After the New Left: On Tsumura Takashi's Early Writings and Proto-“Contemporary Thought” in Japan

Abstract

This article positions the early career of the Japanese activist and writer Tsumura Takashi as anticipating, from an intellectual and historical-media standpoint, the surge of interest in gendai shisō (“contemporary thought,” i.e. French theory) in 1980s Japan. Often understood as the devolution of theory into a mere commercial fad, the gendai shisō boom—in its reliance on a host of writers who worked at a distance from traditional academic publishing networks—promoted an ethos of interdisciplinary and transgressive knowledge production. Tracing Tsumura's interest in structuralism and post-structuralism as an outgrowth of his participation in the student movement, the article provides a prehistory of gendai shisō in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It argues that Tsumura's creative appropriation of structuralism and post-structuralism took place at a crucial juncture when the academic print networks that had legitimated intellectuals in postwar Japan were being hollowed out from within and without.