“Cheers to Perpetual Peace!”: Kant and the Politics of Translation
International political theory is always tied to the national languages in which it is written. The tension between the national and the international is negotiated through acts of translation. Translation, however, does not merely transmit meaning: it also opens space for contesting the intended sense of the original text.
In this talk, I explore this problem through the example of Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, which I am currently translating into my native Estonian (edited and with a foreword by Eva Piirimäe). By reflecting on concrete translational choices, I show how key concepts central to international political theory acquire different inflections when rendered into a new linguistic and political context.
Henri Otsing is a third-year PhD student at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and a Fulbright visiting scholar at Northwestern University this semester. He began his studies in the history of philosophy and later transitioned to intellectual history. His doctoral research focuses on Emer de Vattel and Enlightenment theories of the law of nations. His broader research interests include the concept of liberty, the history of natural law, and the rhetoric of political theory.