The Tragic in Translation: Spivakian Planetarity and a New Ethics of Reading

In the wake of postmodern critiques of the totalizing project of Western philosophy, cultural theorists have had to reconsider the ethical dimensions of their engagement with the other’s singular alterity without subsuming it within the epistemic coordinates of the Western subject. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (2003) is an important intervention in reformulating this question within the institutional politics of Comparative Literature in the American academia. In imagining a “new comparative literature,” based not on globalization but on “planetarity,” Spivak highlights the ethico-political stakes of translation and the risks that must be taken in reaching out to the subaltern other. This essay locates Spivak’s text in the larger ‘politics of love’ that philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida have tried to limn through their work on the other’s irreducible figure. In her writings, Spivak posits the intuitive openness of love as an alternative to hyper-rational, Enlightenment modes of dealing with nature and the environment. It is only by supplementing political activism with the patient, attentive, often painful, act of love that it is possible to establish ethical singularity with the other, even if it is equally possible that this love will not be returned, even if the consummation of this love remains an impossibility. In this essay, I read Amit V. Masurkar’s Hindi film Newton (2017) in the light of Sean D. Kirkland’s distinction between dromoscopic and aporetic temporalities and argue that this act of love is infused with intimations of the tragic, a ‘double bind’ that leads to an acknowledgement of the aporetic dimension of the endeavor, at the end of which there are no ways (Gk. poros) left, and yet an impossible translation remains the only ethical imperative. Keywords: Spivak; planetarity; translation; tragedy; Bollywood