In her text Sonja Neef discusses the biblical myth of Babel under the conditions of the 21st century. She focuses on the meaning of Babel in the age of globalisation. Exploring the genealogy and translatability of the term Babel, Neef shows how the problem of ‹one or many› languages is crucial still in contemporary processes of globalisation. ‹Babel› stands for the task to translate between the cultures even if that is – Neef refers to Derrida – an insoluble task. Following Spivak Neef suggests a transformation from thinking ‹globalisation› to thinking the ‹planet›, because planetarism's ‚spherical thinking‘ emphasizes the problem of alterity and migration as a central issue of cultural studies.
