ABSTRACT
Walter Benjamin insists that the only way to understand, interpret, and valorise translation is 'modally'. Let us take a look at that innocuously powerful statement: Translation is a mode. The art–translation synonymy has already been effected, and the act of 'reading' or 'receiving' has been transformed into performances of remembering and forgetting; God, both as a non-name and as the Name of all names, enters the scene as a weak but necessary horizon. Both in the Benjamin text and in the Jacques Derrida essay, the terms 'translation' and 'language' function both literally and as concept-metaphors, to use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's locution. Derrida raises precisely this issue in his essay: One should never pass over in silence the question of the tongue in which the question of the tongue is raised and into which a discourse on translation is translated. Monotheistic to the core, Benjamin's translation lives out 'the monolingualism of the Other' as the chronic symptom of its own sur-vival.
