In introducing this special issue of boundary 2, this essay seeks to challenge the derivative conception of Marxist-communist translation that posits a hierarchical distinction between universal and particular forms of Marxism and communism. Reconceptualizing translation (via Walter Benjamin) as a necessary structural possibility inherent in the original texts, the essay argues that translation is a constitutive feature of all Marxisms and communisms (including Marx's and Lenin's) across time and space. The essay traces the importance of translation as both an actual practice and an important concept-metaphor in Marx's and Lenin's writings. If their writings may all too conveniently be construed as prophecies that lost their historical force in mistranslation (among other misfortunes), we might say that our obligation today is to translate Marx and Lenin more extensively and more vigorously—not despite but precisely because of their inexhaustible translatability. Insofar as an ostensibly original Marx, or Marxism-communism, has always exceeded its historical realization, we ought to affirm its difference as a universalizable in the so-called postcommunist historical present.

Through a consideration of Turkish Marxist intellectual Hikmet Kıvılcımlı's (1902–71) translation of Wage Labor and Capital, this essay examines the relation between conceptual translation and language in the historical conjuncture of the Kemalist revolution that brought about a radical transformation in language. Moving from Kıvılcımlı's language, suffused with idioms, slang, West Thracian dialectal phonations, colloquialisms, gallicisms, Turkish neologisms, and Arabic and Persian loanwords in the preface to the equivalential chains of Western, Ottoman, and new Turkish words in the translation, the essay uncovers Kıvılcımlı's ambivalence toward the excess of language over concepts. Kıvılcımlı seeks to dispel the effects of linguistic anarchy and perform an impossible leap over conceptual language by creating a short circuit between Marxian thought and Turkish idioms. If the Marxian text is to have a performative force, Kıvılcımlı insists, it must first necessarily become common in both senses of the word, that is, both open to the use of all and typical, ordinary, and perhaps even banal, akin to a conventional formula, a proverb, or an idiom that could be told, recited, and used by anyone and everyone, time and again but always singularly.

Gilles Deleuze, borrowing from Maurice Blanchot’s distinctive vocabulary in The Space of Literature, offers death as the ultimate example of the event. In this paper, I propose reversing the current of concept-metaphor against a certain performance theory of sovereignty and ask, not what the concept-metaphor death does for the thought of the event, but what the concept-metaphor event does for the thought of death on the hunger strike in order to explore the divide between the space of dying and the space of politics, which are incompatibly distinct and yet inextricably linked. Revealing an irreducible anachrony between two deaths — the passage of time that separates dying as pure potentiality from death as a radically contingent event that comes either too early or too late — I argue that the political efficacy of hunger striking depends less on the consummation of death in the immediacy of an ecstatic moment than on the prolongation of this interval of time by potentially endless repetitive enactments, which imply both finality and incompletion.