The proactive echo: Ernst Cassirer'sThe Myth of the Stateand the biopolitics of global English

This essay explores the “translational turn” in the humanities from the perspective of biopolitics. A postcolonial reading of Ernst Cassirer's The Myth of the State illustrates a crucial transitional moment in the management of global hierarchies near the end of World War Two. Cassirer's work authorizes a certain regime of translation, emblematized by the birth of “global English”, that constitutes a model of transnational governance for the ensuing era of globalization. In theoretical terms, the essay draws inspiration from the deconstructionist critique of Romanticism; the Foucauldian critique of biopower and disciplinary knowledge; and the Marxist critique of the commodification of labor. A reading of the Chinese translation of Cassirer's work exemplifies asymmetry in the global regime of translation, and an introduction to the problem of metaspatial images provokes reflection on the role of translation in relation to the society of the spectacle.