The Nation, Sublime and Sublimating. A review of Kōjin Karatani, Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud

Abstract

The Nation, Sublime and SublimatingA review of Kōjin Karatani, Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud Ian Balfour (bio) Karatani, Kōjin. Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud. Translated by Jonathan E. Abel, Hiroki Yoshikuni, and Darwin H. Tsen, Oxford UP, 2017. Kōjin Karatani has long been a distinctive, powerful voice in critical theory on the global or quasi-global stage, a key mediator between Eastern and Western thought, a distinguished historian and critic of Japanese literature, and an incisive, agile thinker of Marxism in an expanded field. He is almost equally at home in philosophy, political economy, literature, and history proper. Karatani's intellectual range is vast. He is one of few people who could plausibly take on, elsewhere, so immense a topic as "the structure of world history," as the title of that volume of his has it. The essays collected in this volume—though it's not just a "collection"—stretch back to the early 1990s, and form the start of an arc in Karatani's work to the ongoing present. Karatani proposes that we focus more on processes and effects of circulation than on production, at least as classically conceived. In his view, the historical dynamics of capitalism—more late capitalism than early or middle—have unfolded in such a way as to make circulation more crucial a matter and topic than it had been before. He has been arguing, moreover, for a mode of transcritique conjoining, first, the two not-usually-thought-to-be-so-compatible figures of Marx and Kant, a procedure he adopts in this book with Kant and Freud, if in a less thoroughgoing fashion than in his major study under that rubric. The subtitle of the volume is a little misleading. Kant and Freud are only front and center in one essay, important in a couple, and a looming presence in others. For better or worse, theoretical studies are almost guaranteed a wider audience than ones focused on one country or a circumscribed area, however crucial in the world system or compelling in itself that nation or area might be. As it happens, the very conjunction of broad-ranging, resonant reflections on nation, empire, and aesthetics together with focused analyses of individual intellectuals, institutions, and problematics mainly located in Japan, is one of the strengths of the book, with the two differently weighted endeavors supplementing each other to the benefit of both. (This translation of Karatani's study is published in a series called "Global Asias.") Karatani contends, following somewhat in the train of Benedict Anderson's pioneering Imagined Communities, that the Marxist tradition has generally been ham-fisted or oblivious or in denial about the force of the nation and nations and, more particularly, that it has denied the constitutive function of imagination in their construction. Nations as such are entities that contain class tensions, struggles, and contradictions within them, however differently these struggles and more might be negotiated. (Japan's distinctive national/state history comes into play here, as the nation of Karatani's greatest scrutiny and expertise, not least in its overdetermined relations to China and Korea, which extend down to the charged status of the seemingly "micro" matter of the provenance of what written characters are in use and what not.) One of the key contentions shaping Karatani's work is that what he calls the "trinity" of nation-state-capital is a kind of Borromean knot, one that cannot be untied. That trinity is coeval and coterminous with the slippery, moving-target notion of "modernity"—but not so slippery for Karatani. The coupling of state and capital occurred, in Karatani's view, in the era of absolute monarchy. The nation joined capital already in progress. The first benchmark moment for the historical trinity emerges in England's Glorious Revolution, as monarchy becomes constitutional. Other nations follow, in staggered fashion. The more advanced capitalism is, the more the nation and state are joined at the hip as nation-state. The nation is, in the beginning, not a given. Not given until it is given. There is nothing particularly natural—despite the notion of birth built in to the etymology of the word—about...