Karatani Kōjin, History and Repetition (Columbia UP 2012)
This review was originally published in Japanese Studies, vol. 32, no 3, 2012, pp. 480–482.
Review of Karatani Kōjin, History and Repetition (edited by Seiji M. Lippit), New York: Columbia University Press, 2012, xxx, 239 pp. inc. glossary, bibliography, index, ISBN 978-0-231-15729-2 pb, http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15728-5/history-and-repetition
This English translation of Karatani Kōjin's History and Repetion, principally translated by literature scholar Seiji M. Lippit, is based on the Iwanami Shoten volume Rekisihi to hanpuku published in 2004. It joins the growing number of Karatani's works available in English translation that have helped make him one of the few contemporary Japanese critical theorists whose work is well known outside Japan.
The repetition of crises in the history of the modern state is the central idea that unites the essays in this volume. Karatani explains his concept of historical repetition through a reading of Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852). Modern systems of representative government arose, Karatani asserts, via the displacement of the absolute monarch whose absence leaves a 'hole' in the centre of the system. When these representative institutions fail to contain the contradictions of capitalism and the system enters a crisis this absence at the centre tends to be filled by an authoritarian figure who is able to represent the interests of society as a whole. Such crises of the state, like economic crises, different in their specific content yet their structure, Karatani asserts, remains the same. This historical 'repetition-compulsion' is analogous to the psychological return of the repressed that can never be remembered' described by Freud in which the past 'instead of being remembered ... is repeated in the present' (2).
Karatani's concept of structural repetition is key to his understanding of Japanese fascism. He rejects narrow definitions of fascism that exclude pre-war Japan, arguing that such views 'lose sight of problems that emerged in the 1930s on a global scale' (5). Fascism arises, he argues, as a counter-revolutionary response to a crisis of representative democracy. In Japan, the limits placed on the absolute power of the Emperor following the Seinan War (1877) and the Freedom and People's Rights Movement resulted in the establishment of a system of parliamentary representation. While the Meiji emperor himself was not deposed he lost his position of absolute power. During Taishō, the sickly young emperor 'disappeared' from public view. This left a hole in the centre of the system that was filled during the social and economic crisis of the 1930s by the Shōwa restoration. Chronic recession and a growing socialist movement in the wake of the Russian Revolution during this period mirrored the circumstances which produced fascism in Europe. Drawing comparisons with the coup d'état described in the Eighteenth Brumaire, Karatani sees pre-war prime minister Konoe Fumimaro as a Japanese Bonaparte. An aristocrat with ties to the imperial house, Konoe represented the establishment but he also had ties to sections of the army, Marxist intellectuals, reformist bureaucrats and the peasant movement. He enjoyed the support of all political parties and was seen as the only person capable of restraining the growing power of the military during a crisis in which the structures of the parliamentary system—the parliament, the cabinet and the state apparatus (bureaucracy, army and navy)—were divided against one another.
Karatani's analysis of Japanese fascism continues in the final chapter of this volume in which he examines the attempt by Meiji restoration scholars like Okakura Kakuō and his one-time student Watsuji Tetsurō to discover in Buddhism 'a principle of Eastern or Japanese culture that would counter the modern West.' (180) This movement was evident in the Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō's development of a concept of 'emptiness' wherein the contradictions between individualism and totalitarianism were sublated in the 'being of nothingness' of the Imperial household. This philosophy was utilised to justify the unification of Asia under the 'empty sign' of the Emperor. Karatani argues that, rather than 're-discovering' an authentic Buddhist philosophy these scholars produced 'an aesthetic object of the imagination, completely unrelated to the Buddhism of the past.' (180) He contrasts this tendency with the work of two pre-war writers who had a more direct relationship to Japanese Buddhist practice: Sakaguchi Ango, who undertook monastic training as young man and Takeda Taijun, the son and heir to an hereditary temple. These writers rejected any 'return' to an authentic 'Eastern' idea of emptiness that could give rise to a transcendent subject such as the Emperor and instead developed concepts of emptiness that implied an absence of any transcendent subjectivity that stood outside of social relations themselves.
In chapter 3 Karatani identifies a series of 'repetitions' that he claims become visible when comparing the Meiji and Shōwa eras in terms of the Japanese calendar. A key event he identifies here is the suicide of General Nogi following the death of the Meiji emperor in Meiji 45 and the suicide of Mishima Yukio in Shōwa 45. For Karatani, these suicides reflect the continuing reappearance of the contradictions of Japanese modernity within a discursive space defined by two intersecting axes: one between Asia and the West and the other between national rights versus popular rights.
In chapter 4, an essay on Ōe's novel Man'en gannen no futtobōru (translated into English under the title The Silent Cry), Karatani points out that the names used in Ōe's novels are not proper names but rather the names of generic types. This is a consequence of the allegorical nature of Ōe's work which Karatani defends as an attempt to find universal meaning in the particular. In chapter 5 he contrasts this approach with that of Murakami Haruki in the novel 1973-nen no pinbōru (translated into English as Pinball, 1973). Where Ōe's allegory attempts to affirm the meaningfulness of historical events, Murakami portrays an undifferentiated landscape devoid of historical significance in which names and dates serve as arbitrary signs within an ultimately meaningless and empty landscape. Karatani identifies the 'I' in Murakami's novels with a transcendent subject that 'by flaunting its baseless absorption with something meaningless, looks down on those who hold on to meaning or goals and avidly pursue something' (129). While Ōe grapples with the meaning of historical repetition, Karatani argues, Murakami maintains an ironic detachment.
At times Karatani's central concept of historical repetition is overly literal and deterministic. This is particularly notable in his claim in chapter 3 that historical repetition occurs not in 60-year but 120-year cycles. However, Karatani's basic argument that the contradictions of Japanese modernity—the struggle for freedom and democracy, the concept of the nation and Japan's relations with Asia and with the West—are recurrent themes in Japan history is convincing. After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Karatani has taken an active role in the anti-nuclear movement, where, as a writer and participant in demonstrations he has emphasised that these same unresolved contradictions lie behind the disaster and the political response to it. In History and Repetition we find a powerful exposition of the contradictions that continue to haunt the modern Japanese state.
References
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers, 1963.
Murakaimi, Haruki. Pinball, 1973. Translated by Alfred Birnbaum. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985.
Ōe, Kenzaburō. The Silent Cry. Translated by John Bester. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1974.
