Contemporary Japanese Thought

The discipline called Postcolonial Studies constantly and often unconsciously revolves around these questions. We could say that it is fated to maintain its productivity as a discipline only by continuing to revolve insistently around these questions. For colonialism and modernity, rather than having determinable beginnings and ends, and thus being objectifiable as “historical periods,” are phenomena which by their nature are forbidden to end, and hence ought to be called “events” in the strongest sense of the word.

Even this two-in-one “event” is proper, in the way that any event is proper. It is first of all—and perhaps eternally—connected with one proper name, which is, of course, the name Europe. This means that, contrary to outward appearances, both colonialism and modernity are not entirely common nouns. In other words, they are not entirely translatable. In these two Latinate words, for example, there remains a reserve of latent meaning even if translated into Japanese as shokumichishugi and kindai. Does one not see here the enigma of Europe: its nonidentical identity; its “essence” that makes the nonidentical its identity; its “essence” that makes its essencelessness its essence?

This is a question that should be asked repeatedly, apart from all the “images” that are woven around the name Europe. To put it differently, it is a question that attaches itself inseparably like a shadow to every question that is asked anywhere about anything. The attempt to respond to this question, or at least to recognize the necessity of this question, is definitely not a local concern limited to “Europeans,” let alone an example of a Eurocentric attitude. How can colonialism be thought through without at the same time asking this question? Fifty years ago, for example, this question was already on the horizon of thought of a writer who was seeking the cause for failure of a certain non-European nation-state’s experience of modernity. As Takeuchi Yoshimi writes in his 1948 essay “Chūgoku no kindai to Nihon no kindai” [Chinese modernity and Japanese modernity]:

I do not know if the European invasion of the Orient was based upon the will of capital, a speculative spirit of adventure, the Puritan spirit of pioneership, or yet another instinct for self-expansion. In any event, it is certain that there existed in Europe something fundamental that supported this instinct, making the invasion of the Orient inevitable. Perhaps this something has been deeply intertwined with the essence of what is called “modernity.” Modernity is the self-recognition of Europe as seen within history, that regarding of itself as a self distinct from the feudalistic, which Europe gained in the process of liberating itself from the feudal (a process that involved the emergence of free capital in the realm of production and the formation of personality qua autonomous and equal individuals with respect to human beings). Therefore, it can be said that Europe is first possible only in this history, and that history itself is possible only in this Europe. History is not an empty form of time. It includes an infinite number of instants in which one struggles against obstacles so that the self may be itself, without which both the self and history would be lost. Simply being Europe does not make Europe Europe. The various facts of history teach that Europe barely maintains itself through the tension of its incessant self-renewals.¹

As the title suggests, the point of Takeuchi’s essay is to present the qualitative difference between Chinese and Japanese modernity. In this case, the stance toward Europe, i.e., whether or not there was resistance, is made the standard of judgment. At the time of his writing this essay, Takeuchi did not yet refer to the non-Western world that included China and Japan as “Asia,” but rather as the “Orient.” He represented from a particular history-of-civilizations perspective the necessity of the “Orient’s” “resistance” and “defeat” in relation to Europe, and attempted to find in the Chinese writer Lu Xun—and through him in China itself—the form of “resistance” required of this historical necessity. In order for the “Orient” to attain “modernity,” it must pass through a “resistance” grounded upon the self-awareness of “waking up from a dream to find no path to take.”² Of course this view was required in order to illuminate contemporary Japan at the same time, which, according to Takeuchi’s thinking, had pursued the path of modernization without passing through this kind of “resistance.” Japan had thereby met the destruction of “August 15,” yet had even then been unable to deeply understand the fact of “defeat” because of this lack of “resistance.”

In its turn toward modernity, Japan bore a decisive inferiority complex vis-à-vis Europe. (This inferiority complex was the result of Japanese culture’s superiority). It then furiously began to chase after Europe. Japan’s becoming Europe, as European as possible, was conceived of as the path of its emergence. That is to say, Japan sought to emerge from slavery by becoming the master—and this has given rise to every fantasy of liberation. Today’s liberation movements are so permeated by this slave nature that they cannot fully free themselves from it.³

These words were written by a Japanese intellectual just after the collapse of the colonial empire of Japan—the first non-European nation-state in world history to have carried out colonial rule on a large scale over a long period of time. Given that many events occurred in the years since, above all the struggles for independence and revolution in the former European colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as well as the difficulties that followed, what kind of light can these words shed on the question of the mutually determinative nature of colonialism and modernity? Here I would like to cast this text, which is usually discussed in the concrete but limited context of Japanese and East Asian modernity, into the general question of colonialism and modernity. And for the sake of a very preliminary consideration, I would like to take up two indices from the above quotations. The first is the character of Takeuchi’s understanding of Europe in the first quotation, the other is the function of the opposing concepts of “master” and “slave” (which are placed in a structural relation with such other concepts as “self” and “subject”). In the first section of this essay, I will begin from the former index and compare the discourse on Europe by twentieth-century European intellectuals with research into the history of (European and Japanese) colonialism. In the second section, I will look at the discourse of a colonial intellectual from the period of independence struggles in order to analyze how the opposing concepts of “master” and “slave” functioned in the work of theorizing anticolonial struggles. Based on my examination of these two indices, I will in the third section suggest that questions of colonialism and modernity, as well as questions concerning the essence of Europe, must necessarily disrupt the thought that depends on this master/slave dichotomy.

“Simply being Europe does not make Europe Europe.” This sentence, taken from Takeuchi Yoshimi, can mean various things that go beyond the author’s intention. The author tried to say that “the invasion of the Orient” was a necessary process for the self-realization of Europe, whose essence is self-expansion. This sentence, however, can suggest not only this kind of external expansion of Europe but also an essential inner difference within Europe. Anticolonial thought has almost always existed in Europe, even though it has had various limits and in the end lacked the force to change the direction of history. For example, in the turmoil of the French Revolution, fierce opinions both for and against abolishing slavery and colonies were exchanged in the National Assembly. The philosophy of English utilitarianism, as exemplified by John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith, had a large influence on the French discussions of abolishing colonialism.⁴ Or again, for German thinkers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when their country had no colonies to begin with—and was not even a nation-state—colonialism was still the “vice of others.” In particular, it is worth drawing attention to the fact that both Kant and Fichte had deeply anti-colonial philosophies.⁵

It was surprisingly late that the ideology of affirming colonialism as the “white man’s civilizing mission” gained mass consensus in the contemporary sense, which goes beyond the bounds of intellectual discourse as analyzed by Edward Said in his Orientalism, and which presupposes compulsory education and the establishment of the mass media. This happened both after Europe entered the stage of imperialism and after World War I, that is to say, around 1930. In 1930 France celebrated one hundred years of its possession of Algeria, and in the following year held an international colonial exhibition. The representation of colonialism from the side of the colonizers shows its most typical discursive form at this time.

The first “value” of colonialism is “progress.” “Progress in the world, that is to say, the exploitation of latent wealth, is the best justification for colonial activity,” and “Colonialist ideology is equated with the development of humanity.” In the historical section of the International Colonial Exhibition, colonial activity was represented as a single continuity, from the crusaders to the beginning of the twentieth century.

The second “value” of colonialism is “morality.” Seen from this perspective, the acquisition of colonies is more a duty than a right. When this moral consciousness takes the form of a “civilizing mission,” it has a doubly religious character. In addition to the fact that the activities of Christian missionaries had always been at the front line of colonial activities, the “empire builders,” i.e., the military and colonial bureaucrats who were the actual parties involved in conquest and rule, were also the owners of a deep ideology that might even be called colonial mysticism. Furthermore, such ideology always sought its expression in “action.” This “action” had to be expressed through the efforts of the colonialists, who were “creators of an energy that emerged from this land of energy that is France.” In the discourse from this period, “action,” “energy,” and “effort” were always connected with masculine virtues. Colonization is invasion and conquest. According to the words of then Prime Minister Pierre Laval, “all the children of France received the most virile of lessons from the Colonial Exhibition.”⁶

This exhibition was greeted with enthusiasm by all political forces in the Third Republic, with the exception of the Communist Party. Hardly any objections were raised, even among writers and artists, with the exception of the surrealists. Even the poet and critic Paul Valéry praised it as “magnificently organized.”

However, in the critiques of civilization and in the discussions of Europe that Valéry wrote during this same period, one can catch a pessimistic echo suggesting that he was not able to affirm colonialism without reservation. At this time, one of the main factors that established the consensus about colonialism in France was the wide public recognition of the strategic importance of the colonies during World War I. The colonies were suppliers of strategic resources and, above all, suppliers of soldiers. After a large number of colonial soldiers lost their lives on the battlefield, the words, “The Colonies’ efforts were worthy of the homeland” became a cliché of French journalism.⁷

Unlike Gide, who became inclined to anticolonialism after witnessing the conditions of forced labor in the Congo, Valéry’s doubts about colonialism did not come from so-called humanistic motives. For Valéry, who grasped World War I as Europe’s “crisis” and as the beginning of its decline, the future consequences of colonialism for Europe could not possibly have been considered uniformly bright.

When the Sino-Japanese War and the Spanish-American War broke out at the end of the nineteenth century, Valéry realized that world history was witnessing the appearance of nation-states that pursued their interests independently of Europe and yet through institutions and technologies that Europe invented. As the first to grasp a portent of the coming age, Valéry stated the following in the preface to his 1931 Reflections on the World Today:

This finite world, of which the internal bonds do not cease to multiply, is also a world which is increasingly equipping itself. Europe laid the foundations of science, which has transformed the life and multiplied the power of those who own it. But by its very nature it is essentially transmissible; it is of necessity reduced to universal methods and recipes. The powers it gives to some can be obtained by everyone else.… Thus the artificial inequality of powers on which European predominance was based for three hundred years is tending rapidly to vanish.⁸

The struggle to divide up the world among the European nation-states that had reached the stage of imperialism (the “Great Powers”) lacked a unified “politics” suitable for the ideal of Europe. Therefore, Europe was now facing extinction as a geographical and spiritual entity with clear contours because of colonialism, that is, because of Europe’s globalization. In Valéry’s understanding, as long as Europe lacked a “politics of spirit” that went beyond the individual and material interests of each nation-state, colonialism could only become a fatal mistake. As a “European,” he knew painfully well that the chance for such a “politics” was already lost forever.

In principle, those who dominate others in the name of universality cannot maintain those relations of domination forever. One must either put an end to domination after the other has been assimilated and become equal with oneself, or one must take down the banner of universality and end the domination that has now lost the foundation of its legitimization. The experience of colonialism in fact did not take either of these paths, but tore apart the colonized through the dual pressures of assimilation and exclusion. Because of these pressures, the path of political liberation for the colonized inevitably suffered distortions.

Let us look at the example of Algeria. Even after Algeria was declared a French possession by the king’s ordinance of July 1834, the inhabitants of this country, i.e., the Arabs or Berber Muslims and Jews, were for a period of time placed under the jurisdiction of religious laws. While in 1864 the “natives” at last became legally “French” and gained the “right” to perform such public duties as military service, they were second-class citizens still deprived of various rights, beginning with the right to vote. In 1870, only Jews among the “natives” were given citizenship through a government ordinance called the Crémieux Decree, which was named for the colonial governor at the time. After World War I, following the deaths of many Algerian soldiers, the path to French citizenship for Muslims was finally opened in 1919, as if in compensation. However, because the achievement of citizenship was to be accompanied by the renunciation of religious rights, almost no practical effects arose. Participation in the “universal” was only allowed on the condition of renouncing the “culture” of the colonized, which was regarded as “particular.” Then, in the age of the popular front, the granting of civil rights without the renunciation of religious rights was for the first time proposed for those Muslims who had supposedly sufficiently assimilated through military service, or by having credentials in a profession. Finally World War II began, and once again with a large number of Algerian soldiers participating in the battle to liberate France, the government ordinance of 1944 came at long last to guarantee suffrage to those living in Algeria (that is, for both colonists and “natives”), regardless of origin, race, language, or religion. Yet this too was a discriminatory system that aimed to protect the interests of the colonists by distinguishing between Muslim and non-Muslim electorates. This situation continued until the beginning of the Algerian War in November 1954. The history of civil rights in colonial Algeria unfolded under French rule which, lasting for over a century, was based on the principle of assimilation. The collapse of French rule over Algeria was more than anything proof that politicosocial equality among ethnic groups is in principle unrealizable in a colonial situation.⁹

In the past, Yanaihara Tadao pointed out that there were many commonalities between Japanese and French colonialism.¹⁰ Unlike England, France possessed a large colony across the Mediterranean Sea in North Africa, and, like Japan at the time (which possessed Korea across the Japan Sea and claimed “Manchukuo” as a dependency), France had adopted the policy of unifying the colonies and the homeland into a bloc. This was called homeland extensionism, and its principle was assimilationism. British-style colonial rule belonged to a different model in that it paid attention to local cultures and recognized a certain degree of self-governance on the part of the “natives.” Yanaihara examined French assimilationism in terms of the three areas of tariffs, suffrage, and education, and thought that the policies of Japan and France were fundamentally similar concerning tariffs and education. Yet in regard to suffrage he wrote, “In Japan this problem has been abandoned without being resolved,” and pointed out the deviation of Japanese colonialism from the French-style ideal, which touted the granting of civil equality in exchange for assimilation. As seen above, however, France too was unable in the end to resolve this problem, at least in Algeria.

Yanaihara’s view of Japanese colonial policy (and especially its education policy) as assimilationist was long accepted. Recently, however, Komagome Takeshi’s Shokuminchi teikoku Nihon no bunka tōgō [The cultural integration of the Japanese colonial empire] has radically reexamined this point.¹¹ Komagome draws attention to the fundamental clash of opinions that arose within the Japanese government at the time of the annexation of Taiwan in 1895 as well as the subsequent process of determining policy for rule. In 1897, Nogi Maresuke, the governor general at the time, submitted a “proposal” that opposed applying the Japanese Imperial Constitution to Taiwan. In opposition to this, Ume Kenjirō, the chief of the Legislative Bureau, refused to recognize any grounds for differentiating Taiwan from Okinawa and Hokkaidō, and advocated the adoption of a policy that would anticipate the implementation of suffrage and conscription for Taiwan as well. It is thought that this opposition reflected the opinions of the Englishman W. M. H. Kirkwood and the Frenchman M. J. Revon, both of whom were then advisers to the Ministry of Justice. However, it was Nogi’s policy, which was based on Kirkwood’s opinion paper, that came to be adopted.

Frequently, Japanese and French colonial rule are simply compared as “policies of assimilation.” However, the choice of not extending substantial parts of the constitutional system to Taiwan shows that in fact the line of Kirkwood and Nogi was adopted. Furthermore, we should bear in mind that the grounds for justifying this kind of policy of rule was of course not universalistic natural law philosophy, but rather the dogma of the Emperor system. As seen in Nogi’s assertion, Emperor-system dogma clearly distinguishes between the “inside” and “outside” of the nation-state of Japan and functions as a logic that impedes fluidity.¹²

It is true, as Yanaihara pointed out, that the position of “national language” (Japanese) education in colonial educational policy shared fundamental elements with that of French language education in the cultural policies of French colonialism. In Japan’s case, however, the logic of exclusion through “consanguineous nationalism” as represented by Hozumi Yatsuka worked very powerfully. If we take the example of suffrage as the institutional index of “homeland extensionism,” the application of the Election Law for the House of Representatives and the House of Councilors was not actualized for Taiwan or Korea until April 1945, during the very last stages of the Asia-Pacific War, as compensation for the strengthening of the conscription system.¹³

Komagome’s work accurately traces the supplementary relationship between two principles for dealing with different ethnicities during changes in Japanese colonial policies. This relationship involved the language-based “principle of inclusion” and the blood-based “principle of exclusion,” whereby the latter is privileged over the former. As such, his work presents us with rich clues for our project of elucidating the interrelationship between colonialism and modernity.¹⁴ Here, however, I would like to point out that, when compared with the previous example of Algeria, the internal contradictions of assimilationism in Japanese colonialism cannot necessarily be considered a problem particular to Japan. That is, the terrible contradiction that forced upon the colonized a “double bind”¹⁵ situation, in which “on the one hand you are different from the ‘Japanese,’ while on the other hand you are an ‘Imperial Subject,’” also worked at the very heart of French colonial policy. Even though this contradiction included many irreducible differences, it is perhaps characteristic of the colonial situation in general, whether of the French or British style. Moreover, this “double bind” situation is something that the rulers must “share” asymmetrically. Was this not precisely what Valéry grasped in his acute consciousness of “crisis” as a “European”?

Valéry, of course, was not able to examine this asymmetrically “shared” “double bind” from the two sides of the colonizer and the colonized, the colonial suzerain and the colony. In this context, he could only play the role of the melancholy witness of European self-consciousness, which reproaches itself for not having carried out its “responsibility” as ruler, even while destined to be a ruler. It was with the progress of colonial liberation struggles starting in the 1950s that it finally became clear exactly how, in concrete terms, this situation had torn apart the spirit of the colonized on the “other shore” and in the “outer regions.” Among the works produced at this time, the work of Frantz Fanon has a certain exemplarity. This is because Fanon, a psychiatrist from the French colony of Martinique, pursued with deep insight a perspective for transforming the ethnic and racial relations that had been determined in the colonial situation. He pursued this insight on the basis of a self-analysis in which, employing European theoretical discourse however creatively transformed, he analyzed his own “existential” crisis while facing racial discrimination. It is no coincidence that Fanon, in the process of this work, went further back than his contemporary Sartre and focused attention on Hegel, specifically the movement of self-consciousness that seeks recognition, i.e., the so-called “master-slave” dialectic as described in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

In a section titled “The Negro and Hegel,” located in the latter half of “The Negro and Recognition,” which is the seventh chapter of his Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon comments directly on a passage from Hegel’s text.

Here Fanon is speaking specifically about the situation of French blacks, in other words his own situation, in which the system of slavery was abolished by the suzerain without any struggle. More generally, however, we could say that he is taking on the fundamental difficulty of transforming the relationship between ruler and subjugated as formed by colonization—especially in its assimilationist forms—into the mutual recognition that Hegel discusses. What happens to the slave’s desire for recognition when, in contrast to Hegel’s scenario, recognition is not obtained through struggle but rather unilaterally awarded, or when the master merely recognizes the slave but does not in turn desire to be recognized by him? Is this not precisely the situation of the colonized, driven into the “double bind” of assimilation and exclusion? When placed in this kind of situation, how can the slave achieve self-consciousness? Since in Fanon’s dialectic the slave cannot find the moment of his liberation in labor by immersing himself in the object, as with Hegel, what remains for him but the desire “to become like the master”?¹⁷

In a section titled “The Negro and Adler” that precedes this reading of Hegel focusing on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, Fanon analyzes the relationships among Martinicans, i.e., the relationships among the colonized. In Martinique, since everyone tries to upstage the other using the white man as standard, mutual recognition cannot take place and fellow countrymen cannot aim for “communication between people.”¹⁸ This is not the result of a “dependency complex” unique to the colonized, as asserted by the psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni. Rather it is an effect of French assimilationist education that transforms the Martinican into a white man at the level of the psyche. “The Martinican is a man crucified. The environment that has shaped him (but that he has not shaped) has horribly drawn and quartered him; and he feeds this cultural environment with his blood and his essences.”¹⁹ It was through Hegel that Fanon tried to elucidate the essence of this assimilationist education, of which he himself was a product.

However, for blacks (who were “historically … steeped in the inessentiality of servitude”²⁰) the possibility of negating and sublating their negative existential conditions through the mediation of labor was closed off. In order to effect “the transformation of subjective certainty of [one’s] own worth into a universally valid objective truth,”²¹ the only path remaining was to assert one’s “alterity of rupture”²² amidst the struggle to “go beyond life.”²³ But at such a time, can this struggle still be said to share the premises or goals of Hegel’s “absolute reciprocity”? It is here that we can see the early signs of the emergence of theories of colonial liberation and revolutionary violence that Fanon, who later participated in the struggle for Algerian liberation, would develop in The Wretched of the Earth (1961):

For Fanon, it is in decolonization that “the ‘thing’ which has been colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself.”²⁶ Revolutionary violence gives birth to “new men” and “consists of reintroducing mankind into the world, the whole of mankind.”²⁷ For Fanon, a “new humanism”²⁸ would dissolve the divisions among the colonized, as analyzed in “The Negro and Adler” in Black Skin, White Masks. The unity of the people would thus be realized, at least during the liberation struggle, through the generation of a “national culture” that is the daily struggle itself. But this was a perspective that could be achieved only by presently abandoning the reconstruction of the horizon of “absolute reciprocity” with the master (the colonizer), by rejecting “one-sided recognition,” and by choosing a recalcitrant “alterity of rupture.” We cannot make our primary task here the reexamination of the range or possibility of Fanon’s theory of violence and his “new humanism.” As a preparatory step, however, let us confirm what we can see in Fanon’s philosophical transformation from an initial emphasis on the importance of the Hegelian presupposition of “absolute reciprocity” to its abandonment in The Wretched of the Earth. It is the aspect of those difficulties that the colonized must inevitably face in the process of decolonization. Fanon’s attempt to break through the “double bind,” aporia, and “pathless” condition that colonialism had assigned to the colonized did not leave behind any easy “paths,” applicable methods, or “answers” to questions for those who followed. On the other hand, after Fanon any idea of “rehabilitating” the notion of “absolute reciprocity” as a presupposition or goal, and of using the logic of modernity to “solve” the “problem of ethnic nations” in the postcolonial period, would be only a repressive idea theoretically and practically fated to end in bankruptcy or self-deception. In this sense, Fanon’s texts expose in the form of a truly exemplary “questioning” the extreme consequences of colonialism as well as the limits of modernity. It is precisely because of this that these texts are irreplaceable as theoretical testimony, worthy of our constant return and re-questioning.

Takeuchi Yoshimi drew this insight from Lu Xun’s allegory “The Wise Man, the Fool, and the Slave.” Here, of course, the “master” refers first of all to modern Japan and particularly to that spirit which supported colonial rule and the war of invasion. Takeuchi sought what he believed was hopelessly lacking in Japanese modernity in Lu Xun’s “resistance,” which did not take as its standard of liberation the “humanism” of European modernity. For now I will leave open the question of the results of Takeuchi’s endeavor, along with the question of Fanon’s “new humanism.”

In terms of our question of colonialism and modernity, it is noteworthy that in this sentence Takeuchi himself apparently fails to draw one of the logical conclusions of his statement. Shortly after the previous quotation, Takeuchi continues: “As Lu Xun writes, ‘The slave and the master are identical.’ Lu also writes, ‘The tyrant’s subjects are more violent than the tyrant himself’ and ‘He who enslaves all others as a master would himself be content as a slave.’ The slave is not liberated when he becomes the master.”³⁰

There follow after these words a few lines that I quoted near the beginning of this essay, which sharply critique the “nature of Japanese culture” that misapprehended “its own Europeanization” as “liberation.” Seen in this context, it is self-evident that Europe is posited as “master.” Yet if, as Lu Xun says, “The slave and the master are identical,” then even the “master” of Japan, i.e., Europe, cannot be simply a “master” but must also be a “slave.” If we suppose that this is the case, what kind of agreement or disagreement can be found between this understanding and Takeuchi’s understanding that “Simply being Europe does not make Europe Europe”? Furthermore, how should this understanding be positioned in relation to Valéry’s sense of “crisis” upon discovering that Europe lacked a “politics of spirit” befitting the “master” of the world? On the other hand, how should it be positioned in relation to Fanon’s sense of aporia when he realized that it was impossible to use the European logic of the master-slave dialectic to solve the contradictions that arose from European colonialism? Would this situation simply become more complicated if we introduced the voice of an Algerian-born Jew at the place where the voices of a Frenchman, a Martinican, and a Japanese—as well as a Chinese quoted by the Japanese—intersect and resonate? Or would a certain clue for elucidation thus become visible? As Jacques Derrida recounts of his own linguistic experience in a recent work, Monolingualism of the Other (1996):

For contrary to what one is often most tempted to believe, the master is nothing. And he does not have exclusive possession of anything. Because the master does not possess exclusively, and naturally, what he calls his language, because, whatever he wants or does, he cannot maintain any relations of property or identity that are natural, national, congenital, or ontological, with it, because he can give substance to and articulate (dire) this appropriation only in the course of an unnatural process of politico-phantasmatic constructions, because language is not his natural possession, he can, thanks to that very fact, pretend historically, through the rape of a cultural usurpation, which means always essentially colonial, to appropriate it in order to impose it as “his own.” That is his belief; he wishes to make others share it through the use of force or cunning; he wants to make others believe it, as they do a miracle, through rhetoric, the school, or the army.³¹

Derrida is not multilingual. The only language that he can speak fluently is French, his “mother tongue.” In the city of Algiers, where he was born and raised, however, this French language was always the language of the other, which sought its norms in another country, i.e., France. From this the following proposition arises: “I have only one language and it is not mine.”³² As we previously saw, for the Jews in Algeria who rapidly assimilated into French culture after they were given French citizenship in 1870 through the Crémieux Decree, it would be difficult to find a language other than French for which they could claim historical legitimacy. Both Hebrew and Arabic are unnatural as authentic spoken languages. However, Derrida does not stop here but continues thinking. Is this situation of his own community, in which no relation to any language can be said to be natural, really that exceptional? In fact, is it not the case that there is no one who can naturally or innately “possess as their own” a language, even their “mother tongue”? Conversely, then, is this not why the love for and pride in one’s “mother tongue” can become so fierce and sublime? And is this not the case with any element that constitutes identity, not just language? The colonizer coerces the colonized to assimilate into his culture, but is this really the colonizer’s culture? Is it not the case that the colonizers themselves are, in the first place, those who have been assimilated, and whether in order to forget the pain of their own process of assimilation or to avoid remembering it, they try to force that culture on the other as if it were “their own possession”? Is it not the case that at the origin of colonial violence there is an originary nonidentity between the colonizers themselves and their culture, and that in order to avert their eyes from this abyss, they try to inculcate in others the belief of their oneness with this culture by means of various speech acts and by creating the conditions that can support the establishment of these speech acts, and that it is through the other’s belief that they try to believe in their oneness with that culture themselves?

Can it not be said that Derrida’s hypothesis is a translation, one that has passed through a distant and different circuit of experience and thought, of those words of Lu Xun’s, “The slave and the master are identical”? Or rather it may be that the possibility of all “resistance” dwells in the fact that these two experiences and thoughts, while in a sense saying the same thing, are not entirely translatable into each other. In any case, in Derrida’s thought colonialism does not begin between Europe and its outside. It has always already begun (and is moreover not finished) in the “inside” of Europe’s geographical boundaries and in the midst of its history. Europe itself is in a sense a colony, and this is why colonialism constitutes its essence.

In fact, it is interesting to look at the kinds of arguments that were used to determine assimilationism in French colonial policy. Arthur Girault, a major theorist of the French colonial legal system from the 1890s to the 1930s who was involved in numerous policy decisions, wrote in 1894:

Here, assimilationist colonialism itself is regarded as continuing the tradition of the Romans, who once conquered Gaul, Spain, and North Africa, spreading their language, religion, and customs. In other words, the “nature” or identity of France and the French is explained through ancient colonialism—Rome’s colonization of the regions and ethnic groups of what was later called Western Europe—and modern colonialism is defined and justified as this ancient form’s continuation, imitation, and, indeed, repetition compulsion.

Here, perhaps, what Takeuchi Yoshimi meant by his view that “Simply being Europe does not make Europe Europe” is being voiced from the reverse side. According to Girault, the movement of “freedom,” in which Europe’s “self” ceaselessly maintains itself at the same time that it transcends itself, is driven by an “obsession” that was implanted through centuries of colonization. Since this movement is now “our nature,” and so cannot be “forced,” one can only “force” others through assimilation. It is probably no coincidence that such a sentiment was declared precisely at the time when colonial policy was being determined. Conversely, Takeuchi’s understanding that “modernity is the self-recognition of Europe as seen within history, that regarding of itself as a self distinct from the feudalistic, which Europe gained in the process of liberating itself from the feudal” still seems to me too limited, because of historical constraints, by modern Europe’s official self-representations. This limitation must influence the content of the concepts of “self” and “subject” in these sentences—sentences that are striking in the motion of tenacious re-questioning that goes forward and backward, as well as in their dense textuality that came from a literal groping in the dark. For when the “slave and master are identical,” the “self’s” regulation or domination, i.e., the definition of the “self’s” “master” as “subject,” also demands a careful yet fundamental rethinking. Takeuchi depended on these concepts of “self” and “subject,” but did not their situation determine and in a sense limit the breadth of his thinking about such things as nationalism, the Japan-Asia relation, and even “resistance”?

Takeuchi/Lu Xun, Valéry, Fanon, Derrida—each of the thinkers discussed in this essay experienced and thought through colonialism and modernity at a specific time and place, and from a specific standpoint. Not one of them was able to command a bird’s-eye view of the situation in its entirety. The question concerning the interrelation of colonialism and modernity, perhaps even more than any other, can be thought only in the midst of multiple voices. And it may be that today this is what it means for “us” or “me” to think; in short, to remain within the unending “event”—the two-in-one event of colonialism and modernity—and attempt to define one’s own “proper” place, in a groping and infinite series of forward steps, while allowing these multiple voices to echo in one’s ears.

5. “If we compare with this ultimate end [the Third Definitive Article of a Perpetual Peace: The Obligation of Universal Hospitality] the inhospitable conduct of the civilised states of our continent, especially the commercial states, the injustice which they display in visiting foreign countries and peoples (which in their case is the same as conquering them) seems appallingly great. America, the negro countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc. were looked upon at the time of their discovery as ownerless territories; for the native inhabitants were counted as nothing.” Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 106.

“As time went on, a kind fortune preserved it [the German nation] from direct participation in the conquest of other worlds—that event which, more than any other, has been the basis of the development taken by modern world history, of the fates of peoples, and of the largest part of their ideas and opinions. Since that event, and not before, Christian Europe, which hitherto, without being clearly conscious of it, had been one, and by joint enterprises had shown itself to be one—Christian Europe, I say, has split itself into various separate parts. Since that event, and not before, there has been a booty in sight which anyone might seize; and each one lusted after it in the same way, because all were able to make use of it in the same way; and each one was envious on seeing it in the hands of another.” Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, ed. George Armstrong Kelly (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 191.

31. Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 23. Incidentally, Yi Young-suk, who has analyzed linguistic policy in Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, makes the following observation: “While language cannot be a mere ‘form of social life,’ neither can it be an entirely indigenous and untransplantable custom. Even if a spirit of loyalty to the Emperor resides in Japanese at birth, there is not a single Japanese that is born speaking Japanese. Moreover, language, unlike other ethnic customs, can be learned even by foreigners given the proper education. Language becomes language for the first time through the mediation of the ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ ‘nature’ and ‘artifice.’” “Kokugo” to iu shisō [The ideology of the “Japanese national language”] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996), p. 261.