week 10

There are many binaries in Naoki Sakai's Translation and Subjectivity: foreign language and national language; individuality and totality; particularism (or nationalism) and universalism; the East and the West. The components of each binary are not merely two extreme ends of a spectrum, but in their relation to one another there is something more fundamental, in the sense that one gives rise to the other. Sakai tells us that desire to know a foreign language is the desire for one's own national language; according to Watsuji, individuality is created only when a person fails to identify himself/herself with his/her subjective position in a totality (for Watsuji, individuality is not only the negation of totality but also the negation of the ethical because, he believes that the totality (community, state) is necessarily ethical and thus occupying of one's proper position in the totality is also what it means for a person to be ethical); it is only through nationalism that universalism, or internationalism, become possible; and the strange and different--namely, the East--is needed to establish the West's identity.

Sakai discusses particularism and universalism' relation to modernity. With monistic history giving rise to pluralistic world history and all states encouraged to become modern industrial society, it might seem that the world is increasingly become universalistic. However, Sakai argues that modernization process, as exemplified by the U.S.'s modernization theory, is not universalistic, but "universalism is a particualrism thinking itself as universalism; it is doubtful whether universalism could ever exist otherwise" (157).