‘To be the antithesis of all that is called human’: Sasaki Masao and political redemption in contemporary Ainu thought

Abstract

The Ainu poet and critic Sasaki Masao (1943–) is one of the most idiosyncratic thinkers of post-war Ainu politics. His writings have ramifications for envisioning new political directions in colonial and post-colonial history, and for thinking through the fraught problematic of political subjectivity. This article, having identified the ‘lived experience of being Ainu’ in modern and contemporary Japan as something irrevocably bound to the temporal structure of modernity, and that structure in turn as something bound to both an epistemological and eschatological notion of the finite and fragile ‘human’ as the ultimate plenitude of national and humanist politics, argues that Sasaki was perhaps the most eloquent in explaining that to be ‘Ainu’ means to be constantly ‘not yet’ quite modern or equal enough. The article shows how Sasaki developed a notion of a kind of political redemption through which, divided from himself and the contemporaneous unfolding of a history that would constantly interpellate him thus, he attempted to suspend the historicist premises for ‘Ainu’ salvation and strive for a kind of politics that might finally place us in direct contact with the primal history of capitalist modernity – a history that demands being ‘Ainu’ to mean so much more than just that.