The Po! ies of Untranslatability‘3S Nothing Is Translatable ‘Over the last three decades, the French philosopher Alain Badiou (building ‘on Gilles Deleuze) has reworked notions of singularity and poetic universal ism for Comparative poetics in an era that has often treated such principles as theoretically suspect, While I remain wary of attempts to resuscitate uni- polar thinking at the expense of multiplicity, entropy, heterodoxy, and trans versality find Badiou’s refutation of easy relationality, along with his will ingness (0 tecognize the limits of cultucal translation, an incentive to rethink translation studies trom the standpoint ofthe presumption that “nothing i translatable.” Construing a translation theory from Badiou is tantamount to playing devil's advocate with my own conviction (set out in the last se tion on humanism) that the translation zone is established on the basis of the philological relation, Ina chapter of his book of essays Petit Manuel dinesthétigue (1998) devoted t0 @ comparison between the poets Labid ben Rabi’a and Mallarmé, adiou emphasizes the chasms and gulf of untranslatabilty that make the enterpei#® of comparative literature so tenuous. The chapter's opening line—"Jé ne ctois pas beaucoup a la littérature comparée” (“I do not really believe in comparative literature”) —prepares his case for disbelief in matters of literafY Comparatism, placing the anus of skepticism on the overdeter~ mined failure of translations to transmit the genius of a source text. In Badiou’s View, translation itself is tantamount to a writing of disaster, a kind of black hole or meaning-void; and yet, for all the obstacies posed by translation, "great poems” surmount the difficulty of being worlds apart and marge to achieve universal significance. This poetic singularity against all odds challenges the laws of linguistic tervtorialization that quarantine language gr0ups in communities “of their own kind” (as in Romance orast Asian languages) or enforce a condition in which monolngualisms coexist without relation, Badiou’s literary universalism, built on affinities of the Kea (“une prosimité dans la pensée”) rather than on philologieal connections or shared sociohistorical trajectories, defines a kind of comparatisme quand réme that complements the miltant credo of his political philosophy (in- dlebted to Becket’s formula for existence—"I can't yo on, Iwill go on”). It argues for the abilty of art to release the revolutionary possibility of an Event by making manifest Truth, a truth that surges forth unexpectedly from a's most “inaesthtic” philosophical expressionism. Ultimately itis a text’ singularity that confers universal value or truth. Identifiable as the form of ‘what is untepresentable inthe situation—its void or emply set—singulaity lines up in Baciou's political thought sith the exception or exclusion on which a set is grounded. According to Badiou's mathematical ontology, in- debted to Cantor’s set theory, singularity qualifies as an “evental site” guid- ing revolutionary teuth to the historical situation. fn aesthetic terms, singu- larity is what allows a given poetic masterwork to become the predicate of a shape shifting poetic form, a cartier of universal truth insofar as it exceeds specificity or the boundaries of the relation.’ Badiou's account ofthis singular universalism has interesting ra fications for literary comparatism, as seen in the example of Labid ben Rabi'a and Mallarmé. A comparison between 1wo wildly divergent au- thors—one a nomad writing in classical Arabic in the pre-Islamic period, the other a bourgeois salonist of Second Empire Franee—has just as much credence for Badiow asa comparison between authors hailing from a shared tradition. Indeed, it would often seem that the greater the arc of radical dissimilitude and incomparability the truer the proof of poctie universal ism, Badiou’s astece, which almost seems to insist that comparativty with the least relation guarantees the maximum of poetic universalism, challenges shibboleths of translation theory and comparative literature alike. Transla- tion theory and Comp Lit have traditionally supported each other in arguing for enhanced conduits of linguistic and cultural exchange. The principle (of adequatio, based on values of equivalence, commonality, and aesthetic mieasure, has led tothe professional triage of literary fells, with compari- sons favored among language groups with a shared philological heritage Even newer forms of postcolonial comparatisy have inadvertently perpetu- ated neocolonial geopolitics in carrying over the imperial carve-up of in- guistc fields. So, for example, in the case of the Caribbean: Haiti, Marti= nique, and Guadeloupe ae placed under the eubric of Francophone studies, CCuby falls under the purview of Spanish and Latin American studies, and 86 cHapreR s Jamaica remains sequestered in Anglophone filds. While there are obvious historical and pedagogical reasons for maintaining geopolitical relations be- tween dominants and their former colonies, protectorate, and clint states {one wouldn't want, for example, to encourage European literatures to erase the past of their colonial encounters orto relinquish commitments to post- colonigl literatures), there are equally compelling arguments for abandoning postcolonial geography. Francophone might, then, no longer simply desig- nate the transnational relations among metropolitan France and its former «colonies, but linguistic contact zones all over the world in which French, or somie kind of French, i one of many languages in play. Badiou’s comparatism could not be further from ths lcation-con- scious “translational transnationatism,” a term I have relied on to anchor the rethinking of translation studies. If there isa transnational dimension to his reading practice, it is produced collaterally, that s to say, as an unin- tended side effect of tracking the [dea wherever it might lead him. Where postcolonial comparatists have imagined a “trans” to “trans” space-time of Iiterary analysis, reciprocally arraigning minority languages while bypassing ‘metropolitan vehicular tongues (as in the hypothetical translation of Mone ton Joual into the Creole spoken in Mauritious, Tagalog into Ogoni, Hin: lish into Spanglish), Badiou pays little heed to linguistic class struggle. ‘Comparative literature—even when it relies on the imperfect vehicle of translation (“toujours presque désastrucuse”)—rises to the political occa- sion precisely because it contributes to the unpredictable release ofa revolu- tionary Truth-Event; this is what makes it an important “inaesthetic praxis (sth “inaesthetic” referring to the "stritly intraphilosophical effects pro- duced by the independent existence of works of art”) Thus, Badiou's read ing of Labid ben Rabi’a and Mallarmé promises a comparative literature that seeks out rather than shies away from parallels between languages of ‘great discrepancy. Though he himself s not interested per se in making an argument about comparative literature asa discipline, his provocative open ing salvo “Je ne erois pas beaucoup a la litérature comparée” hitched ro a tempering “Bt pourtant” stakes its claim on a Comp Lit willing to embrace linguistic nonidentty. Like Walter Benjamin, in “The Task of the Transha- tox” he accepts translation failure as an a priori condition (Benjamin argues that to translate mere content is simply to repeat, badly, the most inessential ‘nature ofthe original), and like Benjamin, he turn ths failure to advantage, transforming it into an enabling mechanism of pote truth | must confess to having been initially disconcerted by Badiou’s blanket rejection of the ethics of location. Bot on further reflection, his paradiga of comparatisme quand méme seemed bracing, a way of confront- 87 NOTHING 15 TRANSLATABLEing the bare truth of translational dysfunction while soldieting on. There was also theoretical significance accruing tothe specific comparison between the Arabic ode (the mu’allaga) of Labid ben Rabi’a and Mallarmé’ sym- bolist masterwork (Un Coup de dé) “We remain,” Badioa insists, “between Mallarmé and the wuallaga” (PM 85). The choice to compare these particu- lar Arabic and French texts is gradually revealed as far from arbitrary: ques- tions of democracy and subjectivation, terrorism, despotism, the nature of mastery, the seduction of sacred language, the influence of clans (the “call” ‘of the tribu), the intoxicating desire for collective destiny anda vita conmmu- nis, the sacrifice of civilization to science and technology, the spiritual “de sert” or empty set of subjectivity, decampment, exile, and the defection of place—these ideas of paramount mutual conceen to Labid ben Rabi'a and Mallarmé constitute an Event in Badiou’s sense of that term, even as they announce a universalist poetics that allows for linguistic relations of radical dlissimilitude Badiou's argument that “we remain between Mallarmé and the u- ‘allaga” prompts examination of a muvallaga by Mahmoud Darwish, A Rhyme for the Odes (Mu'allagat), published in 1995. Darwish triangulates the anomalous pairing of Labid ben Rabi and Mallaemé with his medita- tion on exile and the autonomy of the word: No one guided me to myself. [am the guide. / Between desert and sea, Lam my own guide to myself... Who am F This isa question that others ask, but has no answer. / Tam my language, 1 am an ode, two oes, ten, This is my language. / Lam my lan- ‘guage. Lam words’ verit: Be! Be my body! And I become an em- bodiment of their timbre, /T am what I have spoken to the words Be the place where / my body joins the eternity ofthe desert / Be, 50 that may become my words’ (emphasis in the text) Darwish chisels a subjective space from the desert sand, itself an expanse defined by temporal portage and forced emigration: “They emigrated. / ‘They carried the place and emigrated, they carried time and emigrated.” With a concluding line “So let there be prose,” Darwish would seem to echo Mallarmé’s famous phrase in Crise de vers “Je dis: une fleue!” (“I say: a flower") or the categorical infinitive “Ferite” of Quant au Livres In the face ‘of disaster—defined by Mallarmé as the crisis brought on by Vietor Hugo's ‘overdetermination of modern verse—these simple declarative utterances in ‘duce a revolution in poetic language, licensing prose to become a purveyor of the universal poetic idea (“la notion pure”). The last line of Darwish’s, ‘mu‘allag, “There must be a divine prose for the Prophet to triumph," also a8 cHASTERS alles Mallarmé’s finale in Quant au Livre: “Lair ou chant sous le texte, conduisant la divination d'ici, y applique son motif en fleuron et cul-le- lampe invisibles” (“The tune or song beneath the text, inching our guess- work forward, applies its emblem to the text as an invisible fleuron and tallpice”)? Both poets accord the language of the everyday a prophetic, incantatory sway. Moreover, Darwish’s writing, like that of Labid ben Rabi'a and Mallarmé, builds on the void as the Abgrund of singular creation. The form ofthis singularity is discernible in Badiou’s assertion that “the master ‘of truth mast traverse the place of defection for which, or from which, there is truth, He must bet on the poem as the shortest way to absolute revenge against the indifference of the universe... To say it another way, the master must rsk the poem exactly where the poem's resources seem to have disap- peared” (“le maitre de vérité doit traverse la défection du liew pour lequel, cova partir duguel ily a vérité.. doit parierle poéme au plus pres d'une zevanche absolue de indifference de univers... Antant die que le maitre dit risquer le poéme exactement li oit a resource du poéme semble avoir clisparu”) (PM 78). Singular poetic form, manipulated by the poet asa way ‘of beating the odds against cosmological dffidence, and approximating pure creative expression, is thus built up out of evacuated points of origin. In éstablishing the albeit implausible colloquy between Labid ben Rabia and Badiou seems bent on conjugating the two writers in a single declension, and in so doing, reconciling two voids, oF squaring two models ‘of truth the truth ofthe ode, founded on immanence (of deserted place), and the truth of Mallarméan verse, founded on authorial anonymity “How,” Badiou wants to know, “can one think the truth as simultaneously anonymous, or impersonal [Mallarmé], and yet immanent and terrestrial?” (PM 87). The answer lies in eliding philosophy and art by subjecting the stubject to the “being” of place and positing a credo of militant fidelity to the sites of abandonment in and by the world, whether it isthe isolated tree ‘on a dust swept dune in ben Rabi’a’s text, or the furious, winged Abyss with ‘hich Mallarmé defines art, in Badiow’s terms, “subtracted from the im- passe of the master” (PM 88-89). While the anomalous prospect of a “communist” Labid ben Rabi'a, or of an “absolutely postcolonial” Mallarmé, or of a Mallarméan Darwish ay disturb conventional paradigms of literary comparatism built on his- torical or philological relation, it also reactivates the aesthetic. “The realm of the aesthetic,” according to Peter Hallward, “invariably solicits the exer- «ise ofa shought-ful fedom” (AP 334). To my knowledge, Hallward’s book Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific is the sole experiment to date of a Badiou-inspred postcolonial comparatism. In 89 NOTHING 15 TRANSLATASLrecentering the aesthetic within postcolonial theory (displacing the field’ preoccupation with what ke castigates as a “deadened nativism"), Hallward harks back to an earlier era—the 1980s and early 1990;—before theory fa tigue set in, and before cultural cities stigmatized colonial ontology as an clitist threat to materialist Verstchen. In practicing theory without apology, Hallward revisits the time when Anglophone and Francophone critics alike—among them Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Neigh Wa. ‘Thiong’o, Paul Gilroy, and Robert Young en the Anglophone side, and Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Edouard Glissant, Abdelkedir Khatib, Ab- delwahab Meddeb, Achille Mbembe, Frangoise Verg’s, and Réda Bensmiia, fon the Francophone side—availed themselves unabashedly of continental theory, developing critical paradigms that engaged deeply with the work of Freud, Adorno, Lacan, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Althusser, Fousault, Derrida, Levinas, Deleuze, Irigaray, Cixous, Hallward subscribes to Badiou’s notion of singularity as a carective to the postmodern relativism besetting postcolonial studies its uncitical ‘embrace of plaral registers, is fetishization of the politics of difference, ard its naive celebration of “the local.” “The singular creates the medium ofits ‘own substantial existence or expression,” he writes in an affirmation drafted from Delewze’s pronouncement that “the One expresses ina single meaning all of the multipl.”* Edouard Glissant, Charles Johnson, Mohammed Dib, and Severo Sarduy are elected for analysis by virtue of their invention of a singular postcolonial subjectivity. Representative of Francophone, An- glophone, Hispanophone, Caribbean, Maghrebian, and Latin American tra- jectories, these writers, considered together, offera model postcolonial com- pratism. But rather than focus on grounds of comparison common to all, Hallward explores how each writer, ima free-standing way, engages with the philosophical idea of the “univocity of being,” Absolutely Postcolonial produces a chilly comparatism tilted toward logie, ontology, and ethics. In this picture, the ok Comp Lit utopia of global ‘ransatio and humanist dialogue gives way to an ascetic model of individua- tion in which the transcendence of specificity and relationality yields poetic singelarty and solitude. “To write,” Hallward maintains, ina para- phrase of Blanchot, is to undergo a radical detachment, to become absolutely alone, impersonal, iolated within an im-mediate atemporality (*the time of the absence of time”). Like the Deleuze he inspires, Blan- chot tends to absorb all “actual writers as so many echoes of a singular 'maurmure anonyme.” mo cHarrer § r ‘The “essential solitude” of the writer then, is not that of an anguished isolation among others, but ofa submersion within the aspecific or indifferent pure and simple, a space generally rendered in Blanchot's fiction as void, desert, snow, night oF sea—spaces rediscovered, as we shall see, by the later novels of Mohammed Dib. Writing begins when the writer forgoes the “power to say I.” (AP 17-18) Hallward’s idea of postcolonial worldlness is truly otherwordly, suturing itself to Islamic constructs of lam (surrender to God) and Shadidah (the assertion that there is no God but God”) and to Buddhist notions of suryata (void) and nirvana (self-extinction, transcendence of desire) {AP 7, 9). These principles, allowed to shine through in their linguistic foreignnes, inadvertently reveal the catastrophic state of untransatability that has allowed the word “Islamic” to become a predicate of terorism in Western parlance?” ‘The challenge of Comp Lit is to balance the singularity of untraus- latable alterity against the need to translate quand méme. For if translation failure is acceded to too readily, it becomes an all-purpose expedient for staying narrowly within one’s own monolingual universe. ‘ parochialism resulls, sanctioned by false pietis about not wanting to *mistransate” the other. This parochialism is the fip side of a globalism that theorizes place and translates everything without ever traveling anywhere. Gayatei Spivak has taken direct aim at the way in which globalization theory treats real places like computer spaces “in which nobody actualy lves."* In proposing “the planet to overwrite the globe,” Spivak embraces a humbling view of the alterity of humans, cast as temporary occupants of a planet on loan, Spivak remains, so to speak, firmly on the ground, in her commit- ‘ment (oa radical aterity defined by the polities of translation. By contrast, Hiallward, like Badiow, casts literary theory as cosmology, jumping parallel universes that share no philological common culture. Hallward’s efforts to articulate the singularity of being might be seen as analogous to efforts in quantum cosmology to explain the origins of the universe asa “zero-mo- ‘ment of infinite density—a so-called singularity.” In a chapter of Absolutely Postcolonial devoted to “the Buddhist path” in Sarduy, Hallward evokes sa- tori which he characterizes, quoting Daisetz Tetaroo Suzuki's says in Zen Buddhism as “the Zen version of enlightenment... a kind of instantancous flash or explosion ‘a sort of mental catastrophe’ ” (AP 286). A controversial doctrine running counter to the quietest strain in Zen Buddhism, saroriis characterized by Suzuki as having the characteristics of irrationality, intu- 91 NOTHING IS TRANSLATABLEitive insight, authoritativeness affirmation, a sense ofthe beyond, imperson- ality exaltation, and momentariness. Alternately described by Suzukiassud- ‘den access to the unconscious, a “new world of personal experiences, which ‘we may designate ‘leaping’ or throwing oneself down the precipice,” anc 4 “one-pointed concentration ... realized when the inner mechanism is ripe for the final catastrophe,” suforf takes on a historical dimension when set against the backdrop of the Hiroshime bombings" As the frst prong in a new order of comparatism based on the Kea of catastrophism,sazor invites comparison with Heide [that] is suddenly emerging before us in the form of a planetary catastrophe.” (This 1955 text addressed to Eanest Jtinger, published as “Concerning “The Line,’ responds to Junger’s reference to the “zero meridian” or “zero point” as “the world-historical ‘moment ofthe planetary completion of nihilism.” Walter Benjamin's short essay “The Railway Disaster at the Firth of Tay” may be read as the third prong in this poetivs of planatary catastrophism, Delivered as a 1932 radio lecture, this prescient short history of technology leads us from the baseline of small disasters (accidents) to an end point of mass destruction: [We may say that the most striking alterations to the globe in the course of the previous century were all in some way or an~ ‘ther connected with the railway. | am going to tell you today about a railway disaster. Not So much to recount a horrifying, story, but rather to put the event in the context of the history of technology and more particularly of railway construction. A bridge plays.a role in this story. The bridge collapsed. This was without doubt a catastrophe for the two hundred people who lost their lives, or their relatives, and for many others. Neverthe- less, wish to portray this disaster as no more than a minor epi sode in a great struggle from which human beings have emerged victorious and shall remain victorious unless they themselves de- stroy the work of their own hands once more. Drawing Suzuki, Heidegger, and Benjamin into oni, catatrophism begets ‘planetary comparatism that demands thcoriation a8 anew form of poetic singularity. This planetary paradigm, by turns niilistic and enlightening, is not necessarily restricted to an eschatological poetics of the Idea. Wai Chee DDimock, Gayatri Spivak, and Edvard Said have taken planetary criticism in other directions, focusing not on imminent destruction, but rather, on using planetarity to impede globalization’s monolithic spread: its fnancialzation of the globe and proseytism of orthadoxis of likeness and selfSame. In Spivak’ usage, planetarty implies a critical polities of the Idea capable of 92 CHAPTERS lending credence to comparisons among languages and cultures habitvally located at an intractable remove from one other, or remotely seated in area studies And in Said’s work on humanism, an anti-imperialist reinvention of Goethean Weliterarur comes into facus as part of an expanded worldliness. ‘Though Spivak and Said hardly share Badiou's nondialectcal notion of ‘ruth, they too seem to be, to use Badiou’s parlance, communists of the Idea, following le grand écart of cultural comparison in the name of militant principles of worldly dialectics and the transformative power of cognition in the historical process. The implications of a planetary criticism for the fotute ofa comparative poetics thus place renewed emphasis on a sional formalism—univocity, singularity, irreducibility, holism, quantum ‘cosmology, the Event—while remaining constant to an earthly polities of translation and nontranslatabiliy 93 NOTHING 15 TRANSLATABLE