Transcultural perspectives (Introduction)

Abstract

In the last couple of decades, cultural studies and literature have put a strong emphasis on theoretical hybridization, thus opening a space for culturological reflectionsfrom the amalgam of anthropological, philosophical, archaeological, historical, psychoanalytical and other perspectives. Furthering discussion of the important issues of literary theory and criticism, we intend to clarify some conceptual differences between the seminal terms and notions of transcultural, as well as of other correlated or conflicting, theories. We turn to and start from all those theories that cast culturological issues in terms of exchange, intersection, dialectical overcoming, transgression, transmission and, especially, translation. The essay considers a spectrum of contemplations on language and translation (from Jacques Derrida’s ladifférance and lemonolinguisme de l’autre to Walter Benjamin’s die reine Sprache), taking the inherent non-belonging, différantiation and otherness of language as the starting point of transcultural perspectives. Cast in those terms, the space of translation becomes a place of cultural hybridization where the inherent dislocation (prosthetization) of language offers possibilities of transcultural dialogues, and where the very act of translation becomes the skill of dealing in differences – translation of the untranslatable that keeps translating itself.