Resistance to Modernity and the Logic of Self-Negation as Politics: Takeuchi Yoshimi and Wang Hui on Lu Xun
The works of Lu Xun, perhaps the most studied figure in modern Chinese literature, have been the subject of seemingly endless debate. Given that Lu Xun has been extolled by scholars from widely divergent ideological camps, by examining texts about Lu Xun we often learn as much about the interpreters' historical contexts as we do about Lu Xun's work itself. Put more positively, studying how scholars have interpreted Lu Xun provides a window on how they themselves have responded to the political and intellectual contexts of their times. The path-breaking works of Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910 77) and Wang Hui (1958 ) are especially thought provoking in this respect since they each wrote about Lu Xun as a way of intervening in the politics of their times. Writing in times as different as wartime Japan and post-Mao China, Takeuchi and Wang each drew on Lu Xun to develop a 24:2 doi 10.1215/10679847-3458709 Copyright 2016 by Duke University Press 24:2 May 2016 new vision of politics to combat narratives and processes associated with the nation-state and capitalism. Takeuchi, who became a prominent intellectual during the postwar period, established a new paradigm in Japanese Lu Xun studies with his work Rojin (Lu Xun), published in 1944. Recently Richard Calichman and Christian Uhl have each produced Western-language monographs on Takeuchi, which analyze his interpretation of Lu Xun in detail. Calichman has contributed to our understanding of Takeuchi's overall thought by delving deeply into how philosophical issues such as "the fundamental passivity of the subject" related to his thought.1 Uhl, on the other hand, has meticulously analyzed how Takeuchi transposed certain themes in Kyoto school philosophy, 2 such as nothingness, into his analysis of Lu Xun. However, neither of these quite grasps the significance of Takeuchi's work on Lu Xun because they fail to inquire into the historical conditions for the possibility of the...