Andrea J. Horbinski (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ahorbinski) wrote2011-11-28 09:23 am
ahorbinski) wrote2011-11-28 09:23 am
Entry tags:
Book review: Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque
Bibliographic Data: Driscoll, Mark. Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, the Dead, and the Undead in Japan's Imperialism, 1895-1945. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Main Argument: Joining biopolitics to Marxian theory, Driscoll argues that "…human and nonhuman resources stolen from colonial and domestic peripheries, together with excessive profits jacked from colonized renters and subaltern wage laborers, built Japan's imperial behemoth. … Japan's imperialism was irrefutably modern; there was noting late or lacking about it." (6-7)
Historiographical Engagement: Driscoll has read a lot of scholarship and primary sources on Manchukuo in particular in Chinese, which produces some startling revelations (as well as the sense that others working over this territory before should have known better). He's also dug up a lot of diaries and personal documents from all over the period, and engages very deeply with eroguro literature of the 1920s and 1930s. In terms of scholarship, he seems to have read most of the big names you'd expect (Hevia, Duara, Young, Duus, Harootunian, etc), though it's clear that Hevia had the greatest, mostly unacknowledged, influence on this book. Driscoll also engages with--and productively revises--Hardt and Negri's theory of Empire.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The introduction careens between Yanagita Kunio and Minakata Kumagusu on its way to a discussion of joining Marx with Foucault-derived biopolitical theory, arguing that biopolitics involves not only improving some life (populations) but letting others die, and that "the single most important subjectivity in Japan's imperialism" is the Chinese coolie (21). The explanatory power of this framework--making the death-drive so visible in Japanese imperialism after 1931, but particularly after 1937 not only integrated but sensible--is hard to underestimate.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter (titled, with bitter irony, "Cool(ie) Japan") explores the beginnings of Japan's imperialism beginning in the 1880s, when Chinese "coolies" began one of the larger migrations in human history into north and northeast China in response to promises of wage labor, in which they were in a position of formal subsumption, i.e. being directly exploited by the Japanese colonizers, who were, in Driscoll's assessment, conducting business as a continuation of war by other means. "The population racism and production of biopolitical subjectivity inherent in formal subsumption made coolies into superhumanly strong workers, subhumanly stupid individuals, and doglike in their willingness to obey Japanese colonizers and their Chinese bosses alike" (54).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter focuses on Japanese pimps and the prostitutes they trafficked abroad to the semi-colonial periphery in the late 19th and early 20thC, demonstrating "the centrality of the pimps for Japanese capitalist successes and market penetration in Asia in the thirty to forty years before they assisted the Japanese army in setting up the infrastructure for forced sex work" (60). "A technology of sovereign and severe Japanese masculinity was produced for the pimps and traffickers--the first important male Japanese imperialists in Asia--through the violent trafficking and commodification of enslaved Japanese women and girls. Moreover, the subjectification of sex workers as animalistic, corporeal things to be manipulated by male capitalists established a precedent for how colonial labor would be similarly devalued by Japanese imperial capitalists later on." (69)
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter focuses, fascinatingly, on the role of Japanese women as empire-builders in the colonies, particularly in Korea after 1895 and especially from 1910 onward. Significantly, these women were configured in the imperial metropole (and to a lesser degree in the colonies) as "hysterics," as Driscoll notes: "the colonial condition reproduces hysteria, and at the same time hysteria supports, augments, and intensifies Japan's colonial imperialism" (92). From about 1920, all colonizer women were likely to be seen as hysterics because insufficiently Japanese because in too close contact with non-Japanese men and women because in the colonies; nonetheless, they achieved "a partial valorization and even role-model status for such Japanese women living in the Asian continent" (100), because the sympathy they felt for non-Japanese was necessary for the empire.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter focuses on the colonization (and pre-colonization) of Korea, focusing on the "extraeconomic force" brought to bear on Korean peasants in particular, arguing that, rather than the Oriental Development Company managing to acquire formal title to more than half the land in Korea by the 1930s (!) was not incompetence but a deliberate strategy to expropriate Korean peasants off their land into tenancy and create a labor force willing to emigrate for the prospect of wage labor (on which see Ken C. Kawashima's The Proletarian Gamble). The scale of the immiseration of Koreans in this period is hard to overstate: Koreans didn't regain their pre-1910 average height until the 1960s, and over the colonial period waged income declined to 87% of the 1910 base. The other half of the ODC's grotesquing of Korea, of course, is the Japanese army, which garrisoned a sizable army throughout the country. Both of these institutions, in Driscoll's view, were "basically responding after the fact to the desires of the Korean masses for independence and justice" (116).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples Part II of this book moves back to the imperial metropole, discussing real subsumption (in which all aspects of life are saturated by capitalism) as a form of neuropolitics, because "real subsumption newly submits the neural network of human cognition and the nervous system of human sensation to capitalism" (139). Driscoll goes on to discuss modernologists such as Gonda Yasunosuke and sexologists such as Mori Rintarô (aka Mori Ôgai) and Tanaka Kikuei and Nakamura Kokyo, all of whom in light of the new high modern society of Japanese cities undertook to normalize hentai as a normal and common feature of modern society. Driscoll takes pains to note that even as the splitting effect of hentai is normalized, "the overwheming tendency in their work is to treat women as objects of splitting and men as subjects and authorities on splitting. The naturalization of this binary opposition was widespread in mass culture's reflection on the neuropolitical effects of imperial society" (159).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter focuses on eroguro (erotic/grotesque) literature and pornography, arguing that "both the exterior and the interior of human subjectivity were being transformed by the new world of commodity capitalism" (195), such that the boundary between people and things collapses and "all value is transferred to the rationality of capital" (197). This is less abstract than it sounds; it's no accident that necrophilia and the death-drive as imperial heroism become frequent motifs in literature from this period.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter moves back out to the colonies to consider the deliberate drug-pushing of the oligarchs in control of the sham state of Manchukuo, configuring the Manchukuo paradigm as being perfected in situ before being imposed on other sites during the Asia Pacific War, arguing that Manchukuo in particular existed in a permanent state of exception that gradually subsumed any mission civilatrice into pure extortion: "Manchukuo was biopolitical vampirically and imperialistically in that the easy theft of Chinese labor, land, and life was primarily intended to improve the lives (faire vivir) of a certain population or class of Japaense: rich capitalists, powerful militarists, and the emperor's family" (228-29, emphasis original). In Driscoll's analysis, by 1932 a new mode of subsumption, deformal subsumption, had arisen in Manchukuo, characterized by "its relative unconcern with systemic reproduction. In the necropolitical capitalism hegemonic in Manchukuo, drugs, forced labor, and sexual slavery were not intended to reproduce labor power and consumer investment; they were directly and indirectly linked to their death" (230, emphasis original). It's difficult to overstate the degree to which drug dealers, gangsters and gangster capitalists bureaucrats trammeled freely over Manchukuo and all of north China in pursuit of profit; that 20% of the population of Manchukuo was addicted to hard drugs (opium or heroin/morphine) by 1940 and millions of people were eventually worked to death in the colony cannot be overlooked.
Chapter 8: Argument, Sources, Examples This final chapter explores the three subjectivities that became central to the sham state of Manchukuo (the money launderer and new bureaucrat, the war profiteer, and the forced laborer), considering the future Class A war criminal and Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke and the Nissan zaibatsu chief Ayukawa Yoshisuke as damning examples of the former two. Taylorism, total racist disregard for the Chinese population, and Japanese fascism, when conjoined with hustlers and yakuza, produced in Manchukuo "an almost seamless system well lubed to join the means of industrial capitalism with the ends of total war and death" (270).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples "With full life reserved solely for Japanese men killed in imperialist war, all other forms of life are relegated to the deontological condition of living-dead. Japanese subjects in the homeland ultimately become living-dead like the Chinese and Korean subaltern when, as Aimé Césaire uncovered the precedent for Nazism in Europe's colonial periphery, the modus operandi of colonial fascism in Manchukuo centripetally invades Japan's homeland" (313).
Critical assessment: I still think The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto is the best book I've read this year, but despite some quibbles I think Mark Driscoll's book is the second-best book I've read, and it deserves to become (much like Berry's book) a contested classic in the field. I have to admit that Driscoll has also succeeded in dethroning Prasenjit Duara's Sovereignty and Authenticity from its high place in my regard; while Driscoll's discussion of Manchukuo does not displace Duara's entirely, largely because they have such different concerns and viewpoints, I find Duara's portrayal of the sham state in toto untenable in light of Driscoll's points.
I’ve read at least one of Mark Driscoll’s articles before, and on that basis I was glad to see that in Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque he’s managed to salt his evident passion with enough reasonably couched statements and superb research that his passion augments rather than detracts from his arguments. Furthermore, unlike his fellow traveler Ken Kawashima, whose The Proletarian Gamble is cited several times in this book, Driscoll never loses sight of the people on whose backs and out of whose lives and deaths the Japanese empire was founded and maintained. Indeed, one suspects that Driscoll’s turn to biopolitics and the thanatopolitics that follow out of it in the modern imperial frame (which Driscoll, somewhat idiosyncratically, insists on terming “necropolitics,” against the majority of those working on these topics) was initially animated by his inability to forget the material suffering of the people who were reduced first to bare life and then to the living dead by the operations of empire.
Having spent my own time in the trenches of the thought and lives of many of the imperial actors and abettors Driscoll identifies and discusses, his frank dismissal of people like Yanagita Kunio is a sly sort of revelation, and his elaboration of the systematic aspects of the thought and policies of people like Gotô Shimpei marks an important departure, I think, from the “model of scholarship still present in East Asian studies that emphasizes a more or less homogeneous Japanese cultural nationalism severed from Asia” (4). I’ve long thought that the only way to “save” Japan studies in the era of China’s rise is to square the circle and be aggressively transnational in our historiography, and at least since James Hevia’s English Lessons, which I was glad to see Driscoll cite, we can no longer afford to ignore the global hybridities and mutual deterritorialization and reterritorialization of empire. Driscoll’s exposure of the complicity in and absolutely repugnant cooperation of people like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Futabatei Shimei, who are still more or less sainted in the standard histories on both sides of the Pacific, is also salutary. Moreover, as someone who has come more and more to feel that seeing the Asia-Pacific Wars as a discrete period underplays the extent to which, as Driscoll insists here, the empire ought not be separated from its military operations. Empires are as much a process as they are stable state structures, and violence of all forms is an integral part of that process.
This book was actively difficult to read at times, because as much as I’ve read about the Japanese empire and its colonial sites, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered descriptions of the actual lived—and died—conditions it created that are as frank as Driscoll’s, and none of my suspicions about why that is are comfortable. I suppose some people will accuse Driscoll of doing a hatchet job on the standard scholarship of Japan's imperialism (starting off with a bang by savaging Yanagita Kunio, rightly, for his "paranoid cultural particularlism" (4) in the introduction), and there is a revolutionary quality to the story he tells, by foregrounding not the question of cui bono? but cui dolori? and by looking not at nation-states but at people and the human costs of capitalist empire. This is a grim, unflinching take on that story, configured very much as a deathride to an absolute wasteland of a conclusion, and indeed my primary quibble with the book is that it ends the only place it can, in the bombed-out ruins of the empire in 1945, with Driscoll declaring that "capitalism itself must be seen as a crime against humanity" (313). But, for the rest of us, my question is, what can be saved from the wreckage?
What can be saved? from the wreckage of Japan studies, from the wreckage of the empire, is essential to ask as an American and as a scholar of Japan, because Driscoll is right if perhaps overreaching when he points out that we in the United States have done these same things too, or at least profited from them. I also think my question is connected to Driscoll's manifest reluctance to deal with ζοη (civilized life, life in society) as opposed to βιος (vita nuda, bare life), which is an interesting gap.
This is a very political book, as any book which talks about the grotesque is by its nature, and my few critiques of Driscoll arise from this fact. He has an unfortunate talent to characterize pre-Meiji periods of history in a way that, while not quite untrue, seems to me to stretch the limits of plausible interpretation, and while I appreciate his critique of contemporary American imperialism and neoliberal/neoconservative intellectual formations, these aren’t incorporated entirely systematically, which is a weakness I’m sure his detractors will seek to exploit. Similarly, he frequently gets carried away by the slickness of his own turns of phrase. But inasmuch as Driscoll’s work is a perfect example of doing what Cary Wolfe argues we must, i.e. instantiate the spectral threat of repositioning historical instances vis-à-vis the current instance, this is an excellent—dare I say vital?—book.
Further reading: Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire
Meta notes: "A more serious sin for materialist thinkers is that disregarding larger structural complexities prevents us from, in the words of Walter Benjamin, 'grasp[ing]…the constellation which [our] era has formed with a definitely earlier one'" (301).
Main Argument: Joining biopolitics to Marxian theory, Driscoll argues that "…human and nonhuman resources stolen from colonial and domestic peripheries, together with excessive profits jacked from colonized renters and subaltern wage laborers, built Japan's imperial behemoth. … Japan's imperialism was irrefutably modern; there was noting late or lacking about it." (6-7)
Historiographical Engagement: Driscoll has read a lot of scholarship and primary sources on Manchukuo in particular in Chinese, which produces some startling revelations (as well as the sense that others working over this territory before should have known better). He's also dug up a lot of diaries and personal documents from all over the period, and engages very deeply with eroguro literature of the 1920s and 1930s. In terms of scholarship, he seems to have read most of the big names you'd expect (Hevia, Duara, Young, Duus, Harootunian, etc), though it's clear that Hevia had the greatest, mostly unacknowledged, influence on this book. Driscoll also engages with--and productively revises--Hardt and Negri's theory of Empire.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The introduction careens between Yanagita Kunio and Minakata Kumagusu on its way to a discussion of joining Marx with Foucault-derived biopolitical theory, arguing that biopolitics involves not only improving some life (populations) but letting others die, and that "the single most important subjectivity in Japan's imperialism" is the Chinese coolie (21). The explanatory power of this framework--making the death-drive so visible in Japanese imperialism after 1931, but particularly after 1937 not only integrated but sensible--is hard to underestimate.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter (titled, with bitter irony, "Cool(ie) Japan") explores the beginnings of Japan's imperialism beginning in the 1880s, when Chinese "coolies" began one of the larger migrations in human history into north and northeast China in response to promises of wage labor, in which they were in a position of formal subsumption, i.e. being directly exploited by the Japanese colonizers, who were, in Driscoll's assessment, conducting business as a continuation of war by other means. "The population racism and production of biopolitical subjectivity inherent in formal subsumption made coolies into superhumanly strong workers, subhumanly stupid individuals, and doglike in their willingness to obey Japanese colonizers and their Chinese bosses alike" (54).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter focuses on Japanese pimps and the prostitutes they trafficked abroad to the semi-colonial periphery in the late 19th and early 20thC, demonstrating "the centrality of the pimps for Japanese capitalist successes and market penetration in Asia in the thirty to forty years before they assisted the Japanese army in setting up the infrastructure for forced sex work" (60). "A technology of sovereign and severe Japanese masculinity was produced for the pimps and traffickers--the first important male Japanese imperialists in Asia--through the violent trafficking and commodification of enslaved Japanese women and girls. Moreover, the subjectification of sex workers as animalistic, corporeal things to be manipulated by male capitalists established a precedent for how colonial labor would be similarly devalued by Japanese imperial capitalists later on." (69)
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter focuses, fascinatingly, on the role of Japanese women as empire-builders in the colonies, particularly in Korea after 1895 and especially from 1910 onward. Significantly, these women were configured in the imperial metropole (and to a lesser degree in the colonies) as "hysterics," as Driscoll notes: "the colonial condition reproduces hysteria, and at the same time hysteria supports, augments, and intensifies Japan's colonial imperialism" (92). From about 1920, all colonizer women were likely to be seen as hysterics because insufficiently Japanese because in too close contact with non-Japanese men and women because in the colonies; nonetheless, they achieved "a partial valorization and even role-model status for such Japanese women living in the Asian continent" (100), because the sympathy they felt for non-Japanese was necessary for the empire.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter focuses on the colonization (and pre-colonization) of Korea, focusing on the "extraeconomic force" brought to bear on Korean peasants in particular, arguing that, rather than the Oriental Development Company managing to acquire formal title to more than half the land in Korea by the 1930s (!) was not incompetence but a deliberate strategy to expropriate Korean peasants off their land into tenancy and create a labor force willing to emigrate for the prospect of wage labor (on which see Ken C. Kawashima's The Proletarian Gamble). The scale of the immiseration of Koreans in this period is hard to overstate: Koreans didn't regain their pre-1910 average height until the 1960s, and over the colonial period waged income declined to 87% of the 1910 base. The other half of the ODC's grotesquing of Korea, of course, is the Japanese army, which garrisoned a sizable army throughout the country. Both of these institutions, in Driscoll's view, were "basically responding after the fact to the desires of the Korean masses for independence and justice" (116).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples Part II of this book moves back to the imperial metropole, discussing real subsumption (in which all aspects of life are saturated by capitalism) as a form of neuropolitics, because "real subsumption newly submits the neural network of human cognition and the nervous system of human sensation to capitalism" (139). Driscoll goes on to discuss modernologists such as Gonda Yasunosuke and sexologists such as Mori Rintarô (aka Mori Ôgai) and Tanaka Kikuei and Nakamura Kokyo, all of whom in light of the new high modern society of Japanese cities undertook to normalize hentai as a normal and common feature of modern society. Driscoll takes pains to note that even as the splitting effect of hentai is normalized, "the overwheming tendency in their work is to treat women as objects of splitting and men as subjects and authorities on splitting. The naturalization of this binary opposition was widespread in mass culture's reflection on the neuropolitical effects of imperial society" (159).
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter focuses on eroguro (erotic/grotesque) literature and pornography, arguing that "both the exterior and the interior of human subjectivity were being transformed by the new world of commodity capitalism" (195), such that the boundary between people and things collapses and "all value is transferred to the rationality of capital" (197). This is less abstract than it sounds; it's no accident that necrophilia and the death-drive as imperial heroism become frequent motifs in literature from this period.
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter moves back out to the colonies to consider the deliberate drug-pushing of the oligarchs in control of the sham state of Manchukuo, configuring the Manchukuo paradigm as being perfected in situ before being imposed on other sites during the Asia Pacific War, arguing that Manchukuo in particular existed in a permanent state of exception that gradually subsumed any mission civilatrice into pure extortion: "Manchukuo was biopolitical vampirically and imperialistically in that the easy theft of Chinese labor, land, and life was primarily intended to improve the lives (faire vivir) of a certain population or class of Japaense: rich capitalists, powerful militarists, and the emperor's family" (228-29, emphasis original). In Driscoll's analysis, by 1932 a new mode of subsumption, deformal subsumption, had arisen in Manchukuo, characterized by "its relative unconcern with systemic reproduction. In the necropolitical capitalism hegemonic in Manchukuo, drugs, forced labor, and sexual slavery were not intended to reproduce labor power and consumer investment; they were directly and indirectly linked to their death" (230, emphasis original). It's difficult to overstate the degree to which drug dealers, gangsters and gangster capitalists bureaucrats trammeled freely over Manchukuo and all of north China in pursuit of profit; that 20% of the population of Manchukuo was addicted to hard drugs (opium or heroin/morphine) by 1940 and millions of people were eventually worked to death in the colony cannot be overlooked.
Chapter 8: Argument, Sources, Examples This final chapter explores the three subjectivities that became central to the sham state of Manchukuo (the money launderer and new bureaucrat, the war profiteer, and the forced laborer), considering the future Class A war criminal and Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke and the Nissan zaibatsu chief Ayukawa Yoshisuke as damning examples of the former two. Taylorism, total racist disregard for the Chinese population, and Japanese fascism, when conjoined with hustlers and yakuza, produced in Manchukuo "an almost seamless system well lubed to join the means of industrial capitalism with the ends of total war and death" (270).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples "With full life reserved solely for Japanese men killed in imperialist war, all other forms of life are relegated to the deontological condition of living-dead. Japanese subjects in the homeland ultimately become living-dead like the Chinese and Korean subaltern when, as Aimé Césaire uncovered the precedent for Nazism in Europe's colonial periphery, the modus operandi of colonial fascism in Manchukuo centripetally invades Japan's homeland" (313).
Critical assessment: I still think The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto is the best book I've read this year, but despite some quibbles I think Mark Driscoll's book is the second-best book I've read, and it deserves to become (much like Berry's book) a contested classic in the field. I have to admit that Driscoll has also succeeded in dethroning Prasenjit Duara's Sovereignty and Authenticity from its high place in my regard; while Driscoll's discussion of Manchukuo does not displace Duara's entirely, largely because they have such different concerns and viewpoints, I find Duara's portrayal of the sham state in toto untenable in light of Driscoll's points.
I’ve read at least one of Mark Driscoll’s articles before, and on that basis I was glad to see that in Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque he’s managed to salt his evident passion with enough reasonably couched statements and superb research that his passion augments rather than detracts from his arguments. Furthermore, unlike his fellow traveler Ken Kawashima, whose The Proletarian Gamble is cited several times in this book, Driscoll never loses sight of the people on whose backs and out of whose lives and deaths the Japanese empire was founded and maintained. Indeed, one suspects that Driscoll’s turn to biopolitics and the thanatopolitics that follow out of it in the modern imperial frame (which Driscoll, somewhat idiosyncratically, insists on terming “necropolitics,” against the majority of those working on these topics) was initially animated by his inability to forget the material suffering of the people who were reduced first to bare life and then to the living dead by the operations of empire.
Having spent my own time in the trenches of the thought and lives of many of the imperial actors and abettors Driscoll identifies and discusses, his frank dismissal of people like Yanagita Kunio is a sly sort of revelation, and his elaboration of the systematic aspects of the thought and policies of people like Gotô Shimpei marks an important departure, I think, from the “model of scholarship still present in East Asian studies that emphasizes a more or less homogeneous Japanese cultural nationalism severed from Asia” (4). I’ve long thought that the only way to “save” Japan studies in the era of China’s rise is to square the circle and be aggressively transnational in our historiography, and at least since James Hevia’s English Lessons, which I was glad to see Driscoll cite, we can no longer afford to ignore the global hybridities and mutual deterritorialization and reterritorialization of empire. Driscoll’s exposure of the complicity in and absolutely repugnant cooperation of people like Fukuzawa Yukichi and Futabatei Shimei, who are still more or less sainted in the standard histories on both sides of the Pacific, is also salutary. Moreover, as someone who has come more and more to feel that seeing the Asia-Pacific Wars as a discrete period underplays the extent to which, as Driscoll insists here, the empire ought not be separated from its military operations. Empires are as much a process as they are stable state structures, and violence of all forms is an integral part of that process.
This book was actively difficult to read at times, because as much as I’ve read about the Japanese empire and its colonial sites, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered descriptions of the actual lived—and died—conditions it created that are as frank as Driscoll’s, and none of my suspicions about why that is are comfortable. I suppose some people will accuse Driscoll of doing a hatchet job on the standard scholarship of Japan's imperialism (starting off with a bang by savaging Yanagita Kunio, rightly, for his "paranoid cultural particularlism" (4) in the introduction), and there is a revolutionary quality to the story he tells, by foregrounding not the question of cui bono? but cui dolori? and by looking not at nation-states but at people and the human costs of capitalist empire. This is a grim, unflinching take on that story, configured very much as a deathride to an absolute wasteland of a conclusion, and indeed my primary quibble with the book is that it ends the only place it can, in the bombed-out ruins of the empire in 1945, with Driscoll declaring that "capitalism itself must be seen as a crime against humanity" (313). But, for the rest of us, my question is, what can be saved from the wreckage?
What can be saved? from the wreckage of Japan studies, from the wreckage of the empire, is essential to ask as an American and as a scholar of Japan, because Driscoll is right if perhaps overreaching when he points out that we in the United States have done these same things too, or at least profited from them. I also think my question is connected to Driscoll's manifest reluctance to deal with ζοη (civilized life, life in society) as opposed to βιος (vita nuda, bare life), which is an interesting gap.
This is a very political book, as any book which talks about the grotesque is by its nature, and my few critiques of Driscoll arise from this fact. He has an unfortunate talent to characterize pre-Meiji periods of history in a way that, while not quite untrue, seems to me to stretch the limits of plausible interpretation, and while I appreciate his critique of contemporary American imperialism and neoliberal/neoconservative intellectual formations, these aren’t incorporated entirely systematically, which is a weakness I’m sure his detractors will seek to exploit. Similarly, he frequently gets carried away by the slickness of his own turns of phrase. But inasmuch as Driscoll’s work is a perfect example of doing what Cary Wolfe argues we must, i.e. instantiate the spectral threat of repositioning historical instances vis-à-vis the current instance, this is an excellent—dare I say vital?—book.
Further reading: Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire
Meta notes: "A more serious sin for materialist thinkers is that disregarding larger structural complexities prevents us from, in the words of Walter Benjamin, 'grasp[ing]…the constellation which [our] era has formed with a definitely earlier one'" (301).