Untranslating Machines

Jacques Lezra is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of California-Riverside. His publications include On the Nature of Marx's Things: Translation as Necrophilology (2018), Lucretius and Modernity (co-edited with Liza Blake, 2016) and Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (2010).

• Introduction: This Untranslatability Which is Not One / 1. Two Dogmas of Translation / 2. On Contingency in Translation / 3. Nationum origo / 4. Sovereignty or Translation / 5. What is Possible in Machine Translation / 6. The Animal in Translation / Conclusion / Bibliography / Index

What do thinkers as disparate as Hobbes, Cervantes, Marx, Wittgenstein, Irigaray, Derrida, Cassin and Laclau have to say to each other about translation? If your answer was going to be “not much,” pause, and read this book. Translation and sovereignty, the oneness and not-oneness of untranslatability, universalism’s dependence on non-universal standards of commensuration, comparison and market equivalence, “widgets,” animal translation, the problem of unshared natural language, the articulation of plural modes of “being” in languages - all these topics and more are considered in response to a disturbing thought: “Globalization has taken our tongues from us.” To the growing list of signal works in “non-translation” studies we must add Jacques Lezra’s astute and witty Untranslatating Machines.