Twentieth-Century China as an Object of Thought: An Introduction, Part 2 The Birth of the Century: China and the Conditions of Spatial Revolution

Abstract

This article situates the birth of the twentieth century within the conditions of a spatial revolution. Proceeding from the dimension of horizontal temporality, it analyses anew the problem of “origins” as well as the era’s “politics of displacement” and “politics of self-negation.” A salient phenomenon of cultural politics in the twentieth century was the horizontal movement of concepts, a formulation of how historical content from different temporal axes was transformed, within a synchronic framework, into that which can be expressed in a single discourse. Yet the political content of such discourse and concepts cannot be defined from its European origins, including ideas such as nation, sovereignty, people, class, citizen, and so on. Whenever these alien concepts are used under historical conditions totally distinct from the conditions that originally produced them, this not only leads to the birth of new consciousness, values, and movements, but it also produces a new political logic. For this reason, it would be difficult to explain the meaning of China’s twentieth century if we leave behind the perspectives internal to its revolution. This article therefore takes up the cases of Lu Xun’s “literature of resistance to despair” and Mao Zedong’s “philosophy of victory,” in which one “moves from victory to victory,” in order to once again examine twentieth-century China’s despairs and hopes, its failures and successes.