ARVIND MANDAIR
At a time when scholars in the study of religion have become increasingly self-conscious about the key concepts of their discipline, it seems strange that “translation” has not appeared in recent scholarly collections as a term that merits critical reflection in the study of religion. Yet the last few years have seen a greater number of translations of “religious” texts than at any other time. Why, then, has translation not been considered on a par with other key concepts or “critical terms” in the study of religion?1
One reason for this apparent oversight may be that no two words seem more connected, and the relationship between them more transparent, than the terms “religion” and “translation.” Another reason might be that “translation” has been figured in a particular way in religious studies, as if the translation of religion was an inevitable process. Or that religion is a cultural universal that continues to be successfully translated (that is, without too much resistance) across cultures, a phenomenon for which there has been and continues to be ample evidence in the form of the unproblematic reciprocation of equivalent terms or meanings in other languages and hence their commensurability.
Notwithstanding the fact that the definition of religio itself has changed, this implicit belief in the translatability of religion has in some sense marked much of the Western history of reflection on translation. The belief in religion’s natural translatability is evident in certain prevalent themes, for example, the idea exemplified by the Italian aphorism “traduttore, traditore,” that translation constitutes a betrayal of fidelity, or the theme of the inherent chaos of human communication exemplified by the myth of Babel, which signifies both the impossibility of translating among the irreducible multiplicity of languages and the desire for attaining the completion and purity of the original logos.2 We see this, for example, in some of the earliest reflections on the problems associated with translation in the classical era for which the translation between Greek and Latin languages was the dominant theme. The earliest words for the function of translation were hermeus and metaphora in Greek and interpres in Latin.3 Both imply the sense of an intermediary that transports meaning between two distinct and autonomous languages and speakers. Likewise the long history of Bible translation with its ambivalent practices (for example, that the passage into other languages implies fundamental loss, corruption, and wastefulness, counterbalanced by the constant need for translation in order to make new converts) signals the fundamental problem of mediating between one and many as a problem of language and religion simultaneously (that language is one yet languages are many: religion is one yet religions are many).4 If anything, George Steiner’s periodization of the history of Western translation theory around the figures of Cicero, Schleiermacher, Jakobson, and Benjamin underscores this belief in a basic metaphysical regime. Steiner argues that the evolution of Western theories of translation from antiquity to the present day has been determined by the underlying premise that the underlying structure of language is universal and communication is common to all men.5 Consequently the history of translation in the West has been driven by theories of linguistic hospitality, which have effectively tried to limit the danger associated with the approach of the foreign language. Central to this premise is a fundamental metaphysical assumption that privileges the One over the Many, Unity over Plurality, Host over Guest, and equates Oneness and Unity with the sphere of the native, one’s own-most, which in turn marks it as Universal. By contrast, Plurality is equated with the figure of the stranger or foreigner and carries the stigma of particularity.
It is noteworthy that Steiner’s exposition of the metaphysical assumptions of Western translation converges with the work of religious studies scholars such as Jonathan Z. Smith who speculate about the “expansion of the use and understanding of the term ‘religion’ that began in the sixteenth century.”6 Recent theories about the evolution of “religion” as a universal concept suggest that the term emerged as a way of excluding the non-Christian others but ended up being pluralized (“religions”) by the late nineteenth century as a term for including non-Christian others into a framework that allowed Europeans to systematically map the state of cultures and civilizations of the world. This major expansion of the term “religions” began to take effect at a time when European identity was being nationalized and redefined in relation to a growing knowledge of Asian cultures, which in turn was being accumulated through travel accounts and orientalist and missionary treatises empowered by colonial expansion. One of the main mechanisms for systematizing and ordering the growing database of knowledge about others is the philosophical schemas of representation developed by thinkers such as Kant and Hegel.7
In order to construct a philosophical universalism at the heart of their schemas of representation, both Kant and Hegel devised structures of representation that, in addition to being deployed by missionaries, anthropologists, and orientalists in the nineteenth century, eventually became part of a new academic discipline: the modern study of religion(s) that included philosophy of religion and the history of religions. Central to both of these disciplines is the ability to represent difference in the form of other religions in relation to a European self-identification that accords to itself the ability to simultaneously give meaning to, and overcome, the signifier “religion.” Though rarely recognized, this demarcation of cultural difference (other religions) is based on a concept of religion that is determined by a particular concept of translation, and vice versa, a concept of translation determined by a particular concept of religion. The specific concept referred to here is the concept of identity, which assumes an all-important role in facilitating a meeting point between the nature of thought and the nature of things. No sooner than identity is posited (or presupposes itself) as the ideal relationship between thought and its object, three things happen: (i) concepts themselves can only be thought in terms of identity; (ii) thinking itself becomes a “regime of representation,” which in turn becomes synonymous with unhindered translatability; (iii) difference cannot be thought outside of identity.8
It could be suggested, therefore, that the concept of difference proper to the pluralization of religions is dependent on an assumed translatability (that is, the assumption of some sort of equivalence or fundamental commensurability) between self and other. Not only is the other translatable in terms of the unity of the self, but the difference between self and other is already determined by identity. This understanding of translation as a “regime of representation” in which identity is assumed to be the condition for thinking difference becomes axial to the study of religion(s) and the study of language(s) in the nineteenth and twentieth century. During this phase of scholarly activity, translation operates as a metaphor for cultural/religious encounter. This is especially evident in the drive to pluralize religious studies after the 1960s, as can be seen in the proliferation of “sacred-text” translations. Texts are designated “sacred” or “holy” if they have a nonworldly or metaphysical component that resists translation but nevertheless requires translation.9
But how exactly does the nonworldly or metaphysical come to be assumed as the ground for equivalence between the host culture (usually Western) and the guest culture (usually non-Western)? More importantly, why is it reciprocated by the guest culture or text in such a way that it appears as religious? That is to say, how and when did non-Western texts become “religious” or nonworldly? It is worth noting here that even the more recent phase of translation theory and practice, which has heralded important shifts in the paradigm for studying translation from biblical studies through linguistics and into cultural studies (particularly postcolonial) studies, has not taken the relationship between religion and translation seriously. The reason for this is that something crucial has remained unexamined in the modern schema of religious pluralization and encounter. What remain unexamined in the “regime of representation” are (i) the role of scholars, missionaries, administrators, and politicians in constructing equivalence and reciprocity between texts, cultures, or concepts, and (ii) a model of globalization with European Latinity as its sole driving force and as its target. If this is the case, then it is necessary to ask, “In whose terms, for what linguistic constituency, and in the names of what kinds of knowledge or intellectual authority” does the model of translation underpinning the study of religion operate insofar as it assumes equivalence and reciprocity of the other?10
It is here that the work of translation theorists in Asian studies11 who have cast doubt on the conventional translation practices grounded in representation can be shown to intersect productively with the work of religious studies scholars who have cast doubt on the idea of religion as a cultural universal.12 There is now an emerging consensus among many scholars of religion that “religion” is not a term that all cultures understood in the same way and that the thesis of its supposed universality was constructed in the modern period not least as a result of colonial encounters between Europeans and Asian cultures. Thus, if we juxtapose recent theories of translation with recent theories of religion, one of the questions that emerge is to what extent the concept of religion and the concept of translation helped to mutually construct each other in the era of colonial modernity. To what extent did theories about the nature of language(s) affect theories about the nature of religion(s)? For example, to what degree was the putative translatability of religion grounded in a belief in monolingualism—the idea that the essential characteristics of one’s own language, or mother tongue, are its identity and unity, that it is a boundarified entity and, ipso facto, that the language of the other, the other’s mother tongue, must also be characterized by unity and identity? What was invested in the positing of the monolingualism thesis by European scholars in their translations and cultural interactions with non-Western texts and speaker, and why, as a consequence of this, were Asian speakers obliged to reciprocate the monolingual model even though such reciprocation did not reflect the reality of their language situation? Moreover, to what extent was the economy of language relations (the positing and reciprocation of equivalence) dependent on the political economy of empire?
In order to pursue these interlinked questions more thoroughly, it will be helpful to examine a specific case that illustrates how this phenomenon might have come about. Among the many cases in modern Asian studies that one could choose from, I would like to focus on the case of precolonial India, which, like other East Asian contexts, has no equivalent term for “religion” in the native lexicon. After the colonial event, however, indigenous elites begin to reciprocate the colonial demand for a native equivalent to “religion.” Subsequently “religion” begins to circulate in the neocolonial lexicon as if it were a native concept. The question that arises here is whether the apparent reciprocity between English and Indian languages is the result of a given economy of historical exchange, or whether it is simply a matter of finding equivalent meanings that are assumed to exist naturally in both languages, followed by their transportation and circulation between languages.13
A closer look at the state of language relations prevalent in colonial North India suggests that equivalents were in fact created through historical exchange.14 Prior to their arrival in India, the British found a complex and confusing language situation. Fully expecting to find distinct homogenous languages that corresponded to distinct religious and cultural identities, what they actually encountered was a heterogenous lingua franca, an undifferentiated blend of several vernaculars with varying admixtures of Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic, but with no strict correspondence to a distinct religio-cultural identity shared by Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and others. The British initially referred to this hybrid language as “Moors,” “Indostan,” and eventually “Hindustanee.” Believing this native language to be a degenerate form of an originally pure Sanskrit that was corrupted by contact with Islamic culture, orientalists such as William Jones, Charles Wilkins, and later John Gilchrist began the process of mapping linguistic terms in order to retrieve the original mother tongues and teach them back to the natives. By removing Islamic influences from Hindustani, particularly Persian and Arabic terms, so that there was a correspondence between one language and one religion, the orientalists believed they were also purifying the religious identities of the Hindus. This was achieved in practice by Romanizing and then codifying these languages by creating new grammars that were institutionalized through seminaries. The immediate effect of these grammars was to accelerate language acquisition among first-language users such as military personnel and administrators. Second, it helped to fix and standardize the fluid nature of spoken languages and created modern standard versions such as Urdu and Hindi. The model adopted for standardizing the languages was English. As Bernard Cohn notes, teachers such as John Gilchrist “would explain the English term as best he could to the Hindustanis,” who would then “furnish the synonymous vocables in their own speech.”15 As the fixed standard according to which the fluid languages would be reformulated, the effect of English cannot be underestimated. Whereas prior to the colonial encounter the norm for the Indian languages was a form of translation in which the speaker was constantly exposed to the incommensurality of different languages, soon after the initial contact the earlier kind of encounter was displaced by another: the encounter between the unity and fixed identity of English versus the fluid heterogeneity of the Indian, which thereafter would be forced to reciprocate by conforming to the apparently stable identity of the English.
What grammars and dictionaries did was to fix the naturally translational existence of indigenous languages with a schematic representation of translation.16 To have a representation of translation means that the Englishman possesses a predetermined definition of what translation is, such that he is already assured of the nature or thingness of the language encountered.17 Despite the Englishman’s assurance, it is only the representation of translation that gives rise to the possibility of figuring out the unity of his own language against the supposed unity of the Indian. The discursive apparatus that replaces the temporality of becoming governing indigenous language relations with a regime of translation consists in an operation of thinking whose logic is governed by the law of noncontradiction, that is, an image of thought that disables and displaces the fluid situation where naturally self-differentiating languages come into encounter with a stance where the other is ordered by making it knowable to the self. What happens in the formation of this schema is that the threatening chaos of encounter is secured. It is made stable and fixed. This securing of stability demands that an encounter that threatens to overwhelm the host/receiving/target language (corresponding to the horizon of the self) is transposed onto something that stands as identical. From this moment on, the self-differentiating potential of languages in translation will have been shifted onto a schema through which their natural mobility or capacity to make new relations is slowed down and ultimately presented to the self as an object. Thus the standard (English) is based ultimately on the self-certainty of one’s own cultural horizon, namely, the English self or character. This already-formed horizon is the essential component of what Naoki Sakai calls the “schema of co-figuration,”18 which is the discursive apparatus whereby a community constitutes itself as the self or standard by making visible the figure of an imaginary other—in this case the imagined purity of Indo-Aryan-derived Hindi from the hybrid mélange of Hindustani languages. Hence the fixing of heterolingual Hindustani into monolingual Hindi occurs only when the other is perceived as constituted by a contamination that requires purification. Thus the two imagined unities—English and Hindi—now begin to resemble each other in a process that is entirely spectral.
In order to institutionalize Hindi (henceforth written in the Devanagri script) and Urdu (which continued to be written in the Perso-Arabic script) as two autonomous linguistic entities, the British put into place a major educational infrastructure which included the following two parts. The first part was the founding of Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800 for the purpose of teaching British and Indian administrators.19 With Gilchrist driving the college’s language policy, the tasks of teaching the two newly created languages were given respectively to Lallujilal, a Hindu from Gujerat, and to Mir Amman, a Muslim from Delhi. The initial reluctance of the natives to speak these languages (particularly Hindi), combined with the shortage of materials for teaching them, was eventually overcome by Christian missionaries, who composed and propagated extensive missionary literature in Hindi and implemented the first printing presses in India. The second part was the creation of a vast network of Anglo-Vernacular mission schools in which the native elites were exposed to English along with a vernacular language (Hindi for Hindus, Urdu for Muslims, and by the late 1870s Punjabi for Sikhs) as early as eleven years of age.
Taken together these institutional measures enabled the teaching of “national” or vernacular languages under a blueprint that “produced cultural difference on a world map as an already translated fact and pretended to speak for that difference in a universalizing idiom.”20 Within this educational process, the native elites were expected to internalize the pedagogical mechanism and as result willingly reciprocate (that is, enter into a form of largely unequal exchange) Hindi terms for English. As Lydia Liu argues, in such a system of exchange, “characterized by vastly unequal conditions of power, difference was both produced as a value and at the same time victimized by translating it as a lesser value, or non-universal.”21 For example, the word “religion” is upheld by the English as a signifier denoting civilization, morality, and the “the good.” But within the colonial economy of historical exchange, the indigenous equivalents such as “dharma” or “Hindu” are already devalued as signifiers of lack because religion had been postulated by orientalists and missionaries as something that may have existed in India but had to be recovered through the processes of improvement, reform, and modernization. Also in the indigenous languages the term “Hindu” was considered a marker of civilization and geography rather than religion. Clearly the inadequate term “Hindu” could only be brought into exchange via an ascription of desire for the signifier “religion,” whose linguistic, cultural, and political value would be guaranteed by a combination of Christianity and empire. This desire then enters into the native enunciation through their response to the English demand for the term “religion.”
But how does a particular signifier (for example, “Hindu”) become manufactured into an equivalent of something else (for example, “religion”) during the process of circulation? And how does this act of translation articulate the condition of unequal exchange? In her article “Meaning-Value and the Political Economy,” Liu provides a way of answering these questions by drawing upon Marx’s seminal analysis of money and capital, which in turn makes an insightful comparison between the production of value in economic transactions and the production of meaning-value in linguistic exchange (translation).22 Marx’s theory of economic exchange elaborates on a much older Aristotelian notion of exchange that presupposes a common measure of value, or “universal equivalent.”23 According to Marx, parties in an exchange “cannot bring their commodities into relation as values and therefore as commodities except by comparing them with some one or another commodity as the universal equivalent.”24 Within an economic transaction money is precisely this common measure by which the value of different commodities is compared, and although money may have a material form (for example, gold), it is also a symbol or signified whose materiality is irrelevant. Money is therefore no different from language insofar as in both the signified is an idea “embodied in a material signifier.” The sign, which is immaterial and material at the same time, becomes the medium that establishes and maintains the identity and value of everything within the system of exchange. Hence the “act of monetary exchange, like linguistic exchange, depends on a socially recognized universal equivalent [Gold, God, English, and so on] which seems to homogenize everything, or to reduce everything to a common denominator.”25
According to Mark C. Taylor, Marx’s notion of a socially recognizable universal equivalent that secures the unity-in-difference that transforms opposition into reciprocity is borrowed from Hegel’s Logic.26 Marx’s description of capital as a “self-renewing circular course of exchanges” is actually a secularized version of an older theological principle: the notion of the Absolute, of God as Unmoved Mover, conceived in Western tradition through the metaphorics of the centered circle that “presupposes its end as the goal and has its end also as the beginning.”27 Stated differently, the principle that connects linguistic transaction to economic transaction, linguistic economy to political economy, is religion. It is precisely this triadic connection between language, religion, and political economy that is at work in the contexts of colonial and postcolonial India due to the fact that Indians have continued to reciprocate terms such as “God,” “Religion,” and “Faith” from within their conceptual resources through a process that remains largely uninterrogated because it seems entirely natural. More closely examined, however, this process of reciprocation can be attributed to nothing less than the faculty of speech itself—the very faculty that allows each and every response to take place. By interrogating this response, and by implication interrogating how certain words come to mind whereas others are interdicted, the very focus of the question of translation can be shifted in a different direction: How do agents of circulation consent to such an exchange of words when one of them does not have an equivalent to exchange in the first place, and when the process is fundamentally unequal? How does one subsequently enter into this economy of exchange? And why does agreement or giving of consent appear as natural? Insights in the work of Jacques Derrida (specifically the essays “Theology of Translation” and “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone”) and Jean-Luc Nancy (specifically the essay “A Deconstruction of Monotheism”) help to address some of these questions.28
In “Theology of Translation” Derrida speculates on a particular moment in German Romanticism, suggesting that “a certain thinking about Bildung,” indeed, “all the modifications of bilden [form, formation, figure, co(n)-figuration, schematization, and so on], are inseparable from what one could call precisely the imperative of translation.”29 There is, Derrida suggests, an “onto-theological dimension, a problematics of onto-theology that is located at the founding of a certain concept of translation.”30 This ontotheological dimension of translation can be found in the operation of cofiguring that is central to the work of the imagination (Einbildungskraft), but is in fact nothing more than the objectification of translation, the “totalizing gathering together” of the imagination into an “art of generalized translation.”31 Such “generalized translation” corresponds to an assumed “originary unity” of the imagination, the assumption that there is but “one world” into which two languages, language speakers, are thrown together in the schema of cofiguration. But it is precisely because of this assumed “originary unity” that “generalized translation” is already a disavowal of translation as such. As a result the “generalized translation” that takes place in any schema of cofiguration, in any schematization as such, is in fact a representation of translation, that is, the objectification of translation. The final destination of this objectification is to think the inaccessible and, in so doing, to give expression to what cannot be accessed, namely, the Unknown.32
The theme of “generalized translation” is broached again, albeit in a different manner, in Derrida’s essay “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone.” This essay gives us a glimpse of how the assumption of a “fundamental translatability” is at work in the colonial institutions such as the Anglo-Vernacular (A/V) school. In “Faith and Knowledge” Derrida points to the theological underpinnings of the social contract involved in all linguistic acquisition and encounter, indeed in all human addressivity.33 The role of the “interdict” is crucial here.34 Objectively the interdict corresponds to the regime of translation imposed by the prestige of the English language as “official,” as Law, mediated through the agency of language instructors in the A/V school.
From the standpoint of the native elites subjected to this Law, the interdict operates as a self-censorship that comes into effect by prohibiting a certain kind of speech from being articulated. Instead the interdict specifies access to uncensored identifications while in that very moment actively repressing other identifications. It can be regarded as the native’s willing agreement to submit to language as Law (or to the Law as language). Through such submission one responds to the other and in thus responding will have entered into a relation with the other. Yet the very possibility of this response is premised on a confidence trick. One responds to the other as if one had already mastered language, and as if, in responding, one is in control of meaning or communication. Although Derrida doesn’t reveal his source, he is clearly indebted to Lacan’s notion of the Unconscious structured like a language. We could therefore say, in pastiche of Lacan, that the subject cannot acquire language but only accede to it. In effect this is another way of saying that one does not master language; rather, one is mastered by language, which of course provokes a question: Why does one’s subjection to language/Law appear as a freely given response to the other? Lacan would say that the subject has to let himself into the other’s word by investing a certain degree of faith in the other simply on the basis of the words he speaks, and without any correspondence between facts and proofs, this creates a minimal social relation between speaking beings.35 But what guarantees the investment of belief or good faith in the other? Stated differently, what guarantees that the native’s response will be recognized by the other, and through such recognition deemed by the other to be a response-able subject, a subject who has a similar self-consciousness to his own?
For Derrida the very fact that we require language to speak to another and for another to respond means that speaking/responding is unavoidable insofar as speech/response provides the possibility of the social bond or what might be regarded as the minimal form of community: the self in relation to an-other (the not-self). Thus the subject cannot respond and there can be no responsibility unless there is first of all an agreement already in place, a given-word, a sworn faith, without some kind of testimonial pledge, a legal binding that invokes the sacred: “No response without a principle of responsibility: one must respond to the other, before the other and for oneself. And no responsibility without a given word, a sworn faith, without a pledge, without an oath, without some sacrament or ius iurandum.”36
There was, it seems, no question of the native’s not responding. By responding the native promises to tell the truth and asks the other to believe that he is also an other. But a promise cannot properly take place even though promising is inevitable as soon as the native opens his mouth: “From the moment I open my mouth, I have already promised; or rather … the promise has seized the I that promises to speak to the other.… This promise is older than I am.”37 Language, like Lacan’s symbolic order, precedes those who speak it or those through whom it speaks. For the colonized native subjected to the Law of English as Law, there could never be any question of not responding to the other, for “language has started without us, in us and before us. This is what theology calls God, and it is necessary, it will have been necessary to speak.”38 The connection between God and the possibility of speech/response is better explained in the text of “Faith and Knowledge,” where Derrida provides an important clue as to what is really going on. He warns that:
Before even envisaging the semantic history of testimony, of oaths, of the given word (… indispensable to whomever hopes to think religion under its proper or secularized forms), before even recalling that some sort of “I promise the truth” is always at work, and some sort of “I make this commitment before the other from the moment that I address him, even and perhaps above all to commit perjury,” we must formally take note of the fact that we are already speaking Latin. We make a point of this in order to recall that the world today speaks Latin (most often via Anglo-American) when it authorizes itself in the name of religion.39
What Derrida seems to suggest here goes beyond the issue of Latin’s linguistic hegemony. The reference to Latin is a pointer toward a structural principle around which an entire tradition (religious, intellectual, cultural, and political) continues to gravitate. At the core of this structure there is enshrined a sacred principle that Derrida calls an “a priori ineluctable” or inescapable presupposition: that at the very moment of our coming to speech, at the very moment that an “I” addresses or responds to another “I” (and therefore to an other), the self engenders the figure of God as a witness, “quasi-mechanically” as it were. The very emergence of our speech presupposes that God can be called upon as a witness, albeit the Supreme Witness, who testifies to the legality or correctness of the self’s relation to an other, indeed to the inviolability of the distance between self and other: “Presupposed at the origin of all address, coming from the other to whom it is also addressed, the wager of a sworn promise, taking immediately God as its witness, cannot not but have already.… engendered God quasi-mechanically.”40
According to this model of language, speech begins by presupposing the existence of God, which is also the condition for his absence or nonexistence. Without God, or with a God who is nonexistent, there is no absolute witness and therefore no ground for a proper relationship between self and other. With God, or a God who exists, we have the existence of a third, a mediator who guarantees even the minimal social bond between self and other, even when and perhaps most importantly when the self/I commits perjury, when I lie to the other, or when the pledge is at its most secular. Derrida refers to this fiduciary structure as a “transcendental addressing machine.”41 As such the fiduciary is effectively a mechanism that allows God to be invoked as an “originary unity,” the transcendent One, but does not stop Him from being called upon at will and put to good use.
Quite simply, the fiduciary can be regarded as a “performative experience of the act of faith,” without which there can be no address to the other. Constituted on the “soil of bare belief,”42 the fiduciary not only underlies everything to do with religion or the religious, but insofar as it is also a principle of “generalized translatability,” it underpins the generalized “institutional translation of the theology of translation” into the secular domain. Thus seemingly different notions as belief/faith, religion, and secularism are thoroughly interconnected, thoroughly translatable, one could say, because they are rooted in a peculiarly Christian concept of the world. As such, the fiduciary can only be spoken of universally in relation to other cultures through the phenomenon of Latinity and its globalization, or globalatinization, to use Derrida’s neologism.43
Globalatinization in all of its manifestations is the result of presupposing a “concept of fundamental translatability [which] is linked poetically to a natural language”44 that itself resists translation. Today globalatinization enables the fiduciary, the core mechanism of Christianity and its language, to retain its hegemony due to the conceptual apparatus of international law, capitalist economics, global political rhetoric that works in effect as a “generalized rhetoric or translatology,” and (though Derrida doesn’t specifically mention this) the various modes of multiculturalism. It can be seen as the global re-Christianization of the planet through the discourse of secular conceptuality. Wherever the conceptual apparatus of international law, capitalist technology, and politics (as well as multiculturalism) dominates, it speaks through the discourse of religion, and specifically, as Jean-Luc Nancy emphasizes, monotheism. Indeed as Nancy suggests, “if the capitalist and technological economy constitutes the general form of value or sense today,” it does so by way of “a worldwide reign of a monetary law of exchange (or general equivalency) or the indefinite production of surplus value within the order of this equivalency.”45 Yet this “monovalence of value” is indissociable from the apparently atheistic “transcription of the monoculture whose monotheistic conception it carried: explicitly the culture of Rome and its European and modern expansion.”46 Thus for Nancy, as for Derrida, monotheism is not restricted to a religious history. Rather it continues to determine the present insofar as it constitutes “the provenance of the West qua globalization” over which hovers the specter of nihilism. It is therefore important to realize that “the West is Christian in its depths”47 and that, through this “Christian occidentality, an essential dimension of monotheism in its integrality is set into play. And it is urgent to realize this insofar as the Westernized world has replaced all values with the generalized equivalence that Marx designated as merchandise.”48
But what is it that connects “monotheism to the monovalence of the general equivalency”? The answer, as alluded to above, is the mechanism that Derrida calls “generalized translation.” This is the fundamental mechanism of the global fiduciary that translates monotheism into the objectification of knowledge in the humanities according to the “rhythm of techno-science,” and because state structures depend essentially and concretely on the performativity of sciences and techno-sciences, this fundamental mechanism also translates into “what has rightly been called the military-industrial-complex of the modern State,” and even beyond that to the economic rationality of capitalism.49
Though not always obvious, the process of globalatinization repeats a mechanism—the “theology of translation”—that was put into play at the microlevel in the Anglo-Vernacular school, a mechanism variously described as the manufacture of consent, native-informancy, or mimicry. Indeed, what the term globalatinization highlights is the indissociability of a “fundamental translatability” between the religious and the secular, two spheres that figure prominently in the native elites’ acceptance of and resistance to the colonial symbolic order. As a result of an implicit “theology of translation” the concepts of secularism and religion are peaceably imposed (or violently self-imposed) on all things that remain foreign to what these words designate. This is best seen when we look at the continued translation of the concepts of religion and secularism within the South Asian context, through the medium of violence. In other words, violence mediates the movement between secularism and religion best seen in the complex relations between the secular state and nonstate actors and between state/media and the academy.
NOTES
1. See Mark C. Taylor, Critical Terms for the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). An otherwise excellent volume, it misses out on “translation” as a “critical term.”
2. For example, see Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory and Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 42; George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
3. Richard Kearney, introduction to On Translation, by Paul Ricoeur (New York: Routledge, 2006), xiii.
4. This is comprehensively covered in Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation; and Steiner, After Babel.
5. Steiner, After Babel, 76–112.
6. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Religion, Religions and the Religious,” in Taylor, Critical Terms for the Study of Religion, 269–84.
7. See, for example, remarks about Hegel and Kant in the following works: Gayatri Spivak, Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Arvind Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Lydia Liu, Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture and Translated Modernity—China 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
8. The classic version of this argument can be found in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994).
9. This phase of translation activity begins with Max Muller’s translation of the Religious Books of the East and the like, but a more recent version of it is the volume by Lynne Long, Translation and Religion: Holy Untranslatable? (Buffalo: Multilingual Matters, 2005).
10. Liu, Translingual Practice, 1.
11. Such as Lydia Liu, Naoki Sakai, James Hevia, and Tejaswini Nirinjana, among others.
12. A list of such scholars who have provided a more critical understanding of religion is too long to reproduce here. This subfield of religious studies has expanded considerably since the 1990s and could be said to constitute a mode of inquiry that is often referred to as “critical religion studies.” Scholars who have contributed significantly to this field include Jonathan Z. Smith, S. N. Balagangadhara, Talal Asad, Daniel Dubuisson, Russell McCutcheon, Timothy Fitzgerald, Naomi Goldenberg, Tomoko Masuzawa, Richard King, and many others.
13. Liu, “The Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign,” in Tokens of Exchange.
14. The following works provide useful introductions to the language situation of colonial North India: Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997); Christopher King, One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Language Movement of North India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988); Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
15. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 35.
16. For a fuller discussion, see Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West, chap. 1.
17. My use of the term “Englishman” is more than just an indicator that most colonial translations were done by men. It points to the gendered logic of translation, which operates according to an image of thought that is phallocentric precisely because it fixes or spatializes the movement of time.
18. Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
19. For details on the work of John Gilchrist, see Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge; and Dalmia The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions.
20. Lydia Liu, “The Question of Meaning Value in the Political Economy of the Sign,” in Tokens of Exchange, 19.
21. Liu, Tokens of Exchange, 13–41.
22. Ibid.
23. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Pelican, 1973), 134.
24. Karl Marx, quoted in Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 107.
25. Marc Shell, Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 107.
26. Taylor, Confidence Games, 108.
27. Ibid., 109.
28. Jacques Derrida, “Theology of Translation,” in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), 1–78; Jean-Luc Nancy, “A Deconstruction of Monotheism,” in Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, ed. Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Bettina Bergo (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 29–41.
29. Derrida, “Theology of Translation,” 65.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 78–79.
32. Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity, 34.
33. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 26–30.
34. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 30–33.
35. Willie Appollon, “Theory and Practice in the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Psychosis,” in Lacan and the Subject of Language, ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher (London: Routledge, 1991), 117–19.
36. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 26.
37. Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 14.
38. Ibid., 29–30.
39. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 27.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.
42. Jacques Derrida, “Above All, No Journalists,” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 65.
43. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge.”
44. Derrida, “Theology of Translation,” 69.
45. Nancy, “The Deconstruction of Monotheism,” 31.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid., 32.
48. Ibid., 34.
49. Derrida, “Theology of Translation,” 78.