Renegociar lo intraducible: perspectivas para un humanismo transcultural

Is the exhaustive expansion of (western) science and technology syn­onymous with western culture? Are key concepts such as universality, totality and globality synonymous? Can they be validated as concepts out­side of dominating western languages and cultures? Postcolonial theory intends to respond to the unshared power of western epistemology by a radical inversion: the oneness of western epistemology, it says, must acknowledge the plurality of repressed forms of knowledge. But turn­ing aside from universality by emphasizing ‘pluriversality’ does not free us from abstraction or warrant that the concepts we are using hereby are entitled to overcome the limits of global western epistemological dom­ination. However, considering translation as a necessary precondition of transcultural negotiation places the paradox of a non-homogeneous uni­versality in a different perspective, once we take into account the dynamics of translation as negotiation of the untranslatable.