The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese '68 ed. by Gavin Walker

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese '68 ed. by Gavin Walker John D. Person (bio) The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese '68. Edited by Gavin Walker. Verso, 2020. xii, 256 pages. $95.00, cloth; $29.95, paper; $9.99, E-book. The fiftieth anniversary of the year 1968 served as an occasion for many studies and retrospectives of the events that occurred around the globe that [End Page 422] year and the ideologies and motivations that animated them. 1968 was a watershed moment in shaping systems of economy, politics, culture, and international alliances, the impacts of which are still felt today. The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese '68 is an important contribution to a better understanding of this moment in the context of Japanese history. More specifically, editor Gavin Walker and the contributors seek to articulate and analyze what they refer to as "'68," distinct from the mere chronological marker 1968, which is a "living historical entity" that bequeaths to us a challenge for our times through its theoretical formulations, organizational ideals, and ethical failures. As the phrase "the Red Years" in plural suggests, the authors understand '68 broadly and its timespan is purposefully left vague. The authors also appear unified in their skepticism, even disdain, for what is perhaps the most prominent work dealing with the topic, Oguma Eiji's 1968, which they see as muting the suggestive force of '68. The Red Years features an impressive lineup of scholars and intellectuals. Four of them, Setsu Shigematsu, Chelsea Szendi Schieder, William Marotti, and Walker, are scholars trained in North America who have recently published monographs on issues that concern the topic of this book. Six other contributors, Hiroshi Nagasaki, Hidemi Suga, Yoshiyuki Koizumi, Yoshihiko Ichida, and Yoshiko Shimada, are active and widely read Japanese public intellectuals in varying degrees of generational proximity to the events and organizations in question. Finally, Italian philosopher and intellectual historian Alberto Toscano contributes an expanded version of his preface appended to the recent Japanese translation of his important book Fanaticism. While the contributors based in Japan are notably of an older generation than the others, the book does not present a simple dichotomy of native, nostalgic informants and foreign observers. Rather, each essay serves as a critical appraisal of theoretical, political, and aesthetic approaches to what might be called the "long 1968." With that said, one of the valuable aspects of this work is the fact that it features writers who were involved in the student movements of the era. Hiroshi Nagasaki, the author of the second chapter (the first that follows Walker's introduction), was a key participant in youth movements and an important theorist of the politics of the era. His chapter, "On the Japanese '68," seeks to recover the political significance of the movements of the era, of which he sees the Zenkyōtō (All-Campus Joint Struggle League) as representative, in order to think anew its significance for our politics today. Nagasaki takes issue with Oguma's stance that "following the university-wide Zenkyōtō strikes, the Tōdai struggle ceased to be a political struggle and ended up simply as a 'self-affirmation of youth,'" or a "search for the self." Instead, Nagasaki argues, '68 was a watershed moment in the "style" of politics that demonstrated that "a political movement could simultaneously [End Page 423] be a mutual ethical elevation between subjects" (p. 17, emphasis in original). Nagasaki's chapter situates the Zenkyōtō phenomenon in a broader history of postwar movements and lays out the ethical and organizational stakes its participants grappled with as it shifted its tactics from negotiation to rebellion. In the chapter that follows, Ichida Yoshihiko, a scholar working chiefly in the field of French intellectual history, offers a critical analysis of Nagasaki's 1977 work Seiji no genshōgaku aruiwa agitētā no henrekishi (The phenomenology of politics), a work that theorizes the dynamics between the agitator, its group, and the political party. Yutaka Nagahara's chapter, "1972: The Structure of the Streets," is the most explicit among the contributions in linking the author's own personal experiences to a...