Dislocation of the West/July 2014
DRAFT
Asian Theory and European Humanity
- On the Question of Anthropological Difference -1
Naoki Sakai
Cornell University
If not a completely oxymoronic, the pairing of theory and Asia, as in Asian
Theory for instance, may strike many readers as a sort of quirk or a
defamiliarizing trick. At best it can have the effect of exposing the presumption
often taken for granted in fields dealing with some aspects of what we
understand in the name of Asia, namely that theory is something we normally do
not expect of Asia. Precisely because this sense of oddity that is invoked when
theory is associated with Asia is no more than a certain presumptive or
conditional reflex, neither theory nor Asia receives rigorous scrutiny, and both
are by and large left rather vague in conceptual articulation in this instance.
Rarely have we asked ourselves why we do not feel unsettled about this feeling
of incongruity, where this discomfort derives from, or how one could possibly
explicate reasons for our taking this underlying presumption for granted. As
long as it remains presumptive and refuses to be further articulated conceptually,
I suspect that it turns into something one might well call a ‘civilizational spell,’
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and it will continue to cast a curse on us. In other words, we will remain haunted
by this presumption about theory and Asia. In this chapter you will find a brief
meditation on how we might disentangle from this spell.
So, why do we feel odd about the unexpected combination of theory and
Asia in the first place? Or, with more emphasis on our analytical attentiveness,
how can we manage to evade a sense of oddity about the fact that we are
accustomed to feeling strange about the combination of theory and Asia?
It must be said that there have been some attempts to explicate why
theory and Asia do not go hand in hand; quite a few writers have attempted to
offer some reasons or justification for it even though, since the end of Second
World War, only a comparatively small number of openly conservative or
reactionary thinkers have dared to justify why Asians or non-Europeans are
disqualified to speak or conceptualize theoretically. Yet, as the common sense
prevalent in academic institutions in the North Atlantic as well as Asia holds it, it
has been widely upheld that what is called “theory” is somewhat proper to
Europe, and later, as the United States assumed its global stature, to North
America as well.
In the early twentieth century, a number of prominent intellectuals
addressed the question of Europe’s commitment to theory. Immediately Paul
Valéry and Edmund Husserl come to mind. For example, Husserl argued that
Indian or Chinese philosophy could hardly be regarded as authentically
‘philosophical’ because the life attitude that Indian and Chinese philosophers
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embodied was not genuinely ‘theoretical.’2 For Husserl, Europe was not merely a
geographic category; the geographic territory ascribed to it is far from adequate
to define it. Unlike ‘empirical anthropological types’ such as the Chinese, Indian,
Eskimos, or even the Gypsies roaming around territorial Europe, he continued,
Europe is a historical unity of peoples who shares a certain kinship or a certain
modality of being human, a European humanity, which distinguishes them from
humanity in general. And it is absolutely impossible to conceive of this European
‘man’ without his commitment to theory, which has been handed down in the
name of philosophy from the ancient Greeks through to the 20th century. Of
course, here is an archetypical declaration of anthropological difference, without
which the idea of European humanity would not be intelligible.
For Valéry and Husserl, theory was undoubtedly something that
characterized the European Spirit or the spiritual shape of Europe. They both
referred to the crisis of theoretical or philosophical reason on the grounds that
the Europeans cannot fashion themselves as such without a commitment to
theory. What they perceived in the 1920’s and 30’s was a crisis of the European
man, the wide-spread reality all over Europe that Europeans were ceasing to be
European in this specific regard. In other words, they were horrified that the
Europeans were getting less and less distinguishable from such anthropological
types such as the Chinese and the Indians.
To my knowledge, the statement that we normally do not expect theory
from Asia has been put forth on a number of occasions, and some people –
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Valéry and Husserl included – have wanted to raise this issue as part of their
assessment of the contemporary world.
What is significant about the historical mission of European humanity for
Husserl, for instance, is that, in his late works, notably his posthumous work
collected and compiled under the title of the Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, the entire venture of his phenomenology was
reformulated as a historical movement of the European spirit, as a teleological
project that was at the same time the recourse to the past origin of European
humanity on the one hand and the infinite ecstatic self-overcoming in the future
on the other. Clearly just before his death and under the extreme political
adversity, Husserl wanted to present his phenomenology as a historical
embodiment of the mission for European humanity, and attempted to speak as
the ultimate representative of the spiritual shape of Europe. Yet, his Eurocentric
mission seems plagued with a number of political and philosophical
contradictions, which I would like to explore in order to indicate the issues
involved in this book, Dislocation of the West.
Let me start by offering a brief historical assessment of Husserl’s
ambiguity about racism and the international background of the early 1930’s. We
cannot overlook that he wrote about the crisis of European humanity in the
political climate of fascism. It is more than probable that he offered his diagnosis
of the crisis of European Sciences as a condemnation of fascisms in Europe.
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As soon as the Nazi Party dominated the Reichstag of Germany in March
1933, it passed a number of legislations including the Law for the Restoration of
the Professional Civil Service. These were measures in Germany aimed at
excluding anti-Nazi and non-Aryan elements from public institutions such as
universities, schools, the judiciary, and the civil service. These Nazi policies were
in accordance with the populist outcry of “Europe for the Europeans,” that was
spreading all over Europe around that time. Indeed the life of Edmund Husserl,
an internationally renowned philosopher at Freiburg University, was deeply
affected even though he had already been in retirement from 1928 from the
position of professor in philosophy, a position inherited by his equally renowned
student, Martin Heidegger, himself a Nazi Party member. Being a Jew born in
Moravia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Husserl was denied access to
university libraries and was no longer allowed to publish in Germany as a result
of the newly-implemented Nazi policies.
The rise of National Socialism in Germany, or more generally of Fascism
in many European countries, Latin America, and Japan, provoked a widespread
fear, not only within Europe and the Americas, but also in East Asia. As I have
discussed elsewhere,3 in Japan, for instance, a nation-wide anti-Fascist movement
was organized against the dismissal of Takigawa Yukitori, only two months after
the Nazi ascendency to the national state. Minister of Education Hatoyama Ichirô
– grandfather of Hatoyama Yukio, a recent prime minister of Japan (2009-10) –
dismissed Professor Takigawa Yukitori from the Faculty of Law at the Kyoto
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Imperial University for his alleged sympathy with Marxist scholarship and for
his supposedly critical attitude toward family morality. In the same month of the
same year - May 1933 - Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede, rector’s address, was broadly
covered in Japanese mass media, and leading intellectuals of the day, Tanabe
Hajime, Miki Kiyoshi, Tosaka Jun, Shinmei Masamichi and others wrote
alarmingly about the rise of Fascism in Europe. It is easy to detect the sense of
urgency with which Japanese intellectuals received the news of a Fascist
resurgence - around this time ‘fassho’ was first coined in the Japanese vernacular
and began to be used to denote the contemporary global trends towards
ultranationalism and the theories of racial purity - and, for the rest of the 1930’s,
the topic of Fascism continued to dominate Japanese mass media. The public
debates about Fascism continued until the Japanese State officially endorsed the
leading regimes of Fascist ideologies, Germany and Italy, when it signed the Axis
Pact in September, 1940, and a few months later other countries including those
of the so-called Clerical Fascism – Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Bulgaria, and
Croatia – joined this Pact, although the Japanese leadership was hesitant to
openly endorse the ethnic nationalism and racist doctrines prevalent, particularly
in National Socialism. Even during the war, Japanese intellectuals and reformminded bureaucrats - except for a few ethnic nationalists such as Watsuji Tetsurô
and Nishitani Keiji, whose presence was particularly significant in the history of
postwar Japan - remained critical of the racial policies of Nazi Germany and the
anti-Semitism of Clerical Fascism. Of course, Nazi’s outright disdain for the
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yellow race made it hard for the Japanese to accept Nazism. But, more
importantly, many Japanese intellectuals could not accept the basic tenets of
National Socialism because they were concerned about the multi-ethnic imperial
order that Japan was creating in Greater East Asia; they advocated the ideas of
the East Asian Community - and later the Greater East Asian Co-prosperity
Sphere - by claiming that it was Japan’s mission to liberate Asian peoples from
the shackles of white supremacy.
In May and November of 1935, Edmund Husserl was invited to give
lectures in Vienna and Prague. According to Ludwig Landgrebe, Walter Biemel
and others involved in the deciphering and compilation of stenographic
manuscripts and notes left behind by Husserl, these lectures marked the
beginning of the unfinished work we now know as the Crisis of European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology. One may well recognize in this set of
manuscripts a further elaboration of the themes Husserl had already discussed in
Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology based upon the lectures,
which he delivered in Paris in 1929. What distinguished the Vienna and Prague
lectures from his ones in Paris was his open confrontation with the political
climate of the time. In Cartesian Meditations, Husserl addressed the question of
modernity in philosophy, while in the Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, he reorganized his discussion of a set of topics
concerning philosophy’s historicity under a new directive or problematic that he
summarized as ‘the crisis of European humanity.’
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It is not hard to understand why Husserl had to shift his emphasis
between his lectures in Paris and those in Vienna. They took place in the midst of
the period ‘Austorofascism’ (1934-1938). Fascist fervor broke out not only in Italy
and Germany but also in many parts of Europe - Portugal and Austria - which
would be followed by Romania, Greece, Croatia, Spain and France. In Portugal,
Antonio Salazar became prime minister and introduced an anti-parliamentarian
and authoritarian constitution in 1932. In May 1934, Engelbert Dollfuss, then
Chancellor, suspended parliamentary government in Austria eight days before
Adolf Hitler did the same thing in Germany, and in the following year Dollfuss
succeeded in replacing liberal parliamentary democracy with the doctrine of a
Christian German corporate state. In July 1936, a civil war broke out between the
Republicans who received support from the Soviet Union and Mexico and the
Nationalists led by Francisco Franco, supported by Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany
and Portugal, and Austria’s Second Republican government. Eventually Spain
would be seized under what historians call Clerical Fascism. Countries such
Slovenia, Croatia, and Romania would follow suit, and violent anti-Semitism
spread all over Europe. On 10 June 1936, a month before the Spanish Civil War
started, Moritz Schlick, known as the founding father of Logical Positivism and
the Vienna Circle, was assassinated for his affiliation with Jewish intellectuals by
a deranged student. This was a year after Husserl’s lecture in that city. A
Catholic national newspaper Schönere Zukunft responded to the Schlick
assassination, by insisting: “The Jews should be allowed their Jewish philosophy
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in their own Jewish cultural institute! But in the chairs of philosophy in the
Viennese university in Christian-German Austria, there belong Christian
philosophers.”4 It was under such a political climate that Husserl delivered his
lectures in Prague and Vienna. Husserl was a victim of the populist demand for
“Europe for the Europeans,” but he did not hesitate to endorse the rhetoric of
Eurocentric exclusionism when it was an issue of the spirit of European
Humanity.5
Before involving ourselves in the reading of these attempts, however, we
ought to return to the statement in order to clarify the sense of oddity radiating
from the presumption contained in it.
That we normally do not expect theory of a person if he or she is of Asia is
in fact a negative corollary of another statement: theory is something that we
normally expect of a person if he or she is of the West or Europe,6 and the
relationship between the first and second statements is generally called
contraposition in logic. Let us note that the first statement implied in this
presumption – we normally do not expect theory if the speaker, thinker or
knower is from Asia, a native of Asia, or a resident in Asia – is not thematically
or primarily about Asia. It is no more than a derivative of the general statement
about the West or Europe rather than about Asia.
*****
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However, as a matter of fact, the derivative character of the first statement
in relation to the second is inherent in the designation ‘Asia’ itself.
As Takeuchi Yoshimi, a sinologist specializing in modern Chinese
literature, observed more than half a century ago, the East – Tôyô, the Chinese
compound for the Orient as opposed to Seiyô, the Occident - which he more or
less assumed to be the representative of the Rest of the world, arrived at its selfconsciousness as a consequence of its defeat by the West or Europe.7 Spending
his college days in Japan in the 1930’s, Takeuchi was immersed in the various
readings about Hegel available then; these ranged from the Marxian reading,
arguably best represented by Lukacs, the Kyoto School readings (Tanabe Hajime,
Miki Kiyoshi, and other philosophers of World History), through to
modernization Hegelianism in Maruyama Masao, four years junior to Takeuchi,
who published during the war but would become a leading figure, of the
intellectual world after Japan’s surrender. It is no surprise that he viewed the
historical destiny of Asia in Hegelian terms.
Negativity, without which reflectivity – not reflex, which illustrates a lack
of reflectivity which is essential for self-consciousness to be accomplished – never
originated in the East, and the absence of reflectivity was certainly implied in
Takeuchi’s word ‘defeat (haiboku).’ He claimed that the East could never be
conscious of itself before it was invaded by Europe. Asia came to its selfconsciousness through its defeat. Only through the acknowledgment of its lost
autonomy, of its dependence upon and subjugation to the West - or only in the
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mirror of the West, so to say8 - could the Rest reflectively acquire its
civilizational, cultural, ethnic, and national identities. Historically the moment of
defeat was actualized in the colonization of Asia, and it is in this respect that the
modernity in Asia is unavoidably a colonial modernity. Takeuchi observed that,
only when Asia was defeated, invaded, penetrated, and subjugated, could she
wake up in modernity, so that, in Asia and for Asia, it is impossible to conceive
of modernity without reference to colonial humiliation.
However, because of his uncompromising faith in the Enlightenment
values of modernity, which could only be concretized in the institutions of the
nation-state, Takeuchi could not envision the future of Asia - and by implication,
the future of the Rest of the world - along a historical trajectory other than that of
historicism. Like many intellectuals of Asia and Europe who had their formative
years in the 1930s, Takeuchi had internalized modern historicism to such an
extent that, for him, an effective struggle against the colonizing forces of the West
could not bypass the creation of national subjectivity. His furtive loyalty to Hegel
prevented him from conceiving any other historical trajectories than that of
historicism in which the actualization and appropriation of modern values must
first require a radical negation of external forces as well as of its internal heritage
of a feudal past. Therefore, to be modern for Asia meant to appropriate the
essence of Western modernity by resisting the West without, and overcoming the
reactionary heritage within. In other words, Asia must modernize itself by
negating its own past as well as the West. Without no resistance to, or negation
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of the West, there was no prospect of modernity for the Rest of the world. Where
else, he would ask, if not in the midst of a struggle against colonial powers and
the oppressive remnants of the past, could one possibly actualize the concrete
and practical senses of liberty, equality, and fraternity?
He diagnosed Japan’s modern history as a case where a genuine
negativity was absent. This perhaps explains his excessive idealization of China.
He thought that, unlike Japan which had imitated the West to the extent of
reproducing its imperialism, China would actualize a truly authentic modernity
by negating not only the West’s intervention but also the remnants of its own
past, such as Confucianism. Yet the dialectic, which he anticipated to lead
historical conflicts forward, could not have made sense unless the externality of
what Asia should resist had been postulated. For peoples in the Rest, then,
modernity was considered a sort of historical movement which spatially
consolidated the unity and substantiality of a political grouping called ‘the
nation’, by negating external forces, while at the same time temporally
constituting itself as a subject, as an agent of self-determination, by continually
overcoming its own past. This is why the dichotomy of ‘development from
within (naihatsu)’ and ‘imposition from without (gaihatsu)’ was the ultimate
criterion for Takeuchi’s evaluation of modernity.9
In a schematization such as the one operating in his discussion of
modernity, the unity of the nation depended upon the externality of what had to
be resisted, which was more often than not mapped onto the cartographic plane.
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Just as with the Japanese invasion of China, that which must be resisted must
come from the ‘outside’ of the presumed integrity of the nation. A nation of Asia,
such as China, was located within the reach of the West, but the West itself was
external to it. The externality of what had to be resisted was thus comprehended
in terms of the geographic distance between Western Europe and Asia. For
Takeuchi, therefore, the West was postulated as an entity external to Asia, and
the possibility that the West could be inherent in the Rest of the world was
deliberately foreclosed. Perhaps, more importantly, we must note the other
aspect of this foreclosure: deliberately excluded from consideration is the
feasibility that the Rest is inherent in the West, the Third world immanent in the
First World. Takeuchi was determined to view the relationship between the West
and the Rest of the world as one of geographic externality, of a border separating
two entities; even though he acknowledged the designation of Asia as an
instance of colonial defeat, nonetheless he refused to comprehend it as a relation
of mutual self-reflectivity, or mirroring. What he was totally blind to was the
truism that so many of those self-fashioned Westerners cannot discard their premodernity or non-European features. The binary of the West and the Rest is
often a matter of class difference and of cultural capital. The differential in the
social positionality most often results from factors such as social class, education,
and cultural capital, the distinction of the West and the Rest is in fact far from
stable. Precisely because of the inherent instability of civilizational identity, the
supposedly fixed characteristic of individual’s physiognomy, linguistic accent or
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geographic place of origins is obsessively sought after to naturalize and
consolidate an individual’s position in the system of classification dictated by the
logic of anthropological difference. This is why, while very perceptive to the
implications of Eurocentricity in so many aspects of life in Asia, Takeuchi could
not detect the workings of what elsewhere I called “the civilizational
transference,” a mutual constitution of desire between the West and the Rest, in
nationalisms in Asia10.
Although Takeuchi was unmistakably critical of the modernization
theory, he could not avoid the cartographic imaginary that serves as a
substratum for knowledge production, namely, the postulate of the area, upon
which the modernization theory invariably relied. Therefore, his insight into
colonial modernity could never go beyond a hierarchy premised upon the
developmental teleology of modernization.
What Takeuchi somewhat short-changed in his discussion about Asia was
the self-reflective postulation of Asia. He failed to acknowledge that, essentially,
Asia exists for the West’s self-recognition. For peoples living in Asia, there used
to be no clear distinction of Asia from Europe. Asia had never been an immediate
designation for the Asians and, therefore, Asia could not have existed for them
prior to the occasion of colonial defeat, an occasion that symbolized the very
moment of negativity deliberately pinpointed by Takeuchi.
Since Greek antiquity, Asia always meant an ecstatic or outward
orientation of Europe; it pointed to an area or people in the east of Hellenes, so
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that it was not expected to designate a fixed geographic location, a closed land
surface or a determinate social group; instead it was meant to serve as a
directional index only from the viewpoint of the Greeks, Europeans or
Westerners. However, it is important to remind ourselves that, in the genealogy
of Western or European civilization, Asia played a little or no meaningful role
from the end of the Roman Empire until the era of Eurocentric modernity, simply
because Europe was no more than a provincial periphery to large metropolitan
civilizations of Islam and Mongolia, and the Chinese and Indian Empires. In
short, there was no such thing as Europe prior to the explosion of the modern
international world and the rise of global capitalism. The idea of the continuity of
the Western civilization itself is dubious because most of what Western Europe
claims today as its heritage from Greco-Roman antiquity was handed down from
Islamic civilizations of the pre-modern eras.
In antiquity Asia referred to the Greeks’ geopolitical neighbours to the
east: in Asia Minor or those along the Tigris and the Euphrates; then those along
the Indus and the Ganges were included, and eventually as Europe expanded its
system of Eurocentric international law through global capitalism and
colonialisms, the notion of Asia would extend to those islands in the East Indies,
peoples under the reign of the Central Kingdom – China – and even as far east as
the Korean peninsula and the islands of Japan. This expansion of Asia and the
term’s versatility amply illustrate the directional character of Asia, that is,
moving away – ex-static, meaning a movement beyond or away from the self 15
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from the presumed position of viewpoint. It marks something reflectively social
and cosmopolitan about how Europe could possibly be identified: is it ever
possible to designate Europe without reference to Africa, Asia and the Americas?
Asia is an open kind of reference, indicating the directional relation of the
viewing subject and the designated object. Of course, the West too is such a
directional designation and, in this respect, the East – the polar opposite of the
West – and Asia are often held to be interchangeable. Thus, when all the
historical nuances and accidents are reduced, Asia simply signifies ‘the East of
Europe.’ Asia’s referential function was based upon Europe’s self-referentiality
in the sense that to refer to Asia is to indicate the position of Europe or the West
self-reflectively.11 It is the very ecstatic nature of the West itself that Asia reflects
upon itself. Neither the West nor the East can be a determinate location; both of
them are a relative designation, so that what is determinate about this relation is
the microphysics of power relations that makes the West and the East appear
somewhat fixed, natural or preordained. What makes the West or the East
determinate is the very conduct that takes place in these power relations at the
very locale in which the West is bordered from the Rest. Nevertheless, neither of
them is arbitrarily determined since, as Antonio Gramsci argued, these relations
are hegemonic.12 Instead of the Gramscian term, however, I want to describe
them in terms of the microphysics of power relations.
Well into the nineteenth century, many in Europe knew that there were
many dynasties, theocracies, traditions and peoples in Asia. It was not expected
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that the Asians themselves knew they were Asians. Europeans called people in
Asia Asians, but they never expected Asians to call themselves Asians. Court
officials serving the Nguyên Dynasty, Samurais of the Matsudaira clan, and
merchants working in the port of Ningbo, must have been aware that they were
expected to recognize themselves as subjects of Emperor Gia Long, of the
Tokugawa shoguns, and of the Qing emperors respectively, but it is unlikely that
they were aware of being Asians. What Takeuchi called ‘defeat’ happened in
Asia from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, as a result of
which bureaucrats in Vietnam, schoolteachers in Japan, and soldiers in China
came to acknowledge that they were all Asians. ‘Defeat’ was not only a matter of
competition or rivalry but of self-recognition and identification. Their identity
was nothing but the consequence of an ‘imposition from without (gaihatsu).’
Furthermore, the ‘defeat’ brought about a distinction between Europe and Asia,
the mutually marked positionalities of Europeans and Asians. And the reign of
these mutually-defining positionalities is often called the ‘colonial power
relation.’ The ‘defeat’ therefore means global modernity according to which the
entire world was reorganized with respect to the modalities of self-recognition.
I do not believe that Takeuchi was entirely negligent of this truth about
the dialectic of self-consciousness for the Asians. He wrote, ‘The Orient
essentially lacks not only the ability to understand Europe but also to understand
itself. What understands the Orient, and so brings it to realization, are those
European elements within Europe. What makes the Orient possible is situated in
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Europe. Not only does Europe become possible in Europe, the Orient also
becomes possible there.’13 Nevertheless, Takeuchi stopped short of an ultimate
cognition of the political reality in which the demarcation of Asia from Europe as
a separate entity, region, people or civilization was not only a consequence of
‘defeat,’ but also the condition in which colonialism is preserved. An inscription
of Asia as a distinct entity from Europe is far from innocent, and a people in Asia
may not be able to dispel colonial power relations even if their national
sovereignty is installed. On the one hand, Asia is a derivative of Europe’s selfreferentiality. On the other hand, the distinction of Asia from Europe is an effect
of exclusionist and discriminatory ‘bordering’ or border inscription. Accordingly,
as soon as the Asians fashion themselves as such, the structure of heteronomous
referentiality has to be manifest in their identity. For the Asians, paradoxically,
the desire for their autonomy requires that they be heteronomous.
In this context, it is absolutely imperative for us to guard against the
typical mistake committed by Husserl and many others: in the spatial
configuration of Europe in relation to the Rest – Asia, Africa and Americas –
Europe should never be postulated as a subject that evolves linearly along the
chronological line from antiquity to the present, that transcends itself to form the
successive life of its own from the past to the future, and that generates its own
living tradition. The West is not an enduring entity; it is an accidental assemblage
of power relations that cannot be synthesized to form an organic unity either
spatially or chronologically. In this respect, it is Europe’s mythological obsession
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with its ancient Greek origin that the spiritual shape of Europe came into focus as
a living tradition and as a teleology with the historical mission to infinitely
transcend itself by recourse to its archaic origin while distinguishing itself from
its exterior.
This mythological teleology of the West or Europe is involved in what I
meant by the derivative character of the statement ‘we normally do not expect
theory of Asia.’ Just as Asia is indicated from the implicit and self-referential
position of Europe or the West, the oddity experienced about theory associated
with Asia is a derivative effect of another statement, namely ‘we normally expect
theory of Europe.’ What we must call into question is this ‘normalcy,’ in the
presumption of which we expect theory to be of Europe or of European origin.
So far I have postponed the mention of two elementary questions; this
negligence may make my argument appear persuasive up to this point. As a
matter of fact, however, I am endorsing neither the autonomy of Asia as an
active agent nor the victimization of Asia under Eurocentrism. What I am asking
is how the civilizational designations of the West, Asia, Europe, and so forth, are
still possible today. The two questions at issue are as follow:
I)
Are ‘we’ always and by definition secondary to or derivative of
‘you’ ontologically, so that the European priority hidden in the
designation ‘Asia’ is a consequence of some disastrous logical or
philosophical mistake? Asia as an indexing function is nothing
abnormal in its derivative and secondary nature; then what is not
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normal would be the modern system of geopolitical naming
according to which the West has enjoyed being the centrality of
the global standard. Does the West not illustrate the inevitable
performativity of indexing, namely, that the centre of the world
could only be designated as the West of somebody else? Is the
West therefore distinguished from such previous global centres
of civilization as the Central Kingdom that claimed itself as the
centre without the regime of self-referentiality so that it could
never have a positive outside, a realm outside the Central
Kingdom? In this respect, the emperor of China once was literally
the son of the Heaven.
II)
If one positively positions oneself as the origin of spontaneity,
will one possibly demarcate the distinction between the self and
the alternate? Regardless of whether it is in dialectics or
psychoanalysis, the self is always a secondary postulate,
posterior either to consciousness (in dialectics) or to the
specularity of an image in the imaginary register (in
psychoanalysis). In this respect, the designation ‘Asia’ behaves
normally, so to say, and the problem of its derivative character,
marked by the legacy of colonial ‘defeat’ derives, not inherently
from the postulation of Asia, but rather from the priority granted
to Europe or the West. There is no question that the mutual
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determination of the West and the Rest involves power relations,
but these should not be construed in terms of activity and
passivity. Power relations that posit the West and Asia as
designees are not governed by the causality of cause and effect,
of spontaneity and receptivity; instead of the logic of causality
(hatarakumono) or effectuating, they are rather organized by the
logic of seeing or reflectivity (mirumono).14
For our management of analysis concerning theory and Asian humanity,
we must shift our focus from Asia to Europe or the West in a sort of counter
movement to Takeuchi Yoshimi’s. For this reason the questions I want to
entertain are only reflectively and indirectly concerned with Asian humanity.
They are these: on what ground was theory considered as being European in
origin? what sort of argument tried to justify the presumption that theory is
something that we expect of Europe or the West? how has this presumption
managed to remain hidden until now? what would follow if the conditions no
longer existed by which we normally expect theory out of Europe or the West? In
other words, how can we possibly assess the disappearance of this civilizational
‘normalcy’ and disenchant ourselves with the civilizational spell?
Now under the scope of theory and Asian humanity, it is possible to view
a number of famous arguments that have attempted to explicate in one way or
another why we somewhat presume that there ought to be some intimate link
between theory – variously talked about under the headings of modern
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rationality, scientific reason, commitment to the spirit of rigor whereby universal
openness to knowledge production has been sustained, incessant return to the
archê of the Greek origins - and Europe or the West: Max Weber’s discussion on
European modernity and Protestant ethic, Paul Valéry’s insights into the crisis of
the European spirit, Edmund Husserl’s inquiries concerning the crisis of
European humanity, and Martin Heidegger’s attempt to rescue Western
metaphysics, as well as many others.
I have drawn tentative examples from the first half of the 20th century in
which the term Europe was gradually replaced by the West. The first half of the
20th century is significant in many respects, since, for the first time, the West or
Europe became a topic of such intense debate. Then it is in the element of crisis
that Europe or the West was acknowledged globally and for the first time as a
domineering centre of the world. But, as soon as it somewhat succeeded in
receiving the legitimacy of the global hegemony, it began to suffer from a
confusionism inherent in its identity. Who are Europeans after all? Where does
the West end, and the Rest of the world start? What constitutes the very border
by which the distinction of the West from the Rest can be drawn?
*****
Christopher GoGwilt notes that the term Europe was called into question
early in the twentieth century when the term the West gained a new rhetorical
force. In reference to Heidegger’s discussion of ‘nihilism’, he shows that, in
22
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
discussing it Nietzsche never ascribed the word Western to it. Citing passages
from Heidegger’s Nietzsche however, GoGwilt writes, ‘Heidegger here translates
Nietzsche’s term European (‘europäish’) into the post-Nietzschean terminology
‘Western history’ (‘abendländischen Geschichte’).’15 Heidegger was lecturing on
Nietzsche in Germany under National Socialism, and his terms are of course
inflected in complex ways by debates of the 1930’s. Yet precisely the distance
between the contested terms of Nietzsche’s Europe and those of Heidegger’s
West indicates that the term Western acquired a rhetorical force between the
1890’s and the 1930’s.’16
After the emergence of such a use of the term the West which originated
from the Russian Slavophile-Westerner controversy over nihilism, GoGwilt
argues, Oswald Spengler could make the following claim about Europe and the
West in his Introduction to The Decline of the West.
The word ‘Europe’ ought to be struck out of history. There is historically
no ‘European’ type .... It is thanks to this word ‘Europe’ alone, and the
complex of ideas resulting from it, that our historical consciousness has
come to link Russia with the West in an utterly baseless unity -- a mere
abstraction derived from the reading of books -- that has led to immense
real consequences.17
A half century later than Nietzsche, Heidegger’s focus was on Western
metaphysics. During the interwar period, there is no doubt that the problem of
theory and the West was implicated in the general question of ‘Europe for the
23
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
Europeans.’ To discriminate Europeans from non-Europeans in Europe was a
daunting task then. But it is also a task that an increasing number of Europeans
want to engage in once again today, after a seventy-year hibernation. We must
never lose sight of the fact that the opposition of the West and the Rest served
then and still does now as a trope whereby to constitute ‘Europe for the
Europeans.’ After the Second World War, implicitly and explicitly, the presumed
center of the West moved westward across the North Atlantic, and Americans
began to claim the throne of the West. Given the tremendous versatility with
which the West has been determined cartographically, ethnically, culturally,
politically, economically and socially, it would not be at all surprising for the
West to shift elsewhere, once again in a few decades, and to the eastern shore of
Eurasian Continent facing the South China Sea, for instance.
However, the endless wandering and dissemination of this floating
designee named the West is not subject-matter for my argument in this chapter.
Instead we should concern ourselves with the question of theory and the West,
with how theory can presumably be the exclusive possession of the West.
*****
By inquiring into the geneaology of colonial modernity, we now begin to
comprehend why theory had to be so intimately associated with the West. There
is a figure of ‘man’ or humanity, yet this humanity was not ‘man’ in general.
24
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
Instead it had to be modified by an adjectival, ‘European’ or ‘Western.’ Thus the
geneaolgical analysis of colonial modernity exposes the participation of a certain
humanism in modernity.
In what underlies the possibility of talking about the modern at all, it is
essential to deal with an other of the modern, the pre-modern, with reference to
which modernity has also been defined in a great many instances. Unless it is
contrasted with the pre-modern, the modern cannot acquire any definitive sense
as a periodic adjectival. This pairing may suggest a chronological order. Yet, it
must be remembered that this order has never been dissociated from the
geopolitical configuration of the world. As is known very well by now, this
basically nineteenth-century historical scheme provides a perspective through
which to comprehend the locations and statuses of nations, cultures, traditions,
and races in a systematic manner. The historico-geopolitical pairing of the premodern and the modern has been one of the major organizing apparatuses of
academic discourse in which modernity, modernization, and even modernism
have been discussed. The emergence in the 1980’s of the third and enigmatic
term, the postmodern, possibly testified not so much to a transition from one
period to another as to the shift or transformation of our discourse as a result of
which the supposed indisputability of the historico-geopolitical pairing - modern
and pre-modern - has become increasingly problematic and unsettling. Of
course, it was not the first time the validity of this differentiation was challenged.
Yet, surprisingly enough, the pre-modern – modern opposition has managed to
25
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
survive many challenges, and it would be extremely optimistic to believe it has
finally been found ineffectual. Nevertheless, those who still want to presume that
this historico-geopolitical pairing is somewhat ‘normal’ now suffer from a sense
of insecurity. Particularly in those disciplines dealing with Asia in the West or in
countries accustomed to regarding themselves as ‘modern,’ the level of anxiety
has never been higher than today.
Either as a set of socioeconomic conditions or as an adherence of a society
to selected values, the term ‘modernity’ can never be understood without
reference to this dichotomy of the pre-modern and the modern. Historically,
modernity has primarily been opposed to its historical precedent; geopolitically
it has been contrasted to the non-modern, or, more specifically, to the non-West.
Thus the periodic dichotomy has served as a historico-geopolitical scheme
according to which a historical predicate is translated into a geopolitical one and
vice versa. A propositional subject is posited through the attribution of these
predicates, and thanks to the function of this discursive apparatus, two kinds of
areas are diacritically discerned: the modern West and the premodern non-West.
As a matter of course, this does not mean either that the West was never at
premodern stages or that the non-West can never be modernized: it simply
excludes the possibility of the simultaneous coexistence of the premodern West
and the modern non-West. A temporal differentiation is turned into a
cartographic trope, so that the geographic expanse of the globe is dissected into
26
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
the stages of development, which in turn spatially represents a chronological
series of World History.
A cursory examination of the chronological-cartographic tropics of
modernity amply suggests a certain polarity or warp among the possible ways to
conceive of the world historically and geopolitically. For the West to be, there
must be a scheme of the world that is organized by the polarity, and this polarity
continually reproduces unbalance or extra-ordinary one-sidedness between the
West and the Rest, so that the West is regarded as the source of global flow of
commodities, ideas and institutions. The classic vision of modernization has
never questioned this reproducibility of the polarity upon which not only the
developmental teleology but also the disciplines of area studies have wittingly or
unwittingly relied. As some Asian intellectuals pointed out in the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, there is no inherent reason why the West/non-West
opposition should determine the geographic perspective of modernity except for
the fact that it definitely serves to establish the putative unity of the West, a
nebulous but commanding positivity whose existence has been increasingly
tainted with a sense of uncertainty in recent decades. After all, the West is a
name for a positionality, which is postulated in the microphysics of power
relations and is also an object constituted discursively.
Evidently, the West is a name always associating itself with those regions,
communities, and peoples that appear politically or economically superior to
other regions, communities, and peoples. Basically, it is just like the name
27
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
‘Europe,’ which reputedly designates a geographic area, a tradition, a religion, a
culture, an ethnos, a market, a population, and so on; yet, unlike all the other
names associated with geographic particularities, it also implies the refusal of its
self-delimitation or particularistic determination; it claims that it is capable of
sustaining, if not actually transcending, the impulse to transcend all the
particularizations. This is to say that the West is never content with what it is
recognized as by others; it is always urged to approach others in order to
ceaselessly transform its self-image; it continually seeks itself in the midst of
interaction with other peoples, civilizations, and races; it would never be
satisfied with being recognized but would also wish to recognize others; it would
rather be a supplier of recognition than a receiver thereof. In short, the West
must represent the moment of the universal, which subsumes the particular. It is
the source of spontaneity, whose initiative must be received by its subordinates.
Thus, the West is supposed to assume the positionality of universal activity by
assigning to the Rest of the world the positionality of particular passivity, as
Takeuchi Yoshimi clearly saw in the way in which Asia was identified as such in
colonial modernity.
Indeed, the West is particular in itself, but it also constitutes the universal
point of reference in relation to which others recognize themselves as
particularities. Empirically it is a particularity, but it always engages in the
universal validity of how particular objects are identified. In this respect, it is
transcendental. The West is structured as a doublet with one side in the empirical
28
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
and the other in the transcendental, striding over both the determinate and the
indeterminate; it is fashioned after what 18th century neologism called the
‘subject.’ Unlike Asia whose identity must depend upon its recognition, the West
does not seem to need the other to recognize it. Or, to put it slightly differently, it
is claimed - and this claim must be questioned as I have already hinted at – that
the West is capable of initiating its self-recognition. And, in this regard, the West
thinks itself to be ubiquitous and spontaneous; it is omnipresent and unique; it
represents the universalism of the international world and is the unique and
exceptional leader of the world.
Normalcy, with the presumption of which an intimate association of
theory and the West is taken for granted, comes from this peculiar status of the
West. And, this normalcy was once called ‘man’ by Michel Foucault, namely a
problematic of ‘an empirico-transcendental doublet’ that has continued to
motivate the sciences of man or the humanities in general for the last two
centuries.18
Michel Foucault deployed the Heideggerian problematic of finitude in his
archeological analysis of ‘human being’ and thrived on illustrating the internal
dynamic of humanism in the production of knowledge in the humanities.
However, I do not think that he explored the significance of his own formula
empirico-transcendental doublet in colonial modernity.19 The modern positivity of
man is characterized by man’s mode of being, that is, the mode of ‘repetition – of
29
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
the identity and the difference between the positive and the fundamental’ ‘within
the figure of the Same.’20
..man became that upon which all knowledge could be constituted as
immediate and non-problematized evidence; he became, a fortiori, that
which justified the calling into question of all knowledge of man. Hence
that double and inevitable contestation: that which lies at the root of the
perpetual controversy between the sciences of man and the science proper
– the first laying an invincible claim to be the foundation of the second,
which are ceaselessly obliged in turn to seek their own foundation, the
justification of their method, and the purification of their history, in the
teeth of ‘psychologism,’ ‘sociologism,’ and ‘historicism.’21
It is important to note that the politically and intellectually significant debates of
the crisis of the European spirit or Western humanity in the first half of the 20th
century – Weber, Valéry, Husserl and Heidegger, to mention only the
representative figures – could not evade calling the foundation of scientific
reason into question in specifically humanistic terms. Through theory, therefore,
they had to address how it was ever possible to find ‘human’ legitimacy for
scientific rationality, but in this process they had to encounter the problem of
European humanity. Precisely because of the humanistic problematic – the
finitude of man - motivating the production of knowledge in the humanities,
30
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
they could not but doubt about the destiny of European humanity. This explains
why the crisis of scientific rationality was first construed in terms of the crisis of
European humanity.
Let me note in passing that, despite an alluring analysis of ‘the empirical –
transcendental doublet’ called man, the notion of Western culture or its unity is
never under suspicion anywhere in Foucault’s career, and that he never
interrogated the putative unity of the West in relation to modern humanism.
Nevertheless, his analysis offers the most important insight into the presumed
affiliation between theory and the West, or the teleology of reason and European
humanity.
*****
The West is a peculiar designee – and a social imaginary as far as its
modality of existence is concerned - because, in the first place, it may appear to
be the name of a certain geographical place and, by extension, that of the people
inhabiting it. On the somewhat strained assumption that it is a primarily
geographic designation with fairly clear contours, the West could regulate our
way of representing the production of knowledge, particularly in the humanities
or human sciences. Yet it is impossible to verify that the West is either a
geographic territory with an affiliated population, or a unified cultural and social
formation. Its indexing function changes according to the contingent conditions
31
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
of its particular use in each instance it is applied. One may expect to find some
substance underlying many uses of this appellation, but one will realize how
hard it is to establish any coherence among varied instances where the West is
called forth. The West can mean a different thing each time. It is excessively
overdetermined. Nonetheless, it cannot be called an anomaly since every proper
noun seems to subsume a wide variety of heterogeneous referents under its
singular designation. So, what is somewhat exceptional about the West?
I have already remarked on this point in these ways; first, the West is not a
place-name in the same way as California or Shandong because it is incapable of
specifying a fixed point on the surface of the earth; second, the West is a
directional designation by which the position of the speaker is indicated in terms
of its relationality. It is open to a wide variety of appropriations, as a result of
which it can gather together all sorts of different referents to such an extent that
it appears contradictory in concept. It is impossible to find the features by which
the different manifestations of the West are coherent. On the contrary, its internal
coherence is presumptive; its unity always remains putative. It is only our
essentialist insistence upon its geographic and cultural uniformity that evokes its
putative unity.
This putative unity of the West seems to bestow a sense of coherence upon
the configuration of disciplines in the humanities. It serves to mark a distinction
between the areas and peoples that can be objects of ethnic and area-studies and
those that cannot. People in the West ordinarily do not receive the attribute
32
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
‘ethnic,’ because, supposedly, they are not to be defined in terms of their status
as an object of study: before being studied, known, and recognized, they are
expected to take an active attitude in that studying, knowing, and recognizing.
Instead of being passively inspected, classified, compared, and analyzed, they
are supposed to engage in applying their own means of inspection, classification,
comparison, and analysis to some object, which might well be themselves. When
a group of people are characterized exclusively in their communal mores and
local histories, they are demoted to ethnicity and treated as though they were
mute, passive and anonymous objects of the West’s observing gaze.
Let us recall that, when Husserl denied the status of philosophy to ‘Indian
and Chinese philosophies,’ he attributed ‘anthropological types’ to knowledge
produced by Indian and Chinese philosophers.22 I am not sure how familiar
Husserl was with works by those philosophers, but his comments are in accord
with the regime of the polarity characteristic of colonial modernity. The Asians
may well produce certain wisdom, but their wisdom could never transcend their
ethnic particularity to the domain of theoretical universality. What was lacking in
Indian and Chinese philosophies was the practical commitment to theory, an
attitude of theoretical universality open beyond the institutional conditions of
their life worlds.
Let us keep in mind that, in this implicit racism of theory, Husserl was not
exceptional. Due the lack of space here, a more adequate reading of racism in
Western philosophy must be executed elsewhere. In short, in this epistemic
33
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
transaction, the West insists on being determined in terms, not of its
characteristics as an object of knowledge, but rather of its subjective faculties and
productivity. Tentatively, let me attribute the name ‘theory’ to these certain
subjective faculties and productivity, which distinguish European ‘men’ from
ethnicity, the West from the Rest of humanity.
Accordingly, we could discern two radically different ways for people to
relate themselves to the production of knowledge in the humanities. The group
of people whose regional, civilizational, national, or ethnic identity constitutes
the objective legitimacy of the discipline would participate in the production of
knowledge within that discipline, primarily as suppliers of raw data and factual
information. Information thus supplied by them helps identify their ethnic
particularities and types, but they remain positive and empirical in their
production of knowledge. They need to engage neither in the application of a
classificatory system or of the evaluative methods in the processing of such data,
nor the preparation of an epistemic framework through which the data are
appropriated into a general interpretative narrative. In not engaging in those
tasks, they do not need to participate in the critical review or innovation of those
means of knowledge-production. In this respect, their attitude toward
knowledge production is ‘traditional’ in the classical sense of the word. They
inherit the methods of scholarship from their mentors and are devoted to the
conservation of what they have been handed. Their scholarship is characterized
as a sort of apprenticeship rather than by its scientificity. In due course it is
34
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
beyond apprentices’ expectation to criticize their mentors, to desire to overcome
the mentors’ accomplishments, or to continually innovate the means and scope
of knowing. In this sense, the traditional scholars are undoubtedly hostile to
theory. As they are supposedly not held responsible for this kind of critical
review and innovation, they rarely confront the reality of existing knowledge in
the humanities, namely, the reality that the presumptions and procedures
circulated within the disciplines are far from being systematically coherent or
complete.
Indeed, as ‘modern’ – supposedly opposed to ‘traditional’ - scholarly
disciplines, these are under trenchant scrutiny and constant revision, and,
moreover, the humanities are maintained and revitalized by constant revision
and innovation of their own means of knowledge-production. What keeps the
sciences of man going is this insatiable movement of self-overcoming; in this
respect, the sciences are totally subordinate to the locus of modernity, an
ambiguous position occupied by Foucault’s ‘man.’
Thus the humanities are produced in the element of the historicity of
‘man,’ and must be a part of historical knowledge. Hence, unless one engages in
the historical overcoming of knowledge, one cannot be said to be actively
participating in the discourse of modern man, not to mention the spirit of
European humanity. The suppliers of raw data and factual information are
involved in the production of knowledge in the humanities, but they are not
participating there as ‘men.’ Certainly they are humans, and, in that capacity,
35
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
offer information concerning the particular cases of humanity and human nature.
And, most often, they are found outside the West, or more precisely, they are
supposed to constitute the outside of the putative unity of the West. They are
disqualified as European humanity because they are unfit for the mission the
West is endowed with.
On the other hand, there is another sort of people who seek to know about
humanity and human nature, but who would never be content as suppliers of
information. They refuse to be content with the accumulation of factual and
empirical knowledge. For them, knowing is an essential part of their being, so
that their way of life will be affected as their relationship to knowledgeproduction changes. They necessarily engage in the collection, evaluation,
comparison, or analysis of raw data, but, more importantly, they are continually
involved in the critical review of the existing means of knowing and the
invention of new means. Their concern for their subjective conditions in knowing
carries the weight of an almost moral imperative. For them, knowledge about
humanity and human nature must not only consist of the variety of particular
cases but must also entail commitment to a critical inspection of existing
knowledge and to the project of changing and creating the means of knowing
about humanity and human nature. They must constantly strive to overcome the
limits of their own accomplishments. Everyone within the putative unity of the
West is not automatically inside this group of people – e.g. Husserl excluded
gypsies from European humanity! And this exclusion must be thought through
36
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
with regard to the very demarcation of European humanity. - but presumably
they are representative of the West and can only be found in the West. The
project of changing and creating the means of knowing is commonly called
‘theory,’ and it is taken to be a distinguishing mark or even mission of the West.
In this sense, ‘theory’ is presumably the essence of Western humanity.
Thus, two different relationships to the production of knowledge
presuppose two different conceptions of humanity in the humanities. Humanity
is studied through many cases of, and particular manifestations of man’s nature.
It is presumed that, by extracting what many peoples in the world have in
common, ultimately knowledge about ‘human nature’ will be attained. In such
an instance, the notion of humanity as the guiding principle is that of general
humanity which inheres in every particular manifestation of man. Yet a
completely different relationship is also possible. It relates to the production of
knowledge reflectively, and tries to set new conditions of knowing, thereby
transforming both the constitution of the object for knowledge-production and
the subjective conditions of knowing. In this latter relationship to knowledgeproduction, humanity is problematized not only as a generality that encompasses
all the particular cases but also in the aspect of subjective conditions: humanity
manifests itself in self-reflective knowing about knowing and in the legislation of
the new means of knowing to which ‘man’ willingly subjects himself. The
humanity that is sought in the second relationship is, therefore, not only
epistemic but also practical: what is at issue here is not general but universal
37
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
humanity, to use the Kantian distinction between generality and universality. And
this rift of the epistemic and the practical is probably the site where modern
‘man’ resides; this was the topos where European humanity was perceived as in
crisis by many in the first half of the 20th century.
Since the nineteenth century, as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Osamu Nishitani
have observed independently of one another,23 the difference between these two
relationships to knowledge-production in the humanities has been hinted at by
the juxtaposition of two classical analogues, humanitas and anthropos. As the
historical evolution of anthropology suggests, humanitas has meant people who
could engage in knowledge-production in both the first and the second
relationships, while anthropos has gradually been reserved for peoples who
participate in knowledge-production only in the first. Thus, humanity in the
sense of humanitas has come to designate Western or European humanity, to be
distinguished from the rest of humanity as long as we trust in and insist upon
the putative unity of the West. This means that humanity in the sense of humanitas
authorizes the very distinction of the West from what Stuart Hall incisively called
‘the Rest.’24 This is one reason why I suspect that, as ethnic studies generally
implies a disciplinary knowledge imposed on anthropos, the idea of the ethnic
studies of European Americans would not be welcome. In fact, until recently,
North America and Western Europe were not ‘areas’ in higher education in the
United States, for supposedly the objects of area studies could only be found
outside the West. The ethnic studies of European Americans or the area studies
38
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
of North America could have undermined this configured division of humanitas
and anthropos, and opened up the way towards treating European Americans as
‘anthropological types.’ This might just conjure up some resistance.
As if following from such a separation of humanitas and anthropos, the
global circulation of information maps two different flows of academic
information. The first is a centripetal flow from peripheral sites to various
metropolitan centers in Western Europe and North America. However, this flow
of factual data about anthropos provided by the peripheries is not presumed to be
immediately legible to those not familiar with local contexts. Such obstacles to
transparent legibility are often attributed conceptually to the cultural and ethnic
particularities of peoples in the Rest. And such information is regarded as too
raw or particularistic to be understood by a non-specialist metropolitan
readership because of its dense empirical content; it therefore requires translation
into the more general theoretical language of humanitas.
The second movement is a centrifugal flow of information about how to
classify domains of knowledge, how to evaluate given empirical data, how to
negotiate with the variety and incommensurability inherent in the body of
empirical data from the peripheries, and how to render intelligible the details
and trivia coming from particular peripheral sites to “a Western audience.” This
is to say that the centrifugal flow corresponds roughly to the inquiry into the selfreflective ‘theory’ about the subjective conditions of knowing. Academic
information of this second kind is generally called ‘theory,’ and its production
39
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
has largely occurred according to a historically specific division of intellectual
labor in which ‘theory’ is associated with the mythical construct of the West, and
moves out from it to the Rest of the world. Predictably, the economy of the
centripetal and centrifugal flows maps the outline of the polarized world of
colonial modernity.
Let me again issue a cautionary disclaimer. I am not offering a description
of the state of the humanities today. On the contrary, this presumed division of
intellectual labor has been eroded, and we must conduct an archaeological
analysis on how our essentialist insistence upon the putative unity of the West
restricts us from acknowledging the dislocation of the West. There are so many
instances in which such an old distinction between humanitas and anthropos has
been abraded that nowadays the actual practices of ethnic studies, area-studies,
and anthropology no longer abide by expectations resulting from the putative
unity of the West. Increasingly the configuration of the humanities deviates from
the economy of information flow, regulated by the old distinction of humanitas
and anthropos. Already in the 1980’s cultural anthropology was no longer capable
of finding its legitimate object of inquiry among the ‘primitive’ people. Only
some in old area studies can still believe that their object people are located away
from them, and that the natives of those areas are separated from the area
specialists geographically, culturally, and epistemologically. It may appear that
the transformation of the humanities in the late 20th century and the early 21st
40
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
century is characterized by the disappearance of ‘primitive people’ and of the
conditions of the polarity characteristic of colonial modernity.
The prevailing view of global academic exchange is no longer acceptable
because, clearly, its material conditions are in the process of being undermined.
(The West, astonishingly, is not fading. But precisely because the historical
conditions for the separability of the West from the Rest are being undermined, I
am afraid, its distinction might well be emphasized all the more obsessively. For,
the distinction can only be sustained with a ‘possessive investment in the West,’
to rephrase the title of George Lipsitz’s book.25)
*****
What, then, is the West, after all? Let me first respond to this inquiry from
the standpoint of Asian Studies, a collection of area-studies fields left over from
the days of the Cold War in American higher education and the surviving legacy
of even older oriental studies in European imperial centers.
Partly because of the consequences of accelerating globalization and the
emergence of what, for the last decade or two, a number of people have referred
to as postmodern conditions discernible almost everywhere on the globe, we are
urged to acknowledge that the unity of the West is far from being unitarily
determinable. What we believe we understand by the West is increasingly
41
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
ambiguous and incongruous: the West’s immoderately overdetermined nature
can no longer be buried.
Until recently, the indigenous or local characteristic of a social and
cultural construct found in places in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has
routinely been earmarked in contrast to some generalized and euphemistic
quality specified as being ‘Western.’ Without this institutionalized gesture with
which to identify what is unfamiliar or enigmatic to those who self-fashion
themselves to be ‘Westerners’ in terms of the West-and-the Rest binary
opposition, it would be impossible to understand the initial formation of Asian
Studies as a set of academic disciplines in North American academia. Things
Asiatic were first brought to scholarly attention by being recognized as ‘different
and therefore Asian.’ Then, tacitly from the presumed vantage point of the West,
‘being different from us’ and ‘being Asian’ were taken to be synonymous in an
anthropologizing gesture. A similar operation could well be performed with
Africa or Latin America, so as to identify Africa or Latin America as belonging to
the Rest of the World, the Rest which remains when the humanity of the West is
forcibly extracted from the World.
Too often, therefore, the designation ‘Asian,’ a representative designation
of the Rest, has been accompanied by a sense of ‘being different from us’ which
in a reflective manner earmarks the ethnic or racial positionality of the Asianists
as Westerners. What is fundamental in the ‘anthropological’ description of Asia
is the primordial exposure of the observer to the look of the natives, what Rey
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Dislocation of the West/July 2014
Chow calls ‘the to-be-looked-at-ness,’ which precedes the self-determination of
the observer as a Westerner and the native as Asian, and also discloses the
position of the observer in ethnographic description primarily as the observed
rather than the observer. 26 It follows that the anthropologizing observer’s selffashioning as a Westerner is essentially a reactive self-posturing, reactive
precisely because, in order to posture him-or-herself as a Western observer, the
observer has to disavow the initial moment of what Johannes Fabian called
‘coevalness.’27
As outlined in my critique of Takeuchi Yoshimi, the self-referentiality of
the West is a consequence of this reversal, of reactive self-posturing. But for this
reversal, the West could never postulate itself as an active and spontaneous agent
whose identity is expected to be independent of an encounter with an other. It
follows that what is decisive in the putative unity of the West is the postulation
of separation, an operation of inscribing a border – ‘bordering,’ as conceptualized
by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson – to make the world appear as if it had
already and always been divided between the West and the Rest, to presume
that, somewhat naturally and essentially, the separation of the West from the
Rest or Asia had been preordained and prescribed. Therefore, in the discussions
of European humanity during the first half of the 20th century, the anxiety
concerning the crisis of the European spirit was accompanied by the essentialist
insistence upon the unity of the West; the essentialist insistence on the West’s
unity had to seek the archê of what originarily constituted the West – or Europe –
43
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
as the Greek origin to which the Europeans returned to assert their future as
Europeans.
In the fields of Asian studies, however, this level of commitment to theory
can hardly be expected even though many of the specialists frequently appeal to
the opposition of the West and the Rest. As a matter of fact, many of the experts
working in the fields of Asian studies, are least interested in theory and, in some
cases, positively hostile to it. Even though it is glaringly obvious that the majority
of experts should be classified into anthropos, they do not have misgivings about
the very binary of humanitas and anthropos; rarely do they challenge the
presumption that we normally do not expect theory of Asia.
Yet, this peculiar situation exists not only in the West. Notwithstanding
the fact that the binary serves to figure out not only the non-Western or Asian
‘other’ but also ‘the Western self’ of North American and European Asianists in
the regime of self-referentiality, we must not overlook the fact that it also
operates practically in the production and reproduction of knowledge in
countries in Asia (and other sites believed to be located in the Rest). In these
places the institutions of human and social sciences, such as sociology and
English departments at universities, have been established initially as local
agents for the propagation and translation of European or North American - and
one might add Japanese as well, although much less obvious and smaller in scale
- knowledge which is euphemistically labelled as ‘Western’; and, even today,
most of these institutions are still caught in the habit of regarding themselves as
44
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
secondary or derivative, that is, as imitators or importers, of Western theory: it is
somewhat held as a truism that theory cannot be generated in the Rest, so that it
must be imported from the West. What they have deliberately overlooked is that,
in ‘the West’ too, scholars imitate and import just as in natural sciences and the
fields of engineering. They have so far failed in objectifying the mythology of
European humanity originating ancient Greek geometry as spontaneous, creative
and productive agent. They have yet to rid themselves of their undue sense of
indebtedness to the influence of the West and its metropolitan centers.
In fact, the sense of separation between the West and Asia is best manifest
among scholars in Asian countries who feel somewhat excluded or rejected by
the West. The West-and-the-Rest opposition does not only designate the
boundary of one civilization from another fantastically: it is also interwoven into
the texture of the imaginary reality of the ethnic nation as it has been formulated
in Asia. In other words, the national, civilizational, and racial identity of the
nation in Asia requires the implicit and ubiquitous presence of the West. The
binary of humanitas and anthropos is indeed a matter of epistemic positionality,
but it also serves as a trope for other power relations. Only insofar as the West is
felt to be the point of counter-reference can nationality in the Rest be rendered
sensible to the populace.
In this instance, let me take a moment to note, one more time, that the
West thus disclosed is not a determinate position which exists prior to the
anthropologizing gesture of equating ‘being different from us’ to ‘being Asian.’
45
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
In ‘our’ encounter with people of unknown background, of linguistic heritage, or
intellectual tradition, ‘we’ may well be incapable of comprehending what is
going on between ‘you’ and ‘us’; ‘we’ can be at a loss at the locale of
incommensurability; ‘we’ might go through an experience of non-sense as to
what ‘you’ and ‘we’ are doing together. This is to say that the relationship of
‘you’ and ‘us’ cannot be subsumed under the existing system of comprehension,
so that it fails to make sense within the common-sense making mechanism. Yet,
this experience of non-sense or radical difference cannot be appropriated by the
trope of gap, border or separation. If ‘you’ and ‘we’ are separated by a gap or
insulated from one another by a border, an encounter in which non-sense is
experienced would never happen. Preceding the demarcation of ‘you’ and ‘us,’ a
different type of ‘we’ - ‘we’ as the place or khora of primordial sociality - must
exist as the locale of encounter. This ‘we’ is no longer a position determined in
the system of personal pronominals; it is rather a surface on which distinct
pronominal positions, ‘I,’ ‘you,’ ‘we,’ and ‘they,’ are emblazoned. It is the surface
of sociality on which personal relations can be inscribed.
Unless it is possible to talk about this ‘we,’ the bordering of the West and
the Rest would be inconceivable. Consequently we would not recognize the
presence of either a gap or border that prevents us from making sense together.
On the contrary, in such an encounter, we come across the experience of
discontinuity.28 But, discontinuity cannot be equated to a cut, gap, barrier, or
border. By ascribing two distinct binary figures of the West and the Rest or
46
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
Europe and Asia to ‘us’ and ‘you,’ however, the sense of incomprehensibility is
appropriated into the tropics of civilizational difference, a difference already in
the order of continuity. By locating the occasion of non-sense,
incommensurability or incomprehensibility within the binary configuration of
the West and the Rest, the very difference of discontinuity is anthropologized, and
apprehended as if it bore the order of continuity from the outset. As I argued
elsewhere, the regime of co-figuration operates in the element of continuity, and
the experience of discontinuity disrupts the schematism of co-figuration.29
What is overlooked in this insidious transition from discontinuity to
continuity is that discontinuity means something unrepresentable;
incomprehensibility, non-sense, or incommensurability points to an experience –
if experience is strictly a statement describing a state of affairs empirically
meaningful, then it should not be called ‘experience’ – that can not be rendered
in representation. It is, therefore, impossible to represent it in terms of a figure of
gap or border, since gap or border always implies some sort of break within the
continuous space.
This binary of the West and the Rest is made to imply a lot more than a
contrast of epistemic attitudes; condensed in the opposition of humanitas and
anthropos are other social and personal features such as gender, wealth,
profession, social class background, and level of cultural capital, features which
are most frequently appealed to in order to differentiate one individual from
another, to classify people within a social hierarchy.
47
Dislocation of the West/July 2014
The West comes into being precisely when ‘being different from us’ is
thus rendered analogous to ‘being Asian,’ ‘being African,’ and so forth. Similarly,
from the viewpoint of those who fashion themselves as non-Westerners and as
belonging to the Rest, the West is also postulated at the moment that ‘being
different from us’ and ‘being Western’ are taken as synonymous. Instead of being
construed in view of many different social features, conversation and interaction
about knowledge are figured exclusively in terms of a schema consisting of the
two poles of the West-and-the-Rest. All the other social relations palpable in
intellectual exchange are subordinated to this bi-polar co-figuration; any cultural
incommensurabilities one may encounter are all reduced to figures
commensurate with the schema of co-figuration.30 So, for ‘the Westerners,’ the
thematization of things Asiatic as ‘being different from us’ is the first move to
negate or exorcise ‘them’ from ‘us’ in such a way as to prepare the very
possibility of representing ‘them’ as Asia, and ‘us’ as the West, according to the
schema of co-figuration. The Asiatic essence of things Asiatic is thematized and
isolated just like a figure separated by its frame from its background, so to speak.
And one of the necessary conditions for the West to be perceived real is that it is
assumed to be recognized as such by its counterpart, the Rest, in a symmetrical
and transferential manner.
*****
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Dislocation of the West/July 2014
Another disclaimer must be issued at this juncture. I have not so far
offered a concise description of how theory has been conceived of or what it
ought to be. Nor have I suggested by theory any specific protocol by which a
formula in the form of a theorem can be applied to individual empirical cases to
draw some conclusive generalized judgment. First of all, I want to keep in mind
that the relationship that regulates theory and experience is not one of generality
and particularity. So, by theory, I do not imply something that is applied to
empirical data. To be theoretical is not to search for general formulae by which
particular cases can be classified and subsumed under general patterns.
Yet at the same time, by theory, I assume certain openness to repetition
and refutation. Unless it is able to be reproduced, reinscribed, or reinstated by
any person or any group of people, I do not think it is worth examining as such.
Thus, theory always is concerned with knowledge production, but it is further
involved in the reproduction and modification of the mode of knowledge
production. In this sense, theory is universal. Theory is thus open to anybody; it
must be institutionally guaranteed that the process of knowledge production not
be confined to a closed circle of connoisseurs or apprentices; it can be imitated,
reproduced, reinscribed or modified by anybody; the type of knowledge that
cannot withstand this open process of imitation, reproduction, reinscription and
modification cannot qualify as theoretical. The system of specialization we
adhere to in our universities today may well be far too inadequate to be called
theoretical in this sense.
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Dislocation of the West/July 2014
After the devastation of the First World War, Paul Valéry concluded that
Europe could only find its uniqueness in the essential openness and universality
to which supposedly it was committed. Only through its continual selftransformation and self-innovation in the project of self-transcendence could it
remain identical as Europe. Above I referred to Takeuchi Yoshimi’s insight about
Asian modernity, in which it is difficult not to detect a resonance with Valéry,
whose publications were translated into Japanese. As a matter of fact, the crisis of
European humanity was no longer a matter exclusively for the Europeans, even
in the 1930’s.
For Valéry, Europe emerged for the first time as internally unified only
when its self-transcendence and coherence, or what he eventually capitulated to
– in spite of himself - the Hegelian naming, ‘spirit,’ was fundamentally
threatened. Europe came into being simultaneously with the ‘crisis’ of its spirit.
One may find a resolute expression of the project of transcendental and
universalistic thinking in his adoption of this term ‘spirit’ as well as his
idiosyncratic notion of the ‘method.’ Valéry emphasized that Europe is not a
continent,31 which would imply that it was distinguished from the Rest of the
world not predominantly in terms of geographic markers, historical heritages,
residential populations, or other historical continuities. Instead what he
recognized as the actuality of Europe consisted in an extraordinary inbalance and
unequal distribution of resources and wealth in the world; beyond this existing
one-sidedness, Europe could be defined only as a capacity to reproduce this
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Dislocation of the West/July 2014
inbalance against the natural law of energy dispersion. Just as a drop of blood in
the ocean spreads, dilutes, and eventually disappears, an artificially created
inbalance gradually dissolves and moves towards an equilibrium in which
balance is restored. Europe is a perversion against the law of equilibrium; it
betrays the natural progression in which entropy is bound to increase; Europe
has a miraculous capacity to reverse this process which nature dictates.
Valéry believed that Europe could only find its unity in the essential
openness and universality to which it is committed. But, precisely because of its
adherence to what makes it possible for Europe to exist, it could not help being
exposed to the constant danger of its dilution, dispersal, and dissolution. In
short, Europe was to express the two extremities inherent in capitalism:
maximization in the unequal distribution of wealth and resources, on the one
hand, and endless commodification and standardization, on the other. Europe
was theory in the sense that it thus meant a commitment to the mutually
contradictory principles of the openness and universality that work in
accordance with the increase of entropy in the world system, on one side, and a
miraculous reversal of nature that reproduces the inbalance against the law of
thermodynamics, on the other.
Today, nearly one century later, what Valéry summarized as the essential
feature of Europe can be seen in the emanation vision of colonial modernity.
Retrospectively we can see that, perhaps unwittingly, his diagnosis of the crisis
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Dislocation of the West/July 2014
of the European spirit disclosed an essential condition for the formation of
European humanity, that is, modern colonialism.
Therefore, what was perceived as crisis was an intimation of the age of
decolonization, when the distinction between humanitas and anthropos can no
longer be projected onto a cartographic plane. Perhaps the crisis of European
humanity anticipated a situation in which Europe no longer commands a
miraculous inbalance and where it is thoroughly provincialized - European
humanity being reduced to anthropological types. In this situation, theory would
not have to be ascribed to any geopolitically-determined location.
By no means can I be certain that modern colonialism is over today.
Therefore, I hesitate to speak as if the two classical analogues of humanitas and
anthropos have lost the relevance they once enjoyed. But this much seems certain.
It is impossible to comprehend the differentiation of humanitas and anthropos in
terms of geopolitical tropes. Two types of people cannot be differentiated from
one another by their residential locations. Their distinction cannot be prescribed
by geographic parameters.
With this understanding, we now can see that a series of important
questions remain unarticulated in the statement I referred to at the outset:
‘theory is something that we normally expect theory of Europe (or the West).’
The question we cannot evade today: Who is in Europe or the West? Who are
Europeans or Westerners in the very distinction of humanitas and anthropos?
Already Husserl cautioned us in a dubious manner32 that European humanity
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Dislocation of the West/July 2014
was not a matter of territory. Then, how could he somewhat imply European
humanity could be distinguished from such anthropological types as Indians and
Chinese? How could he differentiate Europeans from the mere residents of the
European territory or area (Westerners from the residents of the West) without
resorting to the naturalizing tactic of identifying Europeans in terms irrelevant to
historical imperatives? Is it feasible to insist that classifying Europeans by such
empirical variables as physiognomic features and economic status would not
signify determining them essentially as an anthropological type? We know that
this implicit inquietude invoked by these questions propelled many who were
concerned with European humanity during the interwar period towards the
problem of historicity and the Greek origins of European sciences. But, can we
still today cling to the lineage of Western civilization in order to know who
Westerners are? Can we respond to this series of questions about how to
distinguish Europeans from non-Europeans, Westerners from non-Westerns,
without inquiring into the conduct and conflicts specific to the locale of the
power relation? These positionalities are relational and contingent upon the local
conditions of power that frame up the contrasting positionalities of Europe and
Asia, the West and the Rest. Neither Europe nor the West is a long-lasting
substance or an internally coherent organism. In extremely diverse situations,
what we should understand is the microphysics of power relations in which
Europe or the West – Asia or the Rest as well - appears substantialized and
naturalized?
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Dislocation of the West/July 2014
Through an examination of the microphysics of power relations, let us
continue to hope we will eventually disentangle ourselves from the ‘civilizational
spell’ about theory and Asian humanity. Yet, it must be stated unambiguously
that this analytic of the microphysics of power relations does not remove theory
or reject the practical commitment to reflectively and critically engage in the
transformation of disciplinary conditions of existent knowledge production.
Rather, it is to demonstrate that theory does not require a civilizational selffashioning on the part of one who engages in theory.
1
The first version was published in Postcolonial Studies, vol. 13, no. 4, 2010: 441-464
2
Edmund Husserl repeatedly argued that theory is exclusively European. See, for instance, ‘The
Vienna Lecture’ included as an appendix to The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology, David Carr trans. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. 269-299
3
‘Transpacific Complicity and Comparatist Strategy,’ positions east asia cultures critique, vol. 17,
no. 1, 2009. 159-207
4
Friedrich Stadler, ‘The emigration and exile of Austrian intellectuals’ in Vertreibung der Vernunft
The Cultural Exodus from Austria, Friedrich Stadler and Peter Weibel ed. Wien and New York,
Springer-Verlag, 1995, p. 15. Also cited in Mark Mazower, Dark Continet: Europe’s Twentieth
Century, Vintage eBook.
5
The question of the victim speaking on behalf of the victimizer has been explored in my “Two
Negations: Fear of Being Excluded and the Logic of Slef-Esteem” in Novel, vol. 37, no. 3, Summer
2004: 229-257.
6
It goes without saying that the West and Europe are clearly two distinct designations, and it is
important to differentiate them historically. However, I must undertake the task of historically
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Dislocation of the West/July 2014
differentiating these two geopolitical, cartographic, racial, and/or civilizational terms elsewhere,
mainly for lack of space. Instead, as it is commonly accepted in the use of Eurocentrism – one
does not bother to fabricate such terms like Westocentrism or West-centeredness to differentiate
the West’s global domination from Europe’s - I would like to allow myself to proceed
provisionally in my demonstration in this article as if the West and Europe were interchangeable.
7
For Takeuchi’s discussion of Asian modernity, see; Sakai, “Critique of Modernity: the Problem
of Universalism and Particularism” in South Atlantic Quarterly, 87.3, (Summer 1988) or its
Japanese translation in Gendai Shiso, 15.15, (December 1987); Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Chûgoku no
kindai to nihon no kindai (Chinese modernity and Japanese modernity)” (originally in 1947) in
Nihon to Ajia (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1993): 11–57 ( also published under a different title
“Kindai toha nanika (What is modernity?)” in 1948 ). [English translation, ‘What is Modernity’ in
What is modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, Richard F. Calichman trans. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005. 53-81]
8
Takeuchi Yoshimi, “Chûgoku no kindai to nihon no kindai (Chinese modernity and Japanese
modernity)” op. cit. pp. 15-19. (‘What is modernity?’ in What is modernity? Writings of Takeuchi
Yoshimi, op cit. pp. 55-58)
9
Against American scholars of the Modernization Theory, a number of Japanese social scientists
and intellectual historians tried to offer a different model of modernization in the 1950’s and
1960’s. In ‘Asia as Method’ (in What is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, Richard L.
Calichman trans. and ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 149-165), Takeuchi
referred to Tsurumi Kazuko, who advocated for the two distinct types of modernization: the
naihatsu type that is motivated from within or ‘development from within’ and the gaihatsu type
that imitates the outside model or ‘imposition from without.’ As a critical endeavour against
American Imperialism, Tsurumi’s attempt and Takeuchi’s endorsement must be appreciated, but
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Dislocation of the West/July 2014
what should be called into question is the tropics of the inside and the outside underlying this
typology.
10
“You Asians” in ‘We Asians’ between Past and Future, Kwok Kian-Woon, Indira Arumugan,
Karen Chia, Lee Chee Keng ed., Singapore, Singapore Heritage Society, 2000: 212-246;
“Civilizational Difference and Criticism: On the Complicity of Globalization and Cultural
Nationalism” in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 17, no. 1, Spring 2005: 188-205.
11
Let me issue a disclaimer here. I do not believe that there is anything abnormal or exceptional
in the derivative nature of the designation ‘Asia’ in relation to Europe. Self-referentiality is
impossible without the presence of alterity. Although the use of pronominals may well impose a
prejudice on our analysis in this case, it is appropriate to say that ‘I’ is a derivative of ‘you.’
Unless ‘you’ can be postulated, ‘I’ cannot be ‘here.’ See Nishida Kitarô, ‘Ware to nanji (I and
Thou),’ in Mu no jikaku-teki gentei (Apperceptive determination of mu) Nishida Kitarô Zenshû, vol.
6, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965. 341-427
12
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, Quintin Hoarse and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith trans., (New York: International Publishers, 1971): 447
13
Takeuchi Yoshimi, What is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, op cit. 59
14
Social relation of ‘you’ and ‘I’ should not be construed in terms of activity and passivity. See,
Nishida Kitarô, Mu no jikakuteki gentei, [Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1932] (Reprint, Nishida Kitarô
Zenshû, vol. 6, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965)
15
The Invention of the West - Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. 232
16
Ibid.
17
Oswald Spenglar, The Decline of the West, Charles Francis Atkins trans. New York: A. A.
Knopf, 1926-1928. Cited in GoGwilt, ibid.
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Dislocation of the West/July 2014
18
According to Michel Foucault, man is fundamentally historical precisely because man can
never be exhaustively determined in its positivity, because the limitlessness of history,
inherent in the modern determination of the human being, “perpetually refers certain
positivities determining man’s being to the finitude that causes those same positivities to
appear.” (Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses – une archéologie des sciences humaines, Paris:
Gallimard, 1966. p. 395) [The Order of Things, New York: Vintage Books, 1973] p. 371]
19
Michel Foucault, The
Order of Things, op cit.
20
ibid. p. 315
21
ibid. p. 345
22
See note 2 above.
23
See: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Marx after Marxism: Subaltern Histories and the Question of
Difference” in Polygraph 6, no. 7. Also see: Osamu Nishitani, Translator’s Postface II for
Pierre Legendre’s Le Crime du caporal Lortie ( Kyoto: Jinmon Shoin, 1998): 287-8; Osamu
Nishitani & Naoki Sakai, Sekaishi no kaitai, (Deconstruction of World History) (Tokyo:
Ibunsha, 1999): 20-2, 103-8. Also see: Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “The awakening of the
power of myth – the auto-poietic act – becomes a necessity once the inconsistency of the
abstract universals of reason has been revealed and the beliefs of modern humanity
(Christianity and belief in humanity itself), which were at bottom only bloodless myths, have
collapsed. But here again we should be careful: Nazism is a humanism in so far as it rests
upon a determination of humanitas which is, in its view, more powerful – i.e. more effective –
than any other. The subject of absolute self-creation, even if, occupying an immediately
natural position (the particularity of the race), it transcends all the determinations of the
modern subject, brings together and concretizes these same determinations (as also does
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Dislocation of the West/July 2014
Stalinism with the subject of absolute self-production) and constitutes itself as the subject, in
absolute terms. The fact that this subject lacks the universality which apparently defines the
humanitas of humanism in the received sense, still does not make Nazism an anti-humanism.”
In Heidegger, Art and Politics, Chris Turner trans. (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990): 95
24
See: Stuart Hall, “The West-and-the-Rest: Discourse and Power” in Modernity, Stuart Hall,
David Held, Don Hubert and Kenneth Thompson ed. (Cambridge, MA and Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1996) : 184-227
25
George Lipsitz, The possessive investment in whitneness, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1998) According to Lipsitz, the term ‘investment’ [in the possessive investment in whiteness]
denotes time and energy spent on the creation and re-creation of whiteness. ‘Despite intense
and frequent disavowal that whiteness means anything at all to those so designated, recent
surveys have shown repeatedly that nearly every social choice that white people make about
where they live, what schools their children attend, what careers they pursue, and what
policies they endorse is shaped by considerations involving race. I use the adjective
“possessive” to stress the relationship between whiteness and asset accumulation in our
society, to connect attitudes to interests, to demonstrate that white supremacy is usually less
a matter of direct, referential, and snarling contempt that a system for protecting the
privileges of whites by denying communities of color opportunities for asset accumulation
and upward mobility.’ (viii)
26
Rey Chow: Primitive Passions – Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese
Cinema, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995): 176-82. The notion of the “to-belooked-at-ness”, introduced in Primitive Passions is a conceptual development of Chow’s
earlier assertion about the colonial encounter. Cf.
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Dislocation of the West/July 2014
27
28
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)
I am not sure whether or not the idiom ‘experience of discontinuity’ is appropriate. It may well
be because it does not allow us to have an experience that it is termed ‘discontinuous.’ It is well
known that the modern concept of continuity is defined in terms of infinite divisibility. For
a
segment to be continuous is for it to be infinitely divisible. Its antonym, discontinuity,
therefore implies an impossibility of cutting or dividing. To be discontinuous at Point A is to
be impossible to divide in the neighborhood of Point A infinite times. When it is possible to
conceive of a border or barrier between ‘you’ and ‘us,’ the relationship at least
accommodates the possibility of cut, division, or gap. A border, cut, gap or divide means the
possibility of continuity rather than of discontinuity. The radical difference of ‘us’ from ‘you’
that is at stake here in reference to incommesurability, non-sense, and incomprehensibility
must be in the order of discontinuity for this reason.
29
See: Translation and Subjectivity – On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism, Mineapolis & London,
University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 1-17, 40-71.
30
For a more detailed discussion on the schema of cofiguration, see: Naoki Sakai, “The
Problem of “Japanese Thought”: The Formation of “Japan” and the Schema of
Cofiguration”, in Translation and Subjectivity, op cit 40 - 71
31
Of course, Jacques Derrida adopted Valéry’s rhetoric in his discussion of the fate of
Europe in L’autre cap, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1991.
32
As I mentioned above ( see note 2 above), Husserl found an example of non-European in
gypsies living in European territory.
59