Abstract
If there were only one language, we might be more certain of the essence of things...
Within a homogeneous human community, the essence of a table is unequivocally conveyed by the word “table,” and yet as soon as it reaches the boundaries of that community, it becomes uncertain.
This wavering ambiguity of the world and the insecurity of the human being who inhabits it would naturally not exist if it were not possible to learn foreign languages […]. Hence the absurdity of a universal language—which runs counter to the “human condition,” the artificial and all-powerful standardization of ambiguity.”
The counter-model to this “wavering ambiguity of the world” discussed by Hannah Arendt ( Journal of Thought , 1950) is, of course, the Greek logos —at once ratio and oratio , discourse and reason—a figure of the universal that fuses being with the expression of being, thereby turning the other into an incomprehensible barbarian.
It is the philosophical and political power of this “wavering equivocity of the world” that I would like to explore throughout this course.
It entails embracing the diversity of languages—a “condition,” as Humboldt says, “for the growth of the world’s richness and the diversity of what we know within it.” But this diversity only comes into effect through translation—the passage from one language to another—and, more precisely, the skill of navigating differences.
This is why the “untranslatables”—not what we do not translate, but what we never cease to [not] translate—are so valuable: they are symptoms of the difference between languages.
The act of translation thus compels us to pause “in between” and to complicate the universal. This is how I understand translation as the language of Europe—of one Europe—and of one world, united in diversity.
