By LEDA TENÓRIO DA MOTTA*

Decolonizing Language: How the Symbolic Violence of Colonialism Persists in Words—and Why Translation Can Be an Act of Insurgency

There is increasing talk of decolonization, since the so-called anti-philosophies or post-philosophies began to deconstruct the suture of saying, thinking and being typical of the so-called metaphysics of presence, deeming as insolvent any transcendental organization of the world conducted by arbitrary language.

Along the same line of argument, a nomenclature of “decolonial” or “decolonial” is introduced into cultural studies, alluding to the epistemic powers of the colonizers, rather than their political ones.

This gives a new dimension to cultural oppressions, which have always been understood as being tied to the figurative meaning of “culture” – from the Latin “colere”, which is “cultivating the soil”, which leads to the idea of ​​territorial conquest and raises the question of the imposition of the uses and customs or social practices of the other –, and one begins to discern in the implementation of colonization the symbolic transplantation of the other's regimes of meaning.

From this other perspective, language is at the heart of coloniality. To colonize is to subject someone to someone else’s universals, through a language. To fall under the power of another culture is to be made homeless from oneself, in the most intimate way, by the power of the other’s expression. “Words are the homeland,” wrote the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish, when in Lebanese exile, realizing the extent of this homelessness.

 What is understood? For if it is true that language is not a neutral place from which to express the reality that escapes the sign, but the mediator or fatal intermediary of our experience of the world, how do all these currents of thought that now refer philosophical apparatuses to the very discourses that make them reign come to formulate, what could be more violent in colonization than the transmission of the verbal reason of the other? The imposition of one's fictitious speech?

 However, it is these same deconstructionisms, in action in the field of human sciences, notably in France, since the middle of the last century, that come to recognize the importance of the word of the other, the particular interest of their construction of reality, because this disagreement makes the certainties of their own languages ​​waver, complicating the universal.

See if The empire of the senses, by Roland Barthes (1970), with its loving handling of Japanese signs, to a strangeness of what the author calls, from the outset, “the greatest gestures of Western discourse”. Admire the way in which the semiologist aims, in considering the unprecedented graphic nature of the Japanese way of being, to provide the chance to surprise a symbolic system “entirely foreign to ours”.

See also this cultivator of the Barthes school, Barbara Cassin, introducing in works such as The praise of translation (2022) the possibility of the foreigner and also sophist Gorgias being the true philosopher, in the great Athenian intellectual scene, by removing the claim of Logos to naturalness. For revealing with its equivocal word games, so detestable in the eyes of Socrates, how the ideal worlds such as the Socratic-Platonic come from predicative syntaxes that are not known as rhetoric.

This explains why, along with being semioclasms or antilogocentrisms or antilogophallocentrisms, the so-called postcolonial theories are philosophies of translation. This is redefined as a place of linguistic differences that are likely to reveal the untranslatable, the irreducibility of sayings, the constructed character of linguistic coherences and thus, by displaying cut-outs, denaturalizing the truths that languages ​​speak.

In fact, structural readings of culture tend to accept the thesis that each language is a different cartography of reality and that, therefore, to translate one language into another is to reveal these reliefs, to intertwine worlds, hospitably. In such a way that, in these new approaches, translation will not only be an operator of deconstruction, in this sense one of the concepts sui generis of the Derrida device, which is behind many post-philosophies, but an agent of what Roland Barthes called “living together” and Barbara Cassin will rename “doing humanity together”.

This is how, as a new philosopher or post-philosopher among the many today focused on the issue of diversity, this other Derridean, the Senegalese Souleymane Bachir Diagne, is putting deconstructive criticism at the service of what he does not hesitate to call a possible reinvention of the West by the East, notably on the basis of translation exchanges. This is in the double statement of one of the most well-received titles of this black Islamized intellectual, trained as a logician and mathematician at the Sorbonne and with a postgraduate degree from the École Normal Superior: From language to language. The hospitality of translation (2022)

Scansion not only of Jacques Derrida’s praise of Babel, but of the latter’s many notes on his exile as a French-Algerian Jew in the monolingualism of the other, Bachir’s translationology has the special interest of taking us to minor languages ​​among minor ones – for example, the dialect of Islamized African Senegalese that speaks neither French nor Arabic –, to endow its values ​​of asymmetry with the ability to interrogate the values ​​of central languages. The same goes for Afro dialects that do not work with the Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction, with all that this entails in terms of the possibility of another ontology.

Em From tongue to tongue, this vision of the encounter of cultures as a chance for “cross-fertilization” also has the usefulness of putting into practice the first Latin translation of Koran, made in the 12th century, by a superior of the Church then linked to its reformist efforts to transmit Catholicism, a certain Abbé de Cluny, for an appreciation of how much, in this translation, the language of the Christianized Roman Empire was capable of reverting Islam into heresy and infamy.

Nor are so many such perspectives foreign to the new conceptions of the interpretation of literary texts that, since the 1960s, have been following in the wake of the same linguistic turn, challenging the idea of ​​stable meanings and emphasizing the discretionary function of signs in the formation of judgments, including literary ones. Hence Jacques Derrida is a literary critic, as shown by his incursions into Antonin Artaud, a surrealist of the diaspora to whom he in fact dedicates his entire inaugural work, A Writing and the difference (1967), and subsequently to Joyce, Francis Ponge, Jean Genet… Not to mention the philosopher's influence on the American deconstructionist critics at Yale.

In fact, also for post-poetics, it is the signs, with their structural stereotyping, that interpret literature. And this is what will subvert the authors' autonomy, their divine originality, giving rise to the work of creation through eternal retranslation. This is what the concept of intertextuality speaks of, through which all new criticism distances itself from the superstition of the original genius of the language, starting to work with the idea that texts, like languages, inform each other, creating a palimpsest or, in Barbara Cassin's outrageous expression, “puff pastry”.

That is, handling a vision of the textual thickness of literature that not only compromises any notion of essential language but refers to the feeling of the writer, especially modern, of not being the owner of his own voice.

Hence also the redefinition à la Barthes of the writing of the modern and very modern as a paradoxical consignment of their impossibility of continuing, after everything has been written. Nothing that was not already, in some way, in the unhappy conscience of the writer according to Jean-Paul Sartre of What is literature? (1948), to which The zero degree of writing by Roland Barthes (1953) replies.

But literature is not alone in this ironic impasse. Especially since the end of the 19th century, it has been to music that it refers, when it withdraws from the circuit of ordinary communication and becomes a stronghold or enclave of its own order, far from the general voice. Since this retreat is also the distinctive gesture of modern music, it also dissociated itself from the word, more or less at the same time, to become purely instrumental.

In a context of intense formalization events – as noted, for example, by Arthur Nestrovski, in Ironies of modernity (1996) –, in which a composition by Beethoven can also be about the composition itself, and a chord can be the theme, or less than the theme, the “basic cell” of a composition by the master, thematically focused on its own material.

The genius of language

After all, how can we continue to fearlessly assume that Brazil is the legitimate owner of its own culture and its own literature? Would there be a genius of the native language, in perfect harmony with itself, free from influences and – since Portuguese literature is a second-rate bush in the garden of the muses – from the French diction that parasitizes the purity of the Portuguese diction that parasitizes our purity…?

To put it another way, and already reintroducing the external referent that, in the conception of the arbitrary sign, did not enter into the equation of the signifier disjointed from the signified: would we agree with those who understand that, in a colonized and post-colonized country like ours, it is necessary to shake off the mark of the other? Everything happening as if cultures, like languages ​​in the religious vision of Babel, were irreconcilable, and cultural debts liquidable, for an absolute cultural restart?

As a way of providing some food for thought, and since we learned at school that the Romantics are our first truly national artists of the word, because they privileged the motif of local nature, completing the Arcadian gesture of identity rooting, it should be noted, to conclude, that the great Romantics precisely avoid any sentimental painting of nature.

In fact, our view of the muses in the tropics does not match the romantic irony. Since, like Beethoven's musical overpowering, the romantic poetic rapture digs a chasm between nature and language, the former always being felt as greater than the latter. Here, no word is capable of annulling the distance between interiority and exteriority, no great writer has clear relations with his world. Hence the Goethean ambition of a world literature , a proposal that assumes the competition of worlds.

Could this be why, putting his nose into the evaluation of the movement through which we entered literature, Oswald de Andrade, the first of the decolonials, writes in the explosive essay “A Arcádia e a Inconfidência”, included in the sixth volume of his complete works (1972), that the romantic awakening of Minas Gerais, so much in the Ouro Preto plan, is “without verbal magic” and “tasteless”? That it is worth more for the insurrection of the poets involved, for the contribution of their emancipatory plea to the progress of humanity, than for its ingenuity itself?

Putting it all together, one suspects that the assertion of one's own culture is monolingual and that monolingualism rhymes with coloniality. And let's celebrate linguistic outrages like that of Charles Baudelaire when, contrary to the valorization of the beautiful French language by the classics that preceded him, he simply comes out to say his melancholy in English, sticking the English word for melancholy in the title of The spleen of Paris. Or like that of Mallarmé, an English teacher and translator of Edgar Poe, a foreign reference for Charles Baudelaire, who, in a short philological essay with repercussions on new criticism, entitled The English words (1877), simply comes to the field of sustaining the greater accuracy of Shakespeare's language, seeing it much closer to poetry than French.

All this after Stendhal and Victor Hugo had rubbed Shakespeare in the faces of Racine's supporters, to relaunch Romanticism in France. And before Roland Barthes came to argue, in Criticism and truth (1966), that the French are proud to have Racine… but do not feel overshadowed by not having Shakespeare.

*Leda Tenório da Motta She is a professor at the Postgraduate Studies Program in Communication and Semiotics at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of One hundred years of Modern Art Week: The São Paulo cabinet and the conjuration of the avant-gardes (Perspective). [https://amzn.to/4eRXrur]

References

ANDRADE, Oswald. From Pau Brasi to Anthropophagy and Utopia. Manifestos, Competition Theses and Essays. Introduction by Benedito Nunes. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1972.

BACHIR DIAGNE, Souleymane. From tongue to tongue. The hospitality of translation. Translated by Henrique Provinzano Amaral and Thiago Matos. New York: WMF Martins Fontes, 2025.

BARTHES, Roland. Criticism and truth. Translated by Leyla Perrone-Moisés. New York: Routledge, 2020.

CASIN, Barbara. Praise for translation. Complicating the universal. Translated by Daniel Falkemback and Simone Petri. New York: WMF Martins Fontes, 2022.

DARWICH, Mhamud. The presence of absence. Translated by Marco Calil. New York: Routledge, 2020.

DERRIDA, Jacques. The monolingualism of the other. Translated by Fernanda Bernardo. New York: Routledge, 2016.

NESTROVSKY, Arthur. Ironies of modernity. New York, 1996.

the earth is round there is thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE