For the work of translating the general equivalences that obtain in the market of markets is work that becomes a quantum, but always, both simultaneously and not, something else, something that scans differently and which cannot be made to measure up to its quantity, which is untranslatable from the hyperbolic form of rhetorical presentation to the hyperbolic form of mathematical representation. This untranslatability which is not one, which is not one inasmuch as it cannot measure up to the quantum, marks the spot where the university, and the speculative disciplines at its core, exceed or lose their credit, and cease to produce value in and concerning the identities, the objects and circuits, at work in the market of markets. The ‘crucial defect … in the structuration/destructuration of … relations’ [Laclau] emerges just here, where the principles of analogy, equivalence, exchange and abstraction, that is to say, where the general principles of translatability and untranslatability-which-is-not-one, become the work of thought inasmuch as those general principles fail to form a coherent system that could, in principle, become the conceptual principle grounding a market of markets in global capitalism. And Derrida’s most powerful suggestion—with which I would like to conclude—is that this thinking, because it concerns what is impossible in translation, is not only the proper work of philosophy; it occurs not only in the guarded disciplinary groves of the university or the formal institutions destined to encourage and to protect speculative thought. Translation, and the accompanying untranslatability-which-is-not-one, are, to return to Marx’s words, a ‘point of departure’ located in ‘individuals producing in a society, and hence the socially determined production of individuals’. Translation, and its accompanying untranslatability-which-is-not-one, are as it were first political economy. They are proper to the ethico-political work we do, I myself and you yourself, at the moment when we encounter one another, when each of us measures up to what is immeasurable for us in the other and in the other’s idiom, when we speak out of measure so as to measure out, each to the other, phrases we take to be ours, phrases bearing our names and bearing what matters most to us, ce qui nous importe/emporte, Derrida’s phrases, even my own to you today.
Jacques Lezra, “‘This untranslatability which is not one,’” in Paragraph 38.2 (2015)