#translatability

For the work of translating the general equivalences that obtain in the market of markets is work that becomes a quantum, but always, both simultaneously and not, something else, something that scans differently and which cannot be made to measure up to its quantity, which is untranslatable from the hyperbolic form of rhetorical presentation to the hyperbolic form of mathematical representation. This untranslatability which is not one, which is not one inasmuch as it cannot measure up to the quantum, marks the spot where the university, and the speculative disciplines at its core, exceed or lose their credit, and cease to produce value in and concerning the identities, the objects and circuits, at work in the market of markets. The ‘crucial defect … in the structuration/destructuration of … relations’ [Laclau] emerges just here, where the principles of analogy, equivalence, exchange and abstraction, that is to say, where the general principles of translatability and untranslatability-which-is-not-one, become the work of thought inasmuch as those general principles fail to form a coherent system that could, in principle, become the conceptual principle grounding a market of markets in global capitalism. And Derrida’s most powerful suggestion—with which I would like to conclude—is that this thinking, because it concerns what is impossible in translation, is not only the proper work of philosophy; it occurs not only in the guarded disciplinary groves of the university or the formal institutions destined to encourage and to protect speculative thought. Translation, and the accompanying untranslatability-which-is-not-one, are, to return to Marx’s words, a ‘point of departure’ located in ‘individuals producing in a society, and hence the socially determined production of individuals’. Translation, and its accompanying untranslatability-which-is-not-one, are as it were first political economy. They are proper to the ethico-political work we do, I myself and you yourself, at the moment when we encounter one another, when each of us measures up to what is immeasurable for us in the other and in the other’s idiom, when we speak out of measure so as to measure out, each to the other, phrases we take to be ours, phrases bearing our names and bearing what matters most to us, ce qui nous importe/emporte, Derrida’s phrases, even my own to you today.

Not that I am cultivating the untranslatable. Nothing is untranslatable, [so long as one takes the time to spend, or to expand, a competent discourse that measures itself against the power of the original]. But the ‘untranslatable’ remains—should remain, as my law tells me—the poetic economy of the idiom, the one that is important to me, for I would die even more quickly without it, and which is important to me, myself to myself, where a given formal ‘quantity’ always fails to restore the singular event of the original, that is to let it be forgotten once recorded, to carry away its number, the prosodic shadow of its quantum … In a sense, nothing is untranslatable; but in another sense, everything is untranslatable; translation is another name for the impossible. In another sense of the word ‘translation,’ of course, and from one sense to the other—it is easy for me always to hold firm between these two hyperboles which are fundamentally the same, and always translate each other.

Make hard-coded text in SAP ABAP translatable

2017 Popsugar Reading Challenge Progress

Untranslatable — the most alluring, provocative word in the language. Circle it. Prod it. Give it a kick. See if it moves.

Everything can be translated. That which is ‘untranslatable’ hasn't yet found its translator.