In his death penalty seminar, Derrida expatiates on the legal rationale offered in Plato's Laws for Socrates' condemnation to death, focusing on this passage:

If he (the ambassador] seems to have returned corrupted, let him keep company with no one, neither young man nor old, in his pretense of wisdom; if he obeys the rulers, let him live as a private citizen; if not, let him die, if he is convicted in the law-court for illicit interference in education and the laws.

Derrida observes:

The council, the syllagos, receives visitors, consultants, observers, experts returning from abroad where they went to study the customs and laws of other countries. Well, if one of them comes back spoiled or corrupted, if he continues to make a display of his false wisdom, to refer willy-nilly to foreign models and if he does not obey the magistrate, "he shall have sentence of death (tethnatô) if the court convicts him of illicit interference in any matter of education or legislation (peri tēn paideian kai tous nomous)" Laws 952d. Once the court of justice has proved that he is intervening wrongly, on behalf of the foreigner, in the formation of the youth and the formation of the laws, he is punished with death.[1]

In addition to revealing how the stranger—and by extension the teacher-translator—when held responsible for imparting foreign ideas becomes criminalized, this moment in Plato's Laws illuminates core principles of Athenian democracy, political justice and legal custom. The phrase peri tēn paideian kai tous nomous, which focuses on the infraction of "illicit interference," or "intervening wrongly," refers to a political subject who, on the one hand, ignores the virtue of political usefulness and behavior of the proper citizen (extolled by Thucydides in the funeral oration of Pericles), and, on the other hand, traduces the ideal of aristocratic non-interference conventionally associated with Odysseus when (as Plato recounts in a myth told by Er in the final book of the Republic) his soul chooses to be reborn into a life without public involvement (as "one lying off somewhere that had been neglected by the others").[2]

A footnote by Peggy Kamuf, the translator of Derrida's death penalty seminar, indicates how the Greek phrase becomes a translation flashpoint: "In this quotation, Derrida has significantly modified the published French translation by substituting d'ingerence illicite [rendered here as 'illicit interference'] for de s'immiscer ['interfering'; A. E. Taylor translates: 'meddling']." The Penguin edition of the Laws, translated by the British classicist Trevor J. Saunders, also has "meddling."[3] "Meddling" connotes the character of the busybody, whose latter-day equivalent might be the lobbyist or the quasi-seditious politician; consider Speaker John Boehner's smug defense of his interference in foreign policy with his invitation to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to a joint session of Congress, by claiming that it was necessary because, when it comes to terrorism, the president [Obama] "is trying to act like it's not there."

Meddling does not fall wide of the mark of the French verb s'immiscer (to get mixed up in, to fiddle with), selected by Plato's French translator Auguste Diès in the edition used by Derrida. But Derrida wants to ramp up with something stronger than "meddling." As Kay Gabriel informs us, "the Greek word that Derrida re-translates as ingérance illicite is πολύπραγμονον, polupragmonôn, from which πολυπράγμα, polupragmôn, the figure of the busybody, is derived. This busybody runs active interference, to the point of threatening Athenian justice—and thus making sense of the moment in Plato's Republic (433a) where Socrates defines justice as 'to do one's own task and not to polupragmonein.'"[4] While the Republic may run counter to the civic ideology of Athenian democracy, it remains evident that polupragmonein is a condemnable offense. It violates the principle of usefulness by implying political involvement in all the wrong ways: it's an impediment to the exercise of power, and, at worst, it exposes power's arbitrary basis. Ingérance captures the full thrust of the negative, referring to those who force themselves on the polity. Obstruction of justice, sedition, government shutdown; all these threats to the demos issue from such a term. In its broadest ascription ingérance spans dirigisme (top-down administration, state autocracy, as in ingérance étatique); political inoperability (désoeuvrement, blocage, direct action, the politics of autonomia); and the impact of the pharmakon, the parasitic host, which, introduced into the system, functions like interferon, a compound of protein molecules released by host cells to block viral replication, whose harmful side effects include the triggering of autoimmune disorders.

From the gaps and jumps in translation, from the effort required to reconstruct what is not translated, a greater appreciation of the politics of interference comes to the fore. I think of it as a political theory of the impolitic crossed with subversive pedagogy—itself arising directly out of translation trouble that, on a purely linguistic level, is of course a form of interference with texts, laws of grammar and logic, protocols of the Political, and grooved ways of thinking, articulating, and socially comporting.

Translation trouble is worth delving into as a means of theorizing political interference. Departing from Derrida's retranslation from the French of Plato's Greek phrase, we thus move full throttle into what it means to run interference, from (as in football) blocking players from the opposing team to secure a way through for the ballcarrier which, when applied to politics, might take the form of aides throwing themselves in harm's way in order to distract public attention from shady maneuvers by their superiors; to procedural acts of parliamentary obstructionism; to tactics of civil disobedience including die-ins, cyber-attacks, and data intercepts; to catastrophes of autoimmunity. Each of these political takedowns can be connected to education—specifically, to Socrates' dialogic pedagogy and skepticism towards the educational status quo. As a teacher, Socrates is a polupragmôn par excellence, even if, as the Republic attests, he is on record opposing interference in affairs of state.

Barbara Cassin has an expression for this translation trouble. She calls it "philosophizing in languages."[5] In the ensemble of her writings on the Pre-Socratics and the Sophists, she developed the construct of the intraduisible, "the Untranslatable," to point up the instability of meaning and sense-making, the equivocity of homonymy and amphiboly, the performative dimension of discursive sophistic effects, the risks and rewards of "consistent relativism."[6] Cassin gives herself over to a praxis that involves relinquishing the hold of words and conceptual networks, and engaging fully with the symptomologies that emerge when we keep on (not) translating. For Cassin, what follows from this point is entrance into the labyrinth of Lacanian sophistry, a psychoanalytic doxography in which non-sense is an incontrovertible core of signifying practices that elicit rhetorical workarounds.[7] Psychoanalysis becomes a linguistic process philosophy, present and perpetual.

Following Cassin, I have defined "the Untranslatable" not as the name of a concept, but as a dual practice of theoretical interference and workaround; as a praxis of cognizing philologically, deconstructively, and politically. The starting point consists of particularities of translational resistance that account for a text's singular unreadability, an effect duly noted, in the case of the Plato's Laws for example, by translator Trevor Saunders:

Plato's Greek in the Laws is difficult: emphatic yet imprecise, elaborate yet careless, prolix yet curiously elliptical; the meaning is often obscure and the translator is forced to turn interpreter. How should such an extraordinary text be rendered into English? Any translation which preserved every note of the original would be doomed to failure more surely in the case of the Laws than of almost any other classical text: it would be quite unreadable.[8]

The Untranslatable imposes an exigent relation on the translator; it makes impossible demands, bringing the translation to the brink of failure, or brooking that failure in translations that never materialize.

In his review for the London Review of Books of the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, Christopher Prendergast took issue with the notion of the Untranslatable. Noting that the English editors (myself, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood) chose to foreground the term in the main title, whereas it appeared in the subtitle in the original French edition, Prendergast (like David Bellos, Lawrence Venuti, and other noted critics in the translation field) deemed the Untranslatable to be a red herring:

This is a term that conservative fundamentalists like; it puts up barriers and ring-fences cultures. What's it doing here? A short (and uncharitable) answer is: not very much. Apter claims that 'it is by no means self-evident what untranslatability means.' But that is far from being self-evidently the case. '"Untranslatable" normally means exactly what it says: that which cannot be translated. Cassin wants to deny this: "untranslatable" in no way implies that the terms in questions … are not and cannot be translated.' In no way? One possible answer to that is: in every way. There does seem to be here a confusion between the untranslatable and the untranslated. The former is essentialist all the way down (which is why fundamentalists like it), an absolute blockage on transmission. The untranslated is an altogether more open and porous category. It has to do more with difficulty than impossibility ("difficulty" and "difficult" recur often in the actual work of the volume), although not typically of the same order of difficulty as that faced by the translator of poetry (Valéry described this as dancing in chains) or of paranomastic prose (Finnegans Wake, while it has been translated into several languages, remains basically untranslatable into anything other than what it itself is made of, "Eurish").[9]

While it should be acknowledged that much of what the Untranslatable does concerns the navigation of what Prendergast characterizes as "hits and mis-hits, convergences and divergences, continuities and breaks, incomplete and imperfect translation, or even plain vanilla translation," he fails to take account of its distinctive "abilities" (to borrow Sam Weber's analysis of the role of the persistent suffix -barkeit [-ability] in Walter Benjamin's notions of reproducibility, translatability, et cetera). Not a reified essence of linguistic singularity, nor a simple remainder, it refers to how concepts assimilate ways of speaking and being and how ways of speaking and being interfere with concepts. And while the Untranslatable might well be taken as proscriptive, its force of interdiction is hardly reducible to a defense of fundamentalism, universal dogma, political absolutism, or censorship. Rather, it operates like interferon, affirming the presence of Unverständlichkeit, un-understandability, unintelligibility, and inoperability. The political Untranslatable, in this sense, is what disables the workings of instrumental language, ushering in the "foreign" on a plurilingual surge and injecting the language of the street into the system of the laws.

Experimenting, then, with doing things with political Untranslatables, one is led to further theorize interference within micropolitics. Consider how the word "occupy"—freighted with the connotations of colonial occupation and violent resource extraction in economically vulnerable regions of the planet—was interfered with by "Occupy Wall Street." Something similar happened to the phrase "blocchiamo tutto," which appeared on a Turin wall in 2012 as part of the tag, "Il potere è logistico. Blocchiamo tutto!" (Power is logistic. Let's block everything), a phrase taken as a declaration of war on infrastructure by a range of militant small groups.[10] "Zone" in French has a similar trajectory; normally associated with zones of detention, camps, or dangerous neighborhoods, it was transfigured by the acronym ZAD (zones à défendre) into a synonym for squatting in fallow property or for actions against environmentally damaging construction projects (which resulted not long ago in the killing of Rémi Fraisse, who was protesting the construction of a dam at Sivens). Consider, too, Maidan, the Ukrainian term for central square. As Timothy Snyder wrote in the New York Review of Books shortly after the Kiev uprising:

What does it mean to come to the Maidan? The square is located close to some of the major buildings of government, and is now a traditional site of protest. Interestingly, the word maidan exists in Ukrainian but not in Russian, but even people speaking Russian use it because of its special implications. In origin it is just the Arabic word for "square," a public place. But a maidan now means in Ukrainian what the Greek word agora means in English: not just a marketplace where people happen to meet, but a place where they deliberately meet, precisely in order to deliberate, to speak, and to create a political society. During the protests the word maidan has come to mean the act of public politics itself, so that for example people who use their cars to organize public actions and protect other protesters are called the automaidan.[11]

Maidan in its philology connects Arabic, Greek, and Ukrainian notions of public politics. It is site-specific, yet connected transpolitically to places of assembly and occupation all over the world where insurrection erupted: Syntagma Square, Tahrir, Taksim, Madrid's Puerta del Sol, Zucotti Park, Ogawa Plaza in Oakland. It designates a particular instance of competing nationalisms in eastern Europe (Putin's envoy officially denounced "the nationalist-revolutionary terrorist Maidan"), as well as strategic solidarity among regionally, ethnically, and religiously conflictual groups. It is a lodestone of language politics, as well as a breakout scene of sexual politics, with feminists and LGBT volunteers well represented at hospital and emergency hotlines. The sexual politics are a particularly important feature of Maidan's untranslatability: for as we know, gay-bashing in Russia is part of a Kremlin-backed effort to galvanize anti-European Union factions—and to force groups that might otherwise be strongly critical of Western neoliberalism into becoming aligned with it. The Maidan political map is configured unpredictably according to its case-sensitive retranslation. Keywords are always inflected by language, but most dictionaries of philosophy tend to forget the politics of translation in adopting transhistorical approaches to concepts.

The transiting of Maidan and "occupy" to unfixed forms and sites of global interference, ranging from resistance to oligarchic repression to anticapitalist pushback, reminds us that political glossaries and lexicons have a historic role in opposition politics. I have in mind the glossary that Althusser's English translator Ben Brewster appended to For Marx. Terms like alienation, epistemological break, conjuncture, consciousness, contradiction, humanism, ideology, dialectical materialism, practice, problematic, and theory project an encapsulated political program, and it is perhaps for this reason that Althusser gave them close attention. "Thank you for your glossary," he wrote to Brewster; "What you have done is extremely important from a political, educational and theoretical point of view … I return your text with a whole series of corrections and interpolations (some of which are fairly long and important, you will see why)."[12] After noting the genealogy of "break" and "problematic," from Gaston Bachelard's early coinage of "epistemological break," to Georges Canguilhem's unsystematic usage, to Michel Foucault's Althusserian appropriation, he underscored the importance of "correction."

Althusser's political activation of theory in the form of an "interfered with" glossary of his own critical lexicon brings to mind Alain Badiou's philosophical lexicon of riot and uprising in The Rebirth of History (Le réveil de l'histoire), his response to the Arab Spring. Badiou proceeds through a tripartite typology. The first term, "immediate riot," is defined as a tumultuous assembly of the young, characterized by weak localization and a lack of distinction between universalizable intention and random rage, between demonstrating and pillaging. The second is "latent" or "pre-political" riot, marked by a qualitative extension outward from the local. The example he gives is the emergence of a single slogan endorsed by disparate voices, "Mubarak, clear off!" "Thus is created," Badiou affirms,

the possibility of a victory, since what is immediately at stake in the riot has been decided … The movement can persist in anticipation of a specific material satisfaction: the departure of a man whose name—a short while before taboo, but now publicly condemned to ignominious erasure—is brandished.[13]

The third term is "historical riot," and it is closest to reaching the bar of what Badiou recognizes as an event. The event is really an advent, the emergence of an "intervallic period" that reboots the revolutionary sequence by nullifying the "natural harmony between unbridled capitalism and impotent democracy."[14] For the riot to become historical, it must become political, which is to say, come to embody the "subjective sharing of an Idea," and demonstrate that "The inexistent has arisen."[15] It must, as it turns out, run interference in the affairs of state. Badiou reprises Mao's injunction issued during the Cultural Revolution: "Get involved in the affairs of state!"[16] But he remakes it into a slogan for the new times of insurrection via fragment 2 of René Char's Feuillets d'Hypnos where one line rings out as a rallying cry: "Don't linger in the rut of results."[17] ("Ne t'attarde pas à l'ornière des résultats.")[18] One might keep on translating this line as: "Gum up the works of affairs of state! Dare to interfere! Commit the crime of polupragmonein!" With each act of translation, from political event to event glossary, from poetry to call to arms, the lexicon of historical riot joins the language of the poets in answer to the query about how to translate the Untranslatable at the very opening of the book: "What is happening to us in the early years of the century—something that would appear not to have any clear name in any accepted language?"[19] Badiou adopts a similar politics of renaming in The Communist Hypothesis as he distinguishes four typologies of May '68. Of particular urgency is the need to recall the word "Communism" from its corrupted usage in neoliberal circulation, thus returning it to its signification prime as a word equal to egalitarianism and coincident with the reauthorized right to words and expressions like "the people," "workers," and "the abolition of private property." The recourse to political Untranslatables in this instance is not (as it is with Cassin) a matter of creating political solidarity in and through philosophizing in languages, but a labor of rescuing radical political philology from the censors:

We have to put an end to linguistic terrorism that delivers us into the hands of our enemies. Giving up on the language of the issue, and accepting the terror that subjectively forbids us to pronounce words that offend dominant sensibilities, is an intolerable form of oppression.[20]

Language is crucial to Badiou's reformulation of the communist hypothesis, as when he translates Guizot's hortatory prescription at the dawning of French capitalism, "Get rich!" as "Live without an idea!" And from thence, an active retranslation that inverts Guizot's injunction: "Have the courage to support the idea, and it can only be the communist idea in its generic sense."[21]

Ayman El-Desouky has similarly worked the political Untranslatable in his scansion of the early days of the Egyptian Revolution with reference to "the amāra on the Square." A term with a long history, amāra is recalled in the context of Tahrir as the name for the conflation of political connective agency with aesthetic praxis:

The terms amāra and amār have their roots in classical Arabic, originally denoting a pile of stones set up in a waterless desert to signal the right direction to those who may have lost their way (according to al-Fayrūzabādī's lexicon, alQāmus almuhit, and Edward Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon). Amāra has also evolved into denoting signs, marks, signposts or elevated ground and has come to indicate an appointed time—lexical metaphors rather appropriate for the resonant revolutionary acts in Tahrir …

The specific usages current in Egyptian Arabic have been noted by El-Said Badawi and Martin Hinds in their Dictionary of Egyptian Arabic, defining it as a sign or indication or as evidence of good faith, an example of which is given from everyday mundane practice: "give me an amāra so that your home helper will let me into your flat." This example of a social amāra captures the potential range of the forms of amāra as either particular signs or details and information only the participants are privy to, or a narrative of an incident known only to them. The visual forms of recognition are encapsulated in the stock phrase "on his face are the amārāt of …" ("ala wishshu amārāt …"). The narrative offered in the exchanges, emphasizing a shared identity or a common bond, usually begins with the stock phrase: "by the amāra of…" which traverses social boundaries … The import of this spoken phrase was transmuted into the lexical and syntactic patterns of the slogans and the visual iconicity of the signs, street art and performances on Tahrir Square, and beyond. Unspoken but extending into the dimensions of social reality, invisibly as in the suggested extension of a gesture, amāra constructions offered the forms in which the verbal as well as visual resonances that seemingly individual and disparate acts have struck with the collective Egyptian imaginary.[22]

Referring to Badiou, El-Desouky extends the auguring force of the expression "by the amāra of …" to something "hitherto untheorized" associated by Badiou with "movement communism" and by Žižek with a "new political reality" posed against "ideological objective reality." Unlike "movement communism" or "new political reality," however, amāra is not aporetic; its contents are substantiated by immanent aesthetic practices of connective agency accessed on the oblique of Arabic philology.[23]  Amāra joins a glossary of translational politics responsive to subversive pedagogy and forms of agency afforded by actions in the square; in short, a politics of interference, of ingérence illicite.