문화번역의 정치성

Politics of Cultural Translation: the Emancipation of Foreignness and Becoming Neighbors

This paper aims to explore political and ethical possibilities of cultural translation overcoming the limits of multiculturalism and universalism through a reading of Walter Benjamin’s argument on translation. Unlike translation limited to linguistic conversion of one language to another, cultural translation can be defined as an active process of interpreting and transforming other cultures in a specific historical context; it is neither an equivalent exchange of meanings between different cultural texts nor a mediation of meanings from a transcendental position. Benjamin’s theorization of translation is productive in that it frees translation from a parasite on the original and allows it an autonomous position because what the translator aspires to translate is not the original but what he calls “pure language,” an unrepresentable “Idea” and “potentiality” inherent in but not reducible to the original. Unlike poststructuralist interpretation of Benjamin’s pure language as just a rhetorical operation of language with no tie to history, I argue that translation is a political act of emancipating the potential meaning repressed and unrealized in the original. Homi Bhabha’s reading of translation as a performative act of deconstructing both the native and immigrant cultures and emancipating the foreignness in the “inbetween” space of the migrant is a postcolonial appropriation of Benjamin’s translation. Transforming Bhabha’s argument, I attempt to define translation as a process of becoming neighbors to other cultures, which requires a traumatic dispossession of one’s own narcissistic ego and facing the uncanny.