1st Edition
The Politics of Culture Around the Work of Naoki Sakai
Naoki Sakai is an important and prominent thinker in Asian and cultural studies and his work continues to make itself felt across a broad range of both national and disciplinary borders. Originally finding a home in the otherwise circumscribed field of Japan Studies, Sakai’s writings have succeeded in large part in destabilizing that home, exposing the fragility of its boundaries to an outside that threatens constantly to overwhelm it.
Bringing together an expert team of contributors from North America, Europe and Russia, this volume takes the groundbreaking work of Naoki Sakai as its starting point and broadens the scope of Cultural Studies to bridge across philosophy and critical theory. At the same time it explicitly problematizes the putative divide between "Asian" and "Western" research objects and methodologies, and the link between culture and the nation.
The Politics of Culture will appeal to upper level undergraduates and graduates in Asian studies, cultural studies, comparative literature and philosophy.
Editors’ Introduction Part I: Translation and its Effects 1. Novelistic Desire, Theoretical Attitude, and Translating Heteroglossia: Reading Natsume Sōseki’s Sanshirō with Naoki Sakai Michael K. Bourdaghs 2. Deixis, Dislocation, and Suspense in Translation: Tawada Yōko’s Bath Brett de Bary 3. Politics as Translation: Naoki Sakai and the Critique of Hermeneutics John Namjun Kim 4. The Biopolitics of Companion Species: Wartime Animation and Multi-Ethnic Nationalism Thomas Lamarre 5. Translating the Image Helen Petrovsky Part II: Economies of Difference 6. For a Communist Ontology William Haver 7. Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude Sandro Mezzadra 8. Transition to a World Society: Naoki Sakai’s Work in the Context of Capital-Imperialism Jon Solomon 9. Total War and Subjectivity: ‘Economic Ethics’ as a Trajectory toward Postwar J. Victor Koschmann Part III: The Modern West and its Outside 10. The Western Relation: The Politics of Humanism Frédéric Neyrat 11. Modernization, Modernity, and Tradition: Sociological Theory’s Promissory Notes Andreas Langenohl 12. Theologico-Political Militancy in Ignacio de Loyola’s Ejercicios espirituales Alberto Moreiras 13. Interview with Naoki Sakai
Biography
Richard F. Calichman is Associate Professor of the City College of New York, CUNY, USA. John Namjun Kim is Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside, USA.
