Author: Finbarr Barry Flood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691125947
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
Objects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. The book--which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries--challenges existing narratives that cast the period as one of enduring hostility between monolithic "Hindu" and "Muslim" cultures. These narratives of conflict have generally depended upon premodern texts for their understanding of the past. By contrast, this book considers the role of material culture and highlights how objects such as coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures mediated diverse modes of encounter during a critical but neglected period in South Asian history. The book explores modes of circulation--among them looting, gifting, and trade--through which artisans and artifacts traveled, remapping cultural boundaries usually imagined as stable and static. It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities. Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques. Objects of Translation draws upon contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization to argue for radically new approaches to the cultural geography of premodern South Asia and the Islamic world.
Objects of Translation
Author: Finbarr Barry Flood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691125947
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
Objects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. The book--which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries--challenges existing narratives that cast the period as one of enduring hostility between monolithic "Hindu" and "Muslim" cultures. These narratives of conflict have generally depended upon premodern texts for their understanding of the past. By contrast, this book considers the role of material culture and highlights how objects such as coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures mediated diverse modes of encounter during a critical but neglected period in South Asian history. The book explores modes of circulation--among them looting, gifting, and trade--through which artisans and artifacts traveled, remapping cultural boundaries usually imagined as stable and static. It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities. Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques. Objects of Translation draws upon contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization to argue for radically new approaches to the cultural geography of premodern South Asia and the Islamic world.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691125947
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 392
Book Description
Objects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. The book--which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries--challenges existing narratives that cast the period as one of enduring hostility between monolithic "Hindu" and "Muslim" cultures. These narratives of conflict have generally depended upon premodern texts for their understanding of the past. By contrast, this book considers the role of material culture and highlights how objects such as coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures mediated diverse modes of encounter during a critical but neglected period in South Asian history. The book explores modes of circulation--among them looting, gifting, and trade--through which artisans and artifacts traveled, remapping cultural boundaries usually imagined as stable and static. It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities. Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques. Objects of Translation draws upon contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization to argue for radically new approaches to the cultural geography of premodern South Asia and the Islamic world.
Objects of Translation
Author: Finbarr Barry Flood
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400833248
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
Objects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. The book--which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries--challenges existing narratives that cast the period as one of enduring hostility between monolithic "Hindu" and "Muslim" cultures. These narratives of conflict have generally depended upon premodern texts for their understanding of the past. By contrast, this book considers the role of material culture and highlights how objects such as coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures mediated diverse modes of encounter during a critical but neglected period in South Asian history. The book explores modes of circulation--among them looting, gifting, and trade--through which artisans and artifacts traveled, remapping cultural boundaries usually imagined as stable and static. It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities. Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques. Objects of Translation draws upon contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization to argue for radically new approaches to the cultural geography of premodern South Asia and the Islamic world.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400833248
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 384
Book Description
Objects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. The book--which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early thirteenth centuries--challenges existing narratives that cast the period as one of enduring hostility between monolithic "Hindu" and "Muslim" cultures. These narratives of conflict have generally depended upon premodern texts for their understanding of the past. By contrast, this book considers the role of material culture and highlights how objects such as coins, dress, monuments, paintings, and sculptures mediated diverse modes of encounter during a critical but neglected period in South Asian history. The book explores modes of circulation--among them looting, gifting, and trade--through which artisans and artifacts traveled, remapping cultural boundaries usually imagined as stable and static. It analyzes the relationship between mobility and practices of cultural translation, and the role of both in the emergence of complex transcultural identities. Among the subjects discussed are the rendering of Arabic sacred texts in Sanskrit on Indian coins, the adoption of Turko-Persian dress by Buddhist rulers, the work of Indian stone masons in Afghanistan, and the incorporation of carvings from Hindu and Jain temples in early Indian mosques. Objects of Translation draws upon contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism and globalization to argue for radically new approaches to the cultural geography of premodern South Asia and the Islamic world.
World Politics in Translation
Author: Tobias Berger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351806343
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
Virtually all pertinent issues that the world faces today – such as nuclear proliferation, climate change, the spread of infectious disease and economic globalization – imply objects that move. However, surprisingly little is known about how the actual objects of world politics are constituted, how they move and how they change while moving. This book addresses these questions through the concept of 'translation' – the simultaneous processes of object constitution, transportation and transformation. Translations occur when specific forms of knowledge about the environment, international human rights norms or water policies consolidate, travel and change. World Politics in Translation conceptualizes 'translation' for International Relations by drawing on theoretical insights from Literary Studies, Postcolonial Scholarship and Science and Technology Studies. The individual chapters explore how the concept of translation opens new perspectives on development cooperation, the diffusion of norms and organizational templates, the performance in and of international organizations or the politics of international security governance. This book constitutes an excellent resource for students and scholars in the fields of Politics, International Relations, Social Anthropology, Development Studies and Sociology. Combining empirically grounded case studies with methodological reflection and theoretical innovation, the book provides a powerful and productive introduction to world politics in translation.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351806343
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253
Book Description
Virtually all pertinent issues that the world faces today – such as nuclear proliferation, climate change, the spread of infectious disease and economic globalization – imply objects that move. However, surprisingly little is known about how the actual objects of world politics are constituted, how they move and how they change while moving. This book addresses these questions through the concept of 'translation' – the simultaneous processes of object constitution, transportation and transformation. Translations occur when specific forms of knowledge about the environment, international human rights norms or water policies consolidate, travel and change. World Politics in Translation conceptualizes 'translation' for International Relations by drawing on theoretical insights from Literary Studies, Postcolonial Scholarship and Science and Technology Studies. The individual chapters explore how the concept of translation opens new perspectives on development cooperation, the diffusion of norms and organizational templates, the performance in and of international organizations or the politics of international security governance. This book constitutes an excellent resource for students and scholars in the fields of Politics, International Relations, Social Anthropology, Development Studies and Sociology. Combining empirically grounded case studies with methodological reflection and theoretical innovation, the book provides a powerful and productive introduction to world politics in translation.
Osiris, Volume 37
Author: Tara Alberts
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226825124
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 414
Book Description
Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period. This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief. Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226825124
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 414
Book Description
Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period. This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief. Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.
Transfer Thinking in Translation Studies
Author: Maud Gonne
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9462702632
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
The concept of transfer covers the most diverse phenomena of circulation, transformation and reinterpretation of cultural goods across space and time, and are among the driving forces in opening up the field of translation studies. Transfer processes cross linguistic and cultural boundaries and cannot be reduced to simple movements from a source to a target (culture or text). In a time of paradigm shifts, this book aims to explore the potential and interdisciplinary power of transfer as a concept and an analytical tool to account for complex cultural dynamics. The contributions in this book adopt various research angles (literary studies, imagology, translation studies, translator studies, periodical studies, postcolonialism) to study an array of entangled transfer processes that apply to different objects and aspects, ranging from literary texts, legal texts, news, images and identities to ideologies, power asymmetries, titles and heterolingualisms. By embracing a process-oriented way of thinking, all these contributions aim to open the ‘black box’ of transfer in the widest sense.
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9462702632
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 236
Book Description
The concept of transfer covers the most diverse phenomena of circulation, transformation and reinterpretation of cultural goods across space and time, and are among the driving forces in opening up the field of translation studies. Transfer processes cross linguistic and cultural boundaries and cannot be reduced to simple movements from a source to a target (culture or text). In a time of paradigm shifts, this book aims to explore the potential and interdisciplinary power of transfer as a concept and an analytical tool to account for complex cultural dynamics. The contributions in this book adopt various research angles (literary studies, imagology, translation studies, translator studies, periodical studies, postcolonialism) to study an array of entangled transfer processes that apply to different objects and aspects, ranging from literary texts, legal texts, news, images and identities to ideologies, power asymmetries, titles and heterolingualisms. By embracing a process-oriented way of thinking, all these contributions aim to open the ‘black box’ of transfer in the widest sense.
The Lives of Objects
Author: Maia Kotrosits
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670758X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
Our lives are filled with objects—ones that we carry with us, that define our homes, that serve practical purposes, and that hold sentimental value. When they are broken, lost, left behind, or removed from their context, they can feel alien, take on a different use, or become trash. The lives of objects change when our relationships to them change. Maia Kotrosits offers a fresh perspective on objects, looking beyond physical material to consider how collective imagination shapes the formation of objects and the experience of reality. Bringing a psychoanalytic approach to the analysis of material culture, she examines objects of attachment—relationships, ideas, and beliefs that live on in the psyche—and illustrates how people across time have anchored value systems to the materiality of life. Engaging with classical studies, history, anthropology, and literary, gender, and queer studies, Kotrosits shows how these disciplines address historical knowledge and how an expanded definition of materiality can help us make connections between antiquity and the contemporary world.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022670758X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Book Description
Our lives are filled with objects—ones that we carry with us, that define our homes, that serve practical purposes, and that hold sentimental value. When they are broken, lost, left behind, or removed from their context, they can feel alien, take on a different use, or become trash. The lives of objects change when our relationships to them change. Maia Kotrosits offers a fresh perspective on objects, looking beyond physical material to consider how collective imagination shapes the formation of objects and the experience of reality. Bringing a psychoanalytic approach to the analysis of material culture, she examines objects of attachment—relationships, ideas, and beliefs that live on in the psyche—and illustrates how people across time have anchored value systems to the materiality of life. Engaging with classical studies, history, anthropology, and literary, gender, and queer studies, Kotrosits shows how these disciplines address historical knowledge and how an expanded definition of materiality can help us make connections between antiquity and the contemporary world.
Prismatic Translation
Author: Matthew Reynolds
Publisher: Legenda
ISBN: 9781781887264
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Book Description
Translation can be seen as producing a text in one language that will count as equivalent to a text in another. It can also be seen as a release of multiple signifying possibilities, an opening of the source text to Language in all its plurality. The first view is underpinned by the regime of European standard languages which can be lined up in bilingual dictionaries, by the technology of the printed book, and by the need for regulated communication in political, academic and legal contexts. The second view is most at home in multilingual cultures, in circumstances where language is not standardised (e.g., minority and dialectal communities, and oral cultures), in the fluidity of electronic text, and in literature. The first view sees translation as a channel; the second as a prism. This volume explores prismatic modes of translation in ancient Egypt, contemporary Taiwan, twentieth-century Hungary, early modern India, and elsewhere. It gives attention to experimental literary writing, to the politics of language, to the practices of scholarship, and to the multiplying possibilities created by digital media. It charts the recent growth of prismatic modes in anglophone literary translation and translational literature; and it offers a new theorisation of the phenomenon and its agonistic relation to the 'channel' view. Prismatic Translation is an essential intervention in a rapidly changing field.
Publisher: Legenda
ISBN: 9781781887264
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 396
Book Description
Translation can be seen as producing a text in one language that will count as equivalent to a text in another. It can also be seen as a release of multiple signifying possibilities, an opening of the source text to Language in all its plurality. The first view is underpinned by the regime of European standard languages which can be lined up in bilingual dictionaries, by the technology of the printed book, and by the need for regulated communication in political, academic and legal contexts. The second view is most at home in multilingual cultures, in circumstances where language is not standardised (e.g., minority and dialectal communities, and oral cultures), in the fluidity of electronic text, and in literature. The first view sees translation as a channel; the second as a prism. This volume explores prismatic modes of translation in ancient Egypt, contemporary Taiwan, twentieth-century Hungary, early modern India, and elsewhere. It gives attention to experimental literary writing, to the politics of language, to the practices of scholarship, and to the multiplying possibilities created by digital media. It charts the recent growth of prismatic modes in anglophone literary translation and translational literature; and it offers a new theorisation of the phenomenon and its agonistic relation to the 'channel' view. Prismatic Translation is an essential intervention in a rapidly changing field.
Lost in Translation
Author: Homay King
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392925
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
In a nuanced exploration of how Western cinema has represented East Asia as a space of radical indecipherability, Homay King traces the long-standing association of the Orient with the enigmatic. The fantasy of an inscrutable East, she argues, is not merely a side note to film history, but rather a kernel of otherness that has shaped Hollywood cinema at its core. Through close readings of The Lady from Shanghai, Chinatown, Blade Runner, Lost in Translation, and other films, she develops a theory of the “Shanghai gesture,” a trope whereby orientalist curios and décor become saturated with mystery. These objects and signs come to bear the burden of explanation for riddles that escape the Western protagonist or cannot be otherwise resolved by the plot. Turning to visual texts from outside Hollywood which actively grapple with the association of the East and the unintelligible—such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo: Cina, Wim Wenders’s Notebook on Cities and Clothes, and Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain—King suggests alternatives to the paranoid logic of the Shanghai gesture. She argues for the development of a process of cultural “de-translation” aimed at both untangling the psychic enigmas prompting the initial desire to separate the familiar from the foreign, and heightening attentiveness to the internal alterities underlying Western subjectivity.
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392925
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
In a nuanced exploration of how Western cinema has represented East Asia as a space of radical indecipherability, Homay King traces the long-standing association of the Orient with the enigmatic. The fantasy of an inscrutable East, she argues, is not merely a side note to film history, but rather a kernel of otherness that has shaped Hollywood cinema at its core. Through close readings of The Lady from Shanghai, Chinatown, Blade Runner, Lost in Translation, and other films, she develops a theory of the “Shanghai gesture,” a trope whereby orientalist curios and décor become saturated with mystery. These objects and signs come to bear the burden of explanation for riddles that escape the Western protagonist or cannot be otherwise resolved by the plot. Turning to visual texts from outside Hollywood which actively grapple with the association of the East and the unintelligible—such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo: Cina, Wim Wenders’s Notebook on Cities and Clothes, and Sophie Calle’s Exquisite Pain—King suggests alternatives to the paranoid logic of the Shanghai gesture. She argues for the development of a process of cultural “de-translation” aimed at both untangling the psychic enigmas prompting the initial desire to separate the familiar from the foreign, and heightening attentiveness to the internal alterities underlying Western subjectivity.
The Innocence of Objects
Author: Orhan Pamuk
Publisher: ABRAMS
ISBN: 1613123892
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
The Nobel Prize winner’s catalog of his Istanbul museum is like “wandering past the illuminated windows of an arcade. . . . This book spills over with pleasure”(The New York Times). The culmination of decades of omnivorous collecting, Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul uses his novel of lost love, The Museum of Innocence, as a departure point to explore the city of his youth. In The Innocence of Objects, Pamuk’s catalog of this remarkable museum, he writes about things that matter deeply to him: the psychology of the collector, the proper role of the museum, the photography of old Istanbul (illustrated with Pamuk’s superb collection of haunting photographs and movie stills), and of course the customs and traditions of his beloved city. The book’s imagery is equally evocative, ranging from the ephemera of everyday life to the superb photographs of Turkish photographer Ara Güler. Combining compelling visual images and writing, The Innocence of Objects is an original work of art and literature.
Publisher: ABRAMS
ISBN: 1613123892
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
The Nobel Prize winner’s catalog of his Istanbul museum is like “wandering past the illuminated windows of an arcade. . . . This book spills over with pleasure”(The New York Times). The culmination of decades of omnivorous collecting, Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul uses his novel of lost love, The Museum of Innocence, as a departure point to explore the city of his youth. In The Innocence of Objects, Pamuk’s catalog of this remarkable museum, he writes about things that matter deeply to him: the psychology of the collector, the proper role of the museum, the photography of old Istanbul (illustrated with Pamuk’s superb collection of haunting photographs and movie stills), and of course the customs and traditions of his beloved city. The book’s imagery is equally evocative, ranging from the ephemera of everyday life to the superb photographs of Turkish photographer Ara Güler. Combining compelling visual images and writing, The Innocence of Objects is an original work of art and literature.
On the Nature of Marx's Things
Author: Jacques Lezra
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823279448
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Book Description
On the Nature of Marx’s Things is a major rethinking of the Marxian tradition, one based not on fixed things but on the inextricable interrelation between the material world and our language for it. Lezra traces to Marx’s earliest writings a subterranean, Lucretian practice that he calls necrophilological translation that continues to haunt Marx’s inheritors. This Lucretian strain, requiring that we think materiality in non-self-evident ways, as dynamic, aleatory, and always marked by its relation to language, raises central questions about ontology, political economy, and reading. “Lezra,” writes Vittorio Morfino in his preface, “transfers all of the power of the Althusserian encounter into his conception of translation.” Lezra’s expansive understanding of translation covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Obscured by later critical attention to the contradictory lexicons—of fetishism and of chrematistics—that Capital uses to describe how value accrues to commodities, and by the dialectical approach that’s framed Marx’s work since Engels sought to marry it to the natural philosophy of his time, necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx’s thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an object is, of what counts as matter, value, sovereignty, mediation, and even number. In On the Nature of Marx’s Things a materialism “of the encounter,” as recent criticism in the vein of the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form theory, post-Schmittian divisible sovereignty, object-oriented-ontologies and the critique of correlationism, and philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine, Cassin, and Derrida. The inheritors of the problems with which Marx grapples range from Spinoza’s marranismo, through Melville’s Bartleby, through the development of a previously unexplored Freudian political theology shaped by the revolutionary traditions of Schiller and Verdi, through Adorno’s exilic antihumanism against Said’s cosmopolitan humanism, through today’s new materialisms. Ultimately, necrophilology draws the story of capital’s capture of difference away from the story of capital’s production of subjectivity. It affords concepts and procedures for dismantling the system of objects on which neoliberal capitalism stands: concrete, this-wordly things like commodities, but also such “objects” as debt traps, austerity programs, the marketization of risk; ideologies; the pedagogical, professional, legal, even familial institutions that produce and reproduce inequities today.
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823279448
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318
Book Description
On the Nature of Marx’s Things is a major rethinking of the Marxian tradition, one based not on fixed things but on the inextricable interrelation between the material world and our language for it. Lezra traces to Marx’s earliest writings a subterranean, Lucretian practice that he calls necrophilological translation that continues to haunt Marx’s inheritors. This Lucretian strain, requiring that we think materiality in non-self-evident ways, as dynamic, aleatory, and always marked by its relation to language, raises central questions about ontology, political economy, and reading. “Lezra,” writes Vittorio Morfino in his preface, “transfers all of the power of the Althusserian encounter into his conception of translation.” Lezra’s expansive understanding of translation covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Obscured by later critical attention to the contradictory lexicons—of fetishism and of chrematistics—that Capital uses to describe how value accrues to commodities, and by the dialectical approach that’s framed Marx’s work since Engels sought to marry it to the natural philosophy of his time, necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx’s thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an object is, of what counts as matter, value, sovereignty, mediation, and even number. In On the Nature of Marx’s Things a materialism “of the encounter,” as recent criticism in the vein of the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form theory, post-Schmittian divisible sovereignty, object-oriented-ontologies and the critique of correlationism, and philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine, Cassin, and Derrida. The inheritors of the problems with which Marx grapples range from Spinoza’s marranismo, through Melville’s Bartleby, through the development of a previously unexplored Freudian political theology shaped by the revolutionary traditions of Schiller and Verdi, through Adorno’s exilic antihumanism against Said’s cosmopolitan humanism, through today’s new materialisms. Ultimately, necrophilology draws the story of capital’s capture of difference away from the story of capital’s production of subjectivity. It affords concepts and procedures for dismantling the system of objects on which neoliberal capitalism stands: concrete, this-wordly things like commodities, but also such “objects” as debt traps, austerity programs, the marketization of risk; ideologies; the pedagogical, professional, legal, even familial institutions that produce and reproduce inequities today.