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In her everyday work, the translator faces the multiplicity of languages, experiencing their irreducible diversity. Is this a condition of imperfection (almost a condemnation, as we learn from the biblical story of the Tower of Babel) or something that can have a positive meaning? This question is the starting point for some reflections about the philosophical meaning of translation. What does the experience of translation teach us? In the wake of some authors who reflected on it – such as F. Schleiermacher and J. Ortega y Gasset -, we will consider how translation is an essential praxis in the development of cultures, which fosters their osmosis and above all allows them to become aware of their diversity. If, on one hand, to translate can be the symptom of a deep-rooted nationalism, on the other hand, it can be a way to prevent the totalitarian closure: translation, as Ortega said through a very beautiful metaphor, is "a voyage to the foreign." The task of the translator has therefore a great political and cultural meaning: that of fostering such encountering, on the limit between identitarian closure and feeling of diversity ; En su labor cotidiana, el traductor se confronta con la multiplicidad de las lenguas, experimentando su irreductible diversidad: ¿se trata de una condición de imperfección (casi una condena, tal como nos enseña el relato bíblico de la Torre de Babel) o de algo que puede tener un significado positivo? Esta pregunta es el punto de partida para una serie de reflexiones acerca del significado filosófico de la traducción. ¿Qué nos enseña, pues, la práctica de la traducción? En la senda de algunos autores que reflexionaron sobre ésta -como F. Schleiermacher y J. Ortega y Gasset-, se tratará de mostrar cómo la traducción es una práctica esencial en el desarrollo de las culturas, que favorece su ósmosis y que, sobre todo, les permite volverse conscientes de su diversidad. Si, por un lado, el traducir puede ser síntoma de un arraigado nacionalismo, por el otro, puede ser una manera para evitar la cerrazón totalitaria: traducir, como decía Ortega con una bella metáfora, "es hacer un viaje al extranjero". El oficio del traductor tiene por lo tanto un gran significado político y cultural: el de favorecer este encuentro, en el límite entre cerrazón identitaria y sentimiento de la diversidad.Traducido del Italiano por Fabrizio Cossalter

Heidegger's philosophy has been interpreted as an absolute historicism, unable to point to a unhistorical standpoint from which history can be judged upon. K. Löwith, for instance, has indicated that the cause of this difficulty is to be found in the conception of time: whereas, in Greek thought, time was considered only as a manifestation of the essence, in modern thought time has the tendency to become the essence itself, as that which fulfills itself in time, up to Heidegger's identification of being and event. What is interesting in my critique is that the conception of time is strictly interwoven with a specific way of conceiving justice and, broadly speaking, ethics. In Plato's philosophy, justice as measure corresponds to a cyclical and even retrogressive conception of time, the one enounced in the myth of Chronos, in the Politikos. The modern conception of time, spiritualistic and biologistic, is instead cyclical and irreversible, cumulative: its most significant expression is Hegelianism. The existential conception of time, instead, is neither cyclical nor cumulative. By commenting on Heidegger's Anaximander's Saying, I wish to show the possibility of conceiving temporality as disjunction (injustice) and only as such capable of producing justice – which I understand as a new possibility of meaning that does not exclude, but carries within itself, emancipation. An ethics of the present developed on the basis of this conception of time – which Heidegger has not completely endorsed – would then be an ethics which accepts as its own ground the discontinuous, yet inventive, dimension of time.

This book presents a multi-faceted reconsideration of dominant approaches to violence and social critique. Its unifying thread is a dedication to overcoming violence and domination on a scale larger than individual micro-resistances, even as many contributors reject programmatic thought and "self-possessed" political action.