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On what basis can we establish an alternative to the unifying of cultures brought about by economic globalization? When ideas, like objects and words, can be translated and marketed everywhere, what forms of critique are available? Straddling the fields of political philosophy, comparative literature, animal studies, global studies, and political economy, Untranslating Machines proposes to this end a weakened, defective concept of ';untranslatability.' The analytic frame of Jacques Lezra's argument is rooted in Marx, Derrida and Wittgenstein. He moves historically from the moment when ';translation' becomes firmly wed to mercantilism and to the consolidation of proto-national state forms, in European early modernity; to the current moment, in which the flow of information, commodities and value-creation protocols among international markets produces the regulative fantasy of a global, coherent market of markets. In a world in which translation and translatability have become a means and a model for the consolidation of a global cultural system, this book proposes an understanding of untranslatability that serves to limit the articulation between a globalized capitalist value-system and the figure and techniques of translation.

This book reveals the common conditions of lateness and synchronisation that pervade all cultures around the world.

Examines philosophy as an event of the city and the city as an event of philosophy and how the intertwining of the two generates an urban imaginary.

This book examines a range of artworks through a postcolonial and feminist lens, in which revolt-both as a theme and as a medium-specific technique or/as critique -is made visible.

Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings - in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts - this volume proposes a critical intervention into the practice of reading itself.

Re-examining the stakes of critique in the twenty-first century, this book contends with the complex socio-political realities of a globalized world and the changing role that critique and the academy have to play.