Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity

Translation and Subjectivity PUBLIC WORLDS Edited by Ben Lee and Dilip Gaonkar VOLUME 3 Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity-. On "Japan" and Cultural Nationalism VOLUME 2 Ackbar Abbas, Hontj Kont): Culture and the Politics of Disappearance VOLUME 1 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions oj Globalization N A O K I S A K A I Translation and Subjectivity On "Japan" and Cultural Nationalism Foreword by Me a g h a n Morris PUBLIC WORLDS, VOLUME 3 UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS MINNEAPOLIS LONDON Copyright 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota Chapter 1 first appeared in Japanese translation in Gendai Sbisd, no. 859 (January 1996): 250-78,- reprinted with acknowledgment of Iwanami Shoten and by permission of the author. Chapter 2 first appeared in Shakai Katjaku no Hobo, vol. 3 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1993), pp. 1—37; reprinted with acknowledgment of Iwanami Shoten and by permission of the author. Chapter 3 first appeared in boundary 2, vol. 18, no. 3 (fall 1991): 157-90, and in Japanese translation in Sbisd, no. 797 (November 1990): 102-36; reprinted by permission of Duke University Press and with acknowledgment of Iwanami Shoten and the author. Chapter 4 first appeared in Discours social/Social Discourse, vol. 6, nos. 1-2 (1994): 89-114, and in Japanese translation in JokydK, vol. 3, no. 10 (December 1992): 82—117; reprinted with acknowledgment of Jokyo Publishers, Tokyo, and by permission of the author. Chapter 5 first appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 87, no. 3 (summer 1988): 475-504, and in Japanese translation in Gendai Shisd, vol. 15-15 (December 1987): 184—207; reprinted by permission of Duke Univer- sity Press and with acknowledgment of Seito-sha, Tokyo, and by permission of the author. Chapter 6 first appeared in Sent/a Nibon no Seisbin-shi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988), pp. 310-34; reprinted with acknowledgment of Iwanami Shoten and by permission of the author. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans- mitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sakai, Naoki, 1946- Translation and subjectivity : on Japan and cultural nationalism / Naoki Sakai ,• Foreword by Meaghan Morris. p. cm. — (Public worlds) : v. 3) Includes index. ISBN 0-8166-2862-9 (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-8166-2863-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) I.Japan—Intellectual life. I. Title. II. Series. DS821.S2413 1997 952—dc21 97-11443 CIP The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. For Gail This page intentionally left blank Contents Foreword Meagban Morris ix Acknowledgments xxiii Introduction 1 1 Distinguishing Literature and the Work of Translation: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictfe and Repetition without Return 18 2 The Problem of "Japanese Thought": The Formation of "Japan" and the Schema of Cofiguration 40 3 Return to the West/Return to the East: Watsuji Tetsuro's Anthropology and Discussions of Authenticity 72 4 Subject and/or Sbutai and the Inscription of Cultural Difference 117 5 Modernity and Its Critique: The Problem of Universalism and Particularism 153 6 Death and Poetic Language in Postwar Japan 177 Notes 193 Index 223 vii This page intentionally left blank Foreword Meatjhan Morris In a previous book by Naoki Sakai, Voices of the Past-. The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse, there is a wonderful passage about a subject with which I am entirely unacquainted, the ethics of Ito Jinsai—a seventeenth-century Confucian scholar and critic of Song rationalism-— that disconcerts and delights me with a sense of partial familiarity. Ex- pounding the conception of sociality in the Song philosophy of mind, Sakai notes that the primordial agreement of Zhu Xi's ideal community as- sumed "a transparency of communication comparable to the face of a clear mirror" secured by subduing the "dust" of materiality, the "trace" (in Ito Jin- sai's terms) of all the accidents, surprises, blockages, and sheer bodily en- ergy of actual social encounters: "as though incommensurability ought not to have been there, as though it were somewhat outrageous and morbid to admit that one cannot actually know another's mind."' More than the structuring contrast between idealist and materialist philosophies that guides me through the passage (I learn that Ito situated virtue outside the mind, in social relationships with others and in the "actual execution of social action"), the phrase "somewhat outrageous and morbid" jolts my imagination. Bypassing any timidity about extrapolat- ing from a comparison of two modes of Confucianism equally new to me, it irresistibly sets me thinking about the prim dust-busters of the Anglo- ix American academy today—those so outraged by any sort of "opacity" in a text, any "obscurity" clouding (from them) the point of an argument, any "dense" talk of textuality in relation to practical activities, that they can bear no serious discussion of the social grit of incomprehension as an in- trinsic rather than an incidental factor in communication. Certainly, few advocates today of "unruffled empathetic transference" (as Sakai calls it in this new book) might agree with Zhu Xi that the mind's interior is equivalent to the totality of the universe in its rationality,- achieving conformity with corporate formats of thought is these days am- bition enough. They simply prefer not to make a fuss about "incommensurability",- to get on with things as though contingency and otherness can be rendered immaterial to the conduct of social life, and as though transparency and reciprocity were possible between people of goodwill. So what strikes them as morbid about discursively reflexive work in the hu- manities ("theory") is its habit of emphasizing instead of ignoring the apo- ria of "another's mind" as the problem arises in diverse forms—often trail- ing clouds of discomfiting social and historical dust—in the everyday life of scholarship. From this perspective, there is more to the famous opacity of theory than a convoluted syntax or a taste for tainting plain English prose with dense dollops of Latin. Theory's opacity is more incorrigibly a matter of foregrounding whatever smudges in practice transparency of communication and ruffles the smoothness of professional exchanges. Complicating activity with paralyzing talk of ambivalence and undecidability, queru- lously finding differences rumpling every situation, endlessly wondering "what are we doing?" and worrying "who is 'we'?" theory itself is a "dusty" practice: an irritant or, worse, a divisive agent in an academy streamlined for speedy information flow and efficient knowledge production. By mak- ing people think too much about the conditions of their practical agency— about the subject as shutai, in Sakai's philosophical vocabulary—theory ob- scures the clear objects of study required by responsible scholarly work. Returning for a moment to Voices of the Past, I find that this detour has taken me no great distance from Sakai's account of how Song rationalism pathologized the very possibility of admitting heterogeneity and contingency as material facts of life,- it may bring me closer to appreciating the otherness of Song rationalism. Zhu Xi's argument gained, Sakai says, rhetorical force by proceeding as though incommensurability "ought not to have been there" in its perfectly ordered world: "it persuaded readers to accept the image of what would happen if communality were not there and convinced them that such a situation would never ensue." Now, I well Foreword X know the device of hinting that the stability of the world as we know it de- pends on sustaining in communities a communal sense of cohesion. How- ever, no argument in the world known to me could carry conviction by rendering harmony primordial and cataclysm impossible. The hints I hear gain their force as threats from an already accepted image of chaos as cos- mic in scale, and disaster as ever ready to ensue from the ordinary disor- ders of modernity. Yet this is how jeremiads against theory are able to sound convincing when they pathologize the activity of taking seriously a heterogeneity and a power of contingency widely agreed to be "there",- volatile forces in an inherently dangerous world, they are best observed by an uninvolved epis- temic subject (sbukan) operating at immense distance, "as though" from another planet. In this mode of containment, otherness and incommensurability may be "there" but not in "this" enunciative practice, "this" discipline, "this" community. Hence the resonance of the hint, its threat: what might happen if communality were not bere7 This is the sort of question that has prompted apparently sober schol- ars in recent years to credit assorted theoretical practices with nation- wrecking powers beyond the wildest dreams of theory's most unworldly proponents. Given the excesses of such polemics, it is easier now to ridicule the fear impelling this question than to begin to answer it—as Sakai does in Translation and Subjectivity—in a positive spirit. Ridiculing the fears of others, of course, can be a way of avoiding one's own. Anxiety about "what might happen" immediately seems less absurd if the question is rephrased as a demand for a practical image of non-"communal" sociality, for example: how is it possible to create a transnational space of debate that crosses linguistic as well as racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, and religious boundaries? Such a space certainly seems desirable, as existing national modes of regulating community are reshaped by the very forces of economic and technological change that are rendering so uncertain traditional ideals of distance and separation between a scholar and "his" objects of study, once there to be talked about, now here and talking back.

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