have been killed or imprisoned, textbooks and examinations have focused on the modernity of a “science” contained in scriptural myth, and an Aryanist history has been concocted.

The old dietary restriction against beef-eating has now become de facto law. And not only has it become law, but it is now possible, as a vigilante, for the Hindu citizen to take the law into their own hands. The justification is always, “they are violent too.” The phrase “Hindu citizen” is a bit redundant now, for there are legalized attempts at citizenship restriction to only Hindus. I am part of the eighty percent Hindu majority, so this heritage of postcoloniality is particularly difficult for me to bear. To its call I respond with the imperative to re-imagine secularism, with the imperative to touch the transcendental, what we must assume yet cannot legally prove. We cannot mourn or judge without the intuition of the transcendental, strictly and persistently to be distinguished from the supernatural, into which it can too easily slip. You cannot imagine and broach, persistently, a robust non-Euro-specific secularism without that intuition. This requires the sort of holistic education from elite to subaltern, primary to post-tertiary, everything nestled within the humanities beyond the disciplines that can only be a dream.

My parents sent us to a school where the teachers were Christianized aboriginals and mostly so-called lower-caste Hindus: St. John’s Diocesan Girls’ High School. These teachers taught with the passion of the newly liberated. I do often say, Diocesan made me. As the days went by, Miss Charubala Dass, the principal of the school, became my role model. Her affectionate dignity, and her gentle sternness is not something that I can hope to imitate. That she had a hand in putting in place the openness to the need for ethical reflexes that might be produced can be made clear by the following story, the significance of which at the moment I did not recognize.

《后殖民理性批判》

I have been training teachers among the landless illiterate in western West Bengal for thirty years. I am myself not at all religious, not a believer. In 2012, at one of the meetings where all the rural teachers had come together for training, I gave them a lesson in English prepositions by repeating Miss Dass’s school prayer: “Be thou, O Lord, before us to lead us, behind us to restrain us, beneath us to sustain us, above us to draw us up, round about us to protect us.” The call of the ethical from my school days done into a different kind of lesson, which I translated, for these people rather far removed from the metropolitan center, in this case Calcutta. Make of it what you wish, but remember, we caste-Hindus treated the direct ancestors of my teachers like animals. It was the missionaries who Christianized them. And, because the national liberators were rather far away from “the people,” that contemptuous treatment is creeping back. Sitting in the heritage of postcolonialism, I realize more and more that so-called national liberation is not a revolution because it is not in fact a national liberation. As Marx and Engels warned us in 1872: “The Commune [Paris Commune of 1871] has provided a particular piece of evidence, that 'the working class [read “the national liberators” ] cannot simply take possession of the ready-made state[1]machine and set it in motion for its own goals.’” And that is what the liberators of India did: take possession of the already existing colonial state-machine and modify it for postcolonial purposes, with a new constitution, whose land reform statutes were quickly suppressed.

I work with a group called Radiating Globality. As we visit country after country we are obliged to conclude that with the simultaneity brought in by globalization, precolonial structures of power and corruption are coming back and beginning to inhabit the polity. This catches the relay of the difference between the national liberators and the masses and becomes part of the difficult burden of the heritage of postcolonialism. In India it is the caste system, which never quite went away and is much older than colonialism. Colonialism was yesterday. This is thousands of years old.

Before these remarks are concluded, there should be a few words on the agreement between the positions submitted here and positions elaborated by Talal Asad in his brilliant brief book Secular Translations. The conference from which these texts are taken was to have been an engagement with Professor Asad’s work. Under the circumstances, he could only come to the opening session, at which I could not be present. Talal Asad’s work is wide in range and profound in depth. Since the mandate was to edit what had actually been uttered at the conference, engagement with Asad on a broad level was impossible for me. I therefore chose to focus on one book, where Asad engages with fieldwork and translation.

In order to come to grips with the heritage of postcoloniality, the only solution that I have so far proposed has been a holistic education from elite to subaltern, primary to post-tertiary, everything nestled within the humanities beyond the disciplines that can only be a dream. By subaltern I mean Gramsci’s minimal definition: “social groups in the margins of history.” At the conference I mentioned my continuing work with the education of the children of the landless illiterate in western West Bengal. I also mentioned my first proposal of “planetarity” to a Swiss philanthropic organization in 1997, inviting them to think of the asylum seeker in a different way: not as an obligation, not as a white man’s burden, but as a human birthright. The difference may not seem to be much in English verbal articulation, but if imagined, say, in the language of the ground-level Islam of my home-state of West Bengal and Bangladesh, it would combine rights and responsibility in the tremendous concept-metaphor of al haq. It is the para-individual structural responsibility into which we are born that is our true being. Indeed, the word responsibility is an approximation for this structural positioning that is only approximately translated as “birth-right.” Whether it is right or responsibility, it is the truth of my being. (As it will be argued later, Asad works the “truth of being” approach in terms of Islamic philosophy, relating it to his repeated use of “translation.” ) Given this “structure of feeling” in those being “ saved,” the Swiss philanthropists would be mistaken in perceiving their own task as integrating the underclass immigrants into an economic dynamic, perhaps with some cultural instruction. In order to learn to learn from the below, to learn to mean to say, not just with the required and deliberate non[1]hierarchicality: I mean to learn from you what you practice. I need it even if you didn’t want to share a bit of my pie, but there is something I want to give you which will make our shared practice flourish. You don’t know, and indeed I didn’t know, that civility requires your practice of responsibility as pre-originary. It should be mentioned here that, like most cultural power institutionalizing responsibility, Islam has historically allowed women to take the other’s part within it. Asad makes an intriguing argument, by way of a comparison with Christian monks, that women’s submission might be thought of as a voluntary submission of will and, if I understand right, places it within what early Christianity learned from Islam. If one were to criticize such submission as an ideological determination of the will, Asad would probably dismiss it as a modernist misunderstanding of the internal reality of an earlier dispensation, from which one cannot escape.

This brings us to the point where the heritage of postcoloniality leads to global labor exportand migration. Let us look at my most recent comments on this, written for the United NationMission of the European Public Law Organization:

Listen to me as you would to those who bear what you impose and see if that imaginative shift is possible. For ruling is, in actual practice, enforcement. And those of us who think about these things as having human purchase—teaching in the humanities beyond the disciplines—think, perhaps somewhat idealistically, that one must persistently, generation after generation, work towards acceptance of the other as agent rather than victim, so that enforcement is not the main method. The desire for social justice is to want the law—and the goal of the general humanities education is to work at the impossible task of producing a general will for social justice, which can be minimally defined as the willingness to turn capital away from capitalism to diversified social good.

But this is a desire for those who have access to capital outside of the possible practitioners of capitalism. This can translate into even a different attitude toward fiscal policy. And I think here, if we are thinking, as best we can, of the entire world, we must learn how to speak to the largest sectors of the electorate, in terms of what Professor Margaret MacMillan, great granddaughter of the British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George, would think of as a basic affect: “These affects, greed, violence, fear—do, of course, drive capitalism’s dark side, a side that most of us can afford not to notice.” Language becomes more parabolic to break down enforcement alone. We expand, we repeat with many acknowledgeable instances: One person’s profit brings death to many. Keep what you need but use the rest for greater good. Narrative as instantiations of the ethical is an altogether “universal” method with a millennial history. If some of us do not learn to use it in a hands-on intensive way for attempting movement from feudal loyalties and convictions to gendered democratic intuitions—namely, autonomy and equality for me and my group as well as other people, other groups, unlike us—we are at best looking forward to a “democratic” world ruled by tyrants, where democracy is body count disguised as rule of law.

It is this insistence upon accessing the other’s structure of feeling through an imaginative activism that trains for epistemological performance that links to Talal Asad’s understanding of the anthropological experience as a fieldwork living another form of life in order to learn about it. For Asad, this anthropological experience is a unique and perhaps inadequately appreciated way of understanding: to go towards the other, to enter into the other’s space. This idea connects to the idea of the humanities teaching imaginative activism to train the imagination to be flexible. And indeed I have described my attempt to learn to learn from below how to teach the subaltern as a species of fieldwork, without transcoding. To transcode, as in the ethnographic session in the evening when the fieldwork is organized by the anthropologist into academic systematicity, would take my focus away from my masters, the subaltern.

Asad also halts transcoding by following the major work of the jurist, theologian, and mystic Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī, The Revival of the Religious Sciences (Ihyā 'ulūm addīn) into proposing an originary (needed each time Islam is set to work for/by the believer) “translation” in Islam that is not word but body.

I suggested that resistance to translating Qur’anic language recited in daily prescribed prayers (or ritual commitments) has to do with the sense that a verbal translation might begin a process of deritualization by treating translation as essentially a move from one set of signs to another. So how should one think about the translation of Qur’anic language to the sensible human body? For language is not only what we do with it (as J. L. Austin famously argued in How to Do Things with Words in 1962) but also what it does to us and in us.

Every act of translation begins with the murder of the phonic body of the source text. Asad’s catachrestic (a word for which no literal referent may be found) use of “translation” offers a concept-metaphor that undoes that crime. Fieldwork without transcoding, then, is translation without the originary murder of the phonic.

Asad affirms the migrant’s stance, insisting that the immigrant comes in and learns the ruling class’s ideology in order to get by whereas it does not work the other way. The anthropologist going native is very different from the underclass migrant coming in and trying somehow to get upward race mobility. Upward race mobility presupposes upward class mobility. The underclass immigrants are veteran anthropologists (practicing what Louis Althusser, following Freud, might call une ethnologie sauvage—a wild anthropology).

This essay has already referred to something similar in the discussion of al haq. Indeed, this skill of the underclass immigrant has been one of this writer’s themes for many decades. Here let me quote a piece of fiction that I taught in the eighties at the University of Pittsburgh, as adjunct faculty in the department of philosophy, in a course on ethics: Peter Dickinson’ s The Poison Oracle, from which I quote at length to show how fiction stages the argument that I am trying to establish. In the novel, a chimpanzee trained by the visiting British anthropologist on a whim, solves the murder mystery, which is the ostensible subject of the novel. The potential object of his anthropological investigation, the “native” girl, in a curious subplot that takes over, undoes the boundary between knowing and known and exits the book on a staging of the reader’s uncertain expectation that she will “get back into the machine”—the airplane, with “the pilot . . . ready to go.” But she has climbed up to the slab that the marshmen (the “natives”) called “the House of Spirits”:

Really, [Morris the anthropologist] thought with exasperation, she is worse than Dinah [the chimpanzee] . . . [N]one of the tribesmen moved, or even looked at the white men. They stared at Peggy, waiting. Morris couldn’t believe that she had climbed up there for anything except adventure, with perhaps an element of scorn for superstitions which she had grown out of. But as soon as she saw that she was a focus of attention she accepted her role, . . . and at last began to dance. Now the marshmen crept towards her silently, and it seemed unwillingly, like birds or small beasts hypnotized by the coiling and writhing of a snake . . . she sang in English. She had insisted that Morris should teach her his own language, and what right had he to refuse? What property had he in her marsh mind? As a research tool, if she chose to put it away? Besides, her will was stronger than his. All he could do was tape the learning process, to record whatever problems she faced in adapting to alien modes of thought. The answer had been almost none. “You are fools,” she sang to the marshmen . . . “You do not know cause and effect. Cause and effect.” It was Morris’s own voice, piping triumphant and scornful through the steamy air.

The fiction makes it deliberately uncertain as to who speaks the final lines, as follows, the shared voice of the rule of law: “Soon all you fools will be dead. Cause and effect. Cause and effect. Cause and effect.”

She has transformed the philosophy of the people who had come to her island to know her into a repeatable formula, and here the writer paints in bold strokes the task of the imagination of the host. Peter Dickinson (1927–2015), a white Englishman educated at Eton and Oxford, worked in British counterintelligence, yet here shows us, as he dramatizes an anthropologist’s experience, the possibility of an author’ s creative imagination grasping the peculiarities of the master-slave relationship with the other, whom we feel we are liberating by subjecting to the rule of law.

Indeed, this fiction stages the experience that would be impossible for the subject proposing a universal rule of law. If you succeed in putting it in place, the other would banalize that impossibility, slipping into your space, imitating reason. Accept the invitation to do likewise, and inhabit the banal impossibility together: the rule of law; turning the key that makes the cohabitation possible: redistribution rather than rejection, built by soul-making education, on both sides.

Nationalism and the Imagination

Junichiro Isomae asked me to include here the few words I spoke on translation in Osaka in 2012. I have not tried to establish a transition, but the remarks, addressed specifically to a Japanese audience, are indeed coherent with, and extend, some of the ideas on translation already submitted above. Here, then, is the earlier piece:

For some years now, I have been focused on the fact that in life as in thought, we almost always receive contradictory instructions at the same time. The greatest example of course is that we must take care of ourselves in our lives although, even as we are living, we are dying. Nestled in this contradiction, we still go forward, hoping for the continuity of our world, beyond the limits of our lives. The general name for this situation is “double bind,” and it is, paradoxically, a productive structure.

Translation is no exception. Before, however, I can go on to discuss the productive double bind in the situation of translation in the humanities, I would like to indicate to the audience that translation in the humanities is a rather limited phenomenon within the general need for translation in the world today. I want to mention as I always do the two ends of the spectrum of translation and then move into the question of the humanities.

At one end of the translation activity in the world today are the many instructions that must accompany manufactured objects as they travel the world in a global situation, originating from some specific locale. This commonest phenomenon of translation today, very far from the grandeur of the humanities, tells us something about the double bind inherent in the nature of translation. Translation is indeed needed. In our globalized world things do travel from one end of the world to another, often put together in many different places. Yet, our situation in language or ways of life acquires depth with reference only to one. This is even true of the first generation in migration or exile. This is what brings us into simultaneous contradictory instructions even in the house of the most practical and humble translation—instructions accompanying manufactured objects. If in the humanities we want to protect our nuance, in this sort of translation, which must be useful to an immense sector of the population of the world, what is required is absolute understandability and low-level rational precision. We all know that this standard is not invariably achieved. Yet, we have to admit that, whereas the population that reads advanced scientific or technological documents is usually capable of understanding some of the so-called global languages, in this sphere, reliability is key.

Apparently, the method here is collective in a way that we cannot hope to or wish to activate in the humanities: there is a first translation into various languages where the product is expected to have marketability, and then, apparently, from each of these areas, there is a translation back into the original language. And, apparently this process is repeated in order to ensure absolute identity between meaning and translation. A simple arithmetical representation of the irreducible double bind between local and global! Here, the theory that Professor Inose has recommended in my own thinking—“Translation is not a practice to transfer just the meaning or a mass of meaning from one language to the other. We must be more conscious of what we cannot translate or what we intentionally or unintentionally delete” —cannot operate. It is in the light of this framing, where we do want absolute precision when we buy a do-it-yourself object online, that we must launch our specific humanities-based translation ideas, so that we can indeed be helpful in developing the kind of mindset that can be ready for the call of unconditional ethics issued unanticipatably. Mr. Inamori used the words: “no higher calling than to serve the greater good of humankind and society.” A call, a calling.

At the other end of the spectrum are the translations that are required when tribal people speak of their victimhood at Truth Commissions. If in the do-it-yourself field, the groups translating become anonymous to produce absolute accuracy, ignoring the substance of language—sound, tone, feeling, subjectivity—here the translator, often located in a language that is shared by those who oppressed, tortured, raped, murdered, etc., must assume the identity of the victims and think of an unknown future—that which is going to be immediately declared by the victim to the commission—as his or her lived and suffered past. This is a tremendous intensification of the best model of reading—the preparation for a response to the call of the ethical reflex—that the humanities can teach. The double bind here—indeed a plurality of double binds interlocked into each other—between victim and translator, my life and the life of the translated—is so exigent that the people who practice this sort of translation often burn out quickly

In Other Worlds

We, in the humanities, teachers and translators (and I am both), inhabit the shadow area between these two extremes. Our model is not the majority model to be followed by everyone. But we are the instrument by which the globe is repeatedly turned into a world. We think through Einstein’s apocryphal earthy pronouncement declaring our usefulness: “I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots.”

Literature and philosophy are the traditional humanities. At their best, they teach imaginative and rational activism. They teach us to construct objects in new ways, for knowing in new ways. I have used the words “epistemological performance” for this training. As for literature, this training enfolds the suspension of the self-interest of the reader in the text, which represents, as far as possible, the other. In philosophy, the philosophizing teacher and student train for an imagination of a generalizable rational being. Here the word “rational” is different from “the reasonable,” or from the “rational” as the adjective in “rational choice,” which drives the world of political and economic predictions, which in turn write the life of most of us struggling in or ruling the world. In Rogues, Derrida recommends that we learn to translate, going beyond Latinity, the difference between “rational” and “reasonable” in all the languages of the world before we imagine a fulfilled globality.

If literature and philosophy are taught in this way, we can fulfill the expectation of the Einstein quote. But inevitably, worldwide disciplinarization has not been able to keep this kind of function intact, especially in the face of the fact that, in a vision quite unlike Mr. Inamori’s, a shortsighted contemporary majority vision, these skills are felt to be old-fashioned, irrelevant, and unnecessary. In response to this, in the face of shrinking resources, and the need therefore to compete with more superficial ideas of mobility, this teaching of the humanities certainly does not much resemble what I have described above. This is our first problem.

It is also true that, historically, the persons who have been able to access this kind of training have been the custodians of what is called humanism. And the implied subject of humanism has usually been the straight, majority-group-or-caste, majority-religion, property-owning male. As this tendency has been questioned in a haphazard rather than a philosophical way, the recipient of the new education is today and generally being indoctrinated into speed, employability, and the ability to find a foothold in the market. On the other side, the tradition of the excluded groups have also sometimes become driven by a politics of identity which questions the ethics of alterity or otherness that I have been describing. This is our second problem.

Mr. Inamori has spoken of the “global community.” I have already suggested that the idea of any such community is in a double bind with the fact that feelings of community are necessarily connected with first language, most often also connected with a group of human beings not necessarily identical with nation or class, but somehow tied with these ideas as they harbor something like imagined neighborhoods. This is our third problem and, all three together, these are the philosophical representation, if that is possible, of the double bind between the global and the local, minimally presented by the first kind of translation that I have described today.

We have to take this into consideration if we are going to look at the productive double bind within translation as such, the double bind between deep language learning, in order to access lingual memory, memory of the language in the language, and the commitment to translate, which also requires such deep language learning. Such considerations drive me to think of translation as an activity rather than a convenience. There is not much to say about translation as a convenience. It is a way of coping with the fact that there can be no global community, except at the very top. And even then, even with just a handful of well-known languages, the convenience of translation must constantly be used and the double bind between the necessity and impossibility of translation denied. There would be much to say about this, but I will, for the moment, turn aside from this.

Here in the bosom of a university I would suggest that we focus on translation as an activity, the most intimate act of reading as I have described above, the ability to suspend the interest of the self in the interest of the other. The goal of translation as an activity rather than a convenience is to generate a dissatisfaction with the product rather than a satisfaction. In an ethical situation that is unconditional rather than focused on a single kind of problem, we know that the extent of the suffering is altogether larger than whatever it is that we are able to redress. There too the typical affect is regret and remorse, not jubilation—a cousin to the dissatisfaction accompanying the necessary impossibility of translation.

Can the Subaltern Speak

Disciplinarily, I do of course always insist on Comparative Literature. In that spirit, in 2000, I said to the President of the University of Toronto, when the university was about to shut down its Comparative Literature program, that it was “health care for a culture.” Comparative Literature, perceived from the perspective of globalization, thinks that the experience of first language learning shared by the overwhelming majority of infants in the world, before they acquire rationality, puts in place the instrumentation for unconditional ethics. Any language, big or small, rich or poor, endangered or triumphant, can activate the metapsychological circuits of the infant subject and launch it on the contingent track of the ethical. When we translate the mother-tongue, this relationship between subject and language is displaced.

Comparative Literature at its best tries to learn language the child’s way, the impossible way, entering the lingual memory, memory of the language in the language, a private and singular hold on its history, which also requires such deep language learning, suspending itself in it. By so doing, it enlarges the scope and range of ethical practice.

At the beginning of October 2012, I was at a conference on “Ethnicity, Identity, Literature” in upper Assam in northeast India. I have already taken some insights from what I learned there and placed them in my address to you today. Upon the border between the state of Assam and upper Bangladesh, there is a great deal of ethnic conflict, resembling such conflicts on the US–Mexico border, the Israel–Palestine border and other well-known international boundaries. Studying some literature from the area, I read the novel Rupabarir Palas by Sayed Abdul Malik, a member of the migrant community. Malik describes the way in which the migrant, especially the underclass migrant, makes the language of the ironically named host state his or her own and how, for the second generation, it becomes a first language. Coupled with this, in the last section of Malik’s novel, there is a lament that, in spite of such an effort, voting rights are denied. I realized through this novel that the model of deep language learning is not just the institutional humanities model of comparative literature, but the practical humanities model of these so-called illegal immigrants—a global phenomenon, a group that I have described as “ the new subaltern.” I believe that the sensibility trained in the humanities as I have been describing them, can also begin to see that the border between the new subaltern and disciplinarized humanities teachers and students is an unstable border. Subaltern classes cannot use the state. In a democracy, the people supposedly control the state.

In Abdul Malik’s novel, we find the words “those who, thinking to stay alive, have sacrificed the enchantment of the motherland, come to Assam and taken her for mother, forgetting their own language have made Assamese their own language . . .” In a passage that I often quote, Karl Marx provides a less affective description of this as revolutionary practice: “ In the same way, the beginner who has learnt a new language always retranslates it into his mother tongue: he can only be said to have appropriated the spirit of the new language and to produce in it freely when he can move within it without rememoration, and forgets his inherited language within it.”

Within the actively translating teacher and student in our classrooms, this practice brings the awareness that the first step in translation is violent, the destruction of the body of the language, the sound that is so deeply tied to the structure of feeling, especially but not only if one is translating from the first language. Perhaps it is a reminder of the setting aside of the interest in the self that must accompany translation as an encompassing model of ethical practice as such, if that can be described. We must imagine that this violence is called for in all efforts at communication. In other words, I’m trying to explain the difficult set of ideas that crowd my mind when I try to open up the unexamined conviction that translation can naturally create cultural exchange and global community. Yet, we have no other way of proceeding here.

When we translate “everything” into our first language, can we assure the kind of deep language learning that must cross the border indicated by Marx—relying on the forgetfulness of the first language when we operate in the well-learned one? I don’t think so; and here is another double bind. Here are people like me, looking at the politics of translation, looking to see what languages are capable of claiming this kind of compendious acquisition of other texts: translation en masse. The diachronic and synchronic competition between languages makes sure that the winning languages are those into which most translation activity is directed.

I would like to suggest that, in the wholesale acquisition of texts in other languages, the idea of translation as convenience begins to win over the idea of translation as activity. You must of course make compensations for my own position as a translator, because no one speaks from a vacuum—unlike the expectations of the first kind of translation that I described. I am a bilingual person, conversant in my first language and in English in almost, though not quite, the same way. However, the experience of translating from a language, French, that I know less well than either of these, and a highly complex text in French, at that, perhaps taught me something about the problems that I am discussing with you.

Let me sum up these words aphoristically: may translating rather than translation be the future of the humanities. We will be a global community, each one of us globalizable, upstream from politics, an island of languaging in a field of traces. The trace of an “unknown” language is where we know meaningfulness is operating, but we don’t know how. Our task as teachers and translators calls us into this challenge, the recognition that a fully translated globe is nothing that we should desire.

《一门学科之死》

May translating rather than translation be the future of the humanities. And the final project of translating is an epistemological project upon ourselves, like all translation, necessary but impossible. Postcolonial was focused on the nation state. To supplement globalization, we need archipelago-thought. Edouard Glissant, the thinker of creolity, has said: “Translation is therefore one of the most important kinds of this new archipelagic thinking.” We must displace the heritage of postcoloniality into island-thinking. Japan can move into this with brilliance.

We are all islanders. I am from the island of Eurasia. And I have lived for sixty years on the island of the Americas, called the Greater Caribbean by Jack D. Forbes. These are big islands.

In 2001, I taught for a semester at the University of Hawai’i and fell in fascination, as one falls in love, with the idea of Oceania. I began to think, then, that neither “Europe” nor the “United States of America” could think of itself as an island, and therefore, they were out of touch with the reality of the world—not only that “no man is an island,” but that we are all islanders.

In 2004, Maryse Condé invited me to speak to the descendants of indentured Indian laborers on the island of Guadalupe. I sang to them an island-dream song by Rabindranath Tagore and demonstrated to them how distanced we mainlanders had been, in our island fantasies, from the reality of their lives. India could not think of itself as an island, a corner of an island. I began to think, then, that the idea of nations, older than nationalisms—something like “born same-s,” men harnessing reproductive heteronormativity to push away the bigger heterogeneity of the island—was ever in a double bind with our islanded-ness. History nestles in that denial of the impossible truth of space.

I now think of Oceania as a heterogeneous place, a model for the world-island, an invitation to develop island-consciousness beyond continentality. There is no mainland.

In today’s world everything is modern. The promise is of a level playing field. If we develop island-consciousness, know that the globe is a cluster of islands in a sea of traces, and approach the heterogeneity of the ocean-world with patience, collectively, and bit by bit, rather than all at once, it is maybe the only way to find out why that field, that cluster, floating in the world-ocean, is so uneven a relief-map.

Postcoloniality celebrates a national liberation based on an orientalist nationalism, I have argued. Creolity as history celebrates archipelagic thinking. I end with a passage from my friend Gary Okihiro, Okinawan immigrant born in Hawai’i, signified “Japanese,” a luminous celebration of pidgin or creole:

While my parents were at work, I stayed with my grandparents, mainly my grandmother who lived next door. Hearing versions of Japanese and Uchinaaguchi was common in my childhood experience along with plantation pidgin English. Uchinaaguchi words like hai sai or “good day, good evening,” gachi maya or “greedy,” and chaa bira or “ excuse me” masqueraded as Japanese in my mind, along with pidgin such as bon dance, Japanese and English for o-bon or “festival of the dead,” and buta kaukau, Japanese and Chinese pidgin for “pig food” or “slop.” Buta or “pig” is Japanese, and kaukau, from Chinese pidgin chow chow for “food.” I learned my Japanese from my grandmother. No pilikia, eh? or “no worry,” obaban would soothe me in her best Japanese or so I thought. Pilikia is Hawaiian for “trouble” or “bother.”

Such was the interpenetration of languages that I long thought hoe hana or “working with a hoe” was a Japanese term. Hanahana, which I believed was Japanese for “work” is plantation pidgin English from the Hawaiian hana for “labor” or “activity.” Pau hana, then, means “finish work” or the end of the workday from the Hawaiian pau or “end.” When my grandmother cautioned me, No huhū! or “no get angry!” in English and Hawaiian, I heard her speaking to me in Japanese.

Think creolity as history, then, rather than the bounded nation upon a bounded continent. A hard task, to save a world.

参考文献 Bibliography

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Asad, Talal. Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, [2003] 2005.

Dickinson, Peter. The Poison Oracle. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

Glissant, Édouard. Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity. Translated by Celia Britton. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, [1996] 2020.

Gramsci, Antonio. Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks). Vol. terzo, Quaderni 12–29 (1932–1935). Torino: Einaudi, [1975] 2007.

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MacMillan, Margaret. War: How Conflict Shaped Us. New York: Random House, 2010.

Malik, Sayed Abdul. Rupabarir Palas. Calcutta: Bijoli Press, 1980.

Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In Surveys from Exile. Translated by Ben Fowkes. New York: Verso, [1852] 2010, 143–249.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Appendix: Prefaces to Various Language Edition.” In The Communist Manifesto. Translated by Samuel Moore. London: Pluto Press, 2017, 104–28.

Okihiro, Gary. The Boundless Sea: Self and History. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019.

Seth, Sanjay. “Lenin’s Reformulation of Marxism: the Colonial Question as a National Question.” History of Political Thought 13. i (Spring 1992): 99−128.

主持：纪建勋  责编：梁欣雨

监审：刘耘华 姚申