Untranslating machines: a genealogy for the ends of global thought

On what basis can we establish an alternative to the unifying of cultures brought about by economic globalisation?

When ideas, like objects and words, can be translated and marketed everywhere, what forms of critique are available?

Straddling the fields of political philosophy, comparative literature, animal studies, global studies, and political economy, this book proposes to this end a weakened, defective concept of 'untranslatability'.

The analytic frame of Jacques Lezra's argument is rooted in Marx, Derrida and Wittgenstein.

He moves historically from the moment when 'translation' becomes firmly wed to mercantilism and to the consolidation of proto-national state forms, in European early modernity; to the current moment, in which the flow of information, commodities and value-creation protocols among international markets produces the regulative fantasy of a global, coherent market of markets.