Nation and Aesthetics: On Kant and Freud appears, in this great English translation by Jonathan E. Abel, Darwin H. Tsen, and Hiroki Yoshikuni, as a sustained experiment in re-plotting the coordinates through which we have learned to read the modern: not along the now-familiar axis that runs from economy to culture by way of a simple superstructure metaphor, but along a more demanding topology in which capital, nation, and state coil into a Borromean knot, and in which aesthetics—understood as a theory of the imagination after Kant and as a historically sedimented practice of sensibility—functions less as ornament than as the very hinge that lets the knot hold.
In that renewed topology the nation ceases to be a mist floating above the “real,” and aesthetics ceases to be a quiet museum separate from political and economic life. Aesthetics is not the décor of the national; it is the operating system of its imagination, and the nation is the mediator that binds state and capital when each alone would fail to reproduce itself. In this sense Karatani’s volume is neither a polemic for nor a lament about nationalism; it is a technical manual for disassembling a formation that has learned, with unnerving finesse, to reproduce itself even under the pressure of critique.
It is also a wager: that the way beyond the capital-nation-state constellation can be glimpsed only by taking seriously Kant’s revaluation of imagination, together with Freud’s revision of the superego after the shock of war, and by reading their respective problematics transcritically, each through the other, with neither forced into synthesis and neither allowed to dictate the terms of the other’s domain. In that rigorous, non-synthesizing movement—Kant through Freud and Freud through Kant—the book locates both the trap and the exit: the trap in the aestheticization of a regulative idea into national substance, the exit in what the volume calls a fourth, evanescent mode of exchange, the X that appears only in punctual irruptions and yet orients critique toward a cosmopolitan horizon.
The argument’s first demand is terminological hygiene. Karatani does not inherit the older Marxist habit that dismisses nation and state as mere epiphenomena determined by the “base.” Rather, he insists on treating each ring of the modern knot as economic in its own right, not because everything reduces to money, but because each ring reproduces itself through a mode of exchange: reciprocity (nation), plunder/redistribution (state), and commodity exchange (capital). To say the nation is “imagined” is not to declare it fictive; it is to say it is an economy of giving and returning stabilized as an image of equality and belonging—a historically effective structure that mediates the other two modes precisely by doing the aesthetic work of making the non-coincident coincide. The result is a critique that neither romanticizes communities of reciprocity nor demonizes markets as such, but that models, with exactness, how reciprocity mobilized as national imagination sutures the violence of state redistribution to the freedoms and inequalities of the market, so that attempts to resist one term are almost automatically captured by the remaining two. In that sense, the nation is not what culture thinks; it is what joins. It is not “mere imagination.” It is the imagination—Kant’s name for the faculty that mediates sensibility and understanding—recoded as a political technique.
This move is not a simple update of Benedict Anderson. It is a re-reading of the Andersonian insight through Kant: if Anderson calls the nation an imagined community, Karatani insists that the relevant imagination here is not subjective fancy but the transcendental power that renders mediation thinkable. The nation occupies the position of imagination in the social formation; it is what allows the state and capital not merely to coexist but to co-implicate, and it does so by aestheticizing a regulative idea (freedom, community, equality) as if it were an object of experience, a sensuous form. To that extent, the historical coincidence of post-Kantian aesthetics (its transposition from a theory of sensibility to a theory of art) and the emergence of nationalisms in the nineteenth century is not accidental but structural: the very techniques by which the ideal is rendered palpable are the techniques by which a people is naturalized as a nation.
Karatani’s recoding of the “economic” as a plurality of exchange modes—reciprocity, plunder/redistribution, commodity exchange—does more than widen Marx’s analytic lens. It lets him show, with historical bite, how the modern trinity resists partial critique. Attack capital alone and one is thrown back into the arms of state and nation; attack the state and one is absorbed by market freedoms and national sentiment; attack nationalism and one often rediscovers the compensations of welfare statism and consumer sovereignty. The trinity survives by rotation. This is why Karatani replaces mode of production with mode of exchange: to see clearly how resistance misfires when it targets a single term. The state’s redistributive economy—genealogically traceable to plunder and imperial extraction—does not contradict capital so much as subsidize it; and reciprocity, idealized as an image of equality, becomes the emotive surplus that lets the other two cohere. In the city, where commodity exchange is dominant, there is freedom but not equality; in the nation, where reciprocity is dominant, there is equality but not freedom; in the state, redistribution prevents collapse while entrenching hierarchy. The knot is not a metaphor; it is a mechanism.
This mechanism becomes tangible in the book’s case studies, where “aesthetics” is not an academic field but a world-making apparatus. The long essay on Okakura Kakuzō and Ernest Fenollosa, for example, reads the museum—its spatial orders, its taxonomies and “epochs”—as a political technology that distributes world history and allocates cultural capital in a Eurocentric economy of seeing. The museum is not simply where art happens to be; it is an engine for stratifying the world and, in the Meiji context, a site for recoding Japan’s relation to Asia and the West through curatorial form. Okakura’s invention of “Asia is one” is not naïve essentialism but a counter-museum politics that recomposes the order of visibility, staging an East that can resist absorption into a European teleology without collapsing into provincialism. Fenollosa’s cosmopolitan Hegelianism here is both enabling and limited, and Okakura’s pan-Asianism is both a political invention and a dangerous temptation; the point is not to choose but to track the aesthetic redistribution of the sensible that makes certain historical futures narratable and others unthinkable.
Equally exacting is Karatani’s traversal of linguistics, where the national language is the most successful aesthetic artifact of all. National philology appears as the science that forgets that it is an art of statecraft. By placing Saussure’s internal linguistics alongside Tokieda Motoki’s language-process theory, Karatani maps the contradiction that modern linguistics inherits from the nation-state: language is imagined as the blood of a people, and yet the state’s expansion multiplies “peoples” within imperial boundaries. Tokieda’s attempt to define “Japanese” as languages furnished with the characteristics of Japanese language (rather than the language of a homogeneous people) is at once a critique of romantic national philology and a symptom of the imperial contradiction that forced Japanese linguistics to extend “Japanese” beyond ethnos and territory. The national language, born from the movement to unify writing and speech, is an artifact of exchange—of reciprocal recognition, of administrative redistribution, of market standardization—and its aesthetic authority conceals that multiplicity under a surface of unity.
None of this would rise beyond symptomatic critique if the book did not also elaborate a different horizon for thought and practice. Karatani names it, by strict analogy with the other exchange modes, X: the recovery of reciprocity at a higher level that neither reinstates the coercive obligations of the “primitive” gift nor repeats the inequalities of the market, a punctual, non-durable, yet decisive irruption whose historical figures are the utopian associations that ignite revolutions and are then absorbed or crushed. To call X a mode of exchange is to insist that it be thought economically—not as an ethereal morality but as a principle of association—and to keep it rigorously ideal: an orientation, not an institution; a regulative idea, not a new substantial community. It is this insistence that protects the project from the aestheticization that produces the nation in the first place.
Here the book’s transcritique on Kant and Freud is decisive. Against the accusation that cosmopolitanism is sweetness without teeth, Karatani wagers that the motor of movement toward a world republic—toward legal and material structures that abolish the trinity rather than turning it—is not goodwill but the harsh and double engine Kant calls unsocial sociability and Freud recasts as the aggressive drive’s introjection into a superego. The point is sharp. If the modern state and its wars are not abolished by moral exhortation, the only plausible traction is to harness a conflict internal to human sociability: the very tendency to associate, simultaneously paired with the equally strong drive to resist subordination, can be made law-like; and the internalization of aggression, as superego, can do the work that external coercion cannot sustainably do. That is why Article 9 of Japan’s constitution, stigmatized by some as a sickness imposed by victors’ justice, becomes in this argument the sign of a higher health: an institutionalization of inhibition that ought to be generalized rather than “cured,” an ethical and juridical redirection of aggression that orientates a state not to war but to its withering.
The book’s wager is not sentimental. Karatani does not imagine the League of Nations or the United Nations as the telos accomplished; he reads them as punctual interventions in which X flickers—an index that unsocial sociability and the superego can be civilizationally coded into law without pretending that violence has been expelled from history. That refusal of consolation is the condition for thinking beyond both the state socialist shortcut (which swells the state to crush capital, only to be crushed by it) and the fascist shortcut (which mobilizes the nation against capital and state, only to become state capitalism hungry for empire). Linking the Kantian republic of states to social revolution is not eclecticism; it is the only way to short-circuit the rotational resilience of the knot.
Karatani’s most delicate move is to expose the internal mechanics by which aesthetics both forges national substance and can be oriented against it. The pivot here is the Kantian sublime. Read as a pedagogy of moral feeling by many post-Kantians, the sublime can be domesticated as a dialectic of loss and recovery: the imagination fails before magnitude, reason rescues it with a higher measure, reconciliation ensues. Karatani, in dialogue with Paul de Man’s Aesthetic Ideology, stresses a different valence: a stony gaze that suspends exchange and interrupts anthropomorphic reconciliation. When the sublime is allowed to work as interruption rather than as moral self-congratulation, it begins to resemble the superego’s displeasure and freedom’s momentary manifestation; it forces a break in the circulating exchanges by which the nation aestheticizes its own inevitability. That moment—the irreconcilable that neither synthesizes nor sublates—aligns formally with X. If reciprocity nationalized is the trap, the sublime as interruption is the clearing in which reciprocity can be recovered without being aestheticized as substance.
From this vantage, the volume’s wide arc—Okakura’s museum politics; Fenollosa’s cosmopolitan Hegelianism and its complicity; Motoori’s mono no aware and the peculiarly Japanese path through which phonocentrism became national philology; Tokieda’s attempt to delink “Japanese” from the modern equation of state-people-langue; the geopolitics of “character” from Maruyama to Kojève—is not miscellany. It is a set of laboratories in which the same mechanism is shown to operate with local specificity. The museum is an aesthetic machine that orders time; the national language is an aesthetic machine that orders voice; “character” is an aesthetic machine that orders personhood.
In each case a regulative idea is sensualized and then reified; in each case the cure cannot be to replace one content with another but to interrupt the machine at the level of its form. The cure is not a different museum; it is a recomposition of the museum’s internal order precisely so that no order can claim to be the sensuous truth of history. The cure is not a different national language; it is the exposure, within any langue, of the speaking subject whose very plurality keeps language from coinciding with people or state. The cure is not a different “character”; it is the refusal to allow the aesthetic predicate of a people to function as ontology.
For readers trained to parse modernity through the single optic of production, Nation and Aesthetics will feel at once familiar and disorienting. Familiar, because the problem of nationalism’s double face—emancipatory demand for equality here, violently exclusionary myth there—is by now a cliché we can recite. Disorienting, because Karatani will not allow that double face to be managed by content alone. He forces us to specify the exchange form in which each face appears. Reciprocity as nation is not simply “good community feeling”; it is an obligation-structured economy (to give, to receive, to reciprocate) that equalizes by constraining freedom and that becomes, under modern conditions, the imagination’s most powerful device for making the state lovable and the market tolerable. Commodities do not exchange themselves; money—an abstract right to exchange—circulates value and permits the purchase of others’ labor “without threat of violence,” that is, under the appearance of consent. The state does not simply tax; it redistributes in order to keep plunder going under administrative form. The triad, seen like this, is not a superstructure metaphor; it is a set of cooperating economies that learn to use aesthetics as their medium.
Karatani’s critical ethic follows from that modeling. Because the trinity is fearless as trinity, critique must be triangulated. What the book calls X cannot be a positive program or a blueprint that would immediately be aestheticized into yet another national form. It must be kept ideal in the Kantian sense: a regulative orientation that disciplines action without allowing the image of its fulfillment to be turned into a sensuous substance. That is why the book’s most “political” moments do not simply add policy to theory. The defense of Article 9 is not policy as such; it is a demonstration that a juridical inscription can function, in a particular historical conjuncture, as the superego’s civil form—shame and inhibition over glory and aggression—and that such an inscription can be generalized without the consolations of purity. What matters is not that a nation is good; what matters is that a state is structurally incapable of war in law and practice, and that such incapacity is the civilized form of unsocial sociability—the very force that, in Kant’s argument, moves history without imagining that history is theodicy.
There is a deeper provocation here for the humanities. If aesthetics is integrally political not because artworks “reflect” politics but because aesthetic form is the historical engine that gives the nation sensuous reality, then the disciplinary separation of aesthetics from political economy is not merely arbitrary; it is part of the problem. The notion that one might defend a “purely aesthetic” sphere free of interest—disinterestedness as a noble ideal—turns out, in Karatani’s hands, to be the very technique by which the nation is purified into destiny. This is not an argument against art or against aesthetic experience; it is a demand that we cease mistaking the effects of a certain historicized regime of sensibility for the structure of sensibility as such. When “freedom” is aestheticized into nation, the moral law is misrecognized as a property of a people; the transcendental illusion becomes political ontology. The task is therefore to keep the ideal ideal—to refuse its capture by national substance—without renouncing sensibility. That is the only way to let imagination mediate without letting the nation monopolize mediation.
Because the book is rigorously comparative without ever flattening differences, it offers a way to think the universality of its claims without Eurocentric recursion. We can observe how Okakura’s counter-museum strategy resists the European order of world art, while also seeing how its pan-Asianism risks becoming the aesthetic predicate of empire; we can see how Tokieda’s refusal to identify “Japanese” with state or people undermines national philology, while also recognizing how the imperial context conditions that refusal. The point is not to relitigate their politics with hindsight but to grasp, formally, how aesthetics under modern conditions tends to expand community predicates until they become imperial—and how only a vigilance about the form of that expansion (not only its content) prevents the passage from nation to empire. If nationalism could be tamed by better stories about identity alone, the twentieth century would not look as it does. The only workable brake is a juridical and aesthetic practice that refuses the reification move: no idea as object, no freedom as substance, no nation as ontology.
The virtue of Nation and Aesthetics is that it leaves the reader with no place to stand that is not already implicated. That is not a failure of program but a success of critique. The volume refuses to console us with a new content to love, a better nation, a purer people, an emancipated state. It instructs us instead in a practice: to treat any appearance of reconciliation with suspicion, to keep the ideal from becoming an image, to harness unsocial sociability and superego not as moralism but as juridical inhibition, and to persist in associational forms that do not require the substance of community to endure. In other words, it teaches a discipline of imagination—one that does not hand imagination over to the nation and yet does not abandon imagination’s function of mediation. If the modern knot resists partial critique because it survives by rotation, the only cut that works is one that interrupts rotation itself. X names that cut. It is not a new ring. It is the refusal to be a ring.
Read as a book description in the strongest sense—an exposition that is also an invitation—this volume fulfills the promise of its title. It does not dress a political thesis in aesthetic language; it demonstrates that the political thesis cannot be formulated at all without aesthetic analysis, because the nation’s very possibility has been aesthetic from the start. And it does not treat Kant or Freud as timeless authorities; it uses their most severe insights against their more consoling descendants.
Kant’s unsocial sociability, when pared of theodical comfort, becomes the motor of a cosmopolitics of law; Freud’s superego, when freed from exclusively individual pathology, becomes the figure of a collective inhibition that can be nurtured rather than pathologized; the sublime, when read as interruption rather than moral pedagogy, becomes a formal device by which exchange is suspended long enough for a new law to be imagined without being substantialized. In that sense Nation and Aesthetics is a book about imagination that refuses to imagine falsely. It is a book about the nation that refuses to be national. It is a book about going beyond the capital-nation-state that refuses to posit a beyond as a new image to worship.
What is most striking in this achievement is the steadiness with which the writers of the introduction and translation frame Karatani’s itinerary without numbing its antinomies. They present a thinker who, having diagnosed how the trinity absorbs its critics, refuses both the consolation of culturalism and the austerity of economism, and who learns to think change as a matter of changing exchange—not because everything is reducible to transaction, but because only attention to exchange forms reveals why so many emancipatory desires end up serving the very structures they oppose.
The result is a study that is both historical and transcendental: historical in its granular attention to Japan’s Meiji and postwar trajectories, to museums and departments, to philologies and manifestoes; transcendental in its insistence that certain structures of mediation—imagination, aesthetic form, exchange as such—must be specified if critique is to have any purchase. In the space between those levels the reader is asked to practice a transcritique of their own, oscillating between positions without synthesizing them, and letting the parallax view do work that no single vantage can perform. That is not a method of indecision; it is an ethic of not letting the ideal harden into a nation, of not letting the nation monopolize imagination, of not letting imagination forget that it is a faculty, not a flag.
If there is a final measure of the book’s precision, it is this: having read it, one finds it difficult to think about nationalism, cosmopolitanism, or the arts in the same register as before. The standard pieties—identity is constructed, nationalism is imagined, art is autonomous, culture is resistance—sound suddenly parochial, because the book has shown that the real work lies not in those slogans but in the specific forms by which imagination mediates, by which reciprocity takes on national complexion, by which redistribution takes on administrative grandeur, by which commodity exchange takes on moral innocence. To understand those forms is not to neutralize them; it is to be able, at last, to interrupt them in the one interval where interruption is still possible: the interval when the ideal begins to become an image. That interval is where the X appears.
And that is where Karatani asks his reader to stand: not to found a nation or abolish a state by decree, but to keep the ideal from becoming a nation, to keep the law from becoming war, to keep exchange from becoming exploitation, and—perhaps most difficult—to keep imagination from becoming ideology by letting it do, once more, the work Kant assigned it: to mediate without substantializing, to open without enclosing, to hold together what cannot be fused, and to do so only for as long as it takes to move from rotation to law. That is not a destination; it is a discipline. It is also, in the strong and unembarrassed sense, an aesthetic.
Simon Gros 
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