Working through a surplus: negative transference in inter-Asia encounters

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ABSTRACT This essay takes a step back to look at the local prehistory of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements. It takes cues from a moment in Chen Kuan-Hsing’s Qu Di-guo (De-imperialization), where the double inscription of the word zhuan-yi, which not only signifies the epistemological “shifting” frame of reference towards Asia—the inter-referencing— but also carries the extra meaning of “transference” in the psychoanalytical sense. The essay attempts to tread the affective dimension of every step of shift/transference on the path of “Asia as method” from Takeuchi Yoshimi to Mizoguchi Yuzo to Chen Kuan-Hsing to Tejaswini Niranjana’s “inter-Asia methodology.” It then looks at an instance of “negative transference” in the history of inter-Asian encounters, or mis-encounters: the Marxist critic Qu Qiu-bai’s encounter with Rabindranath Tagore in 1924 and how the transference is worked through by reconstructing and unfolding the subjective history of “a man of the past.” By doing so, it affirms the negative moments in inter-Asian encounters, for the shift/transference cannot but be working towards/through a certain surplus that comes with our “geo-colonial historical” (Chen) subject position as the “Thing-in-between” (Liu).