Nation and Aesthetics

How can a world republic be possible? This is the question the renowned philosopher Kōjin Karatani has been trying to answer ever since the end of the Soviet Union. Nation and Aesthetics, a collection of essays written over a decade of thought and research, offers a singular attempt to examine the ambiguous nature of nationalism and the nation by examining them through discussions of art and language. Karatani grasps the modern social formation as a nexus of three different "modes of exchange," namely capital-nation-state. Drawing on Kant, Karatani regards the nation as an aesthetic object and offers a new perspective on how nations of people, governing states, and the economic system of capitalism have been interwoven since their modern origins. In this wide-ranging text, with chapters on Okakura and Fenollosa, Kant and Freud, and through discussions of art, language, and religion, Karatani advances new possibilities for a global modernity, one removed from the exchanges required by the capital-nation-state trinity. The key, Karatani argues, lies also in the thought of Kant, a cosmopolitan and an advocate of a world republic. This volume, deftly translated by Jonathan E. Abel, Darwin H. Tsen, and Hiroki Yoshikuni, offers an analysis of nationalism that provides an explanation of and ways to counter current nationalistic and imperialistic tendencies, and should be welcomed by readers across the globe in the humanities and social sciences. -- from dust jacket.