Sun Ge, author of the book "Wandering on the Margins"
Text / Sun Song
Thanks to my friend's hospitality, I want to compile the critical articles or lectures and interviews that I have written over the years into a book. According to the rules, you always need to write a few words first. What to write?
It's harder to read your own articles from more than a decade ago until now, and to pick out the parts of the book that are worth merging into, than to start a new one. Putting together the words in the computer that have been scattered in various folders due to neglect, rereading it once and sifting through the available parts, and then distilling a topic based on their contents is not as simple as starting a new topic.
Each text is linked to a small memory, and these memories, together with the feelings they have preserved, constitute a "history" of my barren life. Organizing this book, and therefore becoming a self-inventory, made me "look back" once in a while.
In retrospect, I've been "wandering" ever since I restlessly escaped literary studies in the early 1990s. This process initially only happened in physical space, but at some point, it also penetrated into my perceptual system and became my "living method". At the end of the 1990s, Life, Reading, and Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore published my first essay, "Seeking Mistakes", which was also the first book in my life. By the time I wrote the foreword to this book, I had realized my fate to "wander"—not an active choice, but just an inescapable acceptance.
From then until now, I have been in a state of "no belonging" in academic thinking. Not only is there no belonging, but it is also fluid. In physical space, my travels extended from Northeast Asia to South Asia, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and North America, and these trips enriched my sense of the world and allowed me to have some perceptual ability when reading the corresponding literature; but I was not yet able to really enter the context of these cultures, to perceive the subtleties in the folds of that culture.
In the mental space, I also have no support, which allows me to seek knowledge regardless of the boundaries of disciplines, and to think and write as freely as possible within the scope of knowledge within my ability. However, in the process of "wandering" without boundaries, the most unavoidable thing is precisely the marginal - as long as you are not willing to "ignorant and fearlessly" turn "wandering" into random fabrication, then only by trying your best to penetrate the margins of thought and knowledge can you objectively understand how far you can go. So I unconsciously took the marginality of spiritual life as the basic field of exploration, and thus came to this day.
The first part of the book mainly contains two texts from more than ten years ago, one is a transcript of a lecture recording, and the other is a manuscript from the Scientific Research Office of my research institute. Both are "propositional essays" that ask me to talk about my academic experience, but I didn't think of publishing it, so I explained my gains from "wandering" without embellishment. Marginality is always an issue for people who work bilingually.
Not only that, the so-called "interdisciplinary" is not actually to destroy the boundaries of disciplines, but only to relativize it. Sometimes, the margin is the border: borders, languages, disciplines... Each of them has something that cannot be ignored; sometimes the margin is a very tense open field: only by being on the margin can one maintain the consciousness of the finiteness of the self while refusing to be kidnapped by this consciousness, so as to constantly reconstruct itself in the face of the other. This is a favor that can never be received in the heartland.
What I try to explain in the first part of this book is precisely this kind of "working on the margins" of hardship. Moving from the field of literature to the history of political thought, from Chinese studies to Japanese studies, is not a "cross-border" for me, but a more in-depth "critical state". My Japanese teachers once told me that if I had studied law and political science since I was an undergraduate, I probably wouldn't have worked like I do now.
In other words, I did not abandon literature and enter the history of political thought, and I had the privilege of transforming the upbringing that literary research gave me into the motivation for thinking about the history of ideas. My mentor, who studied under Maruyama as a student, made a straightforward judgment for me: You who do literature have a "first text" in your chest, and you bring it into the study of intellectual history.
With the encouragement of my teachers and friends, I seem to have been observing and thinking at a critical point through this "first text." But what is the "first text"? This issue did not catch my attention. I just vaguely feel that thinking about the problems of the social sciences through the "first text" may be able to observe some other aspects. It was only late in the evening that I slowly acquired a certain realization, and began to remember this long forgotten "first text" problem.
The training in literary studies in my early years gave me a very important nourishment, which is the concern for the human life process itself. In particular, sensitivity to the subtleties of spiritual life, which is not usually within the scope of social science research, is of great importance to me. However, the history of political thought is not a literary study after all, it refuses to discuss the human life process and spiritual life directly in the form of experience, and it needs to translate all this into an empirically related ideological proposition.
However, the landscape I saw after this transformation did not completely coincide with my thinking when I started only from the internal rationale of the history of political thought. The greatest favor of the First Text is that it inspires the human experience of life itself, thereby helping me to understand the concepts and categories of the social sciences and to transform them into effective analytical tools. The contents of the second and third series of this book may reflect my "transformation" process to a certain extent.
Over the years, a lot of my discussions have been related to the proposition of "Asia." This proposition was originally an undesigned question for me, and the initial discussion was only to satisfy my own intellectual curiosity; but it happened to meet the era of Asia's rise— Asia once again appeared on the historical stage after the Bandung Conference, and China once again played an important role.
However, compared with the 1950s, the positioning of history has changed in both Asia and China. Especially after China has undergone the process of globalization, the use of Asia as a unit of discourse can no longer be based solely on the intuitive reasons for Asia's demand for national independence during the Bandung Conference. So I'm often asked: What's the point of your discussion of Asia?
In response to this inquiry, I have written a corresponding scholarly work for separate publication, and this book does not deal directly with this issue. But behind the book's superficial problems, there is indeed a potential thread for thinking about "Asia." The Asian question, along with the idea of subjectivity, and the way of perceiving world history, is not something that can be naturally induced by the accumulation of knowledge alone, but requires the establishment of some new perspectives.
The second series of this book is set in Northeast Asia and includes my discussions on specific subjects such as Japan, Korea, and Okinawa. In my dealings with intellectuals in these areas, I was able to perceive a less strong sense of boundaries in my country. The so-called Asian identity, in these societies, is an expression of the sense of the world, which makes it impossible for the subject to stay out of the world when he speaks of it. Unlike the "global vision" we have become accustomed to over the years, the objects I have observed are all specific and difficult subjects that cannot be covered or explained by "macroscopic discourses."
But in these temporary and local conditions, great and profound political wisdom has been fostered. These years of traveling in Northeast Asia, especially the privilege of meeting friends living in different societies, have given me very useful inspiration. I have been able to understand that the most universal thinking, the most universal discourse, whether in Asia or the world, can only be truly established in an individual way by means of a deep excavation of local experience.
It is in this sense that Asia is an integral part of world history, but it is not an intermediate link to world history, and whether it can carry world history depends on whether it has ideas and courage that are greater than its own, and whether it has the ability to dig deep into its own uniqueness.
The Korean thinkers who face the north-south divide, the Okinawan activists who face the international pattern of Japan, the United States, and Northeast Asia, they are not facing an abstract "world", but only a limited part of the world. However, due to their persistent excavation, they have a real vision of the world in a limited space.
It was they who taught me to recognize the expressions of Northeast Asia and to understand the "world" and "humanity" in which we are. The Faces of Creos and The Age of Controversy, which are included in this series, are texts that discuss the feelings of the world academically, and I hope that they can be combined with the last article of this series, "Why Look for Asia", to convey my thinking about the relationship between the part and the whole.
The article "The Significance of the Intellectual History of the Meiji Restoration" included in this series is based on the transcript of my lectures at Peking University. Japan's positioning in Northeast Asia is very special, and it has been committed to de-Asia in modern times, but eventually became homeless after World War II. The Meiji Restoration was always seen as a successful revolution, but it opened the way to Western European-style modern colonization. How to accurately evaluate Japan's modern history? What is the relationship between Japan's war of aggression against the outside world in modern times and its modernization? When reading the expressions of Northeast Asia, this is a question I cannot avoid.
This lecture does not deal with this history head-on, but only raises a topic of intellectual history: if the Western European-style modern model is not the way out for Asia, how can it be transformed to create the "modern era" of Asia in this historical period when this model has penetrated into Asia?
The text of the second series does not deal positively with marginal issues, but the problems they deal with occur at marginal places. The extreme state of Okinawa and South Korea, and the problem of Japan's modern transformation, all provide us with clues to the thinking of maintaining a marginal consciousness in the modern world pattern. It is at the tipping point that history moves, and it is only in this dimension that we can understand why static thinking cannot enter history.
The third installment of the book includes some of the commentaries I've been writing about in recent years. Through them, I discussed the thinking of some historical figures and friends around me. The theme distilled for this section is "thinking in history" because none of the subjects I am discussing can be separated from the historical context in which they find themselves.
I have always believed that "wandering" as a kind of free thinking without a framework is the only way to understand all the products of thought, but "wandering" without a framework cannot be separated from the historical context. If "wandering" occurs at a critical point, then it must meet the flowing state of history.
In the past few years, I have been engaged in the study of intellectual history, whether dealing with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean issues, I have tried my best to refine the problems through the thinking of specific people. In the process, I was surprised to find that I always seemed to be at odds with established knowledge. There are too many "conventions" in the academic community, many problems are recycled into established judgments without careful discussion, and more problems are impossible to enter people's vision because of this "convention".
I have constantly learned that as long as the object of study is placed in the historical context in which he is located, as long as he is honestly confronted with the "rebellion of historical materials", then the established premise or general conclusion of static abstraction will almost instantly appear empty and boring.
"Thinking in history" is by no means just a statement, it means a constraint on the subject's will, and it also means a perception of the state of flow. When the practices that have occurred in the history of ideas or in reality are reduced to some kind of "ism", the fluidity of the situation is erased. What I have learned from the grinding of intellectual history, or the salvage of problem consciousness that has been dissolved by "positions" and "opinions", has helped me to find fresh landscapes in the experience of blindness.
Over the years, I have given some interviews and talked to some friends. I have chosen a part of it as part of the fourth part of the book, and to some extent, I hope to conclude this book through these dialogues.
What I would like to say in particular is the two dialogues included here. One is a conversation with Daizo Sakurai, a Japanese tent playwright. Unfortunately, I can't recall where this dialogue took place anyway, it doesn't seem to have been officially published, but it's not very important. For me, the conversation with Daizo was a very strange experience. My personal work is far from drama and I have not intervened in social movements, but when I talk to Daizo, I do not feel estranged.
I want to include it in this book because the protagonist of this dialogue is Daizo Sakurai, and his vivid introduction and highly intensive discussion reveal aspects of Japanese and Even East Asian society that are rarely seen. I'm sure readers will be interested in this. Thanks to Mr. Daizo's permission, I was able to include it in this book. With his consent, for the convenience of reading, I made a small number of revisions and corrections to the parts of the text that were not accurate and too jumpy, but tried not to make excessive additions and deletions to maintain the original taste.
Another dialogue was a lengthy discussion I had with the Korean scholar Mr. Baek Yong-ri. At the request of Professor Bai, we talked about our ideas on today's academic system and the work ethics of intellectuals, and exchanged views on how to think about the possibilities of social humanities. This dialogue was 12 years ago, and some of my judgments at the time seem to be inevitably like tomorrow's flowers today. I was included in this book because it warmly reviewed my friendship with Professor Bai and because Professor Bai talked about his valuable experience in korean intellectual circles.
Baek Yong-ri is an important figure in Korean intellectual circles, specializing in modern Chinese history, and is also a key member of the ideological magazine Creation and Criticism, and has long served as editor-in-chief. This dialogue was published in Creation and Criticism in Korean, but has not yet been published in Chinese World. During the editing of this book, I contacted Professor Bai Yongrui, who took time out of his busy schedule to revise the text of the text and agreed that I should include it in this book.
Dazao and Yongrui are both old friends of mine, and they both have a deeper experience of "wandering on the margins" than I do. It is perhaps most appropriate to conclude this book with these two dialogues—they enlightened me in their own way that the abundance of the margin can only be discovered after we are freed from the central consciousness; the meaning of the margin lies in revealing to us the diversity of the world and the limitations of the individual, so that we can treat ourselves and others correctly.
This article is excerpted from Sun Ge's "Walking on the Margins", published with the permission of the Commercial Press)
Selected Chinese books
"Wandering on the Margins"
Sun Ge
The Commercial Press
September 2021
This book includes Professor Sun Ge's essays, academic reviews, and interviews in recent years, many of which have been published for the first time in China. "Wandering", as the author says, not only occurs in physical space, from Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia, Western Europe and even North America, but also more in the ability to think and perceive to penetrate the margins of thought and knowledge, and explore the broader spiritual world. The book consists of four series, the author is immersed in history to think, cross-cultural exchange and discussion of marginal issues, and constantly reveal to the reader the harvest of "wandering" - placed around the world, in order to constantly reconstruct ourselves for others; strive to reveal the diversity of the world and the limitations of individuals, in order to help us treat ourselves and others correctly.
Good books in Chinese
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