Paper short abstract:

Polyglot and polymorphous, Sakae Ōsugi was a provocative popularizer of Western anarchism in modern Japan. This presentation situates Ōsugi's translation activities in global contexts of cultural communication, examining anarchist conception of human nature and its utopian significance.

Paper long abstract:

Polyglot and polymorphous, Sakae Ōsugi (1885-1923) was a provocative popularizer of Western anarchism in modern Japan. Indeed, this non-academic autodidact translated a wide range of anarchist and non-anarchist literature, including two canonical anarchist texts by Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid and Memoirs of a Revolutionist, in 1917 and 1920, respectively. Translation was so crucial to his intellectual self-formation that he frankly admitted his tremendous debt to foreign sources, even accepting such a derogatory name like "translational socialist." What should be emphasized here is a strange mixture of contemporary metaphysics and somewhat belated positivist social science, out of which his "patchwork" political knowledge had been woven: he was as much intrigued by intuitive philosophy of Henri Bergson and Georges Sorel, as by lesser-known sociological and anthropological texts, along with Souvenirs entomologiques by Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre. If, as Benedict Anderson persuasively depicts in Under Three Flags, the emergent "vast rhizomal network" of global communication in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries enabled a wider and faster circulation of peoples and ideas, it also opened up productive yet cacophonous gaps for non-Western readers, providing diverse, even mutually antagonistic texts produced in different times and places at their disposal. What this presentation seeks to elucidate is how the Kropotkinian contestation of human nature against social Darwinism, and to a lesser degree, anarchist cosmology and natural philosophy, would negotiate with other Western disciplinary paradigms of knowledge and thinking. Put differently, examining what he translated as much as what he did not, this presentation situates Ōsugi's translation activities in global contexts of cultural communication, thus proposing to read them as an uneasy site of negotiations: how he would take side with biological understanding of nature that would adhere to something universal; how he would confront historical singularities of modern Japan without reducing the latter into the former; and what utopian possibilities could come out of anarchist conception of human nature that would problematize both options.