Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability by Emily Apter (review)

It is surely a mark of some kind of success when a movement begins to be attacked by its own participants. We may recall the surrealist debates of the 1920s, with their rival manifestos, counterblasts, and excommunications, or Roland Barthes’s irritated insistence in the mid-1970s that he was not after all a structuralist. Emily Apter’s new book suggests that the resurgent study of world literature has achieved a comparable standing today. Herself a leading figure in the opening up of comparative literature toward global perspectives, notably as author of The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006), as contributor to several collections on world literature, and as a founding board member of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, Apter is well situated to assess the field from within. In Against World Literature, she offers a bracing critique of the politics of translation in American literary studies. All too often, she argues, scholars and teachers of world literature assume a ready transferability across open linguistic and political borders, and she aims to complicate these matters, both linguistically and politically.

Apter’s book ranges widely across the landscape of contemporary literary studies, philosophy, art, and politics. As she says, rather than offering a comprehensive or programmatic narrative, the volume provides “an array of loosely affiliated topoi—oneworldedness, literary world-systems, terrestrial humanism, checkpoints, theologies of translation, the translational interdiction, pedagogy, authorial deownership, possessive collectivism” (16). If the book eschews any progressively developed argument, it does have a distinct point of origin, in Apter’s work as coeditor of a paradoxical project: an English translation—or untranslation—of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles (2006), edited by the Parisian philosopher Barbara Cassin. Focused on the vexed translation history of philosophical terms, the Vocabulaire’s essays proved to need extensive reworking to become legible for an American audience. Six of Apter’s eighteen chapters take up and build on aspects of Cassin’s project. Like Cassin, Apter takes a post-Heideggerian approach to language, building on Derrida to argue against Heidegger’s linguistic ontology in order to counter a too easy evocation of a world of open communication and the free play of the imagination, speciously unified via a Euro-universalism projected onto the globe at large.

Branching off from this philosophical base are chapters arguing against ideals of an independent world republic of letters, whether in French debates on littérature-monde or in a good deal of American scholarship and pedagogy of World Literature (she uses capitals to signify the field of study). The book includes chapters on the work of Franco Moretti and Erich Auerbach together with an essay on Edward Said’s “terrestrial humanism” and discussions of the translation theories of Jacques Derrida and of Abdelfattah Kilito, and ends with essays on the challenges for art and for criticism in a violent and dystopian world.

Running through Apter’s sometimes stark critique of an “entrepreneurial, bulimic” World Literature (3) is a parallel critique of the field of translation studies, both fields having become “too pluralistic, too ecumenical” while still remaining rooted in Eurocentric approaches and “unable to rework literary history through planetary cartographies” (8). World Literature and translation studies too readily take translation “to be a good thing en soi—under the assumption that it is a critical praxis enabling communication across languages, cultures, time periods, and disciplines” (8). Both fields, in Apter’s view, have largely been blind to the recurrent realities of translation failure and the challenges of untranslatability, and so their practitioners have generally (even “inevitably”) fallen short of their cosmopolitan project of fostering international communication and understanding (7–8).

Throughout her book, Apter makes a forceful case for the need to understand the “world” in World Literature as both politically and linguistically fraught, and she echoes Gayatri Spivak and others in arguing that World Literature’s “ethic of liberal inclusiveness … often has the collateral effect of blunting...