Europe and the Politics of Translation

The objective of this research project is to carry out an in-depth comparative study of the terms of an anthropological “polemos”, in the broadest sense, which determines the forms, expressions, norms, rules and protocols of the legitimisation of the communal in contemporary European society. In this research project centred on the dialectics of exclusion and translation, special attention will be paid to the struggle between the “European” universalist model that is today fractured, and a “multiculturalist” model of the constitution of communities.
The starting point of the project that aims to understand the new world order which seeks in vein an equilibrium and transparent rules for action and to identify new political and scientific goals, a range of central categories of western thought and politics – universal, particular, common, exception, identity, community, the Other, subjectivity, etc. must be subjected to critical examination.
The research is centred on two distinct, yet complementary, issues. The first involves an analysis of the relationship between exclusion and translation in order to render intelligible the conditions under which the neutralisation and reactivation of the principle of translation has taken place over the course of the history of Europe, on the one hand; and the occultation of exclusion in the form of an internal exclusion which goes hand in hand with the “invisibilisation” of frontiers in the era of globalisation, on the other. The second involves an inquiry into politics as the stake of translation in order to clarify the dialectics of exclusion and translation that have an influence on the perception and representation of Europe as an open plurality and to examine the “politics of translation” situated at the centre of an anti-segregationist Europe.

Applied research project "Europe and the politics of translation" is founded by Slovenian Research Agency and Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.