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Abstract
This dissertation proposes translation as a model for responding to the end of a human world. Not the end of the world that is, but of human worlds, in the plural, as we make and unmake them. Such making and unmaking is the matter of history. What agency we have in this process, I will argue, has to be theorized as historical agency. The question concerning historical agency was much debated in the late 18th century, when modern philosophy of history first came into its own. As a matter of practical philosophy, it has since been mostly forgotten. For a while now we have known that human historical agency is even wider in scope than originally thought, reaching deep into natural history but, at the same time, also highly precarious, even self-undermining in its consequences. In light of all this, I propose we re-open the question: who acts in history, and what would it mean to do this well? My primary goal is to put these questions back on the agenda of a contemporary philosophy of history. To this end, I look at the dominant answer given, which emerged when a late 18th century concept of poetic genius migrated from aesthetics into philosophy of history after the French Revolution. Few believe in either aesthetic or historical genius anymore, yet it tacitly structures our thinking on these matters even today. I propose an alternative to this poetic paradigm of human historical agency. It is grounded in historical translation practices, and I call it translational action. For centuries, an older concept of translatio had been the backbone of Latinate Western historical thought, until it was lost with the onset of modernity. This dissertation offers a re-statement of the salvageable core of this pre-modern idea for present times. Its appeal today, I argue, lies in that translational action allows us to think of creatively mourning the loss of a world as itself emancipatory: as realizing a revised, yet still distinctly modern form of historical freedom.