D Tejaswini Niranjana The stereotype is not a simplification because it is a false representation of a given reality. It is a simplification because it is an arrested, fixated form of representation that, in denying the play of difference (that the negation through the Other permits), constitutes a problem for the representation of the subject... .9 In questioning discourses of domination, not only do we need to critique representation, we need also to formulate a complex notion of historicity, which I take to mean—although not unproblematically—effective-history, as that from the m past which is still operative in the present.10 The notion of effective-history would help us, for example, to read against the grain William Jones' late-eighteenth-century translations of ancient Sanskrit texts; it would also suggest the kinds of questions one might work with in re-translating those texts two hundred years later. The term historicity would thus incorporate questions about how the translation/ re-translation worked/works, why it was/is translated, and who did/does the translating. It seems imperative, therefore, that we shape a notion of historicity even as we use post-structuralist ideas, since 'histor/ in the texts of post-structuralism belongs in a chain that includes meaning, truth, presence and logos, being a repressive force that obliterates difference. We need to read the significance of the fact that Demdean post-structuralism has not been able to 'deconstruct and 'reinscribe' history like it has other terms implicated with 'origin'.11 Den-Ida's critique of representation, however, is important because it suggests a questioning of the traditional notion of translation as well. In fact, the two proble-matics have always been intertwined in Derrida's work. He has indicated more than once that translation perhaps escapes 'the orbit of representation' and is therefore an 'exemplary question'.12 If representation stands for the reappropriation of presence, translation emerges as the sign for what Derrida would call 'dissemination'.13 We must, however, interrogate carefully the conventional concept of translation that belongs to the order of representation, adequacy, essence and truth. This is the same order under which the discourse of history functions, creating, like translation, coherent and transparent texts through the repression of difference, participating thereby in the process of colonial domination. How can theory, or translation, avoid being trapped in the order of representation when it uses out of necessity the concepts it critiques? Derrida would suggest that it should aim to be the kind of writing which 1x)th marks and goes back over its mark with an undecidable stroke', for this 'double mark escapes the pertinence or authority of truth,' reinscribing through an inhabiting of the structures it deconstructs.14 The double inscription Derrida mentions has a parallel in Walter Benjamin's strategy of citation or quotation. For Benjamin, the historical materialist (the critical historiographer) quotes without quotation marks in a method akin to montage. This is one way of revealing the constellation a past age forms with the present without submitting to a historical continuum, to an order of origin and telos. The notion of a double writing can help us challenge the practices of subjectification and domination evident in histories or in translations. Let me now turn to a text which, although neither history nor translation, is Numbers 17-18