Lecture

GLASS Public Lecture | Translation and Image – on the Schematism of Co-Figuration

Naoki Sakai

Date: Wednesday 2 May 2018
Time: 15:00 - 17:00
Location: Academiegebouw
Rapenburg 73
2311 GJ Leiden
Room: Klein Auditorium

Leiden Global Interactions and Asian Modernities and Traditions will host Professor Naoki Sakai (Cornell University) as the 2018 Spring GLASS scholar from 2 May-4 May 2018.

His public lecture pursues the possibility of liberating translation from the curse bestowed up on it by the view of translation organized around the model of communication. As an art or a poietic technology, translation grants us the possibility to re-examine social action in general; this is something which offers us an invaluable gateway from which to enter to an inquiry into sociality itself. Nevertheless, the modern and conventional view of translation has eluded the potent sociality that suffuses it, through its collaboration with the substantialization of “national” and “ethnic” languages. It goes without saying that he will inquire into the schematism of co-figuration as a bio-political power arrangement, which serves to normalize a particular system of border-formation or bordering, without which the juxtaposition of national unities would never have been institutionalized in the modern international world.

Professor Naoki Sakai teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies and is a member of the graduate field of History at Cornell University. He has published in a number of languages in the fields of comparative literature, intellectual history, translation studies, the studies of racism and nationalism, and the histories of semiotic and literary multitude - speech, writing, corporeal expressions, calligraphic regimes, and phonographic traditions. He has led the project of TRACES, a multilingual series in four languages - Korean, Chinese, English, and Japanese (German, Italian, and Spanish will be added in 2008) - whose editorial office is located at Cornell, and served as its founding senior editor (1996 - 2004). In addition to TRACES, Naoki Sakai serves as a member of the following editorial boards,positions east asia cultural critique (in the United States), Post-colonial studies (in Australia), Tamkang Review (in Taiwan), International Dictionary of Intellectual History (Britain and Germany), Modern Japanese Cultural History (Japan), ASPECTS (South Korea) and Multitudes (in France).

Naoki Sakai (Goldwin Smith Professor of Asian Studies)