The Promise of Translation

Boris Buden

No other concept of cultural theory has received recently as much attention as the notion of cultural translation. The time has come to ask why. But the answer to this question shouldn’t be searched for in the concept itself. The power of its promise is rather in the need of which it is supposed to be the fulfillment: the need to break the deadlock of identitarian differences and the politics based on them. This includes the concept of the nation state in its most advanced form, that is, the liberal democracies of the “developed world”. The promise of the cultural translation is an effect of this crisis. Even if it cannot offer the final solution, it is at least the proof that the solution we already have is by no means the final.

Boris Buden

biography