TRANSLATION, HEGEMONY AND THE PRACTICE OF COMMON LANGUAGE

Can we consider translation as a sort of hegemonic process, i.e., a social and historical process of producing consent in and through language? On the other hand, what if hegemony, which must be conceived in its political, cultural but also linguistic aspects, is structured as a translational relation between leading social forces and their “languages”? The aim of this talk is to tackle the problem of constitutive interaction between translation and hegemony in the conceptual framework provided by Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. The main thesis that will be discussed, through analysis of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, is that a common language of society functions as “historical bloc”, and thus not in terms of some pregiven linguistic and cultural substance that necessitates social unity, but as a political practice of (re)hegemonization that can be understood as translation.