Multilingual Literatures and the Production of Universality Through Translation: Cassin, Diagne, Tawada

Abstract

Does the failure of European universalism imply that we should get ridof the universal as a pernicious idea or does it, on the contrary, reveal the ur-gency of defining a truly universal concept of universality? In the current debatetouching both societal and geopolitical issues, philosophers Barbara Cassin andSouleymane Bachir Diagne position themselves similarly, both tracing the episte-mic dimension of the problem back to the beginning of the European history ofideas. Considering the abstract logos of philosophy as the bedrock of a“pathologyof the universal”(Cassin)–in Diagne’s words an“overarching”,“imperial”uni-versal–they put it to the empirical test of translation. My paper argues that thestrategy of“untranslatables”that they explore is also at work in contemporarymultilingual literature and examines the political potential of its poetic thinking.If writers are capable of letting the reader experience this“more complex”(Cassin)or“lateral”(Diagne) universality on the basis of translingual poetics, then they areprivileged protagonists in the intellectual debate outlined above.