A Foreign Sound: Crush With Eyeliner (Karatani, *Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud*)

[Jeffrey Rubard]

1. CAPITAL-NATION-STATE
1.1 Types of Exchange

The state and the nation are generally considered to be located in the political, cultural, or ideological dimension, a dimension that is not economic.
I argue, however, that they should be addressed as economic issues in a
broad sense. That is, we should grasp the root of the state and the nation
in a different type of exchange from that of commodity exchange. My view
differs from the common understanding of Marxism, which maintains that
superstructures—such as the state or the nation—retain relative autonomy
and are situated over economic substructures (bases), even though determined by them. This Marxist understanding was formed under industrial
capitalism: it was conceived when the commodity exchange economy
became overwhelmingly prevalent. There are various types of exchange,
but in the economy of industrial capitalism only commodity exchange
is considered economic while the other types of exchange are political or
cultural.
As long as they are not considered economic, the state and the nation
will be kept mystified: they will continue to appear as if they did not have
the sort of material origin that the economy appears to have. Although they
appeared outside the traditional scope of commodity exchange, they originated in other types of exchange. Roughly speaking, there are four types of
exchange (Figs 1.1 and 1.2). Marx argues that commodity exchange began
between communities and then, as a result, took place between individuals within each community. Naturally, however, there are exchanges in a
broader sense within a community or a family: reciprocation of gift and
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return. This idea of reciprocity, which has been emphasized by anthropologists since Marcel Mauss, cannot be limited to primitive society or community. A familiar example is the reciprocity between parents and their
children. When parents take care of their children, it is a gift. Although
there is uncertainty as to whether or not the children repay the favor of
the gift, parents might think that they are rewarded merely through the
existence of their children, or the children who do not repay the gift might
have a sense of indebtedness. The relationship of reciprocity is not usually
regarded as an exchange; in terms of the commodity exchange, in fact, reciprocity cannot be an equivalent exchange. For the parties concerned, however, it is an equivalent exchange.
This reciprocal or mutual exchange has been diluted by the prevalence
of commodity exchange. Yet it should be noted, first, that this type of
exchange will never disappear as long as there is the relationship between
Plundering and
Redistribution
Commodity
Exchange
Reciprocity X
Fig 1.1.
Feudal State City
Community X
Fig 1.2.

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parents and children. We were not born of our own will. That is to say, at the
moment we were born, we received the gift of care from our parents, and
we are obliged to repay the favor. It is not our choice. Precisely because it is
not our choice, however, we cannot escape from the sense of indebtedness
arising from the gift. Benedict Anderson writes, “Dying for one’s country,
which usually one does not choose, assumes a moral grandeur which dying
for the Labour Party, the American Medical Association, or perhaps even
Amnesty International cannot rival, for all those bodies one can join or
leave at easy will.”1
As I shall explain later, this kind of sentiment indicates
that the nation is fundamentally derived from reciprocal exchange.
Secondly, reciprocal exchange is indeed the basis for all the other types of
exchange: even though a relationship might not appear to be an exchange,
it should be seen as an exchange if it has taken the form of reciprocal
exchange. For example, the precapitalist mode of exploitation, whether the
mode of feudal or of Asiatic production, is not called an exchange.2
It is
clearly a system in which a ruling class plunders an agrarian community
(a clan society). This exploitation can be called “extra-economic coercion”
(Marx), meaning that it is different from commodity exchange. In order to
exploit continuously, however, the ruler must redistribute the plundered
wealth and play a public role in the community, attending to irrigation,
technical innovation, and defense. In other words, in order to sustain the
relationship between the ruler and the plundered, it must be represented
as reciprocal exchange. Otherwise, the ruling power could not survive for
long. Accordingly, it is possible to consider this plunder-redistribution relationship as a kind of exchange.
3
An apparently exploitive system of rule can be maintained when understood as a kind of equivalent exchange. The rule over a community is at
the same time a protection and benefit, which demands a return. The
Romantics and anarchists, for example, conceived a community as a world
of self-government and mutual aid. Bakunin, too, insisted that, since the
self-governing, agrarian communities (mir) were still in existence in
Russia, removal of the landlord class and the state apparatus would be sufficient.4
However, although reciprocal exchange in a community is indeed
different from commodity exchange and plunder-redistribution by the
state, competition and power are not absent in it. The reciprocal exchange
is mandatory; if one does not perform the duty of this exchange, he or she
will be placed in a socially inferior position. As shown by the example of
potlatch, to give liberally is one of the measures to rule others. Therefore,
the relationship between the ruler and the ruled can be created not only by
violence, but also by liberality. If the former measure can be called power,
the latter can be called authority, which inflicts the sense of unrepayable
gift on the ruled.
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Authority induces voluntary subjection. In distinction from power,
Gramsci called this “hegemony,” whereas Althusser referred to it as “ideology.” At the bottom of this voluntary subjection, however, reciprocal
exchange can be found. For instance, the agrarian community voluntarily
subjects itself to the ruler. As a result, if there is an attempt to overthrow the
ruling or state apparatus, ironically the attempt would encounter resistance
not only from the ruler but also from the ruled community. We should
understand, therefore, that at the foundation of continuing power there is
not only violent coercion but also reciprocal exchange.
The fact that reciprocal exchange forms the relationship between the
ruler and the ruled is not limited to primitive society. As shown by today’s
parliamentary governments, the more liberally a politician gives, the more
powerful he or she is. As a matter of course, he does not liberally distribute his own money but that of others, particular funds acquired through
taxation. Nevertheless, the ruler’s redistribution of the plundered wealth
would be represented as though it were a gift. Marx has pointed out the
process in which Louis Bonaparte gained authority by liberally giving to
all classes: “Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of
all classes. But he cannot give to one class without taking from another.”5
Although they were in fact plundered, each class felt as if they were receiving a gift from Bonaparte. As a result, Bonaparte acceded to the throne
from the presidency.
In order to investigate the modern state and nation fundamentally, we
must trace them back to the mode of exchange. For example, the relationship of plunder and redistribution still exists in the modern state, but it has
been transformed into the one between the liability of the people for taxes
and their redistribution by politicians and bureaucrats. Communal reciprocity still exists in a different form: the nation—one form of Anderson’s
“imagined community.” The nation has its basis in the sympathy for and
indebtedness to the compatriots, which originate in reciprocal exchange.
Of course, the principles of exchange do not explain everything about the
nation and the state. Yet, without going back to these principles, our understanding of the nation and the state would remain superficial. The same can
be said about capitalism: in order to grasp it, we need to go back to examine
the simple exchange of commodities.
Classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo had already explored
the system of world capitalism, but Marx began his thinking with the basic
problem of commodity exchange. This regress is not historical but logical. The classical economists presupposed that commodity exchange was
an equivalent exchange because they believed that labor value was intrinsic
to each commodity. Marx, on the other hand, put this presupposition into
question. What Marx found is the fact that in commodity exchange there

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is something precarious, which can never be sublated. Exactly because of
this precariousness, man tries to store money—the right for exchange: the
original capitalist is the miser. The capitalist economy is fundamentally
irrational even though it is “economically rational.” The capitalist drive is
a perversion in which use value (consumption) is given up while the right
for exchange is hoarded. Nor is the capitalist economy material or verifiable. It is a system of credit or faith that is formed to avoid the difficulties
of exchange—almost like a religious world. In order to grasp the capitalist economy, therefore, we must begin with the “economic substructure,”
namely the mode of commodity exchange.
Commodity exchange is based on mutual consent. Nonetheless it is
not an equivalent exchange, for, if it were, accumulation of capital, which
gains profit (surplus value) through exchange, would be impossible. At
the same time, capital’s activity is essentially merchant capital. The classical economists held that merchant capital was based on an unequivalent
exchange in which things bought cheap were sold dear, but it gains surplus
value from the differences between exchanges in different value systems.
In this way, when a given commodity is bought cheap and sold dear, both
exchanges are equivalent exchanges in that each of them is based on its own
domain’s value system. In this respect, there is no difference between merchant and industrial capital. Merchant capital gains surplus value from the
spatial difference between value systems, whereas industrial capital does
so by differentiating a system temporally through incessant innovations of
technology. Under the guise of voluntary, equivalent exchange, industrial
capital exploits surplus value and produces classes different from the feudal
classes—capital and wage labor.
This capitalistic mode of exploitation does not need “extra-economic
coercion,” but it needs “economic coercion,” as it were: there must be power
to enforce execution of the contract. It was not until the advent of modern industrial capitalism, in which land and labor were commodified, that
commodity exchange became dominant in society; before modernity, commodity exchange had been partial and local while the other two types of
exchange had been overwhelmingly dominant. Commodity exchange takes
place between communities or states, that is, in the market. Reciprocal
exchange in a community has the power to enforce its own execution, the
power of the community over individuals. According to anthropologists’
reports, power that forces the reciprocation of a gift is represented as a
magical power such as mana or hau. On the other hand, there is no such
magical power working in the exchange outside the community—the commodity exchange. It is the state that has the power to enforce the execution
of a contract for exchange. That is, the market needs to be protected by
the state. Then what protects the market that is placed between the states?
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Situating itself above these states and communities, world empire guarantees exchange between the states by binding them in a tributary relationship. It guarantees the trade between communities and states. In this sense,
the world empire was born in the formation of the world economy, however small it was. (Later, I will discuss the world economy system, which
replaces the world empire.)6
1.2. The Borromean Knot
It is generally believed that the nation-state was formed as capitalism developed, and that by the same token it will decline as capitalism continues its
development. This view, however, makes it impossible to understand not
only capitalism but also the nation and the state. So long as they are studied
separately, none of them can be grasped. In this respect, Wallerstein proposed a perspective that relates the state and capital to each other.
Traditionally Marxists tended to see the transition from premodern to
modern society primarily as a change of economic substructure—from
precapitalist to capitalist economy—which consequently caused transformations in the state, laws, and ideologies. Against this Marxist view,
Wallerstein attempts not to separate economy from politics, or monetary
economy from the state. According to his account, the world empire was
the form of politico-economy in the premodern age, and it was replaced
by the world economy—the modern world-system—in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. In spite of its name, the world empire did not cover the
world. There were in fact numerous world empires. These world empires
were transformed into a world economy when the theretofore separate blocs
of economy were unified. Speaking specifically, when the economies of the
Baltic and Mediterranean regions were internationally joined together in
the fifteenth century, the world market was established.
Marx’s Capital clearly presupposes this fact:
The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital. The production of commodities and their circulation in its developed form, namely
trade, form the historic presupposition under which capital arises. World
trade and the world market date from the sixteenth century, and from then
on the modern history of capital starts to unfold.7
The Age of Discovery in the sixteenth century literally brought about
a global market. Once established, no one could dwell outside of it. The

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world empires still existed regionally, but they were already surrounded by
the world market, being exposed to the further prevalence of the market
economy (commodity exchange) and imperialist invasions.
Inside the empire, the states (kings) that had been dependent on it
became independent, as world trade was expanded; and they abolished
(extra-economic coercive) feudal systems and started fighting against each
other, aiming for hegemony. In Western Europe, this situation was called
absolute monarchy, in which lies the origin of the nation-state. A nation is
formed when people, who have been stratified by the feudal system, become
equal to each other by obeying a single absolute king.8
The nation cannot be reduced to an ethnic group (people) or the communality of language or religion. The same ethnic group belongs to different nations every now and then, and so do those who speak the same
language or believe the same religion. Moreover, the nation cannot be
reduced to local communality because those spatially separated can form
a single nation. The homogeneity that transcends differences between peoples, communities, or languages is established under the absolutist state.
However, while people are subjects—the king’s people—the nation remains
impossible. It is not until the absolute monarchy is abolished and, thereby,
those who were subjected to the king become subjective subjects that the
nation-state can be formed. That is to say, the nation-state is formed when
its people are represented as if they were older than their own origin, which
is forgotten.
This view, however, does not fundamentally surpass the idea that the
nation is a superstructure determined by economic structures. Neither does
Anderson’s argument that the nation is an imagined community. We must
therefore see the nation, not as an imaginary product born of the modern
capital and state, but rather as a part of the structure necessary for their
existence. The nation is not a mere fancy but imagination that mediates and
unites the state and market society.
As stated before, sentimentality about the nation’s foundation does not
indicate that the nation is a noneconomic superstructure or mental issue,
but that the nation is rooted in a type of exchange—reciprocal exchange—
that is different from commodity exchange. The nation is nothing but an
“imagined” recovery of the community that was destroyed by the economy
of commodity exchange. Hence the nation has elements that are fundamentally opposed to the state and the capitalistic market economy. Yet,
even if the nation is an imagined recovery of the community, it is at base
different from community as such. In order to grasp the nation, we need to
see a fourth type of exchange, which belongs to neither the state, community, nor market economy.
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This fourth type of exchange is a form that counters the other three
types. In Figures 1.1 and 1.2, it is located in the position of X. It is similar to the market economy in 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 accumulation of capital. This voluntary, independent network of reciprocal exchange does not need a superior, political apparatus
of the state and is incompatible with the principles of the state. It can be
called communism, but to avoid unnecessary misunderstanding, I call this
network an association. It is the only principle that transcends the state,
community, and capitalism. Association is different from the other three
because it does not exist in reality, and in that sense it is a utopia. But as
long as the three types of exchange persist, so does the exchange principle
of association as a regulative idea.
In premodern society, this idea took the form of universal religion; it
emerged in the city within the ancient empire. That is, universal religion
opened up to the individual who had been at one point cut loose from the
communal link. It was opposed to the old community and denied its old
religion: “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the
daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her motherin-law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth
father or mother more than me is not worthy of me …”(Matt. 10:35–37);
“For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same
is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Matt. 12:50).
At the same time, however, universal religion denies Gesellschaft [society] and merchant capitalism and attempts to create a society of mutuality.
In the early stages of its movement, universal religion rejected the idea of
private property: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give
to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven” (Matt. 19:21). Universal
religion thus emerged as a counter-movement against merchant capitalism,
community, and the state. It is, however, clearly an “imagined community,”
and once expanded and well-established, it made compromises with the
state or empire and with the religious customs of the community: universal
religion, in fact, became the support for the state and community.
Universal religion expanded into world religion, as it were, but in this
case the “world” was limited within the boundary of the world empire. That
is, universal religion lost its universality and became a religion of the world
empire. Nonetheless, universal religion retains its authentic trait in its text.
Hence, it has been revived historically by re-reading the text in various contexts. As a result, numbers of agrarian or social movements have emerged
by taking the form of religious (fundamentalist) movements.9

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Although Anderson has defined the nation as an “imagined community”
that supplements religion, universal religion is precisely the first “imagined community.” If the nation has the ideality that mere ethnic groups
do not have, it is because the nation assumes the status of this universal
religion. For example, when the nation’s contours are blurred in a borderless economy, either ethnic nationalism or transnational, religious fundamentalism appears. In such cases, can we regard religion as a supplement
to the nation? As a mode of idea, the nation is not religion, but at the base
of nation and religion, we should see a certain type of exchange. Viewed in
this perspective, it becomes obvious that the nation and religion cannot be
abolished merely by Enlightenment-like critique. As Marx points out, they
cannot be abolished unless their demand is fulfilled.
In probing the formation of the nation, we must take association into
account, whether it takes a form of religion or not. I have stated, for example, that social movements against feudalism emerged as forms of religious
movement. They did so not because bourgeois economy was undeveloped.
For example, the English revolution starting in 1642, which is called the
first bourgeois revolution, emerged as a religious revolution prosecuted by
Puritans. Although there are various kinds of Puritans, the party called the
Levellers was, perhaps, the most important. They represented the class of
independent producers of simple commodities who went into decline with
the expansion of the capitalist economy. In this respect, they are similar
to nineteenth century anarchists. Moreover, the Diggers, who represented
the agrarian proletariat, were clearly communistic. However, their political
views were described as religious ideals such as “millenarianism.” These
radical parties contributed significantly to the overturn of the absolute
monarchy, but the new regime purged them. The revolution ended with the
Restoration of 1660. As a matter of course, the Restoration was not a return
to the absolute monarchy, but close to a constitutional monarchy, which
was established decisively by the Glorious Revolution in 1688. At this point,
the bourgeois revolution concluded, but what is important is the fact that
the bourgeois revolution started as a social movement by a non-bourgeois
class, and also as a religious movement, and concluded with the oppression
of that class and movement.
The French Revolution displays similarities. Although the revolutionary movement did not appear religious, its motivating power came not
from the bourgeoisie but from such associationist movements as the sansculottes. When the achievements of this movement were suppressed by the
bourgeoisie, the bourgeois state was established. The slogan of the French
Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—in a sense symbolizes the
three types of exchange: liberty stands for market economy, equality for
redistribution by the state, and fraternity for association. However, this
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fraternity stressed by the sans-culottes was eventually absorbed into the
nation. Put differently, those who had been citizens at the beginning of the
Revolution eventually became the French (people). According to research
conducted at the beginning of the Revolution, little more than forty percent
of citizens could speak French. It is the state that subsequently introduced
national education.
The associationism that failed in the French Revolution later re-emerged
clearly as socialism. In this case, interestingly, early socialists, including
Proudhon, generally regarded primitive Christianity as a socialist movement and their own movement as its re-enactment. This kind of analogy
was not an arbitrary fancy, but fell into disuse after the revolution of 1848.
This disuse was not caused by the emergence of “scientific socialism” but
by the fact that after the defeat of the 1848 revolution the X element was
absorbed into the nation-state. In France, the X was absorbed into Louis
Bonaparte’s national socialism and in England into Fabian socialism—a
socialism within the boundary of parliamentary democracy or social
democracy.
Today, the capitalist economy, state, and nation supplement and complement each other. For example, when everyone enjoys economic freedom
and thereby economic inequality and class conflict occur, the nation denies
the problems through a sentiment of reciprocal aid and the state regulates
capital and redistributes its wealth. That is, the Borromean knot of capitalnation-state is both flexible and inextricable; and it was established in the
advanced capitalist countries in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
How did Marxists resist this trinity? In his later years, Marx saw the only
hope in associations—producers’ cooperatives—which he caught a glimpse of
in the Paris Commune.10 In reality, however, socialist movements in advanced
countries converged on social democracy. After the Social Democratic Party
succeeded in the German parliament at the end of the nineteenth century,
Engels believed that socialism could be realized in the parliamentary system.
Bernstein inherited Engels’ legacy and completely disposed of the remains of
his predecessor’s classic theory of revolution. After 1848, any violent revolution became impossible in advanced capitalist countries. It is only in developing countries, in which the knot of capital-nation-state had not been fully
established, that violent revolutions took place.11
In the twentieth century, there were two currents that attempted to overcome the trinity of capital-nation-state. One was Leninism, which sought
to abolish capitalism through state control and planning. However, while
repressing the market economy, it strengthened the state’s power. In this
direction, the “withering away of the state” is totally impossible. What
Leninism brought about was, indeed, hierarchical bureaucracy by the party

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and economic stagnation. As a result, historically Leninism could either
collapse, as the Soviet Union did, or re-introduce a market economy, as
China did. It would also adopt the parliamentary system. In the end, all
varieties of Leninism have settled in a form of social democracy.
The other current is fascism, which is not state socialism but that of
the nation. In opposition to both capitalism and the state’s control (by the
communist party), fascism finds a key to overcome them in the nation.
Clearly the nation cannot overcome capitalism and the state but creates
an “imagined community” that fantasizes such an overcoming. In reality,
this resulted in reinforcement of imperialism or national capitalism, but
fascism appeared considerably attractive to people in many countries precisely because it provided a dream world in which every contradiction was
resolved there and then.
It should be noted that many fascist leaders were originally decentralistic
anarchists—or associationists. Italian fascists, for instance, were influenced by
a theorist of anarchism, Sorel. At its core, German Nazism was also agrarian
anarchism against industrial capitalism and statism. Heidegger was attracted
to the Nazis for the ideal of Sturmabteilung [storm trooper] and withdrew from
the party when it was purged. This means, however, not that Heidegger quit the
Nazis, but that the Nazis quit being the Nazis. It should not be forgotten that
Japanese fascism, too, was intensified and encouraged not only by the state’s
reinforcement, but also by counter-movements against the state. For example,
Gondō Seikyō, an agrarian anarchist, who rejected the state and insisted on
self-government of agrarian communities—shashoku—had a strong influence
on Japanese fascism.12
2. NATION AND AESTHETICS
2.1 Moral Sentiment and Imagination
The trinity, or the Borromean knot, of capital-nation-state was formed in
modernity. In this case, it is the nation that links the state and market society together. So how does the nation make this possible? As indicated before,
the nation is an “imagined community,” but it is not a mere fancy or fantasy;
it functions as the imagination that mediates and synthesizes the state and
market society. We need to investigate the imagination, for the nation was
formed at the same time as in the history of philosophy the imagination
assumed the position that mediates sensibility and understanding (Figs 1.3
and 1.4).
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This kind of problem was philosophically thematized first in Britain—
particularly in Scotland—where the capitalist market economy was already
highly developed. In the first half of the eighteenth century, for example, a
kind of sentiment came into notice: what Hutcheson calls moral sentiments.
Imagination
Understanding Sensibility
Fig 1.3.
Nation
State Civil Society
Fig 1.4.

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His disciple, Adam Smith, examined the moral sentiments and described
sympathy as the following:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render
their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except
the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion
which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made
to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the
sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to
prove it… .13
Needless to say, Smith is the economist who argued that the pursuit of
profit by each individual would result in the increase of welfare as a whole
and insisted therefore on laissez-faire. Originally, however, Smith was a
moral philosopher. More precisely, he remained a moral philosopher, and
his political economy was placed at the end of his system of moral philosophy. Still his theory of moral sentiments does not seem compatible with
the idea of the laissez-faire market, which affirms the survival of the fittest. This incompatibility is usually resolved by saying that, while insisting
on laissez-faire, Smith was aware of its inevitable detriments, and that his
moral philosophy was intended to be its remedy. Smith is thus considered a
precursor of welfare economics.
Yet Smith is neither a market fundamentalist nor a welfare-stater. Smith
attempted to base laissez-faire on the theory of moral sentiments to begin
with. How could this ever be possible? There is a subtle but decisive difference between Hutcheson’s and Smith’s ideas of moral sentiments. While for
Hutcheson moral sentiments are opposed to selfishness, what Smith calls
sympathy is compatible with not only pity but also selfishness since sympathy is the “imagination,” by which we place ourselves in the situation of
others.
[Our senses] never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and
it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are
his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than
by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the
impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations
copy. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive
ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body,
and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form
some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker
in degree, is not altogether unlike them.14
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What Smith calls sympathy emerged for the first time in a situation in
which selfishness was affirmed. Hutcheson insisted on moral sentiments
in opposition to selfishness; it is rather Hutcheson’s theory of moral sentiments that acknowledges the market economy, on the one hand, and
tries to resolve its problem morally or politically, on the other hand.
According to Smith, however, morality must be and can be realized not
in the morals, laws, or the state but just in the market economy. Smith’s
moral philosophy is economics, which attempts to fulfill the same demand
that religions, morals, and laws (of the state) have sought to fulfill, without recourse to them.
Smith’s theory became unintelligible because the capitalist economy
after the Industrial Revolution was different from the one in Smith’s
mind. He rejected the mercantilism of the preceding era, which was
based on the principles of merchant capitalism. It gains profit from the
difference in trade; it is also linked to the absolutist state. According to
mercantilism, the wealth of a given state can be gained only through
the sacrifice of other states. Smith objected to these principles and policies of mercantilism. In his critique of mercantilism, he conceived of
the market economy not as the market of merchant capitalism but as
capitalist production by independent producers and a world in which
they exchanged. Since capitalist production enhances its productivity by division and cooperation of labor, it can gain fair profit through
fair exchange. Hence, in opposing mercantilism, which was a political
equivalent to absolutism, Smith also opposed the state’s intervention and
monopoly and asserted the renunciation of colonies. He thought that,
except for the minimal state (the night-watchman state), the state as such
was unnecessary and should be abolished.
The point in reading Smith is that the capitalist production he witnessed was not the one after the Industrial Revolution, but the one that
remained at the stage of manufacturing or handicraft, as agricultural
economies did. The capitalist was a master, who worked by himself, as
the owners of today’s small businesses do. It was important for Smith
to associate the isolated, independent producers through capital and,
thereby, to enhance productivity to the degree that had been impossible by each one of them individually. In the age of Smith, there was
no significant difference between capitalist production and producers’
cooperatives—or associations. The producers’ cooperatives were set up
by artisan laborers to counter the division between capital and labor,
which became more distinct as capitalist production was mechanized.
Smith witnessed capitalist production prior to the Industrial Revolution,
which even could be considered associationist in nature. Smith conceived

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that in this production a moral world could be realized through free
and fair exchange. What he calls moral sentiments is that which upholds
such an economy.
Needless to say, however, history in reality did not proceed as Smith had
expected. Capitalist production as such caused the difference—surplus
value—and the division of class. Confronting this reality, socialist thought
emerged. As in the 1820s Ricardian socialism grew out of Ricardo, Smith’s
theory of moral economy yielded a socialism regardless of his intention: the
socialism that seeks to solve the problems of capitalism socially—that is,
by means of cooperatives of independent producers—without recourse to
the state.
The Romantics sought such socialism. It is worth noting that there were
numerous socialists among the British Romantics. For instance, Shelley the
poet was married to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and adored her father
William Godwin, an anarchist. This tradition linking the Romantics and
socialism continued through Ruskin and William Morris in the nineteenth
century. Morris, the organizer of the Arts and Crafts movement, was one
of the first Marxists in Britain, but his Marxism differed entirely from that
of social democracy or Leninism, but neared associationism or anarchism.
Taking the tradition since Adam Smith into account, Morris’s associationism is not surprising.
What is called “fraternity” in the French Revolution is called by Smith
“sympathy” or “fellow feeling.” Fraternity has a Christian origin, but as
Smith’s idea of sympathy is different from religious compassion and caused
in situations where selfishness is admitted, fraternity at this period is far
from the Christian idea. Fraternity was an expression of the association of
skilled workers. Yet, after the Revolution, the nation assimilated fraternity.
Resisting this assimilation, fraternity revived in early socialism, especially
in Proudhon’s associationism, in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Nevertheless the most influential variety of socialism was the nation’s
socialism that used the state for the solution of social problems and industrial development, as Saint-Simonism did. Louis Bonaparte, for example,
was a Saint-Simonist. In the first French Revolution of 1789, associationism was absorbed into the nation: Napoleon became an emperor. The second revolution of 1848 resulted in the accession of Louis Bonaparte, who
amounted to no more than the nephew of Napoleon. As Marx points out,
the second revolution was a repetition of the first and occurred as farce. It
should be noted, however, that precisely because Louis Bonaparte was a
Saint-Simonistic socialist, he could provoke nationalism that transcended
the classes.
16 Nation and Aesthetics
16
2.2. Sensibilization = Aestheticization
However, sentiments such as sympathy or fraternity were not explored
further in Britain and France; rather, it was in Germany that they were
explored, not at the political or economic level, but as a philosophical problem. The problem of “moral sentiments” is a question of whether or not
sentiment, which had been considered a lower faculty, could have a moral
or intellectual capacity. Before modernity, sensibility had been generally
undervalued; it was believed that sensibility deceived the human being and
that true knowledge or morality could only be found beyond sensibility.
With the advance of modern science, sensibility became important, but,
in fact, its importance concerned only sense-data, or perception, while
sentiment remained a lower faculty. Sentiment was viewed as nothing but
a passion that the human being must overcome through understanding.
The eighteenth century saw an emergence of an argument that sentiment is
not only capable of intellectual cognition and moral judgment, but, is in a
sense, a faculty that exceeds understanding and reason.15 This argument is
called aesthetics, which does not mean simply a study of the beautiful. In
fact, Baumgarten wrote Aesthetica (1750–1758) as a “science of sensual cognition,” and a theory of art comprised merely a part of it. Aesthetics, nevertheless, came to be understood as a science of the beautiful. Kant opposed
this trend, writing:
The Germans are the only people who have come to use the word aesthetic[s]
to designate what others call the critique of taste. They are doing so on the
basis of a false hope conceived by that superb analyst, Baumgarten: he hoped
to bring our critical judging of the beautiful under rational principles, and
to raise the rules for such judging to the level of a science. Yet that endeavor
is futile. For, as regards their principal sources, those rules or criteria are
merely empirical. Hence they can never serve as determinate a priori laws to
which our judgment of taste would have to conform; it is, rather, our judgment of taste which constitutes the proper touchstone for the correctness of
those rules or criteria. Because of this it is advisable to follow either of two
alternatives. One of these is to let this new name aesthetic[s] become extinct
again, and to reserve the name aesthetic for the doctrine that is true science.
(In doing so we would also come closer to the language of the ancients and
its meaning: among the ancients the division of cognition into aiotheta kai
noeta [the sensible and the intelligible] was quite famous.) The other alternative would be for the new aesthetic[s] to share the name with speculative
philosophy; we would then take the name partly in its transcendental sense,
and partly in the psychological meaning.16

Empire and Nation 17
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Kant took issue with Baumgarten not because the latter used aesthetics
to signify a science of the beautiful, but because Baumgarten tried to see
something rational in sensibility or sentiments. In Critique of Pure Reason,
in fact, Kant uses aesthetics only in the sense of a science of sensibility. Here
Kant is consistent in his distinction between sensibility and understanding, or between the sensible and the intelligible, because thought without
this distinction is metaphysics, which claims that a certain thing (God, for
example) exists only because it is intelligible.
“What others call the critique of taste,” mentioned by Kant, refers to
Elements of Criticism by Henry Home, Lord Kames, a Scottish thinker.
Being a “critique of taste,” this book reflected on the possibility of aesthetic
judgment of taste and its ground. Home’s project is to deduce the universality of the judgment of taste from the intrinsic principles of humanity and
to argue that human sensitivity to the beautiful and the ugly is an a priori,
but at the same time he adopts empirical induction to discover the general
rule of taste by extensively collecting and arranging varieties of materials
from every field of literature in all ages. In short, Home finds his task in
establishing the fundamental principles of criticism and its assured standard as such without presupposing any particular principle heedlessly. This
is Home’s “critique.” Basically Kant retains the same posture as Home’s.
According to Kant’s account, there is no rule the judgment of taste has to
follow; it has to be spontaneous; the judgment would be impossible if particular rules determine it. On the other hand, however, the judgment of
taste cannot be made arbitrarily by each individual. To qualify as a judgment of taste, it must lay claim to the consent of everyone, without which it
would be nothing but a personal agreeableness. Kant puts forth this structure in the following antinomy:
1. Thesis. The judgment of taste is not based on concepts, for otherwise it
would be possible to dispute about it (decide by means of proofs).
2. Antithesis. The judgment of taste is based on concepts, for otherwise,
despite its variety, it would not even be possible to argue about it (to lay
claim to the necessary assent of others to this judgment).17
Kant’s point in his argument about the “criticism of taste” is not limited to
the problem of the judgment of taste: it is also the case with sensual cognition in general. Although Kant makes a clear distinction between sensibility and understanding, he conceives imagination as a link between them.18
According to Kant, imagination belongs to understanding, but at the same
time it has a relationship to sensibility. Kant writes, “Human cognition has
two stems, viz., sensibility and understanding, which perhaps spring from
a common root, though one unknown to us,”19 but he does not attempt
18 Nation and Aesthetics
18
to present this in a positive light. Kant states in Critique of the Power of
Judgment that the antinomy implicates something supersensible at the bottom of the sensible intuition. According to Kant, however, it cannot be presented positively, but only inferred by a “skeptical method.” Baumgarten’s
“aesthetics,” on the other hand, presupposed the synthesis between the sensible and the supersensible.
The point is that the imagination, which philosophy had undervalued as
a false representation of perception or an arbitrary fancy, was considered
by Kant indispensable. The imagination is not only reproductive but also
productive or creative. Thus sensibility, understanding, and imagination
form a Borromean knot. Neither of them is dominant; the knot is impossible without either of them. The mediation by the imagination between
sensibility and understanding, or reason, has a double meaning. First, there
is a possibility that sensibility and reason could be synthesized. Second,
such synthesis cannot be presented positively but remains imaginary—an
illusion.
In opposition to Hutcheson who tried to base morality on moral sentiments, Kant thought that the moral law is rational, and that there is
no morality in sentiment or sensibility. If “moral sentiments” exist, they
should be born of the knowledge of the moral law, and not vice versa. In
this respect, as stated before, Smith’s theory of moral sentiments differs
from Hutcheson’s, for the idea of sympathy, which Smith stresses, is nothing but the imagination, by which one imagines oneself in the situation of
others. It is not necessarily compassion, and it admits selfishness of others. In Kantian terms, what Smith calls sympathy is the moral law, which
obliges us to act so that we imagine ourselves in the situation of others who
are free beings.
However, the idea that some sentiments are rational a priori is to sensibilize or aestheticize morality (or reason). Kant criticizes the idea of the direct
link between sensibility and understanding (or reason); it substantializes
the imaginary. I call this kind of thought “aesthetic,” which is clearly not
limited to the science of the beautiful.
In spite of Kant’s “critique,” the Romantic philosophers of the younger
generation began with the presupposition of the unity between nature and
freedom, or subject and object. Schelling, for example, conceived the idea
of intellectual intuition (Intuitiver Verstand), which could transcend the
duality of sensibility and understanding (or speculative reason) as their
synthesis. In other words, he found art at the bottom of every cognition.
Hegel, on the other hand, unlike Fichte and Schelling, attempted a return
to Kant’s antinomy and grasped it dialectically, but fundamentally presupposed a synthesis similar to intellectual intuition. Although Hegel posited philosophy above art, philosophy had already been aestheticized. It

Empire and Nation 19
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is natural that this philosophy led to an idealism, in which what can be
thought can be. From Kant’s viewpoint, Romantic philosophy is another
version of metaphysics.
This is, however, merely common knowledge about the history of philosophy. What is more important for us is that for Kant the problem of
morality is directly linked to that of economy. For him, the core of morality
is not situated in good or evil but in freedom. In that case, the moral law,
which commands us to use humanity in the person of every other “always
at the same time as end [as a free being] and never merely as means,” must
not be understood without referring to actual problems of economy. The
law includes the “categorical imperative” for abolishing those politicoeconomic situations in which others are used exclusively as means. Adam
Smith saw the possibility of this abolishment in the mode of capitalist manufacturing production, as I have argued contrary to market fundamentalist understanding of his theory. In a sense, Kant came up with a similar
solution to Smith: cooperatives by independent producers in opposition
to merchant capital. Noticing this point, Hermann Cohen, a neo-Kantian
philosopher, sees Kant as “the true and real originator of German socialism.”20 Needless to say, this socialism is associationism in distinction with
national socialism. The former kind of socialism, however, was scornfully
rejected under the full development of industrial capitalism and the corresponding national socialism.
It is the Romantic philosophers—such as Herder and Fichte—who denied
Kant’s associationism and transformed it into nationalism. According to
the history of philosophy, Kant’s dualism of sensibility and understanding
was overcome by the Romantics. But Kant remained in dualism because
for him the synthesis of sensibility and understanding by the imagination
is nothing but imaginary. Nevertheless the monism, which is supposed to
overcome Kant’s philosophy, assumes that such synthesis is not imaginary
at all but has always been in existence. The question between either dualism or monism is not merely a problem of philosophical form. The transition from Kantian dualism to Romantic monism clearly corresponds to the
conversion from associationism to nationalism, which occurred around the
time of the French Revolution.
For Kant, to be specific, the association remains an imagined or created
community21: he is conscious that the association is, or ought to be, created
by man. The Romantics substantialized, or aestheticized, it, however. It is
at this moment that the nation became substantial.22 Kant was a cosmopolitan, who resisted the overwhelming inclinations for nationalism. He kept
seeking the possibility of associations of individuals free from states and
communities. Precisely because of his cosmopolitanism, he was scorned by
the Romantics and Hegel.
20 Nation and Aesthetics
20
It was Herder, Kant’s disciple, who first tried to overcome his master’s
dualism. Criticizing Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages for basing its argument solely on sentiments, Herder emphasized in his own
Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772) that from the beginning reason
was involved:
If, that is to say, reason is no compartmentalized, separately effective force
but an orientation of all forces that is distinctive to his species, then the
human being must have it in the first condition in which he is a human being
… . If in its first condition the soul has nothing positive of reason in it,
how will this become real even in millions of succeeding conditions? …
But the most sensuous condition of the human being was still human, and
hence awareness was still effective in that condition, only in a less marked
degree … .23
Contrary to the subjective philosophy of the day, Herder began with the
sensible, such as the clime, language, and people (Volk) as a community
of language.24 But he had already assumed the unity of sensibility and
reason: he aestheticized (sensibilized) reason. Accordingly, even though
Herder began with the sensible, it had latent rationality, which was supposed to be actualized eventually. Due to the attention to sensibility, his
thought does not appear idealistic, but it is an idealism insofar as sensibility
is already rational. Hegel called it objective idealism.
For Fichte, the core of the nation is language. The nation consists of neither the communality of kinship or region nor of a political state but of
language.
To begin with, and above all else, the first, original and truly natural frontiers of states are undoubtedly their inner frontiers. Those who speak the
same language are already, before all human art, joined together by mere
nature with a multitude of invisible ties; they understand one another and
are able to communicate ever more clearly; they belong together and are
naturally one, an indivisible whole. No other nation of a different descent
and language can desire to absorb and assimilate such a people without, at
least temporarily, becoming confused and profoundly disturbing the steady
progress of its own culture. The external limits of territories only follow as
a consequence of this inner frontier, drawn by man’s spiritual nature itself.
And from the natural view of things it is not simply because men dwell
within the confines of certain mountains and rivers that they are a people;
on the contrary, men live together—and, if fortune has so arranged it for
them, protected by mountains and rivers—because they were already a people beforehand by a far higher law of nature. Thus lay the German nation,

Empire and Nation 21
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sufficiently united by a common language and way of thinking, and clearly
enough separated from the other peoples, in the middle of Europe, as a wall
dividing unrelated tribes. It was numerous and brave enough to protect its
frontiers against any foreign incursion … .25
Fichte here distinguishes the nation from the state. While the state has its
boundaries, the nation the “inner frontier.” When the inner frontier is realized, the truly rational state is established. It is clear, however, that in language such as the inner frontier the rational was already sensibilized or
aestheticized. Conversely, the sensible was already spritualized. For example, language—or literature—aestheticizes mountains and rivers as scenes
of the nation.
It is Hegel who completed the philosophy of German romanticism and
idealism. Particularly his Philosophy of Right can be called the first book
that illustrated the relationship between the capitalist economy, the state,
and the nation. The book starts from the family and then proceeds to civil
society and finally to the state. This order, however, does not signify a historical order but the dialectic structure of their relationship. Therefore, the
family with which Hegel begins is not a tribal one but a modern nuclear
family. At a higher level over family is situated the civil society, a world
in which desires and egos compete with each other. Hegel includes in the
stage of “civil society” not only market-economy society but also police,
jurisdiction, and the state apparatus, including the social polity and public
authority. According to Hegel, however, this society is merely “the state as
the Understanding envisages it,” lacking sentimental aspects of the nation.
The unity of the civil society and the nation is realized in the “rational”
state—or the nation-state. Of course, this state did not exist in Germany.
When Hegel wrote about it, the state he had in mind was contemporary
Britain.
Hegel thus captured the knot of capital-nation-state as such. From
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, statists, socialists, and nationalists can deduce
their own theoretical grounds, and these grounds could be criticized on the
basis of the same book. Rather than the strength of Hegel’s thought, however, it is the power of the knot of capital-nation-state that makes his argument all-inclusive. Hegel’s philosophy cannot easily be denied precisely
because it grasped—begreifen in Hegel’s own word—the knot structurally.
Yet his philosophy has forgotten the fundamental fact that the knot is produced by the imagination, which in this case assumes the form of nation.
Hence the possibility for abolishing the knot remains unknowable.
Hegel implies that, on the one hand, the nation (Volk) is rooted in the
sensible, for instance in the family or clan; but, on the other hand, he
also argues that it appears only at a higher dimension—the state—which
22 Nation and Aesthetics
22
transcends not only the family and community but also civil society. As in
Herder’s theory, there is a germ of reason already at the stage of sensibility
and it is later to be actualized. Here the imagination, which links sensibility
and understanding (or reason), is absent: the fact that the link is merely an
imaginary product is forgotten. In short, Hegel’s rational state is already
aestheticized.
3. TWO EMPIRES
3.1 Empire and Imperialism
The knot of capital-nation-state is so firm that all attempts to surpass capitalism have failed. When these attempts were proven a sheer failure at the
end of the twentieth century, social democracy was approved as the only
possibility. As a matter of course, this possibility is not an overcoming
of capitalism at all; it merely means that the knot of capital-nation-state
has been institutionally established. Yet, along with this establishment, a
new challenge to the knot of capital-nation-state began. World capitalism
assimilated the nation-states in order to survive, but then, for its own maintenance, capitalism must fight against the nation-states in itself.
Among the conspicuous phenomena after the 1990s, we find on the one
hand an upsurge of ethnocentrism—that is in fact nationalism—and on the
other hand religious fundamentalism crossing the boundaries of nations.
These phenomena indicate that the old frameworks of the nation-state have
been shaken and have become dysfunctional. There is an explanation for
these phenomena: the so-called globalization of capitalism has advanced
and, thereby, accelerated the fluidity of capital and labor; and, in addition,
due to the collapse of the Soviet Union, those underdeveloped countries
which lost realistic perspective and direction for the future turned to religious fundamentalism. Yet this explanation lacks a structural understanding of capital, state, nation, socialism, and religion; it just juxtaposes them
and arbitrarily points out some causal relations. Therefore, this explanation
is as such unable to find any perspective or direction.
The nation-state was not born from nothing. It was caused by the dissolution and partition of the empire, which served as a preceding ground. At
present, when the nation-state’s framework has been shaken, the “empire”
is referred to as an alternative principle. Although the empire has already
been mentioned, I would like to return to it here for further exploration.
In order to avoid a common misunderstanding about the empire, we must
distinguish it from imperialism. In this respect, it is helpful to consider

Empire and Nation 23
23
Hannah Arendt’s comment that unlike empire, imperialism is a continuation of the nation-state:
Conquest as well as empire building had fallen into disrepute for very good
reasons. They had been carried out successfully only by governments which,
like the Roman Republic, were based primarily on law, so that conquest
could be followed by integration of the most heterogeneous peoples by
imposing upon them a common law. The nation-state, however, based upon
a homogeneous population’s active consent to its government (“le plébiscite
de tous les jours”), lacked such a unifying principle and would, in the case
of conquest, have to assimilate rather than to integrate, to enforce consent
rather than justice, that is, to degenerate into tyranny.26
There are several points to be noted here. First, although Arendt regards
the Roman Empire as the only example of empire, her observation can be
applied to empires of the other regions. Each empire has differences, which
are not unimportant, but there are notable similarities among them. The
world empire reigned over the states that ruled agrarian communities,
but remained indifferent to customs of each conquered state and people
unless the empire’s dominance was challenged. This indifference presents
a contrast to the nation, which homogenizes its members, and to imperialism, which inflicts homogeneity on all peoples. Concerning the Ottoman
Empire, which survived until the twentieth century, Robert Mantran of the
Annales School states the following:
… there was neither islamization nor ottommanization of the local population during the Ottoman Empire era even if the contemporary political
problems obscure this reality. They retained their specific characters, their
religion, their language, very often their staff, their local status, and their
economic activities. The Ottomans demanded money, products, and men,
but they did not seek to Turk-ify each population or each group at all cost;
each region retained its own characters. This explains the emergence of
nationalism in the 18th and especially 19th centuries … .27
It is under the imperialism of Western Europe that the Ottoman Empire
dissolved and the Arab peoples gained independence. The states of Western
Europe, however, believed that they delivered the peoples from the Ottoman
Empire’s imperialism. This ignorance is characteristic of modern imperialism: imperialism is a nation-state’s domination over other nations without
the principles of the empire. As a consequence, it was inevitable that the
great Western Powers, which dissolved the Ottoman Empire, immediately
encountered resistance from Arab nationalists.
24 Nation and Aesthetics
24
Second, Arendt sees the beginning of imperialism in “capital export”
at the end of the nineteenth century, but before that period imperialism
had already emerged as something different from the empire’s principles.
In fact, Arendt herself locates the dilemma of imperialism—“[w]herever the
nation-state appeared as conqueror, it aroused national consciousness and
desire for sovereignty among the conquered people”—in earlier periods,
such as Napoleon’s endeavor for a European union.
The inner contradiction between the nation’s body politic and conquest as a
political device has been obvious since the failure of the Napoleonic dream
… . The Napoleonic failure to unite Europe under the French flag was a
clear indication that conquest by a nation led either to the full awakening of
the conquered people’s national consciousness and to consequent rebellion
against the conqueror, or to tyranny. And though tyranny, because it needs
no consent, may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power
only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.28
Napoleon’s conquest actually caused nationalism in Germany; this is a
typical example in which a nation-state’s imperialistic expansion produces
another nation-state. I argue, however, that imperialism should be traced
back to the absolutist states of early modern Western Europe. It is not that
at a certain moment the nation-state suddenly became imperialistic, but
that its hegemonism resides in the origin of the nation-state. Indeed, the
absolute-monarchistic states, which competed for the hegemony of the
world market, compared themselves to the empire of the past. These states,
however, can never be anything like the bygone world empires.
Here I would like to summarize again the relationship between the
empire, nation-state, and imperialism. The special characteristic of the
empire, first, resides in its law. The empire is not interested in direct rule
over the tribes and states but rather in the relationship among them—in
other words, in the security of their intercourse and commerce. The empire’s
law is basically international; the laws of the Roman Empire, which formed
the basis for the natural law, were fundamentally international. This is also
the case with the other empires even though they did not institute international laws. In the Chinese empires, for example, the status of each subordinate peoples and states was acknowledged insofar as they paid tribute,
which was nothing but a kind of trade since the tributary received in return
more than it paid. The empire does not intervene in the internal affairs of its
subordinate tribes and states unless they threaten the security of the trade
within the empire. Often it seemed as if the world empire was established
almost overnight; it is because the conqueror was hailed for the promise to
secure international law and order as well as trade.

Empire and Nation 25
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The second trait of the empire is a world religion. When the world empire
is established by uniting tribal states, a universal religion that transcends the
religion of each state or community is necessary. In the major expansion of
the empire, the Roman emperor had to base it on Christianity, which until
that time he had persecuted. Likewise, when the Chinese empires expanded
to the scale of the Eurasian continent, Legalist thought (Shi Huangdi of the
Ch’in dynasty) or Confucianism (Wu-di of the Han dynasty) was insufficient, and for that reason the Tang dynasty in fact introduced Buddhism.
The Mongolian world empires also adopted Buddhism or Islam. The world
religion could permeate each of the subordinate peoples and states within
the empire. The Yamato dynasty of Japan, for instance, needed Buddhism
to solidify its basis. Even a small state needs a universal religion that transcends old tribal gods when it develops, subsuming numerous tribes.
Moreover, in a world empire, theology becomes rationalistic and comprehensive, as in Avicenna (Ibn Sina) in Arabia, Thomas Aquinas in Western
Europe, and Chu Hsi in China.
The third trait of the empire is a lingua franca—a world language. Latin,
Chinese characters, and the Arabic alphabet are written linguistic forms
used by numerous tribes and states. Although there were innumerable
spoken languages—vernaculars—under empires, they were not considered languages. These vernaculars were given the same status as dialects
are today. Because the empire’s law, religion, and philosophy are expressed
in this world language, it is in that language above all that the empire’s
distinctive quality emerges; for those who do not belong to the ruling class,
the world language is incomprehensible. For example, unintelligible words
are called Chinese (Chinpun kanpun [Kanbun]) in Japanese, and “Greek”
in English; the philosophical concepts in these languages of empires were
regarded as rational and highbrow while vernaculars, or spoken languages,
were slighted. In philosophical terms, this corresponds to the fact that sensibility has been slighted as the source of deception. Conversely, the modern
emphasis on sensibility and sentiment corresponds to that on vernacular or
spoken language over written language.29
These traits of the empire are linked to each other. In other words, the
processes of independence—of a sovereign state from the empire, of faith
from the world church (or the state), and of the vernacular, which was
dominated by the world (written) language, as itself written language—are
all related to each other. In Europe, for instance, Luther’s Reformation is
generally thought of as a religious issue, but it assumes more complex significance: his resistance to the Roman Catholic Church was primarily a
rejection of indulgences but also a resistance to the economic rule of the
Church as a feudal power. In that sense, Luther’s Reformation included the
independence of the tribal states under the empire and thereby brought
26 Nation and Aesthetics
26
about sovereign states, which overrode the laws of the empire and the
church, and furthermore agrarian movements that demanded freedom
from feudal orders.
Regarding Luther’s Reformation, however, the significance of his translation of the Bible into a vernacular (High German) should not be forgotten: the translation not only advanced the Reformation by making the Bible
accessible to common people but also became the foundation of standard
German. The point is not that a vernacular was written but that world
language was translated into the vernacular. Luther’s translation formed
national German precisely because it was the translation of the Bible.
Clearly the Gutenberg revolution (of printing) cannot be neglected, but it is
the translation of the Bible that established the publishing industry of the
period. The vernacular translation of the Bible gave the vernacular (High
German) a noble and sacred impression comparable to the language of the
empire, such as Greek, Hebrew, or Latin. National language is complete,
however, when the fact that it is translated from written language, such
as Latin or Chinese characters, is forgotten, and when it is assumed to be
derived directly from sentiments or interiority. That is, at the moment the
romantic philosophers, such as Herder, began to investigate the “origin of
language,” the national language had already been completed. The spoken
languages they discovered had already been translated from the written
language, which was the language of the empire. Put differently, the sensibility they saw had already been mediated by reason. I have called “aesthetic” the romantic way of beginning with the synthesis of sensibility and
understanding (or reason); this is also the case with the linguistic level.
Fichte argued the following:
And so we have solved our immediate task, to find the characteristic that
distinguishes the Germans from the other peoples of Teutonic descent. The
difference resulted immediately from the original separation of the common
stock and consists in this, that the Germans still speak a living language and
have done so ever since it first streamed forth from nature, whereas the other
Teutonic tribes speak a language that stirs only on the surface yet is dead at
the root.30
In the foregoing addresses I have set forth, and demonstrated with reference to history, those characteristics which the Germans possess as an original people, and as one that has the right to call itself the people as such, in
contradistinction to other tribes that have separated from it, just as the word
“German” in its proper signification denotes exactly that.31
Here Fichte forgets the fact that standard German was established by
translation. When the above statement was declared under the French

Empire and Nation 27
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occupation, it merely cheered Germans; but what meaning does it have
after Germany was actually unified in 1871? Needless to say, Fichte’s words
function as a discourse of imperialism. The fact that a discourse that forms
a nation-state can be that of imperialism proves that imperialism expands
from the nation-state.
3.2. Two “Empires”
Since the collapse of the Cold War structure, the world appears to be unified under the overwhelming hegemony of the United States, but numerous
blocs are being formed, on the other hand. These opposing tendencies are
developing simultaneously. Likewise there are two directions of argument
regarding empire. One is a concept of empire proposed by Negri and Hardt.
According to their account, with the Cold War ending in the 1990s, imperialism was over and the empire emerged. This is indicated by the Gulf War
(1991). “The importance of the Gulf War derives rather from the fact that it
presented the United States as the only power able to manage international
justice, not as a function of its own national motives but in the name of
global right.”32
Yet I cannot agree with the idea that the United States is not imperialistic
but rather an empire. Any nation-state cannot help becoming imperialistic
if it attempts to be both a nation-state and an empire; and this imperialism
inevitably has caused and still causes resistance not only from peoples of
the other states but also American people. Of course, Negri and Hardt do
not argue that the United States is an empire, but that “Empire” is a place
of nowhere.
[The capitalist market] is thwarted by barriers and exclusions; it thrives
instead by including always more within its sphere. Profit can be generated
only through contact, engagement, interchange, and commerce. The realization of the world market would constitute the point of arrival of this tendency. In its ideal form there is no outside to the world market: the entire
globe is its domain. We might thus use the form of the world market as a
model for understanding imperial sovereignty … . In this smooth space
of Empire, there is no place of power—it is both everywhere and nowhere.
Empire is an ou-topia, or really a non-place.
33
In short, what Negri and Hardt call “Empire” is nothing but the world
market or world capitalism. What world capitalism wants is to gain surplus value through liberalistic exchange. World capitalism regards any
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resistance to, or intervention in, itself by a state or regime as anti-liberal or
anti-democratic. It might seem that the United States practices this world
capitalism, but the United States is a nation-state by itself and motivated
by its own interests. That is, it is situated within world capitalism and at
the same time led by “its own national motives.” To act “in the name of
global right” does not mean that the state is unimperialistic in the slightest.
Rather, after the twentieth century, imperialism exists only in the gesture of
rejecting it. Indeed the logic proposed by philosophers of the twentieth century, such as Heidegger and Nishida Kitarō, in order to overcome the modern world-system—namely, capitalism, the nation, and the state—resulted
in theoretically grounding the German Third Reich and Japan’s Greater
East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere; for their philosophy merely interpreted the
reality of imperialism in different ways.34
It is true that after 1990, with the disappearance of the resisting power
outside of the world market—the Soviet Union—the United States has been
dominant militarily and economically. It is also true that with the progress
of globalization the nation-state has become less significant. Yet it is not true
that these processes can end “the modern world-system.” As I shall explain
later, reality is not proceeding in that direction. In this respect, we need to
look back at the past. There are a few precedents in history for a situation in
which a state overwhelmed the world militarily and economically. Such a
dominant status was achieved by the British Empire, which conquered the
seven seas of the world and was called the workshop of the world.
It is at this period that Marx wrote Capital. His thinking is concerned
with world capitalism: capitalism should be investigated not within the
boundary of a state but in the world economy. Marx maintains that capitalist production does not exist without foreign trade.35 No state can attain
economic autonomy; the world-system can subsume each state’s economy
under the division of labor, regardless of its resistance. The nation-state,
rather than “national economy,” is formed as such in the world market.
Marx might appear to explore the economy of Britain only, but this does
not mean that he modeled pure capitalism after Britain. The British economy itself was enabled by foreign trade. Therefore Marx attempted to grasp
world capitalism by internalizing the world economy outside Britain into
its inside. He did so in order to object to the common view of seeing world
capitalism as the sum of the “national economies” of all states. Hence, the
world grasped by Capital has no outside.
In this sense, it is possible to say that Marx’s thought was conceived
inside the liberal British Empire. As a result, he gained a perspective in
which the nations and the states will be dissolved as capitalism advances
and divided globally into the two classes of capitalists and the proletariat,

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29
the latter of whom will be victorious eventually. Reality, however, went
in the opposite direction. In Marx’s late years, the working class became
wealthier and withdrew from the class struggle, turning to moderate social
democracy. Yet, from the vantage point of world capitalism, the British
working class became wealthier because they received the distribution of
surplus value that capital gained from the Irish and India colonies. This
distribution eased the class conflict domestically, but naturally people of
the impoverished colonies started their resistance against Britain. The class
struggle was appeased domestically but re-emerged externally, taking the
form of nationalism.
In competition against Britain, furthermore, Germany, America, France,
and Japan achieved outstanding development of capitalism in the latter
half of the nineteenth century. Particularly in heavy industries, Britain
was overtaken. The state’s intervention was necessary for heavy industries,
which required vast amounts of capital; and Britain, which had conquered
the world by light industry, fell behind in the next stage. It is in the stage of
imperialism that the old colonial powers and the new states started fighting
over the repartition of the world market. That British Empire which was the
sole winner in the first half of the nineteenth century could be what Negri
and Hardt call the “Empire,” which realizes world capitalism, but in the latter half of the century it explicitly turned to imperialism.
This is the point that was not investigated by Marx, who wrote from
within the British Empire and the world market. As a result, Marxists
later stumbled upon the problem of the nation and state. Negri and Hardt
presume that the nation-states will vanish under the “Empire,” or world
capital, against which the “multitude” resists globally. What they mean
by “multitude” is obscure. Among the examples of revolts by the “multitude” to dissolve the Empire, aboriginal and environmental movements
are counted. Certainly these movements are not proletarian, but Negri and
Hardt’s perspective is fundamentally not different from Marx’s prospect
for the worldwide struggle between bourgeois and proletariat: there is no
insight into the nation and state.
No doubt the nation-state is diluted by world capitalism. The transnational movements of capital and labor make a state’s economic policy
inoperative and its welfare and employment policies difficult. Resistance
to globalization is fierce but no longer erupts in the form of nationalism
or socialism. Instead, what has emerged is a union of states, which denies
old nationalism, or religious fundamentalism beyond nations. This is the
context for recent reference to “empire.”
Samuel Huntington suggested that an age of the “clash of civilizations”
began when the Cold War ended. According to his account, the world at
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present is divided not by the conflict of political or economic ideologies,
as it was during the period of the Cold War, but more radically by the conflict of deeper-rooted “civilizations.” In this case, “civilization” refers to a
larger unit than “culture,” which corresponds to the nation-state; and needless to say, “civilization” corresponds to the world empires of the past. Yet
it is the world economy, not deep “civilizations,” that causes this “clash.”
Based on Toynbee’s comparative theory of civilization, Huntington’s concept of “civilization” explicitly reflects the politico-economic situation of
the current world; indeed Huntington’s has a smaller number of civilizations than Toynbee’s classification while counting Japan as one civilization
by itself. Huntington’s attention to the contemporary politico-economy is
also shown by his treatment of the Islamic regions as a civilization that is
alien to the West.
As a matter of course, we cannot disregard historical backgrounds. The
nation-states we know today were born either from dissolutions and partitions of the world empires, which had subsumed the premodern tribal
states, or from the independence of tribes that had been arbitrarily separated and assimilated by the rule of modern colonialism and imperialism. In either case, if an investigation of the nation-state disregards the
empire as its preceding ground, not only the origin but also the future of
the nation-state would be incomprehensible; for, even though the figure of
the nation-state appeared when the ground of the empire disappeared, the
former still retains the communality of the preceding imperial period. At
the same time, however, the nation-state also preserves the unforgettable
memory of conflict and struggle. Renan once stated that the oblivion of
history is necessary for a nation to be built. The same can be said about the
establishment of a state that covers wider regions. The extensive state is,
thus, not based on memory exclusively: it is also an “imagined” or created
community.
Yet, it is due to the pressure of world capitalism that the states bracket
each memory and form a union by greatly limiting their sovereignty.
Although, since Napoleon, there have been attempts in Europe to organize
a “European Union,” they only turned out to be French or German imperialism. The European Union of today is trying to avoid it, but it is false to
assume that, thereby, the modern system of the nation-state has been overcome. The formation of the Union merely signifies that world capitalism,
or the world market, pressured several states to gather and form one huge
state. In fact, Napoleon’s European union was also an economic defense
against Britain’s trade offensive.
Then what about the counter-movements against capitalism? As mentioned before, among the examples of revolts by the “multitude” to dissolve

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the empire, Negri and Hardt cite aboriginal and environmental movements. Nothing can be comprehended, however, if we see these movements
merely as varieties of revolts by the multitude. It is necessary to grasp the
structural cause that makes these movements possible. I believe that they
should be located in the position of association.
36 With this structural
understanding, the complementary relationship between capital, the state,
and the nation will be clarified, as well as the way to sublate capital and the
state at least. Otherwise, various movements of anti-globalization would
be isolated from and opposed to each other, or merged into the nation or
religion, and ultimately absorbed into the state.
Finally, I would discuss the nation and religion again. Anderson sees
the nation as an “imagined community” that was formed in the decline of
religion in order to supplement it, but the question is, what is meant by religion. Having written, “[f]or Germany, the critique of religion is essentially
completed; and the critique of religion is the prerequisite of every critique,”
Marx began to criticize the “religion” that was called the nation-state and
capital.37 Regarding religion in a narrow sense, he writes the following:
The wretchedness of religion is at once an expression of and a protest against
real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart
of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the
people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is a
demand for their true happiness. The call to abandon illusions about their
condition is the call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. Thus,
the critique of religion is the critique in embryo of the vale of tears of which
religion is the halo.38
This famous passage is not a critique of religion, as commonly believed,
but a critique of the Enlightenment’s critique of religion. Religion is an
illusion, but this illusion conveys in itself a grievance and protest against
reality. Therefore, without realizing the illusion of religion, it is impossible
to abolish religion itself. Beginning from this point, Marx says the following: “[y]ou cannot abolish philosophy without making it a reality.” In this
case, “philosophy” refers to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and virtually refers
to the nation-state. Yet Marx adds the following: you cannot “make philosophy a reality without abolishing it.”39 In this case, since philosophy refers
to the nation-state, it follows that we cannot make the nation-state a reality
without abolishing it; or in terms of religion, we cannot make religion a
reality without abolishing it.
Put into our context, we cannot be satisfied with the Enlightenment-like
critique of religion and the nation; for these two are critiques of capital and
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the state and protests against them and, as such, carry the embryo of association within them. So long as these critiques and protests remain national
or religious, however, they will ultimately result in supporting capital and
the state. Hence critiques of the nation and religion are still indispensable.
Again, the structural comprehension of capital, the state, the nation, religion, and association is of the utmost importance.