Cosmopolitanism, translation and the experience of the foreign

Across Languages and Cultures 11 (2), pp. 161–174 (2010) DOI: 10.1556/Acr.11.2010.2.2

1585-1923/$ 20.00 © 2010 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest

COSMOPOLITANISM, TRANSLATION AND THE EXPERIENCE OF THE FOREIGN

ESPERANÇA BIELSA

Department of Sociology, University of Leicester

University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH Phone: +44 (0)116 223 1081

E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: Cosmopolitanism has received in recent years renewed attention in the so-cial sciences as an important component of the heightening of global consciousness, which Roland Robertson emphasised as the significant subjective dimension of globalisation (1992). The term is used not only to describe an empirical reality but also to question estab-lished disciplinary trends and to point to new methodological orientations. Thus, it denotes both an objectively existing social reality and a methodological approach to describing this reality. Cosmopolitanism is also viewed in its critical potential as embodying a transforma-tive vision of an alternative society. This article considers some important theoretical in-sights of what has been called the new cosmopolitanism and elaborates on the importance of translation for any consideration of a cosmopolitan social reality or for methodological cosmopolitanism, inquiring into the important contribution of translation studies to an illu-mination of key aspects of cosmopolitan social theory. A first section sketches out key in-sights on cosmopolitanism today, while a second and third section elaborate further on the relevance of translation for a productive understanding of cosmopolitanism, exploring trans-lation as the experience of the foreign and relating such an understanding to the notion of cosmopolitanism as openness to the other.

Keywords: cosmopolitanism, foreignness, globalisation, modernity, translation

1. COSMOPOLITANISM TODAY

The concept of cosmopolitanism goes back to Greek Antiquity, where the no-tion of cosmopolitan or citizen of the world was developed by the cynics Anthistenes and Diogenes and the stoic Zeno, social outsiders to the polis, de-noting inclusion, equality, and the idea of a universal community as opposed to particular allegiances to actual city-states (Fine and Cohen, 2002:138). Further,

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it is to the Enlightenment tradition, and in particular to Kant’s theories on cos-mopolitanism and the attainment of perpetual peace, that many contemporary approaches to cosmopolitanism appeal. These emphasise the transformation of international law from a law of States to a cosmopolitan law based on the rights of individuals which do not only derive from the fact that they are citizens of their respective states, but also members of a cosmopolitan community (Boh-man and Lutz-Bachmann 1997; Fine 2007; Habermas 2006).

Cosmopolitanism today, or what has widely been called the new cosmopol-itanism, is characterised by a renewed attention to the global destinies and risks that we now face, brought about by modernity and globalisation. Robert Fine signals the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 as the symbolic event that gives an image of the breaking down of boundaries and the emergence of new forms of solidarity:

This event appropriately marked the emergence of a new intellectual and political movement that is itself international and places human rights, in-ternational law, global governance and peaceful relations between states at the centre of its vision of the world. When we speak today of the ‘new cosmopolitanism’ it is this movement that we have in mind. (2007:1)

At the same time, what is referred to as cosmopolitan social theory entails a

critique of the centrality of the nation-state in social theory and a defense of a new alternative approach to social reality.

In this context, Ulrich Beck has formulated a critique of what he calls ‘methodological nationalism’ and argued for its replacement by ‘methodologi-cal cosmopolitanism’. Beck describes the cosmopolitanisation of social reality, which is perceivable in the global risks and crises that we face, in our global in-terdependence. Cosmopolitanism is thus for Beck no longer an idea but a real-ity, to which social science must respond with a new way of looking and under-standing, with what he calls the cosmopolitan vision. The methodological na-tionalism that has characterised sociology and other social sciences, according to which the nation, the State and society are the ‘natural’ social and political forms of the modern world, is blind to this growing transnationalisation and to the multiple identities and affiliations that go beyond national frontiers. The cosmopolitan vision replaces the national vision and opens peoples’ eyes to an already existing cosmopolitan reality. It is perceptive of the absence of borders and of cultural mixing and contradiction, of the new landscapes of identity and memory brought about by globality.

Beck also elaborates on cosmopolitanism as the recognition of otherness, and on universalism and relativism in the context of global interdependence. While universalism can only treat the other as equal and thus tend towards he-gemony and the elimination of difference, relativism can only work through ac-

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centuating difference, tending towards the principle of incommensurability, which makes mutual comprehension of different perspectives impossible. How-ever, the consequence of the assumption of incommensurability is the non inter-ference between cultures in a world where non interference has become impos-sible and interference is easily transformed into violence (2005:80). Cosmopoli-tan realism thus insists on how interrelation and intervention occurs in the con-stitution of our forcibly intercultural destiny, considering others as both differ-ent and equal (2005:81, 84), beyond the limits and flaws of multiculturalism, which still operates in terms of non interference between homogeneously con-ceived cultural groups. Finally, Beck employs the notion of reflexive cosmopol-itanism (2005:97) to designate what is new in 21st century cosmopolitanism, this growing consciousness of an existing cosmopolitan reality.

Fine has formulated a powerful critique of Beck’s version of new cos-mopolitanism centred not on his understanding of methodological cosmopol-itanism or of the cosmopolitan vision, but on Beck’s critique of methodological nationalism. Fine questions, on the one hand, Beck’s ‘cult of the new’ and in particular his exaggeration of 9/11 as signalling ‘a complete collapse of lan-guage’, of older frames of reference with which to understand the world order (2007:8). On the other hand, he critiques what he calls the fallacy of presentism, which prematurely declares the redundancy of old concepts and theories, show-ing how the very concepts deemed antiquated creep back into Beck’s concep-tion of what the new world order entails (2007:9). After all, as others have shown (Fine 2007:11–14; Turner 2006), the classical sociological tradition builds itself not only on the idea of the modern nation-state, but also on interna-tionalism, as cosmopolitan currents in the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Simmel suggest. But Beck is not the only one in seeing in 9/11 a symbol of eve-rything that has changed in the contemporary world. Slavoj Zižek, for example, has pointed out that 9/11 marks the end of the ‘happy 90’s’, governed by the neo-liberal dream of ‘the end of history’ after the fall of the Berlin wall and the spread of the global capitalist system (2005:51). For him, it signals a return to the real history of new walls of conflict after the end of the utopia of global capitalist liberal democracy (2005:122–3). It would be wrong to deny the new-ness of our present circumstances and the growing transnational awareness of mutual interdependence and global crisis, but it is similarly flawed to make the distinction between a cosmopolitan and a national vision in social science an absolute one. Fine’s critique of the critique of methodological nationalism and the relativisation of what is new in the new cosmopolitanism also bring to our attention the fact that the cosmopolitanisation of reality is a feature not just of the present face of globalisation, but more widely of modernity since the 19th century.

The relationship between cosmopolitanism and modernity is precisely one of the main themes in Gerard Delanty’s approach to the cosmopolitan imagina-

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tion. As he notes, the cosmopolitan imagination, as a condition of self-problematisation and incompleteness, is integral to modernity. Further, he dis-tinguishes current developments in social theory from the dominant Enlighten-ment notion of cosmopolitanism as a transnational republican order because they suggest a post-universalistic cosmopolitanism. Here, different modernities coexist and a single world culture is not postulated (2006:27). Therefore, in what he calls critical cosmopolitanism, “the cosmopolitan imagination occurs when and wherever new relations between self, other and world develop in moments of openness” (2006:27; 2009:52–3). It is thus the principle of world openness, created out of the encounter of the local with the global, which De-lanty emphasises as constitutive of cosmopolitanism. Moreover, the combina-tion of the local and the global (rather than universalism) and the attempt to reconcile universal solidarity with particular solidarities can be more widely taken to define cosmopolitanism today, which in this sense is of a post-universalistic kind (Delanty 2006:27, 34–35; Fine 2007:14). Thus,

[…] theories of multiple modernity have led to a new conception of cos-mopolitanism that gives particular emphasis to post-universalism. A post-universal cosmopolitanism is critical and dialogic, seeing as the goal alter-native readings of history and the recognition of plurality rather than the creation of a universal order, such as a cosmopolis. This is a view that en-ables us to see how people were cosmopolitan in the past and how different cosmopolitanisms existed before and despite westernization. It may be termed ‘cultural cosmopolitanism’, that is a plurality of cosmopolitan pro-jects by which the global and the local are combined in diverse ways. (De-lanty 2006:35)

This post-universalistic cosmopolitanism emphasises tensions and conflict

(between the global and the local, between the universal and the particular) rather than simply plurality, as constitutive of modernity. Therefore, processes of cultural hybridisation and localisation are highlighted as important ways through which the local and the national are redefined through their interaction with the global.

The notion of openness rather than universalism as defining the cosmopoli-tan imagination can also be linked to Derrida’s conception of cosmopolitanism. Derrida links cosmopolitanism to the classical notion of the polis through his concept of the ‘city of refuge’. At the same time, this very notion entails a novel status for the city through a renewal of international law. In the context of wide-spread worldwide violence and conflict, cities of refuge appear as utopian spaces. They are independent from the state and open to new forms of solidarity offering, above all, hospitality to the foreigner, the immigrant, the exile, the nomad, the stateless or displaced person, and thus opening a space for the reori-



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entation of the politics of the state (2001:3–5). The concept of hospitality Der-rida proposes, which embraces both the duty of hospitality and the right to hos-pitality, is developed more fully elsewhere (for example, in Derrida and Du-fourmantelle 2000). Further, it is through unconditional hospitality, through genuine openness to the foreigner, that violence and the tendency of the State towards destructive autoimmunity can be avoided, so that the concept becomes an important one in his reflections on philosophy in a time of terror (Habermas and Derrida 2003; see also Aguilera 2009).

2. COSMOPOLITANISM AS TRANSLATION

Contemporary cosmopolitanism emerges strongly from a perception of global interconnectedness as negative globalisation (Bauman 2006), as a crisis of in-terdependence (Beck 2005). Cosmopolitanism is not simply a result of global-isation but, as we have seen, an integral part of modernity. However, it has been greatly fuelled by the growing speed and extent of globalising trends. Indeed, as Delanty has noted, “cosmopolitanism has become one of the major expressions of modernity today due to the extent and speed of globalization. It follows, then, that the solutions to the problems of globalization do not come from globaliza-tion itself but from the immanent cosmopolitan possibilities within modernity itself.” (2009:72). In this approach it is cosmopolitanism’s transformative vision of an alternative society that is foregrounded.

But, as we have seen, cosmopolitan social science is also a critique of the national bias in the concepts and theories employed to study our society, and a markedly interdisciplinary project that seeks to adequately account for signifi-cant forms of worldwide interdependence. In this sense, the influence of meth-odological cosmopolitanism can also be perceived in translation studies, signal-ling a move away from theories of translation that deal primarily with transla-tion at the national level towards theories dealing with translation’s crucial in-tervention in mediating transnational communication flows. Thus, renewed at-tention is being devoted to translation as a pivotal element in the international literary space (Casanova 2004), in the localisation of commercial information (Pym 2004), and in global news production (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009), while methodological nationalism has been attacked from various perspectives that have sought to redefine the discipline in the context of globalisation (Tymoczko 2007, 2009; Apter 2006; Cronin 2003, 2006).

The purpose of this article is not to trace this important development within the field of translation studies, but to offer some initial remarks on the relevance of translation for a conception of contemporary cosmopolitanism. The key role of translation in this context has by no means gone unnoticed but, as we will see, even those authors who have called attention to the centrality of translation

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for any account of cosmopolitanism today have failed to provide any concrete ideas of how its role is to be understood, let alone any empirical accounts of its key intervention in mediating transnational communication.

As we have seen in the previous section, world openness or openness to others are basic categories in current conceptions of cosmopolitanism. Open-ness and hospitality to the foreigner are key elements in Derrida’s approach to cosmopolitanism, as well as in Delanty’s notion of critical cosmopolitanism. Also for Beck, the cosmopolitan vision breaks with the insularity of national consciousness by opening itself to others and internalising their vision, imagin-ing alternative ways within and between different cultures and modernities (2005:112–3). If it is to be real and genuine, openness to the other necessarily means engagement with the other. It is the substance of this article that transla-tion offers a way of grasping and approaching precisely this engagement.

Again, the significance of translation has already been emphasised by some of the key theorists of cosmopolitanism. Thus, Beck at one point states that the cosmopolitan capacity obliges one to practice the art of translating and laying bridges, with which he means both relativising one’s form of life in front of dif-ferent possibilities and looking at oneself from the perspective of the culturally different (2005:126). Delanty also notes that translation plays a central role in the cosmopolitan imagination and that critical cosmopolitanism opens up spaces of discourse and identifies possibilities for translation. He argues that cosmo-politan processes “take the form of translations between things that are differ-ent. The space of cosmopolitanism is the space of such translations. While the capacity for translation has always existed, at least since the advent of writing, it is only with modernity that translation or translatability has itself become the dominant cultural form for all societies” (2006:43). For Kwame Anthony Ap-piah, cosmopolitanism is the challenge of combining the ideals of universal concern and respect for legitimate difference (2007:xiii). He views cosmopol-itanism primarily in terms of establishing conversations across differences, of developing habits of coexistence. That is, it is not only openness but active en-gagement with the experience and ideas of others that becomes essential to cosmopolitans. Moreover, the problem of understanding the practice of strang-ers is explicitly formulated in terms of translation:

Most of the time, once someone has translated the language you don’t know, or explained some little unfamiliar symbol or custom, you’ll have no more (and, of course, no less) trouble understanding why they do what they do than you do making sense of your neighbors back home. (Appiah 2006:94)

Given its key mediating role in cosmopolitan processes it is surprising how

little attention has been devoted to specifying and analysing the nature of trans-



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lation in this context, even when it is identified as the ‘dominant cultural form for all societies’ or when the research object for critical cosmopolitan sociology is defined as the discursive space of translations (Delanty).1 One reason for this might be the widespread assumption that translation is a transparent process, which merely facilitates linguistic and cultural transfer without leaving any traces of its intervention. In the context of globalisation, and the ever increasing quantities of information flows on a global scale, the assumption of transpar-ency becomes linked to one of instantaneity. Thus, Michael Cronin has re-marked on the paradoxical nature of translation in the circulation of global in-formation flows:

The network underpinned by information technology brings Anglophone messages and images from all over the globe in minutes and seconds, lead-ing to a reticular cosmopolitanism of near-instantaneity. This cosmopol-itanism is partly generated by translators themselves who work to make in-formation available in the dominant language of the market. However, what is devalued or ignored in the cyberhype of global communities is the effort, the difficulty and, above all else, the time required to establish and maintain linguistic (and by definition, cultural) connections. (Cronin 2003:49)

In approaches to processes of globalisation, more attention has been de-

voted to the increased circulation of information, ideas, goods and people than to the productive conditions that make it possible. This has led to assuming that global texts can automatically be received by audiences and to obscuring the crucial intervention of translation in the production of a multiplicity of local versions. Moreover, the assumption of transparency has lead social scientists to ignore the fact that different translating strategies generate radically different texts, and more generally to underplay the degree to which translation calls the whole relationship between different languages and cultures into question. The study of translation – part of the shared languages and linguistic competencies that are a key infrastructure of global communication (Held et al. 1999:345) –

1 In his 2006 article on the cosmopolitan imagination, Delanty clearly attributed a central

role to translation, and in his 2009 book he has gone some way towards remedying this gap by writing a section on cosmopolitanism and cultural translation. In his view, an emphasis on cul-tural multiplicity and interaction does not suffice to account for the cosmopolitan dimension of modernity. Therefore, he adopts the idea of cultural translation to focus on how one culture inter-prets itself in light of the encounter with the other and constantly undergoes change as a result (2009:193–98). His is a groundbreaking account of how translation can be incorporated at the core of any analysis of modernity and can be used as a starting point for further work in this direc-tion.

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sheds new light on the processes of global interdependence on a concrete, mate-rial level and contributes to an understanding of the nature of global communi-cation and of cultural globalisation, the importance of which is emphasised in many accounts of cosmopolitanism.2 For instance, Beck refers to cosmopolitan empathy and the globalisation of the emotions, facilitated by the global media. It is also the global media that make possible the perception of global risks which is at the core of the cosmopolitan vision. Delanty, on the other hand, puts the development of a global public sphere at the centre of the cosmopolitan imagination. Cultural hybridity, mixing and the interpenetration of local, na-tional and cosmopolitan traditions are also emphasised by both authors. Yet, the conditions that make possible the global circulation of messages and the con-crete ways these messages reach different localities in different forms are sel-dom accounted for.

This article maintains that a sociology of translation lies at the basis of any critical cosmopolitan sociology. Modern cosmopolitanism is characterised by the interconnection between the global and the local, rather than by a general appeal to the universal beyond and above any existing local ties. It concerns the processes through which localities are modified by global phenomena, as well as the transnational connections that are established worldwide. In a recent book, David Harvey has argued about the centrality of geographical knowledge in order to illuminate the way to a genuinely cosmopolitan future (2009). Trans-lation, broadly defined as a specialised means of dealing with the foreign, simi-larly offers a privileged way of examining the link between the global and the local and of understanding processes of global communication which lie at the centre of any contemporary notions of cosmopolitanism.

3. THE EXPERIENCE OF THE FOREIGN

In the context of globalisation, intercultural relations have been predominantly perceived either in terms of hybridisation and mixture (e.g. Nederveen Pieterse 2004) or in terms of clashes, whether globally (e.g. Huntington’s clash of civili-zations model) or locally (in what Appadurai has described as a worldwide genocidal impulse against minorities in the context of increasing social uncer-tainty, 2006). Here, an alternative perspective is proposed which does not minimise the significance of prevailing cultural difference and conflict, but also offers a way of examining specific processes of intercultural transfer and of empirically approaching how texts, ideas and beliefs are communicated across

2 For theoretical perspectives dealing with globalisation and translation see Bielsa (2005)

and Bielsa and Bassnett (2009, ch. 2).



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geographical, linguistic and cultural boundaries. That is, a focus on translation allows us to empirically approach Beck’s idea of the cosmopolitan vision and Delanty’s notion of critical cosmopolitanism as positing the coexistence of dif-ferent modernities without the creation of a single culture.

The point of departure for an analysis of translation in this context is, as Paul Ricoeur (2006) has argued, twofold. In the first place, he remarks on the universality of language, the fact that all human beings speak, albeit they do so in different tongues. This universal skill is thus only realised in a fragmented and dispersed way. In the second place, people have always translated, as com-mercial and cultural exchanges between different peoples have been the norm rather than the exception through human history. The existence of bilinguals and polyglots presupposes people’s ability to learn and speak languages that are not their own. Therefore, for Ricoeur, the alternative between translatable ver-sus untranslatable is better replaced with the alternative of faithfulness versus treason, which is of a practical rather than theoretical nature. This also gives a new perspective to the dilemma between universalism and relativism posed so many times and again in new ways in cosmopolitan theories. For the mere abil-ity to communicate to each other, which has been greatly increased in the last decades with the formation of global publics through new communication tech-nologies, belies the incommensurability of cultures proclaimed by relativists.

But affirming the existence of translation as a bridge across the diversity of languages and cultures is only the first step. Further it is necessary to inquire into the very nature of translation in mediating cultural and linguistic difference. And in order to fully do so translation must be approached not just as the trans-fer of a verbal message from one language into another, but as much more than that. In this context, Antoine Berman referred to translation as the experience or the test of the foreign, a process in which our relationship to the other is mobi-lised. Translation, moving constantly between the foreign work and the domes-tic reader, asserting the existence of one language among many others, serves to question the mother tongue, to desacralise it, in Ricoeur’s words, through an ex-ercise in reflexivity and decentering that allows the foreign to appear in its midst. Translation reveals that the mother tongue is one among others, helps to relativise it and ultimately to see itself as foreign (2006:9), ratifying linguistic and cultural difference without proposing any synthesis.

Further, as Walter Benjamin remarked, “[…] all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of lan-guages” (1992:75). However, how this is done, with respect for difference and with the aim of opening up a space for challenge and renewal within one’s cul-ture, or with the intention of appropriating the foreign and of erasing any trace of its very foreignness, can help to reinforce global inequalities and conflicts or to challenge the prevalent status quo. Translation can both help to enlarge the

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horizons of a language and a culture through the introduction of the new foreign elements or help to falsify an image of the foreign for domestic readers.

The ambiguity of translation, the fact that it exists in spite of linguistic dif-ference and the fact that it serves both the foreign work and the domestic reader at the same time, is in part to blame for the suspicion of treason translation and translators constantly provoke. This ambiguous role translation has in mediating between the foreign culture and the mother tongue has been approached throughout the history of translation in different ways. In Schleiermacher’s words, it is a matter of leading the author to the reader or leading the reader to the author. And in the most widely quoted contemporary formulation, it is the difference between what Lawrence Venuti has called domesticating translation and foreignising translation. The former is based on making a translated text read fluently, as if it was an original, thus rendering translation invisible, trans-parent. Domesticating translation denies the foreignness of the text and hides translation’s very intervention. According to Venuti, its effects are to conceal the conditions under which it is made, starting with the translators’ crucial in-tervention in the foreign text, and to create a recognisable, even familiar, cul-tural other. To this Venuti opposes what he calls foreignising translation, which disrupts the cultural codes of the translating language in order to do justice to the difference of the foreign text, and deviates from native norms to stage an alien reading experience (2008:15–6).

The distinction between domesticating and foreignising translation, the strategy followed of either leading the author to the reader or the reader to the author, is a fundamental one for a consideration of cosmopolitanism today. For domesticating translation, by denying the foreign as foreign, by rendering the foreign falsely familiar and translation transparent, is in fact denying any true openness to the other as other. And domesticating translations are not only the dominant form of literary translation into English, thus expressing the global dominance of this language, but are the dominant strategies followed for the translation of commercial information and of international news, where com-municability and accessibility to the target reader are emphasised. This accounts for the invisibility of translation in these fields, which has often lead social sci-entists to remark on the speed and spread of global information flows without considering the material conditions that are necessary to produce them. Further, this also poses the question of whether international news, for instance, can in-deed reveal a truthful and plural account of events and different social realities to global audiences, or are in fact falsifying a familiar image of the world to western audiences made up of what powerful news organizations perceive as newsworthy to their clients and publics.

Antoine Berman has emphasised the paradox between the ethnocentric trends in any culture and what he describes as the ethical objective of transla-tion, which is by necessity openness, dialogue, crossbreeding and decentering



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(1992:4). This is for him one of the reasons for translation’s invisibility and the demand that the translator be subservient to the original text and make him- or herself small:

Time has come to meditate on this repression of translation and on the “re-sistances” that underlie it. We may formulate the issue as follows: Every culture resists translation, even if it has an essential need for it. The very aim of translation – to open up in writing a certain relation with the Other, to fertilize what is one’s Own through the mediation of what is Foreign – is diametrically opposed to the ethnocentric structure of every culture, that species of narcissism by which every society wants to be a pure and un-adulterated Whole. There is a tinge of the violence of cross-breeding in translation. (Berman 1992:4)

Essentially following Berman’s views, Ricoeur speaks in this context of

linguistic hospitality, bringing Derrida’s term directly to use in a theoretical consideration of translation:

Indeed, it seems to me that translation sets us not only intellectual work, theoretical or practical, but also an ethical problem. Bringing the reader to the author, bringing the author to the reader, at the risk of serving and of betraying two masters: this is to practise what I like to call linguistic hospi-tality. (Ricoeur 2006:23)

Translation is about communicating with the foreign without never abol-

ishing the difference because indeed, as Ricoeur also remarks, the test, the ex-perience of the foreign, is the insurmountable difference between what belongs to one’s own culture and the foreign (2006:23), it is about giving up the dream of the perfect translation which, as we learnt from Benjamin, always points to an inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfilment of languages.

Further, this detour through Berman and Ricoeur on the experience of the foreign allows us to better understand the nature of Benjamin’s complex essay on ‘The Task of the Translator’, and in particular his emphasis on the fact that a good translation must not communicate meaning and his characterisation of an inferior translation as ‘the inaccurate transmission of inessential content’:

…what does a literary work say? What does it communicate? It ‘tells’ very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information. Yet any translation which intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information – hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. (1992:70)

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Berman takes essentially the same route when he proclaims an ethnocentric translation to be a bad translation (“A bad translation I call the translation which, generally under the guise of transmissibility, carries out a systemic nega-tion of the strangeness of the foreign work”, 1992:5). Transmission, mediation, is in this view not the primary object of the translator but, in Berman’s words, the test of the foreign, an experience which seeks to transform the mother tongue through confrontation with other languages, or in Benjamin’s words, “to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of an-other, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-creation of that work” (1992:80).

Goethe asserted that “The force of a language is not to reject the foreign, but to devour it” (quoted in Berman 1992:12). It is precisely the systematic de-vouring of more established foreign literatures that put Romantic Germany in the international literary scene, which at the time was dominated by France and its domesticating translations of the classics (Casanova 2004). Foreignising translation helped to build the national literary canon in 18th century Germany, however, the powerful role translation can play in the constitution of a cosmo-politan vision today remains to be seen. It is not enough to merely appeal to cosmopolitanism as the building of bridges and to translation as a privileged way of intercultural mediation. Translation is indeed key to the cosmopolitan vision. However, a naïve appeal to translation can only falsify the fact that it can also be used to abolish the foreign, to render it falsely familiar, and thus contribute to flattening the earth. Whether translation can serve really to build bridges across languages and cultures depends on the strategies followed, on the avoidance of transparent translations and on a type of translation that reveals rather than obscures the foreign as foreign. Where the bulk of translation that takes place is under the form of localisation of commercial products or circula-tion of international news, where communicability of content is emphasised, translation becomes paradoxically impossible, as Benjamin warned us (1992:81). Therefore, in order to make possible any critical and reflexive cos-mopolitanism we must ask ourselves whether we are surrounded by bad transla-tions (ethnocentric translations) that falsify the world for us through the com-munication of inessential information and the abolishment of meaningful differ-ence.

In a context where old boundaries and distinctions no longer prevail, the very nature of the foreign needs to be interrogated anew and reformulated to take account of new uncertainties and conflicts in the face of increased inter-connectedness and mobility, both at the level of individual biographies and at the wider social level. We are increasingly all foreigners, obliged to constantly translate ourselves, to adopt another’s perspective in order to look into our-selves in a world of strangers. And this defines a central paradox of our socie-ties: this is a time of constant movement and communication with the foreign,



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and yet translation remains predominantly invisible, the transparency and in-stantaneity of global information flows is assumed, while a new lingua franca asserts its global dominance. But it is only an understanding of translation as the experience of the foreign, questioning and decentering one’s own traditions through the vision of the other, that can constitute the basis of what Beck has described as the cosmopolitan vision, through which people experience them-selves as both part of a world in danger and of their own local histories and situations.

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Cosmopolitanism, translation and the experience of the foreign