提姆·克莱恩：翻译哲学
2015-04-09 13:44
这本非同寻常的巨著收录了很多语言的哲学术语，是法国 哲学家芭芭拉·卡桑(Barbara Cassin)2004年首次出版的《欧洲各国哲学术语：无法翻译的词汇辞典》(Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles)的英译本。如果原书是个悖论的话，那么该英译本就是双重的悖论了：不仅是无法翻译的词汇辞典而且是对该辞典的翻译。编辑们 不是对自相矛盾的自我引用观念感到绝望，反而对此乐此不疲。事实上，将"无法翻译的"这个词放在英文标题的开头就不无自豪地比法语版原著更强有力地确认这 个悖论，它成为英文版编辑艾米丽·阿普特(Emily Apter)所说的"整个工程的组织原则"。
阿普特在序言中显然没有反讽味道地评论说"只是在我们认识到直接了当地将法语版转变成英语版根本行不通的时候，我们的翻译任务才变得清晰了。" 当然，她是对的：翻译从来不是开门见山的转换。难怪翻译成为哲学探索的肥沃土壤。就像哲学中的很多东西一样，将翻译(当然也包括相关的意义概念)理论化始 终徘徊在两个并不讨人喜欢的极端之间。一个极端是，翻译被视为意义的字面对等;另一个极端则认为翻译根本不可能。正如雅各·德里达(Jacques Derrida)所说，"在某种意义上，没有东西是不可译的;但在另一个意义上，任何东西都是不可译的。我总是能很容易地坚持这两个夸张的观点，它们在本 质上一模一样，总能相互翻译。"
德里达的两个极端或者夸张说法在本质上一模一样的要点等于说：认为翻译不可能(第二个极端)的唯一理由是它必然要求意义的字面对等(第一个极 端)，但这显然是不可能的。第一个极端(编辑称为"映射或同构"的翻译概念)不可能的理由是对等可以转变，而翻译不可以。换句话说，如果翻译要求意义对 等，那么如果甲翻译乙，乙翻译丙，那么甲和丙在意义上就是对等的。但是只要稍微想一想就明白这是不对的：英语"城堡"(castle)可以被译成德语"城 堡"(Schloss)，德语城堡可以被译成法语"城堡"(château)，但是法国著名水上城堡舍农索城堡(the Château de Chenonceau)在任何人的书中都不是城堡。翻译不是意义对等。所以我们在显示没有意义对等时并没有显示翻译是不可能的。德里达说的没错。
不过，当我们拒绝翻译的映射概念时，不夸大其辞很重要。多亏了算法的力量和数据挖掘的强大威力，谷歌翻译确实起作用，其翻译质量越来越好。谷歌 翻译并没有提供意义的对等，但它的确给出了逐字逐句的机械性翻译。当然，谷歌翻译在翻译诗歌或者翻译这本无法翻译的哲学术语时注定走不了多远。本书中无法 翻译的术语被定义为"在从一种语言转变为另一种语言时留下不翻译的词汇"或"通常被误译或重译"的词汇。如果依据这个标准，正如莱米·布拉格( Rémi Brague)在精彩的词条"欧洲"中所说，"哲学"(Philosophy)这个词本身"就是优秀的无法翻译的术语"，它在被翻译成希腊语之外的语言时 就保留不译。只有荷兰语创造了一个词"哲学"(Wijsbegeerte)。在词源学上，它是希腊语"哲学"(philosophia)的仿译(事实上， 匈牙利人也创造了一个词(bölcselet)，不过基本内容仍然保持不变)。
《辞典》中的很多其他词语与此类似。一个著名的例子是海德格尔的术语"此在"(Dasein)，在德语里的意思是存在，但是其精确的哲学意思是 没完没了的争论的话题，因此很少被翻译出来(除了笨拙地用连字符重构成"Being-there")。丹麦人对他们的词汇" hygge"的不可译性感到自豪，这个词表达了一种令人宾至如归的舒适氛围，可以用来描述一个地方或者社交活动，比如你在和家人或朋友共处的时间，在温暖 的房间享受美味佳肴。这里我已经告诉你它的意思了。海德格尔的此在与此类似，只不过需要更长的话来解释而已。
翻译从来不是开门见山的转换，难怪它成为哲学探索的肥沃土壤。
其他哲学词汇通过新词创造、误译或者重译的过程而获得了意义。就哲学而言，有时候用太多的细节考虑这个过程将产生虚假的问题。英语"意识" (Consciousness)是法语词汇"良心"(conscience)(意大利语是coscienza，西班牙语是conciencia)。虽然 "意识"和"良心"在词源学上有关系，但是在英语中它们已经表达完全不同的概念多个世纪了，这些概念在其他语言里也是用不同的词表达的。哲学家艾蒂安·巴 里巴尔(Étienne Balibar)的词条"意识"就探讨了意识和良心之间的概念和历史联系;但是对英语读者来说，这个麻烦是没有必要的假象，只因为原词条是法语词汇 (conscience)而已。
这个例子说明了《辞典》不能真的被用来作为通常意义上的哲学辞典，如指导学生用辞典帮助他们弄清楚复杂的概念。其中有些内容是不准确的。在有关 "认识论"的词条中，凯瑟琳·舍瓦莱(Catherine Chevalley)做出了非常怪异的评论，"在法语中谈论贝叶斯主义Bayesianism(有关概率的认知理论，源于18世纪英国牧师托马斯·贝叶斯 (Thomas Bayes))的进口或者对概率概念的不同解释仍然非常困难。"如果舍瓦莱查阅过让·皮埃尔·克莱罗(Jean-Pierre Cléro)关于"概率"的词条，她就会发现那里有关于贝叶斯和对概率的不同解释的详细讨论(当然，最初是法语写的)。在这场辩论中的核心问题是对一个事 件的概率的讨论是有助于赋予事件本身一种性质(如硬币落地正面朝上的概率是50%)还是它只不过表现出了某种程度的主观确定性或无知(我50%地相信硬币 落地时正面朝上)。第一种概率是客观性的;第二种概率则是主观性的。这种区分并非鸡毛蒜皮的小事，有人认为它与区别对待量子力学作为现实的不可简化特征的 概率性质还是将其视为体现我们无知(如在所谓的'隐蔽变量'理论)有关。克莱罗区分了客观解释和主观解释，称前者是"概率"(probability)， 称后者是"偶然性"(chance)。不幸的是，当今英美哲学界的每个人都使用"chance"这个词指代客观概率，用没有修饰语的 "probability"指主观的或客观的概率(克莱罗没有提及1975年之后出版的任何一部著作)。
最好的文章---其中有杰出的哲学史家布拉格或者艾伦·利比亚(Alain de Libera)的文章，它们梳理了欧洲语言之间意义和词源学之间的复杂关系。但是词条的选择和相对篇幅大小十分怪异。我们看到有"demos"这个词条却 没有"democracy";而差别很大的"描述"(description)和"描绘"(depiction)却是同一个词条;词条"idea"占了半 页，词条"Imagination"也是如此。而"Event"只占了一页的四分之一，但"Ereignis"(海德格尔的术语)则占了一页半。 "Perception"和"Apperception"(莱布尼茨的术语，意思是自我意识)组成一对，作者米歇尔·菲尚(Michel Fichant)把这个话题的历史追溯到19世纪中期的费希特(Fichte)。历史材料非常有价值，但是这个词条应该被称为"从莱布尼茨到费希特的感知 (Perception)和自我意识(Apperception)。
如果这是一本辞典，就更接近皮埃尔·培尔(Pierre Bayle)(1697)或者约翰逊博士(Dr Johnson (1755)的著作。在1300页的篇幅中，它向读者呈现了对哲学中的某些核心概念及其历史和词源学的认识。许多词条让人大开眼界，但本书最令人痴迷的地 方是透过哲学词汇的剖析而揭示出的对欧洲文化片段的片面认知。布拉格注意到用欧洲世俗语言进行哲学探索开始于13世纪西班牙哲学家拉曼·卢尔(Ramon Llull)用加泰罗尼亚语Catalan写作。但是经过了一段时间后哲学话语才拥有了民族身份，这归功于拉丁语和法语扮演的国际思想交流工具的作用。最 伟大的德国哲学家莱布尼茨从来没有使用德语撰写哲学著作。到了海德格尔宣称"只有我们德语才拥有与希腊语匹敌的深刻和创造性哲学特征"，情况才发生变化。 虽然本书对海德格尔的关注很突出，但编辑们肯定有所顾虑。因为《欧洲各国哲学术语：无法翻译的词汇辞典》毕竟是法国哲学家眼中对哲学的赞美。编辑对此毫不 隐讳：阿普特说本书是"对英美分析哲学传统的直接挑战，英国思想的霸权受到策略性地遏制。"这种"被扭曲的着重点分配"被描述为"法语原作论述的存在理由 (raison d'être)的重要角色。"
当然，英语哲学(与英国思想不同)的缺失非常惹眼。所谓的"普通语言"哲学家是奥斯汀(J. L. Austin)、斯坦利·卡维尔(Stanley Cavell)、吉尔伯特·赖尔(Gilbert Ryle)、维特根斯坦(Wittgenstein)等人，此外很少有其他人。布拉格的长词条"欧洲"在谈及英国的时候只用了三句话。但是无论喜欢与否， 英美分析哲学在英国美国澳大利亚和欧洲大陆很多地方的哲学系占支配地位是不争的事实，无论喜欢与否，卡桑的书体现的法国哲学研究途径在全世界处于衰落之 中。看待《辞典》的方法之一是将其视为对法语作为"支配性哲学语言"的衰落的延长版的挽歌，其思想背景是英语已经成为阿普特所说的"唯一揭示普遍性知识的 语言"。
任何一个熟悉20世纪欧洲哲学演变过程和笼统的20世纪历史演变的人都明白这种情况是如何发生的，因而明白《辞典》的原版为什么被描述为对法国的"意外打击"。人们担忧的不是其法国中心主义特征，而是其偏狭的地方主义可能误导那些不了解世界其他地方的人。
《欧洲各国哲学术语：无法翻译的词汇辞典》毕竟是法国哲学家眼中对哲学的赞美。
但是，在著名哲学家阿兰·巴迪乌(Alain Badiou)有关把法语作为哲学语言进行了引人注目的赞歌的"法语"词条中，法国中心主义被置于自我嘲弄的高度。显然像编辑一样对英语的语言帝国主义感 到沮丧，这位哲学家直言不讳地宣称"法国哲学中的主要创造性人物如笛卡尔、柏格森、萨特、德勒兹(Deleuze)、拉康等都认为，用本族语写作的权利是 语言自由和权利。"考虑到没有人阻止任何人用母语写作的事实，我们很难明白宣称这种自由权利的意义何在。当然，当今全世界的学者尤其是在某些学科领域都面 临一种用英语写作的压力。在自然科学界，如果不用英语写作要取得成功几乎是不可能的。但是这个事实与柏格森等人宣称的语言自由权利没有任何关系，无论是否 令人感到遗憾，巴迪乌也没有明确讨论这个事实。
但是，情况变得更糟糕了。巴迪乌宣称哲学语言法语是"女性和工人阶级的语言而非科学家的语言。"在法语中，哲学是"激烈辩论性的，忽略共识，仍 然反对学界人士对公众讲话而不是对同行讲话。""用法语写成的哲学具有政治性"的事实应该是语言事实："从笛卡尔到现在的法语使用中的潜在普遍主义完全依 靠这样一种信念：语言的本质在于其句法。"正如乔姆斯基所说，语言的本质或许在于句法，但是这并非法语所独有，而且与政治自由没有任何关系。这种将语言与 观念扯在一起的怪异做法达到了高潮，当巴迪乌宣称笛卡尔将其《哲学原理》献给波西米亚的伊丽莎白公主(Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia)是"现实中的基本民主意图，将哲学话语转向讨论和诱惑，转向爱神维纳斯(Venus)而不是智慧女神密涅瓦(Minerva)，尽可能远 离科学或学术堑壕。"
伏尔泰和拉康的法语哲学著作之间到底发生了什么变化，这是很好的问题，但无论巴迪乌还是《辞典》的其他任何人都没有深入探讨。阿普特在序言中或 许带着某种尴尬地详细讨论了巴迪乌的词条。她说，"严格说来，民族本体论对巴迪乌来说是一种诅咒。"这个"严格说来"肯定包含了更多信息，尤其是考虑到法 语"接近成为巴迪乌的属性的亚当的语言。"这意味着什么呢?阿普特论述到"它让位于逻辑形式主义、公理、规则、普遍原则。对巴迪乌来说，最重要的是法语有 助于表达的政治化，通过替换操作和提出紧迫问题的艺术剥夺谓语的地位。"
当然，巴迪乌本人是提出紧迫问题的大师。但是他有关法语的言论让人想起维特根斯坦有关法国政客的笑话，这个政客"写到词汇按照人们思考的顺序写 出来是法语的特征。"事实上，因为巴迪乌本人曾写过一本论述维特根斯坦的书，所以这就更加值得玩味。或许它是故意为之;巴迪乌是在嘲笑在哲学写作中竭力追 求简洁和清晰的"盎格鲁撒克逊人"，嘲弄法语的"晦涩难解"吗?是关于"盎格鲁撒克逊人"和"英国思想霸权"的玩笑吗?我们不知道。正如芭芭拉·卡桑本人 注意到，"没有什么比翻译俏皮话更困难的了。"
作者简介：
提姆·克莱恩(Tim Crane)，剑桥大学哲学教授，《泰晤士报文学副刊》哲学编辑。
本文评论的书《欧洲各国哲学术语：无法翻译的词汇辞典》普林斯顿大学出版社
Barbara Cassin, editor
DICTIONARY OF UNTRANSLATABLES
A philosophical lexicon
Translated by Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein and Michael Syrotinski
Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood
1,297pp. Princeton University Press. £44.95 (US $65).
978 0 691 13870 1
译自：The philosophy of translation by TIM CRANE
The philosophy of translation
Barbara Cassin, editor
DICTIONARY OF UNTRANSLATABLES
A philosophical lexicon
Translated by Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein and Michael Syrotinski
Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood
1,297pp. Princeton University Press. £44.95 (US $65).
978 0 691 13870 1
"Pears and Grapes on a Table, Céret" by Juan Gris, 1913 Photograph: Promsied gift from the Leonard A. Lauder cubist collectionWe hope you enjoy this free piece from the TLS, which is available every Thursday in print and via the TLS app. This week's issue also features Thomas Pynchon adapted for the big screen, a necessary reappraisal of Mo Yan, a new poem by John Ashbery, Lisa Hilton's Good Queen Bess – and much more.
This extraordinary book, a huge dictionary of philosophical terms from many languages, is a translation of Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, originally published in 2004, the brainchild of the French philosopher Barbara Cassin. If the original project was paradoxical, then the present version is doubly so: not just a dictionary of untranslatable words, but a translation of that dictionary. Rather than despair at the self-undermining self-referentiality of the whole idea, the editors rejoice in it. Indeed, moving the word "untranslatable" to the beginning of the English title proudly asserts the paradox even more forcefully than the original French title does, and forms what the English-language editor Emily Apter calls "an organising principle of the entire project".
In her preface, Apter comments (apparently without irony) that "the extent of our translation task became clear only when we realised that a straightforward conversion of the French edition into English simply would not work". She is right, of course: translation is almost never a straightforward conversion. This is why it is such a fertile subject for philosophy. Like so much in philosophy, theorizing about translation (and, of course, about the related concept of meaning) lurches between two unappealing extremes. At one extreme, translation is conceived of in terms of literal identity of meaning; at the other, it is simply impossible. As Jacques Derrida put it: "In a sense, nothing is untranslatable; but in another sense, everything is untranslatable . . . it is easy for me always to hold firm between these two hyperboles which are fundamentally the same, and always translate each other".
Derrida's point that the two extremes or hyperboles are "fundamentally the same" amounts to this: the only reason for thinking that translation is impossible (the second extreme) is that it must require literal identity of meaning (the first extreme), and this is clearly impossible. One reason why the first extreme (which the editors call the "mapping or isomorphic" conception of translation) is impossible is that identity is transitive, and translation isn't. In other words, if translation requires identity of meaning, then if A translates B and B translates C, then A and C are identical in meaning. A moment's reflection shows this cannot be right: "castle" can be translated as Schloss, and "Schloss" as château, but the Château de Chenonceau is not a castle in anyone's book. Translation is not identity of meaning. So we do not show that translation is impossible by showing that there is no identity of meaning. Derrida was right.
However, it is important not to exaggerate when we reject the mapping conception of translation. Google Translate does work, and it is getting better every day thanks to the strength of its algorithms and the sheer brute force of its data-mining. It does not provide identities of meaning, but it does give word-by-word translations, and it does this mechanically. Google Translate will not get very far with translating a poem, of course, or with the untranslatables of this dictionary. An untranslatable is defined here as either "a term that is left untranslated as it is transferred from language to language", or one that is "typically subject to mistranslation and retranslation". By these criteria, as Rémi Brague points out in his excellent entry on "Europe", the word "philosophy" itself is "the untranslatable par excellence . . . . 'Philosophy' itself remained transcribed rather than translated into languages other than Greek. Only the Dutch language coined a word Wijsbegeerte which was a calque of the etymology of philosophia" (actually, Hungarian invented one too – bölcselet – but the basic point remains).
Many other words in the Dictionary are like this. A famous example is Heidegger's Dasein, which in ordinary German means existence, but whose precise philosophical meaning is the subject of endless debate, and so is rarely translated (except by clunky hyphenated constructions such as "Being-there"). The Danish are proud of the untranslatability of their word hygge – a word conveying an atmosphere of welcoming cosiness, applied to a place or social event, as when you spend time with friends and family, eating well in a warm room. There: I've told you what it means. Heidegger's Dasein is like that; it will just take a bit longer to explain.
Translation is almost never a straightforward conversion. This is why it is such a fertile subject for philosophy
Other philosophical words have gained their meanings through a creative process of neologism, mistranslation and retranslation. Sometimes considering this process in too much detail can give rise to spurious questions, as far as philosophy is concerned. "Consciousness" is conscience in French (coscienza in Italian, conciencia in Spanish), and these French, Spanish and Italian words can also be translated into the English "conscience". Although "consciousness" and "conscience" are etymologically related, they have for centuries expressed completely different concepts in English, and these concepts are expressed by different words in other languages. Étienne Balibar's entry on "consciousness" struggles with the conceptual and historical connections between consciousness and conscience; but for the English reader, the struggle is an unnecessary artefact of the original entry's being about the French word conscience.
This example illustrates that the Dictionary cannot really be used as a dictionary of philosophy in the usual way – something to which you might direct students, for example, to help them get clear accounts of complex concepts. And some of its content is just inaccurate. In an entry on "Epistemology", Catherine Chevalley makes the odd comment that "it remains difficult in French to discuss the import of Bayesianism [a dominant contemporary probability-based theory of knowledge, deriving from the eighteenth-century English cleric Thomas Bayes], or different interpretations of the notion of probability". If Chevalley had consulted Jean-Pierre Cléro's entry on "Chance/Probability", she would have found there an extensive discussion of both Bayes and different interpretations of probability (written originally in French, of course). One central question in this debate is whether talk about the probability of an event is attributing a property to the event itself (for example, the probability of a coin landing heads is 50 per cent) or whether it is just an expression of a degree of subjective certainty or ignorance (I am 50 per cent sure that it will land heads). The first is probability in the objective sense; the second, the subjective sense. This distinction is not a trivial one: some see it as connected to the distinction between treating the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics (say) as an irreducible feature of reality, and treating it as an expression of our ignorance (as in the so-called "hidden variable" theories). Cléro distinguishes between objective and subjective interpretations, calling the first "probability" and the second "chance". Unfortunately, everyone in contemporary anglophone philosophy uses the word "chance" for objective probability, and the unqualified "probability" for both the subjective and the objective (Cléro does not refer to a single work published after 1975).
The best articles – among them those by historians of philosophy of the calibre of Brague or Alain de Libera – tease out the complex relations of meaning and etymology across the languages of Europe. But the choice and relative sizes of entries are eccentric. We have "demos" but not "democracy"; the very different ideas of "description" and "depiction" get a shared entry; "idea" gets half a page, "Imagination" the same. "Event" gets a quarter of a page, but "Ereignis" (as used by Heidegger) gets a page and a half. "Perception" is paired with "Apperception" (Leibniz's word for self-consciousness), and the author Michel Fichant takes the history of the subject only as far as Fichte in the mid-nineteenth century. The historical material is valuable, but the entry should have been called "Perception and Apperception from Leibniz to Fichte".
If this is a dictionary, it is closer to those of Pierre Bayle (1697) or Dr Johnson (1755). In 1,300 pages it presents a certain conception of some central terms from philosophy and their history and etymology. Many of the entries are illuminating, but what is most fascinating about the book is its partial vision of a fragment of European culture, through the dissection of its philosophical vocabulary. Brague observes that philosophizing in the vernacular in Europe began with Ramon Llull writing in Catalan in the thirteenth century. But it took some time for national identities to impose themselves on philosophical discourse, because of the international intellectual role of Latin, and then of French. Leibniz, one of the greatest German philosophers, wrote no philosophical works in German. Things had changed by the time Heidegger pronounced that "only our German language has a deep and creative philosophical character to compare with the Greek".
Despite the amount of attention paid to Heidegger in this book, the editors would surely demur. For the Dictionary of Untranslatables is, more than anything, a loving celebration of philosophy as conceived by French philosophers. The editors are explicit about this: Apter says that the book is "a direct challenge to the preeminence of Anglo-analytic philosophical traditions . . . the imperium of English [sic] thought was strategically curtailed". This "skewed distribution of emphasis" is described as "clearly an important part of the polemical raison d'être of the French original".
Certainly, English-language philosophy (not the same as "English thought"!) is conspicuously absent. The so-called "ordinary language" philosophers are here (J. L. Austin, Stanley Cavell, Gilbert Ryle, Wittgenstein) but very little else. Brague's long entry on "Europe" devotes only three sentences to English. But like it or not, "Anglo-analytic" philosophy dominates university departments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australasia and many parts of Continental Europe; and like it or not, the French approach embodied in Cassin's book is on the decline worldwide. One way to see the Dictionary, then, is as an extended lament for the decline of French as a "preeminent language of philosophy", in an intellectual context where English has become what Apter calls "the singular language of universal knowledge".
Anyone familiar with how philosophy in Europe developed in the twentieth century, and with twentieth-century history more generally, will understand something of how this came about, and also therefore why the original edition of the Dictionary has been described as "a surprise hit" in France. The worry is not so much that it is Francocentric, but that its provincialism may mislead those who do not know anything about what the rest of the world thinks.
This Dictionary is, more than anything, a loving celebration of philosophy as conceived by French philosophers
The Francocentrism is brought to self-parodic heights, though, in Alain Badiou's entry on "French", a remarkable paean to the French language as a language of philosophy. Obviously as frustrated as the editors are by the linguistic imperialism of English, he remarks plaintively that "the major creative figures in philosophy in French, Descartes, Bergson, Sartre, Deleuze, and Lacan, all claimed the right to write in their native language, in sum, the right to freedom of language". It's hard to know what claiming this right consisted in, given that no one was stopping any of these people from writing in their native language. Today, of course, there is pressure on scholars worldwide, in a huge number of academic fields, to write in English. In the natural sciences, it is simply impossible to succeed without writing in English. But this fact – regrettable or not, and not explicitly discussed by Badiou – has nothing to do with whether Bergson et al were claiming a right to freedom of language.
But it gets worse. Badiou claims that philosophical French is "a language of women and the working class rather than of scientists". Philosophy in French is "violently polemical . . . ignoring consensus . . . still opposed to the academy it speaks (politically) to the public and not to colleagues". The fact that "philosophy in French is political" is supposed to be a fact about the language itself: "the latent universalism of any use of French, from Descartes to the present, rests entirely on the belief that the essence of language is syntax". The essence of language may be syntax, as Chomsky has argued, but this is not specific to French, and has nothing to do with political freedom. This bizarre association of ideas reaches its climax in Badiou's claim that Descartes's dedication of his Principles of Philosophy to Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia "is in reality a basic democratic intention that turns philosophical discourse towards discussion and seduction, towards Venus rather than Minerva, moving it as far as possible away from academic or scientific entrenchment".
It's a good question what happened to French philosophical prose between Voltaire and Lacan, but it is not one that is addressed by Badiou, or by anyone else in this Dictionary of Untranslatables. In her preface, Apter discusses Badiou's entry at length, perhaps with a little embarrassment. "National ontology", she says, is "strictly speaking, anathema to Badiou". A lot must be contained in that "strictly speaking", especially given that French is "close to being an Adamic language in Badiou's ascription". What can this possibly mean? Apter struggles: "it lends itself to logical formalism, axioms, maxims and universal principles. Above all, for Badiou, the French language is conducive to the politicisation of expression, unseating predicates through the play of substitutions and the art of the imperious question".
Certainly, Badiou himself is the master of the imperious question. But his remarks about the French language bring to mind Wittgenstein's joke about the French politician who "wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them". In fact, this is all the more odd because Badiou himself has written a book on Wittgenstein. So perhaps it is deliberate; could Badiou be making fun of those "Anglo-Saxons" who strive for simplicity and clarity in their philosophical prose and mock the "obscurantism" of the French? Is the joke on the Anglo-Saxons and the "imperium of English thought"? It's hard to tell. As Barbara Cassin herself observes, "nothing is harder than to translate a witticism".
Tim Crane is Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and the Philosophy editor of the TLS.
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