Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier
The Tongue of the
Other. Translation, Western Imperiality, and Cybernetics
Dissertation Defense Presentation (University
of California Riverside, May 20, 2026)
Members of the committee, colleagues, friends.
The research I present today, titled The Tongue of the Other. Translation, Western Imperiality, and Cybernetics, is the result of a long intellectual journey that began years ago, in conversations held in different places and languages, and which now provisionally culminates in this writing. I would like to begin by thanking my committee, chaired by Professor Jacques Lezra, and all the people that made this work possible. But let us turn to the matter at hand.
The problem at issue
This dissertation starts from an observation and a suspicion. The observation is that today, in the midst of contemporary regime of war and genocide, the two poles emerging as the new articulators of the “world order” appear to be State sovereignty and “globalization”. Or, if you prefer, nationalism and imperialism. The question of identity is alternately polarized between the liberal cosmopolitanism of globalization, and all kinds of immunitary self-assertions and retreats into idiosyncrasy. It seems as one must choose, with no other way out, between being a partisan of globalization, or, “on the contrary,” of nationalism.
In other words: today, we are said that we have to choose. Either you join globalization, the world market of markets, English and cyber-language as lingua franca, and universal translatability. Or, you take refuge in your identity, your language, your nation, your pure, untranslatable difference. Globalization or nationalism. Universalism or particularism. Pentecost or Babel (to put it into the biblical mythical register).
The suspicion guiding this research is that this disjunctive is a metaphysical-political trap. Globalization and nationalism are not real alternatives, but rather the two poles of the same machine: the Western imperial translation machine.
The metaphysical concept of translation
What does that “machine” consist of? To answer, I have started from Pablo Oyarzún’s hypothesis regarding a “metaphysical concept of translation” that would rest implicitly within the traditional Western conception of “truth” as correspondence between intellect and thing (veritas as adaequatio, in the Western Latin tradition). According to this concept, to translate is to transport an identical, stable meaning from one language to another. The translator would be like a carrier who receives a load at one port and delivers it intact at another.
This conception rests on two pillars. The first is the intentional correlation between a noetic pole (the act of translating, the intention) and a noematic pole (the translated meaning, the intended). The second is Aristotelian hylomorphism: the distinction and hierarchization between a “passive matter” and an “active form” that governs it. This metaphysical structure has been translated into the modern “bourgeois conception of language” analyzed and exposed by Walter Benjamin: language as a means of communication through which meaning-as-commodities circulate.
Therefore, what I call the “imperial translation machine” works like this: on one hand, it needs differences to be pure, closed, authentic, untranslatable. That’s the logic of identity-based nationalism. On the other hand, it needs those same differences to be equivalent, exchangeable, translatable into the universal language of value. That’s the logic of capitalist globalization. In short: nationalism produces the commodity “pure difference”; and globalization puts it to circulate on the market. Production and circulation. There is no contradiction. There is complementarity.
This machine is not new. It comes from far back. It comes from Christian theology—from the dispositive of oikonomía, the old Christian-theological art of government of men, events, and things. It comes from Aristotle and the metaphysical distinction between passive matter and active form. It comes from the idea that translating is transporting an identical meaning from one place to another, like carrying a load from one shore to the other. And today, in its most advanced version, this machine is called cybernetics. Artificial intelligence. Automatic translation. The dream of communication without noise, where everything is calculable, optimizable, equivalent.
The Babel-Pentecost machine
I have genealogized and analyzed this machine starting from two biblical parables. Babel represents the scattering of languages as punishment: fragmentation, untranslatability, retreat into one’s own. Pentecost represents gathering in the Spirit: universal translation, equivalence, communion under a single truth. The imperial translation machine is bipolar: it needs both the fetishized singularity that resists translation, and the general equivalence that makes it exchangeable. Globalization and nationalism are, then, as its economic-political expressions, the two poles of this machine.
But Oyarzún proposes a third scene: that of the technical supplementation of the absent Spirit. After Babel, we cannot but translate, but the “Spirit” of Pentecost no longer guarantees meaning. Translation then becomes an artifice, a technique that supplements the absence of ground. This is the place of translation that interests me: the gap between language and spirit (or, the breach between logos and being!), that is: the Babelian catastrophe as a condition of possibility of a translatability which is neither fetishistic nor universalist. At the end of the day: neither Babelian nor Pentecostal.
The Aristotelian Left
But there is another tradition. Drawing the term from Ernst Bloch, I call it the “Aristotelian Left.” Its central figure is Averroes, the Cordoban philosopher of the 12th century. Against the “Aristotelian Right” of Thomas Aquinas, who inseminates the active intellect into the individual soul as divine preparatio, I have recovered the secret line of Averroism—or, of contemporary Latin American wild Averroism. For Averroes, the material intellect is separate from both body and soul. It is pure cosmological potentiality, a common potentiality that is singularized through the imagination of each human animal.
The intellect is not something that each person has in their head as private property. The intellect is a common, impersonal potentiality. It is not “I” who thinks. Thought happens to me. It comes to me from the outside. This is a radical statement. And, accordingly, language is not something one possesses. We do not have language. We are in language, exposed to it, traversed by it. The imagination is what singularizes that common potentiality. Each human animal uses the imagination in their own way, but the potentiality they use belongs to everyone and to no one.
This anarchic ontology has radical consequences. If the intellect is common and impersonal, then the “subject” is not the center of thought, but its contingent effect. If the imagination, as a transformative force, is the operator of singularization, then difference is not an original datum but a metamorphic process. If language is not possessed, then every claim to idiomatic or identity-based property is a metaphysical fiction with violent political effects.
Marranism as a figure of interruption
In order to think the interruption of the imperial machine, I have worked with the figure of Marranism. The “Marrano” is the Jewish convert of early modern Spain, suspected of “Judaizing”, of hiding his “true” identity. Suspicious to everyone: Jews consider them apostates; Christians consider them a fraud. Their condition is that of double exclusion: belonging neither to the original community (the Jewish community) nor to the community of conversion (the Christendom). The Marrano has no positive identity. His secret hides no content, but rather exhibits the vacancy of all identity.
This figure has allowed me to think a politics of opacity and an ethics of undecidability. The Marranos don’t allow themselves to be translated into any pure identity. They are neither Jews nor Christians. Their existence interrupts the archontic and inquisitorial logic that demands that everyone be one and manifest themselves as that very same one.
Khôra and the thought from outside
Complementarily, I have worked with the Platonic figure of khôra. In the «Timaeus», Plato introduces a “third genre” that is neither sensible nor intelligible, neither being nor non-being. It is the non-place that gives place to everything that is born, while itself being unappropriable and indeterminate. Khôra is graspable only by a “bastard reasoning,” a thought that does not conform to the binaries of Western logic and its three grounding principles (identity/non-contradiction, excluded middle, and sufficient reason).
This figure has reappeared in contemporary thought in many different ways: in Derrida as différance, in Kristeva as pre-linguistic semiotics, in Deleuze as smooth space, in Spivak as the space of the subaltern, in Morton as dark ecology. In all these reappearances, khôra names what exceeds intentional correlation, what cannot be captured by either subject- or object-forms. A space that cannot be captured by any binary, khôra is the space of translation when translation is not the transport of identities but encounter, coincidence, adventure. Homological projection, non-identical echo.
Together, these figures allow me to think a translation that does not seek equivalences. A translation that does not relies on the logics of familiarity and recognition. A translation that gets lost, that shipwrecks, that fails in its attempt to carry meaning intact from one shore to the other. And that shipwreck, I argue, is not a defect in the sense of a lack. It is the very condition of experience as such, that is, finitude (accidentality, and non-identity between the logical and being).
“Double translation” as practice
These theoretical elaborations do not remain in abstraction, of course. I have analyzed a set of concrete translation practices that interrupt the imperial machine. The first is Aljamiado literature: the writing of Romance languages in Arabic script practiced by the Moriscos of early modern Spain. For Moriscos, the term al-‘aǧamiyah referred to Spanish language as “the tongue of the other” (the foreign language). But when Arabic language was banned by the Spanish Empire, for those Moriscos that foreign language became “our other tongue.” Aljamiado is a practice of resistance that neither retreats into identity-purity, nor assimilates to the dominant culture.
The second is Zapatista double translation. The Mayan indigenous people translate their cosmologies into Spanish for a global audience, and, at the same time, they translate Marxism and feminism into their own cosmologies. It is not a unidirectional translation that assimilates the other to the same (imperial and creolizing translation) or makes its own language to behave like that of the other (philological translation), but a bidirectional translation that transforms both related parts.
The third is creolization—as thought by Édouard Glissant. Against capitalist globalization that homogenizes the planet, Glissant proposes worldliness as an archipelago of relations, a space of encounter and mixture where identities are not essences but effects of relation. Creolization is not a mestizaje that fuses differences, but a mestizaje that effects a proliferation of new singularities.
Necrophilology as method
These practices require a concept of translation different from semantic transport. I have found in Jacques Lezra’s work the notion of “necrophilology.” It is a reading and translation practice attentive to remainders, to what does not allow itself to be translated, and, consequently, is open to its formalization into dynamic and intractable conceptual objects that resist disciplinary decision systems—disobeying, as things in translation by lost translators, the three great principles of Western logic.
Apart from the obvious disruption of the principles of identity/non-contradiction and excluded middle, by the very nature of the subjects and things in translation, Lezra proposes a “principle of insufficient reason” as an alternative to the principle of sufficient reason that grounds Western metaphysics. Not everything allows itself to be determined by human reason. Matter is unruly, contingent, catastrophic. Translation is not the search for equivalences, but a defective and metamorphic passage, a homological projection, the exposure to shipwreck while trying to make-sense on difference.
Cybernetics as consummation of the imperial translation machine
Finally, I have attempted to think our present. In our concrete historical material scene, artificial intelligence, automatic translation algorithms, bioinformatics, are not merely neutral technologies. Considering that technicity is a way of being of the animal and not something that can be discarded (which makes both technophobic and technophilic positions absurd), we can observe that, today, “technology” is yielding as the culmination of Western metaphysics: form governs matter. Form (that is code, function, information) governs matter (that is entropy, contingency, imagining and desiring bodies). Its totalitarian drift relies, as old metaphysics do, on the identification of logos and being (that is, the total rationalization of being, and the consequent forgetting of being as that what provokes thinking). Pentecost is now accomplished as a universal artificial language of control, optimization, and acceleration.
The revolt of translation
Cybernetics promises communication without noise, perfect equivalence, infinite optimization. But that promise is also the promise of a world without alterity, without opacity, where the entropy of the living is neutralized. Against it, necrophilology insists on the remainder, on what does not allow itself to be calculated, on the revolt of the animal against the concept.
Conclusion
I would like to conclude with an idea that runs throughout the dissertation: translation is not a bridge between pre-existing entities, but the medium in which every entity is constituted. There are no subjects prior to translation, nor objects, nor meanings. All of this emerges in the khôratic space of the translational relation. Life of relation is the khôratic space of translation.
That is why translation is always a shipwreck. We never arrive at port with the meaning intact. But that shipwreck is not a failure: it is the condition of a common existence that is open, conflictive, and creative. To get lost in translation is not a mistake, but the very errant possibility of encountering the other, the strange, what does not allow itself to be reduced to the same, to one’s own. Al-‘aǧamiyah, “the tongue of the other,” is also our own strange tongue. It is not about appropriating the strange nor retreating into one’s own. It is about inhabiting the inclemency of language, where one’s own is always already strange, and the strange is always already coming home…
I have attempted here, in a few words, a profanation of the old European phenomenology in which I was initially trained. The operation is not only an act of translation from the 1990s to the present, but also an attempt to think the contemporary catastrophe—and particularly the politics of identity and language, in times when it seems one must choose between globalization and nationalism. My hypothesis is that this “alternative” is a trap. And that translation, thought of otherwise, can offer us a sort of way out—I mean, translation not understood as the transfer of meaning between languages within the element of the familiar or the anthropocentric exceptionality, but as a practice of exposure to strangeness and defective decisions. Not a way out toward a purist language or a transparent community, but toward a no-man’s-land where we might camp together the catastrophe of history. It is about accepting that one’s own language is always also a foreign tongue. It is about getting lost in translation as the only way to encounter something other than oneself.
Thank you very much.
Riverside, California, May 20, 2026.
