Beyond Nation: Time, Writing, and Community in the Work of Abe Kōbō 9780804797559

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BEYOND NATION

BEYOND NATION T IME , W R I T I N G , A N D C O MMU N I T Y ¯ BO ¯ IN T H E W O R K O F A B E K O

R IC HARD F. CALICHMAN

STANF ORD U N IVE R SIT Y PR E SS STANF ORD, C AL IF O R N IA

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

©2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Calichman, Richard, author. Title: Beyond nation : time, writing, and community in the work of Abe Kobo / Richard F. Calichman. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | ©2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015037622 | ISBN 9780804797016 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Abe, Kōbō 1924-1993--Criticism and interpretation. | Identity (Psychology) in literature. Classification: LCC PL845.B4 Z59 2016 | DDC 895.63/5--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037622 ISBN 9780804797559 (electronic)

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Palatino

CONTENTS

Acknowledgmentsvii Introduction

1



ONE

Markings in the Sand: On Suna no onna11



TWO

The Time of Disturbance: On “Uchinaru henkyo¯”53

THREE

The Lure of Community in Tanin no kao97



Interventions: Of Abe Ko¯bo¯171

FOUR

Epilogue

233

Notes245 Bibliography267 Index273

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book was supported in part by a City College Humanities Enrichment Grant, a PSC-CUNY Research Award, and an AAS Northeast Asia Council Award. I would like to express my thanks to Eric Weitz and Carlos Riobó of the City College of New York. I am particularly grateful to the book’s reviewers, whose insightful comments helped raise the overall quality of the manuscript. Jenny Gavacs, my editor at Stanford University Press, provided valuable advice and support. Toba Kōji of Waseda University has taught me much about Abe, and I would like to express my gratitude here. Finally, my deepest thanks go to Hirayama Keiko and Hirayama Yōko, whose warm hospitality sustained the project from beginning to end. The book is dedicated, once again, to K.

BEYOND NATION

INTRODUCTION

IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD,

Abe Kōbō (1924–1993) is primarily known today as a Japanese writer whose fictional works explore the theme of alienation through focusing on the individual’s actions within a repressive society that seeks to deprive him of his freedom and autonomy. It is the aim of the present book to complicate this image, to show that Abe’s text seeks to problematize such received notions as alienation, freedom, and autonomy, unsettling the simple opposition between individual and society, while also placing in question what it means to be “Japanese.” My reading attempts to bring to the fore the disturbing implications of Abe’s thought for any interpretation that would identify him too quickly and narrowly, without examining its own methodological presuppositions. Such presuppositions can begin to be shaken, I believe, by sustained reflection on the notions of time, writing, and community as they appear in Abe’s work. This work took various forms over the course of Abe’s career: novels, essays, short stories, plays, poetry, as well as scripts for film, radio, and television, etc.1 And yet these writings might all be considered “art” in the particular sense given this word by Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe, as the medium that “is only identified as that which cannot be identified.”2 For Abe, the notion of identity must be forcefully problematized by reconceiving the relation between movement (idō) and fixity (teichaku). Traditionally, these concepts are seen as existing in a strictly

2 I NTRODUCTI ON

oppositional sense. In Abe’s understanding, however, movement is to be considered primary, with the result that fixity must now be grasped as a derivative effect of movement, that which is inscribed within the general space of this latter. If identity is to be conceived in terms of an entity’s selfsameness, the intrinsic unity it possesses that serves to establish its presence to itself and thus difference from other entities, then the fixity of such identity must henceforth be regarded as fundamentally displaced. This displacement of identity requires that thinking turn its attention to that which precedes identity, both allowing for it and destabilizing it from within. We can see this insight operating powerfully throughout Abe’s ­corpus, as for example in his 1946 poem “Jikan to kūkan” [Time and Space]: Haru kureba haru no yosooi

When spring comes, the

aki kureba aki no yosooi

When autumn comes, the

yasashisa ga omote ni haete

Gentleness shines on the surface

mori no kōji wo samayoinagara

When my secret thoughts stop

kaku mo omae wo kaeru no ka tatta konoha no ichimai ni

hisoka na omoi wo tomeru toki

“shizen” ni kakurete mienakunatta

appearance of spring

appearance of autumn

Does it thus change you? At a single leaf on a tree

As I wander on a forest path, Then the earth, invisible and hidden in “nature,”

daichi ga kaette yomigaeru

Indeed returns to life.

Kono honshitsu no yakusoku wo

When I begin singing to the

chikara ni michita mu no keishō wo

Of this essential promise,

hizashi no kage ni utaidasu toki ō ninjū yo

kono mi wo daichi ni tatoeuru nara

sunlight

Of the powerful figure of nothingness,

Oh, surrender!

If this self can be compared to the earth,

kyō kureba kyō no ono ga mi

Then when today comes, the self

asu kureba asu no ono ga mi

When tomorrow comes, the self

today

tomorrow.3



INT RODUCT ION 3

Here Abe aims to dislocate the borders that have traditionally determined the genre of poetry by introducing concepts and terms that derive specifically from the discourse of philosophy. In question, however, is not simply how we determine the poetic and literary in their difference from what is held to be the non-poetic and non-literary. By investigating the nature of time and space, Abe explicitly raises the issue of how we are to conceive of the self in its experience of change. Is the self exposed to the movement of time and space once it has been formed as a self? If so, then spatiotemporal inscriptions must be considered to be derivative of the self’s identity as such. However, if the self is marked by the difference of time and space from the initial moment of its appearance, then identity can only be constituted retroactively. This retroactivity introduces an irreducible element of contingency to the determination of self-identity. Regardless of whether this self be determined individually (I am “I”) or collectively (e.g., I am “Japanese”), the turn to the past from the vantage point of the present draws attention to the instant of decision, which resists any empirical grounding and requires for its occurrence a singular time and space. In this poem Abe can be seen to offer two divergent conceptions of time. In the first, time is presented in quite classical fashion as circular. Following nature’s rhythms, spring turns to autumn only to then return to itself the following year. These opening lines of the first stanza are then repeated with a slight alteration in the closing lines of the second stanza. There it is the unit of the day that is foregrounded: this day today vanishes at the end of its allotted time and yet is reborn the following day as a new tomorrow. Time is thus represented as governed by the cyclical movement of nature. This requires that identity and difference be determined as repeating one another in a series of constant alternations, for the seasons change only to then reappear, just as a day changes while nevertheless remaining a day. Abe skillfully mimics this natural movement through repetition of the verb “to come,” thereby joining the beginning of the poem to its end: “When spring comes, the appearance of spring / When autumn comes, the appearance of autumn  / [ . . . ]Then when today comes, the self today / When tomorrow comes, the self tomorrow.” This circularity of time, as demonstrated by an entity’s departure from itself only to subsequently return to itself, is contrasted by Abe

4 I NTRODUCTI ON

to an other thinking of time, one that must be regarded as rigorously non-circular. By presenting this other notion of time within the circularity of the poem, Abe implicitly poses the question of the relation between identity and difference (or “fixity” and “movement”) in terms of borders. If these borders contain a non-circular conception of time, Abe asks, are they truly capable of containing that time? Is there not perhaps something within this notion of time that threatens the very possibility of containment in general, hence forcing us to rethink the relation between inside and outside, internal identity and external difference? For Abe, time is to be conceived ecstatically, implacably outside of itself. Time must be understood as departing from itself since it disappears at every instant of its appearance, and yet such departure strictly proscribes the possibility of return. This strange movement of disappearing in the very event of its appearing is necessary for there to be any temporal movement at all. From Abe’s perspective, such movement can be glimpsed even in the rhythm of nature’s repetition. In the passage from spring to autumn no less than in that from today to tomorrow, what is foremost at issue is a “coming” (kureba). This word, which Abe repeats in the brief span of his poem a remarkable four times, names the exposure to temporal alterity that must take place in order for any entity to maintain itself as such. Identity requires this coming and yet dissimulates its threat. For Abe, however, anything that exists must be essentially temporal, and this means that it stands continually exposed to the coming of other times and other spaces in order to be at all. Abe returns to this notion of a non-circular coming of time in his 1962 essay “‘Kyō’ wo saguru shūnen” [The Tenacity to Search for “Today”]. Just as the self in “Jikan to kūkan” can have no existence outside of time, which thereby redetermines it in its singularity as “this self” (kono mi), “the self today” (kyō no ono ga mi), and “the self tomorrow” (asu no ono ga mi), so too does Abe now reveal man’s yielding to the coming of the future: “Even if the future is created by the accumulation of ‘todays,’ it doesn’t necessarily belong to ‘today.’ For example, if someone from the Stone Age were to appear in our present day, it is unclear whether he would regard this present as hell or heaven. No matter what he thought, however, it is absolutely the case that what judges is not him, but rather the era itself. To live, ultimately, might be to envision oneself



INT RODUCT ION 5

in the ­future. The future always comes. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily the case that one will appear within that future in the manner one expects. Even if one were to devote every ‘today’ for the future, tomorrow might well be something reserved strictly for the people of tomorrow.”4 Even before man belongs to himself, Abe insists, he belongs to time, which is to say he remains essentially exposed to the coming of an alterity that repeatedly overtakes him and determines him otherwise. Typically time is understood as a continuum, with each now following one another in an infinite chain, but Abe draws attention to the interruptive force of each future moment. Even though “the future is created by the accumulation of ‘todays,’” that future “doesn’t necessarily belong to ‘today.’” In its difference from all that has preceded it, the future continually resists the present, jeopardizing the solidity of all forms of knowledge and ways of understanding the world. For Abe, this alterity of the future demands that we rethink the question of judgment. Judgment is generally regarded as a function of human consciousness, but Abe points to the limits of subjective interiority by placing the site of judgment in the future. No determinations can be made purely in the present since the present is constantly slipping outside of itself into the future. If, as Abe says, “the future always comes,” this coming does not take place simply after the present has constituted itself as such; on the contrary, the future repeatedly disrupts the present, threatening its unity and integrity. This explains why “the tenacity to search for ‘today,’” to in other words cling to present conceptions of reality, must be seen as a failed project. It is in this context that Abe specifically attacks the nostalgia that informs the desire for community. As he argues in a 1967 roundtable discussion (with the literary critic Sasaki Kiichi and filmmaker Teshigahara Hiroshi) entitled “‘Moetsukita chizu’ wo megutte” [On The ­Ruined Map], “For example, when people speak of ‘human relations,’ they tend to advocate the restoration of man, a proposition virtually no one questions. Man is alienated because of the complexity of contemporary society. To restore man, one has to restore the human connection; that is what they seem to imply. However, it is precisely this notion that I find to be extremely negative.”5 Abe’s dissatisfaction with the concept of the “restoration of man” (ningen kaifuku) must be grasped on the basis of his understanding of time. If time in its ecstatic nature is never fully pres-

6 I NTRODUCTI ON

ent to itself, then man in his existence within time can never be exempt from such lack of self-presence. As Abe observes, man’s divergence from himself is frequently reduced to the sociohistoric phenomenon of alienation (sogai). In this way, what is rigorously a general condition of impossibility (i.e., man can in principle never be fully adequate to himself) comes to be historicized as a mere empirical aberration. According to this narrative, it is contemporary society in its excessive complexity that has made man less human. In order to return man to his proper humanity, then, there must be a restoration of the human bond or connection (ningen no tsunagari). This involves a nostalgic return to the past with the aim of locating a more authentic form of community, one that allows man to realize his full potential as human. Abe realized that such a restorative project depends for its success on a fantastic projection of an idealized image of the human into the past. Through this projection, a true form of humanity could come to be retroactively created, and this image might then be utilized as part of the effort to purify contemporary society of elements that are seen to be responsible for preventing man from achieving his proper self. For Abe, the historical entity that constantly mobilizes this ideology of authentic communality is the nation-state. In the context of modern Japanese literature, it is this fundamentally critical view of the nation that above all distinguished Abe from Mishima Yukio, the writer with whom he is frequently compared. In a 1969 lecture entitled “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō” [The Frontier Within, Part II], Abe himself calls attention to this important difference. Reporting Mishima’s boast that “I participate in the Self-Defense Forces for my country,” Abe contrasts this attitude to his own work of creating “the art of a ruined nation” (bōkoku no geijutsu).6 He explains this relation between art and the nation-state as follows: “When discussing the question of the usefulness of art, for example, there is nobody in Japan, for better or worse, who claims that making art more useful will help rally a spirit of patriotism. Nevertheless, art was often used for this purpose in the past, and there are still countries that use art in this way. In general, however, art is intrinsically not something that serves the state; rather, it must ruin the nation. I don’t believe that art that ruins the nation exists alongside art that makes the nation flourish. In speaking with Mishima, I again realized that what we call ‘art’ must ruin the nation.”7



INT RODUCT ION 7

Abe is unequivocal in his view that art be understood as a form of resistance to the nation-state. The nation-state operates according to an ideology of identity that transforms individuals into national subjects. Rather than questioning what it means to be “Japanese,” for example, Mishima allowed himself to be appropriated by this ideology, determining himself according to the most classical whole-part relation strictly as a member who forms part of the totality that is the nationstate Japan. If, as we noted earlier, art “is only identified as that which cannot be identified,” then Abe’s call for an “art of a ruined nation” involves at its core a resistance to all forms of national identification. Yet how is such disidentification to be conceived? Here we might find a hint in Abe’s understanding of time in its particular relation to the notion of belonging. As he writes, “Even if the future is created by the accumulation of ‘todays,’ it doesn’t necessarily belong to [zoku ­shiteiru] ‘today.’” In the context of the ideology of national identification, an individual’s past consists of the markings of such determinations as birthplace, family affiliations, linguistic background, site of residency, etc. No individual arrives at the present without such markings, for these testify to one’s participation in a larger social world whose operations vastly exceed the control of any one person. Yet if the individual in his present identity is, to use Abe’s words, “created by the accumulation” of these past determinations, it is nevertheless the case that no individual can simply be reduced to them. At every instant—that is to say, in every spilling forth of the present into the future—reality opens itself to being remarked. The notion of belonging functions to conceal this constant interruption of time in determining the individual strictly on the basis of those markings that have gradually fixed the sense of his present identity. In modernity, such markings have come to be powerfully shaped by the presence of the nation-state, not simply with regard to nationality, but in terms of the discursive categories of race and ethnicity as well. In order for these markings to retain their validity, however, they must constantly be repeated. It is at each moment of repetition that an individual’s identificatory belonging to the nation can potentially be disturbed, remarked otherwise. If such belonging requires repetition in order to be confirmed, then it is nevertheless also the case that each occasion of this repetition provides a chance to actively intervene in this cycle of identity.

8 I NTRODUCTI ON

A heightened awareness of the relation between identity and time can be developed through focus on the question of writing. Chapter One examines this notion in Abe’s widely acclaimed 1962 novel Suna no onna [The Woman in the Dunes]. I attempt to demonstrate the general force of this notion by conceiving it beyond its conventional determination as an act performed by a human subject. What is most urgently at stake in writing, I argue, can be approached in the terms of ontology, in which being articulates or determines itself at every moment through a marking that can no longer be understood as purely self-identical. Abe provides an important hint for this rethinking of writing in his repeated references to the concept of time. Writing names an instant of contact or relationality between disparate entities, and this contact leaves behind a trace of itself that can be read thereafter. In this regard, writing points to an impure temporality in which past, present, and future reveal themselves to be strangely interwoven. Such interweaving, I believe, bears upon the central tension in the novel between form and flow. Form provides the unity of identity, whereas flow exposes the fallibility of this identity in showing the interrelatedness between entities that are otherwise held to be strictly discrete and mutually exterior. Abe presents this tension in the example of his protagonist Niki ­Junpei’s sexual relations with the “sand woman.” But he also tries to think the connection between form and flow in his extended reflections on the sand itself. In this sense, Abe might be understood as opening his text to a broader engagement between the literary and philosophical. Chapter Two turns to the series of essays written in the years 1968– 1969 under the collective heading of “Uchinaru henkyō” [The Frontier Within]. My aim in this chapter is to investigate the relation between time and space as presented in these texts. I pursue a certain inconsistency in Abe’s argument, for he appears at moments to conceive of time as a pure movement that unfolds strictly prior to the intervention of space. This I show to be impossible, and that on the contrary Abe’s text also reveals that time and space exist as fundamentally interrelated. Both with and against Abe, I demonstrate that an entity’s exposure to spatiotemporal inscription takes place from the initial moment of its appearance, and it is for this reason that entities are unable to present themselves as such. Although Abe tends to oppose the movement of time to the fixity of space, the notion of alterity he sets forth involves a



INT RODUCT ION 9

generalization of movement to include within it space as well as time. This insight bears directly on the thinking of politics he articulates in these essays, for he wishes to understand the Jew as a figure of movement that resists all appropriation by the nation-state. For Abe, the Jew is that entity which the state must simultaneously produce and destroy in order to maintain itself in its identity. I discuss certain problems with this conception of Jewry, but I also attempt to show the tremendous force behind Abe’s contestation of this identitarian logic that forms such a central part of nation-state ideology. Chapter Three provides a reading of Abe’s 1964 novel Tanin no kao [The Face of Another] through focus on the notion of community. In its traditional determination, community presupposes that identity and difference be conceived as oppositional. For example, the collective identity that grounds communal existence in one case is typically seen as constitutive of its difference from other cases. Abe’s dissatisfaction with this understanding finds expression in his attempt to think communal formation on the basis of contingency. What this means, among other things, is that no community can exist as simply given. Here the identity required to form community conceals an even deeper level of identification, and this demands that attention now be directed to the question of ideology. In order to better understand the problem of identification in communal formation, I examine the notion of transference. What concerns me in Abe’s presentation of this notion is the tension that appears in his text between a commitment to dialectics and a thinking that exceeds dialectics. While untangling these threads, I attempt to shed light on Abe’s treatment of the figure of the minority. The minority must be understood structurally rather than empirically, I argue. Specifically, the community’s attempt to form itself requires that the minority be actively created as the community’s own negative image. By grasping that the minority comes to be determined as that entity against which the community posits itself, we are better able to situate Abe’s references in the novel to Korean residents of Japan and blacks in the United States as part of his attack against the complicity between nationalism and racism. Chapter Four sets forth the notion of intervention in order to explore the manner in which Abe has been read in the U.S. Japan studies field. What interests me is the contradiction in which Abe’s attack against the

1 0 I NTRODUCTI ON

logic of national affiliation has been disavowed through his national inscription as a writer of Japanese literature. Through the example of Abe, I attempt to show how the institution of Japan studies works to consolidate the hold of nationalism by tightening the bond between nation-state and individual subject. I follow the interpretations of Abe on the part of such scholars as Donald Keene and John Whittier Treat in order to locate a desire for a particularist Japanese identity, one that exists alongside expressions of culturalism, Orientalism, and racism. Through showing how the notion of intervention involves an originary co-implication of subject and object in the constitution of objects, I seek to demonstrate that the institutional appeal to Japanese objects remains grounded on a logic of identity that Abe’s texts continually disrupt. For Abe, logic must be understood as necessarily inscribed within time. This insight brings to the fore the importance of the contingency of decision. The absence of any objective basis for decision means that decisions must be repeated, each time differently. My reading of Abe aims to show that his thinking is irreducible to the status of research object, and that, on the contrary, an understanding of his work at the level of methodology must now be sought.

ONE

MARKINGS IN THE SAND ON SUNA NO ONNA

Suddenly his eyes soared upward like a bird, and he felt as if he were looking down on himself. Certainly he must be the strangest of all . . . he who was musing on the strangeness of things here.1

WR IT IN G B E YO N D T H E SU B J E CT

In Abe’s most celebrated novel, the 1962 Suna no onna [The Woman in the Dunes], the protagonist Niki Junpei repeatedly attempts to escape from the sandpit in which he has been trapped. Having failed in his first attempt, he conceives of a plan to tie up the woman in whose house he is imprisoned and force the villagers to release him. In the course of executing this plan, however, he suddenly finds himself imagining a future moment when, having successfully escaped and returned to his former life, he meets with a friend to discuss the written record he intends to make of the traumatic experience. “Well, Niki, I am amazed,” the friend remarks. “At last you have decided to write something. It all comes down to experience. A common earthworm won’t attain full growth if its skin is not stimulated, they say.” To this Niki replies, “It’s meaningless, no matter how intense the experience, to trace only the surface of the event. The main characters of this tragedy are the local people there, and if you don’t give some hint of the solution through your writing about them, then that rare experience will be lost.” The conversation then briefly digresses only to directly return to this question of writing. Niki: “No matter how I try to write, I’m not fit to be a writer.” Friend: “This unbecoming humility again. There’s no need for you to think of writers as something special. If you write, you’re a writer, aren’t you? . . . Isn’t it good to be made to realize what sort of

1 2

MA RK I NGS I N THE S A ND

person one is?” Niki: “Thanks to this education, I have to be forcibly exposed to a new sensation in order to suffer new pain.” Friend: “Yet there’s hope.” Niki: “But one is not responsible for whether that hope thereafter turns out to be genuine or not.”2 It seems important to ask why, in this novel about captivity and escape, Abe chooses to include this scene of imaginary dialogue about writing. Two possible interpretations might be considered. First, Niki Junpei is a teacher, and, as his friend suggests, “professionally they’re pretty close to writers.”3 In this sense, Suna no onna could be regarded as thematically linked to such other fictional works in Abe’s corpus as the 1964 Tanin no kao [The Face of Another] and 1973 Hako otoko [The Box Man], as both of these texts center on protagonists who, although engaged in other professions, nevertheless maintain a keen interest in writing. In the case of Suna no onna, the stark contrast Abe draws between the city and the countryside might conceivably be reinforced through this theme of writing, given the traditional link between writing and the notion of civilization. Hence Niki’s acute sense of estrangement from the villagers, and particularly from the woman with whom he is forced to live in the sandpit, could be explained by the fact that he is (or at least intends to be) a writer, someone whose relations with the others around him are as distant and abstractly mediated as those between an author and his characters. Second, the introduction of this thematic of writing might be seen to derive from a self-reflective gesture on Abe’s part as authorial creator of this text. In this reading, ­Niki’s role as writer would function as an ironic double of Abe, effectively blurring the boundary between the levels of fiction and reality. Niki’s dialogue with his friend about such issues as the relation between experience and writing or the difference between writers and the act of writing, etc. might then be traced back to Abe’s own views on these topics, with an eye toward determining the degree of correspondence (and thus the possibility of ironic intent) between these two worlds. More radically, the references to writing in the novel could serve to call attention to the work’s status as construct or artifice, thereby alerting readers to the need for a heightened critical consciousness regarding the manipulative effects of narrative. The problem with both these interpretations, however, is that they presuppose a concept of subjectivity that the notion of writing force-

ON SUNA NO ONNA13

fully calls into question. Here we need to examine the ability of certain traditional aspects of literary criticism to take into account the movement of writing. The first interpretation determines writing first of all as a theme, that is, a topic or idea that is found to appear across a diversity of textual instances. Yet a theme can never be discovered as such, in the form of an empirical given. Its lack of any purely objective existence demands that it necessarily appear to or before someone, a reader who, in an act of abstraction, disengages the theme from those textual elements that surround it and which form its immediate context. If writing according to this type of literary analysis comes to be remarked as a theme, something extracted from the text, then the reader is likewise implicitly determined as a thematizing subject. For this subject, the activity of raising textual elements from their initial material inscription to the level of theme is above all a conscious operation. It is consciousness that allows the subject to identify the thematic of writing in Abe’s text in its distinction from those elements that appear to fall outside the border or frame of this theme. However, this immediately raises the question of whether writing so easily submits to this operation of consciousness. If one were to conceive of writing as in some sense irreducible to the subject’s thematic framing, then it might be possible to begin to define the act of writing as a kind of overflow, that which exceeds all attempts to contain it within conceptual borders. At the very moment the reader-subject presents to himself the thematic of writing, writing would have already slipped beyond his grasp. Something quite similar can be seen to take place with regard to the second interpretation as well. There writing is considered on the basis of a self-reflexivity that can refer to either the writer or the reader. In the former case, Abe’s doubling of himself in the form of the protagonist Niki Junpei would appear to collapse the border between fiction and reality in raising the possibility that Niki’s remarks on writing may in fact be attributable to Abe himself. Yet this collapse reveals itself very quickly to be in fact a consolidation of a classical conception of literature that privileges the real world of the author as the giver of meaning to the fictional text he creates. In this instance, self-reflection is determined as a mirror in which the text can never be anything but a secondary image produced by external reality. Whether this image (i.e., Niki’s remarks on writing) corresponds to reality (i.e., Abe’s own

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ideas on writing) or not is of minor consequence compared to the subordination of writing to this structure of correspondence itself. Here the measure of writing is understood to be authorial intentionality, which again returns us to the subject in all of its sovereignty. Even when focus is shifted from writer to reader, as can be seen in the more radical aspect of this second interpretation, the question remains one of expanding the capacity of the reader’s consciousness. Recognition of the text’s artifice is enabled by an understanding of the presence of writing in Suna no onna as actually a writing of writing. This doubling of writing in turn brings about a doubling of the reader: the reader who emotionally identifies with Abe’s novel is now able to objectify himself, thereby gaining a degree of critical distance from himself in his greater consciousness of the various rhetorical and narrative devices used by the author to manipulate the text’s reception. Such self-awareness is indisputably valuable from both an epistemological and ethical perspective, but it must be recognized as ultimately insufficient when the task involves disrupting the force of subjectivity itself. In order to understand the resistance of writing to any subjective appropriation in the context of Suna no onna, it is necessary to first reread Niki’s discussion of writing with his friend before we then proceed to other instances of writing in the novel. In our analysis, the urgency of the question of writing must be understood as inseparable from the dominance of modern forms of subjectivity. Abe both recognized this dominance and sought a way to attack or critically undermine it. As he writes in his 1944 essay “Shi to shijin (ishiki to muishiki)” [Poetry and Poets (Consciousness and the Unconscious)], “Subject [shukan] and object [kyakkan] have been the target of mankind’s most brilliant battles over knowledge since ancient times. Each has tried to usurp the absolute throne and negate the other, but with few exceptions the battle finally appeared to end with the pure object falling to its knees before the pure subject.”4 How then are we to contest this modern force of subjectivity? Here Abe proposes that it is necessary to return thought to a more originary level, to a dimension “which precedes this division between subject and object.”5 For Abe at this time, very much influenced by such thinkers as Heidegger and Nietzsche, this more fundamental dimension was termed “ontological existence” (sonzaironteki jitsuzon). We shall attempt in the following pages to trace the contours of this

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thought, following it but also (of necessity) deviating from it, by means of reconceptualizing this idea in the context of Suna no onna along the lines of the movement of writing. In examining Niki’s dialogue with his friend, it is important to first of all underline the strange temporality at work in these lines. Niki, let us recall from the novel, is suddenly struck by a sense of anxiety in contemplating the possibility that his escape plans will once again end in failure. He impatiently asks himself why he is unable to be calmer, in the manner of an “observer” (kansatsusha) less caught up in the immediate circumstances around him. This self-questioning leads directly to his thought of writing: “When I return home safely,” he assures himself, “it will certainly be worthwhile to record [kiroku shite oku] this experience.” In other words, from his present vantage point Niki envisions a future moment at which he will return in memory to these past events and document what took place then. Already we can glimpse in Niki’s words the unexpectedly complex role that writing is to play. Given that his writing in the future will involve a return to the past, the record that he makes at that time must be described as less than originary. The return takes place through memory, which requires that his experience in the sandpit must have in some form or another already marked itself upon him. Without such initial marking, Niki’s documentation of his time in the sands would be purely fictional or fabricated, and clearly this is not what he has in mind. On the contrary, the return from the future moment of writing to the experienced past involves a very particular destination, which is the moment or rather series of moments when that actual experience traced itself upon Niki, leaving behind a memory that he is able to access in the future. Interestingly, Niki and his friend appear to disagree regarding the question of the relation between writing and the original experience of which it is the reproduction. From the friend’s perspective, it is experience that must be privileged. “It all comes down to experience [taiken],” he confidently declares. Yet Niki is unconvinced. For him, the primacy of experience appears oddly threatened by the fact that it is forced to navigate the medium of writing, without which that experience is unable to reappear as such: “It’s meaningless, no matter how intense the experience, to trace only the surface of the event. The main characters of this tragedy are the local people there, and if you don’t give some

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hint of the solution through your writing about them, then that rare experience will be lost.” Niki’s concern is with the villagers—they are the true “protagonists” or “main characters” (shujinkō), as he says—but the problem that he confronts is that an accurate representation of their plight requires that one paradoxically shift attention away from them so as to focus instead on one’s writing about them. He describes his experience with the villagers as an “event” (dekigoto). That experience, he recognizes, was absolutely unique; the fact that it was so “rare” (or “precious”: sekkaku no) means that, having now returned to his previous life, it cannot ever again be repeated. In this regard, Niki is in complete agreement with his friend on the invaluable quality of experience. In order to do justice to that rare experience, however, one has no choice but to betray its very rareness or uniqueness. Writing appears, then, as a kind of double-edged sword. In its claim to represent the original experience, it effectively replaces that which both Niki and his friend would acknowledge to be irreplaceable. Writing is of course a tool, but in this sense it reveals itself to be also a weapon, for it commits an undeniable violence to the singular nature of the past event. Nevertheless—and it is here that Niki begins to part ways with his friend—it is only through writing (kaku koto ni yotte) that the initial experience can be made to reappear at all. This explains why Niki so forcefully stresses to his friend that writing is first of all a matter of techne, or art. It is not simply that experience gives itself in its fullness and transparency to linguistic representation; rather, one is forced to craft language in such a way as to ensure that past events are depicted with all possible accuracy and fidelity. Superficial description is thus insufficient, as Niki argues, for the future readers of this account must be given at least some idea as to how the tragic situation of the villagers is to be resolved. In responding to his friend, Niki refers to the textual repetition of the event as a “tracing.” The verb he uses here is nazoru, which contains both the physical sense of tracing out such things as letters or pictures, as from a copybook, and the more abstract sense of following a past occurrence with the aim of making it reappear. Niki’s meaning in this context is a negative one: a mere doubling of the experienced event is inadequate, for something more needs to be added. One must give to the event something beyond which it originally possessed in order to represent it as such. At issue here is a cer-

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tain deceitfulness inherent in the technicity of writing. Specifically, the solution to the tragedy of the village, which was not present originally, must be retroactively incorporated into that past experience so that the textual effect of verisimilitude can be created. It is this sensitivity to the irreducibility of writing to experience that distinguishes Niki’s attitude from that of his friend. Niki’s friend appears blithely uninterested in such complexity. “There’s no need for you to think of writers as something special,” he insists. “If you write, you’re a writer, aren’t you?” The friend can so easily denigrate writing because it appears to be nothing more than a medium through which past experiences can return to us once again in the present. As suggested by his remark on individual development (“A common earthworm won’t attain full growth if its skin is not stimulated, they say”), the external stimulation provided by experience is necessary in helping a person gradually actualize those abilities that lie latently within him. Yet this conception of the individual as capable of smoothly integrating past experiences within the realm of his present self seems to return us directly to the problem of subjectivity that writing aims to address. Rather than positing any simple continuity between past and present, the notion of writing that Niki touches upon appears instead to reveal a certain discontinuity or disjunction in time. In its “tracing” of the original experience, writing communicates not with that experience in and of itself, but rather with the residual inscription of that experience. In the future scene of writing that Niki envisions, that is, his past experience has already vanished. In its disappearance, however, it leaves behind a mark of itself that remains. It is this remarking of the past, the impression that it has left on or within Niki, that now must be further traced out so as to produce writing in the sense discussed by Niki and his friend. We begin to see in this dialogue about writing that the actual force of writing is far more general than it first appears. Understood in its broadest, most formal sense as an instance of relation or contact between disparate entities that produces a mark—a kind of inscriptive remainder—of that relationality, writing can be said to both give itself and conceal itself in this discussion.6 This is so for at least three reasons. First of all, while certain essential aspects of writing are foregrounded in this scene, neither Niki nor his friend ever question the assumption that the figure of the writer must be determined as human. From their

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perspective, writing (kaku koto) is something done by a writer (sakusha), and this writer is a human being. Time after time, the text of Suna no onna provides examples that openly contradict this assumption, but even before we examine those instances it seems clear that a more expansive understanding of writing is obscured by the traditional view of the writer as sovereign producer of the written. When Niki expresses doubt over his qualifications as a writer (“No matter how I try to write, I’m not fit to be a writer”), his hesitation seems to be influenced by a notion of the relation between the writer and the written as marked by a simple opposition between activity and passivity. Language is thus regarded as a tool wielded by the writer, who consciously gives form to his thoughts in the creative act of writing. Such a conception of writing is familiar enough, but it raises the question of whether writing can in fact be reduced to these oppositional terms. As we have seen, in order for Niki to document his past experience, that experience must have first traced itself upon him. Without such an initial tracing, no return to the past is at all possible. What this means, however, is that Niki must now be considered as in some sense written even before he writes. His conscious activity of writing requires that he first be passively exposed to an earlier writing, regardless of whether he realizes this or not. It should be evident here that the notion of sakusha, or “writer,” is not therefore limited to the human. Another force exists that also writes itself, leaves traces of itself behind, and this force is so powerful that it is even able to mark human writing. Second, Niki’s return to the past, as with all returns to the past, reveals itself to be no simple matter given that the past is no longer. Abe’s question here is this: how is it possible to recover that which can only be acknowledged as lost forever? If some degree of recovery is possible, it is because the past event must somehow have traced itself in its disappearance. The consequences of this insight are enormous, we believe, for now writing in its most general sense can be determined as an operation of memory. Before all else, what an inscription marks is the movement of time.7 Temporal difference does not give itself to be recognized without some form of writing, which appears as a remainder after an event has taken place. In this way, we can begin to grasp that the relation between writing and memory is an essential one. In the scene we are following from Suna no onna, Niki clearly realizes that his future

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plan to record what will have been his past experience in the sandpit depends upon his ability to recall that past, to as it were draw it into the sphere of the present at the moment of writing. It might therefore seem that the act of remembering is only tangentially or incidentally related to the notion of writing. Memory takes place even without such scenes of writing, after all. Yet when the activity of writing is generalized beyond the human, or at least here in such a way that the human appears at once written and writing, then we must acknowledge that any past instance requires inscription in order to survive into the present. Third, the question of memory, i.e., the return in the present to events in the past, shows itself to be in fact inseparable from the future. Niki tells us this much in his reply to his friend when he considers, in this discussion on writing, the issue of hope: “But one is not responsible for whether that hope thereafter turns out to be genuine or not.” His friend disagrees with this view, answering that hope depends upon nothing so much as an individual’s own abilities: “Thereafter one must put one’s faith in one’s own power.”8 In these lines the futurity of hope is emphasized in the repetition of the word “thereafter” (or “what lies ahead”: sono saki made, soko kara saki ha). Memory of the past involves a return to that which has already doubled itself in the form of the residual mark, but that mark exists in a state of temporal suspension, awaiting its reanimation or confirmation at some future time. Niki imagines himself recalling his past, when he will have escaped from the sandpit in which he is currently trapped. The success of such recall depends essentially upon the capacity of past inscriptions to send themselves out into the future, to a destination as yet unknown but where one can at least hope that they will be received and recognized not for what they are so much as what they will have been. This “will have been” names their identity, but given that the identity of an entity can never purely coincide with itself in the instant of the present, it is forced to await future moments of retroactive identification. Because of this temporal disjunction between the initial mark and its subsequent remarking, however, identity now shows itself to be intrinsically disturbed. What this means is that the act of identification as enabled by the return to the past is, in all rigor, impossible. All future remarking, insofar as it takes place at a time removed from the initial marking of the past, must be said to fail in its attempt to identify. Paradoxically, then, the possibility of re-cognizing the

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past now reveals itself to be conditioned by its ultimate impossibility. It is the desire to hold onto this possibility, to at some future moment revisit the past as it had been, that Niki calls “hope.” This notion of hope in the sense of a projection or sending out into the future of that which strictly will have been in the past reappears later in the novel when Niki conceives of yet another plan to escape. Once again, Abe explicitly links the question of hope to the activity of writing, an activity that in his description strikingly calls attention to writing as movement or passage. “One day [Niki] tried setting a trap to catch crows in the empty space behind the house,” the narrator states. “He named it ‘Hope.’”9 Once the crow is caught, Niki plans to write a letter that he will then attach to the crow’s leg before releasing it. From that point onward, the text emphasizes, it is all purely a question of a “thereafter,” a futural “lying ahead” that in its contingency resists any and all forms of knowledge: “Of course, it was all a question of luck. In the first place, the possibility was very slight that, when he released the crow, it would fall once again [nido to] into human hands. It could not be known [shireta mono ja nai] where the crow would fly off to.”10 This image of a text being sent off to other times and other places in the future is a remarkably apt representation of writing in its most general sense, for the destination of writing can never be predicted in advance.11 The empirical factors that condition sending can be exhaustively analyzed—and Niki’s powers of analysis are revealed throughout the novel to be quite formidable—but from the very outset of such a project one must acknowledge that sending in its most essential aspect involves knowledge far less than what Abe calls “luck.” As with Niki’s recording of his past experience, all writing requires a future moment of reading in order to be identified at all. Here it matters little if one is oneself the reader of one’s own writing, for all such instances of auto-affection—i.e., the self’s act of relating to itself—must confront the radically differential nature of time, which functions to divide the self from itself, irreparably breaching the subject’s sovereignty.12 Regardless of whether Niki’s past experiences are sent to him at a future moment of writing (i.e., Niki as destination) or, conversely, he sends out into the unknown a letter with the aim that it will sometime, somewhere be read (i.e., Niki as sender), the fact is that the successful delivery or reception of these marks can never be

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anything other than a question of hope. If these marks will never be retraced precisely as they were, the possibility nevertheless remains for a certain kind of recognition to take place. T H E R E C O VE RY O F PAST PR E S E NCE

It has often been observed that Abe concludes Suna no onna with a pointed reference to writing in the form of the two court documents testifying to Niki Junpei’s disappearance, but it sometimes goes unnoticed that this notion of writing appears from the very first pages of the novel. Writing, then, can be seen to form something like the border of this text at both its beginning and end. In the opening scene, we discover that Niki’s unexplained absence from his home and workplace has given rise to a variety of documents whose common purpose is to recover that which has been lost. Newspaper inquiries, a search request form filed with the police, and a missing persons report all are utilized for this end. Here it is significant that writing already emerges at this early stage as linked to disappearance: someone or something that was once present is now absent, and writing must be mobilized in order to correct this situation, thereby restoring things to their proper order. For Abe, it is an urgent necessity to pose the question as to how to mediate between this past presence and present absence. Must the relation between presence and absence be understood strictly as oppositional? As we saw in Niki’s dialogue with his friend, the past and present appear connected in such a way as to refuse any simple binarity. The past and present are not merely two, then, but neither do they ever purely give themselves as one. Precisely this same structure can be said to govern the relation between the notions of presence and absence. From the opening lines of the novel, Abe informs us that absence is never absolute since something is invariably left behind as a remainder and thus reminder of that former presence. Yet Abe also points out that such remains constantly differ depending upon the concrete circumstances of the disappearance. In the case of missing persons, two distinct types of circumstances are mentioned: those involving either actual or potential bodily harm, such as murders, accidents, or kidnappings, and those where the element of harm is not at issue, as with premeditated escapes. The former category is typically characterized

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by “clear evidence that remains” (hakkiri to shita shōko ga nokotte kureru), whereas the latter category often provides only “elusive clues” (tegakari no tsukaminikui mono).13 It is yet unclear at this point in the text which category applies to Niki Junpei—or rather, since the protagonist’s name has not yet been disclosed, simply “the man”—but it bears emphasis that all evidence, no matter how clear, requires interpretation. While certain events leave behind signs as to what happened that may be either more or less difficult to decipher, the two categories Abe presents converge at the point where misinterpretation remains a general possibility. This possibility derives from the fact that evidence and clues adhere to a strange temporality, a kind of intermediate space between what appear to be two presences. On the one hand, these remains point to the past and thus are able to convey information regarding the various conditions behind Niki’s disappearance—whether he might have been murdered, injured or killed in an accident, abducted in a kidnapping, or whether on the contrary he simply fled home and family through his own volition. On the other hand, however, these traces of the past must direct themselves toward the future in order to be identified as such. It is strictly by receiving at some future time what the past has sent through the medium of these intermediate marks that we can begin to make sense of Niki’s situation. Abe suddenly breaks off this discussion of evidence and clues in relation to Niki’s disappearance only to return to this matter far later in the novel. The narrative voice slightly changes in this later scene: gone is the detached narrator who described Niki only as “the man” and in his place appears a narrator whose thoughts frequently double with Niki’s own. It is only at this point that the reader receives certain concrete details regarding objects in Niki’s home that he has left behind, objects that will undergo a drastic change of status and meaning in being subsequently remarked by the police as “evidence” and “clues.” The passage is given as follows: “Anyone who saw this room that had lost its master would immediately understand what had happened, even if they hadn’t directly heard his voice or seen him. The unfinished book that lay open to the page he had been reading when he put it down . . . the small change he had tossed into the pocket of his office clothes . . . his bankbook, which bore no trace of any recent withdrawals, despite the small amount in his account . . . his box of drying

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insects he had not yet finished arranging . . . the stamped envelope containing the order blank for a new collecting bottle, laid out ready for mailing—all this repudiated discontinuance, everything pointed to his intention to go on living. A visitor could not help but hear the plaintive voice from the room.”14 The references to writing are unmistakable here. The book, bankbook, envelope, and order blank have all come to replace Niki in his absence, and it is strictly through these various forms of inscription that the event of his disappearance can be retroactively comprehended, ideally leading to his return. These writings belong to Niki, they are of him, but they are not of course Niki himself. Abe indicates that Niki presents himself to others in two different ways: in his immediacy, which takes what is described as the “direct” (chokusetsu) form of the sound of his voice and the sight of his person; and in his mediacy, which appears through the indirect form of writing. In this scene, the presence of the latter announces the absence of the former. A certain circularity informs this relation, for insofar as these writings initially come from Niki, so too can they now lead back to him. In other words, the traces that Niki has left behind in the past can at a later moment in time potentially be used by others to trace, or retrace, him. This question of tracing is underscored in the text through the example of the bankbook, which, as we are told, “bore no trace [ato no nai] of any recent withdrawals.” The considerable irony of this description is that this very lack of traces itself functions as an important trace in making sense of Niki’s disappearance. However, it is only after Niki concludes that the evidence in his apartment is sufficiently clear in ruling out the possibility of any premeditated escape on his part that he abruptly informs us of the existence of an additional piece of writing, one that appears to contradict in its meaning the other instances of writing: “Well . . . if only that letter were not there . . . if only that stupid letter were not there. But what was there was there [atta mono ha, atta no da].”15 The letter is described as follows: “And then he had decided quite suddenly to let her know by letter that he had gone off alone for a time and had purposely told no one of his destination. The mystery of his holiday, which would have such effect on his colleagues, would not produce any reaction from her. But he had thought the letter stupid and had tossed it, stamped

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and ­addressed, on his desk and come away. This innocent act, as a result, was to be the automatic, thiefproof lock that only the owner could open. The letter was almost certain to catch someone’s eye. It was as though he had purposely left behind a written statement that he had disappeared of his own volition. He was just like some moronic criminal who, observed at the scene of his crime, had thereupon carefully wiped away his fingerprints and thus proved his criminal intent.”16 Certain elements in this passage can be reconstituted in such a way as to reveal what is most essentially at stake in the general notion of writing that Abe gives us to think. First of all, the concept of sending that we previously analyzed in Niki’s plan to attach a letter to a crow that he has caught and then released returns now through reference to another letter, this one intended for his wife. In truth, though, this letter to his wife finds itself echoed in these lines by mention of the envelope that contains the order form for a new collecting bottle. Abe does not fail to provide certain details related to the actual sending of these missives. The envelope containing the order form is described as “stamped” and “laid out ready for mailing,” while Niki’s letter to his wife is “stamped and addressed.” Furthermore, the conception of writing as remainder as seen in the fact that this letter will be retro­ actively identified as a clue in determining the circumstances of Niki’s disappearance comes to be reinforced in this passage through reference to another text. This is the “written statement” that Niki describes as having “left behind” (nokoshite kita). Here we must reiterate our earlier point that the past, in its disappearance, invariably leaves behind an inscription of itself through which alone we are able to return to it at a future time, thereby confirming not simply what was but rather what will have been. Given the radical movement of time—which Abe obliquely presents in Suna no onna through his figurative expression of a “one-way ticket”17—the impossibility of conceiving of any simple past means that memory in its broadest sense must be restricted to the non-simple because detoured form of the future anterior. Yet Abe alludes in these lines to another aspect of writing that forms part of the same general structure that binds together the notions of sending and remainder. The reference to the figure of the criminal is noteworthy in this context because of its emphasis on the act in which fingerprints are produced only to be subsequently effaced: “He was just

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like some moronic criminal who, observed at the scene of his crime, had thereupon carefully wiped away his fingerprints [shimon wo fukikeshitari shite].” Niki’s letter to his wife is likened to fingerprints because both are seen to have only a mediated existence: their value lies less in themselves than in their capacity to point to a fuller, more immediate form of presence. This is of course the status of all re-presentation, which claims to be nothing more than the doubling of a present that once was but now is no longer. Just as the letter that Niki leaves behind offers the promise of his recovery, so too can fingerprints reveal the truth of the criminal in his criminality. The problem, however, is that such traces possess a strange fragility, for they can be erased at any time. To say that fingerprints can be produced and then effaced suggests, in effect, that no guarantee exists that Niki’s letter will ever arrive at its proper destination. In its sending, any residual mark is intrinsically exposed to that which may come to delete it. If the past in its disappearance leaves behind a trace of itself that is sent out into the future, then the identity of that trace is ineluctably compromised or altered at the instant of its reception. Through the very act of determining this past trace, in other words, one necessarily changes it, for it is now to some degree corrupted by that future moment that is improper to itself, but in which it finds itself delivered. In its essential exposure to impropriety, to a time that differs because it takes place after the instant of its original production, the past must be said to give itself as always other to itself. This movement of self-alteration allows us to understand that no appearing or revealing is possible without a simultaneous concealing.18 Abe’s example of a writing that, in being left behind, comes to send itself to other times and places where it risks erasure in order to be read must be recognized in all of its centrality. Writing cannot be reduced to simply one theme or motif among others in the novel, to be either taken up or not depending solely upon the individual interests of the reader. Among all of Abe’s works, Suna no onna has received the greatest amount of critical and popular attention, but the fact is that none of this commentary, regardless of which particular aspects of the work commentators claim as their object, can ever be understood as purely outside of the general notion of writing that we are developing here. Insofar as any treatment of the novel sets itself up as a response to it, in whatever form, then what is most originally or fundamentally

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at issue is the very nature of the relationality created between the text and its repetition. Writing conceived in this general sense is able to provide an account of the history of reception of Abe’s text, but it can do so, crucially, without merely restricting literature to the empirical terms of literary history. This broader conception of writing traces out the framework within which all empirical approaches to textual reception are able to operate. Such approaches, however, remain uncritically grounded on a notion of identity that they decline to interrogate, and so are unable to provide a theoretical reflection upon that which makes a relation to Abe’s text possible in the first place. Yet even beyond the question of reception, which involves a relation between a text and its outside, we can already see at work within Suna no onna itself the concrete effects that writing produces on identity. Nowhere do these effects appear more clearly than in the subjective identity of the protagonist, Niki Junpei. Abe is careful to show how Niki exists as both writer and written. Here it might be imagined that Niki desires to forcefully appropriate writing in his assertion of self-identity, viewing himself in his sovereignty as the active producer of texts and thus denying that he might in any way be passively written. The truth, however, is more complicated. But this complexity has far less to do with the intricacies of Niki’s own individual psychology than with the convoluted workings of the notions of activity and passivity themselves. Let us recall, for example, that Niki’s first encounter with the villagers is strangely mediated by writing. Wandering through the sand dunes in search of beetles, Niki is suddenly approached by an old man who wonders suspiciously if this stranger is not in fact a government inspector. From the very beginning of ­Niki’s relations with the village, then, the question of individual identity is explicitly foregrounded: is Niki a schoolteacher, as he claims to be, or is he instead a government inspector, as the old man suspects? This issue appears to be resolved only through the production of Niki’s business card, on which is inscribed his name and profession. However, it is worth considering whether Niki’s act of self-identification simply confirms his identity or actually renders it even more obscure by doubling it. Any answer to this question must at some point or another take into account the fact that Abe is also the author of the 1951 short story “S. Karuma shi no hanzai” [The Crime of Mr. S. Karma].19

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In this narrative, Abe depicts a protagonist whose identity has come to be appropriated by his own business card, which moreover has successfully achieved human form, thereby enabling it to function in society as the protagonist’s double. This leaves the protagonist unable to remember his own name, and the doppelganger’s usurpation of his position at work leads him on a bizarre downward path that includes various forms of suffering and humiliation. While Suna no onna is certainly a very different text from “S. Karuma shi no hanzai,” it is never­ theless the case that any relationship between an individual and his business card as appears within Abe corpus cannot simply be taken at face value. The question of identity as raised in the encounter between Niki and the elder villager appears to hinge on the difference between confirmation and doubling. Niki presents his business card in order to confirm that he is who he says he is, and in this regard we can understand that confirmation not only requires doubling, but also represents something like its end point. However, the difficulty is that this relation between the confirmation and doubling of identity is fundamentally asymmetrical. Because Niki is unable to appear as himself, in his full presence or true identity, he must be doubled. Doubling thus emerges out of something like a fault in self-presence. Were Niki capable of giving himself as he is, after all, there would be no need of such business cards and the villager would immediately recognize his identity as a schoolteacher. Yet this fault in presence that gives rise to doubling is seen to be resolved by the act of confirmation, thereby restoring presence to itself. Once released, however, the movement of doubling may always exceed confirmation; the apparent recovery of presence (i.e., Niki is revealed to be Niki) might be said to punctuate its movement, but it in no way arrests it. Niki, for example, might possibly demand confirmation of the villager’s confirmation, and this chain could in principle continue ad infinitum. Careful scrutiny of this passage reveals Abe’s attention to such doubleness. We can see this first in the exchange between Niki and the villager. Villager: “Ah! You’re a schoolteacher!” Niki: “I have absolutely no connection with the government office.” Villager: “Hmm. So you’re a teacher.”20 This doubleness then reappears when the villager, upon confirming that the writing on Niki’s business card corresponds to the words he has spoken, seeks secondary confirmation when he

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carries the card over to several other villagers standing some distance away. These descriptions highlight the fact that doubleness functions in this scene to inscribe alterity within the otherwise unitary sphere of the self.21 As soon as Niki reveals himself to be unable to present himself in his proper identity, then it is the other that must be charged with the task of suturing this gap. When Niki, in a sense, takes leave of himself in the form of his business card to be shown to the villagers so that they may confirm Niki’s own prior confirmation of his identity, what happens to the relation between activity and passivity? Niki desires to lay active claim to his identity, but discovers that he can do so only when he is no longer directly part of this process of confirmation. In order to be recognized as such, in other words, the subject in its activity has no choice but to passively submit to this operation of representation. Abe shows himself to be very attentive to this gradual expropriation of identity away from the active subject: Niki’s words are initially rejected, forcing him to shift from the apparent immediacy of verbal presentation to written representation; this written representation is then presented directly to another, who thereupon removes Niki from the scene altogether by seeking confirmation from others who stand some distance apart. At each step in this act of self-identification, from voice to writing, from self-presentation to representation by another, Niki can be seen to move increasingly farther away from himself. The fact is, however, that no act of self-identification can ever be exempt from such passivity and mediation. Here the subject’s lack of sovereignty reveals itself in the various ways others are given to decide who or what he is. Just as the villagers came to confirm Niki Junpei’s profession, for example, so too will others come to determine the fate of his name. Here the narrator provides a glimpse into the possible reasons behind Niki’s interest in entomology: “The true entomologist’s pleasure is much simpler, more direct: that of discovering a new type. When this happens, the discoverer’s name is recorded in italics in the illustrated encyclopedias of entomology together with the long technical Latin name of the newly found insect; and there, perhaps, it will be preserved semi-permanently. Even if it is in connection with insects, the discoverer’s efforts are crowned with success if his name is able to remain for a long time in people’s memories.”22

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Abe’s description traces out the path of fame while revealing how tenuous this quality actually is. For the renown one enjoys depends entirely upon the force of inscription. Once set down in writing, the discoverer’s name “perhaps . . . will be preserved semi-permanently [haneikyūteki ni hozon sareru].” Individual success, likewise, is shown to be conditioned by the memory of others. It is after all strictly “if his name is able to remain for a long time in people’s memories [nagaku hitobito no kioku no naka ni todomareru to sureba]” that the discoverer can be recognized in his proper identity as discoverer. These lines should not be read simply as a wry commentary on the fleeting nature of fame; even before that, they touch upon the inherent fallibility of writing itself. Despite their differences, the pages of the illustrated encyclopedia may be compared to human memory because both appear primarily as surfaces that give themselves to inscription. Fame (understood as the lasting recognition of one’s name) is fragile because the inscribed name can at any moment suffer erasure. Abe refers here not to “permanence” but rather to “semi-permanence,” a state that is further qualified by use of the word “perhaps” (osoraku). Moreover, he describes the act of remembering in the conditional—if one remembers—thereby implicitly raising the possibility that this condition can always not be fulfilled, leading to the effacement of the name. As soon as the question of writing appears, then attention must directly be given to the issue of “preserving” or “remaining”—that is, how long something can stay or last. While one might wish that a desired object stay “semi-permanently,” that it last “for a long time,” this very choice of language hints at a latent anxiety on the part of the subject that the thing one values will come to vanish. How is such vanishing to be conceived? If an entity’s disappearance is grasped strictly in empirical terms, then disappearance must be regarded as an external phenomenon. In the case of the illustrated encyclopedias of entomology, the loss of the discoverer’s name could conceivably take place through the physical destruction of these texts, for example. A similar accident could be imagined with regard to human memory, as for instance through amnesia or other types of forgetting. In this view, a simple opposition marks the relation between what might be considered the life of the remembered name and its death as brought about by oblivion. The transition from memory to forgetting and life to death can thus only be explained in the terms of aberration,

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as a kind of fall of the former into the latter. Here the synthesis required to think this relation as relation is sacrificed in favor of a mere privileging of one value or set of values over the other. In contrast to this view, the vanishing of an entity can be conceived on a far more general basis, one that resists reduction to oppositionality. If an oppositional framework requires that one first consider entities as existing in a state of mutual exteriority, then another thinking of the relation between appearing and vanishing (memory and forgetting, life and death) would begin by focusing instead on their strange interlacing. Such interlacing can be seen to take place at the level of possibility. That is to say, something can appear strictly on the condition that it can vanish at any time. The possibility of vanishing thus haunts entities in their appearance in the manner of a ghost.23 In this conception, the very separation of the notions of appearing and vanishing presupposes an earlier moment when they are as yet informed by one another. When confronted with the possibility that the inscribed name can be erased from both text and human memory, it must be acknowledged that this possibility was the very condition for the inscription to take place at all. As with all inscriptions, the recording of the discoverer’s name is in a larger sense the recording of time itself; it marks the moment when an absolutely singular and unrepeatable event took place. At a specific moment in history, that is, a new species of insect was discovered, and the purpose of the entomological inscription is to commemorate this unique event.24 Nevertheless, it is rigorously impossible for the recording of time to ever “be preserved” (hozon sareru) or “to remain” (todomaru) as such, in the original identity of its content. Regardless of whether encyclopedias come in time to be physically destroyed or human beings come in time to forget, the fact is that the names inscribed on these surfaces are essentially exposed to the differential movement of time itself, and it is this that before all else causes their identity to vanish. Here we arrive at the difficult question of the proper name. If Niki wishes for his name to be recorded, it is because the name is privileged among all other things as the particular mark of identity. My name names me, it states who I am in my proper identity. In modern society, given the complex level of human relations, the individual’s proper name appears primarily as written—as processed, registered, reproduced, filed,

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etc. Such documentation is indispensable for modern subjects to fulfill their various social roles and achieve recognition from others. This helps explain Niki’s reaction when trapped by the villagers. “I’m no tramp— unfortunately for you. I pay my taxes, and I hold a resident registration card. There’ll soon be a search request form filed with the police, and then you’ll see.”25 Predictably, the threat to identity must be met with an insistence on its utter centrality. Niki’s name appears on his tax forms and resident registration card, and soon it will be printed on the search request form filed by others on his behalf. In the face of this multiplicity of forms testifying to the variegated and composite nature of Niki’s existence in modern society, he can only contemplate his erasure from that world with incredulity: “But it was all so impossible. The event was too much of an aberration. Was it permissible to snare, exactly like a mouse or an insect, a person who had his certificate of medical insurance, someone who had paid his taxes, who was employed, and whose family records were in order? He could not believe it. Perhaps there was some misunderstanding; it was bound to be a misunderstanding. There was nothing to do but assume that it was a misunderstanding.”26 Doubtless the repetition of this word “misunderstanding” (gokai) signals to us the rising anxiety that Niki feels in being forced to confront the fact that he has been trapped. But this repetition goes beyond all references to individual psychology to gesture at a certain contradiction that lies at the heart of Niki’s sense of self-identity. For Niki knows himself to be absolutely unique. Others—family members or friends with whom he shares commonalities—may resemble Niki, but no one can ever fully take his place and claim the singularity that he alone possesses as himself. It is precisely because of Niki’s status as a singular being that he appeals to the sign or signifier that announces his innate uniqueness, and this is the proper name. In the passages above, we see Niki desperately holding onto the thought that his name appears on his tax forms, resident registration card, the search request form filed with the police, his certificate of medical insurance, employment documents, and family records. On these various forms, the name “Niki Junpei” is proper because it refers exclusively to Niki, it designates his unrepeatable propriety. However, if the name were truly proper in the sense of being unique and irreplaceable, it would not be able to signify. On the contrary, its singular appearance would condemn it to pure unintelli-

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gibility. In order for the name “Niki Junpei” to be absolutely proper, it would have to elude identification as the same name at each differential moment of its usage.27 This conundrum of the proper name allows us to better understand the impossibility of identifying singularity. To recognize this impossibility, however, is not at all the same thing as denying its existence. There can be no question that Niki, as a singular being, is unique. Rather, the issue here centers on the ability of language to capture or express that uniqueness. If the name that claims to be proper to Niki were strictly singular, then it would be incapable of repeating itself without thereby disturbing that repetition. For a name to function as a signifier, however, it must be able to repeat itself as itself across the different times and spaces that make up its context. In the examples Abe provides above, the name “Niki Junpei” is identified as the same name when it appears on his tax forms, for instance, as when it appears on his family records. This thought provides solace to Niki, for he believes that each particular usage of that name functions to further consolidate his identity. This plethora of documents and identification forms is not seen by Niki as threatening, as multiplying and thus dangerously obfuscating his existence; rather, these records provide him an opportunity to increasingly instantiate who he is. However, it is here that the proper name reveals itself to be impossible. If the name “Niki Junpei” were truly proper, then it would resist all attempts at replication or doubling, hence calling attention to the absurdity of identification forms in general. The success of its propriety, in other words, results in the failure of the name. But the reverse can be said as well, for the smooth functioning of this name is enabled by the erasure of its singularity. The functioning of the name in its repeatability opens up the possibility of confusion—others, for example, might possess the same name—but this possibility cannot be eliminated without doing away with signification altogether. T H E SE XU AL R E L AT IO N Q U A RE L AT I O N

In being trapped in a place far from the world where his name has been reproduced in a variety of written documents, Niki senses the threat to his subjective identity as taking the particular form of an expunging of writing. As he bitterly reflects on the nature of this sand

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village: “A world where people were convinced that others could be cleanly erased like chalk marks [or “traces”: ato] from a blackboard. In his wildest dreams he could not have imagined that such barbarism still existed anywhere in the present day.”28 This statement calls attention to a significant aspect of the opposition between the city and countryside: the city, site of writing, appears to Niki as dangerously threatened by the erasure of writing that he finds in the countryside. Niki gives voice here to an extremely traditional conception of writing, one in which this act is seen as a sign of civilization and culture, something that in its technicity announces a definitive break with nature. The countryside is associated with nature not simply because of its rural setting, but also because human relations there are putatively still marked by a sense of immediacy, hence obviating the need for writing. Niki, whose proper name is inscribed on a multiplicity of documents, can only find his identity erased in the countryside. This explains why he refers to the village as a site of “barbarism” ( yaban). Whereas civilization is determined in part on the basis of the writing of personal identity, the barbarism linked with the apparently natural state of the village jeopardizes that identity in its refusal to recognize writing. It is here that Abe alludes to a way of life lived in accordance with nature that is seen to precede the writing of identity. Nature, in this context, appears in the particular form of sex, specifically the sexual relations that are retrospectively imagined to have existed before the emergence of modern civilization. What Abe calls here “pure sexual relations” are not described, significantly; rather, these relations can only be envisioned negatively from our own fallen, civilizational perspective. As the narrator explains: “Humans no longer need to fear, even in winter; they have been able to free themselves of the seasonal sexual urge. Yet when the struggle is over, weapons become an encumbrance. Order has come about, and the power to control sex and brute force lies within the grasp of humans instead of Nature. Thus, sexual relations are like a commutation ticket: they have to be punched every time you use them. Of course, you must check to see that the ticket is genuine. But this checking is terribly onerous; it corresponds precisely to the complications of order. All kinds of certificates—contracts, licenses, I.D. cards, permits, certificates of title, authorizations, registrations, carrying permits, certificates of membership, letters of recommendation, notes,

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leases, temporary permits, agreements, income declarations, receipts, even certificates of ancestry . . . every conceivable type of paper must be mobilized into action. Thanks to such checks, sex is completely buried under a mantle of certifications, like a bagworm.”29 At issue in these lines is a certain romanticism that advocates the rejection of order, with its interminable borders or limits, in favor of the apparent immediacy of communalism. We are here very close to what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy describe as the essence of German romanticism: “The goal is to have done with partition and division, with the separation constitutive of history: the goal is to construct, to produce, to effectuate what even at the origin of history was already thought of as a lost and forever inaccessible ‘Golden Age.’”30 The romantic urge springs from a sense of crisis, for this Golden Age is now determined to be lost. What is regarded as man’s primal link to nature has been severed, resulting in an estrangement that human beings have come to perceive not only with regard to the natural world, but also with regard to one another. Abe refers in this passage specifically to sexual relations because these are considered to be the form of human bonding that most closely replicates nature’s rhythms. “Pure sexual relations” names the type of bonding that belongs exclusively to nature and from which human beings, in the writing of identity that marks the beginning of civilization and culture, are painfully alienated. According to this account, it is “order” (chitsujo) that must be identified as most directly responsible for this loss of natural purity. The end of nature coincides with the emergence of order: “Order has come about, and the power to control sex and brute force lies within the grasp of humans instead of Nature.” The phrase “instead of” (no kawari ni) emphasizes that the transition from nature in its freedom to an order that is imposed unnaturally by humans must be understood properly as a replacement and usurpation. Order, that is, has arrogated to itself something that belonged originally to nature. In nature, “pure sexual relations” are characterized by an absolute spontaneity and transparency between entities whose separateness is overcome by the force of their union. The relations are “pure,” precisely, because unmarked by any determinations of individuality, which on the contrary serve to reinforce the difference that is the condition for the relationship to take place. Writing contaminates this natural form of relationality by in-

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troducing the distinct individuality, or individual distinctiveness, of the individuals that form the relation. This is of course the function of the certificate, on which is inscribed the various marks of personal identity. By confirming that the individual is himself, the certificate in effect declares this person’s difference from all others. Certificates testify to the fact that “pure sexual relations” are now articulated: they no longer constitute an originary whole, but rather designate an act that is inescapably mediated by its parts. It is this articulation that is the source of all antagonisms. Here one notes a profound ambivalence regarding the relation between writing and nature. On the one hand, writing in the form of personal identity certificates is denounced for its contamination of an otherwise pure form of relationality. In inscribing within the totality of the relation its distinct parts, writing as necessitated by the emergence of civilization and culture destroys the harmony that existed originally in nature. The usurpation of nature by order suggests that, henceforth, such relationality can only take place through the individual’s consciousness of himself qua individual. In this sense, the transition from nature to order must be seen to parallel a shift from communality to the discrete elements constitutive of this relation. The estrangement between individuals that thus comes about provokes a sense of crisis whose sole means of resolution consists in a return to nature. On the other hand, however, such return is seen as inseparable from the erasure of writing and individual difference, a situation that Niki castigates as barbarism. Let us recall that Niki responds to the villagers’ threat to his identity by making a specific appeal to writing, precisely the same certification and documentation that now comes to be attacked as antithetical to natural relationality. Trapped in the countryside, far from the city where his name is officially recognized on a myriad of forms as required by the bureaucratic workings of modern civilization, Niki regards the return to nature as terrifying. It is in order to shield himself from the disidentifying effects of nature that he requests newspapers to read while also planning his escape through utilization of the written word. Indeed, the threat that nature poses to writing is very clearly signaled in the text by mention of the three victims the village has claimed from the city. In addition to Niki, who in his status as schoolteacher is regarded as “professionally . . . pretty close to writers,” the villagers have

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also successfully captured a postcard salesman and a student selling books. Here the “barbarism” of the countryside appears not simply in its forced abduction of outsiders, but even more generally in its relentless effacement of inscription, such that individual identity comes to be wiped away, “cleanly erased like chalk marks from a blackboard.” At one and the same time, writing is celebrated for its ability to rescue individual identity from the dangerously anonymizing effects of nature and condemned for its tendency to interfere with the fullness of exchange or mutual giving as named by “pure sexual relations.” The surpassing of nature by writing and order is valued for enabling the establishment of civilization and culture, and yet this same process has conversely produced the baleful effect of rendering human beings unnatural, isolated from one another in their excessive self-consciousness as individuals. In a certain sense, Suna no onna can be read as an extended meditation on this relation between writing and nature. Niki J­unpei’s decision at the end of the novel to remain in the village—or rather, more accurately, his decision to delay the moment of that decision—is intimately bound up with his increasing sense that the articulation of writing must be overcome so as to return to the immediacy of communal relations with others. This desire for community is expressed first of all in the sexual relation, as we see when Niki finally consummates his passion for the sand woman: “Still grasping the cord, she slipped by him and went up to her room, where she began to take off her trousers. Her manner was so uninhibitedly natural that she seemed to be continuing exactly what she had been doing before. The man inwardly rubbed his hands in anticipation: such a woman was a real woman.”31 Abe’s choice of language here draws attention to the underlying dynamics of this relational immediacy. The woman’s behavior is described as “uninhibitedly natural” ( yodomi no nai shizensa): what this means, more literally, is that nature is allowed to flow freely and spontaneously given the absence (nai) of stagnation ( yodomi). She is a “real woman” (honto no onna) because, from Niki’s perspective, the experience of relationality she offers is real. This natural relationality appears in the form of an undifferentiated flow, the force of which overwhelms both Niki and the woman in their respective individualities.32 The woman expresses the fluidity of this flow in her movement, which consists of a series of discrete acts. We are told that “she seemed to be

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continuing exactly what she had been doing before [mae kara tsuzuki no dōsa wo, sono mama tsuzuketeiru yō na].” This phrase sono mama, which we have translated as “exactly,” carries the sense of “without change,” “as is,” or “directly.” Specifically, two distinct moments are referred to in this line: the time of her actions “before” and those that proceed from that point, “continuing” it in the form of a succession. These moments might be said to articulate or mediate the flow were it not for the fact that one follows “exactly” from the other. It is this exactitude, the apparent absence of difference in the points that constitute a succession, that properly determines the relationality as natural. Opposed to this type of sexual relations with the sand woman can be seen Niki’s relations with another woman from the city, identified in the novel merely as aitsu, meaning “she” or “that woman”: “This was an experience he had not had when he was with that woman. On that bed, they had been a feeling man and woman, a seeing man and woman; they had been a man who saw himself feeling and a woman who saw herself feeling; they had been a woman who saw a man seeing himself and a man seeing a woman seeing herself . . . all reflected in counter-mirrors . . . a limitless transformation of sexual intercourse into consciousness.”33 Unlike the undifferentiated flow Niki experiences with the sand woman, sexual relations with the woman from the city are characterized by the incessant movement of self-determination on the part of consciousness. Seeking to grasp itself in the larger context of the relation, consciousness is forced to split from itself, rendering itself into an object that can be cognitively fixed by another, greater self as subject. The desire for self-determination arises in order that the self may identify itself in its distinctness and propriety in opposition to the other that must be negated, but with which it is nevertheless linked. The operation of consciousness proceeds by a constant overcoming of itself: the feeling self that appears in its immediacy must yield to a seeing self, one that has the capacity to actively reflect on itself feeling. Abe refers to this desire elsewhere in the novel as the “energy of self-negation” ( jiko hitei no enerugī).34 In the sexual relation, the self that is originally posited discovers that its quality of feeling leaves it unable to account for itself. This original self must then be negated in an act of objectification. The subject that is the seeing self thus finds itself opposed to the feeling self that it has successfully marked as its object,

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and this opposition in turn calls forth a synthesis that is capable of incorporating that difference. Abe meticulously traces out this process in which the original thesis that is feeling comes to be mediated by its antithesis in seeing, which again produces an internal fissure in an act of synthesis whereby the seeing self is itself objectified as seen. Selfreflection, Abe indicates, is by right endless, for what achieves the position of seeing or knowing subject can never fully insulate itself from the possibility of its own self-division. Indeed, these dynamics should be quite familiar to us by now, since they correspond exactly to the relation between Niki and his business card in the scene where he first meets the villagers. There we argued that the notions of doubling and confirmation must be understood as fundamentally asymmetrical. As soon as the self’s immediate presence to itself is overcome through the act of negation, there can be no arresting of this movement. This is precisely why Abe describes this operation of consciousness as a “limitless [or “infinite”] transformation” (mugen no ishikika). If synthesis is required in this dialectical account so as to resolve the opposition between an original thesis and its subsequent antithesis, then it must be admitted that no synthesis ever truly takes place. The “energy” that is “self-negation” never finally reaches its point of exhaustion. A certain irony can be seen to haunt this operation of consciousness. The desire to identify the self is inseparable from an anxiety that this self might always be exposed to contamination by the other with whom it is in relation. Were the self to remain in its original position of feeling, there is no guarantee that what is being felt is not in fact the other rather than the actively feeling self. It is in order to know with certainty that the self I feel is indeed myself that it becomes necessary to see myself feeling. Vision provides the requisite distance between the self and itself that feeling in its excessive intimacy or proximity merely obfuscates. Once I actualize my otherwise latent ability of sight, I am then capable of distinguishing not only my seeing self from my feeling self but also, even more crucially, the totality of my feeling and seeing selves from that other self with whom I am in relation. However, what comes to be produced in these successive acts of self-determination is an endless multiplicity of selves. The transition from feeling to seeing is motivated by a desire to identify myself in opposition to the other, but reflection once underway proves incapable of stopping or gather-

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ing itself, with the result that the distinction between self and other appears no more decisive than that between myself and myself (i.e., between my feeling self and seeing self, my seen self and seeing self, etc.). Moreover, each new manifestation of the self gives itself as necessarily other to all of its previous appearances. The desire to integrate this multiplicity of other selves within the totality that is myself might appear at every moment a new seeing self is generated, but it is that very movement of generation that disallows such totalization.35 In this instance, awareness of such abyssality in the self’s constant remarking of itself emerges alongside a nostalgic desire to return to a form of relationality that appears as yet unscathed. Let us recall the phrase Abe uses to describe Niki’s relations with the woman from the city: seikō no, mugen no ishikika, “a limitless transformation of sexual intercourse into consciousness.” This “transformation,” insofar as it takes place through the abandonment of immediate feeling in favor of a consciousness of the separation between discrete selves, is perceived by Niki specifically as a fall. If the sand woman is a “real woman” in her gift of natural relationality, then the woman from the city can only offer an attenuated bonding, one characterized by artifice, abstraction, and inauthenticity. In a striking gesture, Abe represents this opposition between nature and writing in terms of Niki’s use of a condom: natural relations with the sand woman are free from such usage, unlike the deliberate and calculated nature of his relations with the woman from the city. In this context, the condom appears as a kind of tool that functions to alienate humans from nature as well as from one another. Like writing in the empirical form of multiple personal identity certificates and the reflective form of self-remarking on the part of consciousness, a prophylactic seems to articulate the sexual act as totality into the differential elements that comprise it. For example, whereas Niki and the sand woman are described as “merging” or “melting” (tokekonda) into one another,36 the presence of the condom in his relations with the woman from the city serves to call attention to their mutual difference, for the object creates a physical barrier between them while also being something that is worn exclusively by one and not the other. Moreover, this object causes a painful disagreement between the lovers, making both even more acutely aware of the abstract nature of their relations. For Niki, such separation underscores the general sense of estrange-

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ment he feels in the city in his relations with others. These feelings of isolation lead to a growing desire to eliminate borders in the specifically sexual relation as well as more broadly in the communal relation.37 In the apparent immediacy of communion, through which distinct entities are able to overcome their alienation and return to the undifferentiated flow that is the simultaneous giving and receiving of full presence visà-vis one another, writing in its differential effects is imagined to yield to the pure force of nature. Even prior to this contrast between nature and writing, however, one can discern a more general form of writing that in its scope is able to account for the ultimately limited terms of the dialectical relation. Here it is not a question of privileging either the uninterrupted flow of natural relationality or the inscription of individual difference. Such oppositionality reflects the particular framework within which Niki Junpei attempts to make sense of the two worlds in which he finds himself. The realm of nature, as represented by the sand woman, is characterized by the immediacy of feeling, pure flow, communality, spontaneousness, and temporal originarity. Outside of this stands the domain of writing in its link to the woman from the city, a sphere that is mediated by seeing and reflective consciousness, the differential points of articulation, individual autonomy, techne, and temporal derivativeness. The opposition that Abe introduces here forms part of a long and complex tradition, one that survives today in all debates on modernity and social formation. This distinction shapes the way we conceive of romanticism in its difference from Enlightenment rationalism, for example, just as it does the political philosophy of communitarianism in its difference from liberalism. With only slight exaggeration, much of the tension that emerges in these dualities can be said to appear in very condensed form in the phrase Abe uses to describe the sand woman: yodomi no nai shizensa, a naturalness marked by the absence of stagnation. The word “stagnation,” in this context, refers to anything that interrupts the smoothness or fluidity of flow. Already we can glimpse in these words a certain unnaturalness of nature, and this for at least two reasons. First, the concept of nature traditionally designates an original totality, whereas Abe’s phrase shows this totality to be in fact already determined—that is to say, articulated, divided from itself. On the one hand, nature is pre-

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sented as that which is yodomi no nai in the sense that it is free flowing. Unlike writing, then, nature as a whole is characterized as something that is essentially fluid, a vast passage or channel that appears to exist without borders or limitations. On the other hand, however, this general quality of nature only reveals itself by excluding certain parts of itself. To say that nature is free flowing is to say that it is without stagnation, but given that stagnation or standing pools of water ( yodomi) also exist in nature, this is to suggest that certain aspects of nature must be considered as more natural than others. Hence the general determination of nature as flow is only possible by concealing those particular determinations of itself that are seen to contradict this quality. Second, if nature indeed gives itself as originary, in relation to which the writing characteristic of civilization and culture appears strictly as derivative, then it must be said to exist in the full plenitude of its self-presence. Nature is nature in its absoluteness, that is, in marked distinction from the unnatural world of writing and articulation. Never­theless, Abe describes this full presence of nature in terms of negativity: it is that which lacks or is bereft of stagnation. This nai, the signifier of absence, indicates that the immediate presence of nature is in fact already contaminated by an unnatural negativity. Once nature is recognized, in and of itself, in terms of that which exists outside of it, however, then both its originarity and totality can only be comprehended retroactively as derivative effects. If nature is conceived in terms of flow or flux—or rather, more indirectly, as that which lacks those elements that impede flow—then the unnaturalness of writing can be said to consist in its repeated interruptions by borders or limits as caused by the presence of differential entities. What arise here are two competing understandings of the notion of relationality. According to the view of relation as natural flow, it is the totality of the relation that must be regarded as prior. In this case, the distinct parts that make up the relation only come into being insofar as they are conditioned by that relation itself. Given that these parts strictly derive from the totality that is the relational flow, they possess only an extremely diluted form of individuality or autonomy. If, however, relationality is to be determined on the basis of writing and articulation, then its movement can only take place between the borders that fix it. In this conception, it is the parts of the relation that are

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prior; these parts act as coordinates that control or govern the entirety of its movement, because of which the relation appears less as an unrestricted flow than as a kind of regulated exchange. In the text of Suna no onna, it is above all the protagonist Niki Junpei who seems to conceive of the relation between nature and writing as oppositional. And yet this text itself repeatedly sets forth a notion of writing that exceeds such oppositionality. How are we to understand this other form of writing in the excess that is its generality? The difficulty in determining relationality as flow can be seen in its violent effacement of difference. Such relationality, which Niki associates with the naturalness of the sand woman, recalls Hegel’s criticism of the notion of the absolute in Naturphilosophie as “the night in which . . . all cows are black.”38 Nevertheless, the problem is in no way resolved by appealing to a notion of writing that remains centered on the presence of its various articulations. If relationality determined as flow is unable to account for the difference of its individual parts, then relationality in the sense of writing refuses to think the openness or alterity in which these parts are incessantly exposed. Insofar as the concept of writing is not generalized, remaining still dialectically opposed to a more originary state of nature from which it finds itself banished, then Niki’s nostalgia for the lost union of community appears unavoidable. As can be seen in the phrase yodomi no nai shizensa, nature grasped as flow, however, nature already reveals itself to be contaminated by the articulation of marks. Nature cannot be fully present to itself since it is already riven by negativity; this negativity determines nature, opening up a contradiction within itself (i.e., nature represents the totality except for the presence of stagnant pools of water, which must therefore be seen as both natural phenomena and essentially unnatural) that it is unable to resolve. Yet this phrase in no way stands alone in Abe’s text. Rather, the logic that it designates— an instance of writing that exists prior to the opposition between nature and writing—can be found throughout the pages of Suna no onna. F O R M AN D F L O W

Relationality as flow and relationality as inscriptional articulation represent different forms of presence. In its liquidation of difference, flow takes the form of an identity in which all interruptions or discon-

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tinuities seem to dissolve and melt away. Here identity appears in the totality that is the relation itself. In contrast to this, articulation offers merely a limited form of relationality since movement is restricted to the between-spaces of those poles or points that themselves remain motionless. Nevertheless, the field of relationality that is thus opened up cannot be characterized strictly as difference because the points (i.e., borders, limitations) exist as identical to themselves. In this instance, it is the parts of the relation rather than the relational totality that possess identity. Hence the two conceptions of relationality that appear at first to be oppositional can now more accurately be described as strangely complicit with one another. The flow and inscriptional mark reveal themselves in their difference, and yet both are identical insofar as they remain grounded on a notion of presence. It is what emerges from this difference between difference and identity that can be said to constitute writing in its generality. Such general writing appears in a form that is less than a pure flow, for it experiences constant interruption and discontinuity, and yet greater than an inscriptional mark, since its lack of self-presence demands that it stand ecstatically outside of itself, where it gives itself to be breached by alterity. If the written articulation of nature denaturalizes it, introduces its flow to internal disruption, then writing in its exposure to that flow finds itself at all times drifting outside of itself, carried away toward other writings by the overall force of relationality. Here writing must be generalized in order to take into account its essential generativity. That is to say, there can be no closure of writing, no identity or self-presence of the articulated mark, because each event that is its encounter with other marks necessarily generates something new. At every instant in which writing appears, it finds itself caught up in a network of relations that differs from any of its previous appearances. This difference transforms writing, remarking it as other to itself. Such notion of generative writing by right precedes the opposition between flow (nature, identity) and articulation (inscription, difference). These oppositional terms come into being as abstractions of general writing, which allows for the emergence of such abstraction while nevertheless withdrawing or retreating from that operation, remarking itself in its own self-difference. Niki Junpei attempts to reduce difference to oppositionality, and yet he also gives voice to a conception of writing that in its originarity and

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generativity exceeds all such oppositions. This is what he tries to explain to his friend the Möbius man. “I have considerable doubt about a system of education that maintains that life possesses any ground of support,” Niki tells him. “In other words, an illusory education that makes one think that nothing is something. Therefore I’m very interested in sand in this instance, because, while being a solid, it also contains definite hydrodynamic properties.” The Möbius man appears puzzled by these words, prompting Niki to explain further: “The reason I brought up the example of sand was because in the final analysis I rather think the world is like sand. The essence of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state. It is not that sand flows, but rather that flow itself is sand. . . . You yourself become sand. You see things through the eyes of sand.”39 This passage is crucial to understanding Abe’s project in Suna no onna, for what it reveals is something very close to the notion of “onto­ logical existence” that he tried to think nearly two decades earlier in his essay “Shi to shijin (ishiki to muishiki).” For Niki, understanding deludes itself in its insistence that “nothing is something” (nai mono wo desu ne, aru yō ni). In these lines, that which is “something” in the sense of an actually existing substance is linked to the properties of solidity and fixity. Such substantial being is directly contrasted to a “nothing” that gives itself in the form of a liquid and constantly moving flow. It may thus appear that Niki, remaining within a traditional framework of opposition, advocates a romanticist departure from fixed being in order to enter into what is regarded as the fullness or heightened reality of the fluidity that is pure negativity. Even within such opposition, however, a more general notion of being nevertheless emerges and makes itself felt. Sand, Niki observes, occupies a strange middle ground between solidity and liquidity: “while being a solid [kotai de arinagara], it also contains definite hydrodynamic properties.” As we argued with regard to Abe’s expression yodomi no nai shizensa, such phrases exhibit a logic that in no way exists in isolation. For example, although Niki attempts to think sand beyond the subject-object distinction in his reference to humans who “become sand” and “see things through the eyes of sand,” this sand flow still requires articulation in order to appear. Two different conceptions of being can be delineated here: one that is posed against nothing, which it moreover attempts to

ON SUNA NO ONNA45

conceal in its fixity and solidity as well as through the notion of objectivity; the other, something more general that continually remarks itself otherwise, divided between being and nothing, solidity and liquidity, and fixity and flow. Here the aru, i.e., being in the sense of a substantial something, reveals itself to be more fundamentally a de arinagara, something that while being X is also Y. What is at stake in this latter conception of being is a betweenness in which entities are incessantly drawn out of themselves in their relation with other entities. The identity or as-suchness of something dissolves from the very beginning, since relationality takes place from the first moment of its appearance. Being in its determination as substance does not dismiss such relationality, but it grounds relation to the other on self-presence, because of which identity is preserved and even enhanced rather than threatened by that alterity. When Abe writes that sand, “while being a solid” is nevertheless also partially liquid, he is gesturing toward a sense of being that is neither pure self-containment nor pure flow. The notion of flow of course occupies a central position in Suna no onna. To write, “It is not that sand flows, but rather that flow itself is sand” is to suggest that flow cannot ultimately be reduced to a mere property or quality (seishitsu) of something that itself resists that flow, existing in its fixity outside of it; on the contrary, “the world is like sand” in that all things are in the first instance governed by the principle of change and movement. The transition from “something” to “nothing,” then, far from signifying a vast, undifferentiated stream, instead points to a conception of being in which things never remain purely stable as themselves. “The essence of sand is very difficult to grasp when you think of it in its stationary state [seishi shiteiru jōtai ],” Niki declares, but the fact is that nothing is able to give itself strictly as stationary or motionless. At every moment, things appear in the world in their own self-difference and exteriorization. It is because of this that all conceptual “grasping” must be regarded as derivative. Things are unable to present themselves as they identically are because of their participation in this general flow. In reflecting on this impossibility of self-identity, the narrator of Suna no onna is led to consider the classical notion of form: “This house was already half dead. Its insides were half eaten away by tentacles of ceaselessly flowing sand. Sand, which didn’t even have a form of its own—other than the mean

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1/8-mm. diameter. Yet not a single thing could stand against this formless, destructive power. The very fact that it had no form was doubtless the highest manifestation of its strength, was it not?”40 These words must be read alongside two other passages that appear slightly later in the text. The first appears as an extension of this discussion of sand in its “formless, destructive power”: “Things with form were empty when placed beside sand. The only certain factor was its flow; sand was the antithesis of all form.”41 In the second passage, the reader is introduced to a striking conception of life that goes beyond fixity and form in its acceptance of flow: “If a ship floated on water, then it would also float on sand. If they could get free from the fixed idea of the home, they wouldn’t have to waste energy fighting the sands. A ship that floated freely on the sands . . . homes that flowed, towns and cities without form.”42 The word for “form” that Abe uses here is katachi or keitai. While this concept carries very different meanings throughout the history of thought, it appears in this context to signify the unique shape or structure of something, that which functions to establish its own proper identity in its difference from other things. In his discussion with his friend, Niki Junpei emphasizes that sand should be conceived in its most general nature. “The world is like sand,” he insists, and on this basis we should understand that the tension between form and flow (sand) is not restricted to the world of empirical objects but also includes the contents of consciousness as well. This is an important point, for the text of Suna no onna contains repeated attacks against any dualist conception of the world that would posit an epistemological subject existing over and against material things. The “formless, destructive power” (mukei no hakairyoku) of flow operates equally on all borders, spiritual and material. It is precisely for this reason, as Niki tells his friend, that it is impossible to claim that “life possesses any ground of support [yoridokoro]” (“I have considerable doubt about a system of education that maintains that life possesses any ground of support”). For example, even if an individual were to reject the outside world for its painful contingency, the fact that it might always possibly betray one’s own hopes and desires, the turn to interiority proves to be ultimately no more secure. The privileging of self and consciousness over worldly alterity presupposes a formal distinction between these two realms, but such form is repeatedly threatened by the breaching effects of flow.

ON SUNA NO ONNA47

Form and flow exist in constant tension with one another. The formal self-identity of something finds itself disrupted by flow, continually displaced outside of itself, but this flow in turn cannot be said to exist anywhere else except in those articulations or punctuations that are its markings. The flow of sand, Abe writes, represents “the ­antithesis [or “negation”] of all form” (issai no katachi wo hitei suru). However, this negative operation of antithesis does not take place in any pure or absolute sense; form, that is, suffers partial fragmentation rather than complete liquidation. Form does not disappear but is instead displaced, forced to remark itself differently. Abe provides several examples of this in the passages above: “homes that flowed, towns and cities without form.” In their flow and loss of form, these entities are not reduced to nothing; they remain as homes, towns, and cities, perhaps, but they do so in a profoundly unsettling way, inscribed with the traces of alterity that render them at all times other to themselves. The house of the sand woman is also cited as an example of such fragmentation: “This house was already half dead. Its insides were half eaten away by tentacles of ceaselessly flowing sand.” Such half-death (hanbun shi ni kaketeiru) represents a state that is suspended between life and death, neither fully one nor the other. Just as all finite beings begin to die from the moment of their birth, so too does this house continue to survive by bearing the marks of the conflict between its own form and the deformation wrought by the flowing sands that surround and invade it. This conflict between form and flow can be understood as a movement of drawing, in various senses of the term. Form is drawn or pulled outside of itself by flow, necessitating that it be redrawn in order to maintain itself in its identity; and yet flow in this movement of exscription also finds itself drawn, both marked and cut by the fragmentation that occurs as a result of this relation.43 Exposed to flow from the moment it appears, form reveals its essential impurity. The result of this exposure, as Abe emphasizes, is an irrevocable transgression of borders, an inability to safeguard interiority from external contamination. Niki is forced to confront this experience soon after arriving at the house of the sand woman: “It was as if the sand which clung to his skin had seeped into his veins and, from the inside, was undermining his resistance.”44 Such metaphorical breaching of the borders between

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inside and outside is complemented by the actual or physical penetration of sand within people: “He took the plastic cover off the kettle and jammed the spout into his mouth. He tried rinsing with the first mouthful, but it was impossible to clear his mouth with so little water. Only lumps of sand came out. Then, not caring, he let the sand run down his throat along with the water. It was as if he were drinking pebbles.”45 If, as Niki remarks, “the world is like sand,” then ultimately no pure distinction can be made between the interiority of human consciousness and the material objects existing outside of it. Indeed, the very title of Abe’s novel hints at this porosity between human being and world. Even before the woman is “in the dunes,” as the English translation reads, she is already of them in the sense that they form an inextricable part of her. But if the woman is most originally of the sand, inscribed over and again by its flow, so too is Niki Junpei: “While drawing a mental image [kokoro ni egakinagara] of the flowing sand, he was from time to time seized by the illusion that he himself had begun to flow.”46 It is this conflict between form and flow that Abe refers to in Suna no onna as the “law of the sand” (suna no hōsoku).47 This law is written. What it decrees, in its generality, is that all inscribed articulations of the world remain exposed to an alterity that exceeds them, allowing them to appear strictly on the condition that they withdraw or retreat from that appearance in the same movement. The law of sand returns us directly to Niki’s comment to the Möbius man that any “ground of support” to which humans can appeal must falsely presuppose that “nothing is something.” In such instance, entities are seen to present themselves as they are in their self-identity. The distinction between self and other corresponds to the pure opposition between identity and difference, in which the cognition of difference between entities is grounded in its possibility on their respective presence to themselves. For Niki, such conception represents the triumph of form over flow. What this view elides or disavows is precisely the impurity of inscription, the contamination that takes place at each moment of contact between form and flow. In the rightful absence of such ground, the differential force that is “nothing” resists absorption within the full plenitude named by the word “something.” Nothing does not exist merely outside something but rather disturbs its apparent stability and selfpresence from within. Just as Niki discovers that the border separat-

ON SUNA NO ONNA49

ing him from the sand has already been breached, so too does nothing haunt the being of things in their unity and integrity. Hence it is not simply that Niki rejects something in favor of nothing in and of itself. Given its essential allergy to identity, there can be no nothing in and of itself. Rather, nothing produces its effects strictly by drawing something outside of itself, deforming its form by requiring it to inscribe itself otherwise, each time anew. The link between sand and writing appears in various ways throughout the novel. While walking through the dunes in search of insects, Niki “advanced, cutting across the sand patterns created by the wind, which were inscribed evenly and systematically, as if made by a machine.”48 In these lines, human beings can be seen to participate in this general writing of the world, but this activity is in no way limited to the human. Even before Niki’s appearance, a relation has taken place between sand and the wind, with the latter marking the former in the form of “sand patterns” ( fūmon). Here the sand functions as the surface upon which the wind writes, “inscribing” (or “carving,” “engraving”: kizamu) its lines and ridges. These marks are then remarked by Niki’s act of ­traversal, “cutting across” ( yokogitte) them, generating successively new instances of contact between the sand and himself by means of the footprints he creates. The sand still remains the primary surface of inscription, but the stylus or instrument of writing has now changed from the wind to the human. As we have argued, writing must be understood in its broadest sense as that which marks the moment in which disparate entities enter into relation with one another. The sand is no longer precisely itself because of its engraving by the wind or its intersection by human footprints, and yet neither the wind nor Niki himself can be said to emerge from this relationship unscathed either. Niki not only marks the sand with his footprints, however; he is also capable of writing it with his hand: “On the surface of the umbrella so much sand had collected that he could have written characters in it with his finger.”49 The particular phrase Abe employs here is revealing, for the word “characters” ( ji) can also be read as a homophone for “time.” Why is this significant? The production of marks in the instance of writing is also inescapably a marking of time. Even before the mark created can be determined in its specificity as a character, wind pattern, or footprint, it is first and foremost a temporal inscription. At the very

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moment one writes characters ( ji), one is also of necessity writing time (ji, toki), regardless of whether one intends this or not. There can be no memory of the past, no historical consciousness, without such temporal inscriptions. In for example Niki’s traversing of the sands, the wind patterns he sees and the footprints he creates both exist as remainders of events that take place in time. At a certain moment, the wind touched and reshaped the sands, leaving behind a memorial of the singular instance of that relationality in the form of wind patterns. Likewise, the act of Niki’s “cutting across” those marks leaves behind a trace of itself in the form of his series of footprints. These traces or remainders point to the past; they help us remember how the world appeared in the relentless tension between form and flow. Just as these traces give themselves in their appearance, however, they also recede, allowing themselves to be remarked in their internal divisibility. Trapped in the sandpit, Niki at one point wonders if time has stopped—“he feared that not only his watch but even time itself would be immobilized by the grains of sand,” as Abe writes50—but the impossibility of any cessation of time can be found in the multiple inscriptions that are carved into the vast surface of the sand, marks that present themselves to him strictly at the instant he repeats them. Let us now conclude this chapter by considering two additional passages in which Abe touches upon the connection between sand and writing. At stake in both is a certain contamination in the relation between appearing and concealing. In the first passage, the narrator follows Niki in focusing upon what he imagines at the time to be his sole means of escape from the sandpit: “There was not even a vestigial sign that the rope ladder had been let down. Of course, with a wind like this, it wouldn’t have taken five minutes for any trace to disappear.”51 In the second, Niki has already managed to escape from the sandpit but is forced to remain hidden until sundown so as to escape detection: “An ideal place to hide. The texture of the sand was as smooth as the underside of a shell, and there was not a vestigial sign of anyone’s having been there. But what was he to do about his own footprints? He retraced his steps and found that beyond about thirty yards they were already completely effaced. Even where he was standing they were caving in, transforming before his very eyes. The wind was good for something.”52

ON SUNA NO ONNA51

In these lines, several different words are used to describe inscriptions that are left behind: “vestigial sign” (keiseki), “trace” (konseki), and “footprints” (ashiato). The time of the events as recorded by these marks is irreducibly multiple. Niki might possibly determine if the rope ladder had recently been lowered judging by the imprints on the sand that act would have created and left behind. Likewise, the presence of others in the vicinity of the hiding place he has found might be ascertained by the residual marks of their footprints. These inscriptions remain: what this means, precisely, is that their temporality is divided from within in pointing to a moment in the past in which the world was singularly transformed or remarked differently while also indicating those moments that have succeeded that, continuing on from it by extending the life of that initial act. In this regard, the truism that the past can only be determined on the basis of the present can be said to yield two consequences. First, the past never gives itself directly as such, in its original identity, but strictly through the detour of other times and other places. By continuing to appear after the moment at which the event first took place, the past incessantly dissimulates itself while simultaneously preserving itself in its secrecy. To say that these two movements of appearing and concealing are inseparable from one another is to in effect think difference and identity in their essential impurity. Second, if the nature of the event consists ultimately in its internal divisibility, the fact that it gives itself strictly as other to itself, then that which is called “the present” can provide no real basis at all. At the delayed moment that Niki attempts to determine the past presence of both the rope ladder and other human beings, the incommensurability of those determinations vis-à-vis the events themselves necessarily condemns them to failure. Because these determinations cannot fully repeat the past that has since withdrawn, they must in turn repeat that repetition. What this involves is the present slipping continually outside and ahead of itself into the future. In this way, the project of memory reveals itself to be productive of something like lines or articulated flows, understood in the specific sense that Abe tries to think in terms of the synthesis between form and flow. That is to say, events may take place in which rope ladders are lowered or other people walk past. In order for these events to present themselves in their identity, however, they must depart from themselves, creating a trail of marks that exceed their past happening and travel on into the present and future.

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It is impossible to state with any degree of certainty whether Niki Junpei understands this movement or instead disavows it. For this thinker who undertakes the important task of grasping “nothing” in its relation to “something” also appears to hold out the possibility of capturing an event in its immediacy or pure punctuality. “He might or might not regret it later, but everything depended on this instant [subete kono shunkan]. Don’t delay! An instant is something that is missed if not seized immediately [ima sugu]. One cannot chase after it by jumping on the next instant!”53 Niki appears very close here to a kind of empiricism that grounds itself on the immediacy of the experienced instant. The problem, however, is that the instant never gives itself in its unity or integrity. By insisting on this strict distinction between the “this instant” and “next instant,” Niki seems to contradict his earlier insight regarding the dissolution of form on the part of flow. If flow succeeds in exposing form, then each instant must be described as already fragmented, rendered other to itself. Given that the instant can never be fully present to itself, the “delay” against which Niki warns himself is rigorously irreducible. Time cannot flow, stand ecstatically outside of itself, without this delay. In all cases, the singular instant is “missed,” but in being missed it paradoxically sets in motion a chain of future opportunities to respond to its force.

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THE TIME OF DISTURBANCE ¯” ON “UCHINARU HENKYO

No matter how much the signal of fixity as transmitted by the brain overrides the rhythm of mobility as beaten out by the heart, it is still the heart that supplies blood to the brain. If the heart stops beating, then all cerebral activity must cease.1 There are two kinds of national defense: external defense, to protect against meddling from without, and internal defense, to protect against treason or rebellion from within. Hence the two great pillars of any state are its army and its police. There can be no state in which the domination principle fails to function.2

SPAT IO T E M PO R AL O PE N IN G S

In various ways, Abe’s “Uchinaru henkyō” [The Frontier Within] is a work that must be regarded as not simply or immediately itself. In 1968, Abe first published an essay under this name in the journal Chūō kōron [Central Review]. The following year he delivered a two-part lecture in Tokyo where he returned to several of the themes presented in this essay; this address, later published in volume 22 of his Complete Works, was entitled “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō” [The Frontier Within, Part II]. In 1971, finally, a small book appeared through the publishing company Chūō kōronsha with the title of Uchinaru henkyō, within which were included the essay “Uchinaru henkyō” as well as two other Chūō kōron pieces from 1968: “Miritarī rukku” [The Military Look] and “Itan no pasupōto” [Passport of Heresy]. Beyond these particular facts surrounding publication, however, “Uchinaru henkyō” also gestures to past and future writings within Abe’s oeuvre. Specifically, the sustained reference to the figure of the

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Jew and the interrelated notions of time and space as found in this work find early expression in his 1950 short story “Akai mayu” [The Red Cocoon]. This absurdist tale follows an unnamed protagonist whose identity remains a mystery to both himself and others. His lack of identity is paralleled by the absence of any home, and indeed Abe appears to link these two together in such a way as to suggest that subjective identity might be productively understood as a form of fixed dwelling or site of repose. Two other characters appear in addition to the protagonist: a woman, whose house the protagonist mistakes for his own and who is forced to turn him away, and a policeman, who threatens the protagonist with imprisonment if he continues to linger in places that do not belong to him. It is upon being confronted by the policeman, in fact, that the protagonist in his homelessness wonders if his identity is not that of the wandering Jew. Shortly thereafter he finds his body suddenly being transformed into a cocoon. Enveloped inside this cocoon, he notes, “time stopped” (toki ga todaeta).3 The story ends with the policeman finding this unusual cocoon on the tracks of a railroad crossing and placing it in his pocket. Abe develops this notion of a timeless, enclosed interiority more than three decades later in his 1984 novel Hakobune sakura maru [The Ark Sakura]. Whereas “Akai mayu” contrasts the absence of time and the corresponding sense of spatial fixity with the figure of the wandering Jew, this latter work focuses strictly on the theme of time. This it does by introducing a strange insect called the eupcaccia, which is also known in Japanese as tokeimushi, meaning “clockbug.” This insect lives by ingesting its own feces. Its legs have gradually atrophied to the point of disappearance because of this unique capacity—it has no need to travel in search of food—thus restricting its movements to a perfect circle. Pivoting on its abdomen, the eupcaccia moves in slow, more or less constant rotation, receiving what it gives itself in the repeated cycle of consumption and elimination. This circular movement, combined with the fact that the insect sleeps with its head facing the sun, explains the origin of its name as well as the reason it is used as an instrument to measure time by the people of Epicham Island, its native habitat. The eupcaccia holds particular fascination for the novel’s protagonist, who regards the insect as the perfect symbol of his ideal of selfcontainment or self-sufficiency ( jikyū jisoku: literally, “sufficiency for



¯ ”55 ON “UCHINARU HENKYO

the self as provided by the self”). Such ideal is cherished by the protagonist because of his conviction of the imminence of nuclear war, in preparation for which he has transformed an underground quarry into a type of ark capable of sustaining life. Living alone within the ark in virtual isolation from the outside world, this character is highly reluctant to recruit others for his crew despite his recognition of the necessity of communal existence if mankind is to survive the apocalypse. This desire for absolute autonomy is manifested in the work as spatial and temporal fixity. Spatially, the protagonist has succeeded in eliminating nearly every need to go beyond the parameters of his own self-enclosure. Temporally, he is determined to await the apocalypse, a term that has traditionally signified the destruction of all temporal phenomena in the emergence of the atemporal truth of revelation. This notion of timelessness refers back to the eupcaccia, whose use as a measurement of time is clearly intended ironically by Abe given that the insect’s pure self-sufficiency appears to safeguard it from all temporal alterity. In the self’s giving of itself to itself in the instance of self-sufficiency, no time appears to intervene that would effectively differentiate the self from itself, thereby creating not one but rather a multiplicity of selves, each imperfectly identical to the other. Abe appears to conceive of this state of timelessness in terms of a static spatiality: in “Akai mayu,” the cessation of time takes place alongside the consolidation of a fully encapsulated interiority marked off from external objects; whereas in ­Hakobune sakura maru, the eupcaccia’s particular biology relieves it of the need to encounter anything outside of itself, thereby creating a cycle or circle of repetition in which self-relation occurs interminably without the least infraction of difference. In both narratives, the subordination of time, or more precisely the passage of time, to spatial stability or immobility is determined as an elimination of alterity in favor of a unified selfsameness. In the case of the eupcaccia, any exteriority discovered is strictly that which is produced by the self, and this exteriority is moreover immediately internalized in the act of consumption. “Akai mayu” describes a similar end, for the transformation of the protagonist into a cocoon collapses even the difference between himself and the house that he desires. “The only trouble is now that I have a house,” as he mourns, “there’s no ‘I’ to return to it.”4

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Abe’s thinking of time and space in the various texts set forth under the name of “Uchinaru henkyō” can be said to look back to such earlier formulations as “Akai mayu” at the same time that it projects itself forward, redeveloping ideas already presented, into such future texts as Hakobune sakura maru. At the very end of the essay “Uchinaru henkyō,” for example, Abe seems to determine time as a medium that exists against or in some sense in opposition to space. As he writes, “Just as the foreign invasion of migrant ethnic groups once destroyed the spatial identity [kūkanteki koyūsei] of the agrarian state, introducing a sense of contemporaneity [dōjidai kankaku] beyond national borders and providing a new opportunity to leap beyond the stagnation that accompanies fixity, so too might troops intent on destroying national borders now appear from the internal frontier of cities. The state ideology that recognized ‘legitimacy’ in the particularity [tokushusei] of farming villages might then be replaced by frontier troops who recognize ‘legitimacy’ in the contemporaneity of cities.”5 In this passage, Abe attempts to explain the threat posed to the ­nation-state in modernity by the formation of the city as contained within the nation’s own borders. In the past, he contends, states privileged farming villages over cities, seeing the former as the embodiment of a natural attachment to the land in contrast to the latter’s corruption and artificiality, which came about as a direct consequence of the severing of this relation. It was because of farmers’ close ties to nature that they were granted the seal of legitimacy (seitō) by the state, which meant in concrete terms that they were regarded as the state’s truest or most rightful representatives. A variety of material advantages ensued from this determination, and these came at a cost to the inhabitants of cities, whose corresponding disadvantages in society went hand in hand with the state’s branding of them as illegitimate or secondary citizens. What astonishes Abe is that the state, despite the enormously productive growth of cities, continues in its ideological pronouncements to value the rural for its sense of immediate community and condemn the urban for its alienating, disruptive influence. At issue, then, is a certain reversal that Abe sees in the relation between the nation-state and city. States previously made use of cities as external frontiers, in Abe’s language, meaning sites that belonged only tangentially to the state and were occupied by undesirable types



¯ ”57 ON “UCHINARU HENKYO

of citizens. Upon the state’s recognition of the great profit to be made in consolidating urban areas, however, it came to appropriate the latter for itself, thereby ensuring that the negativity released in the increasing abstraction or mediation of society was utilized for national ends—­ ultimately strengthening rather than weakening the state’s totality. Abe’s aim here is to question the limits of this appropriation. If the state concentrates its resources in the city while nevertheless denouncing this latter for its illegitimacy, then what is the fate of this contradiction? Abe envisions present-day resistance by urban elements to take a form similar to that found in the past in the tension between the agrarian state and migrant ethnic groups. Just as the latter succeeded in destroying the borders insulating the state from its outside, so too might the forces of the city now accomplish this same task in exceeding the determined parameters that the nation has claimed for itself. For Abe, the present-day forces of the city have inherited a certain legacy of violence from the migrant ethnic groups of the past. This legacy binds these two entities together, but Abe takes care to underline an important difference between them: whereas the migrant groups attacked or invaded from the outside (soto kara no shūrai), the “troops” of the city would now appear from within (toshi to iu naibu no henkyō kara). As should be clear, such violence on the part of these groups does not emerge spontaneously or unilaterally. The very fact that the agrarian state of the past erected borders testifies to its forced exclusion of those elements that, in a strange temporality, nevertheless came to be determined as foreign or alien only through the establishment of these boundaries. In other words, this identification of an exteriority allowed the state to gather itself in its newfound unity and selfsameness. According to Abe, the state’s past violence of exclusion changed over time to take the specific form of assimilation, with the result that the originally external frontier of cities has now gradually come to be nearly fully absorbed within the nation-state’s very center.6 In this way, Abe carefully charts the organization of different types of alterity as seen from the perspective of the state. In the past, the other to the state was identified as migrant ethnic groups; thereafter the state marginalized cities and their inhabitants to the outer frontier, located at the border between its own inside and outside; finally, the state’s recognition of the vast economic potential of cities in the emerging money economy necessitated that

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such urban alterity be centralized, thereby domesticating it. In this redetermination of the city as an appropriated “frontier within” (uchinaru henkyō), Abe attempts to discover whether the alterity of the frontier can be said to still remain or whether it has been completely effaced. We can see in this passage the manner in which Abe mobilizes a series of oppositions in order to account for the changing relations between the nation-state and city. The past is set forth against the present, the farming village against the city, and relatedly the incipient modernity of the agricultural state against the advanced modernity of the capitalist state. With this transition, the state reinforces its sovereignty by shifting focus from the violent exclusion of outside elements to the no less violent inclusion or assimilation of internal elements. Significantly, this change involves a radical displacement of space by time: the state’s “spatial identity” as appears in the presence of national borders was previously destroyed by the invasion of migrant groups, who thereby opened the state to its outside. This opening, Abe emphasizes, took the form of a “sense of contemporaneity” that vastly exceeded the establishment of determinate borders. Such borders create a false or derivative opposition between inside and outside that depends on the principle of “particularity.” Abe fully recognizes the force of particularism in the continued presence of discrete, individual states, but he suggests that a more powerful force exists that has the capacity to destroy it. This more universal force that is capable of dissolving the identity of spatial particularity is that of time. Abe’s understanding of time is more allusive than straightforward or systematically presented, but it seems clear that he views time in positive terms as a threat to “spatial identity.” In “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō,” Abe refers suggestively to the notion of time as part of his critique of the spatiality of the state. As he argues, “When we inquire into the nature of our society, status quo [or “present situation”: genjō] and present [ genzai], we begin to see that a sense of security of everydayness (in which today appears like yesterday and tomorrow appears like today), as for example the sense of security one feels in a community, pervades us. We then gradually extend the continuum [renzokutai] of everydayness until we finally enter the framework of the state. Everyone has now grown used to the fact that such frameworks as the native hometown or household come naturally to be destroyed and reorga-



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nized. Upon encountering the state, however, the particular sense or perception one has is that it possesses a different level or character.”7 “Everydayness” (nichijōsei) is a “continuum”; it is that which provides a sense of security or stability that one’s belonging within a given community is assured. Abe here attacks the framework of the state, but he points out that this framework bears commonalities with such other collective entities as, for example, the native hometown and household. It is in order to illustrate what he means by the notion of everydayness that Abe refers to one’s quotidian perception of time as continuity: “today appears like yesterday and tomorrow appears like today [kinō no yō ni kyō ga ari, kyō no yō ni ashita ga aru].” This sense of continuity, he claims, informs not only our affiliation with the various institutions that constitute social existence; it also grounds our understanding of the status quo or present situation and indeed of the very present i­ tself. This is so because the present is divided from within. This internal differentiation takes three forms, which Abe in these lines describes in terms of the unit of the day: past (“yesterday”), present (“today”), and future (“tomorrow”). Time is thus not simply one, for its self-division causes it to appear in some sense multiply. The question Abe seems to pose concerns the relation of these different forms or aspects of time to one another. Temporal continuity is achieved if these aspects are regarded on the basis of identity: even though past, present, and future are not immediately equivalent to one another—if they were, there could be no movement or passage of time at all—they are nevertheless like (no yō ni) each other. The present can be comprehended in terms of the past, just as the future can be grasped in terms of the present. What allows this thinking of succession to support the sense of security one feels in everydayness is the fixed position these temporal forms or aspects seem to occupy visà-vis one another. Given that the phenomenon in question is the selfdifferentiating movement of time, however, how is it possible that such movement can lead to what Abe considers to be the false stability of communal existence? The contradiction Abe discloses springs from his insight that temporal succession must be thought more radically, such as to unsettle any simple division of time into fixed, self-identical units. The concept of everydayness, in its status as the foundation of present existence in all its apparent constancy and solidity, exercises a kind

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of violence upon time. Although time is shown to be constantly differing from itself in its passage from past to present to future, the very conception of these individual forms or aspects as such presupposes a notion of temporality that is antithetical to that movement of selfdifferentiation. What enables this conception is a thinking of time that implicitly privileges the present. That is to say, both the past and future are characterized by absence, for the past is no longer and the future is not yet; hence only the present appears capable of giving itself in all its fullness and immediacy to be thought. However, the recognition that the present exists as embedded within a succession of other temporal forms or aspects that exceed and in some sense condition it necessitates that these latter also be taken into account. This is achieved by recognizing past and future as mere modifications of the present: in this determination, the past comes to be remarked as the past present and the future as the future present. The shared presence of the present in all three temporal aspects is what guarantees the possibility for time to be determined as a continuum. Time differs from itself, but this difference appears to be grounded upon the identity of a present that exists now, did exist previously, and will exist again. It is in order to think time beyond its determination as continuum that Abe is forced to appeal to the notion of alterity. What he earlier referred to in “Uchinaru henkyō” as a “sense of contemporaneity” is in “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō” more fully elaborated as a “shared sensibility with the other” (tasha to no kyōyū kankaku): “Although the expression ‘shared sensibility with the other’ sounds very abstract, it means that we have come to possess a shared sensibility of the age by shifting away from an age of space to one that is shaped by time.”8 Time, then, when linked to the notion of alterity seems to in some sense disturb the yielding to identity and spatiality that is required in order for time to be determined as continuum. The obliqueness of Abe’s language here resists any simple explication of his meaning, but we can certainly find examples in his work where he seeks to actively challenge traditional notions of temporal succession. In for example the 1973 novel Hako otoko [The Box Man], Abe’s protagonist and narrator writes the following: “You evidently fancy to begin recording the past events of the day after tomorrow when nothing has yet occurred.”9 Time appears even further disjointed in the final lines of the 1977 novel Mikkai [Secret Ren-



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dezvous]: “However much I may resent the fact, ‘tomorrow’s news­ paper’ has gone ahead of me and scooped me; and so, in the past called tomorrow [ashita to iu kako], over and over I continue certainly to die.”10 When temporal succession is conceived in terms of everydayness, the spatial identity that Abe associates with the establishment of fixed borders and particular forms of community seems to emerge. When temporal succession is thought on the basis of alterity, however, the underlying presence of the present that grounds the fixed continuum of past, present, and future appears to suffer disturbance. The immediate presence of the present, which traditionally privileges it over the irreducible absence of both the past and future, provides the requisite stability for temporal succession to take place as an ordered movement between the fixed points of the past, present, and future now. In Abe’s fictional descriptions of time, however, this privileging of the present seems to be forcefully displaced. In its stead we find a movement of alteration in which past and future freely drift from the fixity of their positions so as to relate to one another in surprising, unsettling ways. What releases this strange movement of time is the fact that the present proves incapable of fully governing the succession of nows between past, present, and future. Once unmoored from their fixity in the present, the past and future in their inherent alterity come to exceed their modification as mere past present and future present. In this way, a movement is created in which the present begins to be pulled or stretched away from itself.11 Abe seems to gesture toward this movement in the passage already quoted from “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō.” Let us recall that the classical notion of temporal succession that he condemns (in which “today appears like yesterday and tomorrow appears like today”) emerges as part of his attempt to grasp the nature of the present, which he emphasizes through use of the words genjō and genzai. The very presence of the present is disclosed in this shared character gen (or arawareru), which means “to appear” or “to become visible.” This presence, as we have remarked, is contrasted to the quality of absence that characterizes both past and future, since the former is already gone and the latter has not yet arrived. Given that the movement of temporal succession requires absence as well as presence, the question becomes one in which the precise relation between these two elements comes to the fore. Although

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the present depends upon the past in order to become what it is while also depending upon the future so as to determine at the level of retroactive meaning what it will have been, this indebtedness to what is other than itself comes to be concealed. As such, the present in its immediate visibility or positivity can be found to repress those absent forms or aspects of time that it nevertheless requires in order to be itself. In Abe’s example of temporal succession, “today” can be described as “like yesterday” and “tomorrow” “like today” strictly on the condition that the presence of today is secretly allowed to fill the absence of yesterday and tomorrow. However, this operation violates what Abe attempts to think as the more originary time of alterity by effacing both the non-present pastness of yesterday and the non-present futurity of tomorrow. In Abe’s text, this appropriation of the time of alterity by the everyday conception of time as continuum is also represented as the subordination of time to space. What this means is that the fundamental notion of the presence of the present, which holds together the identity of temporal succession in reducing the negative absence of past and future to mere instances of a full present that previously was and again will be, must be understood as a derivative spatialization of time. We have already encountered this critique of space in favor of time in the context of “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō” in Abe’s call for a “shifting away from an age of space to one that is shaped by time,” as he wrote. Similar expressions can be found throughout his work, as for example in the 1949 essay “Bungaku to jikan” [Literature and Time]: “Literature comes to possess its own proper emotional form by expressing the time that is proper to it, without averaging out or spatializing time [heikinka sareta arui ha kūkanka sareta jikan ni yoru koto nashi ni].”12 And again in the 1959 novel Dai yon kanpyōki [Inter Ice Age 4]: “H. G. Wells’s Time Machine was after all child’s play, for he could only grasp the transition of time by translating it spatially [kūkanteki ni honyaku shite], although he spoke of traveling in time.”13 In the particular language of this latter passage, the spatialization of time is for Abe less a “translation” than a mistranslation insofar as it claims to present that which by its nature exceeds the scope of all presentation. If on the contrary the “transition of time” were to be translated temporally, then such privileging of the present would be forced not to disavow but rather to recognize and rigorously take into account this excess.



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T H E N O M AD IC B R E AC H AN D THE L O G I C O F C O N TA MI N AT I O N

In his book Uchinaru henkyō, Abe devotes the final part of the essay “Itan no pasupōto” to a thinking of the relation between time and space in which, significantly, the former is conceived as that which irrevocably opens or breaches the latter. Here Abe returns to the question of the interaction between those peoples who live a fixed or settled existence and those whose existence is marked by mobility. Whereas the essay “Uchinaru henkyō” represented this relation in terms of the historical tension between the agricultural state and migrant ethnic groups, which then comes to be repeated in the contemporary dynamics between the capitalist state and those citizens that inhabit the urban “frontier within,” “Itan no pasupōto” describes the relation between certain settled communities that existed during the period of the Mongol Empire and those Altaic nomads that violently threatened them by invading their territory. In Abe’s account, these nomads “never built borders in the areas they occupied. Unlike the occupations on the part of fixed states, these nomadic peoples did not see the need to redraw borders; rather they allowed the destroyed borders to remain destroyed. Those peoples living a settled existence had hitherto believed that the borders of their land marked the ends of the earth, but now the real horizon suddenly appeared before them, stretching off infinitely into the distance. Long convinced that the time and space within their borders had existed and flowed on the basis of laws that were strictly unique to that area, they now discovered that the same time flowed outside. This discovery must have been a thoroughly shocking experience, outweighing even the trading of goods and the exchange of knowledge.”14 Having established this connection between nomadic existence and a certain violence of time, Abe concludes the essay by determining space as particularity and time as universal: “The nomadic peoples acquired victory and treasure, whereas those settled peoples obtained defeat and the knowledge of time. With the concept of time, the settled peoples took the first half step toward universality [ fuhen] and, as the chains that had previously bound them to spatial particularity [kūkanteki tokushusei] gradually loosened, then took another half step toward universality in feeling love for this same time that was now certainly flowing in other worlds.”15

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It should be noted that Abe’s conception of space appears to refer primarily to man’s remarking of space. Social existence, Abe suggests, requires the institution of spatial relations. Such instituted spatiality determines space strictly in its relation to man, which Abe here interprets in explicitly political terms as denoting a plurality of people with different and often competing interests all intent on utilizing space for their own self-determination. Hence the notion of space typically appears in Abe’s text as linked to the establishment of borders, in which the difference between inside and outside serves to distinguish entities in the respective particularity of their identities. For Abe, then, the notion of “spatial particularity” must be understood as more or less equivalent to what he earlier referred to as “spatial identity.” Both individual and collective entities attempt to create their identity—that is, to delineate or mark out what is properly theirs—through the institution of spatial borders that distinguish one particularity from another. According to Abe, this characteristic can be seen in all forms of fixed or settled existence, whether these be the various communities that developed during the period of the Mongol Empire, the agricultural state of early modernity, or the capitalist state of our own present day. In this determinative remarking of space for the purpose of identity formation, Abe maintains, a kind of forgetting takes place that leads one to regard one’s own identity primarily in terms of the presence of these spatial borders. What Abe is pointing to here is the problem of particularism, which despite vast changes in man’s relation to the world still seems to haunt contemporary society, preserving its links to collective formations of the past. Particularism fails to understand that the institution of spatial identity is above all else an act that occurs in time. That is to say, no original or natural identity preceded the event in which the self sought to differentiate itself from others through the drawing of borders. Such demarcation was made in all contingency: at a certain moment in time, the self came to be determined by an act that instituted a difference between inside and outside. It is clear enough that, given this contingency, the inscription of identity could easily have been made otherwise, thereby altering the self’s relations with its others. What is perhaps less clear, however, is that the spatial relations instituted at the level of temporal contingency are necessarily transient. What allows the borders of identity to be drawn at one moment in time



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is precisely that which keeps them structurally open, susceptible to being redrawn and so transformed at any other moment in time. For Abe, then, particularism in its spatialization of identity forgets nothing less than the contingency of time. Abe argues that the nomads’ successful conquest allowed the settled peoples to acquire what he calls “knowledge of time” ( jikan ninshiki). This knowledge enabled the settled peoples to overcome the limits of their self-enclosed particularity and embark upon the path to universality. In the same breath, however, Abe also indicates that such temporal knowledge already existed within the otherwise spatial community even before the invasion of its borders. As he writes, “Long convinced that the time and space within their borders had existed and flowed on the basis of laws that were strictly unique to that area, they now discovered that the same time flowed outside.” How are we to explain this apparent contradiction? On the one hand, Abe seems to imply that awareness of time on the part of the settled peoples only began through the incursion of the nomads. On the other hand, however, we are told that these settled peoples in fact already knew of the existence of time; their error lay solely in believing that time could be particularized by virtue of the fact that it flowed within the borders of their community. It might be possible that Abe is referring in these lines to two distinct temporalities, the one internal and the other external to the borders of this settled community. But this interpretation appears unlikely given his emphasis that the settled peoples discovered that the other time, that which existed beyond them, was in fact “the same time.” And indeed, it is this “sameness” of time in its ecstatic self-division and capacity to dissolve all presence that establishes what Abe calls its “universality.” Rather, what he seems to be gesturing toward is a thinking of time that incessantly exceeds any determination of its origin. Time, that is to say, gives itself to be recognized by the settled peoples strictly because that moment when one acquires “knowledge of time” is necessarily preceded by another, earlier moment. The nomadic invasion enabled the settled peoples to become aware of time, and yet in truth this past “now” that marked the precise time of knowledge—that is, the time of knowledge of time—was already divided from within, thereby making possible a knowledge prior to knowledge. Abe explicitly tells

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us this: that moment in time when “knowledge of time” was given was in fact nothing more than a repetition or doubling of an earlier instance. In order to better understand the implications of Abe’s conception of time in the various texts that comprise “Uchinaru henkyō,” it is necessary to locate its traces or connecting threads to his other work. Two fictional texts are especially valuable in this regard: the novel Hakobune sakura maru, to which we have already referred, and the 1964 short story “Toki no gake” [The Cliffs of Time]. In the former text a character makes an unusual remark about nuclear war: “It is said that a nuclear war begins before it begins [hajimaru mae kara hajimatteiru].”16 In the latter text a boxer uses exactly these same words to describe a boxing match: “For a match begins before it begins.”17 Despite the vast difference in content between the two events Abe describes here, the general point seems to be that any event, insofar as it takes place in time, cannot but yield to the self-divisive or differing nature of time in such a way that no determination of an event’s temporal emergence can be said to be punctual—that is, that the determination is able to purely correspond to the point in time at which the event first appeared. The reason for this can be found in the essential incompatibility between the retroactive determination of an event, which must presuppose a notion of time that is grounded on the punctually present “now,” and the event’s ecstatic slippage outside of itself into the past and future. As Abe discovers in his various examples of the nomadic invasion, nuclear war, and boxing match, the only true “knowledge of time” that can be given to man is that in which the non-presence of the event is explicitly acknowledged. In its retroactive return to the past, then, the determination must be said to arrive both too early and too late. This insight must affect our understanding of the relation between the settled peoples during the period of the Mongol Empire and the Altaic nomads who violently threatened their territory. More generally, it unearths a more radical dimension to Abe’s conception of the relation between time and space. In his account, time appears on the one hand simply outside of space and on the other hand already linked or coupled with space. The transition from “spatial particularity” to a universality based on time is triggered by the destruction of borders that for Abe was the crucial feature of the nomadic invasion. Yet the gift of time brought about by the invasion did not simply come from outside,



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as it already existed within this community of settled peoples. That is to say, the nomads gave to the settled peoples nothing that they did not already possess. Space could not have first encountered the exteriority or negativity of time at the instant of the invasion, for space and time were already mutually conjoined or contaminated within the community itself. It is because of this more originary conjoining of time and space, in fact, that the borders establishing the identity of the community of settled peoples must be seen as already breached, already compromised. As soon as Abe acknowledges the pre-nomadic presence of time and space within the community, in other words, then his entire account of the transition from the identity of spatial particularity to the dissolution or fragmentation of temporal universality begins to collapse. In truth, we could already glimpse certain difficulties in Abe’s conception of the time-space relation in his representation of space as a fall from a more originary and pure time. The critique of spatialized time that he set forth in such works as “Bungaku to jikan” and Dai yon kanpyōki, while certainly of great value, nevertheless points to a failure to think time and space as originally coextensive. In those writings it was a question of thinking time as such, before its fall or contamination by space. In the texts of “Uchinaru henkyō,” similarly, space is only liberated from the stagnancy of its self-enclosure through its penetration by time. As we have witnessed, however, time and space can neither be thought in spatial terms as simply outside one another nor in temporal terms as simply prior to one another. It must be said that Abe is extremely inconsistent on this point, for his text yields various interpretations regarding the precise nature of the relation between time and space. In one reading, the time brought by the nomads was necessary to allow spatiality to raise itself from the pure immediacy of itself and embark on the path to universality. In another reading, however, the nomadic invasion was strictly incidental to the development of universality that, in Abe’s reckoning, was already in the course of taking place within the latent temporality of the spatial community itself. There can of course be no definitive conclusion as to which of these two interpretations Abe claimed as his own, for the text provides ample evidence of each. Much the same can be said of Abe’s description of the products of this spatiotemporal coupling. In the following lines, for example, he ends his discussion of the relation between the nomads

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and settled peoples by focusing on what each left behind: “Even during the period of the Mongol Empire, when their invincible cavalry from the plains swept with gale force across the continent, these nomadic peoples left behind them nothing but death and destruction. For all their brilliant victories on the battlefield, their influence on history was surprisingly minor. But perhaps that is simply the fate of those who reject a fixed existence. Ruins of the destroyed castles still remain in the kingdoms they conquered, and yet the nomads themselves, victorious, disappeared without leaving behind even a single tent.”18 In a sense, this passage continues Abe’s thinking of a beginning before a beginning, for what is in question here is that which one leaves behind after one’s disappearance. Just as the settled peoples knew time before they received the nomads’ gift of the “knowledge of time,” so too did they leave to posterity traces of themselves after that collective self had died. The end of an entity, in other words, cannot simply be located at the moment of its demise, for it is somehow able to survive that moment and continue on into the future. As we have seen, Abe discovers in his reflections on time that the present is forced to yield to the more general movement of temporal succession, which incessantly pulls the present back into the past while simultaneously projecting it forward into the future. Nevertheless, it remains far from clear as to what degree he grasped the originally coextensive nature of time and space. For instance, the ability on the part of the settled peoples to leave behind a trace of themselves is contrasted with what Abe regards as the pure negativity of the nomads, who putatively left behind nothing. More broadly, Abe appears to link the spatial positivity of the settled peoples with their capacity to survive their own destruction, and this he opposes to the temporal negativity of the nomads, who “disappeared without leaving behind even a single tent,” as he writes. In reading these lines more closely, however, we can detect Abe pointing to a hidden commonality between these two groups. The settled peoples, we are told, can be identified despite their disappearance by the “ruins of the destroyed castles [kowareta shiroato] [that] still remain.” The nomads, Abe also remarks, “left behind them nothing but [or “except for”: nozokeba] death and destruction.” Not nothing, then, but something, even if that something is merely “death and destruction.” The words Abe uses here are hakai no ato to shisha no kazu,



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meaning more literally, “the remnants of destruction and a number of dead.” The opposition Abe establishes here is thus not a pure or absolute one, since both the settled and nomadic peoples alike leave behind ato, meaning, in one form or another, “remnants,” “ruins,” or “traces.” The ato that remain of the settled peoples appear in the form of the castles they built, structures that are now decayed and ravaged by time; whereas the ato left behind by the nomads is described in terms of destruction itself. In point of fact, Abe neglects to identify another ato of the nomads, one that is no less historically significant than the “death and destruction” they left in their wake. This is their name, for above all what allows us to recognize from the perspective of the present the nomadic existence of the past is the fact that we are given to name them, that is, the fact that their name has somehow outlived their own finite existence and reached or communicated itself to us across the expanse of time that otherwise separates us from them. Abe constructs his argument on the basis of an opposition between the settled peoples as the agents of space and the nomadic peoples as the agents of time in order to show how the historical encounter between these two forces led the former to finally overcome the limits of particularism and develop along the path to universality. We can see in this framework Abe’s commitment to a certain historical dialecticism, according to which difference comes to be determined along the lines of oppositional elements whose interaction produces change, a change that is moreover located at a determinate historical moment. Nevertheless, the act in which oppositionality comes to be formulated is repeatedly revealed to be flawed. The transition from spatial particularity to temporal universality is said to originate with the nomadic invasion, but this original moment is shown to be merely the double or repetition of an earlier moment. Similarly, the ability of the settled peoples to be productive even in death, manifested in the surviving remnants of themselves, is contrasted with the pure negativity of the nomads, who left behind nothing. Upon closer inspection, however, this nothing reveals itself to be less than absolute, for like the settled peoples they are survived by ato, even if this ato derives solely from “destruction.” The nomads also, despite Abe’s omission of this point, leave behind their name, for otherwise it would be impossible to even speak of them today.

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The difficulty Abe confronts here is that of contamination. That is to say, the determination of the settled peoples purely in terms of space and the nomadic peoples purely as agents of time is betrayed from the start, since each entity already carries traces of the other within itself. If the “knowledge of time” given by the nomads merely repeats an earlier knowledge possessed by the settled peoples, then the latter in their spatial particularity were already on the path to universality, thereby in effect robbing the nomadic invasion of the crucial historical significance Abe wishes to attribute to it. Yet if the settled peoples are determined by Abe strictly along the lines of space and particularity, then the latent presence of time and universality among them means that this entity can no longer be determined as quite itself, that indeed there is already something of the nomadic about them even before their encounter with the nomads. Similarly, the nomads’ inability to leave behind them nothing, to in other words preserve their status as pure negativity and temporality, means that they too exist in some sense outside of themselves. The very presence of their name and “remnant of destruction” means that they have already been contaminated or, as it were, invaded by the positive spatiality of the settled peoples. Abe wishes to conceive of the sheer, unmarked temporality of nomadic existence in its pure opposition to settled existence, but discovers that the former’s nothing can only be identified in terms of the latter’s something. From the beginning, the attempt to organize difference on the basis of opposition must invariably yield to the contamination that prevents any entity from simply inhabiting itself as such. Abe is extremely sensitive to this force of contamination, but the problem is that—at least at certain moments in his text—he seeks to locate it within history, tracing its origin to a determinate moment in time and space. Here, we believe, Abe falls into the trap of historicism by reducing to an empirical event that which on the contrary must be understood as a general condition of possibility.19 Contamination, that is to say, can never simply be identified—or located, presented—in history given that history itself can at no moment ever be said to exist apart from contamination. At every historical moment entities are contaminated from both without and within, and this contamination cannot simply be conceived as an empirical accident, something that either may or may not happen depending upon particular historical circumstances. In order for history to be



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conceived at all, there must already be at work an originary contamination that makes historical change possible. It is because of this originary contamination that any attempt to identify the determinate origin of an entity’s exposure to alterity is necessarily troubled from the start. To be sure, Abe’s interest in the relation between the settled peoples and nomadic peoples is less historiographic than theoretical, for the point he wishes to make is a properly general one concerning the impossibility of any entity to achieve and maintain a state of perfect self-affection, utterly closed off from the world’s exteriority. Nevertheless, the example he chooses is marked by a historical specificity, that of the period of the Mongol Empire. As a historical event, the contamination of spatiality by temporality can never be determined in its specificity since such contamination must rather be understood as a general feature of any historical occurrence. Failure to understand contamination as a general condition of history leads one to reductively determine it as an empirical event, something that simply takes place within history. This in turn produces a division within history between an earlier moment when a given entity could be seen as yet fully equivalent or present to itself and a later moment when, in the wake of contamination, it has now become other to itself. In Abe’s example, the settled peoples in the pure spatiality of their self-enclosure are at first immediately present to themselves. This self-presence meets its destruction only upon the encounter with nomadic temporality, which introduces mobility to fixity, negativity to positivity, and universality to particularity—that is to say, it exposes identity to difference. However, any conception of the contamination of identity by difference as taking place at a determinate moment in history must be seen as one that is still in thrall to the force of nostalgia. As a general principle, no immediate identity precedes difference, regardless of whether this identity be defined more narrowly as that of the settled peoples prior to the nomadic invasion or, far more generally, as that of the medium of space itself prior to its mediation by time. Directly to the contrary, such identity comes strictly to be produced retroactively at the level of fantasy. This nostalgia arises, we believe, as the result of an inability to think spatiotemporal difference as originary. The force of difference resists all attempts to reduce it to a mere instance that intrudes or supervenes upon an entity that is first itself. In

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a strange way, Abe both knows this and does not know it. This inconsistency, which marks the pages of “Uchinaru henkyō,” must be further examined by scrutinizing the figure of the Jew. T H E G E N E R AL M O VE M E N T OF E T E R N A L WA N D E R I N G

If “Uchinaru henkyō” represents an extended dwelling on the relation between time and space, it is also committed to pursuing the question of the historical figure of Jewry. Significantly, the question of time and space and that of the Jew are for Abe profoundly interwoven. Abe inherits this issue of Jewry from a number of sources. Clearly he writes his text partly in response to Sartre’s influential 1946 work Réflexions sur la question juive, which was translated into Japanese a decade later under the title Yudayajin [The Jews]. Abe also appears to have in mind the complex legacy of the Holocaust, as can be seen in the several references to Auschwitz that appear in the essay “Uchinaru henkyō.” His intent is to actively intervene in this legacy, to broaden the scope of its meaning so that we better understand the continued existence of this past within “our” own present, and yet he wishes to accomplish this by anchoring his discourse to the singularity of the historical events that have come to be known under this name. Finally if more implicitly, Abe seems to be addressing the much more recent Arab-Israeli War of 1967, which ended with Israel’s annexation or control over various territories that had previously been held by such nations as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. From Abe’s perspective, the dramatic change in status on the part of the Jews from statelessness and historical victimization to citizenship within an increasingly powerful Jewish state represented a remarkable development, one that he sought to grasp in both historical and theoretical terms. In order to better comprehend the nature of Abe’s project in “Uchinaru henkyō,” it might seem useful to begin by posing the question of what exactly the Jew is for him. In Abe’s view, however, such form of questioning already reveals a fundamental bias regarding the nature of presence and identity that his text seeks to undermine. To inquire into what an entity is in the apparent stability of its identity is to tacitly privilege the positivity of space over the negativity of time, to use Abe’s language. In a certain sense, what Abe calls “the Jew” ­refers



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to nothing less than that unique figure of alterity whose liminal or haunting existence works to disturb all presence and identity, and does so moreover from within. This is a vital point, for among his other objectives Abe is seeking in this text to probe the limits of a thinking guided by dialectics, locating the moments at which his notion of alterity appears no longer perfectly aligned with the concept of oppositionality, to which he is nevertheless also committed. This commitment did not simply derive from an abstract principle divorced from the concrete realities of the world around him; on the contrary, the urgency of the question of oppositionality appeared to Abe in its specifically historical and political form as a matter of resisting the increasing hegemony of the state. It was in order to reflect on the limits of state power that Abe grasped the importance of conceptualizing an interiority that is not simply opposed to exteriority but rather remains intrinsically connected to it. Pure interiority signifies absorption within those structures that one seeks to resist, while a position of simple exteriority reveals an underlying complicity with these structures through its very stance of opposition. Abe formulates the notion of a “frontier within” as a way to express the interruptive force of an alterity that inhabits the border between these two extremes. This between-space, as it were, neither purely inside nor outside the state and other related forms of sovereignty, is what Abe tries to think under the heading of “the Jew.” We can recall that, already in his short story “Akai mayu,” Abe describes the homeless protagonist—who wonders if he is not perhaps a wandering Jew—as being threatened and finally captured by the policeman, whose role it is to preserve the status quo (or “present situation”: genjō) of society, in which all individuals possess their own homes. Nearly twenty years later, this basic framework remains largely in place in “Uchinaru henkyō”: the notion of fixed identity that in the fictional work took the form of individual house or home now appears in the collective guise of the state; this fixed identity is regarded as a site from which the Jew must be excluded; such exclusion is enforced by official or legally sanctioned forms of state violence; and finally, the Jew deprived of home and identity comes to be determined strictly as a wandering Jew. Whereas the earlier work referred to the figure of the Jew in only the briefest of terms, however, “Uchinaru henkyō” expands on this reference in such a way that it becomes the central thematic of the essay.

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Despite some terminological slippage, Abe introduces an important conceptual distinction between yudayajin, or “Jews,” and what he calls yudayateki naru mono, which we might tentatively translate as “the Jew” or “the figure of the Jew.” While the former is more or less recognizable according to the traditional coordinates of identity, the latter is linked to an alterity that steadfastly refuses to give itself in the fixed parameters of its quiddity, or whatness. That which is yudayateki naru mono can never be accessed in its immediacy. Europeans, Abe tells us, have long sought to determine what the Jew is, but they can only do so indirectly through the medium of writing: “The word ‘Jew’ calls to mind for us only a very abstract concept, one that is perceived strictly through writing, virtually unaccompanied by any concrete image.”20 From Abe’s perspective, examples of Jews that have appeared in European texts especially influential in producing a sense of Jewish identity include both fictional and actual personages, as for instance “Shylock from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice [and] Dr. Einstein, who always appears in one section or another in the Lives of Great Men,” as he remarks.21 ­Because of this excessive abstraction, Abe concludes, “it is impossible to escape the indirect and false scope of this concept, since it is derived strictly from the words and actions of non-Jewish Europeans.”22 These lines are challenging for a number of reasons, foremost among which is the fact that Abe refers to two other groups in this opening discussion of Jewry: non-Jewish Europeans and the collective subject “us” (wareware), which he specifies as the Japanese people. A dialogue has taken place about Jews, but Jews themselves were apparently not part of this communication. At first glance, this absence of the Jews from the exchange seems to be what accounts for the lack of immediacy that characterizes the concept formulated in their name. The Europeans who write about the Jews are not Jewish, while the Japanese who read these non-Jewish writings lack everyday familiarity with this people for reasons of history and geography. Hence the concept of the Jew, as Abe emphasizes, is one that is profoundly mediated: it is “abstract,” “indirect,” and even “false”—in a word, it provides nothing more than “secondary knowledge” (matagiki no chishiki), as he describes it several lines later. The implication here seems to be that direct or primary knowledge of the Jews would be possible if certain empirical conditions were to be



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changed, as for example having Jews write about themselves as well as establishing more frequent contact between Japanese readers and actual Jewish persons. Abe’s text certainly contains this implication, but we must not lose sight of the fact that the central distinction he makes between yudayajin and yudayateki naru mono demands that the notion of Jewish mediation not be reduced to merely empirical or accidental factors. Even if the empirical circumstances that shape the writing and reading of the concept of the Jew were altered so as to include Jews within this process, there would nevertheless remain an irreducible quality of mediation—a presence that was somehow less than or other to itself—that Abe links with the figure of the Jew. In order to more clearly perceive what Abe wishes to think through this figure, let us examine the following long passage. These lines appear in response to a crucial question Abe poses to himself, “What then did it mean to be a Jew?” His reply: “There can be only one answer to this question. Jews are those who could not attach themselves to the land. And those who were not bound to the land were Jews. In other words, Jews were those for whom it was inherently impossible to become ‘authentic citizens.’ Of course it was possible for Jews to become ‘citizens,’ but it was absolutely impossible for them to be ‘authentic citizens.’ Only this thin film of authenticity separated the Jew from the nonJew, but at certain moments this relationship became one of decisive opposition. It seems, moreover, that this relation is formed irrespective of any particular social system. Thus the real nature of authenticity appears to be a condition of the state as represented by the space of territory. Authentic citizens thus appear in the form of peasants, while pseudocitizens are driven off to the cities. In reality, it is the city that is the backbone of the state; on the scale of authenticity, however, the city is merely a frontier within. The figure of the Jew, therefore, is unrelated to the Jew in any racial sense but is rather something that comes to be endlessly reproduced as the destiny of the state that contains the city enclosed within its national boundaries.”23 Abe thus informs his readers that he is in no way presenting an empirical study of the Jewish people. His interest in the Jews focuses less on Jewish history in and of itself and far more on what he regards as the considerably broader phenomenon of anti-Semitism. He takes as his object of inquiry not who the Jews actually are in the putative i­ mmediacy

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of their identity, but rather how and why that identity has come to be negatively created on the part of non-Jews. Abe makes this point quite plainly toward the end of his essay: “Yet my focus here is not on actual Jews themselves. . . . My sense is that the strange heresy trial that is anti-Semitism is deeply related to contradictions that lie concealed at the base of contemporary society (or in the structure of the era). In other words, I wish to examine not the Jews themselves but rather the nature of ‘the Jew’ as well as the anxiety and resistance brought about by this figure in the heart of non-Jews.”24 We can see in these lines that Abe’s approach to the question of the Jew bears a strong methodological resemblance to the phenomenological reduction. That is to say, he declares in effect that the issue of Jewish existence in any real or objective sense must be bracketed off so that attention be more productively shifted to the subjective acts of consciousness through which alone that identity can come to appear. Certainly Abe’s refusal to consider Jewish identity as in any way given or immediate demands that focus be redirected to those instances of discourse in which one claims to speak for, or in the name of, the Jew. In this way, the absence of any original identity that is capable of purely doubling or repeating itself in the act of self-representation invariably calls forth the supplementary acts on the part of subjects who linguistically give content to that which otherwise remains empty and silent. Here we understand even more deeply why the misrepresentation of Jewish identity through the media of writing and reading cannot simply be corrected by the empirical method of replacing the non-Jewish European producer and Japanese recipient of these texts with Jewish people themselves. As soon as the object that is Jewish identity declines to give itself as such, in its original sense, then the role performed by any subject (e.g., “European,” “Japanese,” or “Jewish,” etc.) claiming to speak in its name can never be anything but secondary and supplementary. If Abe employs a kind of phenomenological reduction in order to speak of the discourse of anti-Semitism, however, it must be noted that his ultimate aim in thinking the particular figure of the Jew is to unground subjective identity in general. The Jew haunts the state as its excluded other, and for Abe the state in its broadest sense is the site in which individuals are transformed into subjects, where they come to be marked by a unique or proper sense of self that derives from their be-



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longing to this totality. In truth, much of the difficulty of Abe’s project in “Uchinaru henkyō” is concentrated here, for he wishes to set forth a general critique of modern subjectivity through the privileging of a particular historical example, one that he believes sheds light on the complicity between the state and subjective identity through disclosing what has long been excluded from these structures. This tension between the general and particular, the conceptual and historical, makes itself felt throughout the entirety of Abe’s text. By pulling back from the collective entity of the Jews in their historical determinacy, Abe is able to formulate a notion of figurative Jewry that has no substance beyond its discursive instantiations, precisely through which the state structure of identity can be seen to reveal itself in its full ideological force. This state structure has in the modern era come to achieve global dominance, and so analysis of the excluded figure of the Jew should enable us to better understand the plight of all individuals who have been subjected to it. Nevertheless, the discursive figure Abe chooses to illustrate this general point quite visibly derives from, or is at least linked to, the Jew qua historical entity. This decision anchors his text to a specific history, and certain problems inevitably arise as a result. Let us identify two such problems: 1. If the figure of the Jew functions to call attention to the ultimate absence of all given forms of subjective identity, then the two other groups to which he refers—the non-Jewish Europeans and the “us” that is the Japanese people—must also be recognized as discursive constructions, i.e., entities whose identity comes to be formed strictly retroactively through the force of the utterances that appear in their name. For Abe, Japan and the nations of Europe must be conceived alongside one another as instances of state power, in which attachment to the land serves as the primary criterion that determines authentic citizenry in its distinction from the inauthentic. Jewish existence must be regarded as decisively outside of such state identity. Yet this statelessness points to an original lack of identity that Abe suggests has been dissimulated or disavowed by Europeans and the Japanese. In the course of his essay, however, Abe refrains from providing any sustained analysis of the particular dynamics of European and Japanese disavowal, concentrating instead on the negative force inherent in the figure of the Jew. This persistent focus on the Jew as a privileged figure of negativity clearly reverses the discourse

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of anti-Semitism that Abe denounces, but the danger is that the continued referral to the Jewish discursive object in its uniqueness and difference from other like objects risks repeating the anti-Semitic gesture. In a word, the problem here is that of exemplarity: anti-Semitism marks the Jew as an example of difference in his lack of identity; Abe responds to this history by generalizing such difference as an essential feature shared by all human beings, and yet he continues to mark the Jew as an exemplary instance of this. Of course the figure of the Jew (yudayateki naru mono) is not the Jew himself ( yudayajin), but the fact is that Abe decides to link the radical absence of identity with the proper name of the Jew, thereby continuing to call attention to Jewish difference. 2. The strict focus on Jewish difference causes Abe to at times misread this difference as well as to neglect other forms of difference that require intervention. For example, we are told that the Japanese in their unfamiliarity with Jews “cannot easily distinguish Jews from other Caucasians based on physical appearance.”25 This is an odd observation for Abe to make, not least because he appears to reverse himself one year later in his lecture “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō.”26 Conceptually, Abe aims to generalize the figure of the Jew as the privileged exemplar of non-identity; at the empirico-historical level, however, he seems at moments to accept all too uncritically the discourse of Jewish difference that was then dominant.27 The transformation Abe wishes to effect takes as its point of departure the realization that all human beings are most originally without home or fixed identity, but the force of this theoretical insight does not seem to directly threaten such traditional categories of identity as those of culture, race, and ethnicity. That is to say, despite Abe’s understanding that all empirical forms of identity are ultimately without foundation, the transformation from such particular identity to the general state of non-identity all too easily risks leaving these former in place. It is insufficient that this transformation simply be regarded as ultimate; on the contrary, the general force of non-identity must be allowed to actively intervene in each specific instance of empirical identity—culture, race, ethnicity, etc.—so as to reveal its groundlessness. Such intervention could begin, for example, by interrogating the identity of Abe’s pronominal wareware, his reference to “us” when speaking of the Japanese people. As he writes at the beginning of “­Uchinaru



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henkyō,” for instance: “Even we Japanese [wareware nihonjin] are to a large extent capable of understanding the Russian particularity of Tolstoy.”28 Such form of address effectively works against Abe’s project of undermining all established forms of collective identity. Indeed, this inconsistency appears quite clearly several pages later in his essay, when the exclusionary force inherent in the use of the collective subjective “we” is explicitly underscored. As Abe rhetorically asks, using bōten marks to emphasize this same pronoun wareware, “Must ‘authentic citizens’ appeal to antiurban or native elements in order to preserve their ‘authentic culture’? Must we for the sake of our culture stand barefoot on mother earth and purify the filth from cities?”29 This inconsistency is all the more troubling given that Abe refers to “we Japanese” in the context of a discussion about such other “peoples” as Jews, Europeans, Russians, and Americans. Here we must remember that subjective identity is necessarily relational: it never appears alone but strictly in reference to others that the self attempts to determine (thereby inversely determining itself) according to the concepts of identity and difference. When Abe writes the words “we Japanese,” then, this entity can begin to be determined in oppositional terms as that which is not the Jewish, European, Russian, or American “they.” One can discern in these words the presence of a strong reactive force that, despite everything else in “Uchinaru henkyō,” seeks to repeat and so recreate an identity that is perceived to be somehow under threat. In truth, the Japanese people do not simply exist prior to such utterances, which could thereby do nothing more than linguistically re-present an empirical presence that ultimately has no need of representation. Directly to the contrary, that presence comes to be produced each time retroactively at the instant of enunciation—it comes into being, in other words, as an irrevocably delayed effect.30 Despite these difficulties, however, the fact is that Abe’s text stands as an extremely powerful rejoinder not only to the discourse of antiSemitism, but also to those who insist on regarding subjective identity as based on such putatively “empirical” categories as culture, race, and ethnicity. Here it is important to stress that Abe’s primary object of analysis in “Uchinaru henkyō” is less the figure of Jewry than the state system itself. It is in order to critically assess the modern nation-state system that Abe focuses his attention on the Jew as historical scapegoat, as that entity who has persistently been excluded from the state structure of identity.

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This is what he points to when arguing that “the strange heresy trial that is anti-Semitism is deeply related to contradictions that lie concealed at the base of contemporary society (or in the structure of the era),” as we quoted him earlier. Many of these “contradictions” center on the distinction the state makes between what Abe calls “authentic citizens” (­honmono no kokumin) and “pseudocitizens” (or citizens who are judged to be “fake,” mere “imposters”: nise no kokumin). Structurally, Abe contends, the Jew in his wandering and homelessness is marked by his exclusion from the former category; those states that accept him do so only on the condition that he be deprived the right to own land, thereby condemning him to the perpetual status of “pseudocitizen.” Abe provides concrete historical examples of such anti-Semitism in the case of Europe, Russia, and the United States. Insofar as he considers the question of the Jew to be inseparable from the state system of discrimination and its ideology of authenticity, however, even Japan must be regarded in this light: “Even in Japan, where there are no Jews, this Jewish question is quite real.”31 For Abe, the system of nation-states in modernity remains essentially grounded on a notion of subjective identity that takes the particular ideological form of a unified, self-present people. According to this ideology, states are formed when a people come to arrive at the historical consciousness of themselves as a people and establish a more expansive, mediated political space whose function is to elevate while at the same time preserving their original communal being. In this way, state formation must be considered above all as a process of continuity in which an original entity, in response to various historical exigencies, attains to the level of self-representation vis-à-vis other peoples who have likewise constructed state unities. The problem, however, is that there can be no ideal transition from people to state. Other people invariably enter the space of the state—both before its formation and thereafter—and their existence within this newly organized political unit is naturally tense given that the state has already been appropriated, i.e., claimed by a particular people as their proper site of belonging. From Abe’s perspective, this appropriation appears most visibly in the laws surrounding the ownership of land. It is in this context that he refers to the historical example of medieval Europe and the various restrictions against Jewish landholding: “No matter how tolerant the king or feudal



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lord, Jews in their role as the eternal foreigner were strictly forbidden to set foot in the sacred farming areas. They were granted the right to live only in cities (ghettos) and were allowed to maintain symbiotic relations with Christians because of their practice of moneylending—an act considered impure by Christians but which had already become an indispensable part of the state economy. . . . Instead of owning land, the Jews gained power in such areas of the credit economy as commerce, trade, medicine, and law, thereby resulting in the consolidation of their urban character, whether they wanted this or not.”32 In Abe’s view, one of the essential factors required for a people to come into their own identity as a people is the presence of land. This can be seen readily enough in the various tautological accounts given of national identity, according to which, for example, the entity “Japanese people” is at some point determined as the inhabitants of the place known as “Japan,” just as that place is itself defined as home to the “Japanese people.” Here Abe detects a significant reversal in the relation between human beings and land: a people in its act of selfappropriation appropriates land as an intrinsic part of that identity, but this violence comes to be concealed and naturalized when that identity is regarded as originating in the land. Land may give itself to be appropriated, but this is a general offering, in no way limited to a particular people who at a certain point in history come to claim it as their own. As general, such self-offering on the part of land incessantly exceeds all attempts at appropriation, which is to say that appropriation is possible strictly on the basis of a larger movement of disappropriation. In this sense, the desire for appropriation that informs the relation between human beings and land can be seen to shed light on an other­ wise overlooked dimension of the relation between mobility (idō) and fixity (teichaku) that so powerfully governs Abe’s thinking. As we have seen in “Uchinaru henkyō,” Abe seeks to determine mobility or movement specifically in terms of time and fixity in terms of space. In the context of state formation and the ideology of identity, temporal movement is linked with the Jew in his quality of homeless wandering and the corresponding violation of borders, whereas spatial fixity is associated with the land as object of appropriation (“Thus the real nature of authenticity appears to be a condition of the state as represented by the space of territory [ryōdo to iu kūkan],” as Abe wrote earlier). In the

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double movement by which land or territory gives itself to appropriation while simultaneously withdrawing from it, however, we can see that space has already been penetrated by time, that fixity is forced to accommodate mobility. Abe typically conceives of space and fixity as opposed to time and mobility: his privileging of these latter accounts for his positive reevaluation of the Jew as a figure of alterity, always other to state identity. Yet if land can be seen to resist appropriation in constantly exceeding those attempts to claim it, then the relation between the Jew (time, mobility) and land (space, fixity) must be thought otherwise. For Abe, the Jew—like the nomad—is essentially opposed to land; embrace of the land is regarded as capitulation to the ideology of state identity, which explains why he makes a rigorous distinction between the Jew, who is stateless, and the Israeli, who has ceased his wandering and achieved the status of an “authentic citizen” of the Jewish state.33 The notion of Jewish land would thus be condemned by Abe as, if not in fact contradictory, then productive of nothing more than another nation-state, which would in turn replicate the structure of discrimination in its active production of inauthentic or pseudocitizens. Abe’s argument is entirely consistent here, but it must be pointed out that he fails to consider another sense in which, to follow his vocabulary, “Jewish” elements might be seen in land in general. If land both enables and disables appropriation, this is because it is itself in flight from any permanent possession. Land obeys the same structure that Abe tries to think in the figure of Jewry, for it is incessantly other or in excess to its determinations. This alterity of land vis-à-vis those who seek to claim it as their own points to an originary conjoining of time and space that exists prior to any oppositionality that might be posited of them. If land were strictly seen in terms of fixed spatiality, then all movement and change would necessarily be extrinsic to it, merely empirical or accidental phenomena. By resisting the ideological reduction of itself to the form of state identity, which it outlasts or survives in the eventual disappearance of these particular entities, land can be considered as inherently temporal as it is spatial. Just as the Jew in his homelessness constantly moves beyond those borders that seek to determine him, so too does land itself exceed the grasp of the various peoples or collectivities that attempt to claim it as their own.



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What is at stake here is a thinking of alterity as an internal rather than external force. As we have stated, Abe’s central notion or theme of the “frontier within” is devoted to showing how those elements resistant to state identity that the state seeks to marginalize (to in other words banish to its “frontier”) are in fact constitutive of that identity itself. The state must repress this knowledge, but traces of that which it wishes to exclude from itself nevertheless continue to haunt it from within. Abe is insistent on this point: “My focus here is less on the Israelis as object [kyakutai] than on the false image of the Jews that haunts the interiority [naibu ni sukuu] of non-Jews.”34 In this account, oppositionality must be regarded as instrumental in the formation of identity: the nation-state in its acts of self-representation is forced to posit Jewish existence as contrary to itself, failing which there can be no distinction between “authentic citizen” and “pseudocitizen.” So too must the sacredness of land in rural areas be posed against the undesirable heterogeneity of the city. However, this critique of oppositional logic maintains a very uncertain status in the texts of “Uchinaru henkyō.” In the preceding section, for example, we noted that Abe conceives of the relation between the settled peoples and nomadic peoples during the period of the Mongol Empire as one of opposition: the spatial particularity of the former opens up to the temporal universality of the latter at the moment of invasion, when the settled peoples find that their borders have been breached. If the transition from particularity to universality occurs as an act of violence, then Abe regards such violence as external. One implication of this, as we have remarked, is that the settled peoples could claim to possess an originally immediate form of communal identity prior to their encounter with the nomads. Similarly, the Jew is seen as a force of movement that refuses all attachment to the land, transgressing boundaries in the long course of his wandering. Land in its appropriation as an essential part of national identity must be considered a site of fixity, which for Abe is strictly opposed to the mobility of the stateless Jew. Such oppositionality between time and space, nomadic peoples and settled peoples, mobility and fixity, and Jew and land, let us argue, is fundamentally irreconcilable with the thought of alterity and haunting that Abe also wishes to think. The notion of a “frontier within” suggests that those elements that have been excluded from a certain interiority cannot simply be located

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at the site of that exteriority to which they have been assigned. Identity comes to be formed on the basis of this division between inside and outside, since the former can begin to determine itself as that which the latter is not. Nevertheless, what Abe regards as Jewish alterity refuses to remain at this site of opposition; leaving that fixed outside to which he has been exiled, the Jew and the image that is produced of him succeed in haunting the interiority of identity, thereby disrupting it. For Abe, the Jew exemplifies not simply the manner in which alterity comes to be determined by state identity as oppositional, but also, and more importantly, the necessarily failure of all such positing of oppositionality. In being banished to the outside, traces of the Jew yet remain that continue to haunt the inside, disturbing its putative unity and homogeneity. However, if the force of alterity thus reveals itself to be more original and general than that of oppositionality, then the various oppositional relations to which Abe appeals in order to resist state identity can also be shown to derive from an earlier instance. As such, land must be recognized as informed by alterity every bit as much as the Jew, just as fixity is to be perceived as ultimately another form of mobility. This yielding of oppositionality to alterity allows us to see that something like a common ground of difference underlies, and so necessarily undermines, any binary conception of the world and sociality. JEW ISH PO ISO N AN D T H E S TAT E

Despite Abe’s occasional recourse to oppositional logic, however, it must be emphasized that he repeatedly alerts us to the various contradictions that such logic generates. In the case of anti-Semitism, for example, he demonstrates that the state actively creates a figure of exteriority against which it poses itself and which it is simultaneously committed to erase: “Even with the antidote of Israel, the poison that is the Jew still remains exceedingly potent. This is not surprising. For this poison is not introduced externally by Jewish intruders; rather, it is something intrinsic [onore no tainai no doku] that oozes from within the ‘myth of legitimacy’ that is the notion of authentic citizenry itself. Ultimately, the allergy to Jews is nothing other than a kind of autointoxication [jika chūdoku]. The poison of heresy will forever be reproduced



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insofar as the state seeks its authority in the ‘myth of legitimacy.’ Jews just happen to be this poison.”35 The boldness of Abe’s argument here can only be appreciated by following the shift he makes from an outside conceived in mere empirical terms to a structural or formal interiority. Anti-Semitism, Abe asserts, does not originate in any quality that Jews possess themselves. On the contrary, the state itself creates the negative figure of the Jew as a means to inversely establish what Abe calls the “myth of legitimacy” (seitō shinwa), by which he means the essential aspect of its own identity. For in actual fact the state possesses not one but rather multiple identities: heterogeneous elements are always found within its borders, and these threaten the state’s attempt at self-representation. The state responds to the unsettling fact of its self-differentiation by maintaining a distinction between essential and non-essential aspects of its identity. That which is essential to the state must be limited to those individuals who are seen to belong to the original people from whom the state derives. In the case of Germany, for example, this essence comes to be recognized in the 1930s by Hitler, “who perceived in the good German peasantry the existence of the German Volk with its own pure lineage,” as Abe writes.36 Quoting Sartre, Abe finds precisely this same mechanism at work in the case of France: “Intelligence, for the anti-semite, is a Jewish attribute. . . . The true Frenchman, with his roots deep down in his own country, in his own small locality, sustained by a tradition of twenty centuries, benefiting from an ancestral wisdom and guided by tried and tested customs, does not need to be intelligent.”37 The United States is certainly no different, Abe declares, here citing a passage from a 1949 book entitled Prophets of Deceit in which the so-called or self-saying “authentic” American citizen is allowed to speak for himself: “I do not understand political science, as an authority from an academic viewpoint. I am not familiar with the artistic masterpieces of Europe, but I do say this tonight: I know the hearts of the American people. [For I am] one of [those] plain old time, stump grubbing, liberty loving, apple cider men and women. [I am thus] an American-born citizen whose parents were American born and whose parents’ parents were American born.”38 Distinctions must be carefully drawn between various political regimes and sociopolitical contexts, of course, but such differences

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should not blind us to certain structural features of the nation-state itself. According to Abe, this structure is one of “autointoxication”: the political body produces poison within itself, which it, however, must then isolate and attack in the interest of self-preservation. In this sense, the nation-state must be seen as constantly at war with itself. In the state’s self-division of its citizenry between authentic and inauthentic elements, it would seem that the telos of such infighting would consist in the elimination of the poison that are these latter, inauthentic (or “Jewish”) aspects of itself. Only by eradicating what is inessential to itself can the state appear to reclaim its original essence. As can be seen in Abe’s various references to Nazism and the concentration camps, it is clear that he took this threat with the utmost seriousness. Insofar as the nation-state system continues to exist, he suggests, the danger of certain “ethnic” or “racial” entities destroying others for the sake of self-purification could not be overcome. Nevertheless, such destruction cannot truly be posited as the telos of state violence given that the state is also forced to actively create what is other to it. Failing this, as Abe points out, it ceases to be itself. For Abe, this double movement of creating what it must destroy and destroying what it must create represents the central contradiction of the nation-state. This contradiction appears as soon as the state attempts to account for its own internal difference by introducing the distinction between authentic and inauthentic citizens. This distinction, let us emphasize, is conceived at a temporal level. That is to say, state formation is regarded as originating in a people—retroactively determined according to the coordinates of ethnos and race—who are subsequently forced to share the space of the state with others. In this way, difference comes to be inserted into a narrative trajectory of the Fall in the sense of an external contamination of an otherwise pure origin: the state belongs primarily to those “authentic citizens” who established it as an external expression of themselves, and only secondarily to those “inauthentic citizens” who happen to physically reside in its space. Whereas the relation between people and the state in the former instance is one of essence—the state appears as an embodiment of the people in their original communal identity—that of the latter is seen merely in empirical or accidental terms. For Abe, such determination of difference qua Fall in the context of the political relation between people and the state sets in motion a



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desire to nostalgically return to the site of an originary communal unity that putatively existed before the incursion of difference. In his essay “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō,” Abe condemns such nostalgia as representative of what he refers to disparagingly as an “ancient communal morality”: “The city is certainly a hodgepodge, something that is all mixed up. It also doesn’t provide the same sense of safety or security that one feels in rural communities. . . . We casually speak now less about morality than about our inner sense of alienation. ‘People who live in cities suffer from a sense of alienation’: these words are of course used negatively. However, it is unclear whether such alienation is negative in a logical sense. Is it not simply the case that we feel lonely at an emotional level? The fact that we are so easily given to such expressions as ‘urban alienation’ suggests that we somehow feel ourselves to be already part of an ancient communal morality.”39 In the transition from a communal people to the more expansive, articulated space of the state, the qualities of immediacy and mediacy find themselves replicated in the distinction between the countryside and city. In contrast to the “safety” and “security” that one typically associates with the former, the latter is often fearfully regarded as a site of “alienation” (sogai). Abe’s point, however, is not simply that such valuation is misguided and that the phenomenon of urban alienation should in fact be celebrated over the oppressive communalism of rural life. An argument of this type would represent nothing more than a reversal, the mere trumping of an antithesis over an original thesis.40 On the contrary, Abe is posing the much more complex question as to when the space of unity and identity can be said to open up to the force of difference. Insofar as the city is determined negatively on account of its traits of division, estrangement, and hybridity, Abe suggests, no simple distinction can be made between it and the country­side. From this perspective, the countryside comes into being as a site of communal oneness and immediacy strictly as a retrospective fantasy. Here the strength of nostalgia is such as to reduce this area to a kind of empty receptacle capable of containing the various traits of the anti-city inversely projected onto it. For Abe, the return from urban alienation to rural communality reveals merely other forms of alienation, understood in the sense of a non-coincidence of immediacy with itself. If division and hybridity are seen as characteristic of the city, in

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other words, then these traits must be grasped in a generalized sense as preceding the very opposition between countryside and city. Such traits can in no way be derived from an earlier instance, one of unity and identity, whose Fall they mark. In this regard, we can see how Abe’s understanding of the trap of nostalgia in the context of community repeats his thinking of the ecstatic nature of time, as examined in the preceding section. Given the radical self-divisibility of time, the fact that the present is always already a retracing back into the past and forward into the future in a movement away from and outside of itself, anything that exists within time is from the beginning necessarily caught up within this movement and so never fully equal to or coincident with itself. Or as Heidegger writes in Being and Time, “Temporality is the primordial ‘outside-of-itself’ in and for itself. We therefore call the phenomena of the future, the character of having been, and the Present, the ‘ecstases’ of temporality. Temporality is not, prior to this, an entity which first emerges from itself; its essence is a process of temporalizing in the unity of the ecstases.”41 In other words, a thing is not simply first itself and then exposed to temporality; on the contrary, the differential or self-divisive nature of time is fundamental in the sense that all things are affected by it from the very first moment they appear. Nostalgia provides various ruses in an attempt to posit an originary identity whose experience of self-differentiation represents nothing more than the accretion of changes that mark its existence—i.e., difference is strictly something that happens to, or supervenes upon, the self as such—whereas Abe is trying to think temporal difference much more radically as preceding all identity, thereby establishing the conditions of possibility and impossibility for anything to appear as itself. The reduction of difference as envisioned by nostalgia, far from ever arriving at a state of self-present identity, is rather led to discover merely other forms of difference. Presence is constantly deferred, but this merely serves to expand the range of violence generated by nostalgia. Abe’s insight is that the nation-state contains at its core a structure of nostalgia. The state is believed to be founded on a people, whose own identity is in turn dependent upon the land from which they sprang. In modernity, the nation-state has come to concentrate its resources in the city, and yet it continues to privilege the land of the countryside as



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the site of its unchanging essence. In order to better understand this tremendous force of nostalgia that links the nation-state to land, let us briefly turn away from “Uchinaru henkyō” and consider Abe’s autobiographical comments growing up as an overseas Japanese in colonial Manchuria. As he writes in his 1973 work Hangekiteki ningen [The AntiTheater Person]: “From childhood, I was raised in Manchuria. However, the textbooks we used at school were issued from the Japanese Ministry of Education. It was from these books that I learned, ‘Our national land [waga kokudo] contains mountains and rivers, and there are also cherry trees that blossom.’ Yet in my everyday life there were neither mountains nor cherry trees—only endless plains. When our teachers became angry at us they would always say, ‘Children in Japan proper [naichi] would never do such a thing!’ I thus felt within me an immense yearning for Japan. I experienced unbearable envy simply by imagining that nearby there could be found mountains, rivers, and trees.”42 These lines reveal the intimate connection that is seen to exist between national subjectivity and land. When this connection is attenuated in the case of national citizens leaving what is considered to be their “homeland” and residing elsewhere, the individual’s very sense of himself as belonging to that nation comes to be imperiled. Abe remarks that his teachers would attempt to inculcate among the students a proper sense of Japanese identity by negatively contrasting their behavior to that of the idealized children from the Japanese mainland, but there can be little question that this anxiety regarding their overseas (gaichi) status was felt first and foremost among the teachers themselves. What becomes apparent here is that this ideology of national nostalgia depends upon an organicist conception of affiliation. That is to say, what truly belongs to the nation is determined as that which directly grows from its soil. Abe’s interest as a child was not simply with mountains, rivers, and trees in and of themselves. Despite appearances, these childhood recollections would have been little different had the Manchurian landscape actually contained such features. On the contrary, it was only insofar as these mountains, rivers, and trees were specifically Japanese mountains, rivers, and trees that they could hold such fascination for him. Just as the Japanese soil produced these objects, however, it also created human beings. Those human beings were understood as naturally Japanese, and so any transplanting outside of this

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national soil—as for example that experienced by the youthful Abe— would give rise to doubts and anxiety regarding the imagined dilution of one’s own Japaneseness.43 In the context of “Uchinaru henkyō,” this privileging of land as the origin of national identity explains the particular reason why the object of discrimination must be the Jew. In his stateless wandering and unattachment to national borders, the Jew appears to call into question the organicist conception that ties individuals to national territory. If national affiliation is a natural attribute that derives from the land itself, then the Jew can only be seen as unnatural. This is in fact precisely what Abe discovers. Here he refers to Hitler, as quoted in Hermann Rauschning’s book Hitler Speaks: “The two are as widely separated as man and beast. Not that I would call the Jew a beast. He is much further from the beasts than we Aryans. He is a creature outside nature and alien to nature.” In commenting on these lines, Abe finds what he calls “clear evidence of a pathological hatred for the unnatural or artificial. . . . Jews were like an urban demon that could freely transform itself into anything other than German peasants.”44 Because the Jew is considered to be outside the structure that derives national affiliation from a putatively natural belonging to the land retrospectively determined as national territory, he can be virtually anything. In this account, membership in the larger national community is regarded as a natural trait. Here it should be remembered that the word “nation” has its roots in the Latin term natio, meaning “to be born.” For Abe, the national community claims to be born from the land, just as the members of this community are determined as those who are born into it. Individuals are in this way conceived organically as products of the nation, for it is the national land (kokudo) that has originally given them life. Once delivered from the nation, individuals can always be identified as belonging to it. The Jew, however, is different. Because he has no homeland, he cannot be regarded as natural in the same manner as national citizens. The land of his birth is only incidentally related to his identity. Given the Jew’s unnatural or artificial status, the nation where he is born fails to manifest itself within him at the individual level. From Abe’s standpoint, the Jew appears to violate the sense of natural attachment that ties the individual back to his homeland in the form

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of the nation-state. If in Abe’s autobiographical remarks one grasps how individual citizens come to acquire a sense of affinity with various topographical and botanical features of the homeland insofar as both animate and inanimate objects alike are considered products of the nation,45 then the Jew lacks such rootedness. The apparent absence of any traits that could be traced to the nation and land make it difficult to identify this figure. In the artifice of his statelessness, as Abe writes, the Jew is “like an urban demon that could freely transform itself into anything.” This extreme protean quality of the Jew results from his distance from nature, no doubt, and yet such distance must be understood beyond the empirical facts surrounding the relative density of Jewish existence in the city, far removed from the peasant and land.46 Rather, the natural order is determined as preserving the link between the multiplicity of national citizens and the single origin from which they derive. The same unsettling heterogeneity was of course recognized even among these members of the national community, but such difference was mediated by a common belonging to the nation and its land, because of which it was never perceived as threatening. The Jew lacks such a mediating body, with its formidable ability to neutralize difference by redetermining it strictly as national diversity. As Abe understood, the difference between such diversity and difference was precisely that between nature and artificiality. KAF KA AN D T O L ST O Y : T H E ID E O L O G Y O F N AT IO N AL A F F IL IAT I O N

Unanchored to the land, the Jew appears to drift away from the fixed coordinates of national identity. The demonic quality that defines his protean and peripatetic existence, allowing him to “freely transform [him]self into anything” (nan ni demo jizai ni bakerareru), is inseparable from his exile from the natural order. For Abe, the figure who best exemplifies this “Jewish” rejection both of and from identity is Franz Kafka, whose works, as Abe describes elsewhere, “dwell constantly on rejection and protest.”47 Writing from a minoritarian position, Kafka exhibits in his work a profound sensitivity to the nature of power relations in modern society. Nevertheless, Abe insists, it would be a mistake to regard Kafka as simply Jewish: “There is an argument one sees recently

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that focuses on the notion of the ‘father’ in Kafka—that is, its Jewish characteristics—and while it may appear that this reading shows high regard for Kafka, it actually reduces the contemporary universality of his work to its particular Jewish qualities. There is something ineffaceably sectarian about this. Here we find an impractical attitude that is tantamount to seeing Marcel Proust, Charlie Chaplin, and Henri Bergson simply in terms of their Jewish traits.”48 Abe’s point here, let us note, is not that Kafka’s universality as a writer is recognized throughout the world, by Jews and non-Jews alike, thereby exceeding any attempt to reduce it to his particular identity as a Jew. Abe states this quite clearly in dismissing the typical argument given in support of Kafka’s literary greatness, which he summarizes as follows: “‘Despite being largely bound by his particular Jewish qualities, Kafka was finally able to achieve a contemporary universal form of expression thanks to his talent, which transcended these limitations.’”49 Abe’s rejection of such an assessment rather stems from his dissatisfaction with the common understanding of the notions of “particular” (tokushitsu, tokushu) and “universal” ( fuhenteki). As he argues, the concept of Jewish particularity must not be understood along the same lines as ethnic, racial, or national particularity. The example he uses to illustrate this difference is Tolstoy in his status as a representative Russian writer. By comparing two statements that incorporate this conceptual framework of particularity and universality—“Compare: ‘Kafka wrote with the heart of a Jew, and yet he rose above that to appeal to the soul of all humanity’ and ‘Tolstoy wrote with the heart of a Russian, and yet he rose above that to appeal to the soul of all h ­ umanity’”—Abe suggests that “one immediately recognizes a very different resonance.”50 What is the precise nature of this difference? For Abe, the traditional notions of particularity and universality are wholly governed by the logic of identity: universality cannot be achieved abstractly, but only through an individual’s initial belonging to a particular ethnos, race, or nation. Abe attacks this understanding of “universality through the particular” (tokushu wo tsūjite fuhen he) as a mere “standard formula,” as he calls it, one that functions all too frequently as “the cherished mantra of literary critics.”51 Despite the organicist ideology used to derive the national community from the land and the individual from the national community, Abe recognized the importance of the concept of



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mediation in consolidating the link between the universal and particular. In the specific context of world literature, as centered on Kafka and Tolstoy, universality is determined as the shared recognition of artistic value among the representatives of the system of nation-states. The category of world literature thus consists of Tolstoy as a Russian writer or Shakespeare as an English writer, for example. Here the relation between universal and particular appears in the form of the world and nation-state. Regardless of their literary merit, writers cannot simply or directly be understood as universal; rather they arrive at the point of universality only “through” their prior identification with a particular nation-state. In this account, the universal-particular relation is seen to begin at the point in which national literature comes to be mediated by world literature. In contrast to this view, however, Abe finds that mediation has already begun to operate in the affiliative relation between the individual writer and the nation-state itself. In other words, nothing natural can be seen to exist in this relation. The individual’s belonging to the national community is not immediate in the sense that it is grounded by land—which, as we have seen, produces topographical or botanical features and human beings alike as its products, i.e., concrete expressions of itself. On the contrary, the individual comes to be identified as a (particular) part of the (universal) totality of the nation strictly through the mediation of the ideology of land. As Abe writes, “The notion of Russian particularity was not truly separate from the particularity of other nations or peoples but was rather a mere variation that contained universally peasant characteristics. Insofar as faith in the land continued to flourish in one form or another, it was quite natural that pursuit of such particularity led directly to universality. All modern states have embraced a memory of the land as holy as part of the historical background of their formation.”52 What appears to be most immediate and natural in the instance of national affiliation is, Abe discovers, merely an ideological effect. Here he gestures toward a dismantling of the entire edifice that connects the individual writer to national community and homeland and, through the mediation of these, ultimately to the world. If mediation can be identified as the driving force that allows the particularity of the national (ethnic, racial) unit to transcend itself and achieve the universality that is world recognition, then the departure point for such

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universalization would itself be forced to yield to this same logic. The type of universal-particular relation that Abe associates with Tolstoy seeks to arrest this process of mediation by positing the nationalized individual as immediately given. From the standpoint of the nation, this point appears obvious, for it knows that its own totality consists of the parts as primarily represented by its national citizenry. Abe in no way disputes this claim, but he points out that this relation between whole and part is irreducibly mediated. In reading “Uchinaru henkyō,” we are reminded that the nation does not recognize itself in all of the individuals who reside in its territory. Invariably, certain individuals and groups are privileged over others in being determined as representatives of the nation. These representatives provide a synecdochic function in the sense that they represent the whole even though they are not empirically equivalent to the whole. According to Abe, what comes to be excluded from this frame of national representation is the Jew, which is why he must be regarded as “the eternal foreigner” (eien no takokumono), to use Abe’s expression.53 Yet the Jew’s status as foreigner is in no way simple, for he doesn’t merely reside outside one nation in another nation so much as he exists outside of the system of nation-states altogether. Paradoxically, this exteriority to the nation-state system brings about an effect of dissemination, which allows him to reside in all nation-states. What Abe discerns here is an economy that is simultaneously greater and less than the economy of national affiliation as enabled by the universalparticular relation. Whereas Tolstoy, for example, can be considered both a part that represents Russia and a Russian that represents the world, the Jew (Kafka) lacks any pure affiliation with the nation in which he happens to reside.54 He is thus less than those parts that represent the national whole. Precisely because of this lack of recognition by the nation, however, the Jew is able to exceed any affiliative ties with one nation-state and achieve a scattered or diasporic existence that extends to many ­nation-states. The condition for “belonging” to the many, in other words, is an inability to belong to the one. Nonetheless, it bears emphasis that these two economies cannot simply be understood as distinct from one another. Just as the eternal foreignness of the Jew situates him effectively within the nation without being part of it, so too does the excess of the universal-particular



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relation generate its effects from a position that is at once interior and exterior to this more limited economy. If it is impossible to directly oppose Tolstoy to Kafka, this is because the latter reveals that the system of national affiliation that Abe associates with the former can always be breached, opened up to its outside. Yet this outside is one that incessantly rejects any particular determination or delimitation of itself; it is in surpassing these that the outside gives itself to be thought as general. Abe emphasizes this point by rigorously distinguishing the Jew from the Israeli, for the two embody different forms of exteriority or foreignness. Whereas the Jew’s status is one of “eternal foreigner,” always other to the nation-state in which he finds himself, Israelis are “from the standpoint of non-Jews . . . simply foreigners [tada no gaijin ni suginai].”55 That is to say, from Abe’s perspective, Israelis are Jews who have actively appropriated—and in turn become appropriated by—the ideology of national affiliation as enabled by the universal-particular relation. The system of nation-states is only strengthened as a result of such appropriation, but even this does not make it any less vulnerable to its internal breaching. Insofar as elements remain within the space of the nation-state that resist identification as parts that make up its whole, Abe insists, it stands exposed to all future alterations.

T HREE

THE LURE OF COMMU N ITY IN TANIN NO KAO

Consciousness is nothing but the law of restricted exchange between one person and another.1

T H E N E IG H B O R AN D O T H E R : THE PR O B L E M O F I D E N T I T Y AN D D IF F E R E N C E IN C O M M U N A L F O R MAT I O N

For Abe, the desire to posit identity in its distinction from difference opens up the essential question of community. Specifically, he asks whether it is possible to reduce individual entities (e.g., texts, writers, human beings in general) to those predetermined geopolitical sites, as for example the nation-state, with which they are seen to be affiliated. Are the links between individuals correctly understood according to an ordering that posits the existence of certain collectivities, each grounded in a common identity that unites individuals and defines them as communal members, that stand against other collectivities? Abe’s suspicion of the derivativeness of such framework stems from his belief that individual and communal existence, in their materiality, ineluctably exceed any (theoretical, political) manipulation of these terms of identity and difference. This conviction can be found throughout Abe’s oeuvre, but perhaps nowhere is this notion of community examined more thoroughly than in his 1964 novel Tanin no kao [The Face of Another]. Abe appears to point in this direction himself when he refers to this text in an essay written two years after its original publication. There he describes the relation between identity and difference in terms of the interlinked notions of “neighbor” (rinjin) and “other” (tanin, tasha): “As

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I wrote in my novel Tanin no kao, the notions of ‘other’ and ‘neighbor’ coexist within us. We regard those people within the community as ‘neighbors’ and those outside as ‘others.’ The ‘other’ is the enemy and the ‘neighbor’ an ally. In declaring that ‘the other is also a neighbor,’ Christianity allows the notion of the ‘neighbor’ to impact the ‘other,’ destroying its barriers. This is quite similar to the techniques employed by the Meiji Emperor and government following the upheaval. In other words, what one sees here is the attitude of ‘Well done, my enemy. I’ve got to congratulate you.’ The notion of loyalty to the emperor and state came into being during the Meiji period, for until that time loyalty was restricted to one’s feudal lord.”2 Communal existence, according to Abe, is typically determined on the basis of the coordinates of identity and difference, which inform the apparently contrastive figures of neighbor and other in the distinction between the inside (kyōdotai naibu) and outside (gaibu) of the given community. The fixed economy of this inside and outside is maintained by the recognition of others identified as like oneself as allies, whereas those defined as unlike oneself are seen as posing a potential threat in their difference and hence must be considered enemies. Were this situation to remain unchanged, however, one would be confronted with the primal violence of intercommunal struggle with no hope of ever overcoming this impasse. In this framework, significantly, violence can only be directed outward, beyond the borders of the community. Given the identity that binds individuals together and constitutes them as members of a larger collectivity, the possibility of intracommunal violence appears to be dismissed from the start. It is seen either as unnecessary or even in principle impossible—the assumption being that social antagonisms only arise out of difference, a difference whose possibility is foreclosed in advance within the interior of the community—or, at most, is implicitly recognized in such a way as to make its projection outside the community a matter of the greatest urgency. Yet this state of affairs is finally transcended upon the emergence of a logic that takes into account the limitations of brute violence exercised between communities. If the other (enemy, outsider) is simply subjugated qua other, then this leaves open the eventual possibility of oneself being subjugated by a more powerful other. Here the determination of exteriority in terms of threat would, as a general principle, invariably be reversible



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and so applicable to other communities as well, from whose standpoint one is likewise seen as dangerously other, foreign. There thus arises the need for a more refined and sophisticated weapon, one that raises violence beyond the level of immediacy (one community destroying another, eliminating difference through the simple eradication or expunging of the enemy who is unlike oneself) to that of ideological mediation. In effect, the terms need to be changed, and quite radically. Rather than continue to accept the limited scope of violence necessitated by the oppositionality or mutual exclusivity of the neighbor-other relation, one now sees introduced a new logic according to which violence can be exercised more freely and comprehensively by identifying the other not qua other but, precisely, qua neighbor. Abe cites two institutions that historically effectuated this logic with enormous benefit to themselves: Christianity and the Japanese nationstate. Abe is not insensitive to the widely different historical contexts that separate these phenomena and typically discourage any comparative analysis between them. But what concerns him here is less empirical history as such than the formation and behavior of certain logics that function as the conditions upon which empirical history can be approached in the first place.3 In order to speak of historical entities, one must first organize discourse according to the governing concepts of identity and difference, concepts that are understood to be strictly antithetical to one another. Abe’s aim is simply to investigate the relation between these concepts. Above all, any determination of this relation as antithetical or oppositional presupposes that these terms be fundamentally symmetrical. Such symmetry creates two conceptual chains that are defined as mutually exclusive: inside-neighbor-ally-identity versus outside-other-enemy-difference. Now the genius of Christianity and the Japanese nation-state, Abe suggests, consists in their shedding doubt on the symmetrical nature of these chains. What these institutions discovered is that the other can be subjugated more effectively by reducing his existence to that of the neighbor. In other words, this new logic overcomes the limitations of simple oppositionality by introducing the possibility not of destruction or annihilation, but rather of appropriation. The problem with the elimination of alterity through the enemy’s destruction is clear: this solution fails to take full advantage of the possi-

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bility of the community’s self-expansion. For in order to maintain itself in its internal unity and homogeneity, the community must extinguish all threats to itself posed by those who exist outside of its borders. In this constant violence that is self-preservation, the community gradually expands, thereby appropriating greater resources that lead, in turn, to its increasing development and concomitant need for further border expansion. Yet the eradication of others demanded by the centrifugal movement of the community’s self-expansion reveals its limitation in the simple quantitative fact that the community is outnumbered. It may grow larger and more powerful than other, competing communities, but it is not larger than the sum total of communities that exist outside it—and herein lies its vulnerability. It is in order to overcome this problem that the need arises to identify outsiders as like oneself, neighbors as opposed to others, allies rather than enemies. In this way, the aggression characteristic of the centrifugal movement outside (which heretofore could only take the form of primal violence, the destruction of that which was posited as other to the community) now sees itself transformed in the emergence of a centripetal movement defined as the becoming self of the other (that is, the other now recognized as neighbor, the enemy now loved and valued as ally, the outside now grasped as always latently inside). By remarking the other as ultimately—this distinction between the initial appearance of difference and the essential truth of identity must be vigorously preserved, although it must also, for ideological purposes, remain dissimulated—identical to oneself, the community in one stroke removes all the obstacles posed by oppositionality that formerly inhibited its full self-expansion. Previously the community’s eradication of the other left it with only a lifeless corpse, the inevitable result of intercommunal violence. It is not difficult to see how ultimately unsatisfying this result is for the community, for it arrests rather than drives forward or lends force to the community’s movement of self-expansion. The dead resist all attempts at appropriation in their status as inert matter. The dead other, in being destroyed, reveals its uselessness to the community, the fact that it remains utterly foreign to its sublation by the totality in the form of collective meaning.4 Although the destroyed other no longer poses any physical resistance to the community in the expansion of its territory, it exposes the limits of the community’s capacity for appropriation, limits



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that are subsequently transcended or neutralized in the transformative remarking of the living other qua neighbor. Here the difference that is the other is revealed to be merely provisional and pre-reflective, what Jean Hyppolite describes in his reading of Hegel as characteristic of the “empirical attitude,” which “is unaware of the identity of the reflective self and being” but which will subsequently “be led to reflect on itself and to discover that it was already reflecting on itself without knowing it in its apprehension of objects.”5 In other words, the community in its ability to speculatively recognize itself in or as the other has finally arrived at the status of subject. In the course of its formation, the subject-community surmounts the immediate extinguishing of alterity to settle upon a form of violence that is more conducive to its self-development. This new violence of appropriation seeks to neutralize the alterity of others by remarking them as ultimately nothing more than a reflection of the community itself. Far from simply antithetical or oppositional, the relation between neighbor and other, ally and enemy, inside and outside, and identity and difference now reveals itself to be (or rather, as Hegel and H ­ yppolite remind us, to have always already been) profoundly asymmetrical. The first of these terms is privileged in its association with the capacity for reflection, which means in this context the ability to subjugate alterity through the force of objectivization. What Abe calls above the destruction of the other’s “barriers” (kakine) is rendered possible precisely by this transformation of the communal self as subject and the external other as object. In intercommunal struggle, this barrier could only be pierced physically in the form of arrow or sword. With the emergence of the subject, violence is now spiritualized, i.e., elevated into something mediated and abstract. The piercing of the other’s barrier no longer results in his physical death; rather such penetration is retroactively seen to have already taken place in the very recognition of this other qua other. The other survives this destruction of its barrier because that which is destroyed is in truth nothing but the subject itself in its own self-exteriority. That is to say, the barrier being destroyed is no longer something that separates the other from the neighbor but rather, on the contrary, that which separates the subject from itself. Abe describes this striking transition from immediate to mediated violence with the words teki nagara appare, a difficult phrase that we

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have translated, somewhat awkwardly perhaps, as, “Well done, my enemy. I’ve got to congratulate you.” In shifting his focus from the appropriative force of Christianity to that of the nation-state Japan, Abe is not so much moving from epistemological (How can I know the other?) and ethical concerns (How can I act toward the other in his or her alterity?) to questions of a historical and political nature (specifically, the status of the transformation brought about in Japan by the emergence of the Meiji state). Rather, he wishes to emphasize the fundamentally interconnected nature of these elements. The rise of the nation-state in Japan unleashed a series of sweeping changes at every level of society, but Abe is most keenly interested in the mechanism of identification insofar as it touches upon this totality (or, precisely, totalization) of the social and, in so doing, ideologically reconciles the epistemological and ethical with the historical and political. His question is this: At this moment in history, how did the self know and act toward both itself and others as Japanese? Any response to this question of national identification, Abe insists, must take into account the crucial notion of loyalty (chūsei). Once again, what is at stake here is a manipulation of the terms of identity and difference so as to effect a shift at the level of the individual’s communal affiliation—­specifically, loyalty must now be withdrawn from the feudal lord and newly directed to the Meiji emperor and state. In their establishment of the nation-state Japan, the Meiji forces were required to transcend all relations of enmity with the supporters of the Tokugawa shogunate and create a collective identity in which particular differences could now be subsumed. The expression teki nagara appare, the recognition of one’s enemy as in some sense identical to oneself, names this moment at which violence comes to be elevated (or spiritualized, sublated) to the level of appropriation. Loyalty is essential for this transition because it functions, Abe declares in a resonant phrase, “as the all-purpose adhesive required for solidarity.”6 Loyalty acts as a kind of glue that enables individuals to overcome what appears to be their atomistic existence and forge communal bonds with others. In calling attention to the fabricated nature of loyalty, its historical pliability in being redirected from one collectivity (the particular level of the feudal lord) to another (the more universal and comprehensive level of the modern nation-state—as represented



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by the Meiji emperor, now refashioned as “modern monarch”),7 Abe uncovers an inversion that bestows upon this notion a certain freedom or contingency, one that can, however, always be appropriated for political ends. Along the spectrum of identity and difference, loyalty is typically understood to be grounded on the former in its opposition to the latter. In intercommunal struggle, for example, an individual’s loyalty seems to be determined by the filiative bonds he maintains with one community (i.e., his “own”) in contrast to another. This bonding, significantly, is conditioned by the identical traits that one putatively shares with others, thereby enabling individual members to distinguish inside from outside, ally from enemy, “us” from “them.” What Abe discovers here, however, is that loyalty is not in fact grounded on identity; on the contrary, identity (in its distinction from difference) is now recognized as strangely dependent upon loyalty. In Tanin no kao, Abe formulates this same thought of the inversion at issue in communal formation slightly differently: “A crowd isn’t formed because people gather,” he writes; rather “people gather because there is a crowd.”8 Loyalty, as the adhesive agent necessary for the establishment of solidarity between individuals, is revealed to be bereft of any substantial grounding in identity. People gather not because of any collective identity they share among themselves in their difference from others. Although they may perhaps believe themselves to be doing precisely that, convinced that the organizing principle of any gathering must involve some form of commonality (whether visible or concealed), in truth no identity precedes the community’s formation. Such identity, on the contrary, is attributed only retroactively. With this insight, Abe lays bare the ideology that subtends the ordering of identity and difference as forces that shape the gathering of individuals. In recognizing the contingency of loyalty, he allows us to understand that identity or the self cannot be posited as prior to, or seen as an enabling condition of, difference and the other. As we noted earlier, the logic of appropriation requires that the conceptual chain of inside-neighbor-ally-identity be privileged over that of outside-otherenemy-difference. Such privileging results from the determination of these chains as fundamentally asymmetrical, as the latter is found to be ultimately reducible to the former. Once the self (subjective interiority) belatedly recognizes that its knowledge of the objectivized other

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qua other presupposes its own presence, that the other was a­ lways ­already the self in its pre-reflective exteriority, then Christianity and the Japanese nation-state find themselves conceptually equipped to embark upon their quest to appropriate all alterity to themselves. By ungrounding identity in revealing its indebtedness to contingent loyalty, which is anchored to nothing other than the singular articulations of the social—in which relational bonds with others can at any instant be forged and severed—Abe aims to show that it is in fact alterity (the other, difference, exteriority in general) that must be grasped as ontologically prior.9 As he appears to suggest, Christianity and the Japanese nation-state must at some level be credited with understanding the profoundly asymmetrical relation between self and other, without which there can only be intercommunal strife. Their immense error, however—one that was of course ideologically motivated—consists in confusing the terms of this asymmetry. Intercommunal strife in its positing of two mutually exclusive conceptual chains proved incapable of grasping the importance of reflection. Christianity and the Japanese nation-state understood this weakness and effectively exploited it in their elaboration of a logic of violence based upon appropriation, which reduced the other (qua ­reflected object) to merely another instance of the communal self (qua reflective subject). For Abe, this transition explains the emergence of the nation-state, which illustrates why in the passage above he concludes by focusing on the historical era of Meiji. Yet Abe also glimpses a flaw or vulnerability in this logic: asymmetry in the relation between self and other must be acknowledged, the vast power of reflection must be given its due on account of the extensive historical changes it helped bring about; nevertheless, this power reveals its limits when it finds itself forced to appeal to such contingent elements as loyalty in the formation of community. For here identity, seeking to preserve its distinction from difference, must yield to the process of identification, through which alone it comes to be produced. In other words, the social bond is created not out of any given or preexisting identity, but rather because the “all-purpose adhesive” that is loyalty comes to be applied. For Abe, the nature of this application is necessarily singular and contextual: the bond can be loosened or tightened depending upon nothing more substantial than the finite changes of the historical world. These changes signal the difference that lies at the



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heart of all social existence, a difference that is subsequently concealed in man’s attempt to ground community formation on the difference between identity and difference. It seems clear that Abe’s aim in thinking the notion of community is to return, beyond all relations of oppositionality, to this point of contingency and difference. This return, however, is not motivated by any nostalgic desire for a lost community, one that, located in a distant past or perhaps a distant culture, somehow embodies these traits and to which we could now appeal in an attempt to more effectively resist the appropriative force of modernity and the system of nation-states. Rather, the point is to understand the groundlessness of communal existence, the fact that the bonds between individuals cannot be based on any pre-given identity, no matter how defined. Here it seems important to reread Abe’s passage above, but to do so in a way that goes beyond what Abe evidently intended by his language. As he writes, “the notions of ‘other’ and ‘neighbor’ coexist within us.” Given Abe’s central concern to interrogate the nature of community, it bears asking if what is most essentially at stake in this notion is not to be found in the word “coexist.” The term Abe uses here is heizon, which can also mean “to exist side by side.” Everything here depends upon the precise manner of coexistence, whether it be defined atomistically as a mere assembly of discrete individual units or, much more radically, as a site of relationality where the borders (or, to use Abe’s term, “barriers”) that constitute the individuality and distinctness of individual units find themselves at every moment transgressed in a general movement of refraction or inclination, what the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy tries to think under the heading of clinamen.10 In all rigor, it can never be a question of privileging either the individual or community, for the general notion of coexistence precedes this division. At this more originary level, both individual and communal subjects are revealed to exist as an effect of the differential and contingent space of coexistence. As we have sought to demonstrate in our reading of Abe, this passage to subjectivity (and the reflection that enables the abstract signification or representation of the other qua object) takes place by determining the relation between self and other strictly along the lines of identity and difference, in which the latter comes to be speculatively remarked as nothing more than an instance of the ­former. This opera-

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tion is a deeply ideological one, as Abe indicates in his historical examples of Christianity and the Japanese nation-state, for it emerges as an attempt by the self to negate alterity not by destroying it, but rather by appropriating it in the ceaseless movement of its own self-development. Once identity is discovered to appropriate difference through the highly mediated process of identification, however, then the self (whether individual or communal) finds itself exposed to the contingent forces of coexistence. Yet these forces not only expose the derivativeness of all subjective formations; they also, in a profoundly concrete sense, ex-pose the subject to that which lies beyond it and which ultimately resists all appropriation in its material withdrawal from signification. Few understood this insight better than Abe, who throughout his work (and perhaps most brilliantly in his fiction) painstakingly draws attention to the gap between the subject’s desire for cognitive mastery and the world in its implacable and elusive materiality. Quite literally, materiality is what remains after the subject’s activity of signification and objectivization. Yet this remainder or residue is not without life, or at least a kind of life that must be understood differently from—that is to say, more originally than—that of the subject’s. Abe describes this remainder in a variety of forms, but each time it is a question of that which interrupts or disturbs the subject’s self-relation (which, as we have seen, also takes place in the subject’s objective knowledge of the world), a relation whose privileged image in Tanin no kao is that of Ouroboros, the snake holding its tail in its mouth.11 This remainder can be seen in the harshness of material existence itself, which in the 1957 novel Kemonotachi ha kokyō wo mezasu [The Beasts Head for Home] constantly frustrates the protagonist’s desire for national or ethnic selfidentity in postponing the moment of his communion with Japan.12 But it is also figured in certain characters who in some sense survive their destruction by the subject, as can be glimpsed, for example, in the 1951 short story “Chinnyūsha” [The Intruders] in the protagonist’s final act of disseminating thousands of fliers protesting the colonial injustice of the U.S. postwar occupation of Japan, or again in “Henkei no kiroku” [Record of a Transformation] in the form of the ghost of the old Chinese woman shouting imprecations at the Japanese imperial army soldiers who have just killed her.13



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It is perhaps in this lattermost example where one can most clearly detect a certain essential movement that we are trying to think, alongside Abe, under the heading of coexistence. Specifically, violence is committed in the name of the collective subject that is the nation-state for the purpose of its own self-expansion. Another being (one seen as other, enemy, outsider) suffers that violence, but rather than completely disappearing it remains, neither dead nor alive but capable in its lingering existence of haunting the subject. As ghost or spirit, this haunting does not simply exist outside the subject. Rather coexistence allows it to expose the subject, open it to that alterity which it otherwise seeks to repress or disavow. The unsettling force Abe is trying to describe in this context is in fact very close to what Freud called the “return of the repressed.”14 Alterity in the form of the repressed element appears at first glance to be excluded, closed off from the system of self-relation that contains the individual-subject in its distinctness from others. In truth, however, this border is irremediably breached, the individual-subject penetrated by a more general force that introduces contingency and difference within the otherwise ordered domain of self-presence. It is in this sense that we must understand Abe’s fascination throughout his work with the theme of walls or borders and their invariable destruction, for what is at issue here is the vain if constantly repeated attempt by man to enclose himself within a space of pure interiority. The problem is that this interiority can only delineate or mark itself off within the more general sphere of coexistence, which in principle disallows such closure. Yet it should be emphasized that this disruption of the subject cannot truly be understood in the terms of empirical history, which recognizes contingency and the intervention of difference on a merely accidental as opposed to essential basis. That is to say, the subject’s exposure to exteriority does not simply take place at such and such historical moment or period. On the contrary, the subject is incapacitated at its very inception.15 Failure to think subjectivity at this more fundamental level invariably renders one’s discourse susceptible to nostalgia in its implicit positing of a moment prior to, or outside of, this exposure. What is required here in the thinking of coexistence is rather scrupulous attention to those instants when the excluded or repressed remainder suddenly reveals its presence in the disruption of subjective interiority. While this remainder in

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its resistance to objectivization never gives itself as such, the concrete effects it produces can nevertheless always be perceived, however fleetingly, in the interruptions, hesitations, and inconsistencies apparent in the subject’s various signifying practices. T H E C IR C L E O F T R AN SF E R E NT IA L S U B J E C T I V I T Y

In reading Abe’s Tanin no kao, it is important to recognize that the closure to the exteriority of the world and others that characterizes subjective interiority is at least doubly marked: it can be found at the level of the protagonist, who because of a serious facial injury conceals himself alternately in tightly wound bandages and a stifling mask; and at the level of the text itself, which is presented in first-person narrative in the form of an extended internal monologue with only a modicum of dialogue with other characters. Here the reflective movement of consciousness can be seen in the protagonist’s incessant editing of his remarks, in which, Ouroboros-like, he appears to circle back to his writing as a reader to offer commentary through the medium of various excursuses and marginal notes (and, in one case, an excursus to an excursus). The only exception to this textual solipsism seems to be the letter from his wife that appears toward the end of the novel, but even there it isn’t evident if the author of the missive is not in fact the protagonist himself, once again posing or positing himself as another.16 Moreover, the text, which is composed of several documents (the protagonist’s letter to his wife, three notebooks [black, white, and gray], an appendix to the last notebook, and finally the wife’s letter), runs on for long, difficult stretches, unrelieved by any section heading or clearly delineated break, producing what Abe no doubt intended to be an acute feeling of claustrophobia in the reader.17 The protagonist’s sense of extreme isolation, painfully exacerbated early in the novel by what he interprets to be his wife’s rejection of his sexual advances, deprives him of a sense of solidarity or fellowfeeling with others. His attempt to regain this lost communality takes the form of a desired reconciliation with his wife (who to some degree represents for him all others in general). This desire, he confides at one point, would be most substantially fulfilled not through her touch, significantly, but by her gaze: “(Even as I write this now, I try to think of



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you, and your expression comes to me first. The instant that expression becomes a smile something suddenly shines forth, and everyone who receives its light immediately feels convinced that their own existence is affirmed [jibun no sonzai wo kōtei sareta] . . . ) Yet while you shed this expression generously on everything—windows, walls, lights, pillars— I was the only one on whom you did not seem to be able to turn it [­mawashikirezu ni ita]. . . . In any case, I came to feel that it would be enough if only I could get you to direct your expression on me.”18 What reveals itself in these lines is a form of transferential intersubjectivity that is at once very close to and yet very distant from the notion of coexistence that we examined in the preceding pages. Both of these conceptions of sociality take as their point of departure a critique of atomistic individualism in recognizing that focus must be directed not to the individual as such but rather to the complex relational dynamics that take place between individuals. Relationality is to be understood as logically prior in this dyad, but this is also to suggest that contact with others essentially threatens the integrity or wholeness of the individual at each singular instant. Coexistence, which Abe attempts to think beyond oppositionality (i.e., either neighbor or other) as the incessant breaching of the walls or barriers with which the subject attempts to enclose himself, exposes the individual to the contingency and alterity of the world. The individual thus finds itself fragmented, since those differential elements that it previously sought to repress are now discovered to have taken up residence within the violated space of its own interiority. The phenomenon of transference appears at first glance to be similar, for the subject takes leave of itself in its projecting of certain traits or qualities onto the other strictly through which, as Abe writes, one’s “own existence is affirmed.” Needless to say, at issue here is not material existence but rather the imaginary existence that marks the perfect unity and self-presence of the transferential subject (which relentlessly seeks external affirmation for its own identity). Yet this unity is achieved circuitously—literally, in the form of a ­circle—by means of the subject receiving that which it gives itself via the mediation of others. Abe clearly marks this circularity in his language with the verb mawasu, which we have translated here as “turn,” but which can also mean “rotate” or “revolve” in the sense of manipulating a wheel, for example. In effect, the protagonist charges his wife with

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the task of reflecting the content of his projection back onto himself— thereby closing the circle—for only in this manner can he constitute himself as subject. This split subjectivity reveals that the subject is not initially unitary or whole, but that it requires the affirmative gaze of the other in order to suture this gap and thus re-turn (or, as it were, rotate back) to itself. Once again it is a question for Abe of borders—the reference to walls and windows in this scene of transference is hardly coincidental—and how they can be provisionally dismantled or removed in order to then be more powerfully reinforced as a result. The subject recognizes its incompleteness in its awareness of the strange force that others are capable of exerting upon it. This force must be domesticated given its threat to the subject’s identity. Such domestication is accomplished by reducing this other through the projection into a univocal meaning intended only for the subject himself. The fact that the other maintains its own relations with the world outside of the subject must be bracketed off as incidental. What is crucial is that the other’s positionality be fixed so that the subject can continue appealing to it as the supplementary point of its own identity. The transferential object’s difference from the subject is thus in no way a radical difference, which would on the contrary resist such fixity and univocality and hence function to disturb the subject’s attempts at identification. In its apparent stability, this difference allows itself to be remarked by the subject as that which is unlike himself; this negative determination serves to consolidate his own subjective positionality in its dependent or mediated positivity (i.e., I am that which he or she is not). No one understands these transferential dynamics more astutely than the protagonist’s wife (who of course may or may not be the protagonist himself). As she (or he) writes, “You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any other [tanin] is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself.”19 This motif of the mirror appears throughout the work, emphasizing the manner in which a reflected doubleness is used to reinforce rather than potentially disturb subjective identity. Abe offers a wide range of examples: “I found a mirror attached to the back of the door. I took off my glasses again, removed my mask, and, looking in the mirror, began to undo the bandages”; “Somehow I could not believe that this was my face. It was different



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. . . too different . . . [chigau, chigaisugiru]. These could not possibly be the webs so familiar to me that I could scream, the ones I always saw in my mirror. Of course, since the left and right of the antimony cast were the reverse of my face reflected in a mirror, some feeling of difference [iwakan] was unavoidable”; “A prison’s oppressive, constraining walls, its iron bars, all become burnished and pellucid mirrors, reflecting the inmate. The torment of imprisonment lies in not being able to escape from oneself at any time”; “Looking into a mirror, I stared at the inflamed scar webs, whipping up my desire for the mask”; “I peered into the mirror. A man I did not know looked coolly back at me. Indeed, not the slightest detail would make one think it was me”; “However, the creature in dark glasses reflected from the mirror of the station washroom, was wild and defiant”; “The streetcar toward town was empty, and whatever seat I took, the window glass became a dark mirror, reflecting my mask”; “Unable to suspect others, unable to believe in ­others, one would have to live in a suspended state, a state of bankrupt human relations, as if one were looking into a mirror that reflects nothing”; “the word of consent you casually uttered frightened away the self-confidence of the mask and seemed to drive it into two facing mirrors, talking with itself”; “Looking into the mirror, I felt a certain nostalgia, as if I were meeting an old friend.”20 Abe enfolds various associations into this motif of the mirror, but certainly one of the most noteworthy is the sense of difference the protagonist feels when gazing at what he expects or desires to be his own reflection. Let us emphasize that what is most fundamentally at stake in the mirror reflection is a sending: the subject, not yet constituted, projects himself out of himself with the expectation that he will be enriched upon his return, i.e., that moment when the content of projection circles back to its point of origin, enabling the subject to recover himself as now fully integrated. The structure of self-affection that we saw in the case of Ouroboros is identical to this, as is the demand the protagonist places upon his wife to affirm with her gaze his own mediated existence. Nonetheless, there is no guarantee that this projective sending will ever return to one or that difference will not have intervened in this hermetic circularity. The subject requires this mediation through an exterior element in order to claim himself qua himself, but exteriority invariably retains some degree of contingency or uncontrollability

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regardless of how vigilantly one attempts to reduce these. Sensing this potential danger, the subject comes to view the outside as both desirable and threatening. The promise of identity that this outside holds out can at any time go unfulfilled: such possibility of unfulfillment is not simply an empirical accident that may or may not happen but rather the structural condition of any sending (and hence any self-relation). Enveloped in its own narcissism, the subject fails to grasp this point, perceiving the disturbance of circularity not as an intrinsic possibility contained within the general act of sending but rather, on the contrary, merely the particular fault of the transferential object itself. Abe is especially insightful regarding this trap, illustrating how his protagonist responds to this threat with various fantasies of violence. This violence is directed to any object (either person or thing) the protagonist invests, however fleetingly, with transferential energy. As for example a young office assistant who, early in the novel, teasingly shows him a Klee drawing entitled “False Face”: “I was so upset that the picture appeared to be my very own face as reflected in the girl’s eyes. A false face, seen but unable to look back. It was intolerable to think that I appeared to the girl like this. Suddenly, I ripped the book in two. And with it my heart. From the tear my insides came running out like a rotten egg.” Or a small, curious child the protagonist happens to encounter on a streetcar: “The child, about five, was seated between his two young parents . . . and was just then staring apprehensively at me. . . . Wonder, anxiety, fear, discovery, suspicion, hesitation, fascination, curiosity—all were crammed into his little eyes, and he seemed almost to be slipping into some ecstatic selfless state [muga no kyōchi]. . . . How would it be if, not saying a word, I were to plant myself in front of the parents and child and, contemptuous of their perplexity, remove my glasses and surgical mask and begin to undo my bandages . . . the three of them would be transformed into stones, or lumps of lead, or even insects.” Or, and most especially, the protagonist’s own wife: “To say that you were a victim bound and chained to me, who fundamentally had no power over you, was a pack of lies I had made up for my own purposes. . . . I seriously thought that the end of my agony would never come if I did not drive a spike through your body. . . . Thus both the desire to restore the roadway between us and the vengeful craving to destroy you fiercely contended within me.” And again: “Of course, it



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would be too much to say that I had absolutely no destructive motives inside me. In daydreams, I was more than once carried away by impulses such as wanting to tear your skin from your face to make you experience the same agony as I, to release into the air poison gasses that would paralyze the optic nerves and blind the whole world.” The protagonist at one point even imagines himself as the victim of violence, however metaphorical: “I tried, for example, to trace how I should feel if I were to be tattooed. And the first thing I thought of were the eyes of others that would descend upon me like thorns.”21 In each case, it is a question of determining the unsettling force that others in their alterity maintain over one specifically as a threat, a threat that must be met with violence, whether real or imagined. This threat can be grasped most succinctly in Abe’s use of the term muga, which literally means “no self.” This word is often used in Buddhist discourse to refer to a state in which the existence of the self is finally negated or transcended. Here let us avoid any Orientalist projection that would find satisfaction in uncovering a link, grounded in some spurious “Asian” identity, between Abe’s text and Buddhist philosophy. The desire to create such a connection exists, in fact, as an effect of the phenomenon of transference that Abe is explicitly attempting in this passage to problematize. Rather, the word muga discloses that the identity of the self (ga), insofar as it is mediated by the other (and no subjective identity can exist that is not in some way mediated by the other), remains structurally vulnerable to interruption or destabilization and thus can always come to nothing (mu). In the foregoing passages, the protagonist seeks to project his own image onto others—the office assistant, a small child, his wife—but is forced to confront the possibility that this sending will not be returned, or if returned reveal itself to be different than how it was originally intended. Confusing the general logic of transference with its particular objects (which, as Abe unambiguously shows, can be potentially anyone or anything, regardless of the nature of their relation with the projecting subject), these latter are regarded profoundly ambivalently: if they possess the capacity to affirm the existence of the subject, they can also by that same token withhold this gaze of affirmation, thereby disturbing the transference. This ambivalence has its roots in the very notion of muga: for the transferential subject, others are encountered not in all their elusive and complex alterity, but

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rather strictly in the reductive binary terms of, on the one hand, self (ga), which others return to the subject in their acceptance of the transferential relation, or, on the other hand, no-self (muga), in which others reject that relation. The protagonist’s remark concerning his wife that “both the desire to restore the roadway between us and the vengeful craving to destroy you fiercely contended within me” represents the essential ambivalence of all transferential relations in general. In this way, we can better understand Abe’s insight that the protagonist’s feelings of violence, while certainly significant, are merely the effects of an earlier, more originary violence, one that consists in reducing the other to a one-dimensional yes or no in regard to the question of its affirmation of the subject’s own identity. We have thus seen how the protagonist’s narcissistic enclosure comes to be reinforced by a breaching that reveals itself to be merely provisional, given that the subject calculates in advance the destination of his transferential sending. Mirrors, the protagonist’s own wife, an office assistant, and small child are, in turn, recruited for the task of doubling the subject and hence constituting its identity. The success of this operation depends upon a kind of violence, one that is to be found most originally not at the phenomenal level of the protagonist’s various fantasies or actions but rather in the instrumentalized enframing of others such that their haunting and multiform elusiveness come to be arrested, reduced to a univocal meaning accessible to and useful for the subject alone.22 In order to grasp the full extent of the protagonist’s transference, however, we now need to step back from the novel and examine passages from two of Abe’s essays that deal specifically with the relation between the writer and reader. What is at issue here is a troubling question Abe poses, one that has far-reaching consequences for any reading of his text. This question can be formulated as follows: can one enter into a transferential relation with oneself? The first passage can be found in Abe’s 1955 essay “Mōjū no kokoro ni keisanki no te wo: bungaku to ha nanika” [The Hand of a Calculator with the Heart of a Beast: What Is Literature?]: “The writer’s first lesson can be described as battling the reader in order to know him. The w ­ riter’s emergence from the reader takes place through the ­reader’s self-mirroring [jibun wo kagami ni utsushi]—the surge of emotions provoked in him by the work—and objectification [kyakutaika],



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and appears as the writerly part of the reader splitting off in opposition to itself. This opposition and conflict continue until the writer ceases being a writer. The struggle with the reader can thus be seen as the writer’s alpha and omega. . . . Just as centrifugal and centripetal forces are both required in order to draw the locus of a circle, so too does a work become effective only as a dialectical unity of the opposition [tairitsubutsu no benshōhōteki tōitsu] between writer and reader.”23 The second passage appears in “Rinjin wo koeru mono” [Beyond the Neighbor], written over a decade later: “But reading gives rise to something within one, and writing provokes the desire to share this urgent spontaneous feeling with others. Who is this other? In fact, this other is oneself. Here an internal split first appears between writer and reader. Like a process of cellular division, the writer emerges inside when one feels the need to give something new and original to oneself as other.”24 These lines are, we believe, indispensable for apprehending the true scope of Abe’s project in Tanin no kao. But they are more than that, for they also gesture toward what might be understood as a certain limit in his thinking. This limit touches upon the question of whether alterity and communality can be adequately addressed, their complexity fully taken into account, on the basis of dialectics. For Abe, the relation between writer and reader must above all be grasped dialectically, which means in this context that they should not be seen merely as separate entities who are constituted in and of themselves prior to the moment of their relation. (As we saw earlier, this thinking informed his critique of empiricism, which supposes that the relation between meaning and thing can be understood simply as arbitrary—and hence implicitly empowering of the determining subject, viewed as the creator of ­meaning—as opposed to something that is fundamentally grounded in that relation itself.) At the site of literature, a certain sharing takes place between writer and reader: this sharing is capable, however fleetingly, of overcoming the division that separates these two. In other words, a kind of community is formed between reader and writer through the mediation of the literary text. It is in order to comprehend the specific nature of that community or sharing that Abe is forced to ask whether, at an originary level, writer and reader truly exist autonomously of one another. What he discovers is that there exists a strange bond between them: the writer potentially emerges from the reader in much the same way

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that a butterfly suddenly finds itself transformed from a chrysalis. In fact, a not dissimilar logic of transformation was at stake in Abe’s examination of the relation between neighbor and other. There Abe criticized Christianity and the Japanese nation-state for viewing the other as nothing more than a self-exteriorization of the neighbor (qua subject) itself. In this way, difference came to be appropriated through its retroactive remarking as identity masquerading as other. In the writerreader relation, analogously, the writer reveals himself to be in truth always already the reader. When the reader, stimulated by his reading, is able to sufficiently detach himself from himself and become other, then, Abe declares, he is no longer a reader but a writer. As Abe’s language makes clear, this operation is fundamentally informed by the values of knowledge and consciousness: in order for the reader to become the writer, he must undergo a process of reflective self-mirroring and objectification. The writer can “know” (shiru) the reader, but the reader himself is incapable of such knowledge given that he yet remains at the preliminary stage of “emotion” (kanjō). In other words, the reader is to be understood in terms of immediacy; the texts he reads create “urgent spontaneous feelings” (sashisematta naihatsukan) within him, but the content of these feelings exists prior to articulation and can only be apprehended as a vague, unformed “something” (nanika). Abe formulates the relation between writer and reader in this way out of a desire to think the site of literature in all its proper concreteness. To conceive of the writer and reader merely as distinct individuals who share no intrinsic relation as produced by the mediation of the work is, in effect, to do a disservice to the sharing or communality of literature. For Abe, this view of literature must be rejected as excessively abstract. Regardless of whether it is aware of it or not, this view presupposes that individuals exist as pre-constituted and discrete entities, whereas Abe is primarily interested in thinking the dynamics of the relationality opened up by literature. Because of this relationality, the writer and reader can never be fully separated out from one another. If the writer is always the reader, then the converse is also true, for the reader always remains within the writer as his nascent or embryonic self. The “dialectical unity” that they form is both a joining and separation, which also means that each term or entity retains a certain alterity vis-à-vis the other. According to Abe, the sharing of the



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literary work produces a radical severing of the self from itself. At this site, it is no longer possible to speak simply of a unified self; rather one must now refer to the complex and multiform being that is “oneself as other” (tanin de aru jibun jishin). The question arises, however, as to the ultimate limits of this complexity. The dialectical operation that Abe performs here rejects a traditional conception of subjectivity by placing difference at the center of the self. Difference as it unfolds over time is grasped as a process of development in which the initial “struggle” (kakutō) (or “battle”: tatakai, “conflict”: tōsō) between entities eventually gives way to a reconciliation between them. Such reconciliation is possible, following dialectical logic (which Abe, it must be remarked, both follows and betrays), because entities are determined from the very beginning as oppositional (tairitsubutsu). That is to say, the difference between writer and reader is ultimately conceived on the basis of logic, which functions to arrest or contain their movement through an act of objectification. The disturbing effects of alterity can in this way be neutralized by a siting— or identification, conceptual determination—of the terms involved, for we know that they are posed in some sense against or in face of one another. Despite his commitment to materiality and concomitant critique of reflection, Abe nevertheless suggests in the above passages that the reader is able to give birth to the writer through a method of self-mirroring. This method, like the “process of cellular division,” is one in which the self reflectively exteriorizes itself, such that it now occupies the positions of both subject and object. At the moment the reader divides himself from himself and identifies himself in his difference, the reader is no longer a reader but a writer—and indeed, ultimately, a writer that contains within himself both writer and reader. This logic explains why Abe illustrates the synthesis that is dialectical unity through the metaphor of the circle, for, as we saw earlier in the context of Tanin no kao, what is in question here is invariably the self undergoing a process of differentiation and estrangement as a result of which it is able to more effectively consolidate itself, reinforce its “­barriers.” As with the figure of Ouroboros, the coinciding of origin and destination finally determines the relation between writer and reader to be a closed one, inimical to rather than receptive of the unsettling force of difference.

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It should be emphasized that the success of Abe’s dialectical operation depends upon the implicit privileging of one term over the other. The writer, that is to say, is privileged over the reader because of his capacity to contain the reader within the internally differentiated space of himself. Although the reader always inhabits the writer, he is unable to internalize the writer within himself without thereby becoming the writer. Abe’s fidelity to a certain dialectics must be noted in this regard, for the opposition between the two terms of a dialectical relation can only be resolved by a synthesis created by the sublation—that is, the simultaneous cancelling and preservation—of these terms as one. Precisely as we saw earlier in the relation between the neighbor and other, two particular entities engage in a struggle the result of which is the incorporation of one within the other. This incorporation is possible because these entities are not in truth symmetrical; on the contrary, they are revealed through the development that takes place during the course of their struggle to be, respectively, universal and particular. Writer and reader first appear to be particular vis-à-vis one another: this is their difference. And yet the truth of their relation is that the writer is (or, more precisely, always already has been) universal, for he alone is capable of reflectively objectifying the reader. The amorphous “something” that the reader feels from the literary work is swept up within the development of knowledge, where it is finally given rational and conscious articulation in the form of writing. The prise de conscience effected by the transformation of the reader into the writer reveals that, for Abe, the site of literature is essentially governed by a dialectical unfolding of oppositional logic. Invariably, feeling must yield to knowledge in the same way that the particular yields to the universal and unconsciousness to consciousness. Let us repeat, however, that the victory of these latter terms over the former does not simply destroy or efface them; rather victory takes the form of incorporation, a comprehending of the lesser terms within the expanded space of the greater. Hence the writer, in his sublated relationship with the reader, is both a feeling and rational being, endowed with an unconscious that serves his consciousness, in his constitution as both particular and universal. Nonetheless, or rather precisely because of this, the question arises as to what has been excluded from this “dialectical unity” as formu-



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lated by Abe. Just as the determination of distinct entities on the basis of oppositionality must be understood as an effacement of difference, so too can we observe that the incorporation characteristic of the ensuing universal-particular relation represents a form of violence to the remainder. That is to say, in the dialectical operation of raising unconscious elements to the level of consciousness and rational articulation, an elusive “something” escapes. This something is not merely unknown but properly unknowable; it forms the excess of every system of knowledge. Abe’s concern here is to shed light on the underlying concreteness of the literary transformation from work to reader, from reader to writer, and then from writer back to the work. He desires to present that which remains unrepresented in non-dialectical accounts of literature. Because of this very desire, however, he severely overestimates the power of reflection and objectification, thereby doing violence to that which resists such presentation. In the dialectical reinscription of reader as writer, feeling or emotion as knowledge, and particular as universal, a kind of division takes place (not unlike the “process of cellular division” that Abe refers to here) in which objectified elements incessantly recede or withdraw from themselves, retracing themselves outside the boundary of subjective interiority. Abe, who is otherwise extremely sensitive to this alterity or remainder (as we noted, for example, in the case of the ghost of the old Chinese woman killed by soldiers of the Japanese imperial army), nevertheless fails in this instance to sufficiently respect such exteriority when conceptualizing the relation between writer and reader. WR IT IN G , C O N F E SSIO N , AD D R E S S : T H E EXC E SS O F T R AN SF E R E N CE

We can now return from this digression through Abe’s essays to Tanin no kao, as we are better able to understand the various complexities that subtend the protagonist’s transferential subjectivity as manifested in the bond between writer and reader. What reveals itself, interestingly, is a certain shift in Abe’s thinking of this bond. The dialectical framework remains very much in place in the novel, but Abe now appears to be openly critical of the narcissism and insularity that result from the writer’s unwillingness to release his writing, to allow it to possibly

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signify otherwise in the act of an interpretive reading that exceeds his control. For reading does not merely consist in the immediate feelings or emotions aroused by the text; such immediacy necessarily coexists with a mediated reflection on the text in which passivity doubles itself in the form of an active deciphering of language and meaning. The protagonist of Tanin no kao, in his capacity as writer of the various texts that make up the novel, appears to recognize this threat that reading poses to writing. Writing requires reading in order for the expressed or communicated content to be recognized as such, but this is also to say that the possibility of reading going astray in the form of a misreading is sufficient to distort the identity of writing. This structure should be familiar to us at this point, for it is precisely the structure of transference, which in its circularity essentially depends upon a form of mediation that it nevertheless wishes to efface. As with the essays “Mōjū no kokoro ni keisanki no te wo: bungaku to ha nanika” and “Rinjin wo koeru mono,” Tanin no kao represents an extended dwelling on the relation between writer and reader. Abe marks this relation not only through the presence of the various written texts in the novel, but also by the fact that these texts explicitly identify their intended reader: the protagonist’s letter and three notebooks are intended for his wife, the wife’s letter is intended for the protagonist, and finally the appendix to the last notebook as written by the protagonist is intended for himself (“a record for me alone”).25 In circular form, moreover, the novel begins at the site of reading and ends, in its final lines, with a remark on writing: “So nothing will ever be written down again. Perhaps the act of writing is necessary only when nothing happens.”26 It is also imperative to recognize the particular genre of writing chosen by the protagonist. This genre is that of the confession (kokuhaku), in which the protagonist writes of his own guilt in the hope of receiving leniency or forgiveness from his wife, who is assigned the role of judge over his fate. Significantly, this term kokuhaku is explicitly linked with the figure of Ouroboros: “All you could manage was to wander through the streets and write long, never-ending confessions, like a snake with its tail in its mouth.”27 If the relation between writing and reading is given such weight in the novel, this is because Abe is primarily interested in examining the tendency to conceive of this relation in the limited terms of transfer-



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ence. In this regard, the confession must be understood to represent the literary vehicle most suited to transferential dynamics. The premodern confession, most famously given voice in the Confessions of Saint Augustine, continues to powerfully influence the modern, secular form by endowing the person to whom the confession is addressed with the God-like ability to render judgment and grant forgiveness to the penitent. Confession is motivated above all by a desire for recognition: the confessor relentlessly seeks out the gaze of that person appointed with the task of judgment. Despite appearances, what is essential in this relation is neither the content of the wrongdoing (which, indeed, might never have taken place) nor the content of judgment. Rather it is the form of the relationality itself, in which the subject actively seeks out determination (“You are X”) from an external source, thereby providing content to the otherwise empty form of subjectivity. This strange imbrication of form and content can be stated otherwise: the nature of the wrongdoing and the pronouncement of judgment are strictly contingent upon the penitent being determined qua penitent. Such judgment represents the fulfillment of subjective desire. In this sense, we can better grasp the importance of subjective positionality in confession. What is crucial here, however, is not simply the penitent’s desire for recognition as subject. In order to secure that recognition, the penitent must violently reconfigure the terms of relationality by positing (that is to say, actively transforming in a conceptual gesture) his interlocutor as confessor, i.e., that mediated being through whom subjectivity is granted. We are in fact very close here to ­Althusser’s conception of interpellation, with the significant difference that the hailing, if accepted, leads not to subjectivity itself but rather to the mediation through which subjectivity is achieved.28 The prostrate figure of the penitent figuratively bowing before his confessor conceals the fact that this scene of confession is in truth wholly choreographed by the penitent. The staging of this scene essentially depends upon the address, and in this sense we must recognize Abe’s insight that the act and genre of confession and the specific addressing of the various texts that compose the novel are related not by accident, but by necessity. For the penitent, the alterity of the other must be effaced and reinscribed along the lines of identity. In this act of appropriation, the other is not simply transformed into confessor; he must above all become my confessor.

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Abe presents this elaborate staging of confession from the very opening of the novel. The protagonist’s wife enters an unknown apartment, expecting to find the protagonist but discovers in his place only the letter and notebooks. Let us cite this passage at length: “Now you are beginning to read the letter. You are probably humiliated and angry. But I should like you to fix your gaze [shisen] on the paper, though you don’t want to, and go on reading. I want so desperately for you to pass safely through this instant and make a step toward me. Have I lost to ‘him’ or has ‘he’ lost to me? Either way, the curtain has fallen on my masked play. I have murdered ‘him,’ and I proclaim myself [mizukara nanori wo age] the criminal. I shall confess everything, without remainder [nokosazu issai wo kokuhaku shite]. Whether you act out of generosity or the reverse, I want you to go on reading. He who has the right to sit in judgment also has the obligation to listen to the defendant’s statement. . . . Well, sit down; relax. If the air in the room is bad, open the window at once. A teapot and cups are in the kitchen if you want them. As soon as you settle down, the place will change instantaneously from a hideaway at the end of a maze into a court of law.”29 Abe here skillfully parallels the protagonist’s active configuring of his wife as reader with his configuration of her as judge. If the penitent requires judging in order to claim his identity as penitent, then so too does the writer require the presence of the reader in order for his writing to be legible. (In this sense, to recall Abe’s previous references to dialectics, the dialectic relation between thing [writing] and meaning [writing qua writing] takes place concurrently with the dialectical relation between writer and reader.) What governs these relations of writer-reader and penitent-judge is the notion of transference. It is in this context that we must understand the remark made to the protagonist by a doctor whom the protagonist seeks out for consultation: “It’s an established theory in infant psychology that humans can validate their [sense of] self only through [lit. “only by borrowing”] the eyes of others [tanin no me wo kariru koto de shika jibun wo kakunin suru koto mo dekinai].”30 Abe’s concern here, in other words, is to determine the literary genre of the confession as composed of two parts: the act of confession and the act of writing. He discovers that the former is essentially transferential in that it requires the gaze of another (God, human ­beings who are induced to play the role of God) through whom subjective identity is consolidated. The lat-



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ter act, although unlike the former in its irreducibility to transference as such, nevertheless is manipulated by the protagonist in such a way that it comes to be delimited by the logic of transference. This is a writing that functions to bring together writer and reader in the mutual constitution of their identities. By subsuming writing within the logic of transference and confession, the protagonist ensures his mastery over it. This is an indispensable move, for if the protagonist actively produces this writing, it is also true that writing comes retroactively to produce him as writer and penitent. Given that the “eyes of others” could potentially be anyone, however—thereby jeopardizing the meaning of the writing as intended by the p ­ rotagonist—it is necessary that the writing be specifically addressed to his wife, that she follow his instructions to “fix [her] gaze on the paper,” and that she tacitly accept the role of reader-judge assigned to her. If transference is essentially dependent upon the gaze in its configuration of subjective positionality, Abe wishes to underscore the manipulation inherent in this situation. Through a mixture of pleading, cajolery, and indirect aggression, the protagonist attempts to control in advance the manner in which his wife responds to this unusual setting. The various appeals to her physical comfort (she is encouraged to sit and relax, to drink tea if she is thirsty, open a window if the room is stuffy) are made to draw attention away from the fact that this is ultimately a scene of coercion. Just as the wife is induced to take up the position of reader, so too is she persuaded to act as judge. She is assigned this role by the protagonist, who nevertheless has already made her work redundant by pronouncing judgment on himself. Following Abe’s determination of the writer as that being who “give[s] something new . . . to oneself as other,” the protagonist informs his wife that he has given himself a new identity: “I proclaim myself the criminal,” as he writes, thereby relieving her of this task of judgment. By occupying the position of both giver and receiver of this identity, the protagonist in effect usurps the wife’s role as judge even though he has simultaneously created this role for her. How are we to make sense of this apparent inconsistency? Abe gestures here to another dimension of violence, one that goes beyond the protagonist’s transferential configuring of his wife as reader and judge so that he may, as a delayed effect, be recognized as writer

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and penitent. The protagonist desires that his textual confession be read in such a way as to confirm the intended meaning he wishes to convey. This is why the text must be addressed to a specific person and read at the particular time and place indicated by the writer, for the conditions of its reception are to be restricted as much as possible. Meaning, for the protagonist, only takes place when origin and destination coincide, that is, when the writer’s vouloir-dire is apprehended as such by the reader.31 The time of writing necessarily differs from the time of reading, but the protagonist believes that the meaning or signification that animates writing, raises it above the level of mere material inscription, is capable of transcending this spatiotemporal difference so that it may be remarked by his wife as the same. Otherwise, as the protagonist repeatedly laments, there can be no hope of establishing the roadway between them. In the case of judgment, the protagonist’s actions have exposed him to the verdict of others. As with writing, a temporal gap is opened up between the time of action and the retroactive judgment on that action. Yet it is this very gap that allows for the possibility of judging in the first place. If there were no gap, if act and judgment took place simultaneously such that the former presented itself to the latter in all of its immediacy, then the element of contingency would be lost and judgment would collapse into knowledge. The temporal difference that is retroactivity allows for a relationship between the original act and all subsequent judgments to come about. Without this difference, ironically, there would be no need to judge. Yet the protagonist attempts to foreclose the possibility of judging in advance by pronouncing himself guilty. His stated desire for his wife to judge his actions is belied by the fact that his verdict now renders all future judgments unnecessary. The protagonist’s plea of “Judge me!” is contradicted by his ­message, uttered in the same breath, “But the verdict has already been given.” Similarly, the protagonist’s writing opens his text to the possibility of a general reading, that is, a reading that goes beyond the level of intended meaning (and intended addressee), such that origin and destination no longer coincide. The instructions he gives his wife are, at one and the same time, “Read me!” and “Do not read me other than by doubling my own intended meaning.” In both cases, an act (or effect, inscription) produced by the protagonist creates a future—other times and spaces—in which other acts may turn and respond to it. Despite



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the protagonist’s wishes, however, the possibility of such response is grounded in the very singularity or difference of the instituting act. This means that no response (in the form of judgment or reading) will ever equal it or be adequate to it, for this response necessarily constitutes another singularity in time and space, one distantly removed from the first. Yet this very failure to fully respond to the original mark (i.e., criminal act, text) allows for other marks to be created, thereby extending its future. To say, then, that the protagonist desires to limit the possibilities of judgment and reading is equivalent to saying that he wishes to create a future that is in fact identical to the present. From his standpoint, the ideal response offered by his wife consists in her repetition of his own initial judgment of himself as criminally guilty, just as her reading of his letter and notebooks should purely repeat the intended meaning he originally invests in them. We now better understand why the wife, in her return letter to the protagonist, specifically associates his “confession” with the figure of Ouroboros. In his narcissism, the protagonist is capable merely of conceiving of time as a circle, in which identity continually repeats itself without ever being threatened by the interruption or incursion of difference. As the protagonist writes, his confession is intended to encompass “everything, without remainder.” Such remainderless writing, however, is only possible by excluding the alterity (its own alterity) that it nevertheless opens up in its status as inscription. Indeed, this is why Abe implicitly contrasts, in parallel structure, the protagonist’s letter with the letter from the wife.32 This latter exposes the impossibility of such remainderlessness in its very form: at the end of the missive, the protagonist informs us, appear “two and a half lines of erasures, obliterated to the point of illegibility.”33 Because of these erasures, the operation of sense can never entirely succeed in mastering the text. An excess “something” escapes that conceptuality is unable to seize as its own, and in this sense Abe adroitly mirrors the flight from meaning of the wife’s textual erasures with her own physical escape from the protagonist. In so saying, however, one must resist the temptation to simply oppose conceptual mastery as figured by the protagonist with the remainder or excess of sense as represented by the wife. This would be, finally, to yield to the logic of oppositionality at the very moment one seeks to

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resist it, to say nothing of the problematic status of figuration itself. The protagonist cannot be posed against his wife because, above all, the text of the protagonist is radically unequal to itself; despite his forceful desire for textual unity and coherence, his own writing betrays him—and does so, ironically, when what is in question is the very thematization of writing itself. In for example the following passage, the protagonist seems to explicitly recognize the threat that writing poses to subjective identity: “I am saying that you must not make fun of writing. For writing does not simply consist in replacing facts with arrangements of letters; it is itself a kind of adventure travel. I am not like a mailman merely walking around [mawariaruku] on a set route. There is danger, and discovery, and fulfillment.”34 Here Abe once again expresses the closure of interiority through the form of the circle. Despite the protagonist’s various attempts to manipulate the scene of reading in such a way as to produce nothing more than a confirmation of the original intention of writing, he nevertheless is forced to confront writing’s essential contingency. As inscription, writing institutes its own history: it sends itself beyond itself in the form of future inscriptions that attempt to in some sense account for this origin, which of course represents its own past. This is precisely the responsibility of writing, by which is meant the possibility of responding to the past. Nevertheless, given that the repetition that is the re-sponse necessarily takes place at another moment in time and space, it cannot but fail to fully do justice to that initial inscription. For this reason, the responsibility of writing names both the possibility and impossibility of the return. Put more concretely, given that this possibility and impossibility are radically asymmetrical to one another: the essential impossibility of the response is what allows for something like a response to take place at all. Now the protagonist, in acknowledging what he calls the “adventure” of writing, its intrinsic qualities of “danger” and “discovery,” both recognizes and disavows the fact that writing imperils his project. At one and the same time, he conceives of writing as essentially circular (in which origin and destination coincide in the identity repeated in reading) and infinite or open-ended (in which the return is never achieved, the circle constantly forced open in the exposure to difference). We can see this most clearly in the protagonist’s heightened sensitivity to the



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movement of time. Let us cite several passages from his opening letter to his wife: “now you are beginning to read the letter”; “I want so desperately for you to pass safely through this instant and make a step toward me”; “Well then, let us for the moment here trace back my time. Perhaps it was some time during the morning, about three days ago from your now [emphasis in the original]”; “In short, it would be perfect if, within three days, I could finish my preparations for meeting you and run the story right on after this letter. But three days could scarcely be considered enough. For, as you can see, the statement is a record stretching over a whole year and filling three notebooks the size of folios. It will be a big job to finish up a notebook a day to my satisfaction—rewriting, erasing, and revising . . . I was again made aware of the absolute insufficiency of time”; “It is more important that you should continue reading the letter—my time quite overlaps with your present—and then go on reading the notebooks . . . without giving up . . . to the last page, when I will catch up with your time.”35 In these passages the protagonist displays a certain awareness of the essential relation between writing and time. The differential movement of time renders writing both possible and impossible: possible, for without time reading would represent nothing more than a repetition of writing, but this pure reduction of reading to writing would ultimately imply the disappearance of writing itself insofar as it requires the act of reading to be recognized as such; and impossible, since time invariably jeopardizes this as-suchness of writing, ensuring that all inscriptions are contaminated from the very moment of their institution. In the act of writing, the protagonist focuses on the difference of the “now” (ima) or “present” (genzai) that constitutes the time of the wife’s reading. However, this difference does not simply separate the protagonist’s now (the time of writing) from the later now of his wife (the time of reading). As we saw earlier, Abe sharply understood the importance of the dialectical insight that a border separates things at the same time that it puts them in relation. That is to say, the now of the protagonist’s writing inclines itself toward all future nows of reading, because of which it can never be entirely equal or present to itself. So too the now of the wife’s reading, which remains essentially directed toward (in other words, structurally open to) the past site of writing. This imbrication (or contamination) of the future within the present—writing oriented toward reading—and

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past within the present—reading turned toward writing—is what allows for the very navigation of time that is the reading of writing.36 Nevertheless, this notion of ecstatic temporality ultimately eludes the protagonist, who reveals himself to be entirely unable to cope with its consequences. This is not due to any intellectual shortcoming, however. On the contrary, what is at stake here is above all a question of attitude. The protagonist, quite simply, desires in his narcissism to negate the difference of time in an act of appropriation. Abe hints at this through his language: “Well then, let us for the moment here trace back my time [boku no jikan],” as he writes. And again, several lines later: “my time [boku no jikan] quite overlaps with your present.” This attitude is consistent with the protagonist’s frequent reminders to his wife that he occupies the position of both writer and reader of his text. As she reads through the letter and notebooks in her initial acquiescence of the subject position of reader, the protagonist does not fail to point out that these texts have already been read by himself. Here the temporal priority of the protagonist’s reading serves to reinforce the notion of propriety implicit in the belief, or myth, that writers are inherently the most capable of grasping the meaning of their own texts. Such belief is in fact grounded in the traditional determination of the subject as substratum, uniquely capable of subsuming the difference of its experience in time and space within the unity of itself. In the context of writing, the authorial subject is regarded as knowing the truth of his text, for it was he who originally animated this text with meaning. Reading is in this way determined purely as a recovery of meaning: the reader must in his return to the past site of writing negate those traces of difference (time, all other supervening inscriptions) in order to reanimate that which was only provisionally lost. The protagonist is thus master of his writing because he has gained mastery over time, which is to say that no real difference exists between “my text” and “my time.”37 According to this logic, the writer’s addressing of his text to another reader must be understood as merely contingent and incidental, given that the text’s essential addressee can never be other than the writer himself. Nonetheless, the limits of this logic of writing are underscored by the protagonist himself. If, as Abe declares elsewhere, “language in the case of man represents the axis that links together inside and



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outside,”38 then it must be said that this outside constitutes the general space within which the inside is inscribed as a kind of regional effect. Part of the reason for this is that, in the context of Tanin no kao, the protagonist’s text continually seems to elude his control, acting contrary to the logic that he wishes to formulate. Despite his claim to his wife that writing is an “adventure,” that in accepting its risks he is “not like a mailman merely walking around on a set route,” the protagonist will immediately pull back from the tremendous consequences of this insight and attempt to put writing back in its place. As he states in the notebooks, for example: “How painful it is to write about it. Insofar as the expression is not some hidden door [made to] avoid people’s eyes, it is like a front door, consciously built and decorated for the eyes of visitors [ gairaisha: lit. “those who come from the outside”]. Or like a letter, it apparently cannot exist without an addressee insofar as it is not some advertising handbill that is sent out indiscriminately [aite kamawazu].”39 Here, significantly, the metaphor of the post is used by the protagonist in a way that appears to contradict his earlier reference to the mailman walking a circular route. In both passages, a local or circumscribed region is posed against a more general, contingent space: the mailman’s route, secure in its routine and insularity, is contrasted with the potentially hazardous journey that is writing, just as the letter sent to its particular addressee is opposed to the mass advertisement that can potentially arrive anywhere and be received by anyone. Whereas the earlier example is intended to illustrate the excessive closure of this delimited space, however, the protagonist seems to apply the opposite value judgment to the later example. From his standpoint, an addressed letter is regarded as the normal and positive state of affairs; the specific designation of the addressee in principle ensures that what departs from the origin will arrive at its intended destination. In this respect, it is no accident that the protagonist, in his comparison of the sending of a letter with the door of a house, indirectly associates this former with the qualities of consciousness (ishiki), visibility, and presence. The specific form of sending privileged here is one that resembles a front door, “consciously built and decorated for the eyes of visitors.” In this anticipation of the gaze of another, we clearly return here to the model of transference that the protagonist conceives, time and

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again, as the only proper form of communication between individuals. The propriety of any act of sending (as gaze, as writing) consists in the identity constituted at the moment of its reception. Because this process is determined according to the various values of presence—here, consciousness rather than the unconscious, revealing (the front door) as opposed to concealing (the hidden door), visuality rather than textuality, determinacy (the designated addressee) over indeterminacy (the open possibility of any recipient), calculation rather than contingency, and particular identity as opposed to general anonymity—the difference inscribed within identity, which incessantly works to expose the derivativeness of its borders, comes to be disavowed. As Abe realized, however, what is disavowed and excluded comes eventually to return in a kind of haunting.40 Indeed, we can see this already in the above passage with the protagonist’s ambiguous use of the word kagiri, “insofar as.” This word designates a border, thus both separating and putting in relation what initially appear to be two distinct entities or spaces. To write that a letter “apparently cannot exist without an addressee insofar as it is not some advertising handbill that is sent out indiscriminately” is tantamount to acknowledging, however implicitly or reluctantly, that other forms of sending are possible, but they must be placed outside of consideration because they are deemed undesirable. Their undesirability consists in the threat that they pose to those desired and more limited forms, which are invariably naturalized and granted the status of normativity. Hence a mass mailing must be demonized because it foregrounds the possibility that the letter sent to its intended addressee might not ever arrive or might possibly be received by someone to whom it is not intended. This possibility haunts as a ghost all sendings, which explains why, as we have already argued, the protagonist must respond to this threat with various fantasies of violence. The logic is exactly the same: the possibility that the destination will somehow differ or fail to coincide with the origin (i.e., the originating intention at the site of sending) is perceived as endangering the workings of identity. As with the mass mailing, so too with the hidden door, which, designed to “avoid people’s eyes,” explicitly calls attention to the manner in which transferential intersubjectivity essentially depends on the presence of the gaze as the mediation through which subjective identity is constituted. Here the possibility,



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which must be disavowed as soon as it is recognized—the term kagiri capably provides this double function—is that the other will not look at me, that he or she will refuse the transference by declining to return (to its proper origin) my gaze (sent out to a specific destination). One of the great ironies of Tanin no kao is that the protagonist seeks to use writing as an instrument through which to both reinvigorate the deteriorated social bonds with others (the desire for community) and document his own thoughts and feelings so as to confirm, in the wake of the severe facial injury he has suffered, his sense of personal identity (the desire for subjectivity). Yet the fulfillment of these desires depends entirely on the success of his attempt to domesticate writing. This explains why the protagonist is at times forced to interrupt the flow of his narrative to inquire about the possibility of determining writing purely as a tool or medium through which to convey meaning. Hence the following passage: “No. No matter in how much detail I tell such a story, it is all quite hopeless. There is no need to tell it, and first of all it is impossible [dai ichi fukanō da]. It might turn into something funny, if somehow or other I could apply a text-like coherence [or “logical connection,” myakuraku] to the wild fancies; but they were like scribblings [rakugaki] on a blackboard, randomly mixed up, with no regard to time or sequence, writing and erasing, erasing and writing. . . . I would like to extract only two or three fragmentary scenes, restricting these to the extent necessary [hitsuyō na hani ni todomete] for you to understand the impact that these thoughts had on me.”41 In order for writing to yield to the desires of the protagonist, it must be determined strictly as meaning or signification. That is to say, the protagonist, in his role as the sovereign giver of sense, must be seen as capable of animating through his intentional acts material inscriptions, thereby raising them above the level of materiality in their transformed status as linguistic vehicles available to other consciousnesses. Once material inscriptions are spiritually invested with meaning, they are in principle able to transcend the immediate empirical circumstances of their origin and signify in other times and spaces. The protagonist, indeed, at one point seems to wonder in astonishment at this transcendent power of signification: “My doctoral dissertation, which was on rheology, was properly communicated to and understood by people who had never even seen my face.”42 Such “communication” (dentatsu)

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and “understanding” (rikai) are at all possible, however, strictly b ­ ecause of a certain forgetting of the relation between man and the world in its aspects of time and materiality. Only because man has been determined as sense-giving subject and the world as essentially receptive or vulnerable to the operation of sense can time and materiality be so lightly dismissed, seen merely as enabling conditions for the historical unfolding of this operation. By repeatedly focusing on the theme of writing, its inherent possibilities and limits, Abe wishes to inquire into the violence of this determination and ask whether the relation between man and world cannot be conceived otherwise. It is from this perspective that we should read the protagonist’s conclusion of his attempt to make language say what he means: “first of all it is impossible.” This impossibility is not simply due to the personal or individual failings of the subject. Rather, its origins lie at the more fundamental level of the relation between thought and language as revealed by the metaphor of writing. Here meaning is radically denaturalized; it is shown to involve the subject’s intervention and manipulation, in the form of logical ordering and organization, of material inscriptions (“scribblings”) that appear originally as “randomly mixed up, with no regard to time or sequence.” It is this materiality of writing, Abe suggests, that resists being completely sublated or spiritualized in the form of meaning.43 The subject’s active production of meaning must be taken into account; it can in no way be denied without falling into self-contradiction. Nevertheless, the point here is that in this transformation of matter into animated matter, the mark divides from itself in such a way that an excess comes to be created. The consequences of this excess or exteriority to meaning are enormous, for it prevents meaning from ever fully dominating language and linguistic inscription. As we have already seen, the reading of writing exposes a similar attempt by meaning to, as it were, conceal its traces in the ideal repetition of itself qua itself across time. Such identity can only be produced, however, as an effect of the more general difference that is at once its condition of possibility and impossibility. This impossibility can only be forgotten or disavowed in an act of violence. Yet such disavowal gives way to something like a return of the repressed; it continues to haunt language, as we can see clearly in the protagonist’s remarks, through which this impossibility insistently announces itself.



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Because language in its materiality withdraws from meaning at the very moment it is raised to that level, because it ceaselessly traces out its difference in the temporal gap between writing and reading, it invariably produces a kind of disabled or exposed form of presence that is rife with a non-dialectical negativity, what the protagonist here calls “writing and erasing, erasing and writing [egaite ha keshi, keshite ha egaki].” Difference as the ultimate condition of impossibility of identity in the form of linguistic meaning nevertheless also renders such meaning possible. This relation between the impossible and possible is precisely the relation, examined earlier, between the general and the limited. It is here, Abe suggests, that the question of human agency must be posed. As we have seen, the protagonist, impelled by his desire for auto-affection—the subject communing with itself in the pure effacement of difference—makes certain decisions and establishes certain priorities in his conception of intersubjectivity, as achieved by the mechanism of the gaze as well as that of writing and reading. These decisions can be understood as a kind of cut or incision; they are a form of determination, at once theoretical (bearing upon knowledge) and practical (bearing upon action). The world is in some sense reshaped at such moments, and with it the protagonist himself. This cut of decision, in simultaneously determining the world and man in their inextricable relation, engenders a series of exclusions. Thus, in the previous example of the notion of sending, which was determined by the protagonist on the basis of presence, such values as consciousness, visuality, and revealing came to be privileged over those of the unconscious, textuality, and concealment. These latter values, in their devaluation, did not simply disappear, however; rather they came back to haunt the protagonist within the interiority of his own language. The cut of determination must be understood as an act of violence in producing exclusions (i.e., those elements that are displaced from the singular determination). However, this is in no way to suggest that the protagonist—and human beings in general—can be denounced for his acts of determination, given that there is no other way to exist as, to cite Abe citing Heidegger, “being-in-the-world.”44 Tanin no kao, as a work dominated either completely or nearly completely by the texts of the protagonist, appears to represent a world of the protagonist’s own making, and surely this is the foremost desire behind his

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writing. But the fact is that this world depends upon the time and materiality of the actual world, which the protagonist discovers is already inscribed, already determined. Man’s writing, the protagonist realizes, can only take place as a necessarily belated response to the world’s writing, i.e., the differential articulation of natural and social reality. As part of the world, one’s writing or determinations help reshape that reality that preexists one, but that nevertheless remains open and susceptible to constant reinscription. At the instant of reinscription— the participatory writing of the world that, by virtue of its belatedness, can only take the responsive form of rewriting—the virtual possibility of the response taking any form must be negated in the form it actually takes in its singularity and concreteness. As the protagonist reminds us, this singular determination or rewriting of the world can never exist outside of subjective desire. Despite recognizing the materiality of his thoughts as “scribblings” that exist prior to meaning, thus rendering the operation of sense “first of all . . . impossible,” he nevertheless wants his wife to understand his meaning: “I would like to extract only two or three fragmentary scenes, restricting these to the extent necessary for you to understand the impact that these thoughts had on me.” Against the general space of impossibility, the protagonist attempts to create a delimited region of possibility by means of a “restricting” that takes place through “extraction.” As Abe repeatedly illustrates, this restricting of generality engenders exclusions that will return to haunt the protagonist’s discourse in the form of inconsistencies or contradictions. Yet the protagonist, driven by the force of his desire, either neglects these contradictions or, to the degree that he does recognize them, merely rationalizes these in the form of further contradictions. If man in his being is ceaselessly involved, whether he wishes to be or not, in the process of the world’s reshaping, then subjective desire helps blind man to this general process by causing him to focus only on those aspects to which he restricts himself. In this way, Abe implies, a certain kind of fundamental dialogue with the world comes to be lost. Abe calls attention to this danger of subjective desire in man’s relation to the world because it paradoxically provokes a forgetting or disavowal of the manner in which man actively participates in the world’s reshaping. This can be seen especially clearly in the case of



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social institutions. In order to denaturalize institutions, one must understand them as a form of writing: an instituting mark, originally made in all contingency, comes over time to be re-marked in such a way as to lose that contingency or artificiality and appear natural. Precisely as we have discovered in our examination of the relation between writing and reading, the repetition of institutions establishes a link between past, present, and future. Institutions appear in the present as the same entities that existed in the past. In order to achieve this effect, the history of its differential markings must be concealed or reduced to nothing more than an attribute of itself. These two things amount to the same thing, in fact, since the revealing that takes place in the determination of these marks purely in the form of a self-­attribute functions to conceal the manner in which they radically disturb the unity of that self. In the present, however, at the instant of our own relations with these institutions, it is always possible to remark that institutional history otherwise. This can be done, first of all, by recognizing that the reduction of such differential markings in the form of a self-attribute is a supremely ideological operation. Here the concept of self-attribute is very close to the protagonist’s earlier use of the term kagiri: difference is recognized in exactly the same gesture in which it is disavowed. Just as the protagonist sought to foreclose the possibility of future reading given the threat that it poses to the identity of his past writing, so too do social institutions seek to present themselves as the same entity over time. As Abe understood, however, this act of presentation cannot be achieved unilaterally. At every instant, these institutions require a kind of reading or confirmative reinscription of themselves as that same entity, without which they could no longer exist as such. This instant of reinscription is equally theoretical and practical, for in the active reshaping of the world that is at stake here knowledge reveals itself to be necessarily an act of knowledge. By drawing attention in Tanin no kao to the various ways identity seeks external confirmation, remarking difference at the same time that it reduces it to nothing more than an instance of the self, Abe both highlights the protagonist’s narcissism and points the way to an experience of the world as an irreducible opening to alterity. In order for the relation between man and world to maintain itself as a relation, one that resists all attempts

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at subjective appropriation, the differential markings opened up by the world in its materiality and temporality must not be disavowed but rather continually remarked. T H E M IN O R IT Y AS ST R U C T URE OF S O C I A L F O R MAT I O N S

If Abe’s nuanced critique of the trap of narcissism is essential for understanding Tanin no kao, then it must be noted that his ambitions for the novel do not end there. Abe also aims to expose the violence of modern social formations in their incessant need to create minorities as a means to constitute and maintain communal identity. The minority must be created, Abe suggests, because they do not exist naturally. This active creation of the minority takes place in one and the same gesture by which these social formations attempt to create themselves. This is achieved through a process of self-representation: in modernity, individual social formations identify themselves in their difference from others through the production of an ideal image that is used to actively shape social existence so that it gradually comes to conform to that image. No representational theory of meaning is able to account for this process given that this image of the communal or collective self is not grounded in any preexisting reality; on the contrary, that reality comes to be ideologically produced through the work of this image. What is excluded from this image is, precisely, the minority. Such structural understanding of the minority is necessary in order to avoid the trap of conceiving of this notion on the basis of content derived from such unexamined “empirical” categories as, for example, race and ethnicity. As part of social reality, the categories of race and ethnicity must be understood above all as discursive products that are constituted historically. Social formations attempt to legitimate their existence by naturalizing these categories, concealing their discursive and historical character so that they come to be seen as requisite elements of the particular formation’s own self-image. We can see this clearly in the two examples of the nation-state Abe refers to in the novel: contemporary Japan, which represents itself as ethnically Japanese, and the contemporary United States, which represents itself as racially white. These examples are of course not chosen randomly by Abe, who is explicitly calling attention to a certain history they share, one that is marked by



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violence. In order to foreground the violent and exclusionary nature of these national self-representations in their appeal to such putatively empirical categories as ethnicity and race, Abe introduces scenes that focus specifically on Korean residents of Japan and blacks in the United States. Before analyzing these scenes, however, let us note that the protagonist in his considerable complexity functions not only to illustrate the dangers of narcissism in man’s relation with the world; he also acts as a device through which Abe attempts to shed light on the violence of the social in its simultaneous production and exclusion of minorities. In this regard, the faceless protagonist must be seen as one of several figures that are overtly marked as minority in the novel. In addition to the Korean residents and black Americans, other minorities include the mentally retarded daughter of the superintendent of the apartment building where the protagonist rents lodgings, the tattooed yakuza, or gangster, whom the protagonist encounters in the public bath, and finally the young woman who has been facially disfigured with keloid scars suffered as a result of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In these various examples, Abe indicates that minoritarian traits appear in widely different forms whose sole commonality consists in their negative determination by society. These traits are visibly marked—the atomic bomb survivor’s face is partially ravaged by scars, similar to the scars borne by the protagonist, the yakuza’s upper body is elaborately tattooed, while the superintendent’s daughter, as the protagonist immediately observes, bears the traits of her mental retardation in her pronounced facial features—and then discursively remarked as minoritarian. In a profoundly normativizing gesture, this discursive remarking transforms these traits into signs of a certain lack or deficiency (respectively, one of physical beauty, civic consciousness, and intelligence) so as to more effectively bring into relief the social coding of ethnicity and race. Here the discursive remarking of marks appears more difficult given that they are not always immediately visible. Abe appears to signal this difficulty in describing how Korean residents in Japan are nevertheless perceived as possessing distinct facial features while blacks in the United States are seen as recognizable on the basis of their skin color.45 In these latter two cases, lack comes to be defined as deviation from the normative standards (ethnically Japanese, racially white) as established in these nations’ self-representations.

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The social ideology of lack, Abe emphasizes, brings about a sense of shame or guilt on the part of those who are marked as members of the minority. The protagonist frequently gives voice to these feelings: “I was so ashamed I writhed in anguish, still I did not rightly grasp what I had to be ashamed about”; “What’s more, I hated the streets. In all the diffident, casual glances there were hidden needles bearing a corrosive poison, though those who had never been targets could not be expected to understand. The streets quite exhausted me. I felt like an oily dustcloth, spotted with shame. . . . Anyway I’d like you, however inadequately, to imagine my wretchedness at making people around me uncomfortable just by my existence, like some stray mongrel”; “I wonder what the true nature of this sense of shame is”; “Yet why in heaven’s name was I so frightened? I had not been accused by anyone, yet I shrank back with almost a guilty conscience, as if I were a criminal”; “Walking the streets with a face like this was like a burden, as if I were doing something bad”; “And the instant I involuntarily averted my face from the brilliance of the morning light spilling over the window ledge, piercing to the core of my head, shame suddenly overcame me. . . . Yet, it was not I who should feel ashamed. If there was anyone who should suffer, was it not rather the world that had buried me alive, that made no attempt to recognize a man’s personality without the passport of the face?”; “Just thinking of what happened before this was apparently enough to make the worms of shame come wriggling out of all the pores of my body. If I am ashamed to reread this, how much more ashamed I am to imagine you reading it”; “From now on it would serve no purpose to hold back out of shame. Basically, the mask itself was the crystallization of shame.”46 He who has been minoritized feels himself to be a “criminal”; his crime is that of deviating from the normative standards as established by the particular social formation in which he lives. However, the protagonist repeatedly questions why he should feel such shame, as he seems unsure as to precisely what crime he has committed. He knows by the gaze of others that he is guilty of something, but there is confusion surrounding the cause and temporality of this guilt. This ­confusion derives, in part, from the narrow representational logic governing the relation between crime and guilt. Typically, the criminal act is seen as producing a sense of shame or guilt in the individual through



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the mediation of society’s condemnation. Such condemnation requires no external form, moreover, since it is possible that the individual will feel this guilt purely as a result of his internalization of society’s values and norms. Abe’s dissatisfaction with this causal account of shame or guilt stems from his belief that society’s role in this process of minoritization is far more insidious than it might appear. Society does not simply act as the mediation between the crime and the criminal’s recognition of this crime qua crime in the form of the individual guilt or shame suffered as a result of pubic denunciation. On the contrary, Abe suggests, society functions as the hidden cause of this shame, thereby creating as effect the individual’s subjective conviction that the guilt he experiences must be grounded in an objective criminal act that he has committed, but of which he possesses no knowledge or memory. The individual, ashamed and guilt-ridden in the present, thus projects into the past an imaginary criminal act for which he feels responsible. “I was so ashamed I writhed in anguish,” the protagonist confesses. “Still I did not rightly grasp what I had to be ashamed about.” For Abe, the process of minoritization cannot be understood without this operation of inversion, through which the individual is made to feel subjectively ashamed or guilty for an act of wrongdoing that in fact never took place. By positioning themselves strictly at the level of mediation rather than cause, such as to endow their normative judgments with an empirical or objective basis (i.e., the crime for which you feel guilty actually took place), social formations effectively legitimate their existence. This explains why, from Abe’s perspective, the protagonist must seek to understand the problematic of the face on the basis of race. Let us cite several passages in which the protagonist articulates this connection: “Why did one have to put up a hue and cry about anything so trifling as the skin on one’s face, which, after all, was only a small part of the human vessel? Such prejudice and set ideas, of course, are not especially strange. For example . . . racial prejudice”; “I am more concerned that such easy dependence on the habit of faces will lead to a narrowing and reduction of exchanges between people. Actually, a good example is the stupid prejudice about the color of skin. To entrust the grand task of the soul’s roadway to an imperfect face, in which the mere difference between black, white or yellow could bring things to a halt, is describable only as an attitude which disregards the

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soul”; “If it were possible, I should like to generalize it [i.e., the problem of ethnicity] as much as I could. To expand it to every single face in the world. Only, with a mug like mine the more I talk about it the more it becomes a prisoner’s lament”; “If one supposes that for oneself one is the same person and that for others one is a different person, half of me is different. Even we yellow-skinned men were not originally a yellow race. We were first called yellow by a race of men whose skin was of a different color”; “If men from the very beginning had not had faces, the problem of racial difference would never have arisen, whether one were Japanese, Korean, Russian, Italian, or Polynesian. But still, why did this so magnanimous young man make such a distinction between me who had no face and Koreans who had a different kind of face?”47 Abe is speaking here alternatively of race ( jinshu) and ethnicity (minzoku), but appears to make no rigorous distinction between them. This failure to differentiate these terms is not due to any individual carelessness on Abe’s part, however; rather, the terms themselves are in the instance of discourse constantly conflated with one another, given the impossibility of fixing any objective referent to them. To insist on the autonomy or purity of these terms is tantamount to endowing them with a neutral scientific status that they have never in fact possessed. The discourse of race and ethnicity was created in the modern era as an attempt to organize social relations on a hierarchical basis. As a result, the criteria for identifying individuals based on these categories vary widely, depending upon nothing more solid than the state of social relations at a given time and place. Here it is important to grasp what Etienne Balibar refers to as “the necessary polymorphism of racism, its overarching function, its connections with the whole set of practices of social normalization and exclusion.”48 By removing these discursive categories from what appear to be their immediate empirical referents (blacks, whites, the yellow race, Koreans, Japanese, etc.), we are better able to appreciate the manner in which their essential plasticity has been used across a broad spectrum of social relations, thereby in effect “racializing” and “ethnicizing” other discourses with which they are otherwise entirely unrelated. As the protagonist indicates, the categories of race and ethnicity, by organizing individuals according to the concepts of identity and difference whose application is irreducibly contingent, “lead to a narrowing



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and reduction of exchanges between people.” (This line, let us note, repeats Abe’s critique of consciousness, already quoted, as the “law of restricted exchange” [seiyakuteki kōryūhō] between individuals.) Abe’s concern here is to examine how the violence of social relations is concealed by an appeal to categories that seem to be fixed in their objectivity. In modernity, man appears in the world as heir to these categories, which preexist him and form part of the larger social reality he is forced to navigate. This temporal precedence and general scale combine to place man in the position of passive recipient of this inheritance, which is nothing other than history itself. As historical, racial and ethnic categories inscribe themselves in the reality that man inherits; this reality in no way exists outside of man, however, but rather comes to mark him in his individual or subjective development. In this sense, man’s relation to history reveals itself to be a process in which past inscriptions, in the temporal trajectory that is their sending, come to be reconfirmed or remarked in the present. Here we can understand how the thematic of race and ethnicity as introduced by Abe is intimately tied to the relation between reading and writing, which, as we have demonstrated, constitutes one of the guiding threads of the novel. In his responsibility, man has no choice but to read the writing of the past that appears in the form of a historical legacy. Yet this presence of the past within both man and world is not simply received passively. At the instant of reception, the inherited inscriptions of race and ethnicity can always be read or remarked otherwise. If the history of these categories is constituted by their differential marks through time and space, then this means that they remain necessarily open to constant reinscription, that is to say, transformation. Abe’s protagonist realizes this point and seeks to actively intervene in the course of their unfolding. He does this, first of all, by remarking these categories as such. Not only do they engender a “stupid prejudice,” as he comments. Their historical and derivative—i.e., non-natural—status comes to be probed: “Even we yellow-skinned men were not originally a yellow race. We were first called yellow by a race of men whose skin was of a different color.” Now this observation is important but ultimately insufficient. The protagonist calls attention to the fact that racial classifications necessarily emerge in a context of relationality: one group seeking to distinguish itself from another appeals to the concepts

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of identity and difference through which identification of the other is required as a means to negatively establish one’s own identity. The “yellow race” is not yellow in and of itself, therefore. Only through opposing this race to such other races as “white,” “black,” and “brown,” etc. can it first come into its own. As the protagonist implies, such oppositional logic is not to be found at the immediate or empirical level of skin color but rather at the mediated level of language. It is strictly by being “called yellow” that the organizing concepts of identity and difference come into play in the discursive creation of races, producing in turn the larger notion of interracial. Following the logic of this sublation of the immediately physical by the mediation of language and discourse, however, it should in principle be impossible to speak originally of “a race of men whose skin was of a different color” without thereby falling into self-contradiction. In order for this group to coalesce in their identity and thus be recognized as collectively different from men of the “yellow race,” the oppositional logic that inhabits language must have already supervened. What can be seen here is a phenomenon that is in fact extremely widespread in racial and ethnic discourse, one that can be formulated in more conceptual terms as a remarking whose force is such as to retroactively create the original mark. Here let us recall Abe’s introduction of the three minoritarian characters in the novel—the superintendent’s mentally retarded daughter, the yakuza, and the atomic bomb survivor—whose determinative remarking as minority repeats an initial visible marking (respectively, pronounced facial features, a tattoo, and keloid scars). Such marking allows us to better understand society’s negative remarking of Korean residents of Japan and blacks in the United States on the basis of the categories of race and ethnicity precisely by the retroactive force of the remark. That is to say, racial and ethnic prejudice does not merely take place through a subjective determination of an already existing objective trait of race or ethnicity—in this case, blackness or Koreanness. Rather, in the absence of an initial mark, society’s minoritarian remarking comes to retroactively furnish the existence of such mark at the level of projective fantasy. This strange temporality of racial and ethnic discrimination typically manifests itself in the following sentiments: “Only a Korean could have done that!” or “Only a black person could have acted in that way!” Exactly as we saw earlier in the sense of



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shame or guilt that society induces the minority to internalize in his or her putative lack (the lack of Japaneseness in Japan, the lack of whiteness in the United States), society’s retroactive projection of an objective cause to explain a consequent effect functions to absolve it of all responsibility for the violence of its determinations. As Abe carefully shows in Tanin no kao, it is impossible to understand the social dynamic of minoritization in its racial and ethnic forms without reference to the nation-state. We can already glimpse this critique of the nation-state in his language, as for example his striking description of the human face as a passport (kao to iu pasupōto): “Yet, it was not I who should feel ashamed. If there was anyone who should suffer, was it not rather the world that had buried me alive, that made no attempt to recognize a man’s personality without the passport of the face?” For Abe, the protagonist’s facelessness underscores the multiple ways subjective identity comes to be constituted within social formations. The categories of race and ethnicity are significant matrices of this identity, but it is undeniable that nation-states determine these matrices in various ways, depending upon the history of its differential inscriptions. In terms of the racial and ethnic groups represented in the novel, for example, it is clear that Korean residents of Japan are perceived differently in Japan than they would be, for example, in Ghana, Peru, or Sweden, just as African Americans are regarded differently in the United States than they would be in these same countries. This is not to fall into the trap of national particularism, but simply to underline the importance of the various histories of nation-states when taking into account the multiple social determinations of the categories of race and ethnicity. Here it bears repeating that these categories can have no universal meaning outside of their particular spatiotemporal inscriptions. Abe points toward the presence of the nation-state with his description of the face as a passport, but the gesture in fact goes deeper than this. If, according to Abe, the face in modernity is invariably racialized and ethnicized, then these markings powerfully affect the constitution of membership within nation-states in terms of the dual aspects of population movements and the rights of citizenship. Again, we encounter here the significance of self-representation at the level of the nationstate. In order for Japan to maintain itself in its self-­representation as

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Japanese, the state must exercise strict control over the flow of population movements in addition to establishing criteria on the basis of which certain groups are granted and denied citizenship.49 Indeed, at one point in the novel Abe alludes to the Japanese government’s attempt to deal with the issue of the continued presence of Koreans within its domestic national space. As the protagonist recounts: “In the afternoon, there was a trivial incident. In a corner of the laboratory a group of four or five men had put their heads together, and as I casually approached, one of the younger men in the middle hastily tried to conceal something. When I questioned them, I found that it was really nothing to hide: it was a petition about what to do concerning the problem of Korean travel.”50 This phrase “the problem of Korean travel” (chōsenjin no tokō mondai) remains somewhat vague in the text (E. Dale Saunders, in his expert English translation, renders it more freely as “the problem of Korean immigration and emigration”), but it very much seems that Abe is referring here to the repatriation project (kikan jigyō) as initiated in 1959 by the governments of Japan and North Korea together with the International Red Cross.51 This project offered a politically expedient way for Japan to finally expel the 600,000 Koreans who were then still living in the country, most of whom had forcibly been brought there following Korea’s annexation in 1910. These Koreans, constant reminders of Japan’s imperialist history, suffered various forms of exclusion and discrimination in postwar Japanese society, which, with the support of the United States, sought to portray itself strictly in terms of its break with the wartime past. Japan’s abrupt transition in 1945 from imperial hegemon to nation-state produced a severe displacement of populations that the Korean repatriation project was designed to address. Under the ideological guise of helping Koreans “return” to their native homeland, the Japanese government implemented a policy that was in fact directed toward the goal of “ethnic cleansing,” as forcefully described by the sociologist John Lie, which “accorded with the prevailing nationalist mind-set: population transfer to achieve ethnonational isomorphism.”52 What is significant in this example of the Korean residents of Japan is that Abe is referring in a work of fiction to an actual historical event so as to illustrate the violence of the nation-state in its treatment of mi-



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norities. This focus on national violence allows Abe to adroitly shift the target of his attack from Japan in its discrimination against resident Koreans to the United States in its discrimination against blacks. Actual historical events are again referred to so as to drive home the point. “For distraction I turned on the television set,” the protagonist narrates toward the end of the novel. “As luck would have it, it was just the time for the foreign news, and a report was in progress on the Negro riots in America. Having talked about the wretched black people in torn shirts who were being marched away by white police officers, the announcer continued matter of factly:—The racial disturbances in New York are a cause for concern at the beginning of this long, black summer. They have materialized just as predicted by competent sources. Harlem streets are overflowing with more than five hundred helmeted police, Negro and white. One is reminded of the summer of 1943. In some churches, opposition meetings are being held along with Sunday services. The contempt and mistrust that exist between police and colored citizens . . .” The protagonist’s reaction is immediate: “The words gave me an intolerable feeling of pain and depression, as if a sharp fishbone had thrust itself between my teeth. Of course, I had almost nothing in common with the Negroes, except for being an object of prejudice. The Negroes were comrades bound in the same cause, but I was quite alone. Even though the Negro question might be a grave social problem, my own case could never go beyond the limits of the personal. However, what gave me such a stifling feeling as I watched the riot scenes stemmed from an association of ideas whereby I saw thousands of men and women, like me without faces, gathering together. Could we, the faceless, arise resolutely against prejudice like the Negroes?”53 The protagonist provides no date for this present moment, but all indications are that the event he is watching unfold on television is the 1964 Harlem Riot. This riot was touched off by the killing of an African American teenager by a white off-duty policeman. Demonstrations were organized and protestors issued a series of demands, all of which were ignored by police and government officials. Hundreds of people were injured and arrested and property damage was extensive, resulting in the federal government’s intervention the following year in the form of a public assistance program designed to increase employment and hence prevent further disturbances. As Abe points out, this

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1964 Harlem Riot recalls a previous riot in Harlem in 1943 that began when a white policeman shot and injured an African American soldier who attempted to intervene in the policeman’s altercation with an African American woman whom he had physically struck while arresting. The resulting number of injuries and arrests were more or less similar to those in 1964, and tensions only ceased when New York Mayor ­LaGuardia, in a calculated political gesture, ordered food distributed to the residents of Harlem. The protagonist’s identification with blacks in the United States, significantly, is repeated nearly verbatim in his identification with Korean residents of Japan.54 We return here to the importance of identifying certain commonalities in the dynamics of the minoritization process so as to better understand the structural necessity on the part of the nation-state to actively create minorities. Both the Korean residents of Japan and blacks in the United States offer testimony to the historical violence of the nation-state. Both groups, in this case, were originally brought to these countries for the purpose of labor exploitation. Korean labor was necessary in the building of the Japanese Empire, just as, despite the widely different historical circumstances, the institution of slavery was essential in the nineteenth-century economic development of the United States. The social stigmatization suffered by these groups created a kind of tautological or self-generating perception on the part of the dominant strata of society (i.e., those who identified themselves as ethnically Japanese in Japan and racially white in the United States) that they were inherently superior and thus justified in maintaining existing forms of power. Once again, the grounding of this negative determination of Koreans and blacks on the putatively objective traits of biology or genetics—what we have tried to think under the general heading of the retroactive force of the remark—functioned to absolve society of any responsibility for its discriminatory practices, given the strength of its desire to posit itself derivatively at the level of mediation rather than as the actual cause of this discursive violence. Abe’s description of the face as a “passport” together with his historical references to Japan’s postwar Korean repatriation project and the black riots in the United States should alert us to his argument that the nation-state is fundamentally complicit in the perpetuation of minoritarian violence, which here takes the representative form of



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ethnic and racial discrimination. This complicity is not accidental but rather essential, that is to say, it is an intrinsic feature of the nation-state as such. The nation-state constitutes itself in modernity as a subject, which means, among other things, that its various parts must exist in a kind of sacrificial relation to the totality. This conception of the nation is elaborated by the protagonist as follows: “Perfect anonymity involves sacrificing one’s own name to the perfect group. Is this not an instinctive tendency on the part of an individual confronting his death rather than a trick of intelligence for the purpose of self-defense? Just as various groups—based on ethnicity, the nation, trade associations, class, race, and religion, etc.—first attempt to erect altars in the name of loyalty at the time of invasion by the enemy. The individual is always a fatal victim of death; for the perfect group, however, death is merely an attribute. The perfect group inherently has a character of victimizer. You will surely understand if I use the army as an example of a perfect group, and a soldier as an example of perfect anonymity. Considered in this light, there seemed to be some contradiction to my musings. Why should a court of law that cannot judge an army uniform as being equivalent to premeditated murder look so stringently on right-wing groups wearing identical masks? Does the nation consider the mask as an evil that goes against order? I wonder whether the nation itself is not an enormous mask that merely rejects any internal overlapping of different masks.”55 This is a rather dense passage, but it appears that Abe is attempting to think a certain logic of the nation-state according to the traditional relation between part and whole. It is from this whole-part relation that the concepts of sacrifice and death emerge, the latter under­stood beyond the strictly biological sense of death to include the broader meaning of a submersion of individuality within the totality. In group formation, the individual (part) must accept his status as “victim” (­higaisha) in relation to the totality that is the group itself, which in its activity of comprehension or absorption can never be other than “victimizer” (kagaisha). Let us emphasize that Abe is alluding here in the first instance to a form of violence that preexists any concrete phenomenolization of the group, which he, however, also identifies in his reference to the military. The ideal group, as he writes, is “inherently” (or “essentially,” “intrinsically,” “originally”: honraiteki ni) a v ­ ictimizer.

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This is a formal or logical relation, one that openly displays its character of appropriative violence. The soldier’s sacrifice of his individuality— what Abe calls here his “name,” the loss of which results in “perfect anonymity” (kanpeki na tokumeisei)—for and within the totality that is the army thus represents a concrete instantiation of the violence that by right already exists in any group qua group. The possible event of the soldier’s physical death on the battlefield represents an additional level of violence in this relation, but one that must be recognized as purely contingent. The soldier always may or may not die, which means that this level of contingent violence exists derivatively to both the formal or logical violence of the whole-part relation and the empirical instantiation of this relation in the form of the soldier’s sacrificial belonging to the army.56 Abe’s concern here is to shed light on the violence inherent in the affiliative relation between individual and totality. This explains why he refers in this passage to various types of groups, as linked together by such diverse elements as “ethnicity, the nation, trade associations, class, race, and religion.” All of these groups, insofar as they are governed by the whole-part relation, mobilize individual participation not for the benefit of individual members themselves, but for the good of the group in its totality—or rather, these groups ideally seek to overcome this contradiction between individual and collective good in such a way that individual members eventually cease to make any distinction between them. This point, as Abe realized, depends fundamentally on the operation of ideology. Ideology in this context typically takes the form of loyalty, as we analyzed earlier. Abe doesn’t fail to return to this concept in his remark that groups “attempt to erect altars in the name of loyalty at the time of invasion by the enemy.” Here one must pause at this reference to “the enemy,” for it is certainly not the case that enemies exist only objectively. Indeed, a vague sense that group unity has for some reason or another deteriorated is in and of itself sufficient cause to produce enemies, or at least create a collective sense of alarm among constituent members that the totality to which they belong is now under threat and so must be defended. What is important is that “the all-purpose adhesive required for solidarity” that is loyalty comes to be applied, and this application is necessarily violent. The otherwise strictly formal or logical whole-part relation is enacted in such a way



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that individuals are now judged according to their willingness or ability to reduce their existence to the status of integral parts in the service of the larger collectivity. Abe’s protagonist provides a glimpse of the manner in which minorities come to be affected by this violence. Painfully conscious of the fact that his facelessness marks him as different from others in society, he reflects, “Furthermore, although the people walking along the streets were others [tanin] to each other, they formed a tight chain, like some organic composition [yūki kagōbutsu], and there was no gap whatsoever for me to squeeze in. Was it possible that the mere possession of officially sanctioned [kenteizumi no] faces could form such a strong ligament among them?”57 This unusual description of faces as “officially sanctioned,” in for example the manner of school textbooks that have received official approval (kenteizumi kyōkasho), hints at the presence of the state in much the same way as Abe’s previous comparison of faces with passports. The underlying presence of the state in this context is entirely consistent with the logic of the whole-part relation that Abe aims to critique. Gesturing to classical conceptions of the totality, he depicts this whole from the perspective of his minoritarian protagonist as similar to an organic substance whose constituent parts are held together by “ligaments” ( jintai).58 The protagonist, lacking the official documents necessary for inclusion within this group, is physically barred entry on account of his difference. The irony of this exclusion is that those individuals who deny entry to the group are themselves “others to each other.” Abe is insistent on this point: no identity grounds communal existence; on the contrary, such identity— which is nothing other than the violent disavowal of this originary alterity among human beings—is constituted retroactively, where it takes the form of ideology for the purpose of legitimating or naturalizing existing relations of power. Totalities are violent in two mutually reinforcing ways: internally and externally. They must constantly work to maintain this division, keeping the inside in and the outside out (because, following the logic of subjectivity at issue here, the inside can never be sufficiently in, the outside never sufficiently out). Internally, as we have seen, social formations attempt to materially express or give physical form to an abstract relation that belongs properly to logic. In order for individuals to

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be determined (and to determine themselves) in their affiliation with larger collectivities, as for example that of the nation-state, relations between citizen and nation must be at least implicitly modeled on the relation between part and whole. The citizen shows his affiliation to the nation above all through loyalty, as Abe trenchantly demonstrates. ­Loyalty is articulated in various ways and through a broad range of institutions that mediate between the national body and individual member in a fundamentally dialectical relation of give and take. For Abe, the institution that most transparently exemplifies this ideology of national loyalty is the military—and this, no doubt, because the stakes are highest. Abe introduces the concepts of death and sacrifice to shed light on the very concrete dynamics involved in effectuating, or actualizing, the sublation of part into the whole, but nowhere is this sublation more violent than in the soldier’s belonging to the military. By carrying out his task as soldier in the offering up of his death as sacrifice to the state that has nurtured him and given him life, we are given to see with particular clarity the violence that informs all membership in the nation.59 Externally, the totality stakes out its difference from other totalities primarily through the mechanism of exclusion. Here again we find an attempt on the part of such totalities as the nation-state to effectuate at the level of concrete reality a relation that is purely formal. This relation, which corresponds to the whole-part relation that consolidates the interiority of totalities, is that between identity and difference, which are held to be strictly antithetical to each other. This determination effectively consolidates totalities in their mutual exteriority, for each in its self-identity must—this word designates both a logical necessity and sociohistoric prescriptive—exclude the difference of the other. Nonetheless, the desire to posit self-identity at the level of concrete reality cannot be achieved without recourse to the active process of identification, as we argued earlier. The self must be produced because it does not exist originally. As soon as the nation-state Japan comes to be determined as properly Japanese, then it becomes necessary to eliminate through a process of exclusion those elements that are regarded as foreign or non-Japanese. The minority lives in constant fear of this process, for its difference from the nation-state’s self-­representation in, for example, the aspects of race and ethnicity renders it potentially vulnerable to forced externalization in the form of annihilation



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or ­deportation.60 This explains Abe’s reference to the Japanese government’s attempt to repatriate Koreans, for Koreans, following the violent logic of affiliation and contradiction, by definition “belong” to Korea; their continued presence in Japan is seen to contradict the opposition between identity and difference as governs the organization of nationstates. Only through excluding Koreans, “returning” them to that particular outside that should in principle accept them as part of its own inside, can the normal state of affairs at the level of mutual national exteriority be restored. Invariably, the minority find themselves at the very border between the interiority and exteriority of the totality that is the nation-state. Here we begin to grasp that the violence directed against the minority takes not one but rather two general forms: exclusion and inclusion. If loyalty functions as the ideological mechanism that most clearly measures the individual’s (part’s) affiliative relation with the nationstate (whole), then it is hardly surprising that minorities are regularly suspected of disloyalty. Indeed, this word “disloyalty,” with its Latin prefix dis, meaning “apart” or “asunder,” names the communal dissonance and disparity that marks minority existence from the perspective of social formations. That is to say, even prior to any words or actions that might possibly be perceived as disloyal, the minority is considered to be disloyal as such. Its presence within the nation-state is suspected of contaminating, given its difference and exteriority, that which is fantastically projected to have originally been self-identical. Unlike those citizens whose identities are determined to be consonant with the nation-state in its self-representation, the minority’s status in the nation-state can never rise beyond the level of mere residence to attain that of authentic belonging. Whereas the latter relation is seen to be organic, a natural ordering of parts that serves the purpose of the whole, the former relation can only be superficial, temporary, and aberrational—something made possible strictly by the generosity of the state (and hence, implicitly, revocable), and for which minorities must be eternally grateful. In this sense, loyalty appears as a trait that, as it were, spontaneously emerges in individuals on the basis of their natural affiliation with the nation-state. To be Japanese, for example, means not only to belong to Japan but also, and as a direct consequence of this belong-

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ing, to be loyal to it. Minorities are suspected of disloyalty on account of this lack of affiliation: Korean residents of Japan might physically reside in Japan, but their “identity” as Korean may always lead to the suspicion among Japanese that they are in fact secretly loyal to Korea. The same can be said of the representation of blacks in the United States: the fact of their physical residence in the country is frequently perceived as distinct from the question of their natural affiliation and thus sense of loyalty to it. One example of such suspicion can be found during World War II, when the U.S. government feared that widespread domestic racial discrimination would lead to disloyalty among blacks together with rising sympathy for the enemy. As for instance John W. Dower reports, “Well into the war, [Secretary of War] Stimson and other top-level leaders remained convinced that the Japanese and Germans were conducting a ‘systematic campaign’ to stir up black demands for equality, and that ‘a good many’ black leaders were receiving payment through the Japanese ambassador in Mexico.”61 Here we can discern the essential plasticity of this notion of disloyalty. Not only might African Americans be suspected of harboring secret loyalties to certain African nations, for instance; insofar as they are categorized as non-white, fears immediately arise in the United States concerning possible links with other nation-states whose citizens are likewise determined to be non-white. In this way, loyalty to the nation-state reveals itself to be inextricably tied to the categories of race and ethnicity. Because minorities are feared to be not fully of the nation-state, they must be subjected to the violence of inclusion. As goes without saying, this violence takes place under the implicit threat of exclusion: from the perspective of the minority, failure to sufficiently assimilate and submerge oneself in the whole might potentially lead to expulsion from that whole. The self-representation of nation-states functions as an organizing principle for this process of assimilation. In order for minorities to overcome their negative social status, they must abandon those particularist features that mark them in their difference and embrace those putatively more “universal” traits that signify adherence to the norms of the nation-state. Assimilationist ideology typically transmits two conflicting messages to the minority: “Only by negating your difference can you achieve identity as authentically part of the nation” and “Because you can never sufficiently negate this differ-



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ence, your desire for national identification will always remain unfulfilled.” A ­teleological movement appears that departs from the point of particular difference and leads to universal identity. The minority, fearful of the threat of exclusion, must orient himself along this trajectory, yet eventually discovers that the mark of particular difference can never be erased to the extent that he is granted authentic national identity. This contradiction at the level of social relations engenders violence, as Abe sharply demonstrates in his example of the Harlem Riots. Here let us recall the protagonist’s reaction upon seeing these televised images: “However, what gave me such a stifling feeling as I watched the riot scenes stemmed from an association of ideas whereby I saw thousands of men and women, like me without faces, gathering together. Could we, the faceless, arise resolutely against prejudice like the N ­ egroes?” This violence of the riots, which emerges as a response to the nation-state’s own violence against minorities, appears to represent one possible consequence of the other instance of national violence against minorities raised in the novel, that of Japan’s Korean repatriation project. Despite the significant differences in context, Abe seems to be pointing to the manner in which the state violence of minoritization invariably produces a response of further violence. IN AU T H E N T IC IT Y AN D T H E T H RE AT O F U S U R PAT I O N

We have seen how totalities in the form of the nation-state enact a spatial type of minoritarian violence in their dual operation of exclusion and inclusion. These correspond to the active (re)creation of the totality, which requires in its closure the constant remarking of a border separating outside and inside. The complementary logics of contradiction (the determination of identity and difference as oppositional) and affiliation (the whole-part relation) work to reinforce the general system of totalities, with each individual totality posited as unified and selfidentical in its mutual exteriority with others. However, we must also be sensitive to the manner in which Abe discloses the violence of totalities at a temporal level. In contemporary society, as Abe’s protagonist points out, Koreans can be found in Japan just as blacks can be found in the United States. This apparent presence of difference within the borders of the selfsame indicates the massive failure of the totalization

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project. It is in order to account for this failure that a conceptual distinction comes to be introduced between concrete and abstract social relations. This distinction, significantly, hinges upon a shift in historical time. Let us cite several passages to this effect: “Insofar as others [tanin] are seen strictly at the level of abstract relations [chūshōteki na kankei], excessively distant and beyond imagination, they can only appear as enemies, in abstract opposition [to oneself]. . . . At any rate, in our contemporary age one can no longer easily distinguish between neighbor and enemy through a clearly defined border [kyōkaisen], as one could long ago.” And again: “When I later went out to drink sake, to which I was unaccustomed, I had such a feeling of closeness [shinkinkan] to others who were strangers to me that I wanted to embrace them all. . . . Of course, what I felt was not the familiarity that one feels for one’s neighbor; rather we together shared the extreme isolation of abstract relations in which everyone is an enemy.” Finally: “Contemporary society needs only abstract human relations, so that even faceless people like me can earn their wages with no interference. Neighbors, who naturally enjoy concrete human relations, are increasingly treated as expendable.”62 Here the opposition between concrete sociality and abstract sociality corresponds to the distinction between the “long ago” of the distant past (mukashi) and our own contemporary age (gendai). This is a very traditional distinction to which Abe is referring, one that typically finds expression in sociological and philosophical discourse in the concepts of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society).63 Whereas the former names a mode of social relations in which harmony putatively reigns on account of the fact that no cut has yet severed the relation between part and whole, the latter designates a context in which this sense of collective belonging has now yielded to the alienation of individual self-interest. For the protagonist of Tanin no kao, it is the disappearance of the “clearly defined border” between neighbor and enemy that has brought about a radical change in the way we conceive of others in their alterity. In the distant past of communal existence, others (those who are different from oneself) could be avoided given that contact was restricted to neighbors (those who are in some sense identical to oneself). The disappearance of this border in modernity is precisely the disappearance of community itself, for neighbors no longer exist who can shield one from the potentially threatening difference of ­others. In



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the expansion of difference and alterity from a limited economy to a general economy, modernity has seemed to implant a dangerous heterogeneity even within those who, on account of regional proximity alone, one might otherwise recognize as neighbors. This focus on the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft allows us to better understand the various ways Abe conceives of the figure of the mask. Modernity is represented in unequivocally post-lapsarian terms—a fall from an original good—precisely because people today are forced to wear masks in their relations with others. The emotional intimacy and sense of communicative transparency characteristic of the immediacy of communal belonging have now been replaced by the mediation of self-consciousness, such that individuals are forced to mask or conceal those aspects of themselves that were hitherto openly shared with neighbors. Abe’s figure of the mask incisively suggests that the transition from community to society must be understood on the basis of the opposition between what is revealed and what is concealed. Prior to the mask, nothing obstructed the free flow between individual and individual and individual and totality. In this regard, communal transparency signifies the absence of masks. With the onset of modernity, however, the mask comes to appear as a device used by each individual to safeguard—that is to say, create—that subjective interiority that previously had no existence. Once subjective interiority comes into being, once individuals are somehow rendered opaque to one another, then the natural sublation between part and whole suddenly finds itself disturbed. At this point, we might add, ideology in social formations must emerge as an attempt to restore, in a very calculated and artificial manner, the natural order that has suffered disruption. The essential problem with this narrative is that it represents nothing more than a retrospective fantasy, one that is moreover typically appealed to by the most conservative and repressive elements in society. To posit the presence of pure communality as having an actual historical existence in time is to greatly misunderstand the meaning of both time and materiality. The difference and alterity of others can, in principle and in fact, never be reduced to a limited economy that exists outside the border of the self, whether defined individually or collectively. Difference haunts communal existence from its very origin, which is to say that no abstract societal relations ever supervened upon

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relations that were purely immediate and concrete. In this fantastic ­supervening of difference upon identity, it is not difficult to see that the traits of immediacy and concreteness designate a moment of communal homogeneity that exists prior to the introduction (i.e., production) of ­minorities. A profound sense of emotional kinship and communicative transparency was possible in the relationship between neighbor and neighbor because commonality yet governed the community. Following this narrative, Japan’s historical emergence as a nation-state should by right always be traceable back before modernity to a pre-lapsarian era when members of the Japanese community still enjoyed relations of immediacy with one another. Here we better understand why Abe feels the need to explicitly refer in the novel to the postwar presence of Koreans in Japan as well as to the Japanese government’s attempt to forcibly deport them by means of the postwar repatriation project. For such deportation remains guided by the desire to return the Japanese self to itself, to overcome the violence wreaked upon the community by the intervention of difference, as symbolized by the figure of the foreign other. If, that is to say, the fall from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft in the case of Japan can be retrospectively attributed, at least in part, to the intervention of Koreans, then that violence can only begin to be reversed by their deportation. By eliminating difference from the interior and returning it to its proper place in an external interior (home to its original identity), the Japanese state aims to restore the immediate transparency between individual Japanese citizens as well as between these citizens and the totality that is the state itself. Abe reveals that the modern nation-state desires to understand itself primarily in terms of the putatively natural development that originates in the premodern proto- national community. In this sense, the nationstate fully appropriates the discursive opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft together with the deeply rooted sense of nostalgia that fixes this opposition in the first place. For Abe, the very presence of passports and national borders in modernity attests to this lingering desire for community. At the level of fantasy, the figure of the minority must emerge as that which unjustly prevents the national community from communing with itself. We have seen this structure before, in fact: in precisely the same manner that the impossibility of subjective transference is attributed to those who are arbitrarily assigned the role



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of transferential object, so too does the nation-state ascribe the impossibility of its self-communion to the minority. Both these acts owe their violence to a similar desire for self-presence. Both mistake the unfulfillment of this desire as due solely to contingent or accidental elements— an individual’s refusal of transferential relations on the one hand, the continued presence of minorities on the other—rather than as impossible for essential reasons. According to this fantasy, the disruption of what is represented as a normal or natural state of affairs (the self’s presence to itself, whether defined individually or collectively) can only be restored through the elimination of alterity. In this way, what is seen at the level of subjective fantasy to be the violence of the other vis-à-vis the self prepares the ground for the self’s acts of real violence directed against the other. In the context of the totality that is the nation-state, the threat of the minority must be met with violence because they represent the possibility of the disruption or destabilization of the two logics of affiliation and contradiction: they do not seem to be a sufficiently natural part within the whole-part relation nor, in their situation of internal difference, is it immediately clear that they are more closely aligned with the putatively internal identity of the nation-state than they are with its external difference. If the minority’s existence is tolerated within the nation-state, they must continually be remarked as inauthentic in comparison with those citizens whose possession of traits privileged by the nation-state in its self-representation distinguishes them as authentic. Significantly, this opposition between authenticity and inauthenticity appears throughout Tanin no kao, but it is important to understand its link to Abe’s critique of the nation-state and the process of minoritization that he so carefully traces out. Let us examine two instances when the protagonist explicitly introduces this distinction. The first is a memory from his childhood: “It concerned my elder sister’s wig. I don’t quite know how to put it, but I felt the wig to be unspeakably indecent and immoral. One time I sneaked it away and burned it up. My mother discovered this. She was strangely insistent. She questioned me, and although my action had been intended to do right, when it came to being examined I did not know what to answer and just stammered and blushed. No, if I had tried perhaps I might have been able to answer. But such things are

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tainted [kegareru] by being spoken aloud; I think my sense of fastidiousness [keppekikan] made me be silent.” The second instance is a past dream the protagonist suddenly recalls when he finishes constructing the mask: “It was a dream like some old silent movie that began with a most peaceful scene, in which my father, back from his work, was taking off his shoes in the vestibule and I—I was perhaps not quite ten—was at his side absently watching him. But suddenly the peace was broken. Another father came back from work. This one, curiously enough, was identical to the first; the only thing different was the hat he wore on his head. In contrast to the straw hat that my first father was wearing, the second wore a creased soft felt. When the father with the soft hat saw the one with the straw hat, he looked clearly contemptuous and gave an exaggerated shudder in rebuke for such evident bad form. Whereupon the one in the straw hat smiled mournfully in quite unbecoming confusion and left as if he were furtively escaping, the shoe he had removed dangling in his hand. The child that I was looked heartbrokenly after the retreating figure of my straw-hat father.”64 The opposition between the authentic and inauthentic plays such a central role in Abe’s text because it underscores the inherent tension in the relation between face and mask. The faceless protagonist, shunned by society, constructs a lifelike mask that he wears in order to gain acceptance and be recognized as a fellow citizen. In its uncanny verisimilitude, the mask is capable of passing for a real face, but the protagonist senses that the gap between inauthenticity and authenticity can never be sufficiently overcome insofar as society privileges the face as its normative standard. In its aim to duplicate the face, the mask thus draws attention to the relation between truth and mimesis. The protagonist mourns the fact that social relations are determined in such a way that the face can never be other than the model to which the mask aspires. The mask is constructed with the face as its telos, but no matter how convincing the outward effect of authenticity, the mask’s status as mere copy signifies that it is essentially false and inauthentic. Given the artificiality or constructed nature of the mask, moreover, the teleological movement it sets in motion in its aim to reproduce the face can be said to find its end in nature. We see here once again that an apparently normal or natural state of affairs has suffered disruption, and the question Abe pursues concerns how this aberration may be identi-



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fied so that it can be overcome and social relations restored to their proper functioning. In the context of the nation-state, the mimetic force that orients social movement is one that induces the minority to depart from its various particular inscriptions so as to become more fully universal, that is to say, more fully of the totality. Given that the totality itself defies representation in its abstractness, however, a privileged part is assigned to play the role of the totality in what can be understood as a process of social synecdoche. This part that stands in for the whole that is the nation-state, what can tentatively be called the majority on the condition that one resist any substantialization of this term, acts as the model that the minority is encouraged to emulate. In this process of assimilation, minoritarian affiliation with the totality comes to be measured according to the success of its mimetic relation with the majority. In other words, assimilation as the path to authenticity in the nation-state is achieved by gradual negation of those markings of inauthenticity that determine one as minority. Abe is quick to emphasize the violence of this assimilationist ideology. In the example of the wig, the protagonist in his fastidiousness is led to destroy the inauthentic copy, which is associated with “indecency” (or “obscenity”: hiwai) and “immorality” ( fudōtoku). This violation of morality on the part of the replica lies in its pretense to truth, for if the mimetic effect is successful it becomes impossible to distinguish with any degree of certitude between the original (the authentic, the true) and the copy (the inauthentic, the false). It is in order to safeguard this distinction that the protagonist introduces what might appear to be an unusual opposition between silence and the spoken. Everything here, in a sense, turns on the question of what exists inside and outside of the mouth. Let us repeat the final line of this passage more literally: “But such things are tainted by being mouthed [kuchi ni suru]; I think my sense of fastidiousness made me shut my mouth [kuchi wo tsugumaseteita].” Here the mouth functions as a kind of border establishing the difference between exteriority, which is associated with defilement, and interiority, considered to be as yet pure. Such determination is entirely apt in this context, given that the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity is typically conceived in terms of these spatial coordinates: the genuine is that which lies within, in

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contrast to the ­counterfeit, which necessarily lies outside of truth. By allowing the genuine to transgress this border and cross over into exteriority, it risks being tainted by the counterfeit and falling into inauthenticity. The problem is that the very movement of mimesis takes as its goal the disturbance of this border. If mimesis, that is to say, presupposes the distinction between original and copy, it nevertheless also opens the possibility that these may come to be confused with one another. The protagonist desires that the inside remain inviolable—this is of course the reason for his silence—for in this way the inauthentic copy can be kept outside and the distinction preserved between the moral order, on the one hand, and “immorality” and “indecency,” on the other. Yet the very existence of the copy indicates the difficulty of preventing the outside from breaching the inside and troubling the division between truth and falsity. For the protagonist, this difficulty can only be resolved violently in the destruction of the inauthentic object. The spatial privileging of the authentic in the example of the wig is complemented by its temporal privileging in the example of the two fathers. In the protagonist’s dream, the difference between the two fathers does not consist only in the fact that they are wearing dissimilar hats. It is not simply that the young protagonist cannot distinguish the real or authentic father from the imposter. On the contrary, temporal precedence clearly establishes this difference for the child as much as it does for the reader. Whereas in the previous example the border between authenticity and inauthenticity was represented by the mouth, here it appears in the establishing and subsequent destruction of what Abe calls “peace” (heiwa). The first father’s return home is compared to a silent film “that began with a most peaceful scene.” It is only upon the entrance of the second, false father that this peace is suddenly broken (shikashi totsuzen, sono heiwa ga yaburareru). This apparently violent destruction of peace begets another form of violence in the usurpation of the first father by the second father, much to his son’s sadness. In this spatial and temporal framing of the relation between the authentic and inauthentic, Abe is keen to make two, interrelated points: one, the mimetic relation between these two, although determined to be necessary, runs the risk of eventually confusing the difference between them; and two, the anxiety that this difference be preserved reaches its most extreme form in the complete usurpation of the true (the authentic)



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by the false (inauthentic). The implications of these examples for Abe’s thinking of the process of minoritization within the nation-state should be clear. Above all, the minority in their determination as inauthentic within the space of the nation must be remarked as both spatially exterior and temporally derivative. Such remarkings are only intelligible in relation to those of the majority, who are by definition determined (who determine themselves) as spatially interior and temporally originary. Majoritarian ideology seeks to establish the majority’s relation to the nation-state as essential—the nation-state could not continue as such without their presence—whereas the minority’s relation to the nationstate must be seen as merely contingent or accidental. In, for example, the Korean repatriation project examined earlier, Japan’s status qua Japan is in no way perceived as potentially jeopardized by the removal of this population. In contrast, the hypothetical deportation from Japan of those identified as ethnic Japanese would be viewed as outrageous— “indecent and immoral,” in the words of Abe’s protagonist—an action that would change the very identity of the nation-state.65 Abe’s example of the usurpation of the real father by the false one explicitly calls attention to the threat that a space marked as appropriated and interior might always be disappropriated—not necessarily through one’s forced removal from it, but through one’s replacement by another group that has successfully usurped one’s claims to authenticity. Following this logic, one must come to the conclusion that no natural or necessary relation exists between groups and the sites they occupy. In this regard, it is significant that Abe’s example of the usurpation of one father by another takes place in the genkan—the vestibule or entryway—of the home. This site marks the privileging of domestic interiority while also revealing its fragility, the point where that interiority is exposed and comes up against its limits. Yet we must also not overlook the fact that the domestic tranquility that Abe calls here “peace” is composed of two disparate elements: the interior space of the home and the immediate family members who reside there. In this example, “peace” is only established when these two elements converge upon the return of the father. Conversely, the destruction of “peace” takes place not through the physical destruction of the home or even the harming of a family member, but rather by the interruption of this relation between home and family member. For Abe, this relation

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is precisely what determines the difference between authenticity and inauthenticity. An individual is in this context considered “authentic” strictly on the condition that he belong to a site. Lack of such belonging in the relation between individual and site thus renders one “inauthentic.” By focusing on the violence of this opposition as seen in the threat of exclusion (represented by the figure of the departing father), Abe wishes to remark sites—meaning territory or land, all physical places—as essentially empty. His aim is to show how sites withdraw from all identificatory determinations in the form of property. It is at this level that Abe’s critique of the nation-state and the notion of citizenship must be grasped. For the notion of the nation-state is premised upon the appropriation of land such that this relation between groups and the sites they inhabit comes to be naturalized. The site “Japan,” for example, is thus defined tautologically as the area inhabited by “Japanese.” Once the relation between site and individuals comes to be understood in this fashion, however, then exclusionary violence must be said to exist at something like a formal or structural level. Regardless of whether those defined as non-Japanese are actually removed from Japan or not, their very presence within this domestic space is already seen as inauthentic and aberrational. This foreign or exterior presence within the interior violates the propriety of the national community, a propriety that transforms land, which properly belongs to no one, into Japanese property. It is this formal violence haunting the determination of identity and difference at the level of the nation-state that leads Abe to conceive of land or territory in its materiality as resistant to all appropriation. The opposition between authenticity and inauthenticity, as grounded on a relation between man and place, can now be more effectively challenged as a result. KO R E A IN J APAN

Let us now conclude this long chapter by examining what is doubtless the most significant minoritarian scene in Tanin no kao. This scene appears midway through the novel when the protagonist, anxious to continue testing the viability of his mask in public, suddenly decides to enter a Korean restaurant. As in the example of the dream of two fathers, a convergence of place and those individuals determined as



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belonging to that place immediately forms in the protagonist’s mind: “But it would be a lie to say that there was no reason for deliberately choosing a Korean restaurant. I had clearly taken into consideration that the restaurant was Korean and that there would be many Korean customers.” The sense of national-cultural authenticity depends on such convergence: just as the site “Japan” could no longer be determined as “Japan” in the hypothetical expulsion of individuals marked as “Japanese,” so too this restaurant marked as “Korean” requires the presence of “Korean” individuals in order to authentically come into its own. The protagonist continues, revealing that his true motivation for entering the restaurant lies in his desire for communal identification with other minorities: “Of course, I had unconsciously calculated that even if there still were some crudeness about my mask, Koreans would probably take no notice of it, and moreover I felt it would be easier to associate with them. Or perhaps, seeking points of similarity [ruijiten] between myself who had lost my face and Koreans who were frequently the objects of prejudice [henken no taishō], I had, without realizing it, come to have a feeling of closeness [shinkinkan] with them. Of course, I had no prejudice against Koreans personally. Above all, being faceless did not qualify one for having prejudices. Indeed, since racial prejudice generally goes beyond an individual’s private ends, and because it decidedly casts its shadow on history and the ethnic nation [minzoku], it has unmistakable substance. Thus subjectively [shukanteki ni], the very act of seeking refuge among them was theoretically perhaps a form of prejudice, but . . .”66 This passage is particularly fascinating in that Abe establishes quite unequivocally that the determination of national-cultural belonging is above all an epistemological operation. Prejudice in its national, ethnic, or racial forms requires from the outset a relation between epistemological subject (shukan) and object (taishō). Ostracized from mainstream Japanese society, the protagonist actively seeks out minoritarian ­Koreans with whom to share a sense of kinship. He acknowledges the possibility that this action makes him complicit with the very prejudice he criticizes, but he seems far less conscious of the fact that the sense of emotional immediacy he hopes to achieve in identifying himself as part of a larger minoritarian community is necessarily already contaminated by the epistemological mediation through which alone

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these Koreans can be identified qua Koreans. This of course is the irony attendant upon all desires for communal immediacy: wishing to overcome the sense of alienation and fragmentation of self-consciousness, the subject soon discovers that its objective determination of the community irrevocably “taints” or “defiles” (kegareru) (to use the protagonist’s language) the purity of any identificatory affiliation with it. In other words—and we are here simply repeating a point made earlier in this chapter—the absolute purity of identity requires, as its condition of possibility and impossibility, an initial act or decision of identification, thereby exposing the subject to contingency and difference. The question, then, is how the protagonist-subject actively determines the Korean object as Korean. Abe does not fail to draw the reader’s attention to this process: “Fortunately [un yoku], the three customers all seemed to be Koreans. At first glance, two of them were largely indistinguishable [hotondo kubetsu ga tsukanakatta] from Japanese, but the fluent exchange among them in Korean proved that they were unmistakably the real thing [magire mo naku honmono de aru].”67 From the very beginning of this passage, Abe notes the workings of the protagonist’s desire in his attempt to identify national-cultural difference. In general, the epistemological relationship is poorly understood if one fails to account for this element of subjective desire in the constitution of objects. What the protagonist finds “fortunate” is that the determination of the other as Korean can be used as a reflective mechanism to confirm this subject’s own identity as Japanese. We have already analyzed this gesture at length; suffice it to say that the protagonist’s encounter with Koreans here is yet another instance of his narcissistic desire for selfrelation, as represented by the figure of ­Ouroboros. The encounter of what is often called “cultural difference” takes its point of departure in anxiety: I cannot know this other, who can never be my other; I do not know how to present myself in such a way that our mutual recognition will facilitate communication between us. Subjective desire emerges precisely as a means to overcome or negate this anxiety.68 Through the satisfaction of this desire, the subject comes to posit itself in its internal unity and homogeneity strictly against or in opposition (ob-/tai-) to the object/taishō. In the encounter of cultural difference, this simultaneous determination of subject and object takes place through the adoption of fixed identities whose specific content the subject inherits and attempts



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to identically remark. In this scene, the protagonist’s identification of himself as Japanese and the other as Korean allows him to knowledgeably configure the terms of their “cross-cultural” communication in such a way as to reinforce the internal unity and mutual exclusivity of their respective identities. Abe alerts us here to the two most common indices used in determining national-cultural difference: physical appearance and language. By carefully scrutinizing such traditional markers of identity as, for instance, skin color, facial features, physical stature, manner of dress, and way of speaking, etc., the protagonist believes himself capable of determining whether or not these others are genuinely Korean. For the epistemological subject, what is important is “proof” (shōmei): these markers of identity thus serve as evidence that will either prove or disprove the as yet tentative thesis that these men who “seemed to be Koreans” are in truth what they appear to be.69 The men’s physical appearance yields no definite clue—“at first glance” two of them are “largely indistinguishable from Japanese”—but the fact that they seem to speak fluent Korean directly confirms for the protagonist their status as ethnically Korean. This conclusion is expressed in the language of authenticity: based on the evidence presented, they are found to be “unmistakably the real thing.” This notion of honmono (“the real thing,” “genuine article”), which recalls the oppositions between the sister’s natural hair and false hair as well as between the first and second fathers, is clearly intended ironically in this instance. Given the purely relational rather than essential basis of identity, the Koreans’ status as authentic is limited to this particular site of the Korean restaurant. In the tautology of national-cultural identification, sites marked as “­Korean” require that the mantle of authenticity be reserved strictly for “Korean” individuals, and vice versa. The problem is one of mediation: this Korean restaurant is situated not in the nation-state Korea but rather in Japan, where Koreans are invariably seen as inauthentic. Just as Abe underscored the importance of the vestibule or entryway in the example of the two fathers, here too the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity takes place at the restaurant’s border: immediately outside this border the Japanese protagonist is considered authentic and the Koreans inauthentic, whereas inside the situation is reversed. Through the use of this overdetermined word honmono, Abe

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highlights the contingency and profoundly contextual nature of these determinations. This sense of contingency in its relation to identity gains even greater intensity when Abe proceeds to show that the identificatory traits of physical appearance and language are in fact extremely unreliable. This shift is initiated by a sudden change of language. The protagonist believes that he has already overcome his anxiety and settled the problem of “cultural difference” by identifying the other customers as Korean on the basis of the fact that they were speaking Korean. Now, however, one of these men suddenly switches to Japanese to address the waitress. “Hey girl,” he shouts, “you’ve got the face of a Korean hick [inakamono]. Really, you look exactly like a Korean hick.” Hearing this exchange, the protagonist finds himself struck with confusion: “Startled as if I myself had been insulted, I looked questioningly at the girl, but as she placed the plate of meat before me, she smiled at the laughter of the three, appearing not the least perturbed. I was confused. Perhaps there was not such a pejorative meaning to the expression ‘­Korean hick’ as I had thought. Anyway, ‘Korean hick’ fitted the man who was making the fuss more than it suited the girl, a middle-aged fellow who was the crudest of the three. Judging from their laughter, they had perhaps made a simple joke on themselves. Moreover, it was quite possible that the girl actually was Korean, like them. It was not uncommon for K ­ oreans of her generation to speak only Japanese. If she were Korean, his remark, far from poking fun, was rather more an affirmative, friendly remark. That had to be the case. In the first place, a Korean wouldn’t use the term ‘Korean’ negatively, would he?”70 Here the sense of certitude regarding national-cultural determinations comes to be shaken, revealing the exposure of the epistemological subject in the face of difference. The anxiety that seemed to be definitively overcome by the identification of others based on their physical appearance and language now reappears to challenge those assumptions that have already achieved the status of inferential knowledge. The notion of cultural identity slowly begins to crack, and in this fragmentation such elements as place, language, culture, and physical appearance are shown to have no natural or necessary relation between them. Is the Korean man, here referred to negatively by the Japanese protagonist as the real “Korean hick,” not to be reassessed as possi-



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bly Japanese given his ability to speak that language? If the waitress is also Korean—Abe takes care to mark this collective identity in his description: she may have the same Korean ethnicity (onaji chōsenjin) as the customers, a sameness that would thus underline her difference from the protagonist—why does the man address her in Japanese? The protagonist makes the important historical point that, because of assimilation, younger Korean residents in Japan sometimes speak only Japanese, but what if the waitress speaks both languages? Would Koreans who both speak Korean ever speak to one another in Japanese? If so, might their exchange in Japanese be directed less to one another than to the protagonist himself, who they, effecting a reversal in the positions of epistemological subject and object, have covertly identified as Japanese? If that is the case, then the man’s words would now seem to take on a very different meaning. (In this regard, it is important to note that the protagonist fails to comprehend the meaning of words spoken in his “own” Japanese language, just as he cannot make sense of the Korean he hears earlier. This raises the troubling question: might the greatest anxiety in the encounter of “cultural difference” not lie in one’s sense of the gap between oneself and one’s representation as an authentic member of that culture, in which authenticity is measured by cultural and linguistic knowledge?) Perhaps these words are meant ironically so as to call attention to the protagonist’s desire to overcome his anxiety by securing the coordinates of this cultural difference. Understood in this way, it would appear that the reference to the face and the question of exact resemblance (sokkuri) does more than simply highlight the function of the mask in the falseness of its mimetic relation to natural physiognomy; it also casts light on society’s attachment to this distinction between artifice and nature, the inauthentic and authentic, despite or perhaps because of the overwhelming ambiguity of these terms. Even more than this, however, the epithet “Korean hick” might be used in such a way that these two descriptives no longer signify separately (i.e., a “hick” that happens to be “Korean”) but rather as a kind of ironic redundancy (i.e., to be “Korean” is to be a “hick”). This usage, employed specifically in the context of Koreans in a Korean restaurant in Japan speaking Japanese so as to indirectly draw in or implicate a Japanese person who overhears their conversation, would appear to allude to the modern history of Japanese-Korean relations, in which the

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Japanese ­appropriation of the discourse of the civilizing mission condemned Korea to play the role of colonial province vis-à-vis Japan’s self-­representation as imperial center, the site of all modern learning and culture in Asia. In this ironic sense, the phrase “Korean hick” would refer neither to “Koreans” nor “hicks” but strictly to the desire on the part of members of the Japanese nation-state and imperium to see themselves narcissistically as the very opposite of these terms.71 Yet it is insufficient to fault Japan alone for this denigration of Korea in the specific terms of modern civilizational discourse. To be sure, Japan fully participated in this violent history in its gradual transformation in modernity from nation-state to major imperial power. To focus solely on Japan in this instance, however, would be to blind oneself to the massive history of “Western” imperialism in its role as the source from which Japanese imperialism sprang. It is precisely in order to avoid this trap that Abe directly implicates the “West” in this scene of the protagonist at the Korean restaurant. Two passages must be cited here. The first occurs immediately before the man’s use of the epithet “Korean hick” when addressing the waitress. As the protagonist recounts: “Attached to an ashtray was a fortunetelling device. You put in ten yen and pushed a button; out of a hole underneath came a tube of paper rolled to the size of a matchstick. My mask seemed to be in such high spirits as to want to try something like this. I opened the roll of paper and read my fortune: ‘Moderately lucky. If you wait, there will be fair weather for a sea voyage. If you see a “weeping mole,” go west [nishi he ike].’” The second passage occurs, in symmetrical fashion, immediately after the appearance of this expression “Korean hick,” as the protagonist attempts to make sense of the remark: “As my mind shifted back and forth, I ultimately came to feel unbearable remorse about my superficial self-deception, which contained such an impudent feeling of closeness to the Koreans. Figuratively, my attitude was like that of a white beggar treating an emperor of the colored race as one of his peers [hakujin no kojiki ga, yūshoku jinshu no teiō wo nakama atsukai ni suru].”72 This final phrase is especially revealing, for what is typically identified as “the West” would view the different races and ethnicities presented in the novel—Japanese, Koreans, blacks—collectively as “the colored races” in order to confirm its own self-representation as white. At this level of the cultural imaginary, the difference between the West



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and non-West is coded along the racial coordinates of white and nonwhite, or “colored.” The Japanese protagonist undoubtedly realizes that, from this perspective, he would be seen as both racially and culturally inferior and that no real distinction would be made between himself and the Koreans for whom he otherwise feels such a paternalistic sense of closeness. It is in order to disavow this negative determination by the West that the protagonist compares himself with whites. He cannot become white in isolation, however; it is strictly in relation to the Koreans that his superior sense of whiteness emerges. In the case of Japan, this transformation from Asian to white was originally made possible by the decision to “go west,” as Abe writes—that is, to resist the threat of Western imperialism by becoming like the West through the development of the entire apparatus of the nation-state and, subsequently, by expanding the scope of this centralized power from nationstate to imperium. The homogenization required to form Japan as a unified nation-state drew heavily on the modern discourses of race, ethnicity, language, culture, etc. These became the privileged markers of the nation-state in the particularity of its self-representation. In order to speak in this scene of the “cultural difference” between Japanese and Koreans, Abe realized, one had to refer to the West, however subtly or allusively, for this notion of Western modernity played a crucial role in organizing difference as the opposition between national peoples. Tanin no kao allows us to more cogently grasp this history in which difference comes to be ordered or determined so as to more fully establish the contours of identity.

F OUR

INTER VENTIONS ¯ BO ¯ OF ABE KO

I myself of course more than sympathize with such a notion of transcending and negating national borders; indeed, this is a basic premise of my work.1

“G R O U N D S O F SU PPO R T ” AN D T H E D IST U R B AN C E O F ID E NT IT Y

In this final chapter, I wish to touch upon the question of Abe Kōbō’s appropriative inscription within the discourse or category of Japanese national literature. It appears quite natural today for readers to conceive of writers of fiction on the basis of their national affiliation. Shakespeare was English, Dostoevsky Russian, and Proust French, for example, and each—following this view—must accordingly be understood as situated within the literary traditions of their respective countries. In modernity, this relation between individual subjects and nation-states has become so naturalized that the former typically define themselves, at least in part, on the basis of the latter. This self-determination of national subjects is complemented by a similar determination of others, and indeed these two processes, far from being unrelated to one another, tend to be mutually reinforcing. By defining myself in terms of my national affiliation, I implicitly define others in their own national identity in reference to whether that identity is the same or different from mine. Inversely, my knowledge of the national identity of others frequently has the effect of consolidating the sense of my own national status, regardless of whether I wish to embrace this status or reject it. Such practice of national determination has been and still remains today extremely pervasive in modern society, at both the individual and institutional levels.

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However, readers of literature find this framework explicitly challenged when they confront the works of Abe Kōbō. In his fiction and essays, Abe actively problematized the notion of individual belonging or membership within any particularist entity, as for example those based on culture, ethnos, or the nation-state. Likewise, as many commentators have observed, Abe often sought to eliminate from his works any use of personal or geographic marks of identification in the form of proper nouns, thereby leaving his readers unsure whether his protagonists were Japanese or non-Japanese or whether his stories took place in Japan or elsewhere. These efforts were not motivated by any abstract appeal on his part to a universal humanism, such as to conceivably induce in readers a desire to identify with his characters by transcending the specificity of their own national or cultural backgrounds. Rather, Abe attempted to create in his readers a sense of internal disturbance or disequilibrium, which he hoped might foster a more critical and selfconscious attitude regarding the nature of sociality. We can see this idea operating, for instance, in an interview he gave in 1967 entitled “Kokka kara no shissō” [Disappearance from the State]. As he explains, “I am suspicious of the notion that people must possess a ‘ground of support’ [yoridokoro]. Here I do not mean a kind of foothold that they themselves build, but rather something a priori that they possess in a passive sense, as for example a native hometown or ethnic nation [minzoku].”2 The distinction Abe draws here between active construction and passive acceptance seems to refer to the question of an individual’s awareness of his or her participation in those larger forces or institutions constitutive of society. Individuals may regard themselves purely as free and autonomous subjects, independent of society’s various institutions, but the fact is that these latter exert a powerful influence on how subjects come to determine themselves. By viewing these institutions merely as external entities, Abe suggests, individuals ironically become all the more susceptible to their sway. This is because they unconsciously depend upon such institutions as their “ground of support.” By passively accepting my status as part of a native hometown or ethnic nation, I allow these forces to achieve their ends through me. At the same time, however, it is incumbent that I recognize the impossibility of ever fully liberating myself from such institutions in a decisive gesture of active consciousness. For Abe, subjective freedom or



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autonomy is only possible by my acknowledging my own inevitable imbrication or complicity with these types of larger forces, since I can then, to some degree, negotiate those relations as opposed to simply functioning as an institutional passageway or conduit. It is because of this complicity that something like subjective freedom is necessarily limited or compromised from the start. In other words, resistance against these larger institutions is at all possible because it is impossible for me to ever fully separate myself from them. Hence the sacrifice of my pure or absolute freedom from such forces as the native hometown and ethnic nation should not be seen as cause for lament, since it is precisely the limited freedom that ensues from this impossibility that allows me to engage and negotiate with these institutions in the first place. It seems important to keep this point in mind when contemplating the question of Abe’s inscription within the nation-state Japan. For a serious contradiction emerges in the institutional desire to mark Abe in these national terms when he himself sought to resist this type of framework. For Abe, appeal to such categories as the nation was above all evidence of a desire for a “ground of support.” This ground functions to consolidate the claims of identity: individual subjects over time will come to acquire and relinquish various attributes or properties that define them as human beings, but this constant series of changes always finds itself anchored in one’s national belonging. In this way, an individual’s “ground of support” is regarded as primary; whatever else he or she may become, those identities only exist in addition to his or her national being. In the context of the institution’s system of national inscription, this “ground of support” comes to be mobilized in the form of a common denominator to which all writers, regardless of their individual differences, can be ultimately reduced. In the field of modern Japanese literature, for example, no scholar would deny that Abe’s artistic uniqueness serves to distinguish his work from the texts of such other singular writers as Mishima Yukio and Ōe Kenzaburō, the two authors with whom he is most frequently compared. Yet this quality of distinctiveness is granted only on the condition that all three writers be seen as equally belonging within the national genre of Japanese literature. It was precisely this grounding of difference upon a larger collective identity that Abe sought to resist.

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Two points must be mentioned here in order to avoid any possible misunderstanding of the argument I wish to formulate. One, I am in no way suggesting that the question of national inscription be determined simply in accordance with the particular ideas or viewpoints concerning this notion as expressed by the individual writer. As goes without saying, this issue cannot be reduced to one of personal will. On the contrary, Abe’s explicit questioning of the framework of national inscription must be understood not at the individual but rather the structural or conceptual level. And two, consequently, this displacement of the category of national literature necessarily affects all writers and their works. My aim in this chapter is not simply to demonstrate Abe’s particular unsuitability for appropriation within the category of Japanese literature, for this would be tantamount to tacitly endorsing the national appropriation of other writers. If the mode of academic writing only allows for a relationship between the research subject and research object, then my point is that Abe’s critique of the notion of national affiliation—a critique widely recognized in the scholarship on Abe, both in Japan and abroad—carries with it profound methodological implications concerning the operation of Japanese literary studies as a whole. These implications cannot but affect the way research subjects conceive of—that is to say, actively constitute—the objectivity of their objects. To more fully understand what Abe envisioned through his rejection of foundational identity, let us examine the following passage from his 1955 essay “Shinin tōjō: jitsuzai shinai mono ni tsuite” [Visitation of the Dead: On the Unreal]: “Delayed consciousness is marked by a simple, mechanical contrast between stability or balance [antei] and disequilibrium [keisha]. According to this notion, disequilibrium represents an aberration whereas balance is constant. In this way, one is lulled into the following illusion. Following the logic that stipulates that if A is B, then B is A, what is constant or regular is always balance, whereas disequilibrium is seen as meaningless and unrelated to oneself. That is, what is created here through the aid of the unreal is a fantasy of balance, such that no perturbation can be seen within balance, and disequilibrium does not appear as disequilibrium. . . . It is my aim to tear away the false cement inserted between reason and perception in order to give to disequilibrium its own inherent energy, which is otherwise neutralized in the everyday.”3



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Abe here lays out the basic framework for an explanation as to why any inscription of individuals within a broader collective identity is ultimately invalid. If the concept of national affiliation functions as a “ground of support,” then this is because of its ability to arrest change and provide the guarantee of unity and balance. The relation of identity and difference is in this instance reconceptualized in terms of the dyad “balance” and “disequilibrium,” but these two qualities are not valued equally. Just as a ground is privileged over that which it grounds on account of its capacity to govern this latter, so too does disequilibrium come to be seen as derivative of balance. It is important to note that the effects of disequilibrium—what Abe in these lines also calls yure, or “shaking”—are in no way denied, for Abe believes that these are too powerful for everyday consciousness to simply reject out of hand. Yet the cost of acknowledging the presence of disequilibrium is that it comes to be ordered or organized on the basis of balance. No matter how threatened one might feel by unsettling forces that appear to be beyond one’s control, it will always be possible to rationalize these through a logic of exception: because the disturbance that is disequilibrium is merely an anomaly or “aberration,” it can ultimately be dismissed as “meaningless and unrelated to oneself.” In this way, as Abe underlines, disequilibrium becomes enervated, effectively losing its ability to disturb. Submitted to the operation of stabilization, this value merely comes to inversely confirm the normativity of what is constant and regular. How is it then possible to combat this “fantasy of balance,” as Abe provocatively calls it? Such question must be posed not only in order to better grasp Abe’s own project, but also to comprehend how this project has been subordinated to the general process of national inscription. An initial hint might be found in this passage in Abe’s reference to “logic” (ronpō), which he highlights in order to draw attention to the normativizing gesture whereby the apparently greater frequency of balance is what justifies the attack against disequilibrium. The latter’s infrequency or atypicality means that it may be dismissed as exceptional and therefore more or less inconsequential. Yet the logical (or formal) terms through which this privileging of balance and concurrent devaluation of disequilibrium take place are in fact drawn from stability or balance itself: “if A is B, then B is A,” as Abe formulates it. Now A and B must first be identical in and of themselves in order for this

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equation to make any sense. It is only because A is A and B is B that any equivalence might then be posited between these two terms. However, it is precisely this presumption of self-identity that Abe wishes to call into question by mobilizing the notion of disequilibrium. This logic of identity insists on viewing the relation between balance and disequilibrium on the basis of opposition, what Abe refers to as “a simple, mechanical contrast.” Yet such oppositionality means that these qualities can only exist outside of each other, mutually exclusively, with the result that “no perturbation can be seen within balance.” Abe appears to suggest here that the disturbance (or “perturbation”: dōyō) of disequilibrium achieves its effects not simply by attacking balance externally, but rather by disrupting it from within. In the apparent equilibrium of an individual’s everyday life, he or she may at any time suffer disturbance from external events, but this possibility of external disturbance necessarily rests upon, or is conditioned by, the intrinsic capacity to be disturbed. Without such internal capacity, the world’s disturbances might very well take place, but they could never affect the individual himself. Yet this very exposure to the outside implies more generally that no fixed distinction can be securely drawn between the inside and outside, what disturbs and that which suffers disturbance. Within every entity, the openness to that which is other than itself as marked by the quality of disequilibrium ensures that any selfsame identity is already compromised in advance. Everyday consciousness attempts to minimize the threat of disequilibrium by implicitly grounding its occurrence on a prior state of balance. If disequilibrium is thus seen, as Abe remarks, as something “unrelated to oneself” ( jibun to ha muen na mono), this is because the self is regarded as essentially stable and unified, its identity present to itself. From Abe’s perspective, however, such self-identity must be considered mere “fantasy,” an example of what Freud termed “disavowal” (Verleugnung) in the sense of an individual’s rejection or willed blindness to an external reality that is perceived to be potentially harmful.4 We see here how Abe’s stated aim “to give to disequilibrium its own inherent energy, which is otherwise neutralized in the everyday,” works to undermine the apparent stability of the logic of identity. This critique of everyday consciousness in its concealment or repression of the “­energy” of disequilibrium through the elevation of the value



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of balance must be understood as central to Abe’s project. The desire to dismantle any “ground of support” subjects could appeal to so as to safeguard themselves and impose order upon the world finds expression in Abe’s writings within the various domains of art, politics, and thought—domains he regarded as profoundly interconnected. As for example he states in the 1960 essay “Geijutsu no kakumei: geijutsu undō no riron” [Artistic Revolution: Theory of the Art Movement], “I believe that the criteria for judging the progressiveness of art can be found entirely in the work’s ability to bring shock, excitement, and pain to the balance between reason and perception, thereby destabilizing and revitalizing that balance.”5 Abe specifically refers to art in these lines, but the method of employing shock in order to destabilize existing modes of thought and social practices extended to all aspects of his work. The problem is that, as can be seen most clearly in the institutional inscription of his texts within the category of national literature, Abe’s critique of foundational identity has been poorly understood, its consequences for approaching his work (and undertaking Japanese literary research in general) severely underestimated. What is at stake in Abe’s anti-foundational thinking can be revealed through examining the ways the institution of Japanese literary studies has attempted to understand and evaluate his texts. In the United States, this institution has in its primary concern with particular research objects (literary movements, authors, individual texts, etc.) remained largely indifferent to more general questions of methodology. Even when more abstract theoretical concerns are introduced, their articulations are typically limited to specific literary phenomena as opposed to actively engaging with the broader framework or system of conventions through which objects of knowledge in the field first come to be posited qua objects. As a result, many underlying presuppositions that govern Japanese literary research are left unchallenged. Without question, the most urgent—because most general and foundational—of these presuppositions concerns the logic of identity. In the field of Japanese literary studies, this logic manifests itself most forcefully in the notions of national and cultural identity. As empirical, these notions operate on a very different plane than do the formal terms A and B, for example. National and cultural phenomena produce a vast and complex range of effects that require

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­ inute analysis at every level of the humanities and social sciences. m At the same time, however, this abundance of empirical data must not disguise the fact that knowledge is organized according to certain criteria, and that these criteria are invariably violent. As Abe understood, such violence is enabled by the establishment of borders that police the difference between what is to be considered proper (or internal) objects of research and what must be deemed improper (the external). Once the notions of Japanese national and cultural identity come to be posited, in other words, concrete decisions must at every moment be made concerning what is to be included within and thus excluded from the determination of Japaneseness. In this way, we can see that Abe’s institutional inclusion within the category of Japanese literature is not merely an innocent gesture, something that could be justified at the level of commonsense. The act of inclusion is in principle inseparable from the act of exclusion, which means that inclusion must also be acknowledged as a form of violence. Now this does not imply that the operation of knowledge can ever fully exempt itself from violence. The determination of criteria, qua determination, can only be negated from a position whose own implicit establishing of criteria will lead to further negation in a sequence whose endpoint can be neither fixed nor predicted. The critique of Japanese literary studies for its attempt to found itself on the “ground of support” that is the nation-state Japan thus cannot proceed from any simple desire to eradicate borders in toto, for borders are inevitably traced or inscribed in the very act of thought itself. In this sense, it is important to recall that Abe does not speak about national borders from the perspective of pure destruction, as if borders as such could be definitively overcome without leaving behind some kind of remainder of themselves. Rather, as we quoted him in the epigraph to this chapter, it is a question of continually “transcending and negating national borders” (kokkyō wo koeru, kokkyō wo hitei suru). This crossing of borders, he immediately adds, is a form of labor, one that involves “pain, difficulty, and hardship” that cannot be “casually watered down by empty oratory.”6 The point here is that any pure, unmarked space free from the determination of borders exists only at the level of myth. The work of disrupting national borders, reinscribing them differently, exposing them to that which they exclude, remains essential. And yet we must



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also recognize that every attempt to negate the determination of borders risks displacing them at another level. If the creation of any pure borderless space remains impossible, however, there nevertheless can emerge a degree of awareness regarding one’s own participation in this incessant process of inscription. The recognition that borders, in their most general sense, emerge as a product of determination means that they can always be determined otherwise, remarked differently than they have been in the past. For the truth is that borders can never be reduced to that which appears to be their objective existence. Any border that is determined to exist between entities owes that existence to a process of determinative inscription that allows for interventions at every moment. The difficulty here, however, is that this possibility of intervention occupies a strange position in the context of Japanese literary studies, where the representations of Japanese national and cultural identity typically appear in more or less fixed, objective form. On the one hand, the logic of identity that governs the field finds itself reinforced by a representationalism that regards any national literary inscription merely as a reflection of a prior instance of national affiliation. In the case of Abe, for example, the objective “fact” that he was Japanese and a writer of fiction means that he can, as it were, naturally be considered a Japanese writer, someone whose works must be properly understood within the broader context of Japanese literature. Here the subjective act of literary inscription— which, as with all subjective acts, is necessarily contingent and open to question—finds justification in the objective and preexisting institutions of Japanese literature and the Japanese nation-state. In this case, the positive concept of “nature” signifies precisely the subject’s grounding in objective reality, which the subject merely re-presents or mirrors as such. Such practice of representation effectively forecloses the possibility of intervention. On the other hand, however, the absence of any interval or possibility of mediation between subject and object would prevent one from concretely judging which authors and texts merit inclusion within the corpus of Japanese literature and which do not. For this institution to survive at all, therefore, the possibility of subjective intervention must be preserved, thereby allowing the subject to remark the object. As soon as this possibility of remarking emerges, however— which is to say, in all rigor, from always—then it can no longer simply

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be a question of re-presenting Japanese literary phenomena in the initial presence of their identity. For structural reasons, a moment must appear that can potentially disturb this process, open it to chance. Without this moment, neither inclusion nor exclusion would be at all possible. This foregrounding of the contingency of decision in the subject’s inscription of Japanese literary works must be borne in mind when examining the institutional engagement with Abe’s oeuvre. What interests us is the specific manner in which these texts have been determined, and whether such determination contradicts or is in some sense inconsistent with certain ideas elaborated in those texts themselves. Here the notion of textuality must be employed in order to call attention to the fact that Abe’s writings occasionally yield very different logics. No prior instance of identity can be said to unify this difference at a deeper stratum, as for example has traditionally been sought in literary studies at the level of authorial intention. This notion of textuality follows as a direct result from the foregoing analysis of the mechanics of representation: the temporal delay between an original object of research and a research subject who, arriving thereafter, merely repeats the former’s initial presence or self-identity is appealed to as justification for the goal of scholarly inquiry. This goal is objectivity, which is to say the ideal effacement of the subject’s intervention in the epistemological operation. As ideal, significantly, the erasure of such intervention is thus not regarded as ever fully achieved or actualized in the subject’s treatment of objects, but that is not necessary. It is sufficient that this be maintained as an ideal goal, something that teleologically orients all research. In this way, it becomes clear that the ideal end (or goal) of knowledge coincides with the end (erasure) of all subjective intervention. My reading of Abe diverges quite sharply from this view, but it does so because such understanding of the operation of knowledge, which I believe centrally informs the field of Japanese literary studies, promotes a kind of irresponsibility. By this I mean a disavowal of the fact of the subject’s necessary participation in the constitution of objects, a refusal to recognize something like an originary co-implication of subject and object. This problem can only be rectified by an acknowledgment of the inescapability of intervention. Perhaps the best example of such irresponsibility can be found in the treatment of nationalism, a topic that has received a great deal of attention in Japanese literary studies



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recently in both Japan and the United States. This scholarship typically presents itself as critical of nationalism, and no doubt such contributions are important. However, the difficulty is that the attack against nationalism proceeds strictly at the level of content. Particular literary phenomena are denounced for their complicity with Japanese nationalism in studies that nevertheless accommodate themselves fully and uncritically within the institutional framework of Japanese national literature. There appears to be little awareness of the hypocrisy involved in this practice. Nationalism easily absorbs this kind of critique because it provides the very form through which such negativity is articulated. The general institutional framework of nationalism is in no way unsettled by this discourse; on the contrary, the resulting increase in empirical data such discourse provides functions to reinforce the overall grasp of this form itself. What is overlooked in this research is precisely the mediation between the nation-state Japan and the institution of Japanese literary studies, whether in Japan or abroad. Insofar as this level of mediation remains unexamined and the urgent question of form dismissed, any writing on Japan, no matter how apparently anti-nationalist in content, ultimately leads to the strengthening of the comprehensive and internally differentiated structure of the Japanese nation-state itself. In what follows I will examine two specific engagements with Abe’s texts, but it is perhaps more accurate to consider these engagements as three if one includes a certain dialogue that Abe conducts with himself, one that focuses on several ideas that appear essentially incompatible with his anti-foundationalist critique of identity. Here a reading committed to the differential inscriptions of textuality will help us avoid the trap of simply resolving this contradiction one way or another, as for example concluding with any sense of finality that Abe either was or was not a critic of particularist identity in its national and cultural forms. My own interpretation of Abe aims to highlight and elaborate those aspects of his thought that are most debilitating to the concept of identity, but it would be disingenuous to pretend that other aspects do not also emerge that leave this concept entirely in place—balanced, as it were, rather than exposed to its own disequilibrium. Above all, I wish to stress that Abe’s most radical ideas concerning the notions of sociality, borders, and heterogeneity, etc. cannot simply be reduced to the status of research object but rather are most productively understood at the

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level of methodology. Only in this way can the institutional conventions that govern the field of Japanese literary studies begin to be exposed and reinscribed. In addition to Abe’s own self-engagement, the two other readings I examine involve the work of Donald Keene and John Whittier Treat. Keene was arguably the scholar in the U.S. Japan studies field who was personally closest to Abe and most familiar with his work. Given Keene’s enormous influence in the formation of this field, a consideration of his dialogue with Abe will help us better grasp certain epistemological features characteristic of Japanese literary research that are not limited to the specific treatment of Abe alone. I thus seek to understand Keene not in terms of his individual scholarly contributions but rather, as it were, symptomatically with regard to a persistent desire for a particularist Japanese national and cultural identity that informs Japanese literary research as a whole. Keene’s work is frequently dismissed by contemporary scholars as representative of a prior age, more or less unrecognizable from the putatively superior type of Japanology produced today. However, this narrative of progress can sustain itself only if one ignores the profound commonalities at the more fundamental level of the logic of identity that Keene’s scholarship shares with much current work on Japanese literature. In order to demonstrate this point, I turn to John Whittier Treat’s reading of Abe, supplementing this text with references to several instances of his other work so as to capture as fully as possible the desire for a unique Japanese identity. Treat’s scholarship will prove especially instructive in revealing how a privileging of the concept of oppositionality in a national cultural context links up with notions of Orientalism and racism. D ISAPPE AR AN C E F R O M T H E S TAT E : R ET H IN KIN G T R AD IT IO N

Several months after Abe Kōbō’s death at the age of sixty-nine on January 22, 1993, Donald Keene published a brief article in the journal Chūō kōron [Central Review] in memory of his friend and onetime collaborator. Entitled “Honmono no tensai: Abe Kōbō” [Abe Kōbō: A True ­Genius], this essay underlines Abe’s great importance as a writer while also recalling various personal anecdotes. Keene was especially well



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positioned to write this kind of appraisal of the man and his work, having engaged in a long correspondence with Abe as well as participating with him in various taidan, or dialogues, several of which were collected and published in 1973 under the general title of Hangekiteki ningen [The Anti-Theater Person]. This title, with its double meaning of hangeki as both “anti-theater” and “counterattacking” or “fighting back,” appears to refer to Abe’s well-known (and, by all accounts, well-deserved) reputation as an iconoclast—or “maverick,” as Keene once described him7— in regard to not only drama but aesthetic and political ideas in general. In “Honmono no tensai,” Keene provides a striking example of this quality in the context of Abe’s relation to the tradition of Japanese literature. “Abe seems to have claimed that he didn’t learn a single thing from Japanese literature,” as Keene writes. “He was quite severe in his view of Japanese tradition.”8 Keene adds that Abe often feigned ignorance of Japanese literary works of the past, but that his knowledge of the classical canon was in fact surprisingly limited. As an illustration of this point, Keene relates a remark made by Abe’s wife that Abe had on at least one occasion mispronounced the title of the celebrated Heian period text Kagerō nikki (erroneously following its on-yomi, or “Chinese” reading) as “Tonbo nikki.” Such open disregard for Japanese literary tradition by a twentiethcentury writer whose works were widely seen as continuing and indeed powerfully enriching that tradition appears to have struck Keene as unusual. Nevertheless, Keene did not simply accept Abe’s claims of divergence from this lineage. In the course of one of his discussions with Abe in Hangekiteki ningen, for example, he argues that Abe’s dramatic works can be fruitfully understood in the broader context of Japanese literature: “Within the same tradition of Japanese theater, there have been various lines of descent. This might sound strange, but I think that your plays are related to noh and kyōgen.”9 Keene elaborates on this point several pages later through a comparison of Abe’s 1969 play Bō ni natta otoko [The Man who Turned into a Stick] with the famous noh drama Matsukaze [Wind in the Pines]: “In Matsukaze, the words spoken by the two sisters are extremely elegant and are sublime even as poetry. In Bō ni natta otoko, however, you intentionally use humorous language and occasionally even vulgar or ironic language. In this sense, the two works are completely different. Yet we the spectators are not satisfied

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simply at the level of language, for something exists behind this. It is unclear what that something is, but it creates a deep impression that lingers on afterward. In other words, the two plays are similar in their status as symbolic art. No doubt there are several ways to solve the enigma posed by these symbols. But of course it is also perfectly fine to wish to leave this enigma as enigma. In the face of an eternal enigma, one remains eternally intrigued.”10 Already we can see here a certain expectation or desire on Keene’s part for Abe to acknowledge his status as a Japanese author, someone whose literary achievements can be more properly contextualized on the basis of the tradition from which they emerge and to which they contribute. Nevertheless, one would be quite mistaken in grasping this desire in the purely individual or psychological terms of Keene himself. Rather, the desire at stake here is primarily conceptual and institutional; it takes shape according to a logic of identity that requires that phenomena in their unsettling difference and multiplicity be organized within distinct categorical units that are seen to possess meaning in and of themselves. In the context of Japanese literary studies (as in area studies in general), this unit can only be the nation-state. Here the nation-state, as the historically privileged empirical manifestation of an otherwise abstract or formal logic, must be seen as the implicit touchstone in all discussions of tradition. Spatially, these discrete units of national tradition are conceptualized as existing alongside one another in purely symmetrical fashion. This spatial construction functions to both contain and orient all temporal movement or change, allowing for a retrospective organization of past phenomena as a strictly internal development leading up to the present. Hence Abe’s work must be comprehended as a single link in a chain extending back to other instances within the same national past, as for example noh and kyōgen. It matters little, moreover, whether such retrospective structuring of national tradition is performed by Keene or a “fellow Japanese,” since what is at issue here is ultimately not Japanese literature in and of itself (as that which is, in the circular form of national essence, produced by Japanese writers so as to be consumed by Japanese readers) but rather the general system of nation-states, each of which is endowed with its own cultural tradition. In other words, Keene’s desire to establish an aesthetic link between Abe and classical Japanese theater issues from a



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much broader commitment on the part of the field of Japanese literary studies to the nation-state system. It is significant, then, that this question of tradition, although initially raised by Keene, is revealed by Abe to be considerably more complex than is generally perceived. In response to Keene’s question, “What do you think about traditional art?” Abe insists on the need to understand the notion of tradition in a dual sense: “In referring to this term ‘traditional,’ there must be seen to exist another tradition that is separate from tradition in the sense of finished works. This involves the receptivity that is produced as a result of viewing those works. In other words, this is the tradition that exists within readers and spectators. Such tradition lives on like a worm that can never be fully cut up. Of course this tradition is not entirely unrelated to the interpretation of tradition as traced back to finished works or those things that are completed, but there are different elements involved here. Quite possibly it is the tradition of the recipients of these finished works that constitutes the basis of tradition, for such recipients select and give direction to those works. They do this by eliminating certain things and leaving behind other things. From the perspective of this invisible tradition, I feel that it is impossible to ever separate oneself from tradition.”11 We can observe in this exchange a characteristic difference between Keene and Abe. As a scholar of Japanese literature, Keene’s concern is above all with the empirical realm of national particularity: the under­lying logics or conceptual systems that provide order to these diverse phenomena, enabling things to be recognized as parts within the national whole, are never critically examined. Such methodological issues cannot simply be said to exist outside of Japanese literary scholarship, in for example the discipline of philosophy. On the contrary, they structure this field from within, affecting all research as soon as it encounters the problem of determining the relationship between identity and difference (e.g., what is Japanese and what is not)—that is to say, methodology shapes research at its very origin. Unlike Keene, Abe typically pulls back from such immediate investment in national phenomena. This sense of circumspection is not due to any wish to transcend the empirical; on the contrary, it springs from a desire to resist the national.12 In response to Keene’s question about traditional art, Abe thus avoids the temptation to directly adduce specific examples of

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the Japanese classics that he regards either favorably or unfavorably, as if the notion of tradition were already self-evident. The reason that it is not self-evident can be found in the ease with which tradition comes to be conflated with national tradition. Far from being self-evident, then, the notion of tradition actually reveals itself to be quite complex because it contains within it two distinct meanings: tradition in the objective sense of finished works and tradition in the subjective sense of receptivity. Discussions of tradition typically privilege the former meaning as the sole definition of this term, but Abe signals his strong disagreement with this approach. Not only must the aspect of receptivity be recognized, he maintains, it should indeed be understood as the “basis” or “foundation” (kiso) of tradition itself.13 This departure from the common conception of tradition is motivated by a desire to think this phenomenon more genetically on the basis of its formation and change. The difficulty with the conventional notion of tradition, Abe suggests, is that it is too static. Given its objectivist bias, this conventional view can only comprehend the movement of tradition in terms of the minimal unit that is the finished work. Thus we find Keene attempting to demonstrate the internal development of Japanese theatrical tradition by means of the simple addition of Abe’s work to the already existing corpus, as represented by the classical texts of noh and kyōgen. Temporally, these latter works belong to the past, such that any inquiry into Japanese theatrical tradition could immediately be answered by pointing to their existence. The presence of these texts provides weight or substance to this national tradition, but the cost of such substantialization is the difficulty of change. Change in the form of a quantitative addition or inclusion of new texts (e.g., Abe’s play Bō ni natta otoko) in the present reveals that Japanese national theater remains a living rather than merely dead tradition. We can perhaps better understand the nature of Abe’s intervention in this conventional determination of tradition by focusing on the specific terms he uses. The objectivist view takes as its basic unit “finished works” (dekiagatta sakuhin), which are also called “things that are completed” (kanseibutsu). As with so much else in Abe, everything depends here upon the question of borders. In its appeal to objectivity, the conventional understanding of tradition must be recognized as not simply conservative; it is, for structural reasons, impossible. Traditionalists—



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those in Japanese literature and beyond—may of course believe that such a fixed, preexisting body of works remains present and accessible, but for Abe such belief is no more than an illusory desire, what he earlier referred to as a “fantasy of balance.” In order to conceive of tradition genetically, beyond its reified forms, one must understand it as a necessarily open process. However, this is precisely what the determination of works as already “finished” or “completed” disallows. If the movement of tradition takes place strictly as a passage from one completed unit to another, then there can be no movement at all insofar as this term implies a kind of essential permeability, a breaching or compromising of the integrity that all units must by definition require qua units. As we have already discussed in the context of the notion of intervention, the concept of objectivity emerges through a disavowal or erasure of the subject’s participation in the constitution of objects. The subject cannot not involve himself in this operation but is forced to conceal that involvement through appeal to an ideology of representation, according to which he or she merely repeats the original presence of the object through an act of self-effacement. In Abe’s displacement of the objectivist notion of tradition, it is important to note that he is not simply privileging a determination of subjective receptivity in and of itself. This because “receptivity” (kanjusei) can mean nothing in itself, since it can only be determined at the singular instant of contact between itself and that which it receives. However implicitly, the notion of subjective receptivity thus points to a relation to that which exceeds it as different from or other to itself. That is to say, tradition takes place when receptivity in its passivity comes to be marked by finished works in their activity, i.e., their active presenting or giving of themselves to readers and spectators. As a general process that contains both objective and subjective aspects, tradition is formed synthetically in the simultaneously active and passive constitution of objects, what we earlier referred to as the originary co-implication of subject and object. At the moment of contact or relationality between the receptive subject and the objectively “finished” or “completed” works of the tradition, both subject and object undergo alteration. In their passivity, subjects are irrevocably marked by the texts they receive. Objects suffer a breaching of their borders as well, revealing that their status as closed or completed was in fact impossible. In being forced to navigate the ­subject,

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the objects of tradition find themselves strangely passive vis-à-vis its determinations: “recipients select and give direction to those works,” as Abe writes. “They do this by eliminating certain things and leaving behind other things.” Here we can understand why Abe wishes to emphasize the aspect of subjective receptivity as the hidden “basis” of tradition. The process by which tradition can be formed and re-formed is necessarily synthetic, involving an ongoing relation between subjective passivity and objective activity. Yet the conventional view of tradition violently effaces the moment of subjective intervention in its insistence on comprehending tradition as fixed and objective, merely a matter of “finished works” whose past existence nevertheless somehow remains present to its recipients. By shifting attention to the question of receptivity, Abe is able to foreground the inherent temporality of this process. In its focus on “finished works,” the conventional view of tradition conceives of the past as finished, already complete. It is thus unable to provide an account of how past texts can be reanimated in the present. In direct contrast, Abe attempts to think the decisive (or decisional) moment of inscription when tradition comes into being through the dialogic relation between works and their recipients. In this way, tradition is no longer grasped on the basis of an objective past. Rather, it must be seen to take place at every instant. What this means is that the problem of tradition must now be rethought from the perspective of the present. Abe states this point quite clearly in the 1968 essay “Uchinaru henkyō” [The Frontier Within]: “The present is not framed by tradition; rather, tradition is shaped by the present. If we consider what, from the diverse and complex vector of the present, will be recognized as tradition one hundred years from now, we know that the present itself has no say in this matter and that it is the exclusive concern of that future world. . . . While the excavated remains of the past certainly appear in the form of facts, cultural tradition consists in a community’s structural patterns; it is another name for the everyday present. Tradition is precisely the patterns selected by the present.”14 Now this is an extremely strange notion of the present that Abe introduces, for it appears unable to locate itself in any way beyond the disruptive tension it experiences in the conflicting pull of past and future. If tradition is based most centrally in the receptivity of the subject, that subject occupies a present moment that is simultaneously turned to



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the past (allowing him or her to “eliminat[e] certain things,” i.e., the already existing texts available to the tradition) and to the future (making it possible to “leav[e] behind other things” for those recipients who will someday come to inherit them). The present can never fully liberate itself from the grip of the past, Abe acknowledges, but it can respond to it. In opposition to the conventional notion of tradition that objectifies the past—in the form, for example, of a national tradition of literature, as we saw with Keene—Abe indicates that the relation between past and present is not unilateral and so determinative but rather dialogic (what he would doubtless have called “dialectical”) and thus structurally open. To assert, as he does, that “the present is not framed by tradition; rather, tradition is shaped by the present” is to recognize that any relationship with the past is necessarily mediated by the present. In their conservativism, traditionalists appeal to the past as an authority that must govern present action, but Abe’s point is that this past is in fact shaped to an irreducible degree by the present itself. Despite its ability to respond to the past, however, this present cannot be understood as itself a site of any stability or certainty, for it is always already slipping into the future. Regardless of the subject’s present attempts to reshape past tradition, Abe contends, “the present itself has no say in this matter. . . . It is the exclusive concern of that future world.” Hence any present determination of tradition must remain open—and so vulnerable, “receptive”— to future remarkings, which may either confirm or alter them. There is no guarantee that these determinations will ever be remarked, of course, but without this risk no future determination is possible.15 Because subjects cannot know the past as it objectively was nor predict the future with any certitude as to what it will be, the present for Abe becomes a site of radical contingency. No matter how powerful the force of past tradition, subjects are always given the chance to remark it differently. This means, among other things, that the ideology of national tradition can at every moment be disturbed and resisted. Abe argues that such resistance to the nation-state demands that one call into question the integrity of its borders, as for example he illustrates in the example of national literature: “The novel is now gradually tending to surpass national borders. That is to say, if one compares Japanese novels with French or American novels, one can now more often find commonalities in works between these countries. If, for example, French novels

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contain elements A and B while Japanese novels contain elements A' and B', there might be more commonalities between A and A' than between A and B. . . . Rather than bracketing American writers together and dividing literature between French novels and American novels, for example, one must recognize that it is not at all unusual to find greater commonalities between certain American and French writers.”16 Abe reveals in this passage how a thinking of tradition that foregrounds the question of temporality is capable of intervening in the structure of identity that undergirds the nation-state system. As we have seen, the institution of national literature concerns itself with an enormous diversity of literary phenomena whose organization presupposes certain determinations at the deeper level of form. To identify Japanese literary objects qua Japanese requires, first of all, that one has already established (however implicitly or unconsciously) a set of criteria according to which the inside of Japan can be distinguished from its outside. For Keene to posit Abe’s dramatic works as belonging within the same category of Japanese theatrical tradition as noh and kyōgen, for example, there must be an initial determination of difference (Abe’s texts are not identical to these latter) that is subsequently negated or sublated by a determination of collective identity (despite this particular difference, all belong within the same general category of Japanese theater). Now Keene, at a certain moment, appears to have glimpsed the potential problem of evaluating Abe in these fixed national terms. In a book published a decade after Abe’s death, for instance, he makes a point of emphasizing Abe’s “hatred of any form of nationalism or of the belief that one ‘belonged’ to a nation.”17 This statement is, let us insist, stunning in its implications for the project of national inscription: if the “belief” in national belonging is in fact proved to be illegitimate, then there can be no basis for maintaining the institution of national literature. It is precisely in order to avoid this threatening implication that Abe’s resistance to national affiliation must be immediately reduced to the level of the individual or personal, something limited to Abe alone. The logic in which anyone or anything can be determined as belonging to the nation remains itself unchallenged. In this way, an ideology of exceptionalism can easily be mobilized in order to explain this particular disturbance in the otherwise properly functioning project of national categorization. Abe’s critique thus becomes attributable to a specific set



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of biographical circumstances (e.g., he was raised in Manchuria, he had a “maverick” personality, etc.), thereby confirming in inverse fashion the belonging of all other Japanese writers to the Japanese nation-state and its cultural traditions. Here, it seems evident, the exception proves the rule, and the rule is that one must—this term is in fact less descriptive than prescriptive—belong to the nation. How then does Abe articulate resistance to national affiliation in the context of the notion of tradition? Given that diverse empirical content is invisibly organized at the level of form through the collaboration of the notions of identity and difference, Abe is forced to illustrate his point at this same formal level. As he writes, “If, for example, French novels contain elements A and B while Japanese novels contain elements A' and B', there might be more commonalities between A and A' than between A and B.” In the nation-state system, each national unit achieves its unity and self-presence through distinguishing itself from other units. For example, Japanese objects can be determined in their difference from French objects because they are judged to be collectively more like one another than they are unlike one another. If these Japanese objects come over time to develop such internal differences that they are gradually seen to be less like one another than they are like foreign objects, then the overall unity of the Japanese national unit is effectively placed in jeopardy. Abe’s point is to show that the Japanese elements A' and B', as with the French elements A and B, exist as internal features of the nation-state not because they are originally or naturally alike but rather because they have been, in an act of appropriation, retroactively identified by that unit as internal parts of itself. For structural reasons, the self (in whatever form: nation, subject, etc.) exists as a delayed effect, a delay that is inseparable from violence. With the recognition that the interplay of identity and difference can no longer strictly be governed by these national units, Abe suggests, we are beginning to witness the historical collapse of the nation-state system itself. Nothing less is implied when he refers in this passage to the ongoing movement to “surpass national borders.” In Abe’s view, the narrow ideological understanding of tradition as national tradition derives from the objectivist desire to conceive of this notion solely in terms of the past and its “finished works.” In modernity, this past comes to be regarded as the national past, within which

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“finished works” are retrospectively assigned the status of classical texts representative of the national tradition. As exemplified by Keene, this is typically the standpoint adopted by Japanese literary studies insofar as it fails to problematize the meaning of this notion “Japan.” In marked contrast, Abe is led to rethink the concept of tradition precisely because he wishes to displace this connection to the nation-state. He explains this point forcefully in “Rinjin wo koeru mono” [Beyond the Neighbor]: “I understand the tactical meaning why ‘tradition’ must be problematized. In such expressions as ‘ethnic-national feeling’ or ‘national character,’ the concept of ethnos or nation is very weakly constructed. These expressions . . . represent a kind of taboo that one hesitates to speak about frankly. Taking advantage of such flinching, conservative thought has introduced these terms by transforming them into catchwords. These terms could weaken anyone. Many people feel weakness, cowardice, fear, and anxiety when faced with such expressions as ‘ethnos’ and ‘national character’. . . . The term ‘anti-ethnicnational’ [hanminzokuteki] contains something menacing about it and resembles in nuance the wartime expression ‘unpatriotic’ [hikokumin]. This term evokes a sense of psychological fear, making people feel as if they have done something terribly wrong.”18 Having established the link between tradition, the nation, and the emotion of fear, Abe returns to this argument several pages later: “The ethnic-national fear that resides within our unconscious is in fact a fear of being forced out of the solidarity of the ethnos. . . . The punishment of ‘banishment’ also existed in the past; ‘banishment from Edo,’ for example, meant that one was exiled from Tokyo to the Izu region. This is the fear of being forced out of a frame or border [waku]. Such latent fear is reawakened within us when we are referred to as ‘anti-ethnic-national.’ Within this fear, we become attentive to ‘tradition’ in its visible form.”19 It is important to grasp Abe’s sensitivity to the question of mediation in these lines, although this term itself is not specifically used. The nation-state, through its appropriation of tradition as national tradition, attempts to inculcate among its citizens a sense of the temporal and spatial parameters that establish the interiority of the nation and demarcate it from the outside. Once nationalized in the form of canonical texts, authors, and genres, tradition effectively functions as a form of mediation that maintains and consolidates the bond between the



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­ ation-state as totality and the individual citizen as part within that n totality. According to this conception, the totality marks both the origin and end of the individual part: individuals first come into being through the totality, which endows them with meaning insofar as this totality, in an act of self-negation, manifests itself within them. Thus liberated from the totality, individuals are eventually forced to return to it through the totalistic determinations of their particular actions or works. Spatially, for example, individual citizens may possibly “surpass national borders,” as Abe writes, but the force of the totality reveals itself in the fact that those individuals can always be referred back to it in the instance of determination, regardless of whether such determination is made by themselves or others. This referral back to the totality, significantly, does not proceed to it immediately because of its excessively abstract nature qua whole; rather, the totality is given substance and made concrete by the mediation of tradition. In the case of the individual marked as Japanese, for instance, his or her identity comes to be determined through reference to the nation-state Japan, whose otherwise abstract meaning qua whole or totality is filled in and given concrete content by the diverse phenomena of Japanese tradition. Temporally, the process is quite similar. Just as individuals are granted the freedom to violate national borders, so too can they attempt to express their individual freedom through, for example, artistic activity. Insofar as these individuals are determined to belong to the totality, however, this activity immediately becomes appropriated by the totality through the mediation of tradition. Such tradition stretches back into the past and functions to establish the temporal borders of the totality. Artistic activity of the present thus comes to be determined through reference to past instances of the same tradition. Each present manifestation of this tradition is seen in the form of a contribution or tribute—a kind of return gift—made on the part of individuals to the totality that originally gave them life. As for a particular case that illustrates this point, it should by now be clear that this is precisely the logic that enables the institution of Japanese literary studies to inscribe Abe as a Japanese writer. These temporal and spatial coordinates of the nation-state allow individual citizens to acquire a concrete sense of the extent of the totality within which they exist. As Abe suggests, it is imperative that the

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nation-state work to inculcate this knowledge among its citizens so as to successfully establish the threat of banishment, to in other words cultivate “the fear of being forced out of a frame or border.” Here Abe reiterates his earlier point concerning the presence of elements A and B and elements A' and B' within realms that are determined to be properly French and Japanese, respectively. The nation-state requires borders in order to establish its unity and self-presence in relation to other nationstates that are different from itself. In its mobilization by the nation, tradition reinforces the presence of these borders in both a spatial and temporal sense. The result, according to Abe, is fear, a pervasive sense of anxiety that one’s inclusion within these borders might at anytime be jeopardized and called into question. Here Abe understood that the guardians of tradition, as for example the tradition of Japanese literature, are in truth guardians of the nation. Insofar as they work within this tradition, they effectively consolidate the hold of the nation-state. It is for this reason that Abe speaks of such tradition as a trap: “I believe that the most contemporary and effective way for us to view ‘tradition’ is as a trap, something dangerous and likely to drag us inside it.”20 T R AN SL AT IO N : R E PE AT IN G T HE P R O P E R

The fear instilled by the force of national tradition could be extraordinarily destructive, Abe recognized, and yet already one could see signs pointing to the gradual weakening of the nation-state system. In the context of literature, Abe considered the global phenomenon of literature in translation (honyaku bungaku) to be precisely such a sign. He expresses this idea in the course of a 1977 dialogue with Keene entitled “Nihongo, nihon bungaku, nihonjin” [The Japanese Language, Japanese Literature, and the Japanese People]: “In Japan, there are a great many cases where young people growing up first open their eyes to literature through reading literature in translation. This awakening to literature does not take place as a process of propriety in which one makes one’s proper departure on the basis of works that are properly Japanese.”21 The word Abe strategically repeats here is koyū, which can also be translated as “unique,” “particular,” “inherent,” or “intrinsic.” Translation, he contends, must be thought of as in some sense a violation of the proper, and above all the nationally proper. In what we can now remark



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as a characteristic gesture on his part, Abe declares that this violation of national propriety must be understood in its barest or most formal spatiality as a question of bracketing: “Today we have far exceeded any sense of Japanese propriety, and the question of people on this earth can no longer be conceived within the brackets [kakko] of Japan. . . . A world structured by language no longer depends upon linguistic particularity, regardless of the language in which works are written.”22 Abe’s considerable interest in translation is emphasized by Keene, who regards the former’s reading of translated works as crucial to his development as a writer: “The people for whom Abe had the highest esteem were neither novelists nor scholars, but rather translators. Thanks to Japan’s brilliant translators, Abe, who was utterly unable to read foreign languages, read widely in world literature and received inspiration from it. Abe was able to become an international writer by his reading of these translated works.”23 Keene grasped the biographical fact of Abe’s indebtedness to literary translation, but he also understood more generally the implicit threat that translation often poses to conceptions of national propriety. As he tells Abe in Hangekiteki ningen, “When your novels are translated, there are of course many foreigners who are impressed. But there are also those who complain, ‘His works are insufficiently Japanese.’ Let me provide a more concrete example. The other day Mishima Yukio’s play Sado kōshaku fujin [Madame de Sade] had a trial run in New York. Upon reading the reviews, I noticed that most critics wrote things like, ‘It is bizarre that a Japanese person would write a story about eighteenth-century France. The fact that this play is staged through an American’s translation makes it even more bizarre.’ However, I didn’t particularly feel upon reading the work that, rather than it being something that could only be written by a Japanese, it was something that only a French person could write.”24 Keene recognizes that the reviewers of Mishima’s play, together with certain readers of Abe’s fiction, are motivated by the nationalculturalist desire that Japanese works as composed by Japanese writers present themes that can recognizably be framed as particular Japanese phenomena. Such desire carries within it a prescriptive force that states, in effect, “You must be Japanese!” Here the general category of Japan is not simply or immediately one; rather, it is internally differentiated and mediated, containing within it the various aspects of authorship,

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language, and artistic subject matter. In order for a work to be purely Japanese, it must be written by a Japanese writer in the Japanese language and focus on Japanese themes. This set of implicit criteria helps explain the not infrequent response of puzzlement or disappointment to Abe’s fiction for the reason that, as Keene reports, “His works are insufficiently Japanese.” Keene is correct to call attention to this issue, but in doing so he indirectly raises the following question: if the category of Japan is to be problematized and the assumptions of national-­ culturalism exposed, would it not also be possible to see the institution of Japanese literary studies as governed by this same basic framework? No doubt a distinction must be made between Mishima’s reviewers and scholars of Japanese literature in that the latter do not require that the subject matter for Japanese literature be restricted to what appears to be specifically Japanese phenomena. However, this difference merely underscores the fact that both camps would largely agree on the issues of Japanese authorship and language. In order for a textual object to be considered “proper” or internal to the study of Japanese literature, it must generally be determined to be written by a Japanese writer in the medium of the Japanese language. In this sense, Keene’s remark concerning the reception of Abe and Mishima can be read as unintentionally highlighting a much more fundamental problem that haunts the institution of Japan studies as such. Keene is forced to abandon this line of thinking insofar as it threatens to expose the contingency—that is to say, the violence—with which all determinations of Japan are made. As goes without saying, the question of who is Japanese and who is not, together with the question of what properly belongs within the Japanese language and what does not, is in no way natural or immediately given. On the contrary, the history of these determinations itself forms a kind of tradition in the sense analyzed by Abe. When we encounter these determinations in the present, we recognize that they come from the past, or rather pasts, and are given to us (in our “receptivity” as “recipients,” or heirs, to this tradition) to be remarked now, at every instant, so that they can in turn be released into the future for other determinations that will either confirm or alter them. In point of fact, this understanding of the essentially differential nature of determination can be seen in Abe’s discussion of translation in his emphatic repetition of the word “proper.” As he



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writes, “This awakening to literature does not take place as a process of propriety [koyū no purosesu] in which one makes one’s proper departure [koyū ni shuppatsu shi] on the basis of works that are properly Japanese [nihon koyū no mono].” For Abe, translation is to be conceived as a violation of the proper, exposing the porosity of any “bracketing” or framing of what otherwise appears to be the discrete unit of the nation-state and its system of national language. The question is, then, how are we to understand this violation of the proper in its relation to repetition? In this context, it should be noted that Abe’s choice of the particular word to be repeated is in no way fortuitous. What is “proper” to something is what serves to distinguish its inside from its outside, thereby establishing its own identity and self-presence vis-à-vis other things that are seen to be different from itself. Abe attempts to trouble this logic of identity, precisely, by repeating the proper: if this notion names the pure selfidentity of something, then what happens to that identity when this something repeats itself in such a way as to create different instances of itself? If the word koyū is self-identical, then is the border that demarcates identity and difference, inside and outside, to be drawn around all instances of its appearance or strictly around each instance? If the former, then propriety reveals itself to be internally differentiated and thus no longer self-identical in any pure or absolute sense. If the latter, however, then the very notion of propriety comes to be invalidated since it is now no longer possible to determine which instance of koyū is proper and which is not. In order for any word to signify, it must be able to repeat itself qua itself over the course of its differential inscriptions in time and space. If the word koyū appeared only once, it would be impossible to remark it as identical to itself, with the result that meaning would immediately collapse into chaos. In order for this word to be meaningful at all, it must necessarily contain within itself traces of its differential inscriptions in other times and other spaces. In this way, the identity of meaning can be said to already presuppose a repetition in or through difference. Abe’s unusual example of koyū, koyū, koyū helps us understand that propriety can only be achieved as a delayed effect, that difference cannot simply exist outside of the proper but is in fact constitutive of its very identity.25 Let us stress that this discovery of im-

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propriety, or alterity, within the heart of the proper stands as one of Abe’s most powerful insights, and can be seen to inform a great deal of his work. He at one point refers to this impossibility of propriety as the “structure of heterogeneity” (hetero no kōzō), something that incapacitates every attempt on the part of purity to achieve itself through the “elimination of inferior elements.”26 As Abe’s example of repetition incisively demonstrates, the organization of propriety and impropriety, interiority and exteriority, as grounded on the principle of identity and difference must posit an original unity existing within the unit or entity itself. This is of course what establishes its difference from other entities. By showing that any unit is already forced to traverse or expose itself to difference in order to be recognized as the same unit, Abe sheds light on the essential failure of all propriety. In cases where translation is viewed as transgressive, in either a positive or negative sense, the nature of this transgression is frequently misunderstood insofar as the disturbance of the proper is seen to take place at the moment in which the unity of one national language is confronted with the difference of another. In order to avoid this misunderstanding, it is crucial that one grasp the full extent of the insight afforded by Abe’s example of differential repetition. As we have observed, the repetition of any element in its identity is grounded in its prior inscriptive exposure to difference. What this means, precisely, is that the operation of transgression does not take place at the level of the unit. The logic of transgression, or repetition in difference, is originary, which is to say that it always already undermines any thinking based on the unity of the unit. In this account, difference can no longer be understood derivatively as something that supersedes or befalls a prior instance of identity. As Abe realized, such determination could typically be found at the root of various proprietary conceptions of the social, which project in the register of fantasy a moment of original communal unity that was subsequently destroyed by the incursion of difference. We see here, however, that the passage from identity to difference can occur at all only because that identity is already divided by difference, that it is already late in arriving at itself. It is because of this originary exposure to difference that translation must now be more radically conceived, for the unity of a national language is for structural reasons internally disturbed, not quite itself, even before it encounters the differ-



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ence of another national language. In concrete terms, the translation of any word or phrase from one’s native language into a foreign language presupposes that it has already been rendered foreign to itself in order to acquire signification in that native language. Translation, then, even prior to referring to the transition between one national language and another, can be said to name this originary moment of self-alteration.27 In the specific example Abe provides of translation, he reveals how present-day Japanese youths grow up reading literature without regard to the question of whether these works are written in their “own” language or a “foreign” language. Translation works to trouble this border between the native and foreign by introducing external elements in such a way that they can no longer be easily distinguished from the internal. The phenomenon of literature in translation, in other words, exposes Japanese readers to non-Japanese elements not in a non-­ Japanese medium—where they could be immediately recognized as non-Japanese—but rather in the linguistic medium of Japanese. Exactly as in the case of repetition, one finds the presence of alterity within the “bracket” or “frame” of the selfsame. For Abe, this represents the threat that translation poses to the ideology of the proper, and above all when this ideology is mobilized by the nation-state in its establishment of the system of national language. When Abe declares, for example, that “a world structured by language no longer depends upon linguistic particularity [ gengo no tokushusei],” we must grasp that translation in its most radical sense disables any proper determination of linguistic elements as belonging to one national language as opposed to another. If translation thus calls attention to the internal disturbance suffered by national identity, as Abe maintains, then perhaps the best measure of its effectiveness can be found in the violence of the proprietary response it provokes on the part of the nation-state. This is the violence that Abe calls attention to in his essay “Uchinaru henkyō” when discussing the state’s hatred of social impurities: “And if there were not enough Gypsies to play the role of enemy, then citizens of other ethnic or national origins could be lumped together and victimized. A shortage of enemies is highly unlikely, particularly when one considers, for example, the case of Beckett (who is Irish) or Ionesco (Romanian), both of whom write in French and have French citizenship. For that matter, there could even be state laws banning all translated fiction.”28

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Abe is clearly exaggerating the threat posed to the state by literature in translation, but it is important to recognize that the violent defense of propriety against what are seen to be illegitimate crossings or transitions between national languages is unfortunately all too real. He provides an example of such defense in the context of those guardians of the Japanese language who wish to protect against the influx of foreign words: “One hears talk these days about the ‘corruption of the Japanese language.’ Such a statement comes not only from conservatives but even from those who are considered progressive. Upon hearing this expression, one somehow believes it to be true. However, the question of whether the Japanese language has really been corrupted must be considered academically. What exactly does it mean to speak about language as corrupt?”29 Here again we find Abe vigilantly pulling back from any immediate investment in the various phenomena typically identified with the nation-state. Just as the notion of tradition can be conceived beyond the narrow realm of national tradition, so too can language be understood in more general terms, in a more fundamental sense than the “linguistic particularity” of national language. Nonetheless, it bears repeating that this generalizing movement one sees in Abe is in no way motivated by a search for abstraction, for things that somehow exist beyond the realm of empiricity. On the contrary, Abe was fully committed to the task of thinking the concrete, and yet he understood that this goal could only be achieved by making a rigorous distinction between the concrete and the particular. As he emphasizes to Keene at one point in their dialogue, “I believe that it is dangerous to conflate particularity [tokushusei] and the concrete [gutaisei]” on account of the fact that “particularity always contains ideological [shisōteki] elements.”30 The departure from particularism most effectively takes place by ungrounding the notion of propriety, exposing particular entities to their own internal “corruption.” In insistently drawing attention to the structural failure of any border, frame, or bracketing to establish the contours of identity by purely sealing off the outside, Abe allows us to understand how all things are necessarily “corrupted” from within. Without such corruption, however, no relationality could ever take place. In concluding this section, let us return to our earlier point concerning the notion of textuality, and particularly how this notion is required in our reading of Abe in order to take into account his occasional contradic-

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tions or inconsistencies. Beyond question, Abe sets forth a very forceful thinking of disappropriation, above all in the context of the nation-state and those institutions that act to ideologically mediate the state’s relation to individual citizens. Nevertheless, a range of passages can be found in Abe’s writings that indicate that his critique of national-cultural particularism remains at times insufficient. Examples can be found throughout his oeuvre, which is to say that no simple border exists that could clearly demarcate his critical distantiation from and occasional naïve complicity with the project of national culturalism. We can see this, for instance, in the course of Abe’s dialogue with Keene in Hangekiteki ningen. Despite Abe’s attack in chapter four of this book on the notion of national particularism (which he describes as “always involving something closed and conservative”),31 he tells Keene quite straightforwardly in chapter two that, “in the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat [in the Asia ­Pacific War], I intensely felt that the Japanese people were, in the context of Asia, extremely particular.” He then proceeds to illustrate this claim through recourse to various clichés denouncing the Japanese (e.g., despite appearances to the contrary, “the sense of solidarity among Japanese people is in fact quite weak”; “People often say that the Japanese ego or sense of individuality is undeveloped. My sense, however, is that it is in fact overdeveloped”). Abe concludes these negative remarks by informing Keene, “Generally speaking, I oppose any views about the particularity of the Japanese people,” but that his personal experiences following Japan’s surrender were too horrific for him to feel otherwise.32 Abe no doubt suffered a great deal during this time, and it is important to be sensitive to the circumstances he describes here, but the fact is that no experience, regardless of how painful or violent, can ever claim pure access to the object experienced, and especially when that object is so overdetermined as “the Japanese people.” In this way, Abe fails to heed his own crucial insight that the immediacy of experience, insofar as that experience remains at the level of the particular rather than that of the concrete, “always contains ideological elements.” T H E O T H E R O F O PPO SIT IO N ALIT Y

In the English language scholarship on Abe, several noteworthy publications have appeared since his death, among which we can list the

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following: Nancy K. Shields, Fake Fish: The Theater of Kobo Abe; Timothy Iles, Abe Kōbō: An Exploration of His Prose, Drama, and Theatre; Thomas Schnellbächer, Abe Kōbō, Literary Strategist: The Evolution of His Agenda and Rhetoric in the Context of Postwar Japanese Avant-Garde and Communist Artists’ Movements; Mark Laurent Gibeau, “Nomadic Communities: The Literature and Philosophy of Abe Kōbō”; Christopher Bolton, Sublime Voices: The Fictional Science and Scientific Fiction of Abe Kōbō; and Margaret S. Key, Truth from a Lie: Documentary, Detection, and Reflexivity in Abe Kōbō’s Realist Project. These works have in a variety of ways contributed significantly to our understanding of Abe, allowing us to better assess his continued importance in the fields of art, politics, and thought. With regard to the central contradiction we have sought to explore in the desire on the part of the institution of Japan studies to inscribe Abe within the discourse of national literature despite his repeated attempts to unground this framework, however, John Whittier Treat’s 1993 essay “The Woman in the Dunes” deserves particular attention. This article exemplifies how Japan studies is able to adroitly thematize questions of nationalism while nevertheless disavowing its own powerful investment in the project of national-cultural identity. In order to grasp the full extent of this disavowal, however, it is important to read this study of Abe against the background of Treat’s other work, specifically his 1995 Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb and 1999 Great Mirrors Shattered: Homosexuality, Orientalism, and Japan. I adopt this particular reading strategy for two reasons. First, Treat presents in his interpretation of Abe certain ideas concerning the relation between identity and difference in the context of national culture that are only given extended treatment in these larger works. Critical examination of these latter will thus help us better situate Treat’s approach in his engagement with Abe. Second, as I have previously stated, Abe’s significance for any contemporary evaluation of his thought lies far less in his specific appeal as a research “object” than in his more general value at the level of methodology. By this I do not mean that Abe is best approached from the abstract perspective of philosophy or critical theory as opposed to the putatively more concrete terms of literature. On the contrary, it is only through the conceptual labor involved in dismantling particularist and proprietary frameworks that concrete phenomena (both as they relate to Abe and beyond) first give themselves



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to be thought, released from the fixed coordinates of national identity and difference. It is strictly in displacing these categories that Abe’s texts begin to yield their riches. In this sense, an understanding of the stakes involved in Treat’s reading of Abe necessarily extends to those phenomena that historically lend support to notions of national and cultural identity, as for example racism and Orientalism—issues that are at the very forefront of Treat’s larger works. Abe’s thought can be seen to sharply diverge from Treat’s at this broader level of the social, thereby shedding light on why Treat symptomatically misreads Abe. In order to trace the path of this divergence, it is instructive to begin by analyzing the concepts of alterity and oppositionality. In his essay on Abe’s 1962 novel Suna no onna [The Woman in the Dunes], Treat states that the figure of the Other occupies a pivotal role in this work. As he declares regarding Abe’s protagonist, “Niki Jumpei, in escaping to what he had escaped from, realizes not only his absurdity but the inevitability of locked struggle with the Other, represented in the pit by the person of the woman. Niki and the woman are mutually dependent on each other even as they would psychically wear each other down. This is the same sort of circular battle that characterizes the confrontation of the existential Self with the Other. The Woman in the Dunes can be described as a story of flight from the Other. . . . Now the woman is his clear opponent, his Other from which he cannot flee.”33 It must be emphasized here that this determination of the woman on the basis of the notion of alterity represents Treat’s specific intervention in this text, as Abe does not provide a theory of alterity in the novel that would justify seeing the woman in these terms. This does not mean that such a reading is necessarily wrong, of course, for everything depends on precisely how alterity is understood. Treat provides a hint of what he means by this term in the following passage: “Later, as he succumbs to her seduction, she appears as the Other characteristically seeks to appear: natural. Here ‘natural’ means the sexual object.”34 This determination of alterity in terms of the notion of sexuality is highly unusual, and yet it provides an accurate glimpse of the level of theoretical rigor that Treat brings to his reading. What concerns me, however, is less the question of conceptual acuity in Treat’s engagement with Abe than the attempt to employ such theoretical discourse so as to legitimate a methodology grounded in cultural essential-

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ism. Before pursuing Treat’s understanding of alterity, however, let us ­examine Abe’s own thinking of this notion. In Hangekiteki ningen, for example, Abe explains to Keene his view that art in its critical dimension must somehow be linked to alterity: “Works of art must give rise to some form of critical impulse. As for what might provoke such impulse in people today . . . there must absolutely be a discovery of oneself within that which is different from oneself [jibun to ishitsu no mono] as well as a discovery of radical difference within that which appears to be the same as oneself [jibun to dōshitsu ni mieta mono].”35 These lines reveal Abe’s insight that alterity must be conceived in a double sense. According to the logic of identity, anything that exists must be unified within itself, and this unity establishes its presence to itself while at the same time marking its difference from other entities. For Abe, a critique of the ideology of propriety in whatever form it might appear—artistic, political, philosophical, etc.—must begin at this fundamental level. This critique proceeds by recognizing the impossibility of both the self and other in any pure or absolute sense. Traces of myself can be found within that which is not me, just as within me there can invariably be found traces of that which I am not. Because of this originary “corruption” (to use Abe’s earlier term) between self and other, interiority and exteriority, I cannot encounter any other in its pure, unadulterated form. Abe tells us this quite unambiguously in “Rinjin wo koeru mono”: “Only craftsmen who have lost all creativity unwaveringly consider the reader as a pure other [junsui na tasha]. Real writers should understand that the other is simultaneously themselves.”36 The other cannot exist unmarked, separated from me by an unbridgeable gap, because such pure inaccessibility would prohibit me from recognizing the other in the first place. Conversely, there can be no purity of the self that is not already “corrupted” or contaminated by the outside world. As we saw previously, Abe describes this exposure of subjective interiority to the contingency of difference in terms of a complex “structure of heterogeneity.” In traditional conceptions of subjectivity, for instance, the realm of consciousness is privileged for its ability to sublate through reflection all empirical difference, thereby providing unity and order at the level of representation. Or as Abe writes, “Man encounters things that immediately give rise to the movement of language, and mental activity consists in the subjugation of



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these things.”37 In this very encounter, however, man is ceaselessly marked by those things he internalizes, partially subjugated by that which he seeks to subjugate. It should be clear from the foregoing passages that Treat, confusing alterity with sexuality, is at a far remove from Abe’s grasp of the various problems posed by the logic of identity. However, Treat doesn’t simply link the Other with the erotic; much more significantly, he attempts to think alterity from the perspective of oppositionality. Let us repeat the statement that we quoted earlier: “Now the woman is his clear opponent, his Other from which he cannot flee.” For Treat, the self encounters the force of otherness strictly in the figure of the Other. This Other is posed or placed not merely outside of the self in an indeterminate exteriority; on the contrary, in strict accordance with the root meaning of the term “opponent,” he or she is positioned “against” (op-) the self, “facing” this latter. It is because of this face-to-face encounter that Treat determines the relations between the man and woman in Abe’s novel as a form of combat: there is “the inevitability of locked struggle,” the two characters “psychically wear each other down” in the course of fighting a “circular battle.” It would be tempting to read Treat’s determination of alterity as oppositionality at the particular level of the object of inquiry rather than at the general level of methodology. In this way, the determination could always be seen as deriving from Abe’s own novel, even though Abe in no way conceived of alterity in these restricted terms. In order to demonstrate that this understanding of the oppositional Other characterizes Treat’s approach more broadly, then, one must examine other texts in which he undertakes a similar analysis. In Writing Ground Zero, for instance, this notion of the Other reappears in nearly identical fashion in the context of a reading of Ōe Kenzaburō’s 1965 text Hiroshima nōto [Hiroshima Notes]. There Treat informs us that the notion of alterity derives originally from Sartre, but that Ōe, influenced by Sartrean existentialism, utilized this notion as an analytical tool although he was not necessarily aware of doing so. The problem with this theory of influence, however, is that Treat appears to misrecognize what Sartre means by the Other. As with Treat’s interpretation of the Abe novel, the problem here concerns the status of oppositionality in a thinking of alterity. For example, several pages after quoting Sartre’s state-

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ment that the relation between self and Other “is not a frontal opposition,” Treat speaks bewilderingly of Ōe’s “vital opposition of Self and Other.”38 From Sartre’s viewpoint, the other cannot simply be divided from the self because one is oneself fundamentally “other to oneself”: “To be other to oneself . . . is the primary value of my relations with the Other.”39 In direct contrast to Sartre, Treat determines the Other as constantly opposing the self from a position of simple exteriority: “Ōe himself may very well not be aware that his attempt to define in Notes an Other after the fashion of the existentialists informs the entire work in such an ontological way, since it is ostensibly a product of political journalism and not philosophy. But his interest in maintaining the distinctions between, for example, himself and the hibakusha, the Japanese and the Americans, the past and the present, and good and evil nonetheless sets up certain others as Other, i.e., beings who matter only insofar as they are not Ōe or do not participate in the culture with which he identifies.”40 If, as Treat explains, his aim is “to see how Ōe in writing of Hiroshima conforms to, or deviates from, the particular logic of the philosophy” of Sartre,41 then it seems reasonable to expect of him an accurate understanding of what that philosophy actually says. Failing this, it becomes a question of examining Treat’s own desire that the Other be regarded as that which necessarily opposes the self. As we see in both Abe and Sartre, an understanding of the problem of alterity must forcefully depart from the restricted terms of identity and difference as held together by the notion of propriety, which requires that the self be itself and the other be the other. Each of these entities fully coincides with itself, which is why they must be seen as logically different from one another. Treat is very clear that this is how he conceives of the notion of alterity: a determination of the Other from the perspective of Ōe, for instance, must focus on “beings who matter only insofar as they are not Ōe or do not participate in the culture with which he identifies.” In other words, if the self is X, then the Other must be posited as non-X. A simple negation marks their relation.42 In Abe and Sartre’s thinking of alterity, however, it is impossible to ever fully separate self from other insofar as each contains traces of the other within itself. Regardless of whatever differences might be found between Abe and Sartre regarding this notion, the originary “corruption” between these two entities



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of self and other follows from the latter’s determination of oneself being “other to oneself” and the former’s conception of a “discovery of radical difference within that which appears to be the same as oneself.” The self and other can only exist in opposition to one another if they themselves remain wholly present to themselves in their unity and identity. For Abe, this understanding is profoundly informed by a “fantasy of balance [or “stability”],” as he referred to earlier, but it is so for a very specific reason. In order for self and other to oppose themselves in their mutual identities, their positionalities must remain fundamentally unchanged. For Abe, however, such constancy or fixity is nowhere to be found at the level of ontology, which rather can only be conceived in terms of the incessant movement of difference. What this conception of oppositionality must presuppose, therefore, is a privileging of logic over being. The self can never be grasped as purely identical to itself since it is an entity that exists in the world, where it is invariably affected by forces that alter it and over which it has little control. It is only possible to posit the self as an entity that remains identical to itself over time at the more restricted and derivative level of logic. Treat’s understanding of the relation between self and other, then—despite his use of the word “ontology”—represents a clear subordination of ontology to logic. How is Abe able to conceive of alterity as something that consistently undermines the self’s desire to regard the world on the basis of the logic of identity? Let us return to his statement concerning the relation between self and other: “Only craftsmen who have lost all creativity unwaveringly consider the reader as a pure other. Real writers should understand that the other is simultaneously themselves [tasha ga dōji ni jibun demo aru].” This term dōji ni, which we have translated as “simultaneously,” can also be read as “at the same time.” These expressions are synonymous, of course, but the latter phrase explicitly draws attention to the presence of time in the thinking of alterity. Abe develops this link between time and alterity in his essay “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō”: “It is true that urbanization has led to greater disassociation among us, but is this fact so sad and disturbing? On the contrary, it is only because of this disassociation that the demand for and imagining of a shared sensibility with the other [tasha to no kyōyū kankaku] first emerges. Although the expression ‘shared sensibility with the other’ sounds very abstract, it means that we have come to possess a shared

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sensibility of the age by shifting away from an age of space to one that is shaped around time.”43 For Abe, the other occupies a strange place that is impossible to grasp strictly on the basis of logic. Logic concerns itself with form, which in its inherent fixity and static nature proves essentially incapable of following the movement of alterity in its ceaseless differing from itself. Here we can begin to see a certain expansion of the notion of alterity, beyond the question of the relation between self and other and approaching the level of a general movement within which this relation can take place. If logic in its derivativeness envisions a realm of formal propriety, minimally structured by the selfsameness of the unit, then the ungrounding of such propriety opens a path through which to think the question of alterity more originally in terms of the differential movement of time. It is this question of time in its relation to man that Abe tries to explain to Keene at one point in Hangekiteki ningen: “Typically, there is a certain narrative structure: an event begins, develops and then ends. . . . But with Waiting for Godot, there are no events in a spatial sense, for it is only time that is revealed. Time here continues infinitely. . . . In order to show this time, we choose narrative form as a means or instrument. That is, there is always a beginning and an end in narrative. All narratives contain this structure. The purpose of this is that time can be revealed through the imposition of structure. Man’s difference from the animals can be found in his consciousness of time—in other words, it is on the basis of time that man understands himself. Specifically, one exists here and now, in the present. This present consists of one instant and is the only tangible reality. . . . Man thus anticipates possibilities to come but that are as yet unknown. He endures the present and carries it over into the future. In order to anticipate this future, he seeks to know events that have already taken place in the past. Man tells himself that since the past acts as the cause of present occurrences, then so too does the present act as the cause of the future. He thus looks at the past in order to see the results that should eventually come but that have not come yet. By placing himself in these temporal relations—as, for example, through narrative—man comes to apprehend the world. In order to endure ‘existence,’ man must scatter himself away from the present [jibun wo genzai kara kakusan sasete], embedding or displacing himself within certain temporal patterns.”44



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This is a rather dense passage, as Abe shifts quickly from the particular topic of theater to the more general and complex question of man’s consciousness of time. From the perspective of the notion of alterity, however, the point seems to be that the present is for man strangely divided from within. It is impossible for man to simply remain in the present since his understanding of the world and his own place within it involves a constant “scattering away” into the different dimensions of past and future. For Abe, man is ultimately nothing outside of this diffuseness. Whether he wishes to or not, man is repeatedly forced to return to the past in order to understand the present. Present knowledge is thus delayed because acquired retrospectively: finding himself in the present, man seeks to learn how things have developed in such a way as to create the reality that he now experiences, and yet he can only do so by tracing this “result” back to a past “cause.” The retrospectivity that characterizes man’s present relation with the past reverses itself in the relation between his present and future. Here man anticipates future possibilities on the basis of their present cause, which is simultaneously the result of things that have happened in the past. Although for man the present instant constitutes “the only tangible reality,” this reality provides no stability whatsoever insofar as man is incessantly being “displaced” from it into the past and future. The constant activity of retrospectivity and anticipation ensures that man never remains wholly present to himself. We must not fail to note in these lines Abe’s emphasis on the fact that man attempts to impose order on this temporal movement through recourse to logic. Through the principle of causality, man tries to in some sense arrest or neutralize the difference of time through his cognitive faculties. Changes in temporal events can begin to be understood and hence, to some degree, predicted by conceiving of the relation between past, present, and future on the basis of cause and effect. In his account of man’s consciousness of time, we should recognize that Abe wishes neither to make light of man’s capacity for causal reasoning nor suggest that this ability can ever succeed in fully insulating him from the element of contingency. On the contrary, Abe’s claim is considerably more modest. In his creation of logical connections, man seeks to organize or impose order on the temporal world. This operation is necessary, but strictly on the condition that man acknowledge that time can never be

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reduced to logic. No matter how powerful, logic must be understood as necessarily derivative vis-à-vis time. In Suna no onna, Abe attempts quite brilliantly to reveal this general movement of time and difference through the figure of sand. As he writes in a famous passage: “He tried thinking of something else. When he closed his eyes, a number of long lines, flowing like sighs, came floating toward him. They were ripples of sand moving over the dunes. The dunes were probably burned onto his retina because he had been gazing steadily at them for some twelve hours. The same sand currents had swallowed up and destroyed flourishing cities and great empires. They called it the ‘sabulation’ of the Roman Empire, if he remembered rightly. And the village of something or other, which Omar Khayyám wrote of, with its tailors and butchers, its bazaars and roadways, entwined like the strands of a fish net. How many years of strife and petitioning had been necessary to change just one strand! The cities of antiquity, whose immobility no one doubted. . . . Yet, after all, they too were unable to resist the law of the flowing 1/8-mm. sands. Sand. . . . Things with form were empty when placed beside sand. The only certain factor was its movement; sand was the antithesis of all form.”45 We are now better able to appreciate the complexity of Abe’s thinking of alterity. Through the metaphor of sand, Abe attempts to conceive of the movement of difference as the alterity of time. The “sands of time,” as it were, are nothing in and of themselves. Their movement eludes the capture of logic because the latter is only capable of conceptualizing movement through the reductive lens of form, which punctuates or arrests flow in its privileging of the unit. For Abe, the unit is the space of propriety, that which in its identity and internal unity declares its difference from other units. From the perspective of propriety, the movement of self-alteration can only be understood as derivative—that is to say, it is what befalls the unit in its original self-presence. This thinking of alterity on the basis of the unit, however, represents for Abe a violent and ultimately futile reduction of time to logic. To think alterity as primary is to recognize its force of disappropriation, what Abe calls here “the antithesis of all form.” However, this is not to suggest any simple celebration of the movement of alterity or time as such, for this movement can only take place in its repeated markings or determinations. Abe is trying to think here the question of relation, which



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ceaselessly disturbs all logical formulations in their attempt to erect fixed borders between identity and difference. According to Abe, form must ultimately yield to the movement of alterity, for nothing that man formulates, either materially or mentally, can, as he writes, “resist the law of the flowing 1/8-mm. sands.” If alterity dissolves form, however, it is never absolutely free from determinations, which function to limit or in some sense give shape to its otherwise all-encompassing movement. Here let us refer to Abe’s earlier remark to Keene about narrative structure, that all narratives require a beginning and end: “The purpose of this is that time can be revealed through the imposition of structure [kōzō wo ataeru koto ni yotte jikan toiu mono ga shimesareru].” In other words, time in its movement of selfalterity is not a free flow; on the contrary, it constantly marks itself, or yields to determination, in order to appear as time. Without this marking, time would never reveal itself in its difference. In the context of Suna no onna, we see Abe articulating this same thought in the language of fiction. As he indicates, sand does not simply flow unimpeded: man constructs cities, empires, and villages “with its tailors and butchers, its bazaars and roadways, entwined like the strands of a fish net.” Despite the irresistible force of alterity, these marks are not nothing, even if they will be ultimately effaced and brought to ruin. Abe seems to point here to a strange relationship between alterity and determination, which he conceives of in the specific terms of time and space, respectively. Spatial structures, whether in the abstract form of narrative or the concrete form of desert cities and villages, function in their markings to disclose time. Time, then, is not to be conceived as an empty vacuum; rather, it is that which appears, each time differently, in the spatiality of its markings or determinations. These markings allow time to appear, but they will always be surpassed by time’s continuing movement, thereby in turn calling forth other markings. Let us return now to Treat. In his reading of Abe’s novel, Treat repeatedly attempts to restrict a kind of general movement of disappropriation that Abe wishes to formulate. Hence the sand is seen as containing what he calls a “telos” because it is “collected by the villagers and sold to construction companies.”46 As we can see from the passage above, however, the movement of the sand can have no such teleological orientation because it always exceeds any and all ­determinations.

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However sand may be determined by man—here, as a product to be collected and sold—it is in its incessant movement of alterity always other to those determinations. That is to say, according to Abe, alterity (sand, time) repeatedly gives itself to the markings of determination in the very movement through which it exceeds them. Here we are better able to measure the vast distance that separates the movement of alterity from its determination as oppositional. For Treat, the self and the Other are to be regarded as oppositional because the Other is simply another self. The relation between self and other is thus thought on the basis of identity: the struggle between them can only take place because each is held to be identical to itself. In Abe’s understanding of alterity, however, identity can only be conceived as a derivative effect of a more general movement that ceaselessly disappropriates and exceeds it, exposing it to a difference that it seeks to disavow. T H E D E SIR E F O R N AT IO N AL IDE NT I T Y

What are the consequences for such a disavowal of alterity? Let me insist once again that what is at stake here is not limited to the particular object “Abe Kōbō” or “Suna no onna.” The inability to understand the notion of alterity is ultimately of far less significance than the desire to specifically determine it on the basis of oppositionality. In the institutional context of Japan studies, the danger is that the logic of identity, which grounds the operation in which self (identity) and other (difference) are posited as oppositional, comes to shape one’s determinations of social phenomena. The issue is thus not merely that Treat fails to comprehend that the relation between the protagonist and the woman in Abe’s work cannot be conceived as oppositional; rather, much more broadly, it is that Treat allows this same framework of an oppositional self and other to govern his analyses of such discursive categories as nationality, culture, and race. For the fact is that these categories that shape modern social reality are, of necessity, entirely grounded in the logic of identity and difference. Without a critical engagement with this logic, one can easily fall prey to a discourse in which the national, cultural, and racial self is simply opposed to those who are determined to be the national, cultural, and racial other. As we have seen, Abe’s active problematization of these concepts at an abstract or general level



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takes place alongside a similar elaboration of these issues at the level of fiction. In this way, we can begin to appreciate the profound interconnections between the spheres of art, politics, history, and thought that characterize his work. What this interconnectedness also teaches us, however, is that certain basic decisions made at the level of methodology inform not only one’s reading of literary texts; they also give form to our thinking of the social. Suspicions thus arise when Treat makes references in his essay on Abe to such things as “Oriental hermeneutics” and a “surplus of inscrutable cultural practices.”47 Moreover, the otherwise formal distinction between self and other as oppositional is given concrete, historical form in the binary posited between East and West: “Intellectual parallels between East and West risk obscuring the tumultuous historical circumstances amid which Abe Kōbō grew to adulthood.”48 Here Abe must be regarded as belonging specifically to the East: “Abe’s world, no less than that of any Western intellectual inclined to draw similar conclusions, is one in which values are ridiculed by history.”49 It is unclear why, particularly given his sustained critique of this notion of belonging, Abe is determined in this manner; nor is it clear precisely which individuals or nation-states are allowed to be recognized as Western and which, to use Treat’s word, “Oriental.” As goes without saying, there is nothing natural or necessary about these categories: we may receive them, as Abe reminds us, as “recipients” of a “tradition” that preexists us, but this tradition requires, at each moment, our participation at the level of decision, without which the tradition must perish. Treat provides an excellent illustration of this process concerning the question of Abe’s belonging within the tradition of Japanese literature. As we have already seen, Abe sought quite strategically to reinscribe or displace this particular form of belonging. As Keene writes, “Abe seems to have claimed that he didn’t learn a single thing from Japanese literature,” a gesture of defiance on Abe’s part that Keene immediately attempts to neutralize by reminding him, in effect, “But you are Japanese!” Treat, all too predictably, follows Keene in this same operation of national-cultural inscription, noting Abe’s resistance only to casually dismiss it: “When asked which Japanese writers had influenced him, Abe tersely replied none, thought that can hardly be true.”50 As we have demonstrated, Abe understood that such national-cultural

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inscription was a form of ideology. One is not Japanese as an objective fact; on the contrary, one becomes Japanese as a derivative effect, a kind of retroactivity or retrospectivity, that requires the determinative marks of inscription. Such markings are profoundly ideological, they relate to other inscriptions that are to be found in the discourses of nationality, citizenship, ethnicity, and race. Hence when Treat concludes his essay on Abe with the remark that “Abe Kōbō [was] a Japanese writer very much at home anywhere ideologies totter and crumble into absurdity,”51 we can only wonder at the forces that prevent Treat from recognizing that his decision to reinscribe Abe as a “Japanese writer” is clear evidence that “ideologies,” far from tottering and crumbling, are in fact thriving quite vigorously. Treat marks Abe in this manner because he believes, as Keene does, that the entity “Japan” objectively exists, which is to say that its existence does not fundamentally depend upon the inscriptive acts of subjects. Subjective inscriptions can of course take place, but strictly on the condition that the object objectively exist prior to them. In this way, an enormous gulf appears between the act of “writing on Japan” (which is held to be possible) and that of “writing Japan” (which is seen as impossible and absurd). If “Japan” exists as a fact, as a real object, then the same can by extension be said of those elements or parts that are determined to belong to it, as for example “Japanese people” and such things as “Japanese culture” and “Japanese tradition.” It is important to emphasize this point, as Treat maintains that there are certain nations whose existence in the world is not factual. Such nations are, as he terms them, fictional: “It was in that interim that Abe witnessed the collapse of Manshūkoku: the near instantaneous evaporation of a political fiction, the descent into genuine anarchy of a ‘nation.’”52 Here we can see how easily what passes as responsible political critique is in fact deeply conservative. By determining one particular nation as fictional, as artificially created for ideological purposes, one allows the discursive category of the nation itself to go unexamined. We can in fact see this desire for national particularism and proprietary throughout Treat’s work, as we can indeed in Keene’s work as well. But one would be mistaken, as I mentioned earlier, to see this desire operating merely at the psychological level of individuals. On the contrary, if such desire is capable of sustaining the field of Japanese literary studies



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in its remarking of “Japan” qua “Japan,” then its roots must be sought at the deeper, more elusive levels of conceptuality and institutionality. There can be no question that Manshūkoku was a political fiction, but it is impossible to find any other nation in the world that might be understood as less fictional. As Abe understood, all nations are created artificially for self-interested reasons of ideology. The distinction between “fact” and “fiction” when one is dealing with political entities that have no grounding whatsoever in nature appears to make little sense. However, the problem is that Treat believes that it is possible to distinguish between Manshūkoku as fictional and, to cite an example that he uses elsewhere (and to which we shall return), the “Orient” as factual. Certain cultures and nation-states have the status of objective fact because they exist as a unit, that is, an instance of internal unity and self-presence. Such thought eventually leads Treat, in his analysis of atomic bomb literature, to put forward a defense of the notion of totality. As he writes, “Adorno seemed to have predicted that a literature of fractions rather than wholes was inevitable when he wrote, ‘Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience.’” Treat’s refutation of Adorno in the name of the legitimacy of totalities follows directly after this passage: “But in fact there are few, if indeed any, examples in either Holocaust or atomic-bomb literature unproblematically termed ‘postmodern.’ While one is often struck in reading personal testimonies of hibakusha by the personal, restricted, but highly detailed and intensive experiences of each survivor, and while each is indeed independent of each other and never takes into account the immense scale of the complete disaster, one never doubts that there is, somewhere if not within the sight of any one man or woman, an entire ‘Hiroshima’ or ‘Nagasaki’ that resists division into the pieces of any postmodern pastiche.”53 It is difficult to read passages like this as anything other than expressions of Treat’s own desire. As with the earlier misreading of Sartre, there appears to be no obvious connection between the remark from Adorno that he quotes and the notion of an indivisible whole—what he also calls “totality,” or zentaisei—that he defends. The concept of totality is traditionally taken to signify an entity that is absolutely closed,

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that rejects all alterity or difference from itself through the exclusion of these latter outside of its own proper borders. An intellectual defense of such pure selfsameness and eradication of difference might appear slightly odd in this context, but the logic of identity that grounds the notion of totality also fully informs Treat’s earlier determination of alterity as oppositionality. The operation of totalization must begin by distinguishing an inside from an outside, and such thought is entirely consistent with conceptualizing the relation between self and other in terms of mutual exteriority. As might be expected, this notion of totality was vigorously denounced by Abe. As he declares in his essay “Hetero no kōzō” [Structure of Heterogeneity], “Even if heterogeneity causes symptoms of the psychological allergy that is egoism or strikes one with the sickness of rejection that is solitude, such diseases of the individual actually preserve the health of the group. Or rather, to even regard these things as disease may well be signs of a prejudice on the part of homogeneity. Such disturbances are not merely necessary; they might in fact be the true form of a society for which a future is promised. The dangers and difficulties of the present day are not to be found in the ever increasing aspects of heterogeneity, but rather in the homogenizing impulse, which fails to recognize heterogeneity in its headlong rush to fuse with the totality [zentai].”54 It is no accident that Treat encounters certain difficulties in justifying the notion of totality on the basis of the evidence with which he is actually presented. The hibakusha texts, he is forced to admit, are “restricted” in their scope and “indeed independent of each other.” Each text is written from an individual, and thus necessarily limited, perspective, and so “never takes into account the immense scale of the complete disaster.” It would seem that the nature of these works would therefore argue directly against Treat’s claim that they be regarded as an indivisible whole. Despite these various obstacles, however, he assures us that “one never doubts that there is, somewhere if not within the sight of any one man or woman, an entire ‘Hiroshima’ or ‘Nagasaki’ that resists division.” This final clause is especially intriguing and merits close attention, for it provides a revealing glimpse of the desire at stake in Treat’s project of national-cultural identity. The clause can be remarked for three reasons.



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Firstly, the identity of this “one” who “never doubts” is also never specified. Treat cannot be referring to the reader, for it is impossible to know in advance whether or not some readers will (particularly in light of the absence of any evidence to the contrary) actually doubt the existence of such totality. It is of course possible that this “one” refers to Treat himself, but then the putatively objective existence of totalities would be reduced to a matter of mere subjective opinion, with the result that much of the rhetorical force of the argument would appear to be lost. This point is not minor, for it seems that Treat wishes to posit the existence of an object that he is nevertheless forced to admit has no objective existence. Hence the element of subjective desire comes into play but must immediately be disavowed through appeal to a notion of objectivity. In other words, I posit that X exists objectively, but when I am forced to admit that X in fact doesn’t exist objectively, I then attempt to counter these unfortunate circumstances by subjectively willing X into existence. In this sense, Treat’s subjective desire for an objective totality that appears in these lines must be compared to a later passage in the book when he similarly attempts to subjectively will totality into existence. Here, significantly, the form of objective description typically articulated in the present tense gives way to the desire of subjective prescription in the future tense: “Thus a Japanese nuclear criticism will be a criticism that takes Hiroshima as both its start and finish; it is a criticism that takes the practice of Hiroshima as also the first draft of the theory of nuclear war. It is a criticism that will seek a totality in the nothingness of that bombing.”55 We are in fact very close in these passages to the example that Freud typically cites in formulating his theory of disavowal. For Freud, the male child perceives the absence of an objectively existing penis in the female; this perception frightens him because he can only conceive of this absence as the result of castration, therefore suggesting the possibility that he himself might one day be castrated. It is because of the absence of the objective penis that he must, at the level of fantasy, endow her with a subjective penis. In similar fashion, Treat here implicitly recognizes that totalities do not exist. In a fascinating transition, his failure to discover them in any spatial region leads to his search for them in a temporal realm. As he argues, such totalities must be “somewhere if not within the sight of any one man or woman,” but that “somewhere” cannot, regrettably, be located anywhere. Treat is thus forced to

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posit their existence as situated in the future, for this is the task that he subjectively assigns Japanese nuclear criticism, which, he insists, “will seek a totality in the nothingness of that bombing.” In other words, because the “somewhere” is in fact nowhere, it must be reconceived along the lines of sometime, a vague coming of the future. Since the future is properly unknowable, however, the statement that Japanese nuclear criticism will seek such totality must be understood as little more than a subjective expression of one’s desire that it do so. Secondly, the reason that Treat experiences such difficulty finding these totalities is that their existence can be discovered only at the level of logic. In the empirical world, no totality has ever existed in the past or will ever come to exist in the future. In fact, Abe suggests in his critique of the notion of totality why this is so. For Abe, the “structure of heterogeneity” must be “the true form of a society for which a future is promised.” This link between heterogeneity and the future is revealing, particularly in light of Abe’s attempt to think time as a movement of disappropriation. For a totality to be itself, it must be capable of repeating itself qua the same totality over time. What is disclosed here is an essential relationship between all entities and the future, for identity is only promised in a moment to come in which the determination of any entity can be identically repeated or reconfirmed. This is why the future in its promise of identity exposes all entities to the element of contingency, since there can be no guarantee that this promise will not be somehow betrayed or left unfulfilled. In order to be itself, a totality must open itself to the possibility that difference (or alterity, heterogeneity) may at any moment intervene in the course of its repetition. Abe’s point, then, is not simply that totalities should not exist, that they are a political evil to be vanquished. Rather, for structural reasons—the constant opening and closing of borders that marks an entity’s passage through time— totalities are, rigorously speaking, impossible. The desire for totality is inseparable from the desire for purity, a purity that can be achieved only through the violent exclusion of difference. As Abe suggests in his historical example of one of the most destructive forms such desire has taken, the logic of purity is ultimately self-defeating because it can only end in the elimination of the very self that desires it: “Nazi race theory that appealed to an ethnicity’s [minzoku] pure blood was ultimately nothing more than a theory of self-destruction by one’s own hand.”56



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And thirdly, in the clause “one never doubts that there is, somewhere if not within the sight of any one man or woman, an entire ‘­Hiroshima’ or ‘Nagasaki’ that resists division,” it is important to note exactly which totalities interest Treat. This particular choice of totalities is no accident. Here Treat appears unaware of the contradiction that he has created when he refers to “an entire ‘Hiroshima’ or ‘Nagasaki’ that resists division.” In other words, if that which has the capacity to resist division can only be one entity in its indivisible oneness or integrity, aren’t the two entities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by definition already divided? This pattern should be familiar to us by now, as it is yet another example of Treat’s capacity for disavowal, a disavowal that discloses the force of a subjective desire. If Treat were to say either that “an entire ‘Hiroshima’” or “an entire ‘Nagasaki’” resists division, then that would be problematic enough given the presence of difference or alterity that inheres within each, dividing each from itself in such a way as to reveal that what appears to be one is in fact always multiple, diffuse. But Treat presents us with two entities, one “entire ‘Hiroshima’” and one “entire ‘Nagasaki,’” only to then tell us that these two are in fact one, magically undivided from itself. What is this mystical force that is able to unite Hiroshima and Nagasaki together in the form of a totality? The answer, of course, is the ­nation. For Treat, these two cities function as a privileged synecdoche for the whole that is the nation-state Japan. Evidence of this can be found on nearly every page of Writing Ground Zero. From the very opening pages of the book, for instance, we are told that “all Japanese were potential hibakusha since any city—as long as it was a Japanese city—could have been targeted.”57 Here we can confirm that the logic of totality goes far beyond any narrow thematization of the concept of totality. As soon as I say “all,” I am speaking about a totality. But the implications of this logic exceed even this. When I say “I,” I am referring to the totality of all other instances in the past when I have been determined (either by myself or by others) as “I.” It is this temporal understanding of the relation between identity and difference that Treat utterly fails to grasp. When I speak about “Japan,” I am, whether I wish to or not, in fact positing this entity as a totality: it is that present entity that contains within itself all of its past historical inscriptions. It is essential that one understand this general point about the notion of totality so as to appreciate the immense difficulties involved in

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resisting it. But it is also important to carefully distinguish between different types of totalities as they have appeared within history. Above all, Treat’s commitment is to the totality of the nation-state. By writing about the particular cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he informs us, he is actually writing about “all Japanese.” It is vital that this framework be established from the very beginning of the work so that the reader understand that the object of inquiry is in fact Japan itself. All the other Japanese phenomena that will proceed to be discussed in the book’s nearly 500 pages—the totality of Japanese people, places, and things—can thus be very easily inserted or incorporated into this comprehensive category. It is at this opening point of the text where the frame appears at its most vulnerable, where it is most exposed to that which exceeds it.58 As Abe repeatedly shows throughout his work, the border is the site of violence, for it is there where decisions must be made regarding what is to be determined as inside (that which is proper [koyū]) and what is to be determined as outside (the improper and thus excluded). No preexisting law or principle exists that can govern this decision, which therefore has to be made in all contingency. In Treat’s text, then, it is imperative that the terms of relationality be set forth and rigorously distinguished from one another at the start. Here the determination of self and other as oppositional reveals its true value. If the object of inquiry is immediately nationalized as “all Japanese,” then the issue becomes how the subject can be determined along these same lines. Treat’s answer is unambiguous. As he tells us from the opening pages of the book, “My own standpoint is safer still. . . . I am not a Japanese.” “I write cautiously and uncomfortably as an American.”59 One must not overlook the subtle operation that is taking place in these lines, for it illustrates very clearly how the nation-state as totality appropriates its parts to itself in the classical mode of the whole-part relation. On the Japan side—the side of the Other, that which opposes Treat in its status as object—can be found the particular entities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This relation between the totality Japan and the particular cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is at first excessively abstract, in need of mediation. A form of mediation must be found to ensure that phenomena in their multiplicity do not exist merely as diffuse and unanchored. They must be recognized as parts whose identity

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is given them only insofar as they belong to the whole. This is precisely what Treat attempts to achieve in the line that “all Japanese were potential hibakusha since any city—as long as it was a Japanese city— could have been targeted.” Exactly the same sublation of the individual as part within the national whole can be found on the side of the subject, i.e., the self that opposes the Other that is Japan in its appropriation of “all Japanese.” This is what Treat accomplishes in his national determination of himself: “I write cautiously and uncomfortably as an American.” Exactly as with Treat’s primal scene of struggle between the man and woman in Abe’s Suna no onna, the determination of self and other in the specific terms of the nation-state establishes the basic methodological framework through which a variety of objects can be analyzed. However, it is essential to keep in mind that the historical discourse of the nation-state does not exist in isolated form but is rather complexly interwoven with a host of other discourses, as for example those of culture and race. This is why an uncritical nationalism, even when it pretends otherwise, so frequently appears together with the ideologies of culturalism (or cultural essentialism) and racism. Before concluding this chapter with an examination of the more flagrant instantiations of culturalism and racism in Treat’s work, let us first turn to Abe so as to understand how these same issues can be approached more critically. “T H EY AR E D IF F E R E N T ”: C U LT U R AL ISM , O R IE N TAL ISM , RA CIS M

The nation-state, as we have observed, was for Abe a historical manifestation of a logic of totality and appropriation from which he sought to “disappear.” This does not mean that he believed that all national citizens should simply transgress the borders of their own nation-state and flee abroad, since, as he writes in the 1968 essay “Itan no pasupōto” [Passport of Heresy], “In the twentieth century . . . frontiers no longer exist. With the exception of the South Pole, the earth has everywhere come to be divided by fixed states, and beyond their borders lay only other, similarly fixed states.”60 This is a valuable insight: the system of nation-states that has been created as a defining feature of modernity is a system of large-scale homogenization. Given that global phenomena

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in all their vast difference and multiplicity have been organized on the basis of the totalizing unit of the nation-state, the beyond of the proper region of the self, as accessible through clearly identifiable boundaries, is marked less by chaos and impropriety than merely other forms of propriety, difference that has already been filtered through the screen of identity. Each nation-state thus possesses its own national traditions and cultures in addition to, we might add, institutional forms of knowledge about other national traditions and cultures that are collectively grouped under the category of area studies. In this sense, Abe recognized quite clearly the various levels of ideological mediation required for the continued smooth functioning of the entire nation-state apparatus, connecting individuals with a diverse range of traditions, cultural forms, and institutional bodies of knowledge. Resistance to this comprehensive system of nation-states, each consolidated by layers of internal differentiation and mediation, cannot be undertaken without first acknowledging the enormous difficulties involved. Various strategies are required, but all of these share at some level an essential distrust of any form of identification with the whole. This is precisely the same mechanism of identification that lures one into saying, as we saw for example with Treat, “I am an American.”61 With considerable prescience, Abe anticipates this kind of reaction on the part of those who experience what he called (in a passage cited earlier) “the homogenizing impulse, which fails to recognize heterogeneity in its headlong rush to fuse with the totality.” The desire to fuse with the national totality finds concrete expression in individuals determining themselves and others strictly as parts of this whole. In his 1957 essay “Amerika hakken” [Discovering America], Abe describes such efforts by “American” individuals to identify (or “fuse”) with the “American” whole as part of a “will to create a unified ­America.” Here he quotes the eighteenth-century writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur: “He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.” Abe’s conclusion regarding American national identity follows directly from this quotation: “Americans don’t originally exist, they are created. And the people themselves must subjectively participate in that creation.”62



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Abe points here to an understanding of subjective identity that has tremendous critical implications for the way one typically conceives of the affiliative relation between individuals and political collectivities. Neither Keene nor Treat truly grasps the significance of Abe’s attack on the notion of belonging, no doubt because of their own profound commitment to the project of national identity. To recall, Keene describes Abe’s “hatred of any form of nationalism or of the belief that one ‘belonged’ to a nation.” Treat repeats this nearly verbatim: Abe “learned to distrust the ideology implied in the notion of people ‘belonging,’ essentially, to a particular place.”63 By reductively determining such a critique of belonging at the level of the object, as something limited to the particular ideas of a particular individual (whose own particular biographical circumstances are viewed as explaining the reasons why the thought first appeared), rather than at the more general level of method, scholars of national literature successfully insulate themselves from the critique’s unsettling implications. The notion of belonging presupposes an understanding of social reality as fixed or already determined, what Abe would describe as an excessively spatial and insufficiently temporal conception of the world. In this view, subjects come to objects whose constitution takes place prior to that encounter itself. When I think of my relation with the nation-state, for example, I conceive of its existence as entirely separate from my own. The subject’s relation with the objectively existing nation-state is thus incidental: it can take place or not, for the latter is not seen to be essentially dependent upon the former. Abe’s notion of “subjective participation” sets out to attack this kind of understanding for its political irresponsibility. It is irresponsible, precisely, because the subject’s response to the object is seen as inessential to its existence. For Abe, however, the nation-state qua object requires that its objectivity be constituted and reconstituted over and again ad infinitum. Insofar as it exists within time, this object, as with all objects, demands at each moment to be reinscribed. In other words, it must be structurally open in order to be itself, that is, in order to be marked by subjects as identical to itself over time. This is why Abe can claim that “Americans don’t originally exist, they are created.” The larger point is that nothing— and certainly no nation-states or national citizens—can be said to simply exist in and of itself, in its own proper identity, without also being

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c­ reated. At the fundamental level at which the objectivity of objects is constituted, as for example the object “America” or “Americans,” existence and creation are rigorously inseparable. Disavowing this process, pretending to speak about certain ­national-cultural objects as if their existence somehow preceded and was thus essentially unrelated to the acts of his own subjective inscriptions, Treat comes to speak to “us” about “them.” We already know that they are “the Other,” those who exist in opposition to ourselves. What we are, they are not, just as what they are, we are not. This is the closed, purely timeless logic that informs what he calls in the Abe essay the “circular battle” between self and Other. We have already observed how Treat determines as oppositional the relation between the geo­ political entities East (the Orient) and West. In his self-determination as an “American” whose existence is logically opposed to the Other that is “all Japanese,” the same type of relationship predictably emerges. The difficulty that Treat encounters with such positing of oppositionality, however, is that ontological phenomena never completely submit to this operation, for in their difference and alterity they time and again escape such framing. This essential elusiveness of entities, their uncanny ability to exceed any reduction of their being to logic, requires that they be continually reinscribed to fit the parameters of desire. This desperation to ensure that the object behaves in precisely the manner the epistemological subject demands of it is not difficult to understand, for what is at stake here is ultimately the integrity of the subject himself. If Treat as American and Westerner posits his existence as logically opposed to all things that he determines to be Japanese and Oriental, then Treat as subject can confirm his own identity as that which the Japanese and Oriental Other are not. Here the desire for objectivization shows its true nature, for the subject is forced to continually effectuate the transformation from alterity to object in order to confirm that he is, in his own proper identity, that which the object is not. When Treat thus writes that “My own standpoint is safer still” because “I am not a Japanese,” he reveals more than he knows. In this sense, the subject’s desire to posit the oppositional object is inseparable from his own desire to inscribe for himself a place of safety. All of this can be amply confirmed through a reading of Writing Degree Zero. For example, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Na-



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gasaki resulted in the deaths of many individuals, both Japanese and non-­Japanese. In her book Hiroshima Traces, Lisa Yoneyama provides statistics regarding the Korean victims: “Among the approximately 20,000 Koreans who were victims of the Nagasaki bombing, 10,000 were killed” while “records indicate that among the 350,000 to 400,000 in Hiroshima assaulted by the atomic bomb or exposed to lethal postexplosion radiation, at least 45,000 were Korean. . . . Until 1990, the speeches of political elites at the annual municipal Peace Memorial Ceremony on 6 August never referred to the 20,000 to 30,000 (and perhaps even more) Korean atom bomb dead, who comprised between 10 and 20 percent of those killed immediately in the Hiroshima bombing.”64 In the many plot summaries that fill the pages of Writing Degree Zero, Treat also describes examples of atomic bomb literature that contain non-Japanese characters. Indeed, at certain points these works in their alterity appear to slip entirely away from the frame of Japan and the Japanese. As Treat relates, for instance: “Iida Momo in his An American Hero has an American character note that ‘the dead aren’t only Japanese. Chinese, Koreans, Indonesians, Burmese, Thais, White Russians and our own guys, white and black.’”65 However, it is precisely at the moment when phenomena begin to reveal the essential arbitrariness of these national categories that the latter must come to reassert their authority all the more violently. What this apparently illogical disjunction in identity that emerges in the fact that the deaths of non-Japanese individuals somehow took place within the nation-state Japan might have revealed to Treat is, as he rightly notes in his essay on Abe, “the essentially arbitrary nature of how we organize ourselves and the world around us.”66 Unfortunately, this is not the lesson that Treat actually takes from this collapse in logic. Directly to the contrary, the discordance he encounters between the alterity of phenomena and the logical forms of identity that he mobilizes results in an increased violence on the part of the latter. Hence, even though atomic bomb literature reveals itself to be something other than fully Japanese, Treat asserts that “nearly all these writers have been Japanese, and their works directed towards a Japanese audience. Atomic-bomb literature . . . remains a Japanese preserve.”67 A similar violence can be seen later in the book when Treat, in the course of launching what he very much wants his readers to believe

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is an “attack” against deconstruction, attempts to set forth a space of pure, unadulterated Japaneseness. As he writes, “While one would find ready agreement among Japanese critics that indeed ‘nuclear war’ and even ‘Hiroshima’ and ‘Nagasaki’ do constitute discursive formations, and thus to one degree or another are governed by the words with which they are spoken, they would add that they are also effectively real, i.e., traceable to and identifiable with referents not only prior to language but clearly at the root of language’s noted failure to signify what the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are believed to mean. What is undermined in Japanese literary theory argued amid a critical awareness of post-Hiroshima culture, what constitutes a native Japanese ‘nuclear criticism,’ is a disbelief in the integrity of the sign because it is the signifier, not the referent, that now seems unworkably remote. Reality remains unscathed, remains ‘real’ and is even reaffirmed. Instead, it is language, so often taken in the modern West as the only proper ground for knowledge, which becomes elusive, shadowy, untrustworthy: un-real.”68 We encounter here yet another disavowal, although the level of violence has now clearly escalated. The subject knows that this “Japanese” tragedy did not include Japanese alone, for documents attest that many non-Japanese suffered as well. The objective existence of these latter is acknowledged, but this same existence puts undue pressure on the logical framing device that posits the entity “Japan” as that site which contains “the Japanese.” Subjectively, therefore, this non-Japanese presence must be erased or at least reduced to such a degree that the logical framework remain undisturbed. Through the creation of such discursive categories of absolute Japaneseness as “Japanese preserve” and “native Japanese,” the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, insofar as they represent the possible fate of “all Japanese,” can be now retrospectively presented in all their national propriety as purified of any foreign elements. Foreigners were present, it is true, but this presence must be recognized as merely incidental to what will be seen as essentially a Japanese event. That is to say, while it may be the case that many Korean individuals died in these Japanese cities located within the totality of the nation-state Japan, one never doubts that this historical reality truly belongs to Japan. Throughout its nearly 500 pages, Writing Ground Zero rarely mentions non-Japanese hibakusha at all. This is not an empirical accident,



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a mere oversight that could be easily corrected. This exclusion of non-­Japanese individuals follows as a direct result from certain methodological decisions Treat makes at the very outset of his research concerning the status of identity and difference. In their mutual oppositionality, the self and “the Other” must be kept pure not only of one another, but also of all other peripheral elements. The dialogue here is strictly between America and Japan, Treat informs us. From the perspective of the subject, the oppositional Other must remain unmarked by any corrupting or contaminating traces of other others, for otherwise the logical force of the concept of oppositionality begins to break down and the “­circular battle” waged by the self and other gradually loses all meaning. As Abe reminds us concerning the notion of purity when referring to Nazi race theory, the self itself risks being eradicated in this immaculate sweep of logic. And so it is that not only, for example, Koreans, Chinese, and Taiwanese must be excluded from the fixed epistemological coordinates of America (self) vs. Japan (other); Japanese citizens themselves must submit to the test of determining exactly who is and who is not authentically Japanese, or what Treat here calls “a full Japanese.” This is the fate of the writer Hayashi Kyōko: “As a repatriated Japanese who was not quite a full Japanese culturally . . . her sense of alienation is one that has long remained with her.”69 Treat cogently illustrates how an uncritical philosophy of epistemological realism so easily links up with a politics of nationalism. The subject’s knowledge of objects is somehow acquired independently of the subject himself, who merely represents in all transparency the object as it objectively is. This is what is entailed in his understanding of objective reality, which “remains unscathed, remains ‘real’ and is even reaffirmed,” as he writes above. The main argument Treat makes against “Western” deconstruction, as he calls it, is that objective reality exists, it can be known by the subject, but that access to it in all the purity of its as-suchness can only take place by transcending what is condemned as derivative linguistic determinations. For Treat, the privileged epistemological subject who grasps this secret is an entity that he calls “Japanese critics,” but it is unclear what he means by this term since he elsewhere criticizes certain Japanese critics—whom he calls “Japanese poststructuralists”—for committing the very same error made by the practitioners of “Western” deconstruction.70 While it

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seems important not to dismiss the possibility that “Japanese poststructuralists” are not “full Japanese culturally,” the real issue is that Treat believes that the various distinctions he makes—Western vs. Japanese, self vs. other, Japanese vs. non-Japanese, language (signifier) vs. objective reality (referent), fully cultural vs. partially cultural—come not from himself as epistemological subject but purely from objects as they objectively are. He merely reports what he sees. Reality, Treat emphasizes, is “unscathed.” This appeal to a pristine objectivity prevents Treat from recognizing that the position of epistemological realism falls into a very classical trap, and that is this: if my knowledge of objects in their pure objectivity is free from my own subjective markings, then is there absolutely no possibility that these latter might be smuggled into the epistemological operation under the guise of the object? For example, when a racist claims that “Blacks are really X,” or when anti-Semites claim that “Jews are really Y,” are we to take these statements as representations that merely reflect those epistemological objects as they originally are, prior to the subject’s linguistic intervention? For Treat, the determination of a Japanese individual or thing qua Japanese takes place at the originary level of the object. Because this determination precedes inscription by the subject, it must also be free from the taint of ideology. This is of course why Treat, in direct contrast to Abe, regards attributions of national-cultural belonging as a neutral, value-free operation. What then of the Orient, understood, following Treat, as the site of “all Orientals”? In Great Mirrors Shattered, Treat announces that he has finally put the vexing question of Orientalism to rest through his discovery, contra Said, that the difference of the Orient is an objective fact: “My experience, and that of at least a few of my fellow travelers, teaches lessons other than those implied in Said’s history of us. . . . But we can take away an alternative reading if we think that the Orient is in fact that different, if sexuality assumes surprising forms in places other than our own, and if we are mistaken in thinking that a Barthes or a Burton is only projecting his Western desires rather than having them quite matter-of-factly satisfied.”71 Said failed to understand, in other words, that the question of Orientalism is entirely unrelated to ideology, for knowledge of the Orient is acquired directly from the Orient itself. Fortunately, Ruth Benedict grasped this obvious point and so must



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be understood as providing an important corrective to Said, shifting attention properly back from Orientalists to the Orient and Orientals themselves: “But my point is: it may well be our present enthusiasm for rectifying the Western penchant for construing non-Western cultures as exotically ‘other,’ and doing so for purely Western imperatives, that makes us lose sight of Benedict’s anthropological insight, inspired by its own local (even personal) imperative, that they are different.”72 Having determined that the Orient objectively exists, Treat then proceeds to identify certain objective features of the Oriental nation-state Japan. First of all, it is “a country where shyness is a virtue, not a condition.”73 It is a place whose citizens, insofar as they are authentically Japanese, do not mix with “foreigners” at flea markets: “The exceptions are the Japanese who come to shop at the market. Their Japanese is perfectly fluent, but other than that they never seem really very Japanese. . . . The only real difference between them and us foreigners is that they, as a rule, are still Japanese enough to have retained some modicum of good taste.”74 It is a place that, from the perspective of the United States, must be seen as the “most different of nations.”75 This most different of nations universally celebrates the quality of childishness: “And I sometimes think that my interest in Japan can also be explained by the childishness it celebrates as a nation. Daniel: my very own Peter Pan. My very own Japan.”76 It is also a nation steeped in the long tradition of voyeurism: “There is an old word in the Japanese language: kaimami, a view stolen through a screen. Ancient court aristocrats did it, and so did young medieval lovers. Today, however, it is a nation of voyeurs who are at work. Japan itself watches the sweep of history.”77 It is a nation filled with people who, while insisting on their uniqueness, secretly desire to become American, to in other words become like Treat himself: “Why should they not think themselves different, apart, immune? Why should they not believe themselves unique—yet for that same reason, remain enslaved to an incessant curiosity about the rest of us? A desire to be us?”78 So too is it a nation filled with sexual bottoms: “But Hank was a bottom in a country full of them.”79 Just as it is, finally, a nation of hypochondriacs: “I live in Japan, a nation that obsesses over its ailments. The Japanese language has a dozen words for hemorrhoids.”80 Some of these observations will perhaps seem amusing, but one must keep in mind that the same methodological framework that

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­determines the Japanese people as shy, childish voyeurs in Great Mirrors Shattered is also responsible for eliminating the presence of Koreans and other non-Japanese from the national narrative of atomic bomb history in Writing Ground Zero. As soon as the discursive category of Japan and the Japanese is uncritically accepted, then nationalism, cultural essentialism, and Orientalism predictably follow in short order. But let us not avoid seeing this framework as a template for racism as well, for “the Other” who exists in opposition to the self is not only coded nationally and culturally, but also racially. In accordance with the logic of simple negation that marks the relation between self and other, the latter’s racial determination as non-white is inversely confirmed by the former’s need—a need bordering on compulsion—to stress the “fact” of his own whiteness. Hence the following: at a club in the Philippines, “the theme was white. White feathers, white balloons, white curtains. And Glen and I were, among the Mestizos, the Chinese, and the Filipinos, the Kanos. The White People.”81 At a hospital in Tokyo: “Opening the door, it is my turn and not the doctor’s to be surprised: a Japanese man swivels around in his chair to welcome me. Isn’t this an international hospital, I say to myself. Shouldn’t I be seeing a white doctor? As I realize with shame how ridiculous my assumption is.”82 At a public gym in Tokyo: “Ben used to go swimming there until the stares at his very un-Japanese body got the better of him. When I go, in the early afternoon, it is nearly always empty except for a few mothers accompanying their children to swimming lessons. And for the other white men who, like me, congregate in the weight room.”83 These, then, are some of the experiences of “being an American in Japan, a white man in Asia,” where the white American is constantly reminded of the fact of his racial difference, of “My young American body, skinny and smooth, long and white.”84 Great Mirrors Shattered raises important questions about sexuality and sexuality-based prejudice, but the methodological decision to view others not in their alterity but in the reductive terms of logical opposition condemns the work to repeat the various pitfalls found throughout the “Woman in the Dunes” essay and Writing Ground Zero. Regarding the category of race, for example, Treat at one point refers to the difficulties he encounters in his relationship with his black lover Sarah in the form of a logical dichotomy or “binary”: “We used to think that race was the ultimate test of our loving resolve, but now we have



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other binaries dividing us.”85 This is a typical mistake found in racist discourse: the notion of race is regarded ahistorically as an objective category that claims to neutrally represent the preexisting fact of racial difference. Following Treat’s commitment to epistemological realism, analysis of race does not take the form of an ideological inquiry into the self-interested reasons why it became important at a certain moment in history to create the discursive categories of whiteness, blackness, and Asianness (yellowness), etc. In this account, all issues of ideology, insofar as they pertain to the subject’s linguistic determinations, are believed to exist outside of the process by which the white, black, or yellow object of knowledge gives itself in its immediacy or pure objectivity to the epistemological subject, whose task it is merely to record the content of these preexisting differences. We are a long way from Abe’s understanding of subjective identity as a process of incessant creation, requiring at each moment in time the participation of individuals in the constitution of objects, whose objectivity is therefore always corrupted, neither purely subject nor object. To recall Abe’s determination of American national identity: “Americans don’t originally exist, they are created. And the people themselves must subjectively participate in that creation.” Subjective identity, Abe suggests, is a structurally open process, for it always awaits new and other determinations within each spatiotemporal context in which it emerges, each time slightly differently than the last. As a result, the apparently fixed and objective discursive categories of whiteness, blackness, and yellowness, etc. are constantly being disturbed, their balance and stability upset in such a way as to threaten our various assumptions about social reality. Just as Abe seeks to intervene in the notion of national identity, so too does he attempt to disrupt notions of racial identity as well. Keene and Treat, for instance, assure us that Abe was a “Japanese” writer. This notion of Japaneseness is never clearly explained in their work, but it seems to involve at some level a conflation or confusion of the discursive categories of nationality, culture, race, and ethnicity. Abe himself, however, appears at one point to introduce the intriguing possibility that he might in fact have been “black.” Or at least this is what he suggests to his audience at a public lecture delivered in Tokyo in 1969. Discussing certain physical differences that are commonly perceived to exist between “Japanese people” and “black people,” he

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poses to his audience the question of which group he himself properly belongs to: “The fascinating point here concerns how easy it is for us to discriminate or differentiate, whereas it is very difficult to discover the commonality of belonging to the same genus. You might not be able to tell with this lighting, but I just returned from the sea and am now darker than most people of the yellow race [ōshoku jinshu]. But I don’t think anyone really suspects me of being otherwise. I’m sure people look at me and think, ‘Well, he’s probably Japanese.’”86 This final phrase nihonjin darō points to an essential element of doubt and contingency in all determinations of subjective identity. The question, then, is not whether Abe was actually “ethnically” Japanese or “racially” black, because we would then find ourselves restricted to the particular level of content already shaped for us by decisions made at the more general level of form. As Abe repeatedly emphasizes in his fiction and essays, such empirical forms are not themselves exempt from change insofar as they exist within time, understood here as “the antithesis of all form,” as he writes in Suna no onna. Governed by the logic of identity, form functions today to create and maintain a social reality in which national totalities inculcate ideologies of national, cultural, and racial belonging among individuals so that they may be transformed, precisely, into proper subjects committed to the task of perpetuating these instances of identity. Regardless of how powerful this ideology may be, however, each such instance of identity must, in order to be effective, expose itself to the future where it awaits either confirmation or alteration. It is this exposure that is perhaps signaled by Abe’s use of the word darō. Each national, cultural, and racial determination must, in order to repeat itself, affix this term to itself in its passage to future meaning. But this is also to suggest that we receive these determinations from the past in precisely the same way. As Abe explained in his formulation of the notion of the “receptivity” of tradition, at each moment we, as the “recipients” or heirs to the past, are given the chance to remark these determinations differently.

EPILOGUE

“Toki no gake” [The Cliffs of Time], Abe presents the stream of consciousness of a boxer in what appears to be his final hours of life. Tracing the course of a boxing match, Abe draws attention to the fragility of this interior monologue by implicitly contrasting it with the frenzied action taking place. Whereas subjective interiority is typically privileged for its ability to overcome the various contingencies of the outside world, Abe seems intent in this narrative to underscore its strange vulnerability. This is achieved in part by describing how the boxer is forced to absorb the external blows that mark him both physically and psychologically. In a broad sense, his monologue appears as an attempt to come to terms with the world in its overwhelming force—thereby revealing to the reader that monologue, no matter how insular and enclosed, is ultimately nothing more than a regional or delimited form of dialogue. Such openness on the part of man to a world that incessantly marks him is represented by Abe as the movement of finitude. The boxer’s apparent death at the end of the story appears to the reader as indissociable from the life he had led up until that point. This intimate relation between life and death is sharply set forth in the opening lines of the text. Here Abe describes the boxer receiving a carton of milk that seems likely to have already spoiled. “Isn’t this milk from yesterday?” he complains to an unseen interlocutor. “What’s wrong I N H I S 1 9 6 4 S H O R T S T O RY

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with you? Milk spoils even if one keeps it in the refrigerator. Milk is alive, right? Do you understand? It’s alive. Really, it’s a living thing. Because it’s alive, it consumes itself. It completely loses its nutrition. You’re making things difficult. Look, the date appears right on the cap. That isn’t just for show. Those printing costs are not for nothing. It means that today’s milk must be drunk by today. . . . What time is it now?”1 The question Abe poses here concerns the precise relation between life and death. Is this relation to be conceived as intrinsic or merely as empirical and accidental? While it is certainly true that the fact of death is dependent on a range of external factors—in this case, the physical condition of the fighter, the violence of the blows he receives from his opponent, etc.—the general possibility of death must be seen as inscribed within life itself. In order for the boxer to appear in the world in his status as finite being, his disappearance from it must already be announced in the mode of possibility. This is of course exactly what Abe tells us through the example of the milk. The milk is a “living thing” (ikimono), as he writes, which means that it exists as essentially exposed to time. Here the thematic of time as signaled in the work’s title “The Cliffs of Time” comes to be repeated in the multiple references to time that appear in this passage. The milk is from “yesterday” but remains until “today,” its expiration date appears legibly on the bottle cap, and indeed the boxer only ceases his tirade to ask his interlocutor about the present time. Abe’s message seems clear: to be given life is necessarily also to be given time in which to live that life, but such living is from the outset essentially haunted by the threat of death. The presence of death within temporal life signifies that the concept of life carries its opposite not outside but rather complexly within itself. Abe’s boxer states this quite clearly: “Because it’s alive, it consumes ­itself” ( jibun de jibun wo tabecchimau—literally, “it eats itself through itself”). The element of time appears to disturb any attempt to conceive of life as purely or absolutely itself in its distinction from death. If any living thing is only itself to the extent that it suspends or postpones death, then Abe’s claim in this text seems to be that identity (i.e., any entity or thing existing qua itself) must now be rethought on the basis of time. In the relation between a living thing and its death, the latter appears to announce the end of the former as it once was. Previously the boxer existed as himself, in the sovereign unity of his identity, and this self-



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presence is seen to be severed or interrupted only at the painful moment of his demise. However, if death appears most originally at the inauguration of life, then the boxer must be said to exist as never quite fully or immediately himself. On the contrary, his internal exposure to that which might always “consume” or annihilate him, introducing elements that effectively negate his identity as a living being, must be recognized as taking place from the initial moment of his appearance in the world. In the discourse of literary criticism, Abe is often celebrated for his depictions of protean identity, many of which take the form of the absurd. Human characters in his works often find themselves transformed into a variety of animate and inanimate objects—sticks, plants, animals, etc.—but what is often overlooked in these mutations is the manner in which time and death are found to inhabit the presentation of self-identity. In order for an entity to maintain itself as such, in other words, it must be capable of identically repeating itself qua itself over time. Abe’s concern lies in underscoring the uncanny negation of the life of identity (or the identity of life) from within. If an entity comes at a certain point in time to differ from itself in such a way that its original identity is negated, then such negativity must be found to inhere within that entity itself. Such negation is typically regarded in terms of a fall, but Abe seems to insist that this fall be traced back to the opening of life and identity themselves. The corruption or deformation of identity that so fascinated Abe is not to be understood as an evil that supervenes upon a preexisting good. Because an entity is originally other than itself, its existence is continually marked by the shifting borders between itself in its interiority and an alterity that can no longer be reduced to a simple outside. This insight into the negativity that inheres within all life and identity made Abe extremely suspicious of any claims to immediate presence. The external reality that appears in its givenness or objectivity reveals itself on closer inspection to be marked. This marking takes place strictly through an encounter between subject and object, and it is indeed only through that encounter—continually repeated over time— that the subject and object come to be constituted. Entities can be determined as other than what they are because their markings necessarily take place in time, in the context of a spatiotemporal difference that sets new limits and demands on the encounter between subject and object.

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Abe’s understanding of this process merits sustained attention, but the narrow determination of his works primarily at the level of fiction has unfortunately resulted in an undervaluing of the force and complexity of his ideas as a whole. One of the central claims of this present volume is that Abe’s thought is most productively grasped at the level of threat that it poses to existing conceptions of identity. His engagement with everyday reality must be recognized as an intervention, but for Abe no reality ever gives itself without such intervention. At every instant, man is called upon to reshape the world, and it is through such interventions that man himself comes to be reshaped. An example of the kind of dialogue that Abe finds man conducting with the world, regardless of whether he subjectively wishes to or not, can be seen in his 1964 television drama Mokugekisha [Witness]. Here Abe stages a reenactment of the events that resulted in the murder of a yakuza at the hands of the residents of an island community. The story opens with what appears to be an objective representation of these circumstances—the viewer is shown still photographs of the corpse before a film begins depicting the gangster violently abusing a group of youths—when the gangster, breaking the fictional fourth wall, suddenly turns his gaze directly on the camera and begins complaining of a detail on the set. “Cut!” the director yells, and the camera then pivots to reveal that the scene, far from being an objective representation, is in fact merely the mediated or artificial staging thereof.2 Abe’s artistic aim in this work is indistinguishable from the epistemological and political reflections he seeks to provoke in his readers (and viewers). The external reality that initially appeared to give itself as such, in its objective identity, is shown to come into being solely as the result of the subject’s participation. To say that the subject participates in this act by which reality comes to be objectively determined, however, is not at all equivalent to positing the subject as the center of meaning. On the contrary, the world is determined through the co-implication, or complication, of subject and object. This co-implication means that reality never gives itself as purely subjective or objective, neither as an integral product of consciousness nor as it is in itself, in its immediate quiddity or whatness. The irreducible synthesis of the acts by which the world is determined functions to displace both subject and object, shifting attention instead to the effects such determinations create.



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Mokugekisha teaches us that what appears as real must be properly grasped as an effect of a prior determination. This insight, I believe, can be found throughout Abe’s oeuvre, and stands as one of his most vital and challenging intellectual contributions. For Abe, external reality can never be purely external because it is in part constructed at the level of subjective mediation. If one is to take this insight seriously, however, then it becomes impossible to treat Abe’s works themselves simply as objects that appear in their identity to pre-constituted subjects. To say that objects must first be identified as themselves in order to appear as they are is to in effect point to the existence of subjects who concern themselves with Abe’s texts. Yet these subjects do not merely take the form of individuals; on the contrary, social reality in modernity has come to be organized in such a way as to create certain formations or collective subjectivities whose task it is to determine and bestow meaning on the works of Abe as well as a host of other Japanese writers. Here we arrive at the question of the field or institution of Japanese literature. As Abe suggests in Mokugekisha, it is imperative that we draw back from our immediate investment in the particular object so as to more broadly understand how the object comes to be constituted—that is to say, under what circumstances it presents itself to us and also what desires we might have in subjectively remarking it. In this regard, it seems evident that the specific object of inquiry that is “Abe Kōbō” is inseparably linked to the larger discipline of Japanese literature that has institutionalized his works. One of my central contentions in this book is that the institutional link between Abe’s texts and the discipline of Japanese literature must be explicitly remarked. Without such remarking, I believe, one risks limiting one’s vision strictly to the individual object in its apparent immediacy or givenness. What is thereby lost is a recognition of one’s participation in the active constitution of this object. Crucially, such participation is not to be found simply at the level of the individual subject. The fact is that individual subjects come to be mobilized by the larger institution, which in this case presents Japanese literary texts as objects to be cognitively remarked. The present book claims that no truly concrete knowledge of the Japanese literary object is possible in abstraction from its relation to the larger field or institution that institutionalizes its remarking. It is for this reason that my engagement with Abe seeks to account for

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both his various texts as objects of inquiry and the larger field of Japanese literature within which these texts have come to be presented. I realize that studies of Japanese literature typically discourage such a dual approach. A protocol exists whereby critical attention is turned to those remarkings that constitute the body of secondary scholarship only insofar as this helps further the goal of objective knowledge. In contrast, my aim in this study is to call into question the objectivity of such knowledge by expanding the field of vision to include within it the subject’s institutional inscriptions as well. If the object exists only as a concatenation of the various marks that form its history, then an examination of those determinations that issue from the collective subjectivity that is the institution can help shed valuable light on how this object has historically presented itself to us. The co-implication of subject and object in the production of objective knowledge is poorly understood if one adheres to a conception of oppositionality in its demand that difference and identity be regarded as mutually exclusive. In this way, the subject and object can in principle always be cleanly separated out from one another. In the foregoing chapters, I have sought to present such oppositionality as the subordination of time to logic. It is here that a significant paradox emerges in that Abe’s attempts to foreground time in its disruption of all instances of identity come to be neutralized or domesticated by the oppositional logic that is often brought to bear on his texts. Such oppositionality allows for the subject to constitute itself in its identity as that which the object is not. The negativity that Abe tried to think in the relation between life and death and presence and absence in the context of the short story “Toki no gake,” for example, here finds itself organized or presented in such a way that difference and alterity come to be reduced to the formal terms of oppositionality. As Abe realized, however, the true force of negativity consists in its ability to exceed any delimitation of itself, and it is for this reason that any simple opposition between identity and difference comes to collapse. If the subject has no choice but to appeal to negativity in its negation of the object that it poses outside or against itself, then this gesture can be seen to unleash a more general movement that sweeps up both subject and object in a complex and constantly destabilizing articulation of difference.



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For Abe, however, the relation between identity and difference was to be thought beyond the abstract terms of conceptuality so as to apprehend the very concrete way it informs the variegated instances of social reality. This explains why the recognition that the particular object of knowledge is irreducibly marked by the larger field or institution of knowledge remains in and of itself insufficient—such insight must be recognized strictly as the departure point for further analysis. In the context of Japanese literary studies in the United States, the commonsensical or pre-critical determination of identity and difference as oppositional fully anchors the understanding not only of the subject-object relation, but also of such empirical matrices of identity as nationality, ethnicity, race, culture, and language. In order for an object in this field to be marked as “Japanese,” it must satisfy the traditional requirements of Japanese identity: texts must be written in the Japanese language by authors who are in some way recognized as nationally, ethnically, racially, and culturally Japanese. Following Abe, I have tried in this book to show not only the inherent violence of these identitarian marks in their exclusion of that which is determined to be non-Japanese; I have also demonstrated that these marks, which are grounded in the subordination of time and difference to logic, can only operate by ignoring the essential contingency of their meaning. Such concepts as “Japanese ethnicity” or “the Japanese language” have no stable content whatsoever, but in fact vary dramatically across differences in time and space.3 What we must not lose sight of, however, is how subjective desire asserts itself in these determinations of objective identity. The intensity of desire that can be seen in the subject’s identification of the object derives, at its deepest level, from the subject’s desire to recognize itself. In this account, the object must be presented so that it may serve as the mediation through which the subject’s acts of auto-affection can take place. Such desire for auto-affection can be seen powerfully operating throughout the field of U.S. Japan studies. Through the mediation by which the Japanese object of knowledge is marked as culturally Eastern (Asian, Oriental) and racially “yellow” (ōshoku jinshu), for example, the non-Japanese subject of knowledge has traditionally remarked himself as culturally Western and racially “white.” I pursue concrete instances of this oppositional logic in Chapter Four in my readings of Donald Keene and John Whittier Treat, but it bears emphasis that the

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elements of nationalism, culturalism, Orientalism, and racism that insistently mark their engagements with Abe are in no way unusual or exceptional. On the contrary, these writings are to be understood most accurately as symptoms that beset the institutional desire to posit an identical and selfsame difference (“them”) from the vantage point of an identical and selfsame identity (“us”). One misreads Abe, I believe, if one fails to interrogate the elusive nature of the relation between identity and difference. The self can never simply be itself because it is at each moment of time exposed to a worldly alterity that violently breaches its borders, forcing it to repeatedly reconstitute itself. Abe was particularly concerned with how this general movement affects the formation of community. Community, he observed, presupposes an underlying commonality between disparate individuals, and it is this shared commonality that serves to reinforce the community’s more general difference from other communities. For Abe, such conception of the difference between identity and difference remains grounded on a reified notion of identity, and is thus unable to take into account the radically temporal nature of these determinations. What must be recognized here is that identity never exists in and of itself, but rather comes into being strictly as a delayed effect. This insight, it should be noted, helps us better understand Abe’s persistent attacks against any notion of solidarity or togetherness that finds support in such unexamined concepts as national, cultural, ethnic, or racial unity. Among his many other writings, we can see this awareness operating in Abe’s best-known text, the 1962 novel Suna no onna [The Woman in the Dunes]. This work powerfully describes how the protagonist, Niki Junpei, is forced to reevaluate his understanding of community, but Abe in fact prepares the reader for this shift by first providing an unusual narrative about a dog. The story is relayed by Niki to the woman in the sandpit: “I used to keep a worthless mongrel at my boardinghouse. He had a terribly thick coat that scarcely shed even in summer. He was such a sorry sight that I finally decided to cut his hair. But just as I was about to throw away the hair that had been cut off, the dog—I wonder what could have been going on in his mind?—suddenly let out a pitiful howl, took a bunch of hair in his mouth, and ran into his house. He probably felt that the hair was a part of his own body and he didn’t want to be separated from it.”4



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In these lines Abe focuses on an individual animal rather than a human form of collective subjectivity, but the fundamental logic remains the same. That is to say, one finds here a notion of the self in which the possibility of repeating itself over time identically qua itself is decisively rejected. Because the self is essentially other than itself, its passage through time must be understood as a continual exposure to the world’s differential markings. Significantly, Abe refuses to disqualify the non-human from participation in these inscriptions. In the general movement by which the world draws forth its determinations, even animals are shown to in some way mark themselves. The problem is that this self itself constantly eludes those markings, thereby revealing the difference of time in the failure of one inscription to ever perfectly coincide with another. The dog described by Niki discovers that it is at present no longer identical to itself, and so must attempt to regain that identity by collecting remnants or remains of its past. This disturbance of identity assumes even greater complexity, moreover, as soon as one realizes that the success or failure of this act of self-­recovery can of necessity only be judged in the future. Much later in the novel, Niki finds himself in another discussion with the woman. He has just learned that the villagers illegally sell their sand for construction purposes where it comes to be mixed with cement. Horrified, Niki protests that the sand’s high salt content renders it unusable for construction, with the result that innocent people will surely die when these structures begin to collapse. The impassivity of the woman’s response is well known to both readers of the novel and viewers of the film. “Why should we worry what happens to others [tanin]?” she tersely replies.5 As with the earlier story of the dog, everything here depends upon how the self comes to determine itself in the specificity of its identity. Niki mistakenly assumes that the woman shares his identification as a member of the national community Japan. This is above all a community of sympathy: individual Japanese citizens must care for one another in their belonging to the totality that is the Japanese nation-state. Following the dictates of oppositional logic, such sympathy as generated among members of one national community may be contrasted with the antipathy or at least apathy that one feels for members of another national community. As a privileged resident of the city, where

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the mediation between national whole and part has come to be widely internalized and so accepted as natural, Niki is shocked to discover that the woman does not identify herself primarily through the mediation of the nation. From her perspective, the community is to be defined strictly in terms of the village rather than the nation. Hence those who reside outside the borders of the village may be regarded as “others” for whom one is in no way obliged to feel a sense of communal sympathy. Here the notion of “fellow Japanese” to which Niki is implicitly committed appears to the woman merely as an excessive abstraction; the sense of collective identity that he feels with other Japanese (i.e., that he has been ideologically taught to feel with other Japanese) is rejected by her, for these others are to be marked as foreign to the community that she perceives as a concrete extension of herself. Abe’s insight into the violence inherent in the notion of community bears enormous implications for those institutions that have been historically charged with the task of inscribing his works, presenting them in a manner that reinforces rather than disturbs or calls into question the coordinates of identity in their national, cultural, ethnic, racial, and linguistic manifestations. One of my aims in this book is to allow Abe to respond to those institutional markings that have sought to prematurely fix or arrest the unsettling movement of his thought. Reasons for such marking can be found at the level of both theoretical naiveté and political conservatism. In this regard, it is important to recognize that what is not said of Abe is as equally revealing as what is actually said in order to comprehend the nature of our own encounter with his texts. For above all else, Abe’s work calls attention to the impossibility of any simple determination of “us.” This entity that is “us” comes to be marked by various forms of social reality, shaping how we perceive ourselves in our difference from others. Such marking, I believe, assumes particular virulence in the context of area studies, where the subject “we” is asked to amass enormous quantities of information— literary, historical, anthropological, linguistic, sociological, etc.—so as to more accurately identify the object that is “them.” Reading Abe helps us become more conscious of this epistemological trap, thereby allowing us to remark both objects and the institution differently.

REFERENCE MATTER

NOTES

I NTRODUCTI ON

1.  For a recent attempt to survey the full breadth of Abe’s corpus, see the collection edited by Toba Kōji, Abe Kōbō, media no ekkyōsha (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2013). 2.  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Portrait de l’artiste, en général (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1979), p. 14. 3.  Abe Kōbō, “Jikan to kūkan,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997–2000), v. 1, pp. 169–170. 4.  Abe Kōbō, “‘Kyō’ wo saguru shūnen,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 15, pp. 436–437. 5.  Abe Kōbō, “‘Moetsukita chizu’ wo megutte,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 21, p. 318; trans. in Andrew Horvat, Four Stories by Kobo Abe (Tokyo: Hara shobō, 1973), pp. 130–132 (translation slightly modified). 6.  Abe Kōbō, “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 22, p. 337; trans. in Richard F. Calichman, The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 162. 7.  Ibid., p. 338; p. 163. CHA PTER ONE

1.  Abe Kōbō, Suna no onna, in Abe Kōbō zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997– 2000), v. 16, p. 205; trans. E. Dale Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes (New York: Vintage International, 1991), p. 160. 2.  Ibid., pp. 177–178; pp. 111–112 (translation slightly modified). 3.  Ibid., p. 178; p. 112. 4.  Abe Kōbō, “Shi to shijin (ishiki to muishiki),” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 1, p. 105; trans. in Richard F. Calichman, The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 3.

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5. Ibid. 6.  See on this point Rodolphe Gasché, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 7.  Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 8. Abe, Suna no onna, p. 178; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, p. 112 (translation slightly modified). 9.  Ibid., p. 232; p. 211. 10.  Ibid., p. 232; p. 212 (translation slightly modified). 11.  In a related sense, Karube Tadashi stresses that Abe’s notion of the future is marked by a constant sense of “interruption” (danzetsu). As he argues, “For human beings, the tremendous changes of an era are filled with interruptions that cannot be anticipated. Human beings living in the present are entities whose expectations will be overturned, the naiveté of their judgments judged, by both the future and past.” Karube, Abe Kōbō no toshi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2012), p. 123. 12.  In Chapter Three, we attempt to trace out the dynamics involved in the subject’s auto-affective act of writing to itself in the particular context of Abe’s novel Tanin no kao. 13. Abe, Suna no onna, p. 117; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, p. 3 (translation slightly modified). 14.  Ibid., p. 168; pp. 96–97 (translation slightly modified). 15.  Ibid., pp. 168–169; p. 97 (translation slightly modified). 16.  Ibid., p. 171; pp. 100–101 (translation slightly modified). 17. Ibid., pp. 205–206; pp. 161–162. “A one-way ticket is a disjointed [barabara ni natte shimatta] life that misses the links between yesterday and today, today and tomorrow.” 18.  This insight returns us directly to Heidegger. As he writes in his “Letter on Humanism,” “The happening of history occurs essentially as the destiny of the truth of Being and from it. Being comes to destiny in that It, Being, gives itself. But thought in terms of such destiny this says: it gives itself and refuses itself simultaneously.” Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 215. 19.  Abe Kōbō, “S. Karuma shi no hanzai,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 2, pp. 378– 451. A partial translation of this story can be found in the collection entitled Beyond the Curve, trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1991), pp. 35–42. 20. Abe, Suna no onna, p. 126; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, p. 19. 21.  Abe returns to this notion of the essential doubleness of the self in many of his works, of which we can cite here two examples. From the 1964 short story “Toki no gake,” where the protagonist, a boxer on the verge of death, thinks to himself: “This is strange . . . It seems that I have somehow become two people.” Abe Kōbō, “Toki no gake,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 18, p. 256. And from the 1984 novel Hakobune sakura maru, whose protagonist issues a similar remark: “If



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there is a branch road that joins the main road ahead, I can create an alter ego and enjoy walking on both roads at the same time.” Abe Kōbō, Hakobune sakura maru, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 27, p. 282; trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter, The Ark Sakura (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p. 53 (translation slightly modified). 22. Abe, Suna no onna, pp. 120–121; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, p. 10 (translation slightly modified). 23.  The reference to ghosts and haunting can be seen throughout Abe’s works, most famously perhaps in his 1958 play Yūrei ha koko ni iru, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 8, pp. 359–452; trans. in Donald Keene, Three Plays by Kōbō Abe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 131–226. In the context of Suna no onna, Abe describes Niki Junpei as dwelling upon the question of haunting toward the end of the novel: “Once he had seen a reproduction of an engraving called ‘Hell of Loneliness’ and had thought it curious. In it a man was floating unsteadily in the air, his eyes wide with fright, and the space around him, far from being empty, was so filled with the semi-transparent shadows of dead persons that he could scarcely move. The dead, each with a different expression, were trying to push one another away, talking ceaselessly to the man. What was this ‘Hell of Loneliness’? he wondered. Perhaps they had misnamed it.” Abe, Suna no onna, p. 233; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, pp. 214–215. 24.  In his 1955 essay “Mōjū no kokoro ni keisanki no te wo: bungaku to ha nanika,” Abe discusses this relation between writing and the utterly unique character of the event: “My point here is not that there are absolutely no methods of writing. Practice-based, and thus real, methods of writing overcome technicist notions of writing, and so we must come to an intellectual understanding of the act of writing—that is, we must return to the question of intellectual motive. This cannot be doubted. If for example Columbus’s biography were entitled Ways to Discover America, and this title had no symbolic meaning, even a child would understand the humor involved. No matter how thoroughly one knew about the various plans and preparations behind Columbus’s voyage, or how meticulously one knew about the circumstances behind the difficulties he encountered and how he overcame them, it is nonetheless impossible to speak about rediscovering an America that has already been discovered.” Abe, Kōbō, “Mōjū no kokoro ni keisanki no te wo: bungaku to ha nanika,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 4, p. 494; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 32. 25. Abe, Suna no onna, p. 148; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, pp. 59–60 (translation slightly modified). 26.  Ibid., p. 143; p. 51 (translation slightly modified). 27.  For this contradictory logic of the proper name, see Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss in Of Grammatology, pp. 107–118. 28. Abe, Suna no onna, p. 153; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, p. 67 (translation slightly modified). 29.  Ibid., p. 192; p. 137 (translation slightly modified). 30.  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The

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Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 11. 31. Abe, Suna no onna, p. 193; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, p. 139 (translation slightly modified). 32.  This notion of flow in Suna no onna has been extensively treated in the secondary scholarship. See, for example, Tsuruta Kinya, “‘Suna no onna’ ni okeru ryūdō to teichaku no tēma,” in Abe Kōbō ‘Suna no onna’ sakuhin ronshū, ed. Ishizaki Hitoshi (Tokyo: Kuresu shuppan, 2003), pp. 83–101. 33. Abe, Suna no onna, p. 194; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, pp. 140–141 (translation slightly modified). 34.  “The only way to overcome work is through work. It is not that work itself is valuable, but rather that the overcoming of work must take place through work. It is precisely this energy of self-negation that constitutes the real value of work.” Ibid., p. 204; p. 158 (translation slightly modified). 35.  This problem of reflection and self-consciousness is explained by Nishida Kitarō as follows: “When in self-consciousness the self makes its own activity its object and reflects upon it, this reflection is the very process of the self’s development and as such is an unending progression; it is not an accidental happening, but is the intrinsic nature of consciousness as such. For Fichte the self is ‘the self acting on the self’: ‘Thus to conceive or to think the self consists in the operation of the self itself towards itself, and conversely, such an operation towards itself produces a thinking of the self and absolutely no other thinking.’ The self’s reflection on the self, its reflecting (in the sense of mirroring) itself, cannot be brought to a halt at this point, for self-reflection consists in an unending process of unification, and, as Royce saw, a single project of reflecting the self inevitably generates an unlimited series.” Nishida Kitarō, Intuition and Reflection in Self-consciousness, trans. Valdo H. Viglielmo with Takeuchi Toshinori and Joseph S. O’Leary (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 3–4. 36. Abe, Suna no onna, p. 194; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, p. 140. 37.  The romantic attack against modernity that calls for the resurrection of community and a restoration of what is seen to be “natural” sexual relations possesses a long and colorful history. In the twentieth century alone, heirs to this tradition would include, for instance, D. H. Lawrence, Georges Bataille, Henry Miller, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In the particular context of 1960s Japan, in which Suna no onna was written, one could also include in this group such filmmakers as Imamura Shōhei and Ōshima Nagisa. 38.  “Dealing with something from the perspective of the Absolute consists merely in declaring that, although one has been speaking of it just now as something definite, yet in the Absolute, the A=A, there is nothing of the kind, for there all is one. To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfillment, to palm off its Absolute as the night in which, as the



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saying goes, all cows are black—this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity.” G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 9. 39. Abe, Suna no onna, pp. 169–170; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, pp. 98–99 (translation slightly modified). 40.  Ibid., pp. 132–133; p. 31 (translation slightly modified). 41.  Ibid., p. 138; p. 41 (translation slightly modified). 42.  Ibid., p. 138; p. 42 (translation slightly modified). 43.  The term “exscription” comes from Jean-Luc Nancy: “To inscribe presence is not to (re)present it or to signify it, but to let come to one and over one what merely presents itself at the limit where inscription itself withdraws (or ex-scribes itself, writing itself outside itself).” Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, ed. Simon Sparks (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 110. 44. Abe, Suna no onna, p. 134; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, p. 34 (translation slightly modified). 45.  Ibid., pp. 182–183; p. 121. 46.  Ibid., p. 123; p. 15 (translation slightly modified). 47.  Ibid., p. 125; p. 17. 48.  Ibid., p. 124; p. 17 (translation slightly modified). 49.  Ibid., p. 130; p. 28 (translation slightly modified). 50.  Ibid., p. 166; p. 93 (translation slightly modified). With varying degrees of rigor, scholars have not infrequently sought to examine the notion of time in Suna no onna. See, for example, Tanigawa Atsushi, “Abe Kōbō ‘Suna no onna’ no jikan,” in Abe Kōbō ‘Suna no onna’ sakuhin ronshū, pp. 181–190. The measure of this rigor, I believe, can be found in the degree to which time is seen to threaten the notion of identity. 51. Abe, Suna no onna, p. 163; trans. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes, p. 87 (translation slightly modified). 52.  Ibid., p. 214; p. 178 (translation slightly modified). 53.  Ibid., pp. 224–225; p. 197 (translation slightly modified). CHA PTER TWO

1.  Abe Kōbō, “Itan no pasupōto,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997–2000), v. 22, p. 145; trans. in Richard F. Calichman, The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 118. 2.  Abe Kōbō, Hakobune sakura maru, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 27, p. 442; trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter, The Ark Sakura (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p. 293. 3.  Abe Kōbō, “Akai mayu,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 2, p. 494; trans. Lane Dunlop, “The Red Cocoon,” in A Late Chrysanthemum: Twenty-one Stories from the Japanese (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1988), p. 162. 4. Ibid. 5.  Abe Kōbō, “Uchinaru henkyō,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 22, p. 227; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 148 (emphasis in the original).

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6.  This recognition of violence in communal formation taking the two mutually reinforcing forms of exclusion and inclusion (i.e., assimilation) repeats Abe’s earlier thinking in “Rinjin wo koeru mono,” as we argue in Chapter Three. 7.  Abe Kōbō, “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 22, pp. 325– 326; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 151. 8.  Ibid., p. 343; p. 168. 9.  Abe Kōbō, Hako otoko, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 24, p. 93; trans. E. Dale Saunders, The Box Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 117. 10.  Abe Kōbō, Mikkai, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 26, p. 140; trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter, Secret Rendezvous (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 179 (translation slightly modified). 11.  Abe expresses this unsettling movement of time in Hakobune sakura maru as follows: “The flow of time disappears and ‘now’ takes off alone, flitting capriciously here and there.” Abe, Hakobune sakura maru, p. 393; trans. Carpenter, The Ark Sakura, p. 221. 12.  Abe Kōbō, “Bungaku to jikan,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 2, p. 289. Thomas Schnellbächer has commented on these lines very perceptively: “If the spatialization of time is the fixing of reality in static terms, then the positive time dimension must be the one where events become fixed as facts. Clearly, only positive time is a continuum.” Schnellbächer, Abe Kōbō, Literary Strategist: The Evolution of his Agenda and Rhetoric in the Context of Postwar Japanese Avant-garde and Communist Artists’ Movements (Munich: Iudicium Verlag, 2004), p. 300. 13.  Abe Kōbō, Dai yon kanpyōki, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 9, p. 12; trans. E. Dale Saunders, Inter Ice Age 4 (New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1970), p. 12. 14.  Abe Kōbō, “Itan no pasupōto,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 22, p. 149; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 122–123. 15.  Ibid. p. 149; p. 123. 16. Abe, Hakobune sakura maru, p. 466; trans. Carpenter, The Ark Sakura, p. 331. 17.  Abe, “Toki no gake,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 18, p. 253. 18.  Abe, “Itan no pasupōto,” p. 149; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 122. 19.  See on this point the important debate Derrida wages with Foucault in the pages of “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 31–63. Takahashi Tetsuya provides an astute reading of this essay in his Derida: datsukōchiku (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2003), pp. 121–122. 20.  Abe, “Uchinaru henkyō,” p. 206; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 126. 21.  Ibid., p. 207; p. 126. 22. Ibid. 23.  Ibid., p. 216; p. 136. 24.  Ibid., p. 222; p. 142. 25.  Ibid., p. 207; p. 126.



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26.  Europeans “reply that it is generally difficult to determine whether someone is Jewish simply by looking at their face, although there are exceptions to this. They add that they can tell after speaking with someone for five minutes. More or less recognizing whether someone is Jewish after five minutes means that they cannot determine this at a single glance.” Abe, “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō,” p. 334; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 159. 27.  A similar tension can be seen to inform Sartre’s account of the Jew as well. Like Abe, Sartre insists that “it is not the Jewish character that provokes anti-Semitism but, rather, that it is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew.” Nevertheless, Sartre then proceeds to make such observations as the following: “Very often members of the same family do not perceive the ethnic characteristics of their relatives (by ethnic characteristics I mean here the biological and hereditary facts which we have accepted as incontestable). I knew a Jewish woman whose son had to make some business trips into Nazi Germany around 1934. This son had the typical characteristics of the French Jew—a hooked nose, protruding ears, etc.—but when we expressed anxiety about what might happen to him during one of his absences, his mother replied: ‘Oh, I am not worried; he doesn’t look like a Jew at all.’” Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), pp. 143, 101–102. 28.  Abe, “Uchinaru henkyō,” p. 206; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 125. We touch here upon the problematic of enunciative positionality, which in the field of Japan studies has received the most thorough analysis in the work of Naoki Sakai. See, among his many other texts that explore this issue, “The Problem of ‘Japanese Thought’: The Formation of ‘Japan’ and the Schema of Cofiguration,” in Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 40–71. 29.  Abe, “Uchinaru henkyō,” p. 211; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 131. 30. Jean-Luc Nancy has called this strange structure of collective self-­ referral the “so-called/self-saying people” (le soi-disant peuple): “The people can only say self to itself as a so-called/self-saying people. The subject of enunciation enunciates itself as subject of the enunciated . . . but its real presence is attendant upon the execution of the content of the enunciated: the people will appear when the principles of the constitution take effect, since it is the constitution that constitutes the people. Yet the constitution only constitutes them as subject of its enunciated, leaving them missing as subject of the enunciation. The instituted people lack the instituting people, unless it be the reverse.” JeanLuc Nancy, “The So-called/Self-Saying People,” in Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation, trans. Richard F. Calichman (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), v. 4, p. 251. 31.  Abe, “Uchinaru henkyō,” p. 216; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 136. On this relation between Japan and Jewry, see also Abe’s 1968 dialogue

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with John Nathan entitled “Yudayajin ni tsuite” [On the Jewish People], in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 22, pp. 188–204. 32.  Abe, “Uchinaru henkyō,” p. 210; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 130. Abe does not cite any specific historical sources behind this account, but it should be noted that recent historians provide a rather different view of Jewish land ownership in medieval Europe. As, for example, Kenneth Stow writes: “It is frequently assumed that Jews began lending at interest because legislation against their owning land drove them away from that primary medieval occupation, farming. This is not true: ownership was usually legal, and up until the end of the Middle Ages, Jews throughout Europe owned land. . . . Apart from their obvious inability to acquire and retain land by engaging in feudal warfare, or to defend the land they already possessed against ‘overt and covert assault’ . . . what most directly prevented Jewish landowners from working the soil was competition for cheap labor. Here Christians were clearly advantaged. For nothing stood in their way of dominating peasant workers; even Roman law tied peasants (colonii) to the soil. But the canons—reinforced by ecclesiastics’ urgings to lay rulers over the course of four centuries—prohibited Jews from lawfully retaining in their employ, or under their roofs, Christian domestics, serfs, and slaves.” Kenneth Stow, Alienated Minority: The Jews of Medieval Latin Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 214. 33.  “The founding of the state of Israel finally transformed Jews into ‘authentic citizens,’ and thus they are completely unrelated to what I am trying to think here under the heading of the Jew.” Also: “The Jew is not the Israeli. While it is possible for the Israeli to write of the history and glory of two thousand years of suffering, joining the ranks of those who believe in legitimacy, what remains for the Jewish writer who is refused all participation in history is to write of today, the eternal present.” Abe, “Uchinaru henkyō,” pp. 222, 225; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 142, 146. 34.  Ibid., p. 211; p. 130. 35.  Ibid., pp. 222–223; p. 143. 36.  Ibid., p. 207; p. 127. 37.  Ibid., p. 208; p. 128. Jean-Paul Sartre, Portrait of the Anti-Semite, trans. Erik de Mauny (London: Secker & Warburg, 1948), p. 18. 38.  Abe, “Uchinaru henkyō,” p. 215; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 135. Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 106. 39.  Abe, “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō,” p. 334; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 159. 40.  Abe’s sensitivity to the shortcomings of the reversal is above all a methodological point and should be understood in the context of his engagement with dialectics, with particular regard to the tension in his text between the notions of oppositionality and alterity. In “Uchinaru henkyō,” however, Abe treats the reversal in explicitly historical and political terms as representative



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of a failure to formulate an effective critique of anti-Semitism: “There are those who explain Jewish ethnic superiority on the basis of the lofty ethics, metaphysical depth, and powerful speculative tendency of Judaism. If they continue with this claim, however, they would be forced to admit that at least half the responsibility for anti-Semitism lies with the Jews themselves. Ultimately, it would not be surprising if this argument were seen as indicative of an inferiority complex borne by an inferior ethnic group vis-à-vis their superiors. In this way, the argument for Jewish superiority reveals itself to be the simple reverse [uragaeshi] of anti-Semitic thought. It is by and large a form of escapism to pull oneself down to the same level as those who practice discrimination.” Abe, “Uchinaru henkyō,” p. 218; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 138. 41.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 377 (emphasis in the original). 42.  Abe Kōbō and Donald Keene, Hangekiteki ningen (Tokyo: Chūkō shinsho, 1973), p. 91. For a brief overview of Abe’s life in Manchuria, see Miyanishi Tadamasa, Abe Kōbō: kōya no hito (Tokyo: Seishidō, 2009), pp. 48–53. 43.  I analyze this notion of transplantation with regard to the question of national-cultural identity in my introduction to Overcoming Modernity: Cultural Identity in Wartime Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 17–29. 44.  Abe, “Uchinaru henkyō,” p. 208; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 127. Rauschning’s book consists of a series of conversations he claims to have had with Hitler in the early 1930s. It should be noted that there has been considerable disagreement among historians regarding the veracity of Rauschning’s account. This question of the work’s credibility, however, must be distinguished from the larger point Abe is making here. 45.  Sartre describes such affinity between individuals and the land as one of the characteristics of anti-Semitism: “The anti-Semite can conceive only of a type of primitive ownership of land based on a veritable magical rapport, in which the thing possessed and its possessor are united by a bond of mystical participation; he is the poet of real property.” Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, pp. 23–24. 46.  Abe stresses that Jewish existence in the city has continued even into the contemporary period: “According to statistics, in 1961 one-third of all Jews in the world live concentrated in fifteen cities across Europe and the United States with populations of over one million people. This trend likely remains unchanged today. Although control over finance and trade has already been appropriated by the authentic native bourgeoisie, the Jews’ historically urban character—whose formation and development parallels that of the city itself— remains unchanged.” Abe, “Uchinaru henkyō,” p. 211; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 131. 47.  These words appear in Abe’s 1957 essay “Amerika hakken,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 7, p. 434; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 48. 48.  Abe, “Uchinaru henkyō,” p. 205; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 124.

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49.  Ibid., p. 206; p. 125. 50.  Ibid. Abe immediately adds, “Here I am not intentionally using a Russian as the counterpart of the Jew. There would be no real difference if I were to refer to a Frenchman, German, Arab, or Japanese.” 51.  Ibid. (italics mine). 52.  Ibid., p. 206; p. 126. Abe repeats this point toward the end of the essay: “What enabled Tolstoy to appeal to the soul of all mankind while writing from the heart of a Russian was the presence of the shared motif of the peasant, as found in all ‘orthodoxies.’ This might appear to be similar to the universality attained by Kafka through writing from the heart of a Jew, but in fact it is completely different” (p. 225; pp. 145–146). 53.  Ibid., p. 210; p. 130. 54.  Abe makes precisely this same point about Arthur Miller in wondering whether “Americans would not hesitate when asked whether Miller should be referred to as an American writer or Jewish writer.” Ibid., p. 224; p. 144. 55.  Ibid., p. 222; p. 142 (italics mine). CHA PTER THREE

1.  Abe Kōbō, “Shi to shijin (ishiki to muishiki),” in Abe Kōbō zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997–2000), v. 1, p. 113; trans. in Richard F. Calichman, The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 12 (translation slightly modified). 2.  Abe Kōbō, “Rinjin wo koeru mono,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 20, p. 391; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 95–96. 3.  In his 1960 essay “Geijutsu no kakumei: geijutsu undō no riron,” Abe criticizes a naïve empiricism, which he understands in the sense of positivism, as “the loss of any dialectic between meaning and thing [imi to jibutsu no benshōhō no sōshitsu].” In Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 12, p. 460; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 70. 4.  This understanding is crucial for explaining Abe’s condemnation of all military ideology in its service to the state, ideology which he represents in the 1954 short story “Henkei no kiroku” in the context of the Pacific War: “But the value of a soldier isn’t in his life. As long as our Imperial Army survives, every soldier lives, even if dead.” In Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 4, pp. 264–265; trans. in Julie Winters Carpenter, Beyond the Curve (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1991), p. 83. 5.  Jean Hyppolite, Logic and Existence, trans. Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), pp. 75–77. 6.  Abe, “Rinjin wo koeru mono,” p. 391; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 95. 7.  See Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), esp. pp. 73–101. 8.  Abe Kōbō, Tanin no kao, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 18, p. 413; trans. E. Dale



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Saunders, The Face of Another (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), p. 128 (translation slightly modified). 9.  In Abe’s 1984 novel Hakobune sakura maru, the protagonist makes a similar point regarding the principle of group formation: “Random selection is a method that perhaps rivals the law of heredity.” In Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 27, p. 285; trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter, The Ark Sakura (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p. 57 (translation slightly modified). 10.  See, among numerous other works, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), esp. pp. 1–42. Nancy’s aim is to conceive of the notion of community at its most basic ontological level through reference to Heidegger’s notion of Mitsein, or beingwith. For Abe’s own, considerably more “literary” although no less fascinating reading of Heidegger, see his 1944 essay “Shi to shijin (ishiki to muishiki),” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 1, pp. 104–117; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 1–17. 11. Abe, Tanin no kao, p. 485; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, p. 223. 12.  Significantly, these experiences lead the protagonist at the end of the novel to question the very existence of Japan: “Perhaps Japan doesn’t exist anywhere. . . . Every step I take is matched by the step of the plains. . . . Japan just flees farther away.” Abe Kōbō, Kemonotachi ha kokyō wo mezasu, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 6, p. 451. 13.  Abe Kōbō, “Chinnyūsha,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 3, p. 131; Abe, “Henkei no kiroku,” p. 272; both trans. in Carpenter, Beyond the Curve, pp. 133, 92–93. 14.  Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (New York: Vintage Books, 1957). 15.  This is why one must speak of the subject as in some sense “stillborn.” See here Sakai Naoki, Shizan sareru nihongo, nihonjin: ‘Nihon’ no rekishi-chiseiteki haichi (Tokyo: Shinyōsha, 1996), pp. 166–210. 16.  Such would be the interpretation of no less a reader than Ōe Kenzaburō: “In fact, however, the role played by the wife’s letter can only be characterized as having the effect of a dialectical catalyst. Actually, we might even suspect that this letter, like the other notebooks, was written by the masked man himself.” Ōe Kenzaburō, “Kaisetsu,” in Abe Kōbō, Tanin no kao (Tokyo: Shinchō bunko, 1964), p. 288. 17.  This effect is unfortunately mitigated in the English translation, which contains a total of forty-four drawings of masks that are inserted between sections and serve to break up the text. Much of the novel’s carefully wrought airlessness is lost as a result. 18. Abe, Tanin no kao, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 18, pp. 381–382; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, pp. 86–87 (translation slightly modified). 19.  Ibid., p. 486; p. 224 (translation slightly modified). 20.  Ibid., pp. 327, 354, 368, 390, 391, 411, 424, 437, 459, 494; pp. 12, 48, 67, 98, 99, 125, 145, 162, 190, 235. 21.  Ibid., pp. 329, 363, 387, 435, 450; pp. 15, 59–60, 93, 159–160, 178 (translation slightly modified).

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22.  This notion of enframing (Gestell) is taken from Heidegger: it is that “which sets upon man and puts him in position to reveal the real in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. . . . In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: It seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.” Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 24–27. Despite differences in conceptuality and terminology, we are in fact very close here to the form of sociality that Abe tried to think in “Shi to shijin (ishiki to muishiki)” (already quoted in the epigraph to this chapter): “Consciousness is nothing but the law of restricted exchange between one person and another.” 23.  Abe Kōbō, “Mōjū no kokoro ni keisanki no te wo,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 4, pp. 502–503; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 42–44. 24.  Abe, “Rinjin wo koeru mono,” p. 386; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 89–90. 25. Abe, Tanin no kao, p. 477; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, p. 213. This “record for me alone” recalls Abe’s line, already quoted, that “the writer emerges inside when one feels the need to give something new and original to oneself as other.” 26.  Ibid., p. 495; p. 237. 27.  Ibid., p. 485; p. 223. 28.  Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 118. 29. Abe, Tanin no kao, pp. 322–323; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, pp. 3–4 (translation slightly modified). 30.  Ibid., p. 339; p. 28 (translation slightly modified). The doctor continues: “Have you ever seen the expressions of imbeciles or schizophrenics? If the roadway [between people] is left blocked too long, one ultimately quite forgets there is one.” What is in question here, in other words, is a notion of sociality based on transferential intersubjectivity. 31.  Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 32.  In this regard, it makes little difference whether the letter is authored by the wife or the protagonist himself, for what is in question above all is the latter’s textual narcissism. For a fine reading of this text that assumes that the letter is indeed written by the wife, see Margaret S. Key, Truth from a Lie: Documentary, Detection, and Reflexivity in Abe Kōbō’s Realist Project (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), pp. 125–165. 33. Abe, Tanin no kao, p. 486; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, p. 224. 34.  Ibid., p. 428; p. 150 (translation slightly modified).



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35.  Ibid., pp. 322–324; pp. 3–6 (translation slightly modified). 36.  Abe states this quite plainly in his novel Kemonotachi ha kokyō wo mezasu: “Just as today exists within yesterday, so too does tomorrow exist within today; and just as today exists within tomorrow, so too does yesterday live within today. He had been taught that this was how man lived, and he had come to believe it. Because of the war, however, this convention had disintegrated, becoming something scattered and unrelated. For Kyūzō now, yesterday and tomorrow were no longer linked together. . . . Given that yesterday would never return and tomorrow could not yet be glimpsed, how could one conceive of the meaning of today, which existed between them?” Abe, Kemonotachi ha kokyō wo mezasu, p. 316. 37.  Abe critically refers to man’s appropriation of time in his 1959 essay “Jikan satsujin jiken,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 11, pp. 295–296. 38.  These words appear in the 1955 essay “Shinin tōjō: jitsuzai shinai mono ni tsuite,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 5, p. 200. 39. Abe, Tanin no kao, p. 378; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, p. 82 (translation slightly modified). 40.  Cf. the following lines from “Shinin tōjō: jitsuzai shinai mono ni tsuite”: “If someone thinks that yesterday and today are the same day and believes that the barriers of a home can guarantee isolation and tranquility, then it is certain that there is a haunting here of something unreal. Ghosts are perhaps even the most common thing in the world” (p. 201). 41. Abe, Tanin no kao, p. 419; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, p. 139 (translation slightly modified). 42.  Ibid., p. 341; p. 31 (translation slightly modified). 43.  In his 1954 essay “Bungaku ni okeru riron to jissen,” Abe gives expression to such materialist conception of language through reference to Stalin’s 1950 work, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, from which he cites the following important passage: “It is said that thoughts arise in the mind of man prior to their being expressed in speech, that they arise without linguistic material, without linguistic integument, in, so to say, a naked form. But that is absolutely wrong. Whatever thoughts arise in the human mind and at whatever moment, they can arise and exist only on the basis of the linguistic material, on the basis of language terms and phrases. Bare thoughts, free of the linguistic material, free of the ‘natural matter’ of language, do not exist.” In Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 4, p. 318; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 23. 44.  Abe, “Shi to shijin (ishiki to muishiki),” esp. pp. 114–117; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 13–17. 45.  Abe implicitly complicates this category of ethnicity (which, let us note, frequently overlaps with that of race) in the case of Korean residents by referring to a Korean of partial Japanese ancestry: “I read once in some newspaper or review a strangely thought-provoking article about a Korean with Japanese blood [nihonjin to konketsu no], who in order to look more like a Korean went to

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the trouble of undergoing plastic surgery. This was clearly a stress on facial restoration, but it could never be said that the man was implicated in prejudice. . . . If the opportunity presented itself, I should really like very much to hear what kind of advice the Korean would give someone like me who had lost his face.” Abe, Tanin no kao, p. 342; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, p. 32. 46.  Ibid., pp. 329, 345–346, 347, 362, 382, 389–390, 414, 434; pp. 15, 36–37, 38, 59, 87, 97–98, 129, 158 (translation slightly modified). 47.  Ibid., pp. 327, 342, 348, 442–443, 470; pp. 13, 32, 40, 169, 203 (translation slightly modified). 48.  Etienne Balibar, “Racism and Nationalism,” in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), p. 49. 49.  Abe states this exclusionary nature of citizenship quite clearly: “Furthermore, had there not been concealed in my mask from the beginning a scheme of revenge? There was at work here a justifiable feeling of vengeance, of defiance, of abhorrence for the worldly prejudice that deprived a man of citizenship [shiminken] along with his face.” Abe, Tanin no kao, p. 420; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, p. 140. 50.  Ibid., pp. 469–470; p. 202 (translation slightly modified). 51.  Nakano Kazunori interprets this expression as referring either to the repatriation project or to the campaign to allow Korean residents of Japan unobstructed passage between Japan and the Koreas. See his essay “Abe Kōbō ‘Tanin no kao’ ron: kamen to kōi,” Comparatio (Kyushu University, 2002), issue 6, p. 4. 52.  John Lie, Zainichi (Koreans in Japan): Diasporic Nationalism and Postcolonial Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 45. See also Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). 53. Abe, Tanin no kao, pp. 480–481; trans. in Saunders, The Face of Another, pp. 217–218. 54.  Compare: “Of course, I had almost nothing in common with the Negroes, except for being an object of prejudice. The Negroes were comrades bound in the same cause, but I was quite alone” and “Even though we [Korean residents of Japan and the protagonist] were both objects of prejudice there was a difference between their case and mine. . . . They had companions who joined with them against prejudice; I did not.” Ibid., p. 402; p. 114. 55.  Ibid., p. 441; p. 166 (translation slightly modified). 56.  The analysis I am undertaking here pursues quite different aims and strategies, but cf. Derrida’s crucial reading of Lévi-Strauss’s study of the Nambikwara in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 101–140. 57. Abe, Tanin no kao, p. 368; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, pp. 66 (translation slightly modified).



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58.  Let us point out that the metaphor of organicity works doubly here, as this term for “ligament,” jintai, acts as a homophone for the expression “human body.” 59.  For another critique of this logic, in which Abe powerfully illuminates certain tensions or contradictions that inhere in the relation between family, community, and national military, see his 1959 television scenario Nihon no nisshoku, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 11, pp. 201–224. This text is based on Abe’s 1957 short story “Yume no heishi,” in which he depicts society’s violence through the figure of the wartime deserter, of whom it is said, “Deserters are traitors to their country. The worst kind of low-down cowards.” In Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 7, p. 205; trans. in Carpenter, Beyond the Curve, pp. 217–218. 60.  Abe elsewhere identifies a third possibility beyond annihilation and deportation, that of internal externalization, as appears in the form of the forced (either through political or economic exigencies) ghettoization of minorities within the delimited space of the proto-nation-state. The historical example he provides to illustrate this process of internal externalization is that of European Jewry. In this regard, history amply reveals how easily this particular form of minoritization can change into that of annihilation. See his 1968 essay “Uchinaru henkyō,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 22, pp. 205–228; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 124–148. 61.  John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p. 175. Dower also relates in this same passage the highly revealing fact that the U.S. military kept “white” and “black” blood plasma stored separately. 62. Abe, Tanin no kao, pp. 424–425, 426, 487; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, pp. 146, 148, 226 (translation slightly modified). 63.  These concepts, first introduced by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, are also typically associated with the work of Max Weber. 64. Abe, Tanin no kao, pp. 330–331, 389–390; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, pp. 17, 97 (translation slightly modified). 65.  For one of the most influential apologias of this determination of national identity in terms of a majority population in the particular context of the United States, see Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005). The anxiety in this text regarding the threat of Hispanic immigration, which must be countered by the implementation of more effective assimilationist policies on the part of the state, is directly related to the reading of Abe we are undertaking here. 66. Abe, Tanin no kao, pp. 400–401; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, p. 112 (translation slightly modified). 67.  Ibid., p. 401; p. 112 (translation slightly modified). 68.  For this notion of communication with the other, see Briankle G. Chang, Deconstructing Communication: Representation, Subject, and Economies of Exchange (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); for a valuable critique of the

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widely misunderstood notion of cultural difference in the context of subject formation, see Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), esp. pp. 117–152. 69.  Abe patiently dismantles this notion of proof and inferential logic as a means of attaining truth in many of his works, perhaps most famously in his 1967 detective novel Moetsukita chizu [trans. E. Dale Saunders, The Ruined Map (New York: Vintage Books, 1969)]. For two informative readings of this text, see Tanaka Hiroyuki, Abe Kōbō bungaku no kenkyū (Tokyo: Izumi shoin, 2012), pp. 182–199; and Mark Laurent Gibeau, “Nomadic Communities: The Literature and Philosophy of Abe Kōbō” (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2005), pp. 155–205. 70. Abe, Tanin no kao, p. 402; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, pp. 113– 114 (translation slightly modified). 71.  Additional layers of irony in the representation of “cultural difference” can be found as well. If, as we have suggested, the two major indices employed in determining this difference are physical appearance and language usage, then Abe’s ironic intent becomes clear. The protagonist, in his difference from Koreans, might be the only person in the Korean restaurant with a Japanese face were it not for the fact that he has no face. Further, the waitress might be determined as Korean even though she perhaps only speaks Japanese. In this way, such cultural indices are shown to possess an irreducibly fictional aspect: what matters is less their objective correlation to reality than the desire to believe that such correlation exists. 72. Abe, Tanin no kao, pp. 401–402; trans. Saunders, The Face of Another, pp. 113–114 (translation slightly modified). I undertake a slightly different reading of these same passages in “Abe Kōbō no ‘Tanin no kao’ ni okeru sensō no kioku to jinshu mondai,” Quadrante, no. 14 (March 2012), pp. 175–183. CHA PTER FOUR

1.  Abe Kōbō, “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū (Tokyo: Shin­ chōsha, 1997–2000), v. 22, p. 326; trans. Richard F. Calichman, The Frontier Within: Essays by Abe Kōbō (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 151. 2.  Abe Kōbō, “Kokka kara no shissō: ‘Nihon dokusho shinbun’ no intabyū ni kotaete,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 21, p. 425. 3.  Abe Kōbō, “Shinin tōjō: jitsuzai shinai mono ni tsuite,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 5, p. 201. The term keisha, which I translate here as “disequilibrium,” typically signifies a gradient or slope, but the opposition that Abe refers to in this context with the word “stability” (antei) suggests more broadly a kind of skewing or veering, that which produces an effect of imbalance. 4. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 61. 5.  Abe Kōbō, “Geijutsu no kakumei: geijutsu undō no riron,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 12, p. 463; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 74.



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6.  Abe, “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō,” p. 326; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 151. 7.  “Abe was a maverick, incapable of aligning himself for long with any political movement or writing works in accordance with doctrinal lines.” Donald Keene, Five Modern Japanese Novelists (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 66. 8.  Donald Keene, “Honmono no tensai: Abe Kōbō,” Chūō kōron (April 1993), p. 302. 9.  Abe Kōbō and Donald Keene, Hangekiteki ningen (Tokyo: Chūkō shinsho, 1973), pp. 82–83. 10.  Ibid., p. 86. To this point Abe replies laughingly, “You have finally defended the way in which my work is related to Japanese tradition!” 11.  Ibid., p. 82. 12.  Abe expresses this clearly to Keene in Hangekiteki ningen: “I am opposed to such expressions as ‘the Japanese people are . . . ’ or ‘characteristically Japanese things include . . . ’ This is not because I might agree or disagree with their concrete content, but rather because I detect something dubious about this kind of question or problematization itself.” Ibid., p. 44 (my italics). Once again, what appears in the national-cultural realm merely as “concrete content” that gives itself in its immediacy and objectivity to subjective representation is shown to already derive from an earlier organization at the level of form. 13.  This dyadic structure of tradition is also set forth in the 1966 essay “Rinjin wo koeru mono,” where Abe repeats the privileging of the aspect of receptivity: “The notion of ‘tradition’ can be divided into two main categories. The first consists of artworks. These represent ‘tradition,’ those visible traces that appear on the surface of history. In classical performing art, for example, apprentices are taken in and indoctrinated until they are finally initiated into some mysterious secrets. It seems that certain kinds of traditionalists conceive of ‘tradition’ as a finished work to be transferred from writer to writer. The other kind of ‘tradition’ is the history inscribed within us as invisible traces. . . . Far more significant than ‘tradition’ in the sense of those traces that lie exposed on the surface of history is the invisible image of ‘tradition’ that flows among readers.” In Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 20, pp. 385–387; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 88–90. 14.  Abe Kōbō, “Uchinaru henkyō,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 22, pp. 219–220; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 139–140. 15.  See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), p.16. 16.  Abe, “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō,” pp. 341; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 165–166. 17. Keene, Five Modern Japanese Novelists, p. 73. 18.  Abe, “Rinjin wo koeru mono,” p. 388; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 91–92.

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19.  Ibid., pp. 390–391; p. 94. 20. Ibid., 396; p. 101. 21.  Abe Kōbō, “Nihongo, nihon bungaku, nihonjin,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 25, pp. 474–475. 22.  Ibid., p. 477. 23.  Keene, “Honmono no tensai,” p. 299. 24.  Abe and Keene, Hangekiteki ningen, p. 24. 25.  This conclusion would also logically follow from Abe’s discussion of Sartre’s theory of language in his 1960 essay “Eizō ha gengo no kabe wo hakai suru ka”: “By naming something, or transferring it to the order of language, man was able to subjugate, neutralize, and domesticate it. For example, by giving a stick the name ‘stick,’ he was able to know it as a stick and thereby obtain not individual sticks but rather abstract sticks in general (an infinite number of sticks).” In Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 11, p. 451; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 61–62. In order to arrive at the above conclusion regarding differential repetition, however, the process of linguistic abstraction Abe surveys here would need to be conceived even more broadly, going beyond the “infinite number of sticks” in the sense of empirical objects to include an infinite number of linguistic inscriptions of the word “stick.” Abe refers to this same example several years later in his 1965 lecture “Gendai ni okeru kyōiku no kanōsei: ningen sonzai no honshitsu ni furete”: “For man, sticks have an infinite existence. This is because he has acquired the concept of ‘stick.’” In Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 19, p. 263; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 83. 26.  Abe Kōbō, “Hetero no kōzō,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 18, p. 314. In this essay, Abe specifically focuses on the desire for purity in the historical context of the ethnic-nation. As he writes, “No matter how loudly intransigent nationalists call for the purification of the ethnic-nation, the scale of reality appears to be such as to never yield to these demands, declaring instead the superiority of heterogeneity.” 27.  See in this connection also Naoki Sakai’s crucial work on translation in such texts as Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and Nihon shisō toiu mondai: honyaku to shutai (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2007). 28.  Abe, “Uchinaru henkyō,” p. 218; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 137–138. 29.  Abe, “Rinjin wo koeru mono,” pp. 388; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 92. Abe doesn’t specify to whom he might be referring in this criticism, but he does explicitly name the nationalist writer Kamei Katsuichirō as guilty of this same attitude in a lecture given the previous year: “Kamei Katsuichirō says that when the word ‘Kyōto’ is written in katakana rather than in Chinese characters, the sense of the word is lost. He adds that such linguistic confusion [or corruption: midare] represents a confusion [corruption] in the



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spirit of the Japanese people, and that this will gradually lower the level of the Japanese. This claim is utterly preposterous. I can assure you that it is false.” Abe, “Gendai ni okeru kyōiku no kanōsei,” p. 265; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 85. 30.  Abe and Keene, Hangekiteki ningen, p. 71. 31.  Ibid., p. 69. 32.  Ibid., pp. 28–32. 33.  John Whittier Treat, “The Woman in the Dunes,” in Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective: A Guide for Teaching, ed. Barbara Stoler Miller (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), p. 463. 34.  Ibid., p. 464. 35.  Abe and Keene, Hangekiteki ningen, p. 113. 36.  Abe, “Rinjin wo koeru mono,” pp. 386; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 90. 37.  Abe, “Eizō ha gengo no kabe wo hakai suru ka,” p. 453; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 64. 38.  John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 238, 241 (italics in the original). 39.  Ibid., p. 238. 40.  Ibid., p. 232. 41. Ibid. 42.  Treat is entirely consistent in this understanding. Cf. “What does matter is that saints are the Other, that they are what we are not.” And again: “He is not a hibakusha: he is their Other, and they his.” Ibid., pp. 251, 254–255. 43.  Abe, “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō,” p. 343; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, pp. 167–168. 44.  Abe and Keene, Hangekiteki ningen, pp. 101–103. 45.  Abe Kōbō, Suna no onna, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 16, p. 138; trans. Dale E. Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 41. 46.  Treat, “The Woman in the Dunes,” p. 464. 47.  Ibid., p. 458. 48.  Ibid., p. 465. 49.  Ibid., p. 463. 50.  Ibid., p. 458. 51.  Ibid., p. 467. 52.  Ibid., p. 459. 53. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, p. 75. 54.  Abe, “Hetero no kōzō,” p. 315. 55. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, p. 362 (italics in the original except for my emphasis on the two instances in which verbs appear in the future tense). 56.  Abe, “Hetero no kōzō,” p. 314. 57. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, p. x (italics mine).

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58.  This point is structurally similar to the border that Abe establishes in the Korean restaurant scene in Tanin no kao, as discussed in Chapter Three. The restaurant, a site of Koreanness, is nevertheless located within the internal national space of Japan. Within the restaurant are both Japanese and Korean customers. The question Abe brilliantly poses here concerns the notion of national belonging: in this site of a Korea that exists within the larger site of Japan, who is at home, the Koreans or the Japanese? 59. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, pp. x–xi. 60.  Abe Kōbō, “Itan no pasupōto,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 22, p. 147; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 121. 61.  At one point in his essay “The Woman in the Dunes,” Treat describes Abe as motivated by a similar desire for identification, leading to the inevitable return to the proper: “One senses in Abe’s fiction that he, insofar as he identified with his characters, would nostalgically like to have found home” (p. 460). 62.  Abe Kōbō, “Amerika hakken,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 7, p. 442; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 56. 63.  Treat, “The Woman in the Dunes,” p. 460. 64.  Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 253, 152. 65. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, p. 367. 66.  Treat, “The Woman in the Dunes,” p. 467. 67. Treat, Writing Ground Zero, p. 3 (italics mine). 68. Ibid., p. 360 (italics mine in the phrase “what constitutes a native Japanese”). 69.  Ibid., p. 316 (italics mine). 70.  John Whittier Treat, Great Mirrors Shattered: Homosexuality, Orientalism, and Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 108. 71.  Ibid., p. 202 (italics mine). 72.  Ibid., p. 204 (italics in the original). 73.  Ibid., p. 21. 74.  Ibid., p. 22. 75.  Ibid. p. 13. 76.  Ibid., p. 210. 77.  Ibid., p. 7. 78. Ibid. 79.  Ibid., p. 29. 80.  Ibid., p. 121. 81.  Ibid., p. 41. 82.  Ibid., p. 63 (italics in the original). 83.  Ibid., p. 81. 84.  Ibid., pp. 100, 97. No doubt there will be readers who wish to defend the discourse of Great Mirrors Shattered by making a strict distinction between culturalism and racism. Such a defense overlooks the fact that the categories of



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“culture” and “race” constantly overlap in actual historical practice, but two additional points must be raised here as well: 1. Treat refers to the Japanese specifically as a “race” on p. 69: “a member of the race that I had committed to love as well.” 2. There is a long history of racist discourse that takes the specific form of condescension on the part of those who, wishing to consider themselves members of a “superior” race, describe members of the “inferior” race as “childish” or in some sense undeveloped. Such statements frequently appear in relations of imperial domination, which raises important questions about the geopolitical context of Treat’s remarks in light of postwar U.S.-Japan relations. 85.  Ibid., p. 48. 86.  Abe, “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō,” p. 344; trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within, p. 169. These lines must be read alongside an important passage in Abe’s 1957 novel Kemonotachi ha kokyō wo mezasu in which the Japanese protagonist Kuki Kyūzō is seen by other Japanese as non-Japanese on account of his sunburned skin. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 6, p. 428. EPI LOGUE

1.  Abe Kōbō, “Toki no gake,” in Abe Kōbō zenshū (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997– 2000), v. 18, p. 248. 2.  Abe Kōbō, Mokugekisha, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 19, p. 32. 3.  The most valuable work here remains Naoki Sakai’s Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). As with Abe, this text demands to be read not merely at the level of object but rather more generally at the level of methodology. 4.  Abe Kōbō, Suna no onna, in Abe Kōbō zenshū, v. 16, p. 152; trans. E. Dale Saunders, The Woman in the Dunes (New York: Vintage International, 1991), p. 65. 5.  Ibid., p. 239; p. 221.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abe Kōbō. Abe Kōbō zenshū [The Complete Works of Abe Kōbō]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1997–2000. ———. “Akai mayu” [The Red Cocoon]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 2. Trans. in Lane Dunlop, A Late Chrysanthemum: Twenty-one Stories from the Japanese. Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1988. ———. “Amerika hakken” [Discovering America]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 7. Trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within. ———. “Bungaku ni okeru riron to jissen” [Theory and Practice in Literature]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 4. Trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within. ———. “Bungaku to jikan” [Literature and Time]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 2. ———. “Chinnyūsha” [The Intruders]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 3. Trans. in Carpenter, Beyond the Curve. ———. Dai yon kanpyōki [Inter Ice Age 4]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 9. Trans. E. Dale Saunders, Inter Ice Age 4. New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1970. ———. “Eizō ha gengo no kabe wo hakai suru ka” [Does the Visual Image Destroy the Walls of Language?]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 11. Trans. in Calich­ man, The Frontier Within. ———. “Geijutsu no kakumei: geijutsu undō no riron” [Artistic Revolution: Theory of the Art Movement]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 12. Trans. in Calich­ man, The Frontier Within. ———. “Gendai ni okeru kyōiku no kanōsei: ningen sonzai no honshitsu ni furete” [Possibilities for Education Today: On the Essence of Human Existence]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 19. Trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within. ———. Hakobune sakura maru [The Ark Sakura]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 27. Trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter, The Ark Sakura. New York: Vintage Books, 1988.

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———. Hako otoko [The Box Man]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 24. Trans. E. Dale Saunders, The Box Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. ———. “Henkei no kiroku” [Record of a Transformation]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 4. Trans. in Carpenter, Beyond the Curve. ———. “Hetero no kōzō” [Structure of Heterogeneity]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 18. ———. “Itan no pasupōto” [Passport of Heresy]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 22. Trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within. ———. “Jikan satsujin jiken” [The Murder Case of Time]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 11. ———. “Jikan to kūkan” [Time and Space]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 1. ———. Kemonotachi ha kokyō wo mezasu [The Beasts Head for Home]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 6. ———. “Kokka kara no shissō: ‘Nihon dokusho shinbun’ no intabyū ni kotaete” [Disappearance from the State: In Response to an Interview with the Japan Readers Newspaper]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 21. ———. “‘Kyō’ wo saguru shūnen” [The Tenacity to Search for “Today”]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 15. ———. Mikkai [Secret Rendezvous]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 26. Trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter, Secret Rendezvous. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. ———. Moetsukita chizu [The Ruined Map]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 21. Trans. E. Dale Saunders, The Ruined Map. New York: Vintage Books, 1969. ———. “‘Moetsukita chizu’ wo megutte” [On The Ruined Map]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 21. Trans. in Andrew Horvat, Four Stories by Kobo Abe. Tokyo: Hara shobō, 1973. ———. “Mōjū no kokoro ni keisanki no te wo: bungaku to ha nanika” [The Hand of a Calculator with the Heart of a Beast: What Is Literature?]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 4. Trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within. ———. Mokugekisha [Witness]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 19. ———. “Nihongo, nihon bungaku, nihonjin” [The Japanese Language, Japanese Literature, and the Japanese People]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 25. ———. Nihon no nisshoku [The Eclipse of Japan]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 11. Trans. in Carpenter, Beyond the Curve. ———. “Rinjin wo koeru mono” [Beyond the Neighbor]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 20. Trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within. ———. “Shinin tōjō: jitsuzai shinai mono ni tsuite” [Visitation of the Dead: On the Unreal]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 5. ———. “Shi to shijin (ishiki to muishiki)” [Poetry and Poets (Consciousness and the Unconsciousness)]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 1. Trans. in Calichman, The Frontier Within. ———. “S. Karuma shi no hanzai” [The Crime of Mr. S. Karma]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 2. Trans. in Carpenter, Beyond the Curve. ———. Suna no onna [The Woman in the Dunes]. In Abe Kōbō zenshū, vol. 16.



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Tanaka Hiroyuki. Abe Kōbō bungaku no kenkyū [Studies in the Literature of Abe Kōbō]. Tokyo: Izumi shoin, 2012. Tanigawa Atsushi. “Abe Kōbō ‘Suna no onna’ no jikan” [The Notion of Time in Abe Kōbō’s The Woman in the Dunes]. In Ishizaki, ed., Abe Kōbō “Suna no onna” sakuhin ronshū. Toba Kōji, ed. Abe Kōbō, media no ekkyōsha [Abe Kōbō: Transgressor of Media]. Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2013. Treat, John Whittier. Great Mirrors Shattered: Homosexuality, Orientalism, and ­Japan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. “The Woman in the Dunes.” In Barbara Stoler Miller, ed., Masterworks of Asian Literature in Comparative Perspective: A Guide for Teaching. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. ———. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Tsuruta Kinya. “‘Suna no onna’ ni okeru ryūdō to teichaku no tēma” [The Themes of Flow and Fixity in The Woman in the Dunes]. In Ishizaki, ed., Abe Kōbō “Suna no onna” sakuhin ronshū. Yoneyama, Lisa. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

INDEX

Abe Kōbō: “Akai mayu,” 54; “Amerika hakken,” 222, 253, 264; Bō ni natta otoko, 183, 186; “Bungaku ni okeru riron to jissen,” 257; “Bungaku to jikan,” 62, 67; “Chinnyūsha,” 106; Dai yon kanpyōki, 62, 67; “Eizō ha gengo no kabe wo hakai suru ka,” 262–63; “Geijutsu no kakumei: geijutsu undō no riron,” 177, 254, 260; “Gendai ni okeru kyōiku no kanōsei: ningen sonzai no honshitsu ni furete,” 262–63; Hakobune sakura maru, 53–55, 66, 246–47, 249–50, 255; Hako otoko, 60; Hangekiteki ningen, 89, 183, 201, 204, 208, 261–63; “Henkei no kiroku,” 106, 254; “Hetero no kōzō,” 216, 262–63; “Itan no pasupōto,” 53, 63, 221, 249, 264; “Jikan satsujin jiken,” 257; “Jikan to kūkan,” 2–4; Kemonotachi ha kokyō wo mezasu, 106, 257, 265; “Kokka kara no shissō,” 172, 260; “‘Kyō’ wo saguru shūnen,” 4–5; Mikkai, 60–61; “Miritarī rukku,” 53; Moetsukita chizu, 260; “‘Moetsukita chizu’ wo megutte,” 5–6; “Mōjū no kokoro ni keisanki no te wo: bungaku to ha nanika,” 114–15, 247; Mokugekisha, 236–37, 265; “Nihongo, nihon bungaku, nihonjin,” 194, 262; Nihon no nisshoku, 259; “Rinjin

wo koeru mono,” 97–98, 115, 192, 204, 250, 254, 261–63; “Shinin tōjō: jitsuzai shinai mono ni tsuite,” 174, 257, 260; “Shi to shijin (ishiki to muishiki),” 14, 97, 254, 256–57; “S. Karuma shi no hanzai,” 26–27; Suna no onna, 8, 11–52, 203, 210, 212, 232, 240–42, 245–49, 265; Tanin no kao, 9, 97–169, 254–60, 264; “Toki no gake,” 66, 233, 246, 265; “Uchinaru henkyō,” 8, 53–95, 188, 199, 249–54, 259, 261–62; “Yume no heishi,” 259; Yūrei ha koko ni iru, 247; “Zoku, uchinaru henkyō,” 6, 53, 58, 60–62, 78, 87, 171, 207, 260–61, 263 alterity, 4–5, 8, 28, 43, 47–48, 55, 57–58, 60–62, 71, 73–74, 83, 99–101, 104, 107, 115, 135, 149, 198–99, 203–12, 215, 224–25, 230, 235, 240 Althusser, Louis, 121 art, 1, 6–7 auto-affection, 20, 111, 133, 239 Balibar, Etienne, 140 Bataille, Georges, 248 belonging, 7, 94 172–74, 190, 213–14, 223, 264 Benedict, Ruth, 228–29 Bergson, Henri, 92

2 7 4  I N DEX

Bolton, Christopher, 202 border, 4, 48, 57–58, 61, 63–64, 66–67, 100, 105, 107, 110, 130, 153–54, 165, 178–79, 186, 189, 192, 194, 200–201, 216, 218, 235, 240, 264 Chaplin, Charlie, 92 circularity, 3, 54, 108–20, 125–26 city, 33, 56–58, 87, 91 community, 5–6, 9, 35–36, 40–42, 56, 58–59, 61, 67, 87–88, 92, 97–169, 198, 240–41 consciousness, 13–14, 37–39, 97, 204 contamination, 70–71 contingency, 9–10, 20, 64, 103–4, 111, 124, 135, 166, 180, 189, 196, 218 culturalism, 10, 221, 230, 240, 264–65 decision, 3, 10, 133, 180, 188, 213 de Crèvecœur, J. Hector St. John, 222 Derrida, Jacques, 250, 256, 258, 261 dialectics, 9, 38, 42, 69, 73, 115–19, 122, 189, 252, 254 disavowal, 176, 180, 187, 202, 212, 217, 219, 226 Dower, John W., 152, 259 ecstacy, 4–5, 43, 52, 65–66, 88, 128 ethnicity, 7, 78–79, 86, 92, 136–37, 163, 168–69, 214, 239, 257 experience, 11, 15–17, 201 fall, 30, 39, 67, 86, 88, 155–56, 235 fixity, 1–2, 8, 63, 73, 81–82 form, 42–48, 190–91, 208, 210–11, 232, 261 Freud, Sigmund, 107, 176, 217, 260 future, 4–5, 15, 17, 19, 22, 24, 51, 59–62, 68, 124–27, 188–89, 208–9, 218, 232, 246 Gemeinschaft, 154–56 Gesellschaft, 154–56 Gibeau, Mark Laurent, 202 haunting, 30, 73, 76, 83–84, 107, 130, 247 Hegel, G.W.F., 42, 101 Heidegger, Martin, 14, 88, 133, 246, 253, 256 historicism, 70 Hitler, Adolf, 85, 90

hope, 19–20 Huntington, Samuel P., 259 Hyppolite, Jean, 101 identity, 1–4, 7–8, 10, 19, 26–28, 30–31, 45, 54, 59–60, 62, 64–65, 72–74, 77, 79, 81, 83–84, 88, 92, 98, 103, 130, 171–73, 176–79, 184, 190, 200, 204–5, 212, 234–35, 240 ideology, 9, 80, 92–93, 95, 99, 103, 148, 155, 190, 199, 214, 231–32, 254 Iles, Timothy, 202 Imamura Shōhei, 248 inheritance, 141, 189, 232 intervention, 9–10, 179–232, 236 Jewry, 9, 54, 72–95, 259 Kafka, Franz, 91–95 Kamei Katsuichirō, 262 Karube Tadashi, 246 Keene, Donald, 10, 182–201, 204, 208, 213–14, 223, 231, 239, 261 Key, Margaret S., 202 lack, 137–38, 143 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 1, 34, 247–48 Lawrence, D. H., 248 Lie, John, 144 mark, 7–8, 15, 19, 22, 43, 47, 49, 125, 132, 135, 137, 142, 211, 214, 235 materiality, 13, 97, 106, 131–33, 162, 257 mediation, 28, 74–75, 93–94, 99, 192, 220 memory, 15, 18–19, 24, 29–30, 50–51 Miller, Arthur, 254 Miller, Henry, 248 minority, 9, 91, 136–69 Mishima Yukio, 6, 173, 195–96 modernity, 58, 80, 105, 141, 154–56, 168, 171, 191, 221 movement, 1–2, 4, 8–9, 20, 45, 63, 81–82 Nakano Kazunori, 158 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 34, 105, 247–49, 251 nation-state, 6–7, 56–58, 79–80, 82, 86, 88–95, 97, 99, 102, 104–5, 136, 143–51,

INDEX    275

156, 159, 161–62, 168–69, 171, 181, 184, 189–94, 199–201, 214, 219–23, 229, 241–42 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14 Nishida Kitarō, 248 objectivity, 14 Ōe Kenzaburō, 173, 205–6, 255 ontology, 8, 14, 44–45, 207 oppositionality, 29–30, 43, 69, 73, 83–84, 99–100, 109, 117, 125, 142, 153, 176, 182, 203–4, 212–13, 224, 227, 238 Orientalism, 10, 182, 203, 228–30, 240 Ōshima Nagisa, 248 particularism, 10, 58, 63–65, 69, 92, 199–201, 214 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 248 phenomenological reduction, 76 proper name, 30–32 Proust, Marcel, 92 race, 7, 10, 78–79, 86, 92, 136–37, 163, 168–69, 182, 203, 212, 214, 221, 230–32, 239–40, 264–65 Rauschning, Hermann, 90 reading, 20, 114–19 repetition, 7, 26, 31–32, 125, 194–201, 218 retroactivity, 3, 6, 17, 19, 23, 62, 66, 77, 79, 101, 124, 142, 149, 191, 209, 214 romanticism, 34, 40, 248 Said, Edward, 228–29 Sakai, Naoki, 251, 255, 260, 262, 265 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 72, 85, 205–6, 215, 251, 253, 262 Schnellbächer, Thomas, 202 self, 3, 17, 28, 37–39, 55, 64, 103, 191, 212, 241, 246

sending, 19–20, 24–25, 111–13, 129–30, 141 sexual relations, 33–40 shame, 138–39 Shields, Nancy K., 202 space, 8–9, 55–56, 58, 60, 62–72, 81–82, 153, 193, 208, 211 Stow, Kenneth, 252 subjectivity, 11–14, 17, 20, 28, 32, 37, 76, 101, 105–7, 110, 128, 149, 172, 187, 204, 236 synecdoche, 94, 159 textuality, 13, 20, 180–81, 200 theme, 12–13 time, 2–10, 15, 18, 24, 30, 49–52, 54, 58–72, 81–82, 88, 125–28, 153, 188–90, 193, 207–12, 218, 234–35 Tolstoy, Leo, 79, 91–95 totality, 57, 77, 100, 147–53, 159, 193, 215–19, 222 trace, 16–18, 23, 33 tradition, 182–94, 213, 232, 261 transference, 9, 109–36 translation, 194–201, 262 Treat, John Whittier, 10, 182, 202–32, 239, 263 U.S. Japan studies, 9–10, 182–232, 237–40 violence, 57, 63, 83, 88, 98–101, 107, 112– 14, 119, 123, 136–37, 141, 144–53, 157, 159–62, 178, 191, 196, 199, 220 whole-part relation, 7, 94–95, 147–50, 153–55, 157, 220 writing, 8, 11–52, 114–36 Yoneyama, Lisa, 225, 264