서구의 탈구와 인문과학의 지위

나오키 사카이(Naoki Sakai),강내희 (번역자) 문화과학사 2001 흔적 Vol.- No.1

서구 : 대화의 명령인가 대화의 금지인가?

사카이 나오키(Sakai Naoki),김은영(번역자) 고려대학교 아세아문제연구소 2009 亞細亞硏究 Vol.52 No.4

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 everchanging 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.

경계 짓기로서의 번역

사카이 나오키(Sakai Naoki),정지혜 고려대학교 아세아문제연구소 2011 亞細亞硏究 Vol.54 No.4

A plurality of peoples inhabits the world, and frequently the world is presented as a common space where differences among peoples are manifest. Each people is a group, so differences among peoples are not entirely reducible to differences among individuals. In order to tell the plurality of peoples from the plurality of human individuals, we often rely upon categories for collective identities such as family, kin, race, nation, ethnos, and culture. The most commanding category for collective unity in the modern world is given in language, so that the language is represented as expressing the primordial union of a people. If one human body is somewhat a marker of human ‘individuality,’ the image - or figure, trope, or schema - of a language gives the sense of an individual or indivisible collectivity. Yet, on what ground is it possible to claim that the image of a language is autonomous and self-oriented? My paper argues that what is primarily given is not an image of a language but the image, figure, trope, or schema of languages; the locale where languages are identified is never contained within a single language. The identification of a language is possible only in an heteronomous encounter of frontier where translation is conducted. Differences among peoples precede the union of a people, just as translation comes before the identification of a language. I call this process of social encounter “bordering,” borrowing the term introduced by Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson. Then my argument seeks the consequences of the language’s pluralist origin in two directions: the first is a historical analysis of a schematism by which the image of languages was reorganized in modernity. The national language comes into being through this schematism. The second is the question of culture, and of its subordination to the schematism of national languages. Culture is often modeled after the image of a national language. From these two perspectives, I seek to explore the concept of ‘heterolingual address’ and “bordering.”

Nationalism and Asianism : Coloniality of the International World in East Asia

Naoki Sakai (나오키 사카이) 西江大學敎 人文科學硏究所 2008 서강인문논총 Vol.24 No.-

It may appear plausible to claim that we have grown out of the conditions of coloniality because we are now in the age of post-coloniality. Contrary to such a contention, this paper demonstrates coloniality as the contemporary condition of the present-day world, and illustrate that post-coloniality as the mode of our modern existence does not come after coloniality. The chronological ordering of coloniality and post-coloniality overlooks the basic configuration of the modern international world from which the specifically modern form of colonialism derives. This one-dimensional understanding of colonial domination often forces us to presume that national sovereignty is not a reaction to colonial domination but the resolution of it; it solicits us to believe that, once independent, the nation can be free of colonial power relations in the midst of the modern international world. Accordingly, my argument proceeds, first, by refuting the chronological comprehension of coloniality, and, second, by delimiting the turf of my argument about the coloniality of present-day East Asia. From the above preliminaries, I will explore the two following areas of concern. After the collapse of the Japanese Empire, colonial power relations were actualized in the technologies of nation-building. Gradually there emerged a political composition or arrangement, according to which nationalism and colonialism are not in contradiction to one another. In other words, colonial domination survived within the element of national sovereignty. National sovereignty is a certain fiction, around which a number of technologies are deployed. In post-WWII East Asia, some of these technologies are organized in accordance with the rules of the modern international world; its sustenance requires the continuing actualization of the civilizational and racial categories of modernity. I will argue that what we can expound as East Asian coloniality is ultimately elucidated by asking ‘to what extent these categories are internalized or agreed upon by those who want to dispel what is perceived as colonial domination in East Asia.’ 현재 우리가 포스트-식민성의 시대에 살고 있기 때문에, 이제 우리는 식민성의 상황에서 빠져나와 있다는 주장은 그럴싸해 보인다. 그러나 그러한 주장과는 상반되게, 이 논문은 현재 세계의 동시대적조건으로서의 식민성을 주장하며, 우리의 현대적 존재의 양태로서의 포스트-식민성은 식민성이 끝난 ‘이후에’ 온 것이 아님을 보여주려 한다. 식민성과 포스트-식민성의 연대기적 배열은 식민주의의 특정한 현대적 형식이 발현된 국제 세계의 근본적 형국을 간과하고 있다. 이러한 식민 지배의 일차원적 이해는 우리에게 민족 주권이 식민 지배에 대한 대응이 아닌 그것의 해결이라고 가정하도록 만든다. 이러한 사고를 통해 일단 독립을 하면, 그 국가는 현대 국제 사회 안에서의 식민주의적 권력 관계로부터 자유로울 수 있다고 우리는 쉽게 믿게 된다. 따라서 나는 첫째로, 식민성의 연대기적 이해에 반박하고, 둘째 로 현재의 동아시아의 식민성 개념의 지평을 확대하여 나의 논의를 진행시켜 나갈 것이다. 우선적으로, 나는 다음의 두 영역의 문제를 탐구할 것이다. 일본제국의 몰락 이후, 식민주의 권력의 관계들은 ‘민족국가 건설’의 테크놀로지에서 현실화되었다. 민족주의와 식민주의가 서로 대척적이지 않은 형태의 정치적 구성이나 형태가 점차적으로 등장하게 된 것이다. 다시 말하면, 식민 지배는 민족 주권의 영역 안에서 살아남게 된 것이다. 민족 주권은 다양한 테크놀로지가 배치된 특정한 형태의 허구이다. 제2차 세계대전 이후의 동아시아에서, 이러한 테크놀로지들은 현대 국제 사회의 법칙들에 따라서 구성되었다. 그것이 지속되기 위해 서는 현대성의 문명적인 그리고 민족적인 범주의 지속적인 현실화를 필요로 한다. 나는 우리가 동아시아적 식민성이라고 간주할 수 있는 것은, ‘동아시아에서의 식민주의적 지배로 인식되는 것을 배제하고자 하는 사람들에 의해서 어느 정도까지 이러한 범주들이 내면화되거나 합의되는지’를 묻는 것을 통해 궁극적으로 명료해 질 것으로 생각한다.