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Invisibility 39text with current domestic values, it is also dehistoricizing: the variousconditions of translated texts and of their reception are concealedbeneath concepts of transcendental subjectivity and transparentcommunication. A symptomatic reading, in contrast, is historicizing: itassumes a concept of determinate subjectivity that exposes both theethnocentric violence of translating and the interested nature of itsown historicist approach.IIIThe project of the present book is to combat the translator’s invisibilitywith a history of—and in opposition to—contemporary Englishlanguagetranslation. Insofar as it is a cultural history with a professedpolitical agenda, it follows the genealogical method developed byNietzsche and Foucault and abandons the two principles that governmuch conventional historiography: teleology and objectivity.Genealogy is a form of historical representation that depicts, not acontinuous progression from a unified origin, an inevitabledevelopment in which the past fixes the meaning of the present, buta discontinuous succession of division and hierarchy, domination andexclusion, which destabilize the seeming unity of the present byconstituting a past with plural, heterogeneous meanings. In agenealogical analysis, writes Foucault, “what is found at the historicalbeginnings of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it isthe dissension of other things. It is disparity” (Foucault 1977:142). Thepossibility of recuperating these “other” meanings explodes thepretense of objectivity in conventional historiography: its teleologicalemphasis betrays a complicity with the continuance of pastdomination and exclusion into the present. Thus, history is shown tobe a cultural political practice, a partial (i.e., at once selective andevaluative) representation of the past that actively intervenes into thepresent, even if the interests served by that intervention are notalways made explicit or perhaps remain unconscious. For Foucault, agenealogical analysis is unique in affirming the interested nature ofits historical representation, in taking a stand vis-à-vis the politicalstruggles of its situation. And by locating what has been dominatedor excluded in the past and repressed by conventional historiography,such an analysis can not only challenge the cultural and socialconditions in which it is performed, but propose different conditionsto be established in the future. History informed by genealogy,Foucault suggests, “should become a differential knowledge of