Naoki Sakai - The West

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Social Identities
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The West—A Dialogic Prescription or Proscription?

Naoki Sakai
To cite this Article Sakai, Naoki(2005) 'The West—A Dialogic Prescription or Proscription?', Social Identities, 11: 3, 177 —
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Social Identities
Vol. 11, No. 3, May 2005, pp. 177 /195
The West* A Dialogic Prescription or

/
Proscription?
Naoki Sakai
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The taxonomy of humanity can be dictated by a number of categories: civilization, race,

ethnicity, tradition, culture and so forth. While often perceived as only descriptive and
‘naturally fixed’, none of these categories is capable of specifying the identity of a
particular group without committing conceptual inconsistency or offering a reasonably
coherent and systematic classification of the human kind in general. Yet, it is impossible
to say that they are unreal or merely illusionary. On the contrary, they constitute social
reality and serve significant roles in discriminating one set of people from and against
others. The West* by the same token, with its symmetrical opposite, the Rest of
/
humanity* is such a category that clearly lacks in the rationality of conceptual

/
coherence. It does not have consistent unity. Rather it presents itself as a putative unity,
and contains contradictions within itself, so that it can be unified only in the future. It is
a social imaginary that mainly works as a myth on a global scale just like race. Yet,
unlike race, it tends to have a cartographic association. For this affinity with cartographic
imagining, the dichotomy of the West and the Rest is constantly appealed to as the
schematic trope of dialogue in order to denote and comprehend various instances of social
conflict and estrangement in spatial terms, but with the result of positing the West and
the Rest as territories, as geographic enclosures. Then, this article asks, how does the West
exist? How is it linked to and merged with other such categories, which distinguish one
set of people from others, as gender, nationality, social class, and race? It inquires into the
genealogy of the West, but the genealogy it attempts to portray keeps in sight the ever-
changing configuration of other categories, in the midst of which the West may appear
consistent and unified. In this sense the West is a topos both of displacement and
condensation of social conflict and estrangement. Historically, therefore, one cannot
dissociate the putative unity of the West from colonial modernity.
The concept, dialogue, seems most evocative in its emotive-ethical intensity as

I anticipate how difficult it is to sustain. Dialogue is intense in its adversity, so to say,
and it is thematically called for when, in all likelihood, I would find it very hard to
Naoki Sakai, 350 Rockefeller Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. Email: ns32@cornell.edu
ISSN 1350-4630 (print)/ISSN 1363-0296 (online) # 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13504630500256910
178 N. Sakai
resist the temptation of abandoning the effort to continue to speak to an other person
(or a group of people).
Dialogue is something that must be sustained despite its difficulties. I would retreat
from a dialogic relation unless I deliberately compel myself to continue to be open* /
that is, to address myself and to be receptive at the same time* to that person with
/
whom I am in dialogue. Without such an openness, I would recoil into a familiar and
intimate sphere or milieu from which my counterpart in dialogue is excluded. Such
an interior sphere or milieu of familiarity, as is symbolically marked by the word
‘home’, may well be of fantasy, yet one ominously clings to it as it is associated with a
series of metaphors: home as a family, home ground, home town, home country and
ultimately the most grotesque of this metaphorics, home land security. It is a place of
security that one returns to in withdrawal from dialogue. As soon as I cease to be
open to her, she is no longer an addressee either addressed or listened to, or a

personality at whom my intention is aimed. Typically regarded as a savage, pagan, or
terrorist, she would be rather an object which I talk about and speak at, expelled from
my familiar milieu. It is precisely in such an adversarial situation that dialogue ought
to be tried and sustained. Thus the word, dialogue, seems to imply, on the one hand,
voluntaristic initiative on my part to sustain a certain personal relation with an other,
and, on the other, the anticipation of a certain distance or non-relation which
separates and disconnects me from my potential addressee. Of course, this distance
cannot be immediately identified with physical or geographic measurement; it may
well mean a distance of a social or personal nature* exclusion, discrimination,
/
estrangement or dehumanization; it disrupts my relation with my addressee; it is

capable of preventing me from addressing myself to an other. Consequently, when we
try to think of the two terms, dialogue and difference, simultaneously, I think it is
appropriate to call this anticipated distance or non-relation, which may impede my
will to dialogue or which I expect my dialogue to overcome, ‘difference’.
Insofar as it is associated with dialogue, difference is supposed and perceived as a
matter not only of cognition but also of demand and volition. In the dialogic relation,
the difference between you and me must be recognized as troublesome, problematis-
ing or, at the least, problematic in such a way that we are constantly incited to work
towards one another in order to somehow overcome and solve it. Dialogue requires
the continuing participation of the two parties, and the perceived difference must
mark the dimension of the future in the dialogic relating. This is why dialogue cannot
be comprehended either as communication according to the communication model
or as the transfer of information. For, neither the model of communication nor the
notion of information succeeds in capturing its temporal dimension of futurity
because it is grasped in the perfect aspect and seen exclusively as an epistemic
occurrence from these viewpoints. Primarily, difference takes place between two
people or two groups of people. To that extent, it is true that it takes place spatially,
but it makes no sense unless it is of the order of an event which is susceptible to the
volition of the people involved and which therefore remains indeterminate and
incomplete because of its futurity.
Social Identities 179
Accordingly, difference in dialogue can be viewed neither as a conceptual

distinction construed in terms of specific difference (diaphora) in classical logic
nor as a localisable displacement in a uniform space. Undoubtedly it takes place in
diverse spatio-temporal frameworks, but it cannot be determined in terms of a linear
series of chronology nor a single system of spatial coordinates; it takes place in an
intensive space of distances rather than an extensive space of measures and
properties.1
Following such a cursory meditation on ‘dialogue and difference’, it is reasonable
to attempt to understand the relationship between the West and the Rest of the World
in terms of difference and dialogue. Undeniably the West and the Rest dichotomy
serves as a telling trope of the global reality which has been consolidated during the
last several centuries. It is still an effective trope which summarily explains where we
can locate those differences which would still forcefully separate and disconnect one
class of humanity from another, and because of which we only talk about and speak
at each other. Therefore, it is also an affective trope which configures the politics of
difference. Definitely it still teaches us about the origins of those social injustices with
which we continue to live today; it is still capable, increasingly and more truthfully, of
sensitizing us to an alliance and association among the diverse sites of racial and
ethnic discriminations to which we are subjected. Thus, the dichotomy of the West
and the Rest represents the very locus of the difficulty against which we must engage
in dialogic relating. In this respect, as I understand it, difference between the West
and the Rest is an exemplary problematic where we can see the inherent congruity of
difference and dialogue and the affective-emotive politics of self-fashioning, in terms
of racial, sexual, ethnic and civilizational identities.
As soon as the dichotomy of the West and the Rest is apprehended with a view to
dialogue, however, the very ambiguous nature of this dichotomy reveals itself.
Whereas the difference of the West from the Rest cannot entirely evade cartographic,
geographic, or geopolitical connotation, it must at the same time be temporal and
indeterminate (this is one of the reasons why Stuart Hall, for instance, had to
postulate the discourse of the West-and-the-Rest in which certain technologies of the
self are deployed) because it is a social (and dialogic) relating. In this difference,
people act, change and redefine themselves in relation to each other. What the
dichotomy of the West and the Rest entails is a consequence of the execution of a
subjective technology, a consolidation of one subjective position in relation to
another through a prescriptive choreography.2 But when the dichotomy of the West
and the Rest is seen exclusively in cartographic terms, it serves as a schema whereby
the West and the Rest are co-figured and represented as two particularities which
occupy some uniform space. To the extent that this difference as an event is co-
figured in representation, the temporal and transformative aspects of the event of
dialogue are obliterated. It should be just like reducing dialogue to an exchange of
information in the communication model. All the important moments of dialogue* /
the anticipation of difficulty, my sense of uncertainty as to how the other will respond
180 N. Sakai
to me, my potential incomprehension of the other’s medium, an anxiety over the

other’s rejection of me, and so forth* would then be overlooked.
/
What I would like to call into question, therefore, is the institutionalized

assumption overshadowing this dichotomy, according to which the West and the
Rest are taken to be two identities and two particularities subsumed under a common
generality. How could this presumption of the exceptional uniqueness of the West be
sustained and nurtured? I would like to examine the pervasive assumption that the
West exists as a bounded domain or an interior which is somehow distinguished from
its exterior* even as a hermeneutic horizon of tradition3 * and the historical
/ /
conditions of our knowledge production, thanks to which the contours of the West
have been imagined to be clear and distinct.
‘The West’ is a peculiar construct. Above all, it is a mythic construct because, in the
first place, it may appear to be the name of a certain geographic place and, by
extension, of the people inhabiting it. Since we accept the somewhat strained
assumption that the West is a primarily geographic designation with fairly clear
contours, the West could regulate our way of representing the production of
knowledge, particularly in the Humanities. Yet I do not believe that the West is either
a geographic territory with an affiliated population, or a unified cultural and social
formation. It remains always a putative unity; its unity is preordained regardless of its
inherent fragmentation and dispersal. It is in fact a mythic unity.
Although its sense of coherence is fast evaporating, it is true that the putative unity
of the West once bestowed a certain coherence upon the configuration of disciplines
in the Humanities. It has served to mark a distinction between the areas and peoples
that can be objects of anthropological, ethnic and area studies and those that cannot,
a distinction that was erstwhile ascertainable to a certain extent thanks to the
prevalence of a racial hierarchy and colonial order. In this context, people of the West
supposedly do not receive the attribute ‘ethnic’, because they are not to be determined
in terms of their status as an object of study: before being studied, known, and
recognized, they are expected to take an active attitude in studying, knowing, and
recognizing. Instead of being passively inspected, classified, compared, and analysed,
they are supposed to engage in applying their own means of inspection, classification,
comparison, and analysis to some object, which might well be themselves. When a
group of people are characterized exclusively in their communal mores and local
histories, they are represented as being deprived of their subjective faculties; they are
demoted to ethnicity and treated as though they were mute, passive and anonymous
objects of the West’s observing gaze* even if the samples are taken from within the
/
geographic territory of Europe. In short, in this epistemic transaction, the West insists
on being determined not in terms of its characteristics as an object of knowledge but
rather of its subjective faculties and productivity.
Correspondingly, there are roughly two distinct ways in which people are to relate
themselves to the production of knowledge in the Humanities. Due to their regional,
civilizational, national, or ethnic identities, some people are singled out as legitimate
objects of the discipline. People endowed with such legitimacy would participate
within that discipline in the production of knowledge, primarily as suppliers of raw

data and factual information. In other words, the most active participatory role they
could possibly enjoy in the discipline is that of informants. They need to engage
neither in the application of a classificatory system nor evaluative methods in the
processing of such data, nor the preparation of an epistemic framework through
which the data are appropriated into a general interpretative narrative. In not
engaging in those tasks, neither do they need to partake in the critical review or
innovation of those means of knowledge production. As they are presumably not held
responsible for this kind of critical review and innovation, they rarely confront the
reality of existing knowledge in the Humanities, namely, the reality that the
presumptions and procedures circulated within the disciplines are far from being
systematically coherent or complete. Indeed, these are under trenchant scrutiny and
constant revision; moreover, the Humanities are maintained and revitalized by the
constant revision and innovation of their own means of knowledge production. What
keeps the sciences of man going is this insatiable movement of self-overcoming and,
in this respect, the sciences are totally subordinate to the locus of modernity, an
ambiguous position occupied by what Michel Foucault has called ‘man’. Thus human
sciences are produced in the element of the historicity of man, and cannot but be a
part of historical knowledge. Unless one engages oneself in the historical overcoming
of knowledge, therefore, one cannot be said to be actively participating in the
discourse of modern man.
The suppliers of raw data and factual information are involved in the production
of knowledge in the Humanities, but they are not participating there as ‘men’.
Certainly they are humans, and, in that capacity, they offer information concerning
the particular cases of humanity and human nature. And, most often, they are found
outside the West, or more accurately speaking, they are supposed to constitute the
outside of the putative unity of the West.
On the other hand, there is another sort of people who seek to know about
humanity and human nature, but who would never be content to be suppliers of raw
data. For them, knowing is an essential part of their being, so that their way of life
will be affected as their relationship to knowledge production changes. They
necessarily engage in the collection, evaluation, comparison, or analysis of raw
data, but, more importantly, they are continually involved in the critical review of the
existing means of knowing and the invention of new means. Their concern for their
subjective conditions in knowing carries the weight of an almost moral imperative.
For them, knowledge about humanity and human nature must not only consist of the
variety of particular cases but must also entail a commitment to the project of
changing and creating the means of knowing about humanity and human nature.
They must constantly strive to overcome the limits of their own accomplishments;
they are ordained to be iconoclastic with regard to existing knowledge in the
discipline. Everyone within the putative unity of the West is not automatically inside
this group of people, but presumably they are representative of the West and can
only be found there. The project of changing and creating the means of knowing is
182 N. Sakai
sometimes called ‘theory’ (or philosophy) and it is taken to be a distinguishing mark

or even mission of the West. In this sense, ‘theory’ is seemingly the essence of Western
humanity, particularly in view of the fact that philosophy no longer prides itself on
the portraiture of Western Reason.4
Thus, in the Humanities, two different relationships to the production of
knowledge presuppose two different conceptions of humanity. Humanity is studied
through many cases and particular manifestations of man’s nature. It is presumed
that, by extracting what many peoples in the world have in common, ultimately
knowledge about ‘human nature’ will be attained. In such an instance, the notion of
humanity as the guiding principle is that of general humanity which inheres in every
particular manifestation of man. Yet a completely different relationship is also
possible. It relates to the production of knowledge reflectively, and tries to set the new
conditions of knowing, thereby transforming both the constitution of the object for
knowledge production and the subjective conditions of knowing. In this latter
relationship to knowledge production, humanity is problematized not only as a
generality encompassing all the particular cases but also in the aspect of subjective
conditions: humanity manifests itself in self-reflective knowing about knowing and in
the legislation of the new means of knowing to which ‘man’ willingly subjects himself.
The humanity that is sought in the second relationship is, therefore, not only
epistemic but also practical: what is at issue here is not general but universal
humanity, to use the Kantian distinction between generality and universality. And this
rift of the epistemic and the practical is probably the site where modern ‘man’ resides.
‘Man’ is not only a member of humanity generally. What distinguishes the Western
‘man’ from the rest is his commitment to theoretical universality.
To what extent can we still remain exceedingly generous or forgiving to this
rhetoric of the Western exceptionalism? What obliges us to continue to overlook the
philosophical inquiries and theoretical innovations undertaken within the framework
of European Humanities and sciences by people of the non-West and in places
outside Western Europe and North America? Is it because of the blindness and
institutionally imposed ignorance of non-European languages and knowledge
production that some intellectuals can remain unashamed to fashion themselves as
if they were Westerners immediately and unproblematically? Why do we have to keep
on ignoring the vast presence of people within Europe and North America whose
economic, social and cultural status have much more in common with those of the
so-called Third World than with Western ‘men’ endowed with Western Reason? These
queries are pressing, but, let us meanwhile suspend the inevitable questions until
later.
For the last two centuries, the difference between these two relationships to
knowledge production in the Humanities has been hinted at by the juxtaposition of
two classical analogues, humanitas and anthropos. As the historical evolution of
anthropology suggests, humanitas has meant people who could engage in knowledge
production in both the first and the second relationships, while anthropos was
gradually reserved for peoples who participate in knowledge production only in the
first style. Humanity in the sense of humanitas has thus come to designate Western or
European humanity, to be distinguished from the rest of humanity. The differentia-
tion or discrimination of humanitas from anthropos coheres as long as we trust in
and insist upon the putative unity of the West. This is to say that humanity in the
sense of humanitas authorizes the very distinction of the West from ‘the Rest’. But this
differentiation must be discussed in the past tense now; humanitas and anthropos are
part of confusionist terminology. The historical investigation of their confusionism is
the task we have to undertake.
Though it is generally believed to designate a place, the West is a name whose
indexing function is evoked in order to represent spatially the events of the past, the
present and possibly the future in chronological order. It is therefore a topos in the
chronological register, a topos without which the idea of advanced societies as
opposed to primitive societies or the entire framework of developmental history

would be incomprehensible. Thanks to this spatial mapping of a chronological order
onto a cartographic plane, it used to be possible to say meaningfully that the West
was ahead of the rest of the world.
But, it is important that what obtains in this cartographic mapping of the
chronological order is the corroboration of a particular social relationship which
exists* say, between the rich merchant and the peasants from the countryside, the
/
colonizer and the native, the educated upper-class colonial official and the poor
displaced ‘mixed-blood’, and the wealthy local landowner and the impoverished
labouring immigrant* in the guise of spatial direction at the very site where
/
reference to or distinction regarding either the West or the Rest is enunciated. What
may appear to be a spatial distinction in the cartography of the world can be a
representation of social distinction between two contrasting subjective positions. An
individual occupies so many different subject positions; one can see how difficult it is
to configure these positions neatly within a simple dichotomy. Yet the dichotomy of
the West and the Rest does precisely this, and it serves to give the taxonomy of these
positions an appearance of rationality. The putative unity of the West is nothing but
one result of this operation by which to generate an apparent taxonomic coherence
where real coherence is impossible. Here it is important to keep in mind that it is
equally possible to conceive of this social dynamics temporally, without spatial
representation. Time and time again, modern man’s temporal relation to himself has
been conceptualized as a form of transcendence or self-overcoming. It goes without
saying that the ecstatic form of aporetic* self-contradictory and paradoxical*
/ /
temporality has been recognized as the essential feature of ‘modern subjectivity’.5

When spatially represented, however, the aporetic temporality inherent in modernity
is bound to be neglected. This is to say that, in spatial representation, modernity is
reduced to modernization.
What I cannot emphasize enough here is that the opposition between spatial
representation and temporal form derives from a deliberately alternative mode of
grasping the social dynamics of modernity. Just as I have argued elsewhere about
the disjunctive relation between the representation of translation and the work of
184 N. Sakai
translation (see Sakai, 1997, pp. 12 16; 51 63), spatial representation and the
/ /
temporal form are connected to one another in the logical relation of disjunction: if
social dynamics is represented as a spatial direction, its temporality cannot be
conceived; if it is grasped as an instance of aporetic temporality in modern
subjectivity, it is free from spatial representation. And disjunction between the
temporal conception of ‘man’s’ relation to himself and the spatial representation of
this relation, in terms of the West and the Rest schema, is logically incompatible with
such distinction as the one between humanitas and anthropos, a distinction which is a
mere juxtaposition of one class and another on the same plane and not disjunctive in
any way* and yet it is displaced and projected onto the dichotomy of the West and
/
the Rest. This is why the dichotomy of the West and the Rest is invariably of a racist
taxonomy in the sense that it naturalizes and essentialises what is given as a
temporary social distinction between subject positions. Therefore, let me assert again,
the fantastic dichotomy of the West and the Rest is overdetermined but serves as a
nodal point of condensation for many different, heterogeneous and sometimes
contradictory discriminations. As a consequence, it is through this displacement and
condensation that Western humanity was to gain the status of ‘man’, as if they could
relate to themselves exclusively in terms of self-transcending temporality, while the
Rest are destined to remain anthropological and thus deprived of this ‘modern’
historicity.
In short, the West is one term in the dichotomy of the West and the Rest which
works to co-figure spatially the relation of one subjective position to another. Rather
than designating a bounded territory, it expresses the orientation or a gradient at a
specific site. The West and the Rest are more like two opposite directions which the
positive and negative polarities of a gradient point at. A vector at one site does not
necessarily indicate the same orientation it would have at another. Furthermore, even
at the same site, the West can easily be associated with multiple vectors, each of which
may well have a different gradient. For instance, an Iranian American scientist might
well be regarded as a Westerner in relation to most of the residents in Taiwan, but he
would be an Asian in relation to German tourists visiting there. Or, a métis (mixed-
blood) from Tonkin might well be regarded as a Westerner among the residents in
colonial Singapore, but he could easily be treated as a non-Westerner by a British
colonial executive inspecting the educational and moral standards of the poor white
population in Indo-China.6 Likewise a Japanese visitor to India on his way to Europe
in the 1920s might have described the residents there in almost the same way as the
British colonial administrators did, thereby asserting his ‘Western’ positionality in
relation to Indian ‘natives’. His viewpoint and his anthropologizing attitude toward
the Indian populace were unambiguously those of someone desiring to fashion
himself as a Westerner in contrast to the non-Western natives. But, the same person
began to describe himself as a representative of Asia as soon as he landed in
Marseilles.7 Likewise, a person who may well be regarded as a ‘non-Westerner’ in
Western Europe might grab every opportunity to fashion her or himself as a
‘Westerner’ in any remote regions where generally considered to be a ‘Westerner’ and
therefore ‘pass’ for a Westerner. Yet, these must not be taken as aberrant cases. The
ego-ideal of self-fashioning called the West can exist only in this way. There is no
foundational way to differentiate those who are essentially Westerners from those
who merely pass for Westerners.
The dynamic I recognize here is correlative with the desire for recognition in a co-
figurative relationship. It regulates a personal relationship between two subjects in
which one position is always determined in relation to the other. The structure of
polarity in the dichotomy of the West and the Rest reflects the co-figurative
relationship between the two subjective positions. Dependent upon what subjective
position one wants an opponent to occupy, one’s own subjective position is
articulated. In his extensive description of the Indian population on his journey to
Europe, for instance, what the Japanese visitor aspired to was to fashion himself as a
desiring subject, just like the British colonial anthropologist, by depicting the native
people as his countering opposites. He articulated himself to the ‘natives’ in India in
this description in order to co-figure his and their subjective positions.
Essentially, as a gradient, that is, a sort of differential matrix, the schema of the
West-and-the-Rest can be imposed upon so many different and unequal social
relationships. This is one of the reasons why the West can be such a powerful trope
demonstrating a historical tendency or orientation in a given social relationship.
Furthermore, a gradient always comprehends a derivative function, so that, even if
subordinate to spatial representation, it retains some aspect of temporal change. And
this also explains why the West has so frequently been taken as a synonym for being
ahead in historical time and progress, as a projected trajectory for the subject’s self-
transcendence.
Since it is able to express a historical orientation in a particular relationship, the
West-and-the-Rest dichotomy has been duplicated in many regions and sites in the
world, involving a different set of people each time.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Japanese elite were sent to
Western Europe to study and learn about what was then thought of as the most
advanced civilization. The sight of metropolitan glory and growing racism in
European societies overwhelmed these visitors, who subsequently began to identify
themselves ethnically and racially according to the civilizational hierarchy of the
Eurocentric worldview. Even while this experience of confronting a powerful and
sophisticated civilization gave rise in them to a resolve towards Japan’s progress and
modernization, they were made to realize how oriental and non-Western they
themselves were. Precisely because they experienced living the reality of the West, they
were acutely aware of their exclusion from it, and their Japanese ethnic identity was
constituted co-figuratively in contrast to the West. Yet, on returning to Japan, they
were expected to civilize and modernize the local commoners (who knew little or
nothing of the Eurocentric world order) and took upon themselves the mission of
creating national subjects of these commoners. In this novel orientation, they now
had to play the role of ‘Westerners’ and to duplicate the hierarchical relationship
between themselves and the ‘uncivilized masses’ in Japan proper and later in its
186 N. Sakai
colonies such as Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria. Just like Christian missionaries, they
had to carry out the mission of civilizing the masses into national subjects. Far from
believing in an immediate relief from the haunting power of the West, their sense of
being excluded from it induced them to duplicate its anthropologizing attitude in the
local community (which they supposed was in the Rest) and to locate the presumably
‘primitive’ reality of the local within the ethnographic framing of modernity. This
explains why the Japanese fashioned themselves as the whites in Asia and reproduced
the same relationship to Asian peoples as that of humanitas to anthropos.
Their tireless search for the ‘primitive’ was, therefore, prompted by a desire to
fashion themselves as occupying the position of the West vis-à-vis the Rest, of the
developed ahead of the underdeveloped in the chronology of modernization.
Underlying the pursuit of the underdeveloped/ primitive was the movement of
negativity, which objectifies the social given (and thus reflectively posits the subject)
and transforms it into something, which has yet to come. To see the social given as
primitive is a necessary step to viewing it as what can be transformed, to recognizing
a social formation not as naturally given but as something manufactured. To that
extent, as Rey Chow has brilliantly illustrated, the primitive is an essential moment in
modern subjectivity (Chow, 1995, pp. 22, 199). Let me construe the concept
‘primitive’ in terms of its temporality rather than the spatial externality of one culture
to another, and then one can see that to view the local reality as primitive is
correlative to the formation of a subject which constitutes itself by transforming its
environment as well as itself.8
Yet it is necessary to note that the primitive is extremely ambiguous and unstable
since it can be construed either as being in ‘us’ or as being in ‘them’. While it is
possible to view it temporally, it is nonetheless equally possible to exoticize it and
project it onto the other in the schematism of co-figuration. How one describes the
primitive is never independent of the desire for the positionality of the describer.
No relation between two individuals or two groups can be determined unitarily; it
is according to what register is chosen that the set of contrasting subject positions
each participant is to occupy is highlighted. In her autobiographical novel Sea Walls
(Un barrage contre le Pacifique), Marguerite Duras describes an intense but repressed
love affair between Suzanne, young daughter of an impoverished French colonial
settler family and Monsieur Jo, son of a very wealthy local landowner in colonial
Vietnam in the early 1930s (Duras, 1985; [1950] 1997, pp. 153 367). Due to their
/
dire poverty, Suzanne’s family, representative of the poor white in French Indo-
China, is a potential threat to the French state order. What takes place in M. Jo’s
encounter with Suzanne’s family is a struggle over which subjective positions the
characters in the novel can assume, in regard to the terms of their relationship in
which the politically-constructed dichotomy of the colonizer and the colonized is
attested, subverted, annihilated and reconstructed in the narrative. The most
powerful register operating in this love affair is that of race, ‘a central organizing
principle of European communities in the colonies’, and ‘racial thinking was part of a
critical, class-based logic that differentiated native and European’, but precisely
because racism ‘was part of the apparatus that kept potentially subversive white
colonials in line’ (Stoler, 2002, p. 13), it is disavowed throughout this novel* the /
narrator never mentions what race M. Jo was regarded as, or that the love affair must
have involved inter-racial sex* except in a number of suggestions whose implications
/
are revealed when readers refer this novel to Duras’ later works such as The Lover
(L’Amant) and The North China Lover (L’Amant de la Chine du Nord). What is
remarkable about Duras’ later novels is that she dealt with the work of the
unconscious in her own historical memory in which the affiliation of fascism and
colonialism was unambiguously and undeniably outlined.
One feature of modern subjectivity may well be found in the pursuit of the
ephemeral, the transitory and the instantaneous in everyday life. It is not only the
newness of the present that is highlighted by this pursuit; but it is also the
impossibility of grasping the qualitatively new in some stasis of a durable medium, of

capturing the present in the present. For this reason the past as the primitive is called
for. So, only by marking the past as a contrasting term could the present be indicated
negatively and reflectively. In modernity, it became impossible for time to serve as a
continuous medium in which the past, the present and the future occur; instead it
became a dynamic rupture or incision between the determined and objectified past
and the indeterminate and unobjectifiable present. It is the exotic that provides the
determined and objectified past in this dynamic. Time thus became an incessant
movement of self-transcendence.9 Accordingly, the term ‘subject’, which signifies not
a substantial but a relational concept, illustrates this feature of modernity by
incorporating the structure of differential calculus.
Here the primitive becomes something of a paradox in modernity. The positing of
the exotic enables one to occupy the position of foreigners and the indeterminate and
unobjectifiable present in whose gaze the primitive is displayed as the determined and
objectified past, as ‘a passing-on’. Yet, for somebody like Suzanne who was born in
Vietnam and never knew ‘French culture’ first hand, it is extremely difficult to posit
the exotic outside herself, of course, unless she appeals to a preoccupation with white
prestige and the naturalized identity of her race. She has to appeal to the conflation of
whiteness and the West precisely because she can find almost nothing inherently
Western in her up-bringing and ‘native’ circumstances.
In a similar way to this exoticizing, Japanese intellectuals began to view their local
reality as primitive. Their sense of being Japanese and Asian was thus closely-
interwoven with their contradictory aspiration for the West, on the one hand, and
their resentment against it, on the other.10 As some literary historians have noted,11 it
is astonishing that exactly the same orientation can be detected in the aspiration and
resentment of those colonial elite of the annexed territories of imperial Japan towards
the metropolises of Tokyo and Kyoto, during the heyday of Japanese colonialism. It is
noteworthy that, as Ghassan Hage argued, one can detect the same contradictory
copresence of what Pierre Bourdieu termed hyper-identification with or excessive
aspiration toward the British upper-middle class values, and despairing revolt, which
is that of those whose aspiration is blocked, among those Australians of British
188 N. Sakai
descendants who have managed to accumulate enough cultural capital from British
upper class values (Hage, 1998, p. 195). Just as Paris, London and Berlin symbolized
‘the West’ to the poor white in colonial Vietnam, ‘Anglo Australians’12 and Japanese
intellectuals, Tokyo and Kyoto embodied the image of ‘modernity’ towards which
Taiwanese elite, educated in Japanese at Japanese universities, for instance, turned, as
they accepted the mission of transforming their own, local and indigenous ‘primitive’
reality.
Thus, the same Japanese intellectual can be a typical representative of the Rest in
one gradient, but is expected to play the role of the ‘Westerner’ in another. Multiple
gradients coexist even within the same person. And this is evidently not limited to the
case of the Japanese. The doublet of humanitas and anthropos seems to be duplicated
in many sites in the world* hence, let me repeat, it is fundamentally misleading to
map the distinction between humanitas and anthropos onto the world’s cartographic
plane* and, along with the global circulation of industrial commodities and the
/
expansion of Euro-American-Japanese military domination, this is one of the reasons

the West was and still is felt to be ubiquitous throughout the world. As I argued with
regard to the complicity of universalism and particularism, what may appear to be
the universality of the West consists in its capacity to generate at a remote site, far
from European metropolises, a certain orientation or gradient by means of which
something like the West-and-the-Rest dichotomy is duplicated.
And each of those orientations or gradients is, let me note, always associated with a
certain qualification. For instance, in order for a highly-educated engineer to play the
role of the Westerner as distinct from the indigenous habitants in a remote region of
the Japanese Empire, a specific opposition of qualities* such as a contrast between
/
the ability to think and behave scientifically and its lack* was highlighted. The
/
relationship of Japan proper and Taiwan was often represented by some vague
contrast between the two groups of people: those who supposedly possessed scientific
rationality and those who still dwelt in superstitious pre-modernity. And in this
chronologically-measured orientation from pre-modernity to modernity, one would
have to exhibit the signs of scientific rationality in order to qualify as Japanese and to
fashion oneself as Japanese* although it should have been glaringly evident that the
/
vast majority of the Japanese population in Japan proper lacked scientific rationality,
in comparison with many well-educated Taiwanese.
Similarly, in an orientation from pre-modernity to modernity, one has to
demonstrate the signs of individualistic autonomy* as opposed to collectivist
/
deference* in order to qualify and to fashion oneself as Westerner. Yet in another

/
orientation, the ability to speak one of the Western European languages is taken to be
a qualification for belonging in the West, just as the ability to speak Japanese was
once considered to be an emblem of modernity in some Japanese colonies.
Clearly, a great number of different qualifications and orientations are taken to be
characteristic of the West. Neither the West nor the modern is ever determined by one
single qualification or gradient. The gradients one is caught in are never singular; one
always engages with multiple gradients. Yet the inference regarding the two qualities
applies to the other co-existing qualities, with the result that, even if a number of
them are supposed to refer to the same West, they are neither necessarily co-possible
with nor contradictory to one another. This is to say that, as I see it and as many
examples have already indicated, the West is never an internally coherent entity. At
first glance, the West may appear to be a subject consisting of an organically
systematized set of predicates; yet, as my argument has demonstrated, the West
should be regarded as an accidental composite of such predicates which are, in fact,
independent of each other. The West is a composite of many variables, none of which
remains constant. At the risk of repetition, there is no single quality which is adequate
to define the identity of the West. Neither Christianity, economic superiority,
democratic values, nor whiteness of fantasmatic physiology* nor, indeed, all of
/
these put together* would suffice. Neither the West nor the Rest is, therefore, a
coherent systematicity of attributes: neither of them can be presumed to be a

substance. The West is, above all, a putative unity, and, therefore, cannot be defined
exclusively in its objectivity.13
Therefore, a person rarely exists either in the West or in the Rest consistently and
coherently, except for the fact that, just as with social class, the means and resources
to acquire certain qualifications and their qualities are not equally distributed. In fact,
the means and resources are concentrated in certain groups in such a way that it is
easier for those in certain privileged groups to acquire the qualifications for
Westernness than for others.
Those historical conditions which have induced us to overlook the contradictions
and overdetermination inherent in the unity of the West are fast disappearing; the
social and economic realities which allowed those qualities characterizing the
dichotomy of the West-and-the-Rest to appear anchored in solid ground have
melted into thin air. It is not surprising that around the world many are overwhelmed
by anxiety concerning their social, economic, and cultural identities. Fundamentally,
what has been called into question is the status of the West as a singular and unified
referent. Particularly since Asia has traditionally been defined as the negative of the
West (or of the Occident). Today the overdetermined nature of the West, which
expresses many forms of social and economic anxiety in a condensed manner, is
acutely felt in the production of knowledge on Asia in the Humanities.
And yet, curiously, nowhere in the world does the term ‘the West’ seem to have lost
its universal appeal and immediate intelligibility. Nowhere in the world has it lost the
force of an objective reality. Especially in East Asia, the West has continued to play the
role of the master index in relation to local nationalism, which has tried to determine
its ethnic, cultural, and racial identity in the co-figurative representation of the West
and the Rest. At the same time, however, a growing number of social groups and
aspects of everyday life in East Asia may well be located inside the West rather than in
the Rest, depending upon the choice of focus.
But, how can the West manage to continue to hold on to its immediate
intelligibility? How can people in many places in the world continue to believe
in the West despite the glaring evidence of its instability, transience, and over-
190 N. Sakai
determination? Let us now return to our own examples of the overlapping of the
colonial relationship and the West-and-the-Rest dichotomy. To the exemplary
observation about the Western/non-Western oscillation of an Iranian American
scientist in Taiwan, one might plausibly respond by claiming that he is only
figuratively and not really a Westerner. In this claim, one would presume that there
must necessarily be ‘natural’ Westerners, who are originally Western in themselves
and among whom the Iranian American scientist is not in the first place included:
one would insist on being able to posit the entity of the West beyond any and all
historical vicissitude. This is an essentialist claim which attempts to naturalize, as well
as root and ground the pedigrees of the West (as well as the Rest) on certain
properties assumed to be solid, unchanging, and natural.
In terms of the concept of fixity, Homi Bhabha has analysed the processes of
subjectification for the colonizers as well as the colonized, and the ideological
construction of otherness in colonial discourse (Bhabha, 1994, pp. 66 84). We also
/
know that such an obsession with this presumed fixity can easily be appropriated into
the nationalist yearning for an eternal ‘peoplehood’, particularly in post-indepen-
dence countries, where the memory of subjugation to the Euro-American-Japanese
colonial administrations is still vivid. What I want to envisage with regard to the
presumptive and essentialist claim to the West’s pedigree, however, is slightly different
from this desire for fixed essence and immemorial past. For this presumptive claim of
nationalism is intended to countervail a recognition of the fundamental instability of
the identities of the West-and-the-Rest, a facticity such that, with no good reason and
without knowing why, a person happens to be Western simply by virtue of some
‘qualifications’ and non-Western by virtue of other qualifications; it is an almost
instinctive reaction compensating for the dissolution of those historical conditions
which once allowed those qualities characterizing the identities of the West-and-the-
Rest to appear to emanate from essences, to disavow the dissolution which may well
be brought about by globalization.The claim is essentialist in the sense that
aristocracies are essentialist, as Pierre Bourdieu has argued.
Regarding existence as an emanation of essence, they set no intrinsic value

on . . . deeds and misdeeds . . . They prize them only insofar as they clearly
manifest, in the nuances of their manner, that their one inspiration is the
perpetuating and celebrating of the essence by virtue of which they are
accomplished. (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 24; see also Hage, 1998)
Unlike the social-class distinction on which Bourdieu focuses, the distinction of the
West from the Rest is often imposed by both thus separated parties, upon themselves.
The West-and-the-Rest are both anxious to naturalize their distinctive qualities and
qualifications. Therefore, the presumptive and essentialist claim to the respective
pedigrees of the West-and-the-Rest calls for a sort of naturalization. Let me cite
Bourdieu again on natural taste here:
The ideology of natural taste owes its plausibility and its efficacy to the fact that,
like all the ideological strategies generated in the everyday class struggle, it
naturalizes real differences, converting differences in the mode of acquisition of
culture into differences of nature: it only recognizes as legitimate the relation to
culture (or language) which least bears the visible marks of its genesis, which has
nothing ‘academic’, ‘scholastic’, ‘bookish’, or ‘studied’ about it, but manifests by its
ease and naturalness that true culture is nature*/a new mystery of immaculate
conception. (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 68)
It is through this urge to naturalize that the disparate, overdetermined, and

heterogeneous West (like the Rest) appears unified. The unity of the West, therefore,
is always its putative unity: it is something to be called for, and yet, in the
presumptive and essentialist investment, it is naturalized and presumed to be a given.
This too explains why the West-and-the-Rest distinction can never be free of the aura
of racism. Here, we need not comprehend racism narrowly, that is, in terms of
reduction of the social and cultural qualities of an individual to his or her
physiological features, such as skin colour, hair type, and the distribution of cerebral
functions. What constitutes racism is a foundationalist investment, a demand that the
perceived qualities and differences must be naturalized, rooted and grounded in
essentialized properties such as ethnic culture, whiteness, national or Western
tradition, and language. In this respect, the West is another sort of fictive ethnicity,
after Etienne Balibar’s terminology. As goes without saying, none of these grounding
terms is more reliable and less contingent than the perceived qualities and differences.
In spite of its constant dispersal, fragmentation, and mutation, the distinction of
the West from the Rest appears intact only because this effort to countervail of the
dissolution of the historical conditions, an effort which has encouraged us to
overlook the dispersal and overdetermination inherent in the very distinction of
West/Rest is always at work. In other words, the distinction of the West from the Rest
is reactive to vicissitude; it is an attempt to repress historical changes. No wonder that
those who obstinately insist on their Western identity are more often than not those
who feel most uncertain about their own qualifications to be Western. For what is
preserved in the distinction are the historical conditions of the encounter of unequal
powers which gave rise to bourgeois Europe, and in which colonial forces
progressively dominated what would summarily be lumped together as the Rest.
There is no doubt that the West is a historical construct and, as such, is constantly
exposed to historical change, but the putative unity of the West which is also at work
in that countervailing tendency is not historical in the sense of continually registering
historical mutation. Rather it represses the historical. In short, the putative unity of
the West is not in time. It is instead in the topography of the colonial unconscious
that the proper understanding of the distinction of the West from the Rest must be
sought.
If the distinction between the West and the Rest is increasingly independent
of geography, race, ethnic culture, or nationality but is a matter of cultural
capital shaping the individual’s socioeconomic status, one can be attentive to the
192 N. Sakai
socioeconomic formation of the qualifications in terms of which the West and the
Rest are distinctively and performatively presented, and to how people invest in the
acquisition of such qualifications. At social occasions, an increasing number of people
fail to qualify either as Westerners or as Asians.
From this, however, we cannot conclude that the West will cease to be distinctive
from the Rest. Nor would I ever claim that, because of its increasing fragmentation
and dispersal as an inevitable consequence of globalization, the West will soon cease
to be a reality. Just as it would be inane to presume that the social category of race will
soon be irrelevant to one’s perception of social reality, simply because the notion of
race is so abstract, conceptually fragmented, genetically incoherent, sociologically
arbitrary, historically contingent, geographically mutable, and, in short, irrational* /
in the same way I would commit a fatal mistake if I expected the West to be dissipated
by increasing commerce in the world.
I hope that where I find the strategic significance of this conference on dialogue
and difference is evident by now. Difference in dialogue never exists between the West
and the Rest. Dialogue must not be framed in this dichotomy. By contrasting the
dichotomy of the West and the Rest with difference in dialogue, one can in fact
demonstrate that dialogue of this kind always betrays such a co-figuration. Even if we
anticipate that our dialogue will be hindered by the very history or histories which
have given rise to what is summarily discussed as the dichotomy of the West and the
Rest, we will not necessarily work to recast ourselves into the same positions of the
West and the Rest. For, we act, change and transform one another in the event of
dialogue. Certainly we are capable of the dislocation and dispersal of the West instead
of the confirmation of its putative unity, just as ‘we’ are capable of refusing to recoil
into the security of a homeland from which my counterpart in dialogue may well be
expelled and exorcized.
Notes
[1] For more discussion on intensive and extensive spaces, see Delueze and Guattari (1987,
pp. 474 /500).
[2] In what I call subjective technology, I like to modify this ‘technology’ with a Japanese
adjectival shutai-teki , which is derived from the noun shutai , one possible translation for the
word ‘subject’ from European languages, because the shutai-teki or subjective technology
whereby the subject (shutai ) constitutes and manufactures itself can possibly be contrasted
to the ordinary and conventional comprehension of technology */shukan-teki technology,
one might call it */by means of which the subject (shukan , a different translation for the
word ‘subject’) manipulates and transforms the object for a pre-determined objective. In the
shukan-teki technology, the object of technological manipulation always remains other than
the subject who applies technology as a means to the object, while such a stable division
cannot exist between subject and object in the case of the shutai-teki technology precisely
because its objective is a self-fashioning for, of, and by the subject. With regard to this
subjective technology and choreography, see Legendre (1974) and Chapter 9 of Sakai (1991,
pp. 280 /319).
[3] For a more thorough critique of ‘the interior’, see Chapters 7 and 8 of Sakai (1991, 209 /79).
In Chapter 7, I discussed the formation of an interior in relation to the regime of translation.
Also see a critique of the interior as a horizon of understanding in the context of my
discussion of Ogyu Sorai’s notion of mono (pp. 280 /319).
[4] Equivalent to the Western humanity in the domains of aesthetics is modernism. The
aesthetic dimension of modernity is manifest most in the modernist movement in arts which
is characterized by experimentalism and an incessant search for innovation, and which calls
into question the existing forms of representation and marks the present anew from the past.
As its iconoclastic energy has been appropriated into mainstream cultures by mass media
and consumer industries, modernism has been transported into the domain of what is called
‘theory’ and postmodernism. In this way, the locus of modern ‘man’ survives in so-called
postmodern theories. As a matter of fact, I am not interested in repeating the ritual of
blaming postmodern theories of their inherent Eurocentrism. What concerns me here is the
historical restrictions imposed on postmodernism by the presence of modern ‘man’ in their
theoretical pursuit. Have postmodern theories seriously confronted the problematic

concerning the dislocation of the West today? Is it still possible to mark the site or sites
of ‘theory’ and postmodernism exclusively as ‘Westerrn’?
[5] I identify one feature of modern subjectivity */which is not characteristically limited to
European texts of the last few centuries but observed in literary, theological and
philosophical texts in the regions since the eighteenth century */in the endless search for
the instantaneous in literature, which was accompanied by the stylistic innovations which
accentuated contradiction between the spoken or colloquial utterances of the present and
traditional utterances of the old literary styles. This is exactly the point I wanted to
demonstrate in Voices of the Past (Sakai, 1991). It is not only the newness of the present that
is highlighted by this contradiction; but it is also the impossibility of grasping the
qualitatively new in some stasis of durable medium, of capturing the act of speech in writing.
Therefore a striving to transcribe contemporary speech necessarily disclosed an aporetic dual
temporality in which the time of transcription and the transcribed time were in disjunction,
in which the present of enunciation had to be posited at a dimension higher than the
enunciated content, thereby differentiating the present of enunciation from even the most
recent past of that which was enunciated. Time became a dynamic rupture or incision
between the determined and objectified past and the indeterminate and unobjectifiable
present. Often this moment of discontinuity in modern time-consciousness is talked about
as the representative feature of modernity.
In the eighteenth century in Western Europe this dual temporality was specifically
formulated in the matrix of what Michel Foucault (1973, pp. 303 /87) called ‘empirico-
transcendental doublet’ and gave rise to a neologism ‘subject’ which meant an agent which
objectifies and constitutes itself by splitting itself into the determined self and the
determining ego. Thus, the modern subject was conceived as a dialectical composite of
the determined self and the determining ego, with the latter playing the role of meta-
language in relation to the former. It is assumed that this aporetic dual temporality illustrates
the basic form of modern Humanism.
[6] For a brilliant analysis of the unstable status of the métissage and the poor whites in
European colonies, see Stoler (2002, pp. 79 /111, particularly Chapter 4).
[7] The case in point is a leading philosopher of postwar Japan, Watsuji Tetsurô. See his (1961)
pre-war travelogue Climate and Culture . Some of Watsuji’s explicit racist remarks are edited
out in the English translation.
[8] As Rey Chow notes, primitive passions are politically ambivalent. They are no doubt
concerned with the invention of the national origin ‘which is now ‘‘democratically’’
(re)constructed as a common place and a commonplace, a point of common knowledge and
reference that was there prior to our present existence’ (1995, p. 22).
194 N. Sakai
[9] For an excellent but brief history of the concept of subject, see: Balibar (1991, pp. 33 /57).
Also see Critchley (1999, pp. 51 /82).
[10] A very informative analysis of the attitude of Japanese intellectuals towards the West can be
found in Komori (1998, pp. 170 /98).
[11] See Chen (1995, pp. 389 /406); Tarumi (1995, pp. 51 /101). It is worthwhile noting that the
colonized intellectual’s commitment to modernity is frequently interrogated as to whether or
not it was a form of collaboration with the colonial rule after the colony’s independence.
Beyond specific historical contexts, there seem to be some intimate connections between
modernity and the colonization of the world.
[12] Hage cites C. J. Koch, an Australian novelist: ‘The culture based on London was the
imaginary pole star of our world’ (Hage, 1998, p. 194).
[13] It is in this context that I would like to reconsider the significance of some insights, notably
his logic of basho, by Nishida Kitarô (1870 /1945) who attempted to create a philosophical
argument in terms of Aristotelian hypokeimenon and Platonic chora to deal with the
questions of modern subjectivity in Volumes 4, 5 and 6 of Nishida (1965).
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colonialism. In H. Bhabha (Ed.), The Location of Culture . London & New York: Routledge.
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Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chen, W. (1995). Yume to genjitsu (Dreams and reality). In S. Shimomura, T. Nakajima, S. Fujii &
Y. Huang (Eds.), Yomigaeru Taiwan bungaku (Resurrecting Taiwanese literature) . Tokyo:
Tôhô Shoten.
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The West—A Dialogic Prescription or Proscription?

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The West* A Dialogic Prescription or

The taxonomy of humanity can be dictated by a number of categories: civilization, race,

humanity* is such a category that clearly lacks in the rationality of conceptual

The concept, dialogue, seems most evocative in its emotive-ethical intensity as

ISSN 1350-4630 (print)/ISSN 1363-0296 (online) # 2005 Taylor & Francis

open to her, she is no longer an addressee either addressed or listened to, or a

estrangement or dehumanization; it disrupts my relation with my addressee; it is

Accordingly, difference in dialogue can be viewed neither as a conceptual

to me, my potential incomprehension of the other’s medium, an anxiety over the

What I would like to call into question, therefore, is the institutionalized

within that discipline in the production of knowledge, primarily as suppliers of raw

sometimes called ‘theory’ (or philosophy) and it is taken to be a distinguishing mark

opposed to primitive societies or the entire framework of developmental history

temporality has been recognized as the essential feature of ‘modern subjectivity’.5

impossibility of grasping the qualitatively new in some stasis of a durable medium, of

expansion of Euro-American-Japanese military domination, this is one of the reasons

deference* in order to qualify and to fashion oneself as Westerner. Yet in another

coherent systematicity of attributes: neither of them can be presumed to be a

Regarding existence as an emanation of essence, they set no intrinsic value

It is through this urge to naturalize that the disparate, overdetermined, and

theoretical pursuit. Have postmodern theories seriously confronted the problematic

questions of modern subjectivity in Volumes 4, 5 and 6 of Nishida (1965).

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