Honyaku no sanaka ni aru Shakai-Shugi (Social justice in translation)

Readers of this book may be struck by the surprising combination of the words “translation” and “social justice.” The book attempts to overturn views on language, our relation to culture, and the presupposition of the human subject—ones that are typically associated with translation. It also tries to destabilize, through the framework of translation, existing ideas in politics and political education that produce the discourse of social justice. The main task of this book is to reconsider and reconstruct, through an alternative perspective on the human subject, cultural identity, and translation, a discourse of political philosophy and philosophy of education that is involved in the debate centering on liberal autonomy.

The idea of translation discussed in this book implies a broad sense of translation that is inseparable from human transformation, one that goes beyond the exchange of language between different language systems. It means that translation has already started within a language system, that translation is internal to language, and that translation symbolizes human life as a whole as the “metonym” of the life of a human being as a linguistic being. As some of the essays included in this book indicate, translation whose fundamental characteristics are asymmetry and the experience of an abyss destabilizes the illusions of the human subject (and the concept of autonomy as its presupposition) and the identities of human being and culture. It invokes the “replacement of the subject of philosophy” as an the alternative mode of thinking, which is transitive and ongoing.

The alternative modes of thinking that are presented in this book are developed in a dialogical way centering on Derrida’s poststructuralism, the American philosophy of Emerson, Thoreau, and Cavell, and Sakai’s work on Japanese thought, with the interaction of Benjamin’s ideas on law and language, the thought of French sociologist Bruno Latour, and the phenomenological perspective of Merleau-Ponty. Through these diverse voices, the nature of the subject-object relationship is revealed to have far more complicated and broader implications than the one that is defined in the framework of identity politics of liberalism and communitarianism. Through the interaction of these alternative modes of thinking about the human condition, this book focuses on the triangular relationship between language (and cultural identity), the human subject, and social justice, all of which are considered to be in the process of translation. Thence, a different way of looking at the subject and object is called for. In addition, language is to be understood as something that is closer to the source of our being as it involves more than mere communication, and its significance is elucidated. Social justice is reconsidered from a new metaphysical perspective—the standpoint of translation as a way of understanding human experience.

 

(Written by Naoko Saito, Professor of Graduate School of Education, Kyoto University and Yasuo Imai, Emeritus Professor, Graduate School of Education / 2019)