Takeuchi Yoshimi, pan-Asianism and the puzzle of postcolonial modernity

Responses to inequality are complex. Marxists have tried two strategies, both of which have met with little success. On the one hand, echoing or anticipating Fabian, they seek to assert that Asia is contemporary with Europe and America, since all nation-states are part of the global capitalist system. This strategy has the advantage of affirming that China and India, for example, are not backward. However, the problem with this position is that all differences seem to evaporate overnight, during which "all cows are capitalist". The other strategy, clearly expressed by post-colonial theorists, is to assert that there is a difference that escapes capitalist logic. This point of view has the advantage of overcoming a simple teleology, but if this difference is quite different, then we are faced with the question of why such a difference would be relevant to those interested in large-scale projects of human emancipation. Takeuchi's vision of China and Asia attempts to synthesize these two positions, and seems to privilege the postcolonial point of view.

Takeuchi's vision of China is that of another, bygone era, whose demise can be lamented. Today, China is often perceived as a major player in the global capitalist system of nation-states. China-watchers, journalists and politicians talk incessantly about China's "rise to power" and debate whether it is becoming a threat to the West. In this context, "threat" means China becoming a greater capitalist power than the USA. Such discussions suggest that China's rise to power won't really change the global system, insofar as it will remain a capitalist system; history will simply have replaced one hegemony with another. However, Takeuchi's texts depict a China that both anticipates and contradicts this vision. Takeuchi's discourse anticipates the above vision because it emphasizes China's importance in world history. But rather than being perceived as a capitalist threat, according to Takeuchi, and commonly thought of more broadly in post-war Japan, China appears as the hope of a different future, one beyond a modernity dominated by imperialist and capitalist logics. In this context, Takeuchi has attempted to reread the historical significance of both the 1911 revolution and that of the meaning of Chinese literature embodied by the figure of Lu Xun. In post-war Japan, when Japanese intellectuals were debating the consequences of the American Occupation and Japan's role in the Second World War, Japanese sinologists often interpreted the 1911 revolution as a symbol of a different future, despite or perhaps thanks to its failure. Takeuchi Yoshimi pioneered this intellectual movement, arguing that the 1911 revolution, unlike the Meiji Restoration, which was a pale imitation of Western modernity, represented a vision of revolutionary subjectivity, which included subtle mediations of language and politics. Takeuchi's post-war reflection on the 1911 revolution is based on the inter-war text of Lu Xun, the famous Chinese writer whom Takeuchi sees as the philosopher of nothingness.

This may remind us of Hegel's famous discussion of nothingness in The Phenomenology of Spirit. Although Hegel is often perceived as the teleological and Eurocentric thinker par excellence, the use of some of these concepts in non-Western contexts suggests that his work goes far beyond this. Takeuchi probably didn't read Hegel carefully, and so rather than talk of intellectual influence, I favor conceptual convergence, rooted in global capitalist modernity. Takeuchi attempts to resist from a subjective point of view. Nothingness here implies the potentiality of subjectivity. In his post-war works, Takeuchi reads Lu Xun as a critique of modernity and then uses his reading of Lu Xun to rethink the relationship between China and Japan, and eventually that between Asia and Japan. Takeuchi argues that alternative temporalities and global inequalities could engender hope for a future beyond capitalism. These ideas are transmitted by Takeuchi's reading of Mao Zedong, which he develops during the post-war period.

I'll end my presentation with a discussion of ways of interpreting Takeuchi's work through recent theories of capitalism. As I mentioned above, Marxism and postcolonialism represent two sides of an antinomy, and a Marxist response to postcolonial critiques requires an ability to confront all that is not fully encompassed within "capital". I follow recent attempts by Marxists to deal with this based on the idea of formal subsumption. While most Marxists interpret capitalism as migrating from a formal stage to that of real subsumption, recently some theorists are challenging this view and claiming that capitalism can never reach true subsumption. From this point of view, we can think of incomplete subsumption as the reason behind Takeuchi's interpretation of Asia. Does such a vision have more than purely historical significance for us today?