Translation’s counter-violence

My contribution deals with the relation between translation and violence taking up the concept of de-violence as found in Rada Iveković’s work. The basis of the argument is the thesis that violence is not simply opposed to non-violence since both are interdependent. In order to discuss this, I will return to Walter Benjamin in a joint reading of his reflections on translatability and violence. The guiding questions will be the following: Do we need a critique of violence in order to produce an appropriate (political) concept of translation? If translation is not simply a non-violent communication, shall we then conceive it as a sort of counter-violence against a monolingual closure of meaning? By addressing these problems, I will try to outline the idea of “de-translation” as a true systematic violence that obstructs or annihilates the openness to the foreign. The task of translators today would be thus to be engaged in that politics of translation which counteracts the violence of systemic de-translation.