Global France Seminar presents, Souleymane Bachir Diagne “De langue à langue, l’hospitalité de la traduction”

Presentation and discussion in English
Location: Building 14, 14E-304 (map)

Abstract: His most recent book, De langue à langue, l’hospitalité de la traduction presents translation as humanism. In other words, if our primary human condition is to constitute multiple cultures and speak different languages carrying different worldviews and different epistemes, then translation, which the philosopher Paul Ricœur has said is both an impossible and a sublime task, is the ongoing creation of an open human society oriented towards the same horizon of universality, not in spite of the plural nature of the world, but starting from it and building on it.

Bio: Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a professor in the departments of French and of Philosophy at Columbia University. His areas of research and publication include History of Philosophy, History of Logic and Mathematics, Islamic Philosophy, African Philosophy and Literature. His latest publications in English include: The Ink of the Scholars. Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, Dakar, Codesria, 2016; Open to Reason. Muslim philosophers in conversation with Western tradition, New York, Columbia University Press, 2018;  Postcolonial Bergson, Fordham University Press, New York, 2019 ; In Search of Africa(s). Universalism and Decolonial Thought, (a dialogue with Jean-Loup Amselle), Polity Press, 2020; African art as philosophy. Senghor, Bergson, and the idea of Negritude, The Other Press, New York, 2023.