Internationalist Aesthetics: China and Early Soviet Culture

Abstract

Lu Xun by investigating his writings on the Wei-Jin period and portraying him as engaging the tension between the possibility of an idealist escapism and a vigorous materialism. This parallels the presentation of his reconciliation of Chinese history and culture with imported iconoclasm discussed in the first half of the book. Chapter six turns to nihilistic elements in Lu Xun’s work. Despite his frequent bleakness, Lu Xun is for Cui not hopeless, but is energized by his confrontation with what she characterizes as a Daoist nothingness that challenges stable configurations in the world. Again, this echoes the first half’s tensions between the inevitability of death and a bodily will to live. The final chapter outlines a possible theory of community based on Lu Xun’s ontology and encounter with nothingness. Cui argues that these positions enable Lu Xun to theorize a modern, Chinese community that respects the striving of the individual without abandoning the ground of a group identity. This is an exciting project, if at the limits of what Lu Xun’s corpus can support. The fundamental tensions in his work that Cui traces through both the personal and the philosophical are justified and consistent with recent scholarship on Lu Xun, if not at this level of sustained detail. However, the broader attempt to use these tensions to construct a coherent, contemporary philosophy out of the author’s catalogue moves quickly in the second half. This is not to say that it is implausible to see Lu Xun as a philosopher; in fact, this is a refreshing approach that recognizes his extensive reading in Buddhist and Daoist texts. Nevertheless, much is left unsaid in the second half about the technical philosophy (and philology) undergirding many of the concepts deployed. Again, the argument is engaging and compelling, but relies on Cui’s capacious knowledge of several different fields of Chinese and European philosophy to gloss complicated textual lineages. That said, Cui’s mobilization of so much of Lu Xun’s textual support, even if in the abstract, adds to the value of this work. Working through the book and tracing its references is exceptionally rewarding for the scholar of Lu Xun or cross-cultural exchange, both for its insightful close readings and for the scope of the material under discussion. More provocatively, the book is valuable to the scholar of intellectual history through its construction of Lu Xun as a major philosopher on the global scene.