A book on contemporary Japanese thought might at first glance appear surprising, given that “thought”—or “theory,” as it is often called—has in the modern era generally been linked with the West as its proper provenance. One readily speaks, for example, of French theory or German theory, and these references are more or less directly understood without raising much question. Despite the presence of numerous theoretical writings by so-called non-Western thinkers in non-Western languages, these texts have hitherto done little to drive a wedge between the notions of “West” and “thought,” thereby provoking discussion as to the meaning of these terms both in themselves and in combination with one another. The question arises, then, as to how to best categorize or classify such concrete examples of modern non-Western thought—for surely academia has thus far appeared unwilling to grant currency to such categories as, say, Chinese theory or Indian theory. Rather the common response to these texts has been to see them as necessarily derivative of the West, such that the West retains its position as the center of intellectual production and the non-West becomes the mere recipient of that influence. Even in the field of Asian Studies, the notion of “Western theory” has gone largely unchallenged. The question has not been whether this term any longer makes sense, if indeed it ever did, but rather whether such thought or theory can legitimately be applied to Asian texts, as these latter are assumed to be inherently devoid of any theoretical properties.
In other words, theoretical readings of non-Western works are still in many cases seen to be misreadings, since the application of Western theory presumably brings to these texts certain abstract elements that are strictly foreign to them. Now this assumption is problematic for several reasons, but it is especially so in the case of Japan. For the fact is that modern Japanese thought has long been at the forefront of theoretical inquiry and scholarship. In this context, it is perhaps important to recall that Japanese thinkers have since the beginning of the twentieth century participated in the latest philosophical developments in, for example, phenomenology, life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), dialectics, and hermeneutics. Much of this work coalesced around the group of philosophers collectively known as the Kyoto School, as led by Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) and Tanabe Hajime (1885–1962). This group, although highly diverse in nature, set forth many important insights regarding the status of such notions as history, praxis, technology, aesthetics, and religion. But from today’s standpoint, it is arguably the study of the relation between subjectivity and negativity that has come to be regarded as their most significant intellectual legacy. While it is not the aim of this introduction to examine the achievements of the Kyoto School, it should be mentioned that these philosophers were, in one way or another, invariably confronted with the question of their own positionality vis-à-vis “Western thought.” The secondary scholarship on modern Japanese philosophy has followed this lead, as can be seen in the representation of the texts of the Kyoto School as striving for a dialogue or even synthesis between East and West, the former determined primarily along the lines of Zen Buddhism and the latter in terms of the grand philosophical tradition that stretches from Plato to Heidegger. From our own perspective, however, there seems to be little reason to determine thought on the basis of its geographical or cultural background. This point will be more fully explored in the following pages, but for the moment it is sufficient to note that contemporary Japanese thought can trace its beginnings back not only to previous Western thinkers and traditions, but also to those of Japan. Indeed, given the extreme complexity and convoluted nature of such affiliations, it might be worthwhile to question the very possibility of assigning to thinkers and their thought any fixed regional properties.
Contemporary Japanese thought centrally takes up this question of regional identification in the context of nationalism, which is why even the otherwise standard reference to “Japanese thought” must be made with circumspection. Many of the essays in this volume explicitly address this question; others, however, pursue quite different paths that raise equally important questions. Yet taken as a whole, these essays can be said to offer a more or less fair or accurate representation of Japanese thought as it has flourished these past two decades or so. As goes without saying, this collection makes no claim to be the definitive text on contemporary thought in Japan, for one can easily imagine other collections with their own equally valid principles of inclusion (and, therefore, exclusion) regarding individual contributors, common thematics, dates of essays, university and journal affiliations, political inclinations, etc. Clearly there can be no such thing as a perfectly neutral or objective collection of this type, for the criteria brought to bear upon the field of Japanese thought ineluctably transform any simple representation of it into an active intervention. Here we must accept responsibility for the principles underlying our own editorial choices. In particular, let us name two of these principles (among others) and their effect upon the overall composition of the volume:
1. The principle of practice. Among contemporary thinkers in Japan, priority has been given to those whose attention to theoretical issues has explicitly focused on their practical dimensions. It is this indissociability of the theoretical and practical that grounds for these thinkers the political thrust of their writings. To read their works is to understand that scholarship is not to be undertaken simply for the purpose of acquiring knowledge, but also to effect a change in contemporary social practices, both in Japan and beyond and in academia and beyond. Such thinking is fully consistent with the aim of this volume, which is to present an introduction to contemporary thought in Japan while at the same time provoking reflection as to the very meaning of this notion of “Japanese thought.”
2. The principle of gender. In Japan, generally speaking, the term shisō, or “thought,” does not include feminism, which on the contrary stands as its own category. The inclusion of feminist writings in a book on contemporary Japanese thought, therefore, might strike some readers as odd or inappropriate. However, it was felt that a reflection of this exclusion of feminist theory from the category of thought would only perpetuate certain problematic assumptions at work within intellectual circles in Japan, and this we were unwilling to do. Gender issues occupy an undeniably significant place in contemporary thought and practice, and the composition of this volume attests to that fact.
Finally, let us not fail to mention certain concrete circumstances surrounding the organization of this collection. After the initial plan for the book had been conceived and a publisher secured, contributors were contacted and asked to provide essays of approximately 10,000 words in length (in the form of either one long essay or two shorter ones). Translators were assigned to these essays, which, upon being translated, were then edited so as to ensure maximum fidelity and readability. Rather than group the essays thematically, a decision was made to simply pair them with their respective authors, who are listed here in alphabetical order.
I
In a volume such as the present one, it might be helpful to begin thinking about the disciplinary or institutional space known as “Japanese thought” through reference to the celebrated Meiji writer Natsume Sōseki. For traditionally Sōseki’s works have been determined to exist outside of this space: while it is readily granted that Sōseki fulfills the criterion of Japaneseness on account of his birth and parentage, he is nevertheless primarily read as an author of literature rather than as a thinker, or shisōka, thereby placing him in the category of Japanese literature as opposed to that of Japanese thought. Such an understanding, however, seems to be refuted or at the very least troubled by the fact of his inclusion in the recent Iwanami Tetsugaku shisō jiten [Dictionary of philosophy and thought], where Sōseki, who appears in that text as “someone who is more than just a writer” but, indeed, a “thinker,” is credited for the depth and complexity of his reflections on such topics as desire, ethics, and East-West relations.1 I mention this not so as to resolve the question of Sōseki’s institutional belonging in favor of thought over literature, for example—thus allowing me to present him as a forebear to contemporary Japanese thought, of which the eight writers assembled here would be representatives—but rather to draw attention to a certain irreducible contingency that inheres within this space of “Japanese thought.” This contingency reveals itself in the very criteria by which to judge the nature of Japanese thought, that is to say, what it is and what it is not. If there can exist some degree of uncertainty or confusion over whether to situate such a monumental figure as Sōseki either within or without the institution of Japanese thought, then clearly this institution cannot be understood as in any way natural or necessary. In other words, the institution of Japanese thought must be seen as properly devoid of anything that could enable it to constitute itself as such. Sōseki’s inclusion within or exclusion from Japanese thought depends, rather, on a contingent decision. If there are those who see him as rightly occupying this space, then there are also those who see him as just as firmly outside of it. In the absence of any objective criteria according to which we could determine the parameters of Japanese thought in its distinction from, say, Japanese literature or, conversely, from French thought or Chinese thought, we are left simply to judge what belongs to the space of Japanese thought and what does not. In the case of Sōseki, it is, of course, the aspect of “thought” that is most immediately in question. Yet if the notion of thought can be shown to surrender its apparent necessity or naturalness, then so too could the notion of “Japanese.” If the institution of Japanese thought must distinguish itself from that which, while Japanese, is nevertheless not properly classifiable as thought, then this same institution must also distance or differentiate itself from that kind of thought which does not present itself as Japanese. Here, as well, the absence of anything that could be objectively determined as Japan or Japanese means that we are forced to decide the nature and extent of these boundaries ourselves. This decision, let us repeat, is necessarily a contingent one, given that there is nothing that announces itself as intrinsically Japanese.
We are perhaps now better prepared to read Sōseki, and so discover the strange lesson he helps teach us about the nature of Japanese thought. The following passage is to be found in the opening part of Sōseki’s well-known lecture “Gendai Nihon no kaika” [The civilization of modern-day Japan], delivered in Wakayama on August 15, 1911:
But if you ask me what we’re supposed to do (dō suru noda) about this present-day civilization of ours, I won’t have an answer for you. I merely plan to explain (tada setsumei wo shite) what “civilization” means and leave the rest to you. Well, then, what do we mean by “civilization”? My guess is that you do not understand the civilization of modern-day Japan. By this I mean no disrespect toward you. None of us really understands it, and that includes me. I just happen to be in a position that gives me more time than you to think about such matters, and this lecture allows me to share my thoughts with you. All of you are Japanese, and so am I (anata gata mo watakushi mo Nihonjin); we live in the modern age, not the past or the future, and our civilization influences us all; it is obvious that the three words “modern,” “Japan,” and “civilization” bind us together inseparably (dōshitemo kittemo kirenai hanasubekarazaru missetsu na kankei ga aru). If, however, we remain unconscious of the civilization of modern-day Japan, or if we do not have a clear understanding of what it means, this can adversely affect everything we do. We will all be better off, I believe, if, together, we study this concept and help each other understand it.2
Apart from the fact that these lines derive from the thought of a Japanese thinker or perhaps literary writer, they do not seem to directly touch upon the institution of Japanese thought. Nonetheless, they are highly important in helping us better understand that aspect of Japaneseness without which Japanese thought would be, according to its very definition, impossible. Sōseki’s aim here is to clarify the meaning of modern Japanese civilization, a phrase which, if only hazily understood at the time, was nevertheless no less widespread and thus powerful for all that. In order to clarify this meaning, he recognizes, it is first necessary to break up this phrase or concept into its component parts, which are then very briefly described in terms of their relevance to his lecture. Hence, in the order Sōseki himself lays out: Japan (“All of you are Japanese, and so am I”); modern (“we live in the modern age, not the past or the future”); and civilization (“our civilization influences us all”). Sōseki’s particular focus throughout the essay is on this last term, civilization, as he appears to believe that the first two terms, Japan and modern, present in their immediacy far less difficulty of comprehension. He is, moreover, careful to remind his audience of the lecture’s modest intentions, for he wishes only to describe or “explain” the meaning of civilization, and thus of modern Japanese civilization, rather than prescribe a course of action in regard to this civilization (“But if you ask me what we’re supposed to do about this present-day civilization of ours, I won’t have an answer for you. I merely plan to explain what ‘civilization’ means and leave the rest to you”). In this way, Sōseki implicitly reveals his belief that explanation can be cleanly separated from prescription, that, in other words, language can be used to convey the meaning of something without thereby producing any concomitant effects, either on the object being explained or on those being addressed. Modern Japanese civilization is thus viewed as something that, preexisting in its reality Sōseki’s explanation of it, offers itself simply as the object that is repeated or represented through that explanation.
How then are we to understand Sōseki’s stated refusal to supply a prescription regarding modern Japanese civilization? This gesture reflects, at its most fundamental level (that is to say, even prior to any literary or historical analysis of his works), a refusal to recognize the prescriptive force of his own utterances. In his positing of a modern Japanese civilization, Sōseki essentially denies his own contribution to the formation of such entity through the effects of his language. For, contrary to what one might believe, that which is called “modern Japanese civilization” (and so too, following this same argument, “contemporary Japanese thought”) exists nowhere else but in the inscriptions that at each instant institute or found modern Japanese civilization. It is through the force of such instituting inscriptions that modern Japanese civilization comes into being, precisely, as an institution, i.e., a body or form which does not exist naturally. Nowhere is this more apparent in this context than in the entity Japan, which for our purposes functions to highlight the difficulty of the concept of contemporary Japanese thought. For Sōseki, the aspect of Japaneseness within the phrase “modern Japanese civilization” appears to be self-evident: “All of you are Japanese, and so am I,” he tells his audience, and there the matter is laid to rest. But the truth of the matter is that, however unwittingly or unconsciously, Sōseki is actually doing something through these words; his language in its performativity is creating effects that function to institute or sustain a sense of Japaneseness, one which does not otherwise exist naturally. In his haste to focus on the notion of civilization, Sōseki fails to consider that the Japanese identity he claims to share with his audience does not derive from the fact that they are, in reality, all Japanese. This claim rather has its source in a kind of decision Sōseki makes to establish a sense of ethnic or national communality by identifying himself together with his audience as Japanese. Given its status as a non-natural institution, Japaneseness cannot be understood as representative of a preexisting reality that is Japan. Referring not to any past reality but rather to the present instant of Sōseki’s statement or utterance, “Japan” reveals itself to be irreducibly temporal in nature: it is in time that “Japan” emerges through its inscriptions.
Clearly, the consequences of this insight for any introduction to contemporary Japanese thought are enormous. For the institution of Japanese thought must now be recognized as having no transcendent status that can be appealed to beyond its inscriptions, or markings, in time and space. This institution, qua institution, is entirely subject to those inscriptions that form it retroactively, or jigoteki ni, hence forcing us to rethink both our relation to the past and our present institutional belonging. The scholar Abe Masao can be said to demonstrate this point in his introduction to the English translation of Nishida Kitarō’s 1911 Zen no kenkyū when, in responding to the question of whether there can be found in Japan a philosophical tradition, he cites the works of such thinkers as Kūkai, Shinran, Dōgen, and Itō Jinsai as proof of its existence.3 Leaving aside the problematic structure of address here (in which Abe writes from the enunciative position of a Japanese writing about a fellow Japanese for the benefit of a readership that he identifies as “Western”), we can point out that Japanese philosophy comes in this act of language to be projected back onto a past in which it did not originally exist. It is in this way that institutions come to be naturalized, that is, shorn of those present instances of inscription upon which they are, in fact, fully dependent. In the context of Japanese thought, there have historically, of course, been thousands of thinkers and texts that can be subsumed under this category. Yet it must be acknowledged that this category emerged only after the appearance of these diverse instances, not prior to them. Japanese thought constitutes itself as an institution or disciplinary field by retroactively gathering these multiple instances together and sublating their difference through recognizing, or remarking, them as now parts within an ideal whole. Let us point out that the success of this operation of forming Japanese thought as a unified and integral entity depends, crucially, on a passage from empiricity to transcendentality. Given its status as ideal object, that which is called “Japanese thought” should have no worldly existence in and of itself. If it is true that this thought is instantiated or concretized by those multiple instances that appear in its name, one must nevertheless make a radical distinction between these merely empirical events and Japanese thought as such, which is properly transcendental. However, taking into account the retroactive nature of ideal objects, which are formed by remarking past inscriptions on the basis of the present—such that, for example, Kūkai, Shinran, Dōgen, and Itō Jinsai come to be seen ex post facto as the forefathers of Japanese philosophy or perhaps Japanese thought—we cannot but conclude that transcendentality, far from simply governing those empirical instances that appear in its name, actually depends upon them. Empiricity, that is to say, reveals itself in its marking to be nothing less than the condition upon which the transcendental first becomes possible. Meaning this, more simply stated: that what is called “Japanese thought” is devoid of any reality other than that which is bestowed upon it (retrospectively) through the instituting or founding acts of inscription.
However, given the radical difference of time within which all empirical inscriptions necessarily take place, those instances that otherwise purely instantiate Japanese thought must be seen to be utterly dissimilar to one another. In this sense, such thinkers as Kūkai, Shinran, Dōgen, and Itō Jinsai are, prior to their collective identity as Japanese philosophers—which identity, let us repeat, is accomplished strictly through the retroactive act of identification—marked most immediately by their mutual difference. Identity is arrived at by passing through this difference, and from this we may infer that identity is, far from being primal or originary, in truth wholly derivative of difference; it is what can appropriately be called an effect of difference. And here we might refer to Heidegger, given his tremendous importance for twentieth-century “Japanese thought” (both in the Kyoto School and beyond), and specifically Heidegger’s suggestion that identity is derivative of a more originary instance, that which he calls “the Same.”4 In thus recognizing that difference is constitutive of identity rather than the reverse, we can also see—and indeed by the same token—that difference threatens this identity essentially. If Japanese thought is what it is by virtue of its differential inscriptions in all their worldliness or empiricity, then this is tantamount to saying that Japanese thought is always already different from itself. Inhabiting all identity from its very inception, this difference must nevertheless be rigorously understood to be structural or formal as opposed to merely empirical. Were difference to be nothing more than empirical, it would be impossible to formulate how the unity of Japanese thought comes to be constituted, just as it would be impossible to account for the inscription of difference in all idealities. Such an essential (or virtually essential, given the terms of our argument) understanding of difference is indispensable in grasping how actual instances of “Japanese thought” can always not be either “Japanese” or “thought” as well as, conversely, how instances that are traditionally situated outside of this thought can always be remarked as belonging within it. For example, the same criteria that might disqualify Sōseki from identification as a figure of Japanese thought (despite the considerable complexity of his ideas, as elaborated in both his fiction and his essays)5 would surely exclude, say, Heidegger from the category of Japanese thought (despite his sustained influence on Japanese thinkers, from Miki Kiyoshi to the present, and despite the appearance of his works in Japanese translation).6 In order to fully appreciate the contingency upon which such criteria are based, however, it is necessary to realize that the differential inscriptions upon which the ideality of Japanese thought is grounded, or made possible, function simultaneously to unground it or render it impossible as well.
One would be mistaken in viewing this insight into the relation between identity and difference, or transcendentality and empiricity, as either irrelevant to or excessively abstract in respect to a proper understanding of Japanese thought, which is after all the aim we have set for ourselves in this introduction. A very similar logic of empiricity in its double movement of appropriation within and resistance against conceptual thought can be read, for example, in the works of the postwar critic and sinologist Takeuchi Yoshimi, where it appears as the necessary (un)grounding of what is called the “place of contemplation” (kansō no ba) by or within the “place of action” (kōi no ba).7 It would not be too much, I believe, to claim that this logic represents the very obverse of abstraction. For what is at stake here is the process by which institutions come to be formed in their revealed unnaturality or derivativeness through present acts of inscription. These acts are decisive both in the sense that they leave behind them a mark or incision (from caedere, meaning “to cut”) and in that they announce a decision. This decision is made in the face of all contingency and carries with it a prescriptive force: whether one wishes to or not, the decision transforms (or remarks) reality, instituting in its place a new and entirely unprecedented reality. As opposed to the view that institutions exist objectively, or in and of themselves outside of human intervention—what phenomenology refers to critically as the “natural attitude” (natürliche Einstellung, shizenteki taido)—an awareness of the prescriptive force of one’s decisions reveals that institutions can at any time be changed or altered, for in order to be what they are they must remain essentially open to human activity. The institution of Japanese thought, for example, appears to be closed off in principle from that which does not present itself as either “Japanese” or “thought.” Yet since both of these notions acquire meaning only in being remarked, they are in fact susceptible to transformation. The impact of decision on existing reality takes place against the background of time, which, in its constant change, naturally threatens institutions that can maintain themselves only by being identically remarked. In this regard, we can better perceive the considerable weight of decision in its relation to the maintenance of institutions. For, given that institutions attain their autonomy and self-functioning only as an effect of the differential inscriptions that are decision, their opening to this latter is nothing less than an opening to the possibility of change.
This strange need for entities to inscribe themselves so as to present and preserve themselves as such has recently been examined by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. As Nancy writes in his essay “Le soi-disant peuple,”
The people can only say self to itself as a so-called/self-saying (soi-disant) people. The subject of enunciation enunciates itself as subject of the enunciated … but its real presence is attendant upon the execution of the content of the enunciated: the people will appear when the principles of the constitution take effect, since it is the constitution that constitutes the people. Yet the constitution only constitutes them as subject of its enunciated, leaving them missing as subject of the enunciation. The instituted people lack the instituting people, unless it be the reverse.8
Here we see very clearly that a people do not exist naturally but rather come into being derivatively only at the instant of their self-inscription, what Nancy refers to here as a “self-saying.” This term plays upon the double meaning of soi-disant, which in common parlance means simply “so-called” but can also more literally be read as “self-saying”: a people (for example, Americans, Japanese, etc.) can never be other than so-called, that is, not really a people because they arrive at this identity only through the act of identifying themselves collectively as a people. There is thus an insurmountable delay in the formation of identity, since it departs from a self that is however not yet a self so as to reflexively arrive at itself through the force of its self-articulation. This passage that is the movement of self-formation furthermore creates a split between the people as, on the one hand, instituting (or that which actively posits itself in its collectivity) and, on the other, instituted (that which the people are posited as being—or rather, in retroactive fashion, as having been). For Nancy, this split is necessarily an irreparable one.
Given what we believe to be the central importance of this point for any understanding of “Japanese thought” in its own terms, let us refer back now to the passage from Natsume Sōseki that we quoted earlier for purposes of illustration. In order for Sōseki to establish what he calls an “inseparable binding” (literally, an “intimate relation that can in no way be cut or divided”) with his audience, he must first appeal to their common or shared identity as Japanese. It is perhaps not insignificant in this respect to point out that the movement of unification or collectivization that Sōseki is here effecting by his language manifests itself only in tension with its opposite movement. This countermovement, as it were, can be seen in the set of distinctions he draws, first between himself and his audience (“My guess is that you do not understand the civilization of modern-day Japan” whereas “I just happen to be in a position that gives me more time than you have to think about such matters”) and then, secondly, between the three terms that together comprise the topic of his lecture (“it is obvious that the three words ‘modern,’ ‘Japan,’ and ‘civilization’ bind us together inseparably”).9 However, these two movements of unification and differentiation should not be regarded as simply equivalent to one another. Rather it is more accurate to say that the identity Sōseki is attempting here to effect is articulated in relief against the background of that difference to which he calls attention. This difference is, to use the word Sōseki himself uses in the essay “Bungei no tetsugakuteki kiso” cited below, a kind of “fact” (jijitsu). It is from this initial fact of difference that he draws distinctions between people and words; in this way he simultaneously acknowledges the presence of difference and begins to negate it by actively figuring it in the form of distinct entities (I-you, modern-Japan-civilization). This negation of difference is then finally itself negated by the formation of collective unities, in which difference is now synthesized as part within the whole. Hence, despite the difference that originally underlies them: the “inseparable binding” that ties together “we Japanese” as well as the title and topic of Sōseki’s lecture. What must be emphasized here is that it is language that functions as the medium through which the relation between identity and difference comes to be organized. Focusing strictly on the collective Japanese identity that Sōseki posits in these lines, we can see that this identity must have recourse to a “self-saying” in order to come into being. This strange need to say the words anata gata mo watakushi mo Nihonjin derives from the absence of any substantial community of Japanese people, an absence which these words paradoxically attempt to conceal as well as to compensate for. Sōseki fails to realize that the Japanese whom he invokes are nothing more than a “so-called people,” constituted not by any fictionally shared experience of modern civilization or by any other empirical criteria (linguistic, cultural, ethnic, racial, etc.) but rather simply by the force of its “self-saying.” It is this self-saying that, while producing a split within the subject between the instituting and instituted, nevertheless also effectively transforms the original “fact” of difference into distinct and articulated parts which are then taken up within the communal whole.
We are now better able to understand the danger of speaking of “Japanese thought” as if these words referred back beyond language to the thought of a Japanese community or people understood as substance (jittai). The problem here, however, is that such a substantialist notion of identity still thoroughly informs the field of Japan Studies, and this despite certain recent theoretical advances to the contrary. In this respect, it is important to note that the formation of Japanese identity as undertaken, for example, by Sōseki (and this would be but one of thousands of possible examples that could be examined here, for Sōseki is in no way alone in this project) finds full support on the part of “non-Japanese” writers as well. Indeed, it makes little difference whether one is an actual Japanese citizen or national in this case since what is most crucial to this project is the inscriptive act of identification, in which one is essentially anonymous.10 This directs our attention back to the need for recognizing the irreducibly prescriptive force of one’s statements given that, as we have discussed, the notion of Japaneseness comes to the fore only in its being remarked. It is for this reason not an innocent act to write on Japanese history, Japanese literature, or Japanese thought, etc., for, as we saw in the case of Sōseki, descriptions or explanations simultaneously constitute their object in the course of their activity. It is in this light that we must view the paradoxical status of “theory” in the Japan Studies field. For this term is traditionally applied to any discussion which inquires not merely into the Japanese object itself, but rather into the conditions of possibility of that objective knowledge. It is at this more fundamental level of inquiry that one understands that objects of cognition can have no natural existence outside of consciousness, that, on the contrary, consciousness is necessary in order to disclose the objective world as meaningful or significant. This is not to say, of course, that consciousness produces the world in the manner of God. Rather it discovers itself as already situated in the world, one which is inherently hostile to its interests, and it seeks to domesticate this hostility by revealing things as meaningful. As is well known, this insight represents the very departure point of phenomenology.11 What is most relevant for our purposes here is the lesson that things in their natural existence are meaningless in and of themselves; objective meaning is something that can by right be arrived at only through the participation of consciousness in its repeated acts of inscription. As such, it represents absurdity itself to speak of things as if the property or quality of Japaneseness inhered naturally within them. And this same, of course, holds true in thinking of Japan itself as a thing to which properties originally belong. “Japan is nothing” (Nihon wa nanimono demo nai), as Takeuchi Yoshimi famously declares in the 1948 essay “Kindai towa nanika” [What is modernity?], meaning in this context that no substantial reality can precede the operation in which Japan comes to be temporally inscribed or marked up as meaningful.12 In the present case, for example, it is in the act of writing on “Japanese thought” that one actually comes to write Japanese thought. Given the prescriptive force of one’s statements, there can be no theoretical distance on the part of the Japan scholar between himself and his object of study. In this way we can see that what in the Japan Studies field is called “theory,” which is generally derided for its excessive abstraction, represents in fact the most concrete form of inquiry. For here there can be recognition that the field is formed on the basis of one’s decision to write on those objects internal to it, thereby constituting their very objectivity and interiority. This recognition opens up the possibility, then, to transform or even deform the field in its very formation.
Before finally turning our attention to the eight thinkers whose works are represented in this volume, I would like to conclude this discussion on the problematic nature of “Japanese thought” through reference to the well-known literary and arts critic Kobayashi Hideo. In the course of a roundtable discussion during the “Overcoming Modernity” symposium held in Tokyo in the summer of 1942, Kobayashi addresses some challenging remarks to the Kyoto School religious philosopher Nishitani Keiji regarding the relation between Japanese philosophy and the Japanese language:
To slightly change the topic, both your essay and that of Yoshimitsu [Yoshihiko] are extremely difficult. I would go so far as to say that these essays lack the sensuality of the Japanese people’s language. We feel that philosophers are truly indifferent to our fate of writing in the national language. Since this language is the traditional language of Japan, no matter how sincerely and logically expressed, its flavor must appear in one’s style as that which can only be achieved by Japanese people. This is what writers always aim for in their trade. It is linked to literary reality, and so either moves people or leaves them unmoved. Thought is contained within this literary reality. Philosophers are extremely nonchalant in this regard. If this attitude is not overcome, however, it strikes me that Japanese philosophy will never truly be reborn as Japanese philosophy. What are your thoughts on this?13
What is perhaps most evident in these lines is the tension not simply between Japanese literature and Japanese thought or philosophy, but rather, even prior to this, between the notions of Japanese and non-Japanese themselves. In this respect, the disciplines of literature and philosophy function as the vehicles in which the quality of Japaneseness is conveyed. For Kobayashi, this quality is seen to be manifested most properly or immediately in the Japanese language. In this way, Japanese literature and philosophy can be judged as to the degree of their embodiment of Japaneseness on the basis of the criteria present within the Japanese language, or “national language” (kokugo) as Kobayashi refers to it. Here philosophical writing is found deficient, as it lacks that “sensuality” (or “suggestiveness”: nikkan) believed to be inherent to Japanese, and thus, in marked contrast to literature, fails to consider the emotive effects it produces on its readers (which “either moves people or leaves them unmoved”). In its apparent unconcern for that language from which it springs and with which it is forced to negotiate in the course of its self-expression, Japanese philosophy runs the risk of losing that quality which makes it most authentically Japanese. In which case, whatever the measure of its philosophical achievements, it will properly speaking no longer be Japanese philosophy.
In his desire to see produced a Japanese philosophy that is as fully Japanese as Japanese literature, Kobayashi is forced to conflate the notion of the Japanese language with that of the Japanese people. Let us point out that the rhetorical force of this conflation derives from what is implicitly set forth as the logical or necessary relation between these two entities. As Kobayashi argues, “Since (ijō) this language is the traditional language of Japan … its flavor must appear in one’s style as that which can only be achieved by Japanese people.” The underlying assumption of this (false) cause-and-effect relation is that mastery of the Japanese language is possible only by Japanese people. Such sentiment reflects a widespread if tacit misunderstanding concerning the relation between language and people, which can be very simply formulated as follows: if one is Japanese, then one speaks the Japanese language; or conversely, if one speaks the Japanese language, then one is Japanese. (This conflation can in fact be seen operating in the English word “Japanese,” which signifies both Japanese people and the Japanese language). Grasped in these terms, it is clear that precisely this same logic of identity underlies the institution of Japanese thought, just as it does those of Japanese history and literature. The principles that govern these institutions generally require, for example, that what is called “Japanese thought” be produced by Japanese people in the medium of the Japanese language. While such requirements appear to be commonsensical, it must be remembered that they are the result of a decision, and hence profoundly contingent. Three points should be mentioned in this connection.
1. The decision that institutes and maintains the institution is a necessarily violent one. We can perceive this violence very clearly in Kobayashi’s remarks to Nishitani, particularly when he warns of an impending threat to Japanese philosophy if it continues to remain “indifferent” to what he believes to be the “fate” (shukumei) of Japanese writers to write in the Japanese language (“If this attitude is not overcome, however, it strikes me that Japanese philosophy will never truly be reborn as Japanese philosophy”). Yet this violence may be said to reflect an even deeper violence, one that is inseparable from all institutions, for institutions preserve themselves strictly on the basis of exclusion. As we demonstrated earlier, for example, the institution of Japanese thought must exclude from itself both those Japanese discourses that lack the status of thought (e.g., literature) and those discourses of thought that derive from outside of Japan (e.g., German thought or Chinese thought). However, this is not to suggest that the institution of Japanese thought be simply or immediately done away with in the hope of avoiding such exclusionary violence, a notion that calls to mind nothing so much as Hegel’s figure of the “beautiful soul.”14 (For it can never be a question of withdrawing oneself entirely from participation in institutions. In the case of Japanese thought, this institution has proved invaluable in the production and interpretation of Japanese texts, and this work should be supported as vigorously as possible. At the same time, however, there is no reason that this institutional attention to Japanese texts must continue on the basis of their putative Japaneseness, with all the exclusions that this concept entails). Rather, it is first of all to draw attention to the inescapably violent nature of institutionality, an understanding of which may be said to open up possibilities for institutional change, a chance to render institutions less exclusive and more receptive to difference or alterity. In, for instance, the present volume on Japanese thought, we can, I believe, observe a powerful critique of the notions of Japanese people and Japanese language upon which this institution has traditionally been grounded.
2. Kobayashi’s determination of the Japanese language (literally, “the language of the Japanese people,” or Nihonjin no kotoba) as inherently “sensual” alerts us to a certain essentialism or ahistoricality in his thought, a point to which many scholars have, in fact, critically drawn attention. All too often, however, this criticism is set forth solely in respect of Kobayashi’s attempt to attribute an essential meaning to what is yet insufficiently regarded as the historically shifting nature of the Japanese language. In other words, the argument here still focuses too exclusively on Kobayashi’s subjective act of essentialization without taking into account the equally essentialist nature of the Japanese object as implicitly posited by the scholar himself. For if one fully recognizes the temporal or historical character of the Japanese language, then it becomes impossible to speak of this entity as simply having a history; rather this language’s thoroughly historical being threatens its unity or integrity so fundamentally that it becomes necessary to inquire into the very possibility of employing it as a legitimate object of study. Here again we uncover another point of commonality between Kobayashi and the Japan Studies field as a whole, given the latter’s deeply entrenched aversion to such essential questioning as might place in jeopardy the identity of the Japanese object. In the particular context of Kobayashi, his stated desire to eliminate from Japanese philosophy the abstract and unsensual elements of its language so as to restore its properly Japanese character is, we believe, profoundly reminiscent of Motoori Norinaga’s project in the eighteenth century to restore Japan to what he believed to be its originally natural being, in all its concreteness and immediacy, prior to its contamination and resulting abstraction through contact with China. It is in this regard no coincidence that Kobayashi would so strongly identify his own thought with that of Motoori, resulting in his major work, Motoori Norinaga, to which he devoted fully eleven years of his life before finally completing it in 1976.15 The series of hierarchical oppositions that Motoori established between immediacy and abstraction, nature and history, purity and contamination, and Japan and China, all of which are represented in the binary terms yamatogokoro (Japanese mind/heart) and karagokoro (Chinese mind/heart), finds expression here nearly two hundred years later in Kobayashi’s condemnation of Japanese philosophy (with the significant exception, of course, that the Japan-China binary has now been replaced by the Japan-West binary).16
3. The operation of returning Japanese philosophy to its proper source in Japan, from which it has become unmoored and thus rendered inauthentic, takes place entirely on the basis of the whole-part relation. We can glimpse a sign of this in Kobayashi’s remark that “thought is contained within this literary reality” (bungaku no riariti … no naka ni shisō ga fukumareru), for the logic which enables thought to be reduced to a mere part within the totality that is “literary reality” (and it is unclear what Kobayashi means by this term) is precisely the same logic which states that Japanese philosophy can be subsumed within the totality that is Japan. Here Japanese philosophy is determined strictly in terms of specific difference, in which it coexists alongside Japanese literature as species whose dissimilarity from one another is ultimately negated by their common subsumption within the genus Japan. (And here we might recall Sōseki’s rhetorical gesture of distinguishing himself from his audience so as to determine the parameters of that specific difference internal to the genus of “we Japanese”).
In response to this move by Kobayashi, we can make two observations. First, despite the fact that Japanese philosophy is seen together with Japanese literature as instances of specific difference, there is nevertheless an implicit hierarchy between these two fields. For it is literature that is understood to maintain a more intimate relation with the Japanese language, which for Kobayashi is after all the most immediate embodiment or manifestation of Japaneseness. Without this hierarchy, it would be impossible for thought, which informs philosophy, to be “contained within this literary reality.” Hence the opposition that Kobayashi posits between Japanese literature and philosophy, in which he positions himself very clearly as on the side of literature, is one in which literature is judged to be superior. However, the problem that immediately arises here is that Kobayashi is forced to appeal to, or draw upon the resources of, philosophy so as to establish this superiority of literature. In grounding his argument on the very classical notion of the whole-part relation, according to which Japan functions as the whole that comprehends within itself both philosophy and literature as its distinct parts or species, Kobayashi is in effect arguing against himself in asserting that the priority that literature enjoys over philosophy is ultimately grounded upon philosophy itself. Even more important, however, we can see in this demonstration that the whole-part relation of philosophy grounds the very relation between Japan (whole) and Japanese philosophy (part) itself. One lesson that can be gleaned from this is that the part, or that which is (to use Kobayashi’s word) “contained” within the whole, can nevertheless always come to exceed this latter, thereby threatening the very structure of the whole-part relation and particularly the notion of belonging so central to it. The consequences of this lesson for any thinking of “Japanese thought” should be evident, as thought is perhaps now not so easily contained within that national genus. As we will see, the present collection very explicitly bears witness to this fact.
Second, the logic of the whole-part relation that informs the containment (or belonging) of Japanese philosophy and literature within the whole that is Japan as well as the containment of “thought” within “literary reality” comes to be called into question by Kobayashi’s own language. Let us recall here that the entire exchange with Nishitani centers on a critique of Japanese philosophy for its “nonchalance” and “indifference” to what Kobayashi describes as the “fate” of Japanese writers to write in Japanese. Through reminding Japanese philosophers that thought is ultimately contained within literary reality, it is hoped that they will become more attentive to that “sensuality” or “suggestiveness” putatively inherent in the Japanese language. The notion of literary reality thus represents for Kobayashi a kind of linguistic purity, in which the particular properties of Japanese (sensuality, etc.) reveal themselves in all their fullness and immediacy. Strangely enough, however, Kobayashi chooses to designate this space of pure Japaneseness with gairaigo, or what is referred to commonly as a “loanword,” meaning a term that originally derives from outside Japan. Kobayashi speaks here of bungaku no riariti, significantly, not bungaku no genjitsu or bungaku no jitsuzaisei. As someone deeply versed in French literature and thought, of course, such usage would have been quite natural for Kobayashi (and indeed, for many others without that training). Yet the point here is not simply to focus on the circumstances surrounding Kobayashi’s manner of speech. Rather his choice of a loanword in this context is noteworthy in that it points to an outside of Japan. If the phrase bungaku no riariti … no naka ni shisō ga fukumareru can be said to illustrate the logic of the whole-part relation which enables, in turn, the comprehension of Japanese philosophy and literature within Japan, then the true “reality” of this logic is that philosophy and literature—and, let us add, “Japanese thought”—can never be contained within Japan. Or rather: such containment takes place on the basis of an outside that both allows it and disallows it. In which case, all Japanese thought, Japanese philosophy, Japanese literature, and Japanese history can be said to refer most originally to this outside. The reference to Japan is strictly derivative or secondary, that is to say, contingent; it is dependent upon a decision.
II
It will perhaps not come as a surprise that Nishitani’s response to Kobayashi takes a very different form from the one we have sketched out above. Nishitani defends Japanese philosophy against Kobayashi’s criticism by arguing, more or less, as follows: We are fully aware that the abstractness of philosophical writing poses a problem; this abstractness derives primarily from the fact that Japanese philosophers are engaging with the texts of Western philosophy, which present both conceptual and terminological difficulties that cannot be resolved simply through recourse to traditional Japanese usage or phraseology, as this would indeed lead to even greater confusion; lacking the time to write in such a way as to make our texts more easily comprehensible to the average Japanese reader, we in fact see ourselves as participating in a dialogue with Western thinkers, whose ideas we seek to advance beyond; and finally the linguistic “sensuality” or “suggestiveness” as referred to by Kobayashi differs between the fields of literature and philosophy.17 This response is as one might expect, but it is nevertheless unfortunate (and, of course, deeply revealing) that Nishitani fails to more fundamentally call into question the subsumptive relation between Japanese philosophy and Japan, as maintained here by Kobayashi. (And Nishitani was no doubt fully in agreement with Kobayashi on this point, whatever their other differences). Yet even here we can begin to perceive some of the cracks or strains of this relation, almost as if it were asked to bear an excessive amount of weight. For if, as Nishitani indicates, Japanese philosophy conducts its philosophical dialogue most urgently beyond as opposed to within Japan’s own national borders, then perhaps the very notion of thought as “contained” by or within a nation (national culture, national language, etc.) must be reexamined. Such a reexamination, let us point out, would not simply take as its goal the opening of Japanese philosophy or thought to its outside. On the contrary, that opening must be understood as having already taken place from the very moment Japanese philosophy or thought forms itself as such. In this sense, the empirical event of Japanese philosophy going beyond itself and encountering its exterior (for example, Nishitani’s own period of research in Germany from 1924 to 1926 immediately upon graduation from Kyoto University, where he famously studied under Nishida) can be said to repeat or remark that more essential movement of difference within which it is necessarily caught up. Because of this movement, that which is called “Japanese philosophy” can, rigorously speaking, be referred to only with quotation marks.
What, then, might an institution of “Japanese” thought look like that was more conscious of its (unsublatable, unsubsumable) internal differences, and hence more receptive to the event of alterity? In the present volume, for example, we have gathered together eight thinkers whose works have for at least the past decade or so constituted an important critical force in the Japanese shisōkai, or “domain of ideas,” broadly understood. For a variety of reasons, these thinkers may be said to challenge some of the principles or premises upon which Japanese thought has traditionally, if merely implicitly—given the extent to which these principles have become naturalized—grounded itself. We can refer here to the range of empirical criteria used to determine the category of Japaneseness, primary among which are those of race, ethnicity, language, culture, and geographic location. In the past, these distinct sets of criteria were frequently conflated with one another (as, for instance, we saw in the case of Kobayashi Hideo), such that a Japanese person was defined, naturally enough, as a racial and ethnic Japanese who resided in Japan and spoke the Japanese language. Recent scholarship on cultural theory has valuably shown that such notions of national identity are entirely fabricated, in the double sense here of construction and deception. Paradoxically, however, these insights have if anything tended to strengthen those fields of research that are grounded upon national identity, as for example the field of Japan Studies. In this regard, the appropriative ability of institutions must be reckoned with in all of its force. Here we confront one of the greatest difficulties in our own project, for the general heading of “contemporary Japanese thought” appears capable of reducing all of the thinkers represented here into mere examples of this national discourse, hence confirming their belonging to Japan in the very gesture by which they are otherwise shown to exceed or undermine it. In terms of this non-belonging, we might remark that not all of the thinkers brought together in this volume reside in Japan, not all are what are traditionally considered to be “ethnically” Japanese (once again, reminding ourselves of the utterly fabricated nature of this concept),18 and not all of their works are originally written in the Japanese language. (And furthermore, in respect of the historically male-dominated institution of Japanese thought, not all of these thinkers are men). In, for example, the instance of language, the fact that works are produced that are written initially in, say, English or French (as is in fact the case here with some of the essays) might conceivably disqualify them from inclusion within the category of Japanese thought. Such tension between national identity and national language has, of course, a long and varied history, as we see quite clearly in the field of literature when considering such modern writers as Conrad, Kafka, and Nabokov as well as Kazuo Ishiguro, despite the considerable differences between them.19 Even beyond such empirical facts as those relating to biographical circumstances and textual production, however, it is significant that the thinkers assembled here attempt more or less explicitly to work out a logic with which to dismantle this notion of national identity. No doubt these attempts are quite diverse from one another, responding each in its own way to different historical exigencies that generate, in turn, a plurality of reading strategies (methodologies, objects of inquiry, etc.). Yet there can nevertheless be seen in these texts a sustained thinking of resistance against that movement of unification or collectivization that seeks to reduce difference to nothing more than disparate instances of identity. If then it must be recognized that it is always possible to appropriate these essays back within the posited whole or totality that is contemporary Japanese thought, it must on the other hand also be acknowledged that such operation contravenes the logic that is actively being worked out within them.
From our perspective, the essays of the sociocultural theorist Kang Sangjung can perhaps best be approached as a critique of the denial or disavowal of history, which takes here two distinct (if interrelated) forms. First, this critique directs itself against the institution of Oriental Studies (Tōyōgaku), as established in Japan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by the colonial administrator Gotō Shinpei together with the scholar of Oriental history (Tōyōshigaku) Shiratori Kurakichi. History is denied by this institution in its attempt to set forth distinct and internally unified geopolitical entities whose relation to one another is based strictly upon oppositionality. It is this dimension of oppositionality, which belongs properly to logic rather than to history itself, that reveals the ahistoricality inherent in the Orientalist project. Hence the notion of Oriental history must be seen as a contradiction in terms since, as Kang notes, “the very category of the ‘Orient’ is nothing but an ‘imaginary time and space,’ one that emerged from the suffering common to non-Western societies in their attempt to reconcile civilization and culture, difference and identity.”20 Following the West in the construction of the image of the Orient so as to better reflect itself (what Kang refers to in the context of collective cultural and national identity as “narcissism,” or jiko tōsui), Japan also went about erecting an entire network of Orientalist knowledge only to discover that the oppositionality upon which that knowledge was grounded ultimately gave way before that force of history which it had sought to repress. If we visualize history in this sense as exerting a violent and relentless pressure against identity, then it might help us better understand Kang’s own role in his textual practice as both a reader and producer of those “cracks” (wareme) and “internal fissures” (uchigawa kara hokorobi) that mark the opening of geopolitical entities to alterity.21
Second, the critique draws support from both history and philosophy in its attack on the notion of essence, as employed by various nation-states in the service of national ideology. Kang condemns here both the cultural essentialism of the United States (“The unity and communal identity of the American state are being defined once again by inciting antagonisms of cultural essentialism”) and the Japanese emperor system understood as “national essence” (kokuminteki honsei).22 In the specific context of the latter, the emperor system comes to be seen as an integral part of Japanese modernization, thus functioning as the thread that ties together the entirety of post-Meiji history as, properly, Japanese modern history. In its essential grounding, which enables the nation to preserve its identity despite the flux of historical difference (and these two terms dōitsusei and saisei are, let us point out, crucial for Kang’s thinking of history), all traces of violence can be effaced from the “national narrative” as mere accidents and exceptions, or what Kang calls “temporary deviations” (ichijiteki na itsu-datsu).23 Violence is in this way situated outside Japan in its self-formation as a modern nation, whereby it is opposed to modernity, and this opposition between modernity and violence comes to be conceived in philosophical (or metaphysical) terms according to the classical distinction between essence and accident. That is to say, the entire history of colonial violence that brought about, in successive fashion, the 1895 Sino-Japanese War, the 1905 Russo-Japanese War and, most destructively, the 1931–1945 Fifteen-Year War is regarded now as inessential to Japan’s original nature, which on the contrary (tautologically enough) is defined by its opposition to and against such violence. This disavowal of history very effectively served to perpetuate the myth of the postwar, at which time, it was claimed, Japan could finally overcome the “temporary deviation” or aberration of militarist violence (i.e., history) and return to its true course of progressive modernization (essence): “The postwar signified a reversal of that history of insanity and a return (fukki) to the healthy and transparent nationalism of the Meiji state.”24 Frighteningly enough, as Kang reports, polls suggest that over eighty percent of Japanese citizens now accept this kind of national narrative as true. It is precisely against such collective amnesia, as it were, that the importance of rigorously thinking about history emerges in all of its force.
For Ueno Chizuko, the noted sociologist and feminist scholar whose works have been instrumental in fostering an understanding of Japanese feminism for some two decades now, it is necessary to think of questions of gender and sexuality without any recourse to the notion of nature. For, indeed, nature must be understood in some sense as a notion, because of which it becomes possible to claim that there is nothing natural about nature, that it is already to some degree exposed to, or permeated by, history. The importance of this insight is perhaps best measured by the degree to which the notion of nature has traditionally informed the common or everyday understanding of gender. According to this understanding, women’s natural (or innate) weakness, passivity, and irrationality are to be sharply distinguished from men’s natural strength, will, and capacity for reason. As Ueno points out, however, such an attribution of differential qualities “tells us more about those who attribute than those who are attributed.”25 Here we discern two principles that may be described as central to Ueno’s thought:
1. The transition that is to be effected from the attributed to the attributor corresponds with a decisive shift in focus from object to subject. In this shift, the object is revealed to be irreducibly other to those significations that come in history to be attached to, and thus ultimately conflated with, it. What must be remembered is that the object exists on a radically different level from those significations that first open it, for better or worse, to the world of meaning. Failure to recognize that the object, existing originally prior to meaning, thereby resists those significations inevitably leads to a naturalized view of the meaningful object. In response to this process of naturalization, Ueno insists that it is history that is responsible for making objects what they are. Recognition of the force of historical significations to shape social reality introduces within this latter an element of contingency, and it is on the basis of such contingency that political change (e.g., changes in gender politics) becomes possible. As, for instance, Ueno writes in the context of the notion of motherhood, perhaps one of the most naturalized concepts in modern society, “The concept of ‘Mothers’ … is thus in no sense necessary.… [T]he category of ‘Mothers’ is a manufactured one that can be discontinued at any time.”26 It is precisely because of this absence of necessity in regard to the historically sedimented meanings around the notion of motherhood that this notion can be signified otherwise, thus opening up new and even subversive possibilities for—as another scholar of Japanese feminism might put it—acting like a mother.27
2. The critique of what commonly appears to be natural is not simply made from a position that is external to this latter, since natural attributes or properties reveal themselves to be directly opposed to those other attributes or properties set against them. Thus, in the case of gender, it is clear that female qualities are posited in opposition to male qualities. What is necessary, then, is to examine putatively natural entities in terms of these qualities so as to uncover the logic that in fact informs them through and through. This logic, which of course lacks any natural status, is one of binarity; although hidden from view, it is central in determining objects that are otherwise merely different from one another as now “binary oppositions,” as Ueno writes. It should be remarked here that Ueno, who has written a book on structuralism, is especially sensitive to such binary operations as well as to the motivation behind them, given that one term comes always to be tacitly privileged over the other (male over female, Occident over Orient, etc.).28 Rather than simply reverse this hierarchy and declare the historically deprivileged term as now in fact superior (which would be the position of a certain dialectics), Ueno instead undertakes a kind of genealogy so as to reveal the historically changing nature of these terms. Hence the reading strategy she adopts in the context of Japanese mothers consists in carefully following this concept throughout its itinerary in postwar Japanese fiction, from Yasuoka Shōtarō in the 1950s to Yamada Eimi in the 1980s. This reading demonstrates the impossibility of reducing the enormously complex social phenomenon of motherhood to any fixed or comprehensive meaning, either through binary logic, cultural determinism, or sociobiological destiny.
Finally, let us not fail to call attention to the importance of Ueno’s attack against Japanese particularism, as to be found most transparently in Nihonjinron discourse. Here focus is directed to the works of such otherwise extremely disparate writers as the conservative scholar Hasegawa Michiko, the psychiatrist Doi Takeo (author of the 1971 Amae no kōzō [The anatomy of dependence]) and the literature and social critic Karatani Kōjin. Ueno’s profound interest in history prevents the critique of Japanese particularism from grounding itself in Western universalism—a charge which has in fact frequently been leveled against Japanese feminism, and one which she strongly refutes. Ueno is correct in seeing within Japanese particularism (especially in its more overt nationalist overtones) a certain reactionism: it is strictly in response to the threat of Western universalism that a desire emerges to posit and preserve a fictitious uniqueness to Japanese culture, for this uniqueness, it is believed, protects the sovereignty of Japan from the comprehension of the West. What must be underscored here, however, is that the paradoxical effect of reinforcing a sense of national-cultural particularism is the overall strengthening of universalism itself. For, as can be seen most clearly in Hegel, the part is necessarily both part and whole. Despite its particularism, Japan as a nation-state is capable of self-differentiation, and in this process precisely the same relation between the West and Japan is replicated between Japan and its own parts (citizens, national institutions, etc.). As such, it is ultimately insufficient (despite the importance of its political strategy, which must also be taken into account) to claim a space proper to Japanese feminism, as when Ueno argues against the universalism of Western feminism: “Japanese feminism has its own raison d’être, its own history, and its own voice.”29 What is perhaps more valuable in this context is to remain vigilant against those “binary oppositions” whose presence Ueno helps teach us to detect, as for example the binary between Japan and the West.
Ehara Yumiko is another sociologist and feminist scholar whose works are instructive both in illustrating some of the problematics and methodologies current within the institution of feminism in Japan, and also in investigating those discourses of power that come to create the modern self. For Ehara, the process by which this self is shaped or created necessarily involves questions of time and place as well as of gender. As she writes in her study of the political theorist Maruyama Masao,
Rather I would like to ask how, as a subject (shutai) with the sexed body of a woman who is located within the time of the present and the locus of Japan, one might be able to question the various powers that have constructed the self (mizukara).… [T]he question is how to understand the concrete operations of the various powers that encircle my body, or the subject called myself.30
We can see in these lines that Ehara rejects any notion of the self that would designate a space of pure subjective interiority; on the contrary, the self is “constructed” (or “constituted”: kōsei shitekita), and this construction in its very sociality brings into play various relations of power. There can thus be no simple conflict between self and society, as has been maintained in traditional sociological discourse, since the self is at its inception already opened up to the social. Yet such a notion of the self as existing in some sense before or outside of the social can be seen to linger in Maruyama’s otherwise astute analyses of sociopolitical phenomena. The “free, decision-making agent” whose absence Maruyama condemns in the context of Japanese ultranationalism during the Fifteen-Year War is considered as characteristic of the modern West, in contrast to which Japan in its uniqueness or particularity (Nihonteki tokushitsu) must be grasped as strictly premodern, hence producing citizens whose lack of freedom and “sense of subjective responsibility” results in a violent “transfer of oppression.” Part of Ehara’s critique of Maruyama derives from this difference of situating the self in its sociality.
Ehara’s focus on the self in its social constructedness leads her to examine those power relations that, in politically determined contexts, repress certain individuals while privileging certain others. Here it becomes necessary to locate those structures whose presence is so ubiquitous in society as to avoid calling attention to themselves, hence making their effects all the more powerful. The everyday phenomenon of teasing, for example, is revealed by Ehara to contain an extremely intricate system of rules and dynamics that govern the relation between the teaser and the teased. This “logic” of teasing, as it is called, naturalizes the violence that is perpetrated on the teased by ensuring that it is seen as nothing more than a form of play, thus effectively preventing any condemnation of this behavior. Such structural analysis is important when one tries to understand the historical reception of the women’s liberation movement in Japan during the 1970s, when women who participated in the movement were openly scorned and ridiculed in the mass media. Because this treatment was cloaked in humor, however, the violence that motivated it came to be obfuscated. In order to first reveal this violence as violence, then, Ehara is forced to abstract from the immediate historical circumstances surrounding this denigration of feminism (which were at this point of such an immediacy as to provoke only reactions of denial concerning this violence) and highlight those structural aspects of teasing that function to keep it subordinated. By making explicit those inequalities inherent in the social—or, as she writes elsewhere, that “power contained in social structures themselves, whose workings cannot be reduced to the intentions of specific individuals”31—Ehara effectively opens up new possibilities for social relations, especially those relations in which gender and sexuality are most at stake.
The works of Karatani Kōjin, the widely recognized dean of criticism in Japan, have long been influential in generating discussion on such contemporary philosophical notions as those of alterity (tashasei), exteriority (gaibusei) and singularity (tandokusei), to name but a few. Karatani brings to his theoretical analyses an unusually broad range of knowledge and interests. So, for example, in his reading of Sōseki here, the opening discussion alone touches upon such otherwise historically diverse figures as Ōoka Shōhei, Masaoka Shiki, Roland Barthes, Northrop Frye, Origuchi Shinobu, Rousseau, Saint Augustine, and Arai Hakuseki.32 This gesture of summoning an array of writers and thinkers in the course of following the thought of a single figure (which gesture must be described as a characteristic feature of Karatani’s writing, and is in no way limited to his texts on Sōseki) is an exciting one, but it would be wrong not to see here an expression of what is in fact a powerful theoretical insight since, for Karatani, focus on one thinker is possible only through focus on others. No doubt such a reading strategy produces quite dispersive effects at times, and yet these effects are precisely what Karatani aims for in showing the ultimate grounding of all thought in alterity. In other words, this strategy has its roots in—and therefore cannot rigorously be understood outside of—his thinking of the relation between the one and the other, in which the latter must first be traversed in order to arrive at the former, and because of which attention on this one can at any time be disrupted by those elements of which, in a double sense, it is a-part (that is, both belonging to and different from itself).
Another feature of Karatani’s work that bears emphasis is his inflection of certain terms or concepts for the purpose of bringing the complex relation between philosophy and history more sharply into focus. One example of this can be seen in the notion of bun, meaning “writing,” through which he comes to approach Sōseki’s text. Here Karatani attempts to think this notion in such a way that it functions as a kind of center around which a dialogue is staged between Sōseki, the writer Ōoka Shōhei (author of the 1952 antiwar novel Nobi [Fires on the plain]), Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida. (Derrida, who is not named in the essay, appears only implicitly, in contrast to these other three writers.) Now on the one hand, bun existed in the Meiji period as a literary genre, as Karatani cites Ōoka writing in regard to Sōseki, and this can of course be seen in Masaoka Shiki’s distinctive use of shaseibun, which Karatani views as a sub-genre of bun. On the other hand, however, bun reveals itself to be far greater than a specific literary genre that emerged at a specific point in history. Rather it is, as Karatani writes, “that ‘degree zero’ which contains all possibilities; it is écriture, to use Barthes’s terms.”33 In this merging of bun with écriture, a historically delimited literary form is radically opened up so as to signify something like an original site of possibility (kanōsei), from which it then becomes possible to launch a critique of actuality (genjitsusei). And this is precisely what Karatani does in this context, as when he turns his attention now back to the specific historical possibilities that offered themselves during the second decade of the Meiji period. These possibilities were unfortunately never realized, but what is of significance here is the pivot Karatani makes from history (the genre of bun) to philosophy (écriture qua general possibility) and then back again to history (those specific possibilities available in early Meiji). In this pivot, the meaning of “writing” comes to be considerably transformed so as to refer no longer simply to either Ōoka’s bun or Barthes’s écriture, as this latter usage designates primarily the formal conditions established by a writer in relation to his work.34 Indeed, bun/écriture qua possibility must properly be seen as that which newly emerges or takes place as a result of Karatani’s putting into relation two otherwise distinct fields, writers and historical contexts. Yet the necessity of this strategy reveals itself in Karatani’s critique of modern Japan in its betrayal or perhaps neglect of those possibilities inherent at its inception, possibilities which were subsequently foreclosed by such factors as its modernist ideology, the nation-state system, and the genre of the novel.35
The notion of aesthetics undergoes a similar metamorphosis in Karatani’s study of the “Overcoming Modernity” symposium, where his reading diverges quite sharply from both Takeuchi Yoshimi’s 1959 essay “Kindai no chōkoku” and the philosopher Hiromatsu Wataru’s 1989 book “Kindai no chōkoku” ron. This notion refers, in various parts of the paper, to Kant, Hegel, Nishida Kitarō, the Marxist philosopher Tosaka Jun, the burai-ha writer Sakaguchi Ango, Paul Valéry, and Kobayashi Hideo (this last makes reference during the symposium to what he calls “Bergsonian aesthetics”). Karatani defines aesthetics most clearly as “that which surmounts and unifies actual contradictions at an imaginary level.” He continues: “Conversely, ‘aesthetics’ becomes dominant in those places where it is impossible to actually surmount actual contradictions. This explains why aesthetics never developed in England.… On the other hand, German idealism is basically an ‘aesthetics’—as is modern Japanese philosophy as well.”36 Karatani is attempting here to show why the participants of the symposium all but avoided any discussion of England or the United States during the proceedings, despite the fact that Japan was then at war with these two countries, and chose instead to focus on the philosophy and literature of Germany and France. He finds his answer in aesthetics, which he defines essentially as an overcoming of contradictions. As with the case of Karatani’s use of the Barthesian term écriture, however, this definition of aesthetics differs substantially from those of Kant and Hegel, to which he nonetheless makes reference. To further complicate matters, Karatani seems at times to indicate by this notion mere aesthetic objects or activities (as for example when he speaks of those fields of study that tend to draw Japanese students to France, such as literature, philosophy, cooking, and fashion).37 In point of fact, this difficulty of defining aesthetics can also be seen in both Kant and Hegel, but there the tension revolves most centrally around the two meanings of this word (from the Greek aisthēsis, “perception”) as, on the one hand, the study of perception or sensibility and, on the other, the study of art or beauty. Karatani avoids this ambiguity by lifting the term from this debate and making it function primarily in relation to the notion of contradiction. The merits of this move can be debated, but the political intent is admirable, as Karatani seeks to demonstrate that the symposium’s “overcoming of modernity” was purely imaginary in its failure to resolve the actual contradictions at hand.
Like Karatani, Naoki Sakai writes very much across the disciplinary borders of history, philosophy, and literature, as well as across the geopolitical borders of Japan and the United States. Much of Sakai’s work can be described on the basis of a question rhetorically posed by the philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Why would the problem of identification not be, in general, the essential problem of the political?”38 This attention to the problem of identification functions in Sakai’s thought as nothing less than a kind of ethical imperative, which can be formulated in its most basic terms as follows: Act in such a way as to resist the desire for identification. Now the difficulty that immediately becomes apparent here is that, as Nietzsche famously remarked of Kant’s categorical imperative, such a command “smells of cruelty.”39 This cruelty lies in the fact that one must resist not merely such external mechanisms of identification as, for example, the State and its various institutions, but rather, precisely because such institutions have already become remarked or internalized by the subject in its interiority, one must learn to resist one’s own desire for identification. While there is in this rejection of subjective desire a certain ascetic quality, one must nevertheless be careful not to explain this quality in terms of the—admittedly dense—theoretical nature of Sakai’s work. (In Japan as well as in the United States, Sakai’s works have often been accused of being excessively theoretical, thereby provoking both misunderstanding and antipathy). On the contrary, following the classical philosophical distinction between theōria, praxis, and poiēsis, this work reveals itself to be concerned most fundamentally with acting, or praxis, rather than with theory. (In the context of the essay included below, moreover, it is the notion of poiēsis, or “making, producing,” that receives the greatest attention). Nowhere is this resistance against identification manifested more palpably than in the critique of national or cultural identification, which provides in turn the groundwork for the comparative analysis of what Sakai calls “imperial nationalism” undertaken here.
Explication of the process of identification requires a combination of broad historical knowledge and acute psychological insight, given that the subjective desire for national or cultural identity is produced above all objectively, meaning in this instance as a result of the convergence of certain historical forces that exist outside the self. If these forces first produce the subjective desire for identification, however, they nevertheless require the subject’s response to them, in which the subject comes now to confirm or claim this desire as his own, and acts according to it. Sakai sketches out the various forms that this response generally takes, and discovers at their core the presence of a binary logic that determines identification strictly along the coordinates of “the negation-affirmation axis,” as he writes.40 So for example, in his reading of John Okada’s 1957 novel No-No Boy, Sakai locates the desire on the part of the Japanese-American minority subject to either embrace his sense of belonging to the United States through self-identification as an American citizen, despite the very real racial discrimination and inequality he encounters there, or to reject such self-identification because of those injustices and instead identify himself as Japanese. In both cases, however, the negation of identification with one national culture takes place only the better to effect an affirmation with the other, as this other national culture is seen as the symmetrical opposite of the first. Precisely the same phenomenon can be seen in wartime Japan with respect to those Taiwanese colonials who were violently submitted to the integrationist policies (kōminka seisaku) of the imperial nation, which demanded that they identify themselves as Japanese despite their clearly inferior social status.41 As Sakai shows in his examination of several Japanese-language literary texts produced in Taiwan during that period, certain Taiwanese identified themselves with the colonized (thereby falling into the trap of the modernization = civilization paradigm) while others, in their otherwise politically important gesture of resisting Japanese colonial violence, nevertheless grounded this resistance on their sense of native Taiwanese identity (thereby falling into the converse—and hence complicitous—trap of minzokushugi, or ethnic-nationalism). Sakai’s reading of these works is guided throughout by an interest in undermining these complementary desires for identification, which are based equally in narcissism, so as to open up a kind of “cruel” (because ethical) form of relationality that takes place beyond any transference and sense of belonging.
One final, related point: Sakai would surely describe the emergence of Japanese nationalism, and particularly that of its past imperial nationalism, in much the same way that certain contemporary philosophers have described German nationalism, “as the long history of the appropriation of means of identification.”42 (And the opening part of his paper here represents an attack against this same mechanism of appropriation within American nationalism, particularly that of its current imperial nationalism). Significantly, however, Sakai chooses to problematize the identificatory processes utilized by or rather inherent in imperial nationalism by focusing on what he calls “subjective technology” (shutaiteki gijutsu). This notion, which refers back to Nishida’s reading of Aristotle and the problem of technē, is briefly defined elsewhere as the process “whereby the subject (shutai) constitutes and manufactures itself,” in contrast to the more widespread meaning of technology, in which the subject (shukan) creates or works on an object that exists simply outside itself, thereby not resulting in the subject’s own self-production.43 What must be emphasized here is, first, the close relationship between the notions of technē and poiēsis, given that they both refer to a making or manufacturing of the subject; and, second, the extremely valuable insight into everyday sociopolitical processes that this understanding of subjective manufacturing affords Sakai. (It is the latter that represents Sakai’s very marked political departure from Nishida, despite the clear debt to his thought). For if imperial nationalism—in the context of either Japan or the United States—establishes certain technologies through which to effectively produce national subjects, then a rigorous understanding of this process might help us better resist it.
It is highly instructive to read the works of the philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya alongside those of Sakai, for while they are both among the foremost practitioners of deconstruction in Japanese criticism, their approaches nevertheless differ considerably from one another. As the author of one of the leading books on Derrida in Japan, Takahashi’s relation to deconstruction is perhaps the more clearly delineated.44 At any rate, the two essays included in this volume are noteworthy in providing us a glimpse into the dynamics of intellectual debate taking place in Japan today. These essays may be said to form a set in that, despite the fact that they were originally published separately, they are both essentially critiques of the literary critic Katō Norihiro with respect to the problem of nationalism.45 What may perhaps seem surprising here is Takahashi’s particular manner of critique, for the logical rigor with which he reads Katō presents itself hand in hand with an emphasis on the importance of content. In philosophy, generally speaking, an appeal to logic is associated with a denigration or at least deprivileging of the role of content, and with this of course a corresponding stress on the notion of form, and yet in Takahashi precisely the reverse can be seen. How can we explain this unexpected turn of events? One way to do so would be to detect in Takahashi’s thought a certain kind of logic that remains yet intimately bound up with the worldliness or empiricity indicated by the term “content” (naiyō). The complex nature of this binding is such as to allow Takahashi to condemn Katō’s argument for its excessive formalism without, however, thereby falling into the trap of historicism, i.e., the reduction of things (phenomena, concepts, etc.) to determined empirico-historical events. When, for example, Takahashi, in quoting Katō, remarks that “while such statements may appear to be ‘correct’ in a formalistic sense (keishikiron toshite), they are not at all self-evident when seen in the context of concrete historical situations,” he is not, let us emphasize, merely privileging content over form, the concrete over the abstract, and history over the transcendental.46 If these first terms may be said to occupy pride of place in Takahashi’s thought, they do so only by virtue of their relation to those second terms to which they are otherwise opposed. For in truth Takahashi’s critique could be easily recuperated were it to do no more than simply counter Katō’s formalism—which notion is also expressed in the language of these essays by such terms as “fundamentalism” (genrishugi) and “pure” (junsui)—with an appeal to the concreteness of historical situations. (Let us mention in passing here that while such critiques are not infrequently made against philosophy on the part of historians, they remain very much indebted to an underlying, and unexamined, empiricism). This explains why Takahashi attempts to situate his discourse both prior and posterior to that of Katō: it is prior in the sense that it formulates certain concepts whose universality or generality is able to take into account Katō’s formalism, and yet it is also posterior in that it focuses on those singular historical circumstances which Katō neglects. However, this double move that Takahashi takes reveals itself to be in fact one and the same move, since he is primarily concerned to show how the “Japanese ‘national subject’ as closed community” (tojirareta … kyōdōtai toshite Nihon no ‘kokumin shutai’) that Katō wishes to construct is from the beginning already opened up to its other.47 It is this opening that, taking place originally prior to the formation of this community as such, in a sense foretells the event of those incursions or infringements from which it will actually come to suffer. The concepts that Takahashi employs to demonstrate this exposure of the community to its otherwise excluded outside include that of originary impurity (or “impurity of origins,” shutsuji no fujunsa), the trace of the other (tasha no konseki), responsibility (which is glossed elsewhere more fully and more literally as ōtō kanōsei toshite no sekinin),48 and democracy to come (kitaru beki minshushugi).
While this is obviously not the place to examine these concepts in depth, we can nevertheless make several brief remarks regarding Takahashi’s charge of nationalism against Katō. As with many of the best critics of nationalism, Takahashi follows Heidegger’s statement in his 1947 “Letter on Humanism” that nationalism is to be understood most properly as subjectivism.49 The national subject that Katō aims to construct, according to Takahashi’s reading, is one necessarily based on unity, internal homogeneity, and self-representation. This unity can be seen primarily negatively, as Katō mourns its loss in the postwar period in the form of what he refers to as the nation’s “personality split.” Takahashi rightly discerns in such language a nostalgic desire to repair this split, thereby allowing Japan to recover its putatively original oneness and state of normalcy. Although Katō’s desire here takes shape in order to offer a unified apology to Japan’s war victims in Asia, Takahashi argues that it is this very national unity that lies at the root of the problem of nationalism. Hence Katō’s proposal of a unified national apology would represent something like a “rational nationalism” as distinct from the wartime “irrational nationalism,” as Takahashi critically cites the political analyst Alain Minc saying in regard to the difference between French and German nationalism. For Takahashi, such distinctions are merely cosmetic, for they leave entirely in place the violent structure of nationalism itself. The issues of internal homogeneity and national self-representation come together in Takahashi’s view in what he calls “the politics of national symbols,” meaning here the Hinomaru national flag and Kimigayo national anthem.50 Responding to Katō’s rejection of this anthem because it does not emotionally resonate with many Japanese citizens, Takahashi points out that it is precisely in such emotional identification that national homogeneity comes to be created. Even if such identification is effected in the name of apologizing to Japan’s Asian war victims, it invariably excludes this Asian other in the process of nation formation and thus remains violent at its core.
Addressing this same issue of Japan’s national flag and anthem, the scholar of modern French literature and thought Ukai Satoshi argues that the attack against the Kimigayo as based on its relative estrangement from the lives of most Japanese people harbors within it, in fact, a desire for national identification that is necessarily of a piece with fascism: “When we seek a point of contact with the masses as based on a sense of unease with the Kimigayo, we become absorbed by the [oppositional] movement’s unwitting progressivism. We thus succumb to the temptation of overcoming the situation at the mountain’s lowest point, to use an old-fashioned expression. [Walter] Benjamin would certainly see here an opening for fascism.”51 Ukai is in this context concerned to show some of the faults that have unfortunately dogged the opposition in its protest against the passage of the National Flag and Anthem Law (kokki kokka hō) in the summer of 1999. To this end he reads Benjamin alongside the poet and writer Tanigawa Gan so as to arrive at a more rigorous thinking of teikō, or “resistance,” one that remains sensitive to the theoretical trap inherent in the notion of opposition, to which perhaps resistance always remains vulnerable. For the oppositional stance enacts its reversal strictly by accepting the terms upon which the debate takes place, hence blinding itself both to the deeply problematic nature of these terms themselves and to the manner in which the opposed and opposing sides remain entirely controlled by them. In for example the debate around the Japanese national flag and anthem, opposition comes to be articulated on the basis of a progressivist ideology that shares much in common with the logic of nationalism, with the result that the sense of Japanese national identity becomes, ironically enough, strengthened by that opposition. Although clearly sympathetic to such movements in their struggle against conservative forces, Ukai nevertheless seeks to expose and interrogate those otherwise hidden theoretical grounds that all too often condemn political and social opposition elements to replicate that violence which they wish to prevent. In this work, an internal questioning of the notion of opposition is commenced, through which Ukai extends to his readers something like an “invitation to resistance.”52
This important difference between the notions of opposition and resistance can be seen to inform Ukai’s thinking of what he calls the “two-in-one” (meaning: necessarily interrelated) problems of colonialism and modernity. He develops this thinking through an ambitious examination of the writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, the Chinese writer Lu Xun, Frantz Fanon, and Derrida, interweaving these very disparate texts together against the shared background of Hegel’s dialectic of the master-slave relation. Both Takeuchi (aided by his reading of Lu Xun) and Fanon conceive of the phenomenon of colonialism in terms of the master-slave dialectic, which is in turn mapped onto the geopolitical relation between the West (“Europe”) and the non-West. Ukai provides a generous interpretation of these two writers in their efforts to set forth resistance against European colonization, and yet ultimately he rejects this dialectic between the master and the slave as too limiting in its binarity, since “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 (nibunhō).”53 It is highly significant that the rejection of this dialectic does not simply originate in Ukai’s own “subjective” decision. On the contrary, the reading of Takeuchi and Fanon that he undertakes here remains guided throughout by these “objects” of his inquiry, who precisely for this reason (i.e., the fact that objects in their alterity precede the fixed division between subject and object necessary for all scholarly inquiry) are both more than and less than objects. Hence the texts of Takeuchi and Fanon give themselves to be read in such a way that the participation in a certain traditional dialectics comes to the fore while, at the same time, these texts offer themselves up to be read otherwise, now resisting that dialectical interplay of opposites within which they seem to be caught up. Must we stress that it is this very reading strategy that Ukai adopts which powerfully bears upon the question of colonialism that lies at the heart of this essay? For the opposition against colonialism generally takes as its theoretical departure point the opposition between the West (Europe) and the non-West, because of which resistance comes to be reduced to nothing more than the stance adopted by this latter entity against the former. To this, however, Ukai asks if the notion of resistance might not be more originary, or general, than that of the opposition which underlies the distinction between these two entities. If so—and clearly this is what Ukai believes—then it becomes no longer possible to speak simply of these oppositional entities as such, and this in turn calls for an entire rethinking of the phenomenon of colonialism. As Ukai writes, with reference to Derrida and, further back, to Lu Xun: “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.”54
Nishitani Osamu, who, like Ukai, is also a scholar of modern French literature and thought, turns his attention in the essay “‘Fushi’ no wandārando” [The wonderland of “immortality”] to the complex relation between human subjectivity and death in the light of recent advances in medical technology. This essay represents an attempt to open up a dialogue with Heidegger (specifically the early Heidegger, for whom the thinking of death appears most urgent), to whom any thinking of subjectivity and death is of course enormously indebted. In this regard, the following passage from Being and Time will perhaps help us better understand the general thrust of Nishitani’s reading:
Death does not just “belong” to one’s own Dasein in an undifferentiated way; death lays claim to it as an individual Dasein. The non-relational character of death, as understood in anticipation, individualizes Dasein down to itself. This individualizing is a way in which the “there” is disclosed for existence. It makes manifest that all Being-alongside the things with which we concern ourselves, and all Being-with Others, will fail us when our ownmost potentiality-for-Being is the issue.55
The relevance of these lines for Nishitani’s dialogue with Heidegger lies in the notion of individuality and corresponding neglect of the question of the other that marks, in a certain sense, Heidegger’s thinking of death. That I must die alone since no one can possibly die in my place establishes, for Heidegger, the importance of individuality in the context of death. It is in this context that the individual Dasein can break free from its subjection to the “they” (das Man) of everyday existence and finally recover its self in its “ownmost potentiality-for-Being,” as he writes. Thus the opening of Being that takes place through an authentic “anticipation” of the possibility of one’s own death not only offers itself to the individual Dasein; it is indeed that which individualizes Dasein in the first place.
Now Nishitani takes extremely seriously this role of death in bringing Dasein forth in all the fullness of its individuality. His response to Heidegger, to whom he is at once respectful and critical (and this attitude, let us quickly note, differs sharply from that found in other areas of the Japan Studies field, where the attack against Heidegger’s “politics” takes place with only the most cursory understanding of his thought), is to confront the conceptual dyad of death and individuality with that of immortality (fushi) and communality (kyōdōsei), as effected by what Nishitani calls, in an unusual phrase, “compositing” (fukugōka: literally, the making composite or compound). Here Nishitani refers to the technology of organ transplantation, which appears to decisively break up the individual’s integrity or wholeness—that is to say, its status as unit—by introducing others’ organs or bodily parts within the otherwise proper space of the physical self. In this instance, death would no longer belong to me; or rather, it would be mine now only insofar as I exist as constituted by others. As Nishitani writes, “The exchangeability (kōkan kanōsei) of parts renders individuality (kotaisei) itself composite, thus changing the meaning of the event of ‘death,’ which completes the individual as absolute unit (zettaiteki tani). In the world of the individual as exchangeable composite, even death comes to be cheated in the formation of new composites. Death occurs only with the individual, but this individual is now variable and recombinable.”56 In response to this point, it is conceivable that Heidegger would argue that Nishitani forces the discussion of death into a narrow biological-empirical interpretation, for what is at stake in Being and Time is not the event of physical death itself but rather, crucially, the attitude of anticipation one adopts vis-à-vis the possibility of death, that is to say, the possibility of the very impossibility of existence for Dasein. Furthermore, Heidegger might protest that it is precisely in the anticipation of death qua possibility that one is able to free oneself from the hold of the “they” of everyday existence and recover that being with others that is essentially part of Dasein. In which case, anticipation in its individualization of Dasein would paradoxically also be that which most opens it up to Being in its fundamental alterity; that is to say, this strange “individuality” of Dasein is one in which it would be in fact least individual because most fully ex-posed to the presence of the other.57
Yet it is important to emphasize that Nishitani is not merely attempting here to use contemporary medical technology as the means by which to refute Heidegger’s thinking about death, despite his claim that the latter “was in a sense blind to modern ‘death.’”58 On the contrary, for Nishitani the emergence of this technology forces us to recognize that the subject can never be proper (koyū) to itself, that even when confronted with the possibility of its own death, it remains strictly anonymous (mumei) and impersonal (hininshōteki, hijinkakuteki), nothing more than “scattered and dispersed existence,” as he puts it.59 And this is why Nishitani seems to privilege the example of cellular reproduction, in which an organism divides to become two in what is simultaneously an event of birth and death. As he points out, it is senseless here to assign death to a single identity, since this latter is itself the product of the births and deaths of countless other single-celled organisms. The technology of organ transplantation appears to follow more or less this same principle, which might be called something like “originary multiplicity” in that the individual unit is revealed to contain within itself traces of the other. (In this respect, it is surely no accident that Nishitani makes several references throughout the essay to saen, or différance). What must be understood here, however, is that for Nishitani the significance of transplant technology lies at its basis in movement (i.e., the “trans-” of transplant, the i or utsuru of ishoku). It is this notion of movement, which he conceives both here and elsewhere in both a philosophical and a historical sense,60 that accounts for the fact that the subject is necessarily a composite or compound (fukugō). Hence, contra Heidegger (or rather a certain reading of Heidegger), even prior to the individualizing moment that man comes to authentically anticipate the possibility of his own death, he is already exposed to the alterity of others in such a way that his subsequent individuality will always be compromised or haunted by them. Or rather, since, to be fair, Heidegger is foremost a thinker of movement, the anticipation with which authentic Dasein moves outside or ahead of itself to its own death is reexamined by Nishitani on the basis of another kind of movement, one that is coeval with this one but which is less “vertical” than “horizontal” since the inexorable movement to my own death is always shared or divided by those others with whom I am in relation, and who indeed partially die with me and I with them. In this sense, Nishitani performs an invaluable service for us in beginning to draw out the infinite implications of the with.
Notes
1. Hiromatsu Wataru et al., eds., Tetsugaku shisō jiten (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1998), pp. 1200–1201.
2 In Natsume Sōseki zenshū (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1995), vol. 16, pp. 416–417; trans. Jay Rubin, Kokoro: A Novel and Selected Essays (Lanham, Md: Madison Books, 1992), pp. 258–259.
3. Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good, trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. viii.
4. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 28 ff.
5. Karatani Kōjin, whose work on Sōseki is represented in this volume, has long been instrumental in analyzing the conceptual density inherent in his texts. Many of these essays appear in the collection Sōseki ron shūsei (Tokyo: Daisan Bunmeisha, 2001). One might also refer here to the important readings undertaken by the literary critic and theorist Komori Yōichi, as, for example, his Sōseki wo yominaosu (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1995) and Seikimatsu no yogensha: Natsume Sōseki (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1999).
6. This engagement with Heidegger can be seen in several of the thinkers presented here, most immediately in the works of Nishitani Osamu: Fushi no wandārando: sensō no seiki wo koete (Tokyo: Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 1996); Naoki Sakai: Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Takahashi Tetsuya—Gyakkō no rogosu: gendai tetsugaku no kontekusuto (Tokyo: Miraisha, 1992), esp. pp. 75–108; and Karatani Kōjin: Kotoba to higeki (Tokyo: Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 2001), esp. pp. 327–352.
It bears emphasizing that the approaches and strategies that constitute these engagements with Heidegger are entirely dissimilar from one another, and indeed have on occasion functioned as the site of active criticism and debate between these thinkers. For this reason there can be no such thing as the “Japanese” reception or understanding of Heidegger, despite the prevalence of such phrases in Japanese philosophical and intellectual historical scholarship.
7. In Ro Jin nyūmon (1953), as collected in Takeuchi Yoshimi zenshū (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1980), vol. 2, p. 39. These notions can be traced back equally to Nishida Kitarō and to the Chinese writer Lu Xun, whose writings Takeuchi assiduously worked to introduce in Japan.
I elaborate this reading of Takeuchi in Takeuchi Yoshimi: Displacing the West (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Series, 2004).
8. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Le soi-disant peuple,” in Traces: A Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory, vol. 4. (I would like to thank Jon Solomon for introducing me to this text.)
In this connection, it might be apposite to call attention to the fact that Nishitani Osamu is also known in Japan as the translator of Nancy’s influential work The Inoperative Community, trans. Mui no kyōdōtai: tetsugaku wo toinaosu bunyū no shikō (Tokyo: Ibunsha, 2001).
9. No doubt there will be readers who accuse us of overinterpreting Sōseki on this point, as if these distinctions he is making derive more from our own reading than from the Sōseki text “itself.” In support of our reading, then, let us refer to Sōseki himself. As he writes in the essay “Bungei no tetsugakuteki kiso” (1907), “In the first place, I am standing here and you are all sitting there. I am standing in a low place and you are all sitting in a high place. That I am standing and you are sitting represents a fact. If we were to express this fact differently, we could say that I am a ‘self’ (watakushi wa ware toiu mono) and you are my ‘exterior’ (watakushi ni taishite watakushi igai no mono to iu). Using a more difficult expression, this fact is one of ‘self-object opposition’ (butsuga tairitsu). That is to say, the world comes into being on the basis of the dual or relative relation (sōtai no kankei) between self and object.” (In Natsume Sōseki zenshū, vol. 16, pp. 67–68). On the basis of these lines, written four years earlier than the “Gendai Nihon no kaika” essay we are following here, it should be evident just how much is at stake in Sōseki’s otherwise unremarkable gesture of distinguishing himself from his audience.
10. Hence it is necessary to make a transition from the notion of natural identity to that of enunciative positionality (hatsuwa no tachiba) since, as Naoki Sakai points out in his essay “The Problem of ‘Japanese Thought’: The Formation of ‘Japan’ and the Schema of Cofiguration,” “‘Japanese’ is not a natural attribute to an individual but an identity constituted relationally within a specific discourse in each instance.” In Translation and Subjectivity, p. 47.
11. Let us take the occasion to note here that phenomenology has historically in Japan maintained very open relations with the various discourses of the human sciences, thus producing works in which empirical research manages to avoid the pitfalls of naturalism by allowing itself to be shaped by the insight into the intentional nature of consciousness. One example of such work would be Ehara Yumiko’s early text on the sociology of the life-world (Lebenswelt), Seikatsu sekai no shakaigaku (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1985). In a more explicitly philosophical context, Takahashi Tetsuya examines the work of Husserl in his discussion of the relation between history, violence, and reason in Gyakkō no rogosu, pp. 16–74. Kang Sangjung also refers to Husserl and the phenomenological critique of naturalism and historicism in his work on Max Weber, Max Weber to kindai (Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobō, 1986), pp. 147–181.
In the field of literature, Kamei Hideo has provided a phenomenological analysis of Meiji-period texts in his Transformations of Sensibility: The Phenomenology of Meiji Literature, trans. Michael Bourdaghs et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies, 2002).
12. Takeuchi Yoshimi zenshū, vol. 4, p. 145; italics ours. This essay is discussed by Ukai Satoshi in his “Colonialism and Modernity” paper included in this collection. Significantly enough, it is also taken up elsewhere in a very similar context by both Kang Sangjung, in “Datsu orientarizumu no shikō,” in Orientarizumu no kanata he (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996), pp. 198–200, and Sakai, in “Modernity and its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism,” in Translation and Subjectivity, pp. 170–176).
13. In Kindai no chōkoku (Tokyo: Fuzanbō Hyakka Bunko, 1999), pp. 247–248. These lines are also cited and discussed by Karatani in his “Overcoming Modernity” paper below.
For English-language accounts of the “Overcoming Modernity” symposium, see Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 34–94; and Minamoto Ryōen’s essay “The Symposium on ‘Overcoming Modernity’” in Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism, ed. James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), pp. 197–229.
Kobayashi Hideo’s writings on literature have been made available in translation in Paul Anderer, Literature of the Lost Home: Kobayashi Hideo—Literary Criticism 1924–1939 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
14. This figure “lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extreme of ultimate abstraction.” G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 400.
15. In Kobayashi Hideo zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2001), vol. 14, pp. 25–523.
16. Ueno Chizuko discusses Motoori’s notions of yamatogokoro and karagokoro in her essay “In the Feminine Guise: A Trap of Reverse Orientalism,” as included below.
17. Kindai no chōkoku, pp. 248–249.
18. Or what Etienne Balibar has called “fictive ethnicity,” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1992), p. 10.
19. Ishiguro was born in Japan in 1954 but has lived in England since age five. In the course of a revealing dialogue between Ishiguro and the novelist Ōe Kenzaburō held in Japan in 1989, Ōe remarks upon Ishiguro’s qualities as a representative English (as opposed to Japanese) writer as based upon a very problematic notion of national character: “When your books first began to appear in Japan, that was how they were introduced [as peaceful and gentle, like Japanese art]. You were described as a very quiet and peaceful author, and, therefore, a very Japanese author. But from the first I doubted that. I felt that this was an author with a tough intelligence…. I also felt that this kind of strength was not very Japanese, that this person was, rather, from England.” “The Novelist in Today’s World: A Conversation,” in Japan in the World, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 168–169.
It is unfortunate that Ōe, despite his great importance as a writer, fails to understand that a plurality of possible national identities available to an individual does not necessitate choosing one true identity from among them. On the contrary, this very plurality points to the original absence of such identity. What is more, this absence of identity opens up in turn the possibility of identification, but the necessary consequence of this transition from identity to identification means that the latter is now radically contingent.
20. Kang Sangjung, “‘Tōyō’ no hakken to orientarizumu,” in Orientarizumu no kanata he, p. 136. And again, several pages later: “The well-known term ‘Orient’ (or Asia) came to be defined as a geopolitical order due to the Japanese colonial empire’s invasion following the first Sino-Japanese War. Prior to this invasion, there existed no fixed geopolitical-cultural space in the region, thereby rendering any sense of Asian unity impossible” (p. 146).
21. “Kokumin no shinshō chiri to datsu-kokuminteki katari,” in Nashonaru hisutorī wo koete, ed. Komori Yōichi and Takahashi Tetsuya (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1998), pp. 150 and 154.
22. Nashonaru hisutoī wo koete, p. 145, and Orientarizumu no kanata he, p. 143, respectively.
23 Orientarizumu no kanata he, p. 123. This logic of “deviation,” which grounds difference upon identity so as to negate or neutralize its otherwise dispersive effects, is also worked out by Takahashi Tetsuya in the course of his critique of Katō Norihiro, in Sengo sekinin ron (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1999), pp. 132–133 (included below).
For an exchange of views between Kang and Takahashi regarding such topics as nationalism, civilization, and barbarism, see Shikō wo hiraku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2002), esp. pp. 3–50.
24. Nashonaru hisutorī wo koete, p. 149.
25. “In the Feminine Guise: A Trap of Reverse Orientalism,” in U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English supplement no. 13, 1997, p. 3.
26. “Collapse of ‘Japanese Mothers,’” in U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, English supplement no. 10, 1996, p. 5. Italics ours
27. Ayako Kano, Acting Like a Woman in Modern Japan (New York: Palgrave, 2001). As Kano (whose work is cited by Ueno in a note to “In the Feminine Guise”) writes, “Acting like a woman does not come naturally. It has to be taught, learned, rehearsed, and repeated. It does not arise from a moment of inspiration, but from many years of persistent inculcation. In an acting woman, the cultural and social desires of an age are concentrated, molding her every gesture, every glance” (p. 3).
28. Ueno Chizuko, Kōzōshugi no bōken (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1985). Regarding this privileging of one term over another in the binary relation, Ueno aptly points out that it is the privileged term that actually sets forth the deprivileged term “as its residual category.” In “Collapse of ‘Japanese Mothers,’” p. 11.
29. “In the Feminine Guise,” p. 10.
30. “Feminizumu kara mita Maruyama Masao no kindai,” in Feminizumu no paradokkusu: teichaku ni yoru kakusan (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 2000), p. 100.
31. Feminizumu to kenryoku sayō (Tokyo: Keisō Shobō, 1988), p. 32.
32. “Sōseki no tayōsei: ‘Kokoro’ wo megutte,” in Kotoba to higeki, pp. 40–42.
33. Ibid., p. 41. For a more extended treatment of this notion of bun in regard to Sōseki’s works, see Karatani’s Sōseki ron shūsei, pp. 233–260 and 357–361.
34. As Barthes writes, “[W]riting is thus essentially the morality of form, the choice of that social area within which the writer elects to situate the Nature of his language.” Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: The Noonday Press, 1967), p. 15.
The Barthesian notion of écriture has been examined by Jonathan Culler as follows: “As opposed to his language, which an author inherits, and his style, which Barthes defines as a personal and subconscious network of verbal obsessions, an écriture or mode of writing is something an author adopts: a function he gives his language, a set of institutional conventions within which the activity of writing can take place.” Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 134.
35. Let us point out here the massive importance of this notion of possibility in Karatani’s thought, as can be seen for example in Tankyū II (Tokyo: Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 2001), pp. 52–67; in “Ango sono kanōsei no chūshin,” in Kotoba to higeki (Tokyo: Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 2001), pp. 399–420; and in Marukusu sono kanōsei no chūshin (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1978).
36. “Kindai no chōkoku,” in “Senzen” no shikō (Tokyo: Kōdansha Gakujutsu Bunko, 2001), pp. 121–122.
38. “Transcendence Ends in Politics,” in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 300. (Let us note that Sakai himself refers to this important work several times in Translation and Subjectivity).
39. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 65.
40. “Two Negations: The Fear of Being Excluded and the Logic of Self-Esteem,” p. 42 (previously unpublished manuscript).
41. For a recent example of English-language scholarship on this issue, see Leo Ching’s Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
42. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Le mythe Nazi (La Tour d’Aigues: Éditions de l’Aube, 1998), p. 39. Emphasis in the original. We cite Nancy here at least partly to emphasize how important his thought, and particularly the notions of community, identification, and exposure so central to it, has been for Sakai’s own thinking. It is regrettable, let us add parenthetically, that the works of Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy have remained largely unread in the Japan Studies field, given the considerable implications of their thought for much cultural studies research being done today.
43. Translation and Subjectivity, p. 24.
44. Derida: datsukōchiku (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1998). In addition, Takahashi has translated (with Ukai Satoshi) Derrida’s 1991 text L’autre cap as Ta no misaki: Yōroppa to minshushugi (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1993) as well as the 1977 “Limited Inc a b c …” as Yūgen sekinin kaisha (Tokyo: Hōsei Daigaku Shuppankyoku, 2003).
45. Katō’s works are not especially well known in the United States. Harry Harootunian refers to his 1985 text Amerika no kage in “America’s Japan/Japan’s Japan” (Japan in the World, p. 199); Norma Field also refers to this text in “Somehow: The Postmodern as Atmosphere” (Postmodernism and Japan, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 170–171).
46. “Nihon no neonashonarizumu 2: Katō Norihiro shi ‘Haisengo ron’ wo hihan suru,” in Sengo sekinin ron, p. 136.
48. “‘Sengo sekinin’ saikō,” in Ibid., pp. 23–30. See on this notion of responsibility also the dialogue between Takahashi and the writer Suh Kyungsik in Danzetsu no seiki shōgen no jidai: sensō no kioku wo meguru taiwa (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2001), pp. 90–148.
49. Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 221. As Heidegger (who would of course fall subject to his own critique here) writes, “Every nationalism is metaphysically an anthropologism, and as such subjectivism. Nationalism is not overcome by mere internationalism; it is rather expanded and elevated thereby into a system.”
Takahashi discusses the problem of Heidegger’s nationalism (alongside the nationalism of the philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō, who was strongly influenced by Heidegger) in “Kaiki no hō to kyōdōtai: sonzai he no toi to rinrigaku no aida,” in Gyakkō no rogosu, pp. 75–108.
50. “Hinomaru-kimigayo kara shōchō tennōsei he,” in Sengo sekinin ron, p. 251.
51. “Hata no kanata no kaisō: naze Hinomaru wa ‘omedetai’ no ka,” in Impaction (March 2000), no. 118, pp. 30–31.
52. Teikō he no shōtai (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobō, 1997). In this collection of writings, Ukai attempts to forge a thinking of resistance through a reading of a wide range of topics as well as of such authors as Jean Genet, Edward Said, Derrida, and Kant.
53. “Koroniarizumu to modaniti,” in Tenkanki no bungaku, ed. Mishima Kenichi and Kinoshita Yasumitsu (Tokyo: Minerva Shobō, 1999), p. 210.
55. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 308. Italics in the original.
56. “‘Fushi’ no wandārando,” in Fushi no wandārando: sensō no seiki wo koete, p. 293.
57. On this and related questions, see Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger: Thought and Historicity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 28–54; and Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Decision of Existence,” in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 82–109.
58. Fushi no wandārando, p. 280. Interestingly enough, Heidegger is here compared unfavorably with Hegel, for whom, as Nishitani writes, “human activity is from the beginning bound up with ‘death.’”
59. Ibid., p. 273. In this context it becomes clear that Nishitani is trying to work out a notion of man in all his bareness as mere “bodily existence” (shintai no seizon), but what is equally noteworthy is that such bodily existence represents for him precisely the opening for ethics, or what he calls the “subject as ‘ethicality’” (‘rinrisei’ toshite no shutai) (p. 256).
60. See for example Ridatsu to idō: Bataille, Blanchot, Duras (Tokyo: Serika Shobō, 1997), pp. 7–18.