Course Description
This seminar was jointly organized with Professor Paul Standish at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Summary and purpose
In order to achieve rich dialogue between “old and new generations in the 21st century,” cross-cultural dimensions are crucial in diverse ranges of education — including language education, citizenship education, cosmopolitan education, environmental education and moral education. Education cannot be contained in terms of a tidy division between adulthood and childhood: rather it is to be reconsidered as the endless process of human perfection — one through which adults and children alike learn continually what it is to be a grownup (Cavell 1979, p. 125), and this involves crossing borders, in and out of school.

In considering the conditions for such perfectionist aspirations, this course highlights the theme of translation. Through a reading of the film “Lost in Translation” (2003) in relation to poststructuralist and American philosophical texts, we shall explore the idea of philosophy as translation as an alternative way of thinking about understanding other cultures and of exploring educational implications. Translation here signifies more than the “merely linguistic”: it involves the translation of the human subject, understood now as being inseparable from language and culture. In this sense translation is a condition of human beings and is inseparable from the transformational experience of recovery from loss — loss of the self, of the meaning, and of place, and the loss of innocence that is part of growing up. The experience of translation in this broader sense has in fact already begun in one’s own language and culture: the other is already there in what is perceived to be one’s own.

The central film in this course also leads into themes of estrangement and uncanniness and we shall address these themes with reference to further aspects of Cavell’s work in which he finds connections between these themes and aspects of Japanese thought.