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Coil of the Serpent, 2021
ion results in fictively condensing in the figure of the emperor the ideological representation o... more ion results in fictively condensing in the figure of the emperor the ideological representation of the state, folk religious conceptions associated with the commons, and the imagined identity of the peasantry themselves. Taken as a whole, we can describe Yoshimoto’s approach here as a "diachronic" one because it deals with the longue duree of how the rituals of the commons changed over a long span of historical time and were absorbed into use for ruling-class hegemony of the ancient Yamato dynasty. Of course, Thompson himself suggestively gestures toward this synchronic approach, as when he mentions the adaptation of "rough music" to nineteenth-century industrial conflict and, in passing, "to the public humiliation after the liberation of
To declare that the refusal to proscribe the "problems of the origin of language" and t... more To declare that the refusal to proscribe the "problems of the origin of language" and the affirmation of "geneticism - or a certain generativism" are "not chance encounters" imply a certain historical determination, namely that such demystification of origin and conceptualization of "geneticism" were occurring in relation to - though not generated by or generating - the crisis of Keynesian world capitalism in the late 1960s when Noam Chomsky and Jacques Derrida were both writing. Such determination is premised on a historical search for origins - although Derrida and Chomsky's subject is linguistics, we may substitute it with the self-organization of the working class, whose multilateral struggles made possible that global crisis to begin with - necessitates us to advance a theory of generation ("a certain geneticism - or a certain generativism"), a succession of historical links and relationships that connect one form of revolut...
In 1959 C.P. Snow published his widely influential Two Cultures, which set out to diagnose the th... more In 1959 C.P. Snow published his widely influential Two Cultures, which set out to diagnose the then discernibly growing divide between the humanities and the sciences. Although Snow’s recognition was prescient in light of today’s capital-intensive domination of the sciences over the ever-fractured, underfunded humanities in the neoliberal university, his analysis was based on a one-dimensional faith in scientific progress. Contrary to Snow’s condescending characterization of Luddites and their intellectual analogues as indulging in an “Edenic fantasy”, the compatriot social historians of Snow’s times revealed the exact opposite: that it was the historical process of enclosures and capitalist expropriation that prompted the commoners’ insurrectionary struggles of machine-breaking in defense of their culture at the point of production and reproduction. Any collective effort toward the making of a “third culture” is bound to fail without properly situating the arts/sciences cultural divide as an organic part of this historical privatization of knowledge and social relations.
The Annual Review of Cultural Studies Vol. 2, 2014
![Research paper thumbnail of The Urban Working-Class Culture of Riot in Osaka and L.A: Toward a Comparative History [coauthored with Takeshi Haraguchi and Kazuya Sakurada]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/34020048/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](Marxism and Urban Culture , Apr 2014
Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature, Oct 24, 2013
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 2011
E.P. Thompson used the Confucian trope of “rectification of human names” to summarize the major t... more E.P. Thompson used the Confucian trope of “rectification of human names” to summarize the major themes of his work. Such rectification has both political and scholarly ramifications that extend to poststructuralist debates over historical discourse (Ranajit Guha’s meditation on the method of Subaltern Studies, Hayden White’s theory of rhetorical universalism); organic relationship between working-class gesture, linguistic philosophy, and political economy (as exemplified in Piero Sraffa's renowned contribution to the "epistemological break" between the early and late Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy); and the universality of class struggle in defining the crucial intellectual breakthroughs of the 1970s, from the works of Michel Foucault and Yoshimoto Takaaki to those of autonomist Marxism and history from below. As is clear in Thompson’s revealing but also limited polemic against Louis Althusser, every act of rectification is necessarily incomplete and requires endless revision, both individually and collectively.
In 1995 Noam Chomsky‟s The Minimalist Program proposed a radical overhaul of certain theoretical ... more In 1995 Noam Chomsky‟s The Minimalist Program proposed a radical overhaul of certain theoretical developments in his theory of generative grammar, advancing the “economy of representation” and the “economy of derivation” as two of the most potentially fruitful areas of future research. Ten years earlier Jacques Derrida, whose Of Grammatology Chomsky has characterized as an “appalling” “pathetic misreading,” wrote an essay on translation entitled “Des Tours de Babel,” which indicated the perennial problem of “translation” inherent in every act of writing in light of his rereading of the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel. A practicing translator, who is often torn between conflicting impulses to be faithful to the literal meaning of the original text and to “naturalize” the original into the translated language by way of paraphrase, recognizes that both Chomsky and Derrida‟s approaches offer something of value metaphorically – if not pragmatically – for the act of translation, the necessity to make semantic, even historical and philosophical, connections where there are none to be found apparently. After the two thinkers, we may call this theoretical orientation the “economy of Babel.”
For too long now the very notion of a public intellectual relies on a missionary model, of going ... more For too long now the very notion of a public intellectual relies on a missionary model, of going out to the masses with a view to enlightening them. The essay analyzes past and present praxis which would abolish this approach altogether, based on close readings of the experiences of the New York Intellectuals and the Forest-Johnson Tendency.
To declare that the refusal to proscribe the "problems of the origin of language" and the affirma... more To declare that the refusal to proscribe the "problems of the origin of language" and the affirmation of "geneticism - or a certain generativism" are "not chance encounters" imply a certain historical determination, namely that such demystification of origin and conceptualization of "geneticism" were occurring in relation to - though not generated by or generating - the crisis of Keynesian world capitalism in the late 1960s when Noam Chomsky and Jacques Derrida were both writing. Such determination is premised on a historical search for origins - although Derrida and Chomsky's subject is linguistics, we may substitute it with the self-organization of the working class, whose multilateral struggles made possible that global crisis to begin with - necessitates us to advance a theory of generation ("a certain geneticism - or a certain generativism"), a succession of historical links and relationships that connect one form of revolutionary working-class self-organization to another. And, just as Derrida proposed the way in which Rousseau problematizes the origin of linguistics as Chomsky recounted it in Cartesian Linguistics, we can propose the way in which the revolutionary commons problematizes the origin of the workers' councils as, for instance, theorized by Sergio Bologna's "Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origin of the Workers' Council Movement", a seminal article published in 1972.
Coil of the Serpent, 2021
ion results in fictively condensing in the figure of the emperor the ideological representation o... more ion results in fictively condensing in the figure of the emperor the ideological representation of the state, folk religious conceptions associated with the commons, and the imagined identity of the peasantry themselves. Taken as a whole, we can describe Yoshimoto’s approach here as a "diachronic" one because it deals with the longue duree of how the rituals of the commons changed over a long span of historical time and were absorbed into use for ruling-class hegemony of the ancient Yamato dynasty. Of course, Thompson himself suggestively gestures toward this synchronic approach, as when he mentions the adaptation of "rough music" to nineteenth-century industrial conflict and, in passing, "to the public humiliation after the liberation of
To declare that the refusal to proscribe the "problems of the origin of language" and t... more To declare that the refusal to proscribe the "problems of the origin of language" and the affirmation of "geneticism - or a certain generativism" are "not chance encounters" imply a certain historical determination, namely that such demystification of origin and conceptualization of "geneticism" were occurring in relation to - though not generated by or generating - the crisis of Keynesian world capitalism in the late 1960s when Noam Chomsky and Jacques Derrida were both writing. Such determination is premised on a historical search for origins - although Derrida and Chomsky's subject is linguistics, we may substitute it with the self-organization of the working class, whose multilateral struggles made possible that global crisis to begin with - necessitates us to advance a theory of generation ("a certain geneticism - or a certain generativism"), a succession of historical links and relationships that connect one form of revolut...
In 1959 C.P. Snow published his widely influential Two Cultures, which set out to diagnose the th... more In 1959 C.P. Snow published his widely influential Two Cultures, which set out to diagnose the then discernibly growing divide between the humanities and the sciences. Although Snow’s recognition was prescient in light of today’s capital-intensive domination of the sciences over the ever-fractured, underfunded humanities in the neoliberal university, his analysis was based on a one-dimensional faith in scientific progress. Contrary to Snow’s condescending characterization of Luddites and their intellectual analogues as indulging in an “Edenic fantasy”, the compatriot social historians of Snow’s times revealed the exact opposite: that it was the historical process of enclosures and capitalist expropriation that prompted the commoners’ insurrectionary struggles of machine-breaking in defense of their culture at the point of production and reproduction. Any collective effort toward the making of a “third culture” is bound to fail without properly situating the arts/sciences cultural divide as an organic part of this historical privatization of knowledge and social relations.
The Annual Review of Cultural Studies Vol. 2, 2014
Marxism and Urban Culture , Apr 2014
Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature, Oct 24, 2013
Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 2011
E.P. Thompson used the Confucian trope of “rectification of human names” to summarize the major t... more E.P. Thompson used the Confucian trope of “rectification of human names” to summarize the major themes of his work. Such rectification has both political and scholarly ramifications that extend to poststructuralist debates over historical discourse (Ranajit Guha’s meditation on the method of Subaltern Studies, Hayden White’s theory of rhetorical universalism); organic relationship between working-class gesture, linguistic philosophy, and political economy (as exemplified in Piero Sraffa's renowned contribution to the "epistemological break" between the early and late Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy); and the universality of class struggle in defining the crucial intellectual breakthroughs of the 1970s, from the works of Michel Foucault and Yoshimoto Takaaki to those of autonomist Marxism and history from below. As is clear in Thompson’s revealing but also limited polemic against Louis Althusser, every act of rectification is necessarily incomplete and requires endless revision, both individually and collectively.
In 1995 Noam Chomsky‟s The Minimalist Program proposed a radical overhaul of certain theoretical ... more In 1995 Noam Chomsky‟s The Minimalist Program proposed a radical overhaul of certain theoretical developments in his theory of generative grammar, advancing the “economy of representation” and the “economy of derivation” as two of the most potentially fruitful areas of future research. Ten years earlier Jacques Derrida, whose Of Grammatology Chomsky has characterized as an “appalling” “pathetic misreading,” wrote an essay on translation entitled “Des Tours de Babel,” which indicated the perennial problem of “translation” inherent in every act of writing in light of his rereading of the Genesis story of the Tower of Babel. A practicing translator, who is often torn between conflicting impulses to be faithful to the literal meaning of the original text and to “naturalize” the original into the translated language by way of paraphrase, recognizes that both Chomsky and Derrida‟s approaches offer something of value metaphorically – if not pragmatically – for the act of translation, the necessity to make semantic, even historical and philosophical, connections where there are none to be found apparently. After the two thinkers, we may call this theoretical orientation the “economy of Babel.”
For too long now the very notion of a public intellectual relies on a missionary model, of going ... more For too long now the very notion of a public intellectual relies on a missionary model, of going out to the masses with a view to enlightening them. The essay analyzes past and present praxis which would abolish this approach altogether, based on close readings of the experiences of the New York Intellectuals and the Forest-Johnson Tendency.
To declare that the refusal to proscribe the "problems of the origin of language" and the affirma... more To declare that the refusal to proscribe the "problems of the origin of language" and the affirmation of "geneticism - or a certain generativism" are "not chance encounters" imply a certain historical determination, namely that such demystification of origin and conceptualization of "geneticism" were occurring in relation to - though not generated by or generating - the crisis of Keynesian world capitalism in the late 1960s when Noam Chomsky and Jacques Derrida were both writing. Such determination is premised on a historical search for origins - although Derrida and Chomsky's subject is linguistics, we may substitute it with the self-organization of the working class, whose multilateral struggles made possible that global crisis to begin with - necessitates us to advance a theory of generation ("a certain geneticism - or a certain generativism"), a succession of historical links and relationships that connect one form of revolutionary working-class self-organization to another. And, just as Derrida proposed the way in which Rousseau problematizes the origin of linguistics as Chomsky recounted it in Cartesian Linguistics, we can propose the way in which the revolutionary commons problematizes the origin of the workers' councils as, for instance, theorized by Sergio Bologna's "Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origin of the Workers' Council Movement", a seminal article published in 1972.
International Labor and Working-class History, 2004
Bulletin of Kobe Tokiwa University, 2009
The following is a Japanese translation of an exchange between the American physician and anthrop... more The following is a Japanese translation of an exchange between the American physician and anthropologist Paul Farmer and journalist Laurie Garrett over Garrettʼs “The Challenge of Global Health”, an article that appeared in the January/February issues of Foreign Affair. In it Farmer points out that although many of the criticisms Garrett lays at the feet of recent resurgence in what she describes “stovepipe” funds -- funds earmarked for specific disease, particularly AIDS - in failing to promote general healthcare in the worldʼs poorest countries are justified, his own experience with Partners in Health (of which he is a co-founder) in practicing social medicine at the grassroots in Haiti, Rwanda, and other places demonstrate the possibility of utilizing these very “stovepipe”, vertical funds for “horizontal”, more comprehensive healthcare. In order to actualize such a universal healthcare, which views health as an inalienable human right, he offers a successfully field-tested alternative model of effective social medicine, in which trained healthcare workers distribute medication and work with doctors and nurses to integrate treatment with fulfillment of everyday social needs, such as subsistence and clean environment. Garrettʼs reply, while acknowledging Farmer as one of the “heroes” in the current struggle for global healthcare, notes that she never questioned the constructive use of funds but the recent resurgence of funds in the billions of dollars “ought to buy better” services.
Kyoto Journal 65, Jan 20, 2007
Haniya Yutaka’s lifework Shirei (Dead Spirits) stands as a major monument of postwar Japanese lit... more Haniya Yutaka’s lifework Shirei (Dead Spirits) stands as a major monument of postwar Japanese literature. It is, like Dostoievski’s Demons, an epic novel of revolutionary ideas, and, in an elegantly crystalline language of brooding metaphysics, does for the internecine political intrigues of underground leftwing radicals in interwar Japan what Dostoievski did for nineteenth-century Russian anarchists and nihilists. Jailed during World War II for his Communist activism, Haniya read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in his cell and forged a dissenting politics of hybrid originality, which he defined as that of “Communist by day and anarchist by night.”
by Rebecca Ruth Gould, Sarah Irving, Eylaf Bader Eddin, Moses Kilolo, Aria Fani, omid mehrgan, Brahim El Guabli, Sahar Fathi, Mehrdad Rahimi-Moghaddam, Manuel Yang, Michela Baldo, Bidisha Pal, and Partha Bhattacharjee
The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse, and in many r... more The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse, and in many respects ground-breaking overview of literary, cultural, and political translation across a range of activist contexts. This volume brings together case studies and histories of oppressed and marginalised peoples from more than twenty different languages, ranging across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Part One considers the theoretical foundations of translation and activism. Part Two examines the figure of the interpreter as an activist. Part Three examines the figure of the translator as an activist. Part Four is comprised of autobiographical reflections by translators and writers who bear witness to the stories of oppressed peoples. Part Five engages with translation and activism from a range of legal perspectives focusing on human rights. Part Six introduces a range of case studies of translations into vernacular languages. Part Seven situates translation and activism in the context of migration, with particular attention to refugee experience. Part Eight examines the role of translators in shaping revolution. As the first extended collection to introduce translation and activism from a systematically global perspective, this handbook will serve as a useful guide to translators, writers, scholars, and activists seeking to better understand the agency of language in bringing about political change.