Nation and Aesthetics is a newly translated collection of essays by the Japanese philosopher and literary critic Kojin Karatani. The volume is translated by Jonathan E. Abel who, in the preface, introduces Karatani’s work as a sustained yet prolific engagement in varied topics, such as ‘language, culture, philosophy, economics, and politics’ (p. viii). Fundamentally, Abel places Karatani in the critical social theory tradition which understands itself as taking up some sort of Kantian turn (p. xi). Abel lists Habermas, Žižek, Butler and Spivak as figures who most closely parallel Karatani in the ‘Western’ tradition. Karatani’s overall focus in this volume is two-part: the way in which the aesthetic and linguistic objectification of reciprocal relations leads to nationalism, and how the understanding of the nation as merely ‘imagined’ in Kant’s sense, rather than sensible, might overcome nationalism and drive us toward the world republic. I will focus on the first two essays because I believe that they give the theoretical framework to justify the essays that follow.

In the first essay in the collection, ‘Empire and Nation’, Karatani lays out what he considers to be the interconnected trinity of capital-nation-state. Traditionally, capital is seen as an economic mode of exchange, while nation and state are seen as superstructures that preside over economic structures. Karatani insists that, instead, we ought to see them as different but interconnected modes of exchange. Capital is obviously commodity exchange, or exchange based upon the relations of economic coercion through the exchange of commodity as it is traditionally understood in the Marxist tradition. Karatani, however, insists that state can be understood through the mode of exchange of ‘plundering and redistribution’ and that nation can be reduced to the mode of exchange of ‘reciprocity’. ‘Plundering and distribution’ is most clearly understood in the modern context as taxation: the state ‘plunders’ its citizens and then redistributes resources in order to maintain the citizenry for further taxation. The ‘reciprocity’ of the nation is most easily understood as the familial giving and receiving of gifts (pp. 6–7). These three exchanges form what Karatani calls a Borromean Knot. Opposed to the traditional Marxist understanding, Karatani insists that the nation-state is not a product of capitalist society, but rather that nation-state-capital mutually define one another. There is also a fourth mode of exchange that Karatani calls ‘X’. This mode of exchange counters the other three types. It is similar to the market economy in the sense that each individual is ‘free from the constraints of the community, and at the same time similar to the community in that, contrary to the market economy’s competition and dissolution of class, it aims for the exchange of reciprocal aid – a market economy that does not cause the accumulation of capital’ (p. 8). Karatani calls this ‘association’. Association, or exchange mode ‘X’, is capable of overcoming the other three modes, and when it actually does, the trinity of capital-nation-state will be abolished to form a ‘cosmopolitan whole’ or a ‘world republic’. Therefore, the exchange mode ‘X’, which Karatani describes as the recovery of reciprocity at a higher level, is what destroys the nation at one level and leads to the cosmopolitan aim at a higher one. However, Karatani warns that a community founded on the principle of association has never been brought into being. It is a utopian idea. Karatani, ultimately, wants to place association, the ideal mode of exchange, among Kant’s regulative ideas which can never be objects of experience but must forever remain an end of all human effort. Among these ideas, freedom is deemed the most important by Kant. Indeed, in Kant’s critical philosophy, freedom is the power to begin a new series of events from a source of causality outside the deterministic causality of nature. Kant separates nature and freedom, while insisting, as he shows in the Third Antinomy, that human beings can be both natural (subject to nature causality) and free beings (beholden to the moral law). This is why freedom must remain a regulative idea. It can never be an object of experience, because if it were, it would become something natural and thus cease to be freedom. In other words, Kant insists on the gap between nature and freedom because freedom cannot and should not be an object of sensibility. Therefore, association, in the same way, must remain a regulative idea that guides our communal identity. Karatani believes that nation, and eventually nationalism, are brought about when we fail to recognize this utopian reciprocity as a regulative idea and attempt to objectify it (pp. 15–18). In the first as well as the following essay, titled ‘Transcritique on Kant and Freud’, Karatani makes the important point that the emergence of German idealism and romanticism after Kant corresponds with the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is because while Kant insists on the strict separation between reason and sensibility, or nature and freedom, the idealists and romantics collapse the two into one another. The regulative idea was ‘aestheticized’ and became an object of sensibility, materializing as the nation. Kant remains a dualist with reason and sensibility that is mediated by the imagination. However, this mediation must remain an imagined one (p. 41). Thus the ideal is taken to be real, making nationalism what Kant calls a transcendental illusion. Interestingly, Karatani argues that Kant’s later turn toward cosmopolitan concerns was a critique of this transcendental illusion of the nation and nationalism.

The essays in this collection on aesthetics and language should be seen within the framework of the ideas outlined above. Karatani’s essays on Okakura Kakuzo’s Japanese art museum project (‘History as Museum’) as well as his art theory (‘The Utility of Aesthetics’) display the activity of aestheticizing the ideal. This is also true of the last two essays in the volume, ‘Nation-State and Linguistics’ where Karatani looks at Tokieda Motoki’s theory of language and ‘Geopolitics of Character’ where he evaluates the Japanese-like. These investigations demonstrate the sensibilization of the regulative idea of association through art and language. As long as what it means to be Japanese is based on the sensibilization of the ideal, art and linguistics are connected to nationalism.

However, if the ideal of association cannot be made sensible, then how can we ever make progress toward a world republic? Karatani answers this question in chapter 2 of this volume by reading Kant and Freud against one another. For Karatani, the answer to this question lies in Kant’s notion of ‘unsocial sociability’. Karatani closely links this sort of sociability with the exchange mode of association. For Karatani, unsocial sociability is a drive for something beyond one’s natural capacities, for something always beyond the capacities of human beings, and which eventually brings about the world republic. In the attempt to explain unsocial sociability as the cause of the world republic, Karatani links this facet of human nature to Freud’s notion of superego, as a drive turned inward to the human being herself. Furthermore, Karatani points out the similarity in structure between the superego and the Kantian sublime (pp. 45–8). For Karatani, the sublime comes from within the self, but at the same time it works at odds with the self. It is fundamentally a displeasure, like the Freudian death drive, turned toward the self. Above all, the experience of the sublime is a momentary manifestation of freedom or the intervention of reason in nature. It is the sublime or superego that drives people toward perpetual peace. Thus the ideal exchange mode is manifested only as a feeling of sublimity which drives the human race forward in the cosmopolitan task (pp. 56–7).

This volume gives us an innovative account of Kant which provides us with resources to place his writings on politics, history and society within the larger critical project by seeing them as criticizing nationalism as a transcendental illusion. Furthermore, Karatani creatively opens up space for understanding the role of cultural norms, in the form of the superego and feelings of sublime, in the actualization of the cosmopolitan task. I will now briefly raise two concerns with Karatani’s project. First, it is unclear, if the motivation toward the ‘world republic’ requires the intervention of reason through an experience of sublimity, how we make sense of Kant’s continual insistence on the non-moral status of the world republic. It is clear that Kant believes that cosmopolitan order is a matter for the doctrine of right, at least in the sense that it does not concern itself with the specific motivations and maxims of individual subjects, and, therefore, the world republic can be enforced even without a sublime experience (Toward Perpetual Peace, 8: 366, Metaphysics of Morals, 6: 355). Karatani’s invocation of the Kantian sublime seems to stem from obscurities in Kant about ‘natural inclinations’ and ‘human nature’ which Karatani fails to clarify. In other words, it remains unclear how the cosmopolitan task does not collapse into the moral task if we do not clarify what we mean by ‘going beyond nature’ in human sociability. Second, Karatani’s reliance on psychoanalytic thought to make his point seems to obscure rather than clarify his point about Kantian sublimity. The notion that sublimity is an internal feeling which humiliates the self and drives it, in a specific sense, ‘beyond itself’ can be captured, or at least argued for, from a Kantian standpoint. The inclusion of Freud in the second essay and Lacan in the last essay seems to be justified inasmuch as it clarifies the way in which the sublime is the result of the internalization of cultural norms which then suppress the ego as the superego. However, in Freud, this suppression involves a complicated notion of the unconscious that cannot be assumed in Kant. I am sympathetic with Karatani’s claim that cultural force is a necessary tool in the pursuit of perpetual peace. However, the psychoanalytic process of subconscious internalization seems to be foreign to Kant. Without an account of how this fundamental concept can be explained in Kant, it seems that the comparison between Kant and Freud remains merely superficial.