邊緣再思：文化、傷痛、再現─惡與真實：後現代的轉折(3/3)

In recent years, translation, in the metaphoric sense of understanding (and
accepting) alterity through some representational transport, has become a common
reference point in critical discourse, usually used to accentuate the practice of
cosmopolitan tolerance and respect for cultural difference. This paper begins with a
questioning of this trend, proposing that there is an implicit globalizing valuation of
the cosmopolitan stance that has to be analyzed and critiqued through a return to the
ethical dimension of translation. To establish the relevance of ethics, it invokes
Derrida’s account of “relevant” translation, taking it perhaps beyond Derrida’s
purpose, to advocate an ethical translation in terms of which translational judgement
is both relativized and given constraint by a sense of direction and terminality.
Walter Benjamin’s insistence on the “linguistic being” of all objects and Homi
Bhabha’s spatializing conceptualization of multilingual competence are discussed.
An ethics of the real is then proposed, which, following Lacan’s reading of Freud’s
“Project for a Scientific Psychology” in his seventh Seminar, should remind us that
to signify is not only a right but a drive, a call to return to the silenced in the
traumatic emergence of subjectivity subjectivity from matter.