Philosophy and Society 2025 – 36/3

REVISITING THE POLITICS OF TRANSLATION: TRANSLATION, NATION AND GENDER

 

This thematic issue brings together eight articles written by nine authors from North and South America, Europe and Asia. As specified in the Editorial, the articles examine the universal language and politics of translation from globally plural perspectives. Iveković, Pavlović and Bojanić see the imaginary of translation as the only “universal” language, yet keeping in mind, at the same time, the multiplicity and inequality of languages, the possible tricks played by an a priori adoption of hegemony or any unquestioned concept of the universal on the representation we may have of translation and, above all, recognising the inherent link between translation and its underlying geographical, national and ideological roots.

Sanja Bojanić’s “Meaning-changing as a form of translation: a ‘woke’ case” examines translation as a dynamic process that reshapes meaning and negotiates power, positioning it as a politically active practice that challenges or reinforces societal narratives. As she argues, meaning-changing operations in the case of “woke”, initially tied to social justice, evolve as this notion is co-opted and reinterpreted across ideological spectrums.

In her article “Post-hegemonic conservative counter-translation”, Rada Iveković argues that negotiated state sovereignty and hegemony seems to partly dissolve within a now accomplished globalisation. This requires much political translation, some of which, concerning the preceding unwritten translation contract, Iveković calls counter-translation, adding that language and language (de)nomination needs to break free from the obstetric vocabulary of the nation.

Naoki Sakai’s contribution “The International World: the Modern Regime of Translation” focuses on the individuality of language. How can language be individuated, grasped as an indivisible unity, and compared with other languages that are also assumed to be individual unities? The author attempts a historical investigation concerning the individuality of language on the one hand and the formation of the modern individual world in which individuated languages are juxtaposed to one another, considering the translation as the instance in which languages are originally figured out as individuals.

Valeria Graziano “Deciphering Harm: Naming the issue in Italian healthcare struggles during the '60 and '70”, presents how struggles for healthcare within the workers’ movements in Italy in the ’60s and ’70s generated a range of radical imaginaries in which struggles for wellbeing, environmental concerns, critiques of automation and anti-work politics intertwined. In conclusion, she considers some of the profound differences that nonetheless demarcate the period in question from the present, speculating on the traction of “political translation” for contemporary antiwork and ecofeminist struggles. 

Françoise Vergès’ “Finding the Right Translation for ‘Peace’ in a Land of War” takes feminism further in order to present “an antiracist decolonial feminist politics of protection”. In other words, she argues how discourses about war and peace, and their implementations, have been deployed to justify a protection that rests on criminalization, incarceration, military interventions, creation of armed militia, legitimation of police violence, militarization of public space, and surveillance.

Noemi Lendvai-Bainton and Paul Stubbs in their article “Revisiting Making Policy Move: towards a decolonial politics of translation” attempt to apply insights from theories of translation and assemblage to the field of policy studies. The authors suggest that the conceptual, empirical, moral-ethical and political implications of taking colonialism and racism seriously were underdeveloped, and go further to outline some of the ways this could be remedied in future work. In particular, they emphasize the importance of a politics of translation for understanding coalescing crises, the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism, and the collapse of democracy and associated rise of techno-politics.

Nivedita Menon’s article “Translation as a mode of self-making: Psychoanalysis from the global South” explores translation as a mode of self-making across multiple contexts in which we live. As she argues, focusing on location in the global South introduces the dimension of power and universalistic, hegemonic conceptions of the self that collide with other notions. In particular, she looks at psychoanalysis located in the global South as having challenged such conceptions from the lifetime of Freud onwards.

Last, but not the least, Saša Hrnjez’s contribution, “Translation’s Counter-violence” opens with a thesis that violence is not simply opposed to non-violence, since both are interdependent. As he asks: if translation is not simply a non-violent communication, shall we then conceive it as a sort of counter-violence against a monolingual closure of meaning? By addressing these problems, he attempts to outline the concept of “de-translation” as a form of systematic violence that obstructs or annihilates openness to the foreign. The task of translators today would thus be to engage in the politics of translation that counteracts the violence of systemic de-translation.

 

STUDIES AND ARTICLES

The Studies and Articles section of this issue brings together four theoretically robust and methodologically diverse contributions that address key problems of modern political thought, ideology, intervention, and metaphysical structure. Although independent from the thematic block on translation, these articles engage core concerns of truth, power, governance, and ontological explanation, reinforcing the interdisciplinary profile of the journal

In “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Literature, Politics and the Economy of Lie”, Vladimer Jalagonia revisits Rousseau’s political philosophy by examining the structural role of deception, fiction, and literary form in modern politics. Jalagonia argues that Rousseau does not treat lies merely as moral failures, but as politically productive elements embedded in the formation of legitimacy, persuasion, and collective belief. The article offers a nuanced contribution to debates on political rhetoric, truthfulness, and the symbolic economy of modern political life.

Ekaterina S. Cherepanova and Maria A. Yantsen, in “Designing the Mother-Peacemaker in the USSR of the 1980s: From Stagnation to Perestroika,” analyze the late-Soviet construction of the figure of the mother-peacemaker as a gendered political symbol. Focusing on the transition from stagnation to perestroika, the authors show how motherhood was mobilized to reconcile moral authority, peace activism, and state ideology. The article sheds light on the intersection of gender, political symbolism, and ideological transformation in socialist societies.

The normative and political problem of external control over political communities is addressed by Milan Varda and Nemanja Anđelković in “The Great Invigilator: Is Interference over Polities Ever Justified?” Drawing on political theory and contemporary global practices, the authors critically examine arguments for intervention, supervision, and paternalistic governance. Their analysis interrogates the moral foundations of humanitarian intervention and global oversight, questioning when—if ever—interference in sovereign polities can be justified.

In “Metaphysical Structures and Holism: Reply to Schaffer”, Miloš Bogdanović engages directly with contemporary analytic metaphysics by responding to Jonathan Schaffer’s priority monism. Bogdanović critically examines the explanatory reach of metaphysical holism, questioning whether structural and grounding-based accounts can adequately explain dependency relations without overextending their ontological commitments. The article contributes to ongoing debates on structure, fundamentality, and metaphysical explanation.