European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology

ISSN: 2325-4823 (Print) 2325-4815 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/recp20

Politics of translation: A cosmopolitan approach

Esperana Bielsa & Antonio Aguilera

To cite this article: Esperana Bielsa & Antonio Aguilera (2017) Politics of translation: A
cosmopolitan approach, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 4:1, 7-24, DOI:
10.1080/23254823.2016.1272428

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2016.1272428

Published online: 31 Jan 2017.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 21

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=recp20

Download by: [92.186.0.68] Date: 16 February 2017, At: 12:46

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, 2017
VOL. 4, NO. 1, 724
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2016.1272428

Politics of translation: A cosmopolitan approach

a
Esperana Bielsa and Antonio Aguilerab
a
Department of Sociology, Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain; bDepartment
of Philosophy, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

ABSTRACT
Translation has gained a central importance in recent accounts of
cosmopolitanism that emphasise global interdependence and the interaction
between different cultures and traditions. In this context, it becomes
necessary to formulate a politics of translation that questions some idealist
assumptions about translation that are present in the sociological literature,
specifies translation as a fundamentally ethnocentric act, and formulates
relevant strategies to confront this inherent ethnocentrism in order to open
up translation to the difference of the other. This implies a broad conception
of translation primarily as a social relation with foreignness, rather than
merely as the transfer of meaning from one language into another. In this
light, a politics of translation based on linguistic hospitality is seen as a more
realistic alternative than Derridas notion of absolute hospitality, while also
responding to problems related to the difficulty of understanding, which are
minimised in a Habermasian notion of tolerance. It also connects with a
philosophy that relates language to its anthropological and material roots,
thus presenting linguistic hospitality as a space where a human potential
based on flexibility and adaptability can flourish.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 2 June 2016; Accepted 12 December 2016

KEYWORDS Cosmopolitanism; hospitality; politics of translation

Translation in a cosmopolitan context

Translation is currently seen as a central process of intercultural com-
munication in a cosmopolitan context. However, until recently, its signifi-
cance has remained largely unnoticed in the social sciences. One reason
for this is the widespread assumption that translation is a transparent
process, which merely facilitates linguistic and cultural transfer without
leaving any traces of its intervention. In the context of globalisation,
and the ever-increasing quantities of information flows across the
world, the assumption of transparency becomes linked to one of instanta-
neity which, according to Cronin, devalues the effort, the difficulty, and

CONTACT Esperana Bielsa esperanza.bielsa@uab.cat

2017 European Sociological Association
8 E. BIELSA AND A. AGUILERA

the time required to establish and maintain cultural connections (2003,

p. 49). Thus, most approaches to globalisation have typically devoted
more attention to the circulation of information, ideas, people, and
goods than to the productive conditions that make it possible. This has
led to assuming that global texts can automatically be received by different
audiences and to obscuring the crucial intervention of translation in the
production of a multiplicity of local versions (for theoretical perspectives
dealing with translation and globalisation, see Bielsa, 2005; Bielsa & Bass-
nett, 2009; Cronin, 2003).
Whereas globalisation theory emphasises the singularity of the world,
social theories of cosmopolitanism question this pretended unicity (in
Robertsons term, 1992), underlying the multiplicity of perspectives and
the interaction between different traditions (Rumford, 2008, p. 1). Paral-
leling this development, attention to the homogenising spread of a simpli-
fied form of global English a lingua franca perceived as the
McLanguage of a globalised McWorld or as the Eurospeak of our mul-
tilingual continent (Snell-Hornby, 2000, p. 17) has increasingly given
way to a new perception of the cultural and political significance of multi-
lingualism and its complexities. It is in this context that key theorists of
what has been called the new cosmopolitanism have called attention to
the central role translation plays in mediating between different moder-
nities or traditions in our forcibly intercultural destiny. Thus, for Beck
(2006), cosmopolitan competence forces us to develop the art of trans-
lation and bridge-building relativizing ones own form of life within
other horizons of possibility (p. 89), while Delanty (2006) argues that cos-
mopolitan processes take the form of translations between things that are
different (p. 43) and uses the notion of cultural translation to focus on
how one culture interprets itself in light of the encounter with the other
and constantly undergoes change as a result (2009, p. 19398). There is
also an increasing awareness of the significance of multilingualism and
translation in key aspects of the cosmopolitan project such as global
democracy (Archibugi, 2008), human rights (De Sousa Santos, 2010),
transnational or cosmopolitan citizenship (Balibar, 2006), social move-
ments (De Sousa Santos, 2005), and borders (Balibar, 2010). Boaventura
de Sousa Santos has called attention to an underlying epistemological
issue that is relevant to all these approaches, proposing an ecology of
knowledges and intercultural translation as an alternative to a general
theory that cannot grasp the infinite diversity of the world. This
demands and makes it imperative to formulate a politics of translation.
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 9

Widening the definition of translation

If the first point of this article referred to the contention that translation is
a key process of intercultural communication in a cosmopolitan context, a
second step is to question our current definition of translation as the
transfer of a verbal message from one language into another and to
reveal its radical insufficiency to formulate a politics of translation. In
this sense, Balibar has called attention to the curious reduction of what
is understood by translation in our political constitutions, defending a
wider conception of translation as the basic instrument for the creation
of a transnational public space in a democratic sense, where ideas and pro-
jects can be debated across linguistic and administrative borders (2006,
pp. 56). Translation thus appears as a basic paradigm of the border as
a non-exclusive relationship with others that is opposed to the alternative
paradigm of war (Balibar, 2010), an exemplary instance of what Rumford
has approached through the concept of borderwork, emphasising the
involvement of ordinary people in the construction, maintenance, and dis-
mantling of borders (2008). For Balibar, the political importance of the
practice of translation lies not in the transmission of contents but in the
production of a transnational space of translation, to which he refers as
a multilateral and multicultural regime of translations. Translation is
conceived as the common idiom of this new public sphere, representing
a form of practical universalism, as opposed to the idea of a universalised
and simplified use of a shared language such as international English
(2006, p. 6). This conception of translation is based, on the one hand,
on the belief that the possibility of universalism lies precisely in this
common capacity to reach an effective communication without possessing
in advance common meanings and interpretations (Bauman, quoted in
Balibar, 2006, p. 5). On the other hand, Balibar relies on Benjamins con-
ception of translation, which insists that its function is not the trans-
mission of contents (Benjamin, 2007). For Benjamin, translation does
not play an intermediarys role, but it primarily establishes a certain
relationship with the foreign. A second, fundamental step to articulate a
politics of translation consists therefore in stating that what matters
about translation is not the information or the contents that are trans-
mitted through it, but how they are transmitted and the relationship
that is established with the foreign in the process; that is, to substitute
what could be characterised as an instrumental view of translation for a
more substantive conception of translation in its key intersubjective and
social dimensions. This is the starting point for all those who propose a
10 E. BIELSA AND A. AGUILERA

politics of translation against the limited dominant definition of trans-

lation, including authors such as Spivak (2000), Berman (1992), and
Venuti (2008), who will be referred to in what follows. And if a definition
that questions translation as the transmission of contents from one
language to another may initially seem strange, it is due to the narrow
concept of translation that we are used to, which considers it as a deriva-
tive act, as a mere reproduction of something the value of which lies
beyond translation itself (and this is why something always seems to get
lost in translation). This is a definition that reduces and depoliticises
translation.

The ethnocentrism of translation

The formulation of an alternative and political conception of translation
points to a necessary third step, which is to outline how ethnocentrism
is a central tendency or resistance in any act of translation. This aspect
of translation has not sufficiently been recognised in the recent sociologi-
cal literature on cosmopolitanism, which is in danger of adopting an
essentially idealist notion of translation. Thus, both Beck and Delanty
simply assume the possibility of transcending ethnocentrism through
translation. For Beck (2006), translation is the capacity to see oneself
from the perspective of cultural others (p. 89), while for Delanty (2009)
translation provides the possibility of incorporating the perspective of
the Other into ones own culture (p. 13). These conceptions presuppose
not only a genuine openness to others, but also that incorporating the per-
spective of the other into ones own culture is a relatively straightforward
process, thus minimising the degree of difficulty or resistance with which
one is confronted when one embarks on such a translation. However,
according to Venuti, translation is a fundamentally ethnocentric act
(1998, p. 10). Venuti (2008) emphasises the violence that is implied in
any act of translation and defines translation as the forcible replace-
ment of the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text with a
text that is intelligible to the translating-language reader (p. 14). We are
calling attention to this definition of translation as an act of ethnocentric
violence in order to problematise Beck and Delantys assumption that
translation offers the possibility of transcending ethnocentrism and to
underline that what is interesting about translation is rather the struggle
that is established with cultural ethnocentrism in any translating act.
The best theorisation of this important aspect is that offered by
Berman, who reflects on the paradox that exists between the ethnocentric
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 11

trends in any culture and what he describes as the ethical objective of

translation, which is by necessity openness, dialogue, crossbreeding, and
decentring (1992, p. 4). For Berman, a bad translation is not one which
results in a loss of meaning from the original, but one in which it is not
possible to perceive the foreignness of the original, a strangeness that
cannot be directly assimilated into the receiving culture. This is why he
refers to bad translations as ethnocentric translations, that is, those trans-
lations that carry out a systemic negation of the strangeness of the foreign
work generally under the pretext of the difficulty of its transmission (1992,
p. 5). Both Berman and Venutis approaches to the difficulties of trans-
lation can be traced back to the central notion of intelligibility. To
respect the other, to do justice to the difference of the foreign text,
means to resist to the highest possible degree the ethnocentric demand
of intelligibility, the violence inherent in translation. However, this resist-
ance also implies to subject the translators language to the strangeness of
a different tongue and can lead to the production of a text that threatens to
become unintelligible.
The relevance of these issues goes beyond an academic reflection on
translation and necessarily implies all of us as consumers of translations.
Because: are we really willing to be confronted with opaque translations
that offer not a presumably transparent access to otherness (to an other
who can readily be recognised and assimilated into our cultural patterns),
but rather make visible the difficulty of understanding others in their
strangeness? Not only with reference to the literature, in respect of
which it could be argued that it is easier to accept the autonomy of art
and its distance from an everyday reality we all take for granted, but
also with reference, for instance, to translated news, which are our
window to the world, when we cannot even perceive in them the ubiqui-
tous mediation of translation.
A textual example from the still vastly understudied field of news trans-
lation will clarify this. Silverstone starts his book on Media and morality
(2007) with a reference to an interview broadcast on BBC Radio 4
during the height of the war in Afghanistan. The interview was with an
Afghani blacksmith who offered his account of why the bombs were
falling on his village: It was because, his translated voice explained, Al
Qaeda had killed many Americans and their donkeys and had destroyed
some of their castles (2007, p. 1). Silverstone (2007) reflects on the stran-
geness of the blacksmiths appearance on British radio, which is not only
connected to the rarity of hearing the discourse of an ordinary person so
far removed from us in the news, but also to what he says and how he says
12 E. BIELSA AND A. AGUILERA

it, to the fact that he is offering an account of us as well as to us, that he is

interpreting our reality and his in order to tell us, through his voice, a
translated truth, a cultural truth, and a truth meaningful for him
(pp. 12). As Silverstone argues, it is the rare appearance of a stranger
who penetrates through the media in our home and speaks about our mis-
fortune as well as his. To this reflection we should add that the rarity of
this presence on British radio is also due to the fact that no effort has
been made to hide that translation has taken place. This contrasts with
the dominant form of translation in the media, which is characterised
by the privileging of fluent translations that make others speak as we
would ourselves, thus clouding the foreignness of their discourse and
making translation an invisible process.

Politics of translation
It is the fundamental ethnocentrism of translation, the reductive tendency
that is present in any culture, that makes it necessary to formulate a poli-
tics of translation in any cosmopolitan project; a politics of translation
based on the ethical purpose of translating, which according to Berman
is to open up in writing a certain relation with the other, to fertilise
what is ones own through the mediation of what is foreign (1992, p. 4).
No language or tradition, however big or small, dominant or minoritised,
can strive for survival by closing itself to others, by asserting the identity of
what, characteristically, lacks any identity (Derrida, 1998, p. 30; for a
reflection against ethnocentric translation, which can only be seen as a
loss in cosmopolitan terms, as well as against its qualified defence
within the discipline of translation studies, see also Bielsa, 2016, p. 78).
Ricoeur has stated that translators can find happiness in what he calls lin-
guistic hospitality, appealing to a regime of correspondence without ade-
quacy that does not erase the irreducibility of the pair of what is ones own
and what is foreign (2006, p. 10). The fourth step in order to articulate a
politics of translation of openness to the other consists therefore in invok-
ing Derridas notion of hospitality and conveying its relevance in this
context. We are referring here to a notion of unconditional hospitality
and not of mere visiting rights, as in Kants version of hospitality,
because even though the latter radically affirmed hospitality as a right
of individuals and not of states in a cosmopolitan context, the Kantian
concept of hospitality remained caught in the paradox that it only guaran-
teed entry into a state, but not the right to permanently settle in it (Kant,
1991). Derrida and Dufourmantelle (2000) appeals instead to a notion of
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 13

absolute hospitality that is beyond the law and that also demands a break
with the hospitality of the law:
[A]bsolute hospitality should break with the law of hospitality as right or duty,
with the pact of hospitality. To put it in different terms, absolute hospitality
requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (pro-
vided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to
the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I
let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them,
without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their
names (p. 25).

Absolute hospitality may be unattainable, but only linguistic hospitality

understood as an absolute or unconditional hospitality that lets the stran-
geness of the foreign tongue arrive and does not hide it under a pretended
equivalence or false familiarity will make it possible to fertilise what is
ones own through the mediation of what is foreign, thus allowing the
incorporation of the perspective of the other into ones own culture that
Delanty and Beck refer to. Absolute hospitality, as Derrida points out,
breaks with the law of hospitality as a right or as a duty. Beyond the
obvious reason that an ethical translation of the other, that is, a translation
that does justice to the difference of the other, is not contemplated in any
regime of rights, one would need to approach a politics of translation
based on linguistic hospitality as a responsibility and not as a right.
This is a responsibility that is beyond the law and that must also be dis-
tinguished from the concept of duty (Aguilera, 1999, pp. 122125), a
responsibility that cannot be put under a general rule, but requires
instead a strategic ethical and political positioning of the translator in
front of a concrete situation. In many instances, this responsibility not
only anticipates the law, or is even positioned in certain cases against
the norm so that justice can be done, but also refers to the circumstances
and conditions in which genuine communication can be established. This
cannot be articulated from a rights-based approach, which approves of
any type of communication as long as nobodys rights are infringed.
This point can be illustrated with two reflections about the positioning
and responsibility of the translator in a context marked not only by cul-
tural and linguistic difference, but also by pronounced inequality and
asymmetry. They refer to how the translator confronts the challenges of
translation in a concrete situation which, as has already been indicated,
is the only way in which a politics of translation can be articulated. The
first concerns Spivaks reflections on translation, in essays like Translating
into English (2005) and, especially, in her influential essay entitled The
14 E. BIELSA AND A. AGUILERA

politics of translation (2000). The author deals with the responsibility of

the translator who translates from non-European languages into English, a
responsibility which is greater because of certain geopolitical compli-
cations like the growing power of English as global lingua franca, the
demand for translations from non-Western literatures as a quick way of
accessing other cultures, and the non-existence of a community of poly-
glots in the receiving society which could judge such translations. For
Spivak, only from a reflection on the ethical and political responsibility
of the translator, who does not simply transmit the contents of a
foreign literature but reproduces them assuming their opacity from
what she calls a sense of the retoricity of language, can a neo-colonialist
construction of the non-Western scene be avoided (2000, p. 399).
Global asymmetries and inequalities demand a more immediate
response from the translator in the second case for reflection provided
here, which refers to the context of legal interpreting. Take for instance
the interpreter who clearly perceives in the accent of the man she is inter-
preting that he is from Morocco and not a Palestine from Ramallah as he
pretends to be, but decides not to reveal this to the police so as not to jeo-
pardise his claim that he is a refugee. As Inghilleri points out in her excel-
lent book Interpreting justice, the principles of neutrality and impartiality
contained in interpreters codes of practice should not be taken to mean
abdication from the personal and social responsibilities in their role
(2012, p. 51). In cases like the one we have referred to, the professional
duty of the interpreter, which consigns her to a mere role of mediator
from a supposed position of neutrality or impartiality, would not allow
her to respond to power abuses or injustices that she may witness, or
would even lead her to become an accomplice of these abuses. Just as
justice is beyond the law, a politics of translation based on linguistic hos-
pitality is beyond the deontological obligations of the translator, and
obliges us to think in a different way.

A non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism
A politics of translation constitutes an important and necessary aspect of
any approach to the possibility of articulating a non-Eurocentric cosmo-
politanism. In the cosmopolitanism debate, the issue of Eurocentrism has
come to the fore not only as the consequence of postcolonial critiques of
Western cosmopolitan designs (Mendieta, 2009; Mignolo, 2000; Van der
Veer, 2002), but also because of the unhappiness of authors such as Chris
Rumford with the centrality attributed to Europes role in a cosmopolitan
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 15

project or, in his words, with the desire to install cosmopolitanism as

Europes big idea, which he sees most evident in the work of Habermas
(Rumford, 2008, p. 3). Recent contributions have also sought to call atten-
tion to the relevance of non-Western cosmopolitanisms, such as for
instance Fanons postcolonial cosmopolitanism (Go, 2013a). Translation
appears as a crucial instance through which actually existing relations
between different cultural traditions can be approached, whether one
insists on the interconnected nature of spaces and traditions, such as in
some postcolonial accounts centred on connected histories (Bhambra,
2014, Go, 2013b), or whether, alternatively, the idea of modernity as a con-
dition that simply spreads from the West to the rest of the world is ques-
tioned and the existence of and interaction between different forms of
modernity or multiple modernities (Eisenstadt, 2000; Wagner, 2011,
2012) is recognised in the formulation of a notion of cosmopolitan mod-
ernity (Beck & Grande, 2010). However, so far, the relevance of a politics
of translation has not been explored in the sociological literature, and the
central importance of linguistic interconnections for any cosmopolitan
project has been ignored. There is one notable exception: Delantys
recent article (2014), where the author calls attention to the need to trans-
late between different world varieties of cosmopolitanism as a key aspect
of the construction of a critical, non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism.
Delantys views on cultural translation rely on an implicit politics of trans-
lation based on linguistic hospitality. What we are defending in this article
is the importance not only of realising the crucial role translation plays in
mediating between different varieties of cosmopolitanism, but also of
making explicit that only certain forms of translation will enable such a
possibility. Translation can be and is being used in ethnocentric and Euro-
centric designs to abolish difference and to render the other falsely fam-
iliar. A politics of translation based on linguistic hospitality that
assumes the responsibility of doing justice to the other must face up to
multiple political, economic, and cultural impediments derived from
global pressures for quick, transparent, fluent translations that can be
readily consumed by publics without threatening values that are often
taken for granted. Only if we are aware of the difficulties for such trans-
lations as well as of the important role they can play in a cosmopolitical
direction can a politics of translation be fully enlisted to contribute to the
construction of a non-Eurocentric cosmopolitanism, particularly through
the translation of significant forms of non-European cosmopolitanism
that have been rather marginalised in the cosmopolitanism debate. This
is a hugely relevant form of translation that inverts the dominant direction
16 E. BIELSA AND A. AGUILERA

of global translation flows, which take place predominantly from the west to
the rest of the world, and that can become a source of growth and renewal of
genuinely open and globally significant cosmopolitan projects.

An alternative to a politics of identity

A politics of translation also constitutes an alternative to a politics of iden-
tity or of recognition (Taylor, 1994), which since the decade of 1970 have
been at the basis of multiculturalist politics in Western democracies. This
is because a political understanding of translation such as that we are
defending here leads us to question certain fundamental aspects of what
we understand by identity; it explodes the very notion of identity. In
this perspective, the key for living together in heterogeneous societies
does not lie in the recognition of identity and of cultural difference, but
in the practices of cultural translation where openness to others leads to
self-problematisation and change, to the perception of ones own limits
and not to the reinforcement of an assumed originary identity that ema-
nates from old presuppositions about what cultures and individuals are.
As Ivekovic (2005) maintains,
The idea of translating, between cultures as an open-ended relational and reci-
procal gesture of freedom putting into question the translator and the orig-
inal itself can be opposed to the somewhat limiting and communitarian
(communalist) arrogant idea of a dialogue between cultures [], often pro-
posed by a benevolent yet limited multi-culturalist approach (p. 6).

Ivekovic shares several of the ideas that have been elaborated upon in this
article, starting with a political conception of translation that asserts that it
signicantly transforms both the original text and the translator. A similar
approach to the inherently destabilising effects of translation can be found
in Naoki Sakais critique of what he refers to as the metaphysics of com-
munication (embodied in the conventional notion of translation as trans-
fer and as the establishment of homogenising equivalence) and of the
binary opposition between same and other that is established by a
regime of translation based on monolingual address. Instead, Sakai
argues for a different attitude based on the translators ambiguous and
unstable position as a subject in transit, or a form of heterolingual
address as a situation in which one addresses oneself as a foreigner to
another foreigner (2006, p. 75)
The notion of transformation, of the incorporation of the perspective of
the other into ones own culture, is diametrically opposed to what is
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 17

behind that of identity, with reference both to individual self-identity and

to the concept of a community with well-defined borders that is presup-
posed by the idea of a dialogue between cultures, which in reality serves to
hide existing differences and asymmetries between them. As Ivekovic
points out, identity essentialises and naturalises culture (2005, p. 5).
While the main source of identity is the process of construction of alterity,
translation points to the opposite process, that of a radical and reciprocal
exchange between different forms of being or existing, a questioning of self
in light of the difference of the other that is at the basis of a cosmopolitan
notion of genuine openness to others.
This defence of a politics of translation against a politics of identity does
not only refer to normative principles and philosophical issues, but also
possesses an eminently sociological and empirical aspect in the sense
that Beck defended in his book The cosmopolitan vision (2006). We live
in a society that, in a certain sense, has been cosmopolitanised. The cos-
mopolitan vision enables us to perceive an already existing cosmopolitan
reality, a reality of multiple belonging or cultural hybridity, of translated
lives and world families, a reality that escapes and can no longer be
grasped by traditional conceptions of identity, which assume a natural
correlation between the identity of individuals and the place they belong
to. If we take, for example, world families, a concept through which
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim analyse a growing and particularly relevant
case through which the contradictions caused by globalisation are mani-
fested in the everyday and intimate life of families (2014), we realise
that there is not a possible notion of identity that defines them, but a per-
manent struggle with the contradiction and difference that characterises
them, a translation that is always provisional and therefore unfinished
and infinite between different ways of existing. World families question
our most familiar assumptions about what families are; like strangers,
they are ambivalent figures of non-identity. In a similar way, a cosmopo-
litan politics of translation makes strangeness appear in the midst of what
is most familiar to us, our mother tongue. And only when identity disap-
pears, when the unquestioned immediacy of the circumstances that sur-
round us vanishes, can we think ourselves and openly relate to others in
a world that has become increasingly strange.

Identity in non-identity
A notion of identity in non-identity allows us to break with the bipolarity
that is presupposed by the disjunctive between either an identity as the
18 E. BIELSA AND A. AGUILERA

iteration of something positive (blood, soil, language, ethnos, culture) or a

fragmentation or decomposition of what lacks any identity. In this task of
an identity in non-identity at a cosmopolitan level, linguistic hospitality
could be key in drawing attention to a language that constitutes us and
that has to open itself to everything that appears within us and outside,
in the most strange forms, whether they are discursive or not, whether
they come from wakefulness or dream. Derridas notion of hospitality
has the important advantage of showing what exceeds the subject and
has to be confronted with oneself and with others, especially with those
who are the strangest; in that, as Levinas or Mead has demonstrated
(Levinas, 1991; Mead, 1934), we are something derived from our relation-
ship with others. We would not be ourselves had we not been taken care of
for a long time by another (the mother) who unconditionally opened
herself to our fragility, a condition of everything that is human, an absol-
ute condition of its own strength and resistance, of its adulthood. There
are multiple paradoxes here: another appears that is internalised as one,
a fragility emerges that gives way to a stronger resistance because of the
ability to adapt to the new in a context that changes with every situation.
From an anthropological perspective centred on what constitutes us as
human (Aguilera, 1993) or from the function of an intelligence that
mobilises drives, movements, and sensations that are open to the other,
the notion of Derridean hospitality wishes to account for the need of
incorporating the foreign. But it demands too much because it invokes
an unconditionality that is not even limited by the law. This is why a
more realistic idea of tolerance that has been transformed by a notion
of democracy, which Habermas establishes at the centre of the social
(1998), might appear more plausible. In a cosmopolitan space or society
we have to be tolerant with others, always with the possibility of under-
standing that presupposes dialogue as the core of a generalised democracy.
The role of the social subsystems as a strange frame that limits interactions
or that can colonise them must not be forgotten, but only tolerance as a
condition for dialogue would allow the establishment of social relations
between different cultures or forms of life. However, there still exists in
this notion of Habermasian tolerance a problem that the idea of hospital-
ity uncovers with respect to a fully human sociality: the difficulty of under-
standing. Habermas displaces this towards the social subsystems that
operate through non-linguistic means. But the idea of hospitality incor-
porates the need to include others even when they cannot establish a dia-
logue or simply do not want to. To a certain degree, it recalls the shelter
that the newly born finds within the social or family niche, even in the
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 19

case of significant disabilities. Here, the key is to accept the non-intellig-

ibility of others, to take them in as beings who cannot be reduced to
understanding or recognition; not only to recognise them or to commu-
nicate with them, but also to embrace them, to care for them, allowing
them to be as human beings, whether we understand them or not.
In Monolingualism of the other, Derrida developed the idea that my
language, my own language, is, for me, a language that cannot be assimi-
lated because my language is the language of the other (1998, p. 25). This
alienation constitutes us in what cannot be alienated, in what is not alien-
ation, because it structures us and our property of language. Do we need to
suggest that most intimately within us there inhabits a stranger, that
within what most appears to be our own there is an ineradicable strange-
ness? We should respect what is strange not out of altruism or because I
should love my neighbour as myself, but because love of myself requires
love of the other, of the stranger. It requires an acceptance of what
cannot be assimilated in what is strange, because it concerns our most inti-
mate self. We believe that a concept of linguistic hospitality would
improve on the idea of Derridean hospitality by displacing it in its deploy-
ment, removing that disturbing aspect, the terrifying principle that denies
the idea of tolerance and gives it its force: openness to an absolute that
could be deadly. In the unconditional hospitality that admits others and
gives them shelter without asking them their names or intentions, even
if they are criminals or terrorists, there exists the danger that the world
that gives hospitality could be decomposed and destroyed. One could
think of an antechamber to such hospitality and the absolute weight it
carries with it. Linguistic hospitality would give a place to others in
their language in what remains unintelligible of their language as a
translation that does not close itself by aiming for immediate usefulness.
It would give the foreign a space so that it could at least settle in the
realm of our language and of what that language opens up in our intelli-
gence and our affectivity, in our senses and movements: a strangeness that
could grow in us in a non-absolute way, making possible a genuine open-
ness to the other, their world and intentions, without having to put in
danger what we are in an unconditional way, as if others were sacred. Lin-
guistic hospitality acts as an antechamber to real hospitality, which is key
for the interaction between cultures and forms of life in a cosmopolitan
context, making visible not only the importance of a hospitable trans-
lation, as opposed to an instrumental one centred on communication of
meaning, or even a tolerant one, but also as a first step towards the formu-
lation of political possibilities that can take concrete shape in spaces of
20 E. BIELSA AND A. AGUILERA

non-Eurocentric normativity between different cultures. It is a way of

acknowledging Derridas perspective, which defends an absolute but not
very plausible hospitality, as well as that of Habermas, which argues for
dialogue in an already cosmopolitanised public space that could face up
to the systemic dynamics generated by globalisation. Linguistic hospital-
ity, which is prior to any possibility of dialogue or democratic interaction
at the global level, maintains a relationship with the foreign without an
absolute surrender to its form of life or intentions, as if ours was
nothing or deserved to die or to put itself recklessly in danger.

Linguistic hospitality
A politics of hospitable translation insists on the materiality of language,
beyond any reduction of the linguistic to a set of ideas that are transferred
from a source to a receiver, a reductionism of language to signification or
discursivity, to mere communication. It is very close to the artistic processes
that are capable of taking that hospitality to other means of expression,
always around the senses, movements, and drives of human intelligence
capable of establishing the means and the ends for everything that is
human desire, in all its variety and multiplicity. Such a conception of
language is placed before a linguistic idealism that emphasises signification
or discursivity, believing that the signifying means are only instruments of
information or communication, which leads to underrate not only the aes-
thetic aspect of language, but also those languages and cultures that are
apparently distant from certain lines of progressive development. It is
also placed before an idealist cosmopolitanism, which minimises or does
not take seriously enough the real difficulties that exist for adopting the per-
spective of the other in ones own culture, ignoring the cultural resistances
that emerge when one embarks on a translation that does not falsify, which
attempts to offer hospitality to what is translated.
A cosmopolitan politics of translation refers to an identity that is not
constituted through its closure to unconceivable, unintelligible strange-
ness, forgetting what made possible the very constitution of this identity
with reference to socialisation, enculturation, or simple protection of
ones own necessary vulnerability as an anthropological condition of
human potential. Childhood is a key model for understanding something
that is no longer intelligible for the adult, as Benjamin knew when he
referred to children as representatives of paradise (Benjamin, 1996,
p. 1243). How could one enter language, a socialised world, by not attend-
ing prodigiously to what is strange without any resistance that does not
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 21

derive from the very experience that is being articulated? The newly born
as a stranger must turn strangeness itself into his or her world in order to
become a member of the social world, in order to cease to be a stranger.
The process that leads to adulthood does not end with a result that
would reduce the living human to mere discursivity, intelligibility, or rec-
ognition. Language carries many remainders, as shown by psychoanalysis
or the old cure through words, Christian confession, or psychological
relief in traumas or disasters. The apparent centrality of understanding
hides alienation in language, the unilaterality of the rational. Human
beings conceived as premature births must find a social niche in which
to complete their development, full of shortcomings when compared
with other similar animals, even in what would seem most elementary
for a classical anthropological philosophy (senses, movements, and
drives). They receive their identity from the non-identical that constitutes
them, which existed before they were themselves and continues to exist in
them in a way that is not reducible to their mere individual consciousness
or to those of the series of human beings who cared for them. This presup-
poses, at the individual and social levels, an infrastructure of rational pro-
cesses that are marked by the foreign, by the non-identical, by
impressions, movements, and drives. A conception of language that
attends to drive and sensorimotor infrastructure allows us not only to
better connect what is not identical to linguistic signification, but also to
chart complex social processes that are deposited as language and that
can be guided from language. Art, in its diverse material configurations
(sound, visuality, movement, spatiality, and so on), reminds us time and
again of these connections, of the roots of language.
To place a linguistic hospitality that anticipates and makes real hospi-
tality accessible at the centre is to activate an an anthropological view of
how language operates discursively; this includes the ways it makes both
social and individual vitality possible. This not only refers us to the back-
ground of our own language, but it also makes possible to genuinely meet
others with what in their language has become manageable for us. An
identity that reveals a glimpse of linguistic hospitality could avoid an iden-
tity that autoimmunises itself in processes of closure, of a repetition that is
assumed to be eternal but is still ephemeral and fragile, only less flexible
and often less resistant and capable of survival. What at the philogenetic
level distinguishes intelligence from instinct is not much more than this
flexibility, which is impossible to sustain through the preservation of a
dogmatic core of origins and essence that the old identitarian identity
treats as an idol. There is no lasting tradition that is not renewed by the
22 E. BIELSA AND A. AGUILERA

foreign. Linguistic hospitality allows for this innovation without parting

blindly with what deserves to be preserved. Thus, linguistic hospitality
could be the core of a politics of translation that is open to the foreign,
neither closed nor absolutely open. Where Derridean hospitality would
invoke a negative theology without any remaining borders, and where
Habermasian tolerance would demand equality across borders, a politics
of translation centred on linguistic hospitality draws a porous border in
a cosmopolitan space. It really follows a perspective that led Derrida in
his later work to preserve a minimal nation state in an international
context, and Habermas to insist on a cosmopolitan constitution with
few remaining borders. Close to real hospitality, such a politics of trans-
lation could give social shape to welcoming foreignness, conform it in
language, that material of our wakefulness and dreams, of collective
longing, that has modified and stirs our flesh, sending it beyond a spirit
conceived as mere ideality, beyond culture as a mere symbolic game.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness
under [grant number CSO2011-23097].

ORCID
Esperana Bielsa http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5882-3382

References
Aguilera, A. (1993). Hombre y cultura. Madrid: Trotta.
Aguilera, A. (1999). Responsabilidad negativa. In M. Cruz & R. R. Aramayo (Eds.), El
reparto de la accin. Ensayos en torno a la responsabilidad (pp. 115140). Madrid:
Editorial Trotta.
Archibugi, D. (2008). The global commonwealth of citizens. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Balibar, E. (2006). Strangers as enemies: Further reflections on the aporias of transna-
tional citizenship (Globalization Working Papers). Irvine: Universit de Paris-X
Nanterre and University of California.
Balibar, E. (2010). At the borders of citizenship: A democracy in translation?
European Journal of Social Theory, 13(3), 315322.
 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 23

Beck, U. (2006). The cosmopolitan vision. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Beck, U., & Beck-Gernsheim, E. (2014). Distant love. Cambridge: Polity.
Beck, U., & Grande, E. (2010). Varieties of second modernity: The cosmopolitan turn
in social and political theory and research. The British Journal of Sociology, 61(3),
409443.
Benjamin, W. (1996). Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. I, 3. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Benjamin, W. (2007). Illuminations. New York, NY: Schocken Books.
Berman, A. (1992). The experience of the foreign. Culture and translation in romantic
Germany. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Bhambra, G. K. (2014). Connected sociologies. London: Bloomsbury.
Bielsa, E. (2005). Globalisation and translation: A theoretical approach. Language and
Intercultural Communication, 5(2), 131144.
Bielsa, E. (2016). Cosmopolitanism and translation. Investigations into the experience
of the foreign. London: Routledge.
Bielsa, E., & Bassnett, S. (2009). Translation in global news. London: Routledge.
Cronin, M. (2003). Translation and globalization. London: Routledge.
Delanty, G. (2006). The cosmopolitan imagination: Critical cosmopolitanism and
social theory. The British Journal of Sociology, 57(1), 2547.
Delanty, G. (2009). The cosmopolitan imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Delanty, G. (2014). Not all is lost in translation: World varieties of cosmopolitanism.
Cultural Sociology, 8(4), 374391.
Derrida, J. (1998). Monolingualism of the other. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Derrida, J., & Dufourmantelle, A. (2000). Of hospitality. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
De Sousa Santos, B. (2005). The future of the world social forum: The work of trans-
lation. Development, 48(2), 1522.
De Sousa Santos, B. (2010). Descolonizar el saber, reinventar el poder. Development
and change. Montevideo: Trilce.
Eisenstadt, S. N. (2000). Multiple modernities. Daedalus, 129(1), 129.
Go, J. (2013a). Fanons postcolonial cosmopolitanism. European Journal of Social
Theory, 16(2), 208225.
Go, J. (2013b). For a postcolonial sociology. Theory and Society, 42(1), 2555.
Habermas, J. (1998). The inclusion of the other. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Inghilleri, M. (2012). Interpreting justice. London: Routledge.
Ivekovic, R. (2005). Transborder translating. Eurozine. Retrieved from www.eurozine.
com
Kant, I. (1991). Political writings (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levinas, E. (1991). Totality and infinity. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Mendieta, E. (2009). From imperial to dialogical cosmopolitanism. Ethics & Global
Politics, 2(3), 241258.
Mignolo, W. (2000). The many faces of cosmo-polis: Border thinking and critical cos-
mopolitanism. Public Culture, 12(3), 721748.
Ricoeur, P. (2006). On translation. London: Routledge.
24 E. BIELSA AND A. AGUILERA

Robertson, R. (1992). Globalization. Social theory and global culture. London: Sage.
Rumford, C. (2008). Cosmopolitan spaces. London: Routledge.
Sakai, N. (2006). Translation. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(23), 7178.
Silverstone, R. (2007). Media and morality. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Snell-Hornby, M. (2000). Communicating in the global village: On language, trans-
lation and cultural identity. In C. Schffner (Ed.), Translation in the global
village (pp. 1128). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Spivak, G. C. (2000). The politics of translation. In L. Venuti (Ed.), The translation
studies reader (pp. 397416). London: Routledge.
Spivak, G. C. (2005). Translating into English. In S. Bermann & M. Wood (Eds.),
Nation, language, and the ethics of translation (pp. 93110). Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism.
Examining the politics of recognition (pp. 2573). Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Van der Veer, P. (2002). Colonial cosmopolitanism. In S. Vertovec & R. Cohen (Eds.),
Conceiving cosmopolitanism (pp. 165179). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Venuti, L. (1998). The scandals of translation. London: Routledge.
Venuti, L. (2008). The translators invisibility: A history of translation (2nd ed.).
London: Routledge.
Wagner, P. (2011). From interpretation to civilization and back: Analyzing the tra-
jectories of non-European modernities. European Journal of Social Theory, 14(1),
89106.
Wagner, P. (2012). Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.