The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between ed. by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (review)

All men are others. They might have been brothers, but now that they're sisters and half of them misters, there's no more convention, but only invention: A one-handed fable transmitted from Babel. For tongues in confusion attempt no transfusion. Give blood for the ghosts to the Lord and his hosts.

This grumble is not directed against a well-edited and interesting book, but against the contemporary multiverse it presupposes. Alterity offers us a Hobbesian state of nature in which every act of speech is an act of power, directed first against the other, secondly against the speaker's self. To replace it by the state of civil society, we need to establish some elementary power sharing in the politics of language. Leviathan being neither acceptable nor available, it is likely that we shall have to reenact Enlightenment, and certain that we must try—though not that we shall succeed in the attempt—to renew power over ourselves, before we can share it with others. Long way to go.