ABSTRACT

Following Derrida’s claim that ‘With the problem of translation we are dealing with nothing less than the problem of the passage to philosophy’, Andrew Benjamin aims to reinvent the philosophical enterprise by considering its relation to ‘translation’, defined here not merely as a movement across languages, but as a cognitive activity, as ‘understanding’ or ‘interpretation’. The main line of argument travels contra Plato, Heidegger, Seneca and Donald Davidson, pro Walter Benjamin and Freud. In a sequence of carefully ordered and elegantly nuanced discussions, Benjamin critiques the ‘Christian Platonic’ concept of meaning as a unified essence that entails the hopeless pursuit of a one-to-one correspondence between interpretation and its object, between translation and foreign text. ‘Semantic unity can never be other than a site of differential meanings in which potential and actual meanings are present as well as allusions or reattributions that are themselves the result of the process of history’ (p. 35). The Christian Platonic tradition acknowledges an ‘an-original differential plurality’, but only ‘in the attempt to establish an original and archaic site of meaning, in the presence of self-referring and therefore self-inclusive structures of signification, and finally in the desire for an unmediated access to the world’ (pp. 178-9). In Davidson’s essay ‘On the very idea of a conceptual scheme’, for example, ‘translation and the overcoming of disagreement are possible to the extent that divergence and difference are themselves grounded in identity of sameness’, revealing his fundamental assumption of ‘a universalist rationalist anthropology giving rise to a generalized and universal conception of self’ (pp. 73, 64). The Christian Platonic tradition fails to negotiate the sheer alterity of the other in any act of understanding, interpretation, translation because it is unable to think difference except on the transcendental ground of a prior unity.