法政大学大原社会問題研究所叢書
「論争」の文体
日本資本主義と統治装置

法政大学大原社会問題研究所：編著, 長原 豊：編著, ギャヴィン・ウォーカー：編著

「1920年代から30年代にかけてこの国のマルクス派を二分して闘われた〈日本資本主義論争〉とは、政治の文体あるいは物語をめぐる衝突であった。再生産論、革命論、国家論、そして天皇制──中断され、閉じられた論争の鍵概念をいまいちど現代思想の方法論的雑踏のなかに差し戻し、資本の〈内部─外部〉を分析する諸論考のもとに新たな言説装置として再構築する試み。」

詳細はこちらをご覧ください。

Gavin Walker, ed. Foucault’s Late Politics, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 121, no. 4 (Duke University Press, 2022).

In recent years, Michel Foucault’s late work has been the target of a certain orientation within Marxist theory, hostile to what it perceives to be the cultural politics and inward, micropolitical turn of the great French thinker. But recent attempts to reexamine this complex material from the late 70s and early 80s reveal instead the richness and political commitment of the late Foucault, from the complex figure of “political spirituality” in the texts of the 80s, to his remarkable late internationalism, traversing the globe from Iran to Japan to Brazil and across North America, even his political experimentation with new possibilities for the political subject. In this special issue, we refuse the facile reduction of Foucault’s late politics to an ambiguous or even reactionary individualism, instead emphasizing the crucial dimensions of his late work, whose insights and contours largely remain to be discovered as a repository of emancipatory, radical politics for our time.

For more information, see here.

Gavin Walker, ed. The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese ‘68 (Verso, 2020).

“The analysis of May ’68 in Paris, Berkeley, and the Western world has been widely reconsidered. But 1968 is not only a year that conjures up images of Paris, Frankfurt, or Milan: it was also the pivotal year for a new anti-colonial and anti-capitalist politics to erupt across the Third World, a crucial and central moment in the history, thought, and politics of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Japan’s position—neither in “the West” nor in the “Third World’—provoked a complex and intense round of mass mobilisations through the 1960s and early ’70s. Although the “’68 revolutions” of the Global North—Western Europe and North America—are widely known, the Japanese situation remains remarkably under-examined globally.

Beginning in the late 1950s, the New Left, independent of the prewar Japanese communist moment (itself of major historical importance in the 1920s and ’30s), came to produce one of the most vibrant decades of political organization, political thought, and political aesthetics in the global twentieth century. In the present volume, major thinkers of the left in Japan, alongside scholars of the 1968 movements, reexamine the theoretical sources, historical background, cultural productions, and major organisational problems of the 1968 revolutions in Japan.”

For more information, see here.

Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai, eds. The End of Area: Biopolitics, Geopolitics, History, a special issue of positions: asia critique, vol. 27, no. 1 (Duke, 2019).

“As technological innovation and cultural exchange challenge conventional borders, national identities, and notions of the nation-state, scholars have increasingly argued that the traditional concepts of "area" are ideological and political constructs tied to a schema of the world that no longer exists. This special issue of positions: asia critique, edited by Gavin Walker and Naoki Sakai, posits that this "end of area" does not necessarily mean the end of area studies as a discipline. Rather, contributors suggest that "area" has detached itself from the realm of geopolitics and entered into the realm of biopolitics and biopower, which provides an opportunity to reevaluate and remap the goals of area studies. To address that change, this issue centers translation and the biopolitical as new theoretical mechanisms for area studies to order, combine, separate, and classify life. Topics include the concept of "area" itself; the philosophy of translation; reflections on Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Edward Said; governmentality and biopower in the time of global capital; and biopolitical management of geocultural areas.”

For more information, see here.

Kojin Karatani, Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Gavin Walker (Verso, 2020).

“Originally published in 1974, Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility has been among his most enduring and pioneering works in critical theory. Written at a time when the political sequences of the New Left had collapsed into crisis and violence, with widespread political exhaustion for the competing sectarian visions of Marxism from 1968, Karatani’s Marx laid the groundwork for a new reading, unfamiliar to the existing Marxist discourse in Japan at the time.

Karatani’s Marx takes on insights from semiotics, deconstruction, and the reading of Marx as a literary thinker, treating Capital as an intervention in philosophy that could be read as itself a theory of signs. Marx is unique in this sense, not only because of its importance in post-’68 Japanese thought, but also because the heterodox reading of Marx that Karatani debuts in this text, centred on his theory of the value-form, will go on to form the basis of his globally influential work.”

For more information, see here.