New Book
The Politics of Culture: Around the Work of Naoki Sakai, edited by Richard Calichman and John Namjun Kim, has just been published. An exploration of one of the most interesting theorists working in Japanese cultural studies (and one of my own mentors), the volume contains new essays by scholars from a variety of fields–including yours truly. My own piece is a re-reading of Natsume S??seki’s 1908 novel Sanshir?? in relation to Sakai’s philosophical approaches to the questions of language and translation, as I trace the meandering paths of a number of stray sheep–both literal and figurative.
My own copy hasn’t shown up in the mail yet, so I can’t tell you a great deal about the other essays yet, other than that they are by some of the most interesting people I know. At $130 a pop, you might want to ask your rich uncle to buy the book for you, or perhaps borrow it from your local university library. But anyone with an interest in the theories of translation, subjectivity and nationalism will, I’m sure, find it a provocative and challenging read–much like the work of its subject, Naoki Sakai.
The publisher’s homepage on the book is here, and below is the table of contents.
Editors’ Introduction
Part I: Translation and its Effects
1. Novelistic Desire, Theoretical Attitude, and Translating Heteroglossia: Reading Natsume S??seki’s Sanshir?? with Naoki Sakai; Michael K. Bourdaghs
2. Deixis, Dislocation, and Suspense in Translation: Tawada Y??ko’s Bath; Brett de Bary
3. Politics as Translation: Naoki Sakai and the Critique of Hermeneutics; John Namjun Kim
4. The Biopolitics of Companion Species: Wartime Animation and Multi-Ethnic Nationalism; Thomas Lamarre
5. Translating the Image; Helen Petrovsky
Part II: Economies of Difference
6. For a Communist Ontology; William Haver
7. Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude; Sandro Mezzadra
8. Transition to a World Society: Naoki Sakai’s Work in the Context of Capital-Imperialism; Jon Solomon
9. Total War and Subjectivity: ‘Economic Ethics’ as a Trajectory toward Postwar; J. Victor Koschmann
Part III: The Modern West and its Outside
10. The Western Relation: The Politics of Humanism; Frédéric Neyrat
11. Modernization, Modernity, and Tradition: Sociological Theory’s Promissory Notes; Andreas Langenohl
12. Theologico-Political Militancy in Ignacio de Loyola’s Ejercicios espirituales; Alberto Moreiras
13. Interview with Naoki Sakai
