Representation, History and the Case of Translation nologies of colonial power, could underwrite a new practice of translation/history-writing. The scope of this paper restricts me to these rather programmatic statements, but I have presented elsewhere an example of re-translation that attempts to deploy the critique of representation/historiography.4 Here I am concerned merely with pointing out the possibilities opened up by such a critique. At the outset, we need to complicate our notions of cause and effect. For it is not as though classical philosophical discourse merely engenders a practice of translation •^0 as subjectification. Simultaneously, translation in the colonial context creates and supports a certain conceptual economy which works into philosophical discourse and functions as a philosopheme. As Jacques Derrida points out, the concepts of metaphysics are not bound by or produced solely within the 'field' of philosophy. Rather, they come out of and circulate through various discourses in several registers, providing a 'conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted'.5 In forming a certain subjectivity, translation also brings into being overarching concepts of reality and representation which help render invisible the epidemic violence that accompanies the cathecting of a subject to occupy the place of the 'Other'.6 The classical concept of representation is critiqued by Derrida, for example, who questions the very notion of an origin or an original that needs to be re-presented. Derrida argues that the 'origin' is itself dispersed, its 'identity' undecidable. A representation thus does not re-present an 'original'; rather, it represents that which is always already represented. Thus one of the most useful insights Derrida's work offers to post-colonials is the notion that origin is always heterogeneous, that it is not some pure, unified source of meaning or history. Suppressing the difference that is already there in the so-called origin, representation in the classical sense grounds the whole of western philosophy. This philosophy, according to Derrida, is one of 'presence', of the 'absolute proximity of self-identity and of presence to oneself'.7 Derrida claims that western philosophy tries to reappropriate 'presence' or the origin through notions of adequacy of representation, of totalization, of history. Cartesian-Hegelian history, like the structure of the sign, 'is conceivable only on the basis of the presence that it defers and in view of the deferred presence one intends to reappropriate' (SP, p. 138). Here Derrida points to historicism's concern with origin and telos and its desire to construct a totalizing narrative. The post-structuralist critique of historicism is relevant to the rethinking of translation because it shows the genetic (searching for an origin) and teleological nature of traditional historiography. Of immediate relevance to our concern with colonial practices of subjectification is the fact that 'historicism' presents as natural that which is historical (and therefore neither inevitable nor unchangeable). A critique of historicism, then, might show us another way in which to deconstruct the 'pusillanimous' and 'deceitful' Hindus of Mill and Hegel. I am not concerned here with the alleged misrepresentation of the 'Hindus'. Rather, I am trying to question the withholding of reciprocity and the essentializing of 'difference' (what Johannes Fabian calls a denial of coevalness8) which permits the Other to be stereotypically constructed and deployed in a discourse of domination. As Homi Bhabha puts it: Journal of Arts 6' Ideas