Holding friction: toward a politics of translation in Guadalupe Santa Cruz

Abstract

This article addresses the problem of translation understood solely as a technical transfer of meaning governed by equivalence, fidelity, and transparency, and examines its limitations in accounting for critical translational practices. Its objective is to analyze translation in the work of Guadalupe Santa Cruz as a politics of translation oriented toward sustaining friction, foreignness, and the non-closure of meaning. The methodology is qualitative and analytical, based on a close reading of a translational corpus that includes Santa Cruz’s Spanish translation of Julia Kristeva’s Sense and Nonsense of Revolt and her translations of Jean Remy’s texts on Georg Simmel, with particular attention to lexical choices, syntactic strategies, and paratextual devices such as Translator’s Notes. The results show that Santa Cruz’s translations do not aim to stabilize meaning or resolve untranslatability, but rather to expose and activate it within the target language. The article concludes that her translational practice constitutes an ethics of obstruction: a material intervention in language that renders loss, failure, and foreignness productive, affirming untranslatability as a political condition of thought and of the critical circulation of knowledge in the Latin American context.