Lecture | Translation, Dialogue and Conversation: Malebranche’s “Entretien d’un philosophe chrétien, et d’un philosophe chinois”
Sydney Intellectual History Network and Translatability of Cultures Reading Group
Lecture
| Translation, Dialogue and Conversation: Malebranche’s “Entretien d’un philosophe chrétien, et d’un philosophe chinois” | |
| Presenter: Andrew Benjamin (Kingston University, London and University of Technology, Sydney) There is a particular form of philosophical dialogue – a form that includes as much Nicholas of Cusa’s De Pace Fidei (1453) as it does Malebranche’s Entretien d’un philosophe chrétien, et d’un philosophe chinois (1708) – in which what is taken to be a series of spaced differences, thus original differences refusing automatic relations, are reconfigured such that differences, in becoming merely apparent, are elided yielding the synthesis of what were at the beginning purely differential relations. There is a form of translation in which differing positions become the same and thus relationality is reconfigured. For Malebranche the Chinese term ‘Ly’ becomes God. The aim of this lecture is to begin an analysis of what is involved in this mode of translation. Andrew Benjamin is Anniversary Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Kingston University London and Distinguished Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Technology, Sydney. His recent publications include: Towards a Relational Ontology. Philosophy’s Other Possibility. SUNY Press. (2015). Art’s Philosophical Work. Rowman and Littlefield. (2015) and Virtue in Being. SUNY Press. (2016). He is currently completing a book entitled Law as Political Theology. |