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  • Introduction
  • Alia Al-Saji and Brian Schroeder

This special issue brings together some of the highlights from the fifty-fourth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). Emory University hosted the conference on October 8–10, 2015, in Atlanta, Georgia. The articles included in this volume draw out, in plural ways, the trajectories, methodologies, and orientations that run through what we call today Continental philosophy. By mining the affective, imaginary, conceptual, and political dimensions of experience, they critically deepen and elaborate, indeed perform, not only what Continental philosophies are about but how they orient perception, feeling, and thinking. Hence our issue, “Critical, Affective, and Plural Trajectories in Continental Philosophy,” both reflects the trajectories sketched by current work in the field and gestures to a performative openness and pluralism, a thinking in movement, that these philosophical trajectories embody.

The issue opens with the plenary address that Barbara Cassin delivered at the close of the 2015 SPEP conference. Cassin’s article, “Translation as Paradigm for Human Sciences,” shows what it means for philosophy to be performative. Cassin takes her point of departure in her own [End Page 235] experience of the Dictionary of Untranslatables, which has recently appeared in English (Princeton University Press, 2014). Itself a creative reworking of the French edition, Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaires des intraduisibles, which was published in 2004 (Éditions de Seuil) and became a best seller in France, this book is more than simply a dictionary or even an encyclopedia. Widely acclaimed as a novel and pioneering work, it shows the loving attention and critical dedication of its editors to languages—to the differences within and between languages, their equivocations and homologies, and to the difficult and endless experience of translating between them. Untranslatables, Cassin tells us, are “not what one doesn’t translate but what one doesn’t stop (not) translating.” Cassin notes how moments of untranslatability and resistance are “symptoms” of the differences between languages, but she argues against these becoming the bases for reifying any language into an “ontological nationalism.” Untranslatability is, then, not a barrier but an ongoing task that cannot come to an end. Moreover, this task is a philosophical one, Cassin argues, since to translate is already to do philosophy; philosophical concepts are not disembodied ideas but, rather, need to exist in words, in languages that perform differential worlds.

Doing things with words, (re)making reality, is precisely what Cassin’s Sophists are doing. Cassin argues for philosophy in terms of what she calls sophistics and shows this to be a discursive practice that is performative—in other words, rather than saying what is, this discourse produces its world. Cassin offers a forceful and creative rereading of the history of philosophy that critically engages with and challenges Heideggerian ontology—and which offers a different way of being pre-Socratic, namely, “logology.” Of interest here are the gestures of exclusion whereby Sophists become cast as irrecuperable, as nonphilosophy, even as nonhuman or plantlike—gestures that are replicated in philosophy today. The point for Cassin is not to rehabilitate the Sophists, to bring them back into the philosophical fold, but to take them as countermodels. This offers ways of resisting philosophical regimes of univocity and of performing a different relation of language and being. Here Cassin argues for what she calls a “consistent relativism.” Instead of the binary opposition of true and false, Cassin proposes a “dedicated comparative” that complicates the universal, makes it strategic, and takes into account context and locality; its purpose is not Truth as such but to help choose what is “better for.” In this way, Cassin shows how untranslatables are the basis not only of philosophical method but also [End Page 236] of political method: “They deepen differences as a way of understanding, not through assimilation but by bridge-building.” This political gesture refuses the impoverishment of language in Globish (Global English), just as it refuses the sacralization of any national language. Translation is a political method that dwells in plurality; to translate, says Cassin, is to move between languages, without end, so “de-essentializ[ing]” any given language by “showing the gap, the entre, instead of fixed essences or unique ideas...

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