Untranslatable Worlds: Perspectivism and the Limits of Translation

Catalog description

This seminar proposes a dialogue between two central concepts in contemporary thought - the untranslatable (Barbara Cassin) and Amerindian perspectivism (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro) - to analyze a corpus of 20th and 21st-century Latin-American literary works that place the encounter between worlds at the center of their poetics. The question that structures the course is: What happens when one is confronted with an otherness that does not fit into one's categories - linguistic, ontological, epistemological? Do we inhabit one nature and many cultures, or one culture and many natures? How does indigenous thought not only survive but actively inhabit the present? And how does it call into question the Western categories of nature and culture, identity and subjectivity? Both Cassin and Viveiros de Castro offer answers that shift the question of "error" toward a positive concept of "equivocation": the untranslatable is "that which never ceases to be (re)translated," and perspectivism is not relativism but rather an ontology in which the world is not given as one. The selected works function as laboratories for these tensions.