Beyond Nation

Time, Writing, and Community in the Work of Abe Kōbō

Richard Calichman

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780804797016
• eBook ISBN: 9780804797559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Japanese History
• Index: History

In the work of writer Abe K?b? (1924–1993), characters are alienated both from themselves and from one another. Through close readings of Abe's work, Richard Calichman reveals how time and writing have the ability to unground identity. Over time, attempts to create unity of self cause alienation, despite government attempts to convince people to form communities (and nations) to recapture a sense of wholeness. Art, then, must resist the nation-state and expose its false ideologies.

Calichman argues that Abe's attack on the concept of national affiliation has been neglected through his inscription as a writer of Japanese literature. At the same time, the institution of Japan Studies works to tighten the bond between nation-state and individual subject. Through Abe's essays and short stories, he shows how the formation of community is constantly displaced by the notions of time and writing. Beyond Nation thus analyzes the elements of Orientalism, culturalism, and racism that often underlie the appeal to collective Japanese identity.

THREE

THE LURE OF COMMUNITY IN TANIN NO KAO

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

THE NEIGHBOR AND OTHER: THE PROBLEM OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE IN COMMUNAL FORMATION

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 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 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 nation-state. 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 possibility 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 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 Hyppolite 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 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 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-other-enemy-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 qua other presupposes its own presence, that the other was always 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One. Markings in the Sand: On Suna no onna
• Two. The Time of Disturbance: On “Uchinaru henkyō”
• Three. The Lure of Community in Tanin no kao
• Four. Interventions: Of Abe Kōbō
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index