Seminar/Conference

The Promise and Compromise of Translation

The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Art of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), is pleased to announce ‘The Promise and Compromise of Translation’, a four day platform of reading groups and lectures taking place in Oslo during winter and autumn 2016. The programme is dedicated to the seminal theorist Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) who championed a new language within philosophy, interlocking his writings on language, history and the arts with the partisan perspective of the ‘tradition of the oppressed’. Against the conformism of his contemporaries, his ‘untimely’ political aesthetics and materialist concept of history aimed at a redemptive interruption of modernity’s idea of progress.

Despite his belated reception, today Benjamin has arrived in the pantheon of global humanities. His writings belong to the canon of Modern European philosophy, art theory and literary criticism. But can this academic appropriation of Benjamin’s thought do justice to his ‘critical life’ and to the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ that his writings invoke? Given the new spinning role of the humanities in today’s neo-liberal capitalism, a merely academic discourse on Benjamin does violence to his thought.

With painful prescience, Benjamin, the essayist, philosopher and translator, authored the landmark essay ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921), in which he vigorously exposed the violence of the modern state and its jurisdiction, legislation, and executive forces undeniably projecting so relevantly in today’s belligerence of war across the globe with the expounding role played by the statehood formation derived from the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. For the early Benjamin, it was clear that there was ‘something rotten in the law’ – be it the law of monarchy, ‘normal’ democracy or autocratic regimes. From Benjamin’s perspective of a radical critique of violence, justice and the law of the state remain irreconcilable.

Spanning sessions over four days, ‘The Promise and Compromise of Translation’ aims at discussing translatability and to traverse core Benjaminian themes of language, violence and history by focusing on pure language (from ‘The Task of the Translator’, 1923) and the ‘Tradition of the Oppressed’ (from the 'Theses on the Concept of History', 1940).

‘The Promise and Compromise of Translation’ is a project led by German-Palestinian philosopher Sami Khatib, together with Lara Khaldi and Yazan Khalili, initiated through the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Art (KHiO). This workshop, which is articulated through two interrelated sessions in Oslo during winter and autumn 2016, is inspired by a larger project dedicated to Benjamin and the politics of translation. The international workshop and conference ‘Benjamin in Palestine: On the Place and Non-Place of Radical Thought’, took place in December 2015 in Ramallah at the International Academy of Art Palestine and Birzeit University. It was organised and attended by a number of highly reputed Benjamin scholars, critical theorists, activists and artists from the Middle East, Europe and North America. The event in Oslo will focus on questions related to translations of Benjamin’s writings in Sami, Norwegian and Arabic.

Sami Khatib noted that ‘The constellation of Benjamin, Palestine and Oslo is not arbitrarily chosen. For the legibility of Benjamin’s oeuvre is not a given – it is bound to the time and place of both the text and its reader. Revisiting the debates from Ramallah in Oslo also means to acknowledge a (post)historical deadlock that connects Benjamin's belated readers with the untranslatability of struggles in the Middle East and Europe.’

Programme

Monday 29 February

Text: ‘Task of the Translator’
13:00–13:45 Lunch
13:45–14:00 Introduction by guest speaker Rebecca Comay
14:00–18:00 Reading group led by Sami Khatib and moderated by Mike Sperlinger
19:00–19:10 Public address by Katya García-Antón
19:10–20:10 Lecture by Rebecca Comay
20:10–20:30 Q&A with Sami Khatib
Venue: Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Nedre gate 7

Tuesday 1 March 2016

Text: ‘Tradition of the Oppressed’
13:00–13:45 Lunch
13:45–14:00 Introduction by guest speaker Jeffrey Sacks
14:00–18:00 Reading group led by Sami Khatib and moderated by Rike Frank
Venue: Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Nedre gate 7, 0551 Oslo
19:00–19:10 Introduction by Vanessa Ohlraun
19:10–20:10 Lecture by Jeffrey Sacks
20:10–20:30 Q&A with Sami Khatib
Venue: Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), Fossveien 24, 0551 Oslo

The dates of the second session taking place in the autumn will be announced over the summer.

‘The Promise and Compromise of Translation’ is addressed to scholars, philosophers, artists practitioners and professionals who want to engage in in a discussion on geopolitical and societal issues affecting the world today. The lectures are open to everyone, while the reading group sessions will require registration. To register, please send an e-mail to info@oca.no with ‘Reading group’ and the date in the subject field by Friday 26 February 2016. For more information, please contact OCA’s Communication Manager Tara Hassel.

About the speakers and moderators

Rebecca Comay is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature and the Director of the Program in Literary Studies at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Rike Frank is a curator and researcher based in Berlin and Oslo, and Associate Professor of Exhibition Studies at the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo.

Sami R. Khatib is a philosopher, critical theory scholar and currently Postdoctoral Fellow at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

Jeffrey Sacks is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages at the University of California, Riverside, CA, USA.

Mike Sperlinger is Professor of Writing and Theory at the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo and previously co-director of Lux, an organisation for artists working with the moving image.

About ‘Benjamin in Palestine: On the Place and Non-Place of Radical Thought’

Organised by Benjamin scholars, critical theorists, activists and artists from the Middle East, Europe and North America ‘Benjamin in Palestine’ was an event with three main components, all taking place in Ramallah in December 2015: an opening event on 6 December at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center; a three day reading workshop on Benjamin’s writings at the International Academy of Art from 7–9 December; and an international conference from 9–11 December at Birzeit University and Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center. The conference programme included lectures and presentations by distinguished international scholars from the fields of Benjamin studies and critical theory, among others Susan Buck-Morss, Rebecca Comay, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler.

As the organisers have stated, 'The international conference and workshop in 2015 was part of the attempt to break the de facto cultural and academic boycott of Palestine, implemented and enforced by the occupation regime and its multi-layered web of checkpoints, territorial zones and other juridical-administrative measures. It was an intervention into ongoing debates on occupation, statehood, theocracy, binationalism, and anti-colonial struggles for liberation. If in Benjamin’s heterodox Marxism the different strands of Jewish messianic and libertarian-utopian thought form a relationship of ‘elective affinity’ (Michael Löwy), his name and legacy invoke a constant appeal against the arrogance of any state power and representations of victors’ history. In this vein, Benjamin’s texts not only speak to the international community of Benjamin scholars and critical theorists but also to political struggles in Palestine.'

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