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"This volume brilliantly translates 'translation' by theorizing it and demonstrating the contingency, historicity and political inflections of the practices that have constituted it. Specific attention to a series of examples from China and the diverse encounters with European knowledges show that the Universal is always particular."--Paul Rabinow, University of California, Berkeley

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TOKENS of EXCHANGE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

LYDIA H. LIU, Introduction.....................................................................................................................1LYDIA H. LIU, The Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign...............................................................13ROGER HART, Translating the Untranslatable: From Copula to Incommensurable Worlds..............................................................45QIONG ZHANG, Demystifying Qi: The Politics of Cultural Translation and Interpretation in the Early Jesuit Mission to China.....................74HAUN SAUSSY, Always Multiple Translation, Or, How the Chinese Language Lost Its Grammar........................................................107LYDIA H. LIU, Legislating the Universal: The Circulation of International Law in the Nineteenth Century........................................127ALEXIS DUDDEN, Japan's Engagement with International Terms.....................................................................................165JAMES HEVIA, Looting Beijing: 1860, 1900.......................................................................................................192ANDREW F. JONES, The Gramophone in China.......................................................................................................214LARISSA N. HEINRICH, Handmaids to the Gospel: Lam Qua's Medical Portraiture....................................................................239TZE-LAN DEBORAH SANG, Translating Homosexuality: The Discourse of Tongxing'ai in Republican China (1912-1949)..................................276NANCY N. CHEN, Translating Psychiatry and Mental Health in Twentieth-Century China.............................................................305Q.S. TONG, The Bathos of a Universalism: I. A. Richards and His Basic English..................................................................331JIANHUA CHEN, Chinese "Revolution" in the Syntax of World Revolution...........................................................................355WAN SHUN EVA LAM, The Question of Culture in Global English-Language Teaching: A Postcolonial Perspective......................................375Glossary.......................................................................................................................................399Bibliography...................................................................................................................................411Index..........................................................................................................................................445Contributors...................................................................................................................................457

Chapter One

By adopting certain nave presuppositions, studies of the asserted problems encountered in translations across languages have often reached dramatic conclusions about the fundamental differences between civilizations. These presuppositions are nave in that they circumvent many of the questions that should properly confront historical inquiry, adopting instead simple formulas. For example, on what level of social organization should historical explanation concentrate-what are the significant units of society in analyses of historical change? Instead of determining the complex networks of alliances that dynamically constitute groupings within societies, in such studies the boundaries are already given-drawn along lines of languages or, more often, systems of languages that mark the purported divides between civilizations. What are the fracture lines in societies underlying antagonisms and conflict? Instead of analyzing complicated divisions along the dimensions of class, gender, status, allegiances, or competing schools of thought, all such differences are collapsed into a unity predetermined by the sharing of a single language (the same, that is, once all historical, regional, educational, and status differences are effaced). What kinds of relationships should historical analysis elucidate? With civilizations as the given units of analysis, such studies are typically content with assertions of similarities and differences. What is the relationship between thought and society? Instead of historicizing the role of ideologies, self-fashioned identities, and performative utterances in the formation of social groupings, individuals are instead reduced to representatives or bearers of entire civilizations. How does one understand thought through the transcriptions preserved in historical documents? Instead of explaining the dissemination of copies, commentaries, and interpretations of texts in their cultural context, such studies fix an original against which the correspondence of the translation can be compared. And what is the relationship between thought and language? Too often such studies implicitly presuppose a correspondence between words and concepts. After such a series of simplifying reductions, the conventional conclusions about civilizations are an almost inevitable result.

Rather than critiquing in a general fashion the aporias that inhere in claims made about civilizations in studies of translations, this essay illustrates these aporias through the analysis of selected studies. To accomplish this, I return to one of the most intensely researched examples of translations across civilizations: the Jesuit missionaries and their translations of European religious and scientific treatises in China in the seventeenth century. Admittedly, much of the historical literature on this episode hardly merits critique; I have chosen two exemplary studies of these translations that represent the best scholarship on the subject. I follow a tradition of applying historical research to philosophical problems, similar perhaps to what Pierre Bourdieu calls "fieldwork in philosophy." I first outline the claims, presented in these two studies, of linguistic and conceptual incommensurability between seventeenth-century China and the West, claims that are based on the asserted difficulties of translating the copula and the concept of existence. I then turn to the theories of incommensurability that underwrite these studies, along with several related philosophical theories: Emile Benveniste's analysis of the copula to be, Jacques Derrida's critique of Benveniste, W. V. O. Quine's arguments on the indeterminacy of translations, and Donald Davidson's criticisms of assertions of conceptual schemes. Finally, as an alternative to incommensurability, I present an analysis of the translations by the Jesuits and the Chinese converts in cultural context.

China, the West, and the Incommensurability That Divides

Imagining China and the West to be two central actors in a historical drama, writers since the eighteenth century have sought symbols to distinguish the two. Terms such as modernity, science, and capitalism headed the list of mutually incongruous candidates invoked to portray stark differences: China was identified often by mere absence (e.g., of science, capitalism, or modernity) or else designated by pejoratives (e.g., practical, intuitionistic, or despotic). Anthropomorphized through the assignment of personality traits (pride, xenophobia, conservatism, and fear), China itself became the subject of a praise-and-blame historiography of...