The Nation, Sublime and Sublimating

Ian Balfour (bio)

A review of Karatani, Kōjin. Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud. Translated by Jonathan E. Abel, Hiroki Yoshikuni, and Darwin H. Tsen, Oxford UP, 2017.

Kōjin Karatani has long been a distinctive, powerful voice in critical theory on the global or quasi-global stage, a key mediator between Eastern and Western thought, a distinguished historian and critic of Japanese literature, and an incisive, agile thinker of Marxism in an expanded field. He is almost equally at home in philosophy, political economy, literature, and history proper. Karatani’s intellectual range is vast. He is one of few people who could plausibly take on, elsewhere, so immense a topic as “the structure of world history,” as the title of that volume of his has it.

The essays collected in this volume—though it’s not just a “collection”—stretch back to the early 1990s, and form the start of an arc in Karatani’s work to the ongoing present. Karatani proposes that we focus more on processes and effects of circulation than on production, at least as classically conceived. In his view, the historical dynamics of capitalism—more late capitalism than early or middle—have unfolded in such a way as to make circulation more crucial a matter and topic than it had been before. He has been arguing, moreover, for a mode of transcritique conjoining, first, the two not-usually-thought-to-be-so-compatible figures of Marx and Kant, a procedure he adopts in this book with Kant and Freud, if in a less thoroughgoing fashion than in his major study under that rubric.

The subtitle of the volume is a little misleading. Kant and Freud are only front and center in one essay, important in a couple, and a looming presence in others. For better or worse, theoretical studies are almost guaranteed a wider audience than ones focused on one country or a circumscribed area, however crucial in the world system or compelling in itself that nation or area might be. As it happens, the very conjunction of broad-ranging, resonant reflections on nation, empire, and aesthetics together with focused analyses of individual intellectuals, institutions, and problematics mainly located in Japan, is one of the strengths of the book, with the two differently weighted endeavors supplementing each other to the benefit of both. (This translation of Karatani’s study is published in a series called “Global Asias.”)

Karatani contends, following somewhat in the train of Benedict Anderson’s pioneering Imagined Communities, that the Marxist tradition has generally been ham-fisted or oblivious or in denial about the force of the nation and nations and, more particularly, that it has denied the constitutive function of imagination in their construction. Nations as such are entities that contain class tensions, struggles, and contradictions within them, however differently these struggles and more might be negotiated. (Japan’s distinctive national/state history comes into play here, as the nation of Karatani’s greatest scrutiny and expertise, not least in its overdetermined relations to China and Korea, which extend down to the charged status of the seemingly “micro” matter of the provenance of what written characters are in use and what not.) One of the key contentions shaping Karatani’s work is that what he calls the “trinity” of nation-state-capital is a kind of Borromean knot, one that cannot be untied. That trinity is coeval and coterminous with the slippery, moving-target notion of “modernity”—but not so slippery for Karatani. The coupling of state and capital occurred, in Karatani’s view, in the era of absolute monarchy. The nation joined capital already in progress. The first benchmark moment for the historical trinity emerges in England’s Glorious Revolution, as monarchy becomes constitutional. Other nations follow, in staggered fashion. The more advanced capitalism is, the more the nation and state are joined at the hip as nation-state.

The nation is, in the beginning, not a given. Not given until it is given. There is nothing particularly natural—despite the notion of birth built in to the etymology of the word—about the nation, even if the configurations of some nations are shaped, as Fichte and others argued, by natural forces such as rivers or mountains, as if they were natural borders. Karatani is suspicious of claims, such as Habermas’s, that language is the constitutive, unifying force of the nation. (And he is, in this volume’s chapter on “Nation-State and Linguistics,” in turn critical, via an appeal to Saussure, of certain strains of Japanese linguistics that imagine language to be natural, conceived of in terms of roots, branches, families and the like.) The nation takes shape in the ruins of empire, to borrow a phrase from Volney, and can still be “imperialistic,” Karatani maintains, without being of the order of empire.

To make sense of the nation (by definition, for him, a phenomenon of modernity), Karatani turns not just to Benedict Anderson’s generative analysis of nations but further back to the late eighteenth century, to Adam Smith’s notions of empathy and understanding in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and especially to Kant for his articulation of the imagination as mediator between sensibility and understanding. As such, the (Kantian) imagination is a faculty whose products are both historical and aesthetic (the latter, if only in the baseline sense of being of the order of representation) and its exemplary, consequent product is, in this historical moment, the nation. Karatani makes much, in this book and in his The Structure of World History, of the fact that the nation comes into its own at the end of the eighteenth century—in itself a claim also made by Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm—at the very same time that philosophy is “discovering”¹ the imagination in a positive fashion. It’s true the coincidence is striking, though it’s not as if anyone needed philosophy to confirm what was already the case in discourse about the nation in the Enlightenment period and after.

Karatani is gently critical of Anderson’s paradigm of the imagined community, not because it is wrong but rather because it is somewhat reductive in its notion of imagination and does not go far enough.² Whereas Anderson, in a chapter of his later The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World, provided an account of how the nation tends to tell itself that it is “good”³—a kind of predictable group narcissism—Karatani has pertinently repeated recourse to the notion of the sublime, one of the two (and really only two, in Kant and Burke) aesthetic modes whose articulation with the imagination organizes the whole of Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgement in the third Critique.⁴ Not only does this sublime discourse of the nation fit well with what plays out in texts about the nation a little before and after 1800 (Burke, Wollstonecraft, Fichte, and more), the dynamics of it are well suited to be set in dialogue with Freud’s work. It is the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, with its enigmatic articulation of the death drive, Jokes [Der Witz] and Their Relation to the Unconscious, with its attention to striking conjunctions of pleasure and unpleasure, and essays such as “Why War?” and “Timely Reflections on War and Death,” perhaps the places in Freud where the state most visibly rears its head and where one finds a specific sort of trauma for which the nation is a defining factor. (In Anderson’s Imagined Communities it’s determinate for the nation that so many people are willing to die for what might be understood as an arbitrary construct.)

It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature or the History of (Un?)Consciousness to recognize the Freudian superego as a kind of perfect Kantian non-thing in itself, so to speak, a powerful force that sits in judgement, as do so many modalities of reason in Kant. (Freud, Karatani points out, casts the psyche as a courtroom, very much as Kant does. And Freud himself explicitly aligned the Oedipus complex with Kant’s categorical imperative.) In his understanding of how the aesthetic works, Kant presents the judging function as (even) pre-cognitive, before proceeding to the higher sort of judgements executed by reason on the far side of sublime disruption, with its telltale mixture of or oscillation between pleasure and unpleasure (which Kant collapses to a single notion: “negative pleasure,” negative Lust). It’s no wonder that Karatani can profitably toggle back and forth between Kant and Freud, laying out the dynamics of the nation as a sublime object of ideology—not to coin a phrase—which just might issue, in a certain triumph of reason, a product of what is, in small way, a triumph of Kant’s and Freud’s own reason, on the other side of their dark insights and critical rigor.

The various chapters more resolutely focused on Japan and Japanese discourse treat the nation as a (strategically conceived) totality, internally divided, and rather more beset upon by surrounding nations than has long been suggested by the myth of Japanese insularity. The chapter on “History As Museum” is an eye-opener to someone like me—only sketchily versed in Japanese culture (some novels, lots of films, the odd general history and scholarly study)—and it shows Karatani as a fine analyst of both sides of the world clunkily called East and West, categories which nonetheless have their pertinence for Karatani’s set of reflections. Here his precise topic is the scholars Okakura Kakuzō (author of the famous Book of Tea from 1906, written in Boston!) and Ernest Fenollosa, the American art historian, and the institutions for which they were foundational or central, especially The Tokyo School of Fine Arts. The empirical fact that both scholars, like Karatani, worked both sides of the street, as it were, in Japan and the USA, is only one small index of how aesthetics and imperial politics in both parts of the world—but France too is in play via Impressionism—are mutually implicated in dialectical and not-so-self-evident ways.⁵ Karatani can show, strikingly, that certain forms of Japanese art, considered traditional in the “home” culture, could count as avant-garde in the West. The converse is also true: what counted at some moments as progressive in Japan was then received in the West as if traditional for Japan. Go figure. In fact Karatani does go figure it out, by situating the circulation of art in a nexus of commercial and historical forces, all of which point to the not-exactly-ontological status of the work of art. Karatani deftly unsettles a good many conceptions of what is—especially from the outside—understood as tradition in Japan.⁶ (This entails something that is rather different from the familiar story about how what starts out as avant-garde can over time become mainstream.) Art, for Karatani, is a medium of national consciousness, from within and without, and the museum is a privileged site for it in more ways than one, often standing-in, more or less violently, as a synecdoche of national culture in and beyond a given artistic medium or two or three. The museum allows for a spatial articulation of history, something that, in Okakura’s case, unfolds at the end of the nineteenth century (on the cusp of the Imperial constitution being promulgated), and takes the shape of a teleological narrative derived from Hegel via Fenollosa. Karatani ascribes to Okakura nothing less than the invention of the East via his discourse on art (72)! It’s an inverted Hegelianism, not remotely Eurocentric, and one that appeals to the oneness of Asia, not a nationalism but a kind of imperialism sans empire from within Japan, itself conceived, in Karatani’s analysis, as a kind of museum of history.

An essay on the aftermath of Edward Said’s Orientalism explores that massively influential argument with an eye to the ways dynamics diagnosed by Said play out specifically in East Asia, under and not under western eyes. Karatani is concerned to expose especially how, with respect to the various nations of East Asia, a scientific gaze from a position of condescension is coupled with aesthetic judgements of admiration and respect, but with the latter bracketed (in a bad way) from the world in which that art is made and received. Respect, a category of the Kantian sublime, has been shown to be, not least by psychoanalytically minded critics such as Sarah Kofman, a double-edged phenomenon, by no means all sweetness and light (as Kofman shows for eighteenth century philosophical discourse about women, much of it officially in a mode of respect that nonetheless undermines, brackets, or cordons off the objects of putative respect). Karatani returns to the era of high aesthetic theory, in the wake of Baumgarten, to invoke again Kant and especially the sublime to argue that the aesthetics of the period in general brackets the world, from the famous notion of disinterestedness on. Karatani contends that the colonialist and imperialist postures are less dismissive of the art of polities under their sway than they are appreciative and respectful. These latter gestures, however, are problematic to the extent that they tend to cordon off the aesthetic, as if a thing unto itself, divorced from the world in which it lives and breathes and has it being. In this context, Karatani turns again to Okakura, in Japan’s imperial era, and to the practice of handicraft. Here Okakura is singing “the praises of anti-modernism and anti-industrial capitalism,” but in a posture that Karatani calls “modern and colonial” (89). A similar but more open set of impulses is registered in the work of Yanagi Sōsetsu—William Morris is something like his Western counterpart—whose progressive character takes the form of an openness to Korean art, in the overdetermined agon of neighbouring cultures. It’s a resistance to Said’s general paradigm which nonetheless helps make sense of the “Orient” from within, an internal differentiation separating itself from what Karatani glosses as “myopic nationalism.”

The final chapters chart the changing historical situation of language in Japan in the shadow of the nation-state. Karatani has argued that the nation-state emerges after and from empire with a certain imperative, via language, for homogeneity but also, in Japan’s case, for a willed independence from the written form of the formerly imperial language. The complicated history of written characters and spoken sounds results in the singular situation that Karatani describes thus: “Perhaps nowhere other than in Japan exists a group of people which distinguishes the origin of a word by using various kinds of characters” (124), noting that this has been the case for a thousand years. The system of written characters is such that, even if internalized in speech, the foreignness of Chinese characters is retained in writing. “[E]verything foreign,” Karatani concludes, extravagantly, “is preserved in Japan” (125). It’s as if Walter Benjamin’s theory of a just translation—which preserves the foreign in the target language—is embodied in Japanese writing generally.

In Karatani’s hands, the impurity of Japanese and of each Asian language under his scrutiny displays difference and so calls up something that transcends the particular form the given language takes at a given time. Openness to the other is embedded in these languages (and perhaps in languages in general), all but demanding a going-beyond of the given. The parole of the moment conjures up something on the way to the universal. The penultimate essay on “Nation-State and Linguistics” ends with a call to arms for the United Nations to “initiate a project to create a universal language.” It’s a circumscribed linguistic—which is also to say representational (but not only) and aesthetic (but not merely)—version of Karatani’s persistent imagining, in this book and elsewhere, of a world republic, a kind of association that returns society to an economy of reciprocity and gift. Karatani’s vision is not of some revamped League of Nations or United Nations, but of the Kantian imaginary of a world republic, as sketched out in the hypothetical “Perpetual Peace” essay. It’s a global configuration that transcends the “transcendental illusions” that characterized the individual nations in the first place. To read in the pages of such a hard-nosed theorist, a lifelong student of Marx and admirer of de Man, of a world republic to come, one is prompted to ask: is it for real? Is it a kind of Kantian regulative idea, not imagined ever to be known or realized but something to think with? Something to orient oneself in the world without a world republic? Or a cosmopolitan version of what even Karatani’s Freud, the Freud of the dark war essays, can call “the hope of the world”?

Footnotes

1. Karatani’s term of “discovery” is perhaps borrowed from or indebted to Hannah Arendt’s comment on the greatness of Kant’s “discovery” of the imagination in The Critique of Pure Reason. See her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (80). For a more recent, powerful take on the imagination in Kant and its political stakes, see the opening chapter (“Knowledge of Freedom”) in Fred Moten’s Stolen Life, especially pp. 1-15.

2. On one point, Karatani’s critique of Anderson seems to me off target, namely when he charges that for Anderson the nation is a kind of “ideal superstructure” (Nation 38).

3. The final chapter in The Spectre of Comparisons is titled “The Goodness of Nations.” This rich and varied collection, a great supplement to Imagined Communities, does not seem to have garnered all that much attention.

4. In his valuable introduction to this volume, Hiroki Yoshikuni highlights at some length the relation of Karatani’s analysis to that of Paul de Man’s various essays on the sublime. Though I think Karatani’s thinking is indeed shaped somewhat by de Man’s analysis of the stakes of the sublime, I don’t think he follows de Man in seeing what Yoshikuni points to as de Man’s diagnosis of the “deep, perhaps fatal break or discontinuity” at the center of the third Critique (79). Karatani also has a far more positive sense of the Kantian imagination as something positive than does de Man. It’s a curio of intellectual history that, as Yoshikuni recounts—and as I happened to hear from Karatani himself prior to the publication of Nation and Aesthetics—four days before de Man’s death, de Man had agreed to be interviewed by Karatani precisely about the wartime years in Belgium. The whole history of the reaction to the scandal that resulted from the revelations of de Man’s collaborationist and other activity of the period might have been utterly different had that interview taken place. Karatani chose for a long time not to make this incident public in writing.

5. Okakura writes in The Book of Tea: “You may laugh as us for ‘having too much tea’ but may we not suspect that you of the West have ‘no tea’ in your constitution?” (12). The context is a “discussion” of European imperialism and the “absurd cry of the Yellow Peril.” One might think Okakura himself guilty of too clunky a notion of the East but he earns it, so to speak, via his knowledge of analysis of the non-uniqueness of Japanese culture within its proximate geographical orbit, arguing, for example, for the formative influence of Chinese and Indian Buddhism in and on Japan, among other things.

6. Various parts of the volume sketch out the heightened attention to canon and what counts as traditional within Japan, from the analysis of how national classics, kokugaku, functioned in the Tokugawa shogunate and beyond. Eric Cazdyn, in a work partly indebted to Karatani, shows that Japanese culture puts a premium on filming its literary canon as a way of keeping a certain tradition alive and of having the film industry provide just that sort of content. He notes: “Almost every work in the canon of modern Japanese prose fiction has been made into film, usually more than once,” and proceeds to analyze that distinctive tradition (88).

Works Cited

• Anderson, Benedict. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, South East Asia and the World. Verso, 1998.
• Arendt, Hannah. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. Edited by Roland Beiner, U of Chicago P, 1982.
• Cazdyn, Eric. The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan. Duke UP, 2002.
• De Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology. U of Minnesota P, 1996.
• Karatani, Kōjin. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Productions to Modes of Exchange. Translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs, Duke UP, 2014.
• Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Duke UP, 2018.
• Okakura, Kakuzō. The Book of Tea. Putnam, 1906.