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Though they may demarcate spaces called “cultural”, all limits are by definition political. Borders multiply within and beyond states, across the spaces they are supposed to delineate; they may be social, political, legal, economic or otherwise beyond territoriality. Translation itself is political and contextual: it happens within globalisation and against the backdrop of partage de la raison[1], which is another way of stating the political. Concepts come to us in pairs of opposite notions such as male/female, black/white, within/without, up/down etc. The dichotomy, however, hides the dynamics, which are what concern us here. The symmetry in a binary is an illusion, since it usually conceals a hierarchy. Dichotomies are normative, and so are definitions. This creates “identities” and borders, essentializes them and makes you believe that there is such a thing as “East” and “West”, as two opposed entities. Borders in the mind are thus produced. But dyads are never sufficient to express the multiplicity and complexity of things. Proceeding through normative and appropriating binaries has historically been developed in Europe’s colonial expansion, has been maintained as a form of “othering” and is still largely part of postcolonial cultural and political mores. It is much easier to think with the help of such stable and inherited forms, identities or with borders. But we may now have to think with and from unstable forms and reckon with uncertainty. It is far less comfortable. This is an approach dealing with the dynamics and bifurcations of reason, of the mind and of conceptualisation. The capturing and subject-producing power of such dynamics is much more difficult to grasp than that of mere binaries, since what serves you may play against you. How do we translate two opposite meanings of the same discourse? And since when has there been such indistinctness in things and such dual meaning? I shall assume that it became very obvious from a specific year: 1989, a turning point, the end of the Cold War (and of a big binary), a year symbolic of a general conflation.
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