Translation

To trans-late, meaning ‘to carry across’ or ‘to be borne across,’ conveys a dual sense of communication and departure, fidelity and betrayal.  The 2012 philoSOPHIA conference will have as its theme ‘Translation,’ broadly conceived, taking the work of translation to include translating across disciplines, genres, traditions, texts, historical epochs, and languages.  For example, translation could take place between aesthetics and politics, between science and philosophy, between beauty and morality, between the body and language. We envision an array of political, ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological approaches that could be pursued in asking about the meaning, value, and work of translation in its multivalent sense. More particularly, we are interested in pursuing some of the following questions:  What kinds of translation are possible or impossible, obligatory or self-indulgent, more or less difficult?  Does or should translation transform or preserve its ‘original,’ and how does translation alter our understanding of the original in salutary or damaging ways?  Are there right and wrong ways to translate, across, for instance, disciplines, historical periods, or structures of experience?  Are all differences porous to translation or are some forms of strangeness impervious to transposition into another realm? Are bodily or material phenomena accessible to or commensurable with the language we use to describe them and ourselves?  How does translation provoke resistance or acquiescence?  Does the work of translation presume the reconciliation of antagonisms or can it maintain them?  What is the temporality of translation?  Questions of translation are especially critical for feminist philosophers, who re-read and often criticize the historical and textual resources of the tradition of philosophy, bringing new questions to bear on older fields of inquiry.  Moreover, feminist theorists often work liminally, between or across disciplines, and this also means confronting divergent assumptions and discourses and considering how best to move between them.