Foreword: In the Mirror of Alternate Modernities

I have high hopes that the publication of Karatani Kojin's bookone of those infrequent moments in which a rare philosophical intelligence rises to the occasion of a full national and historical statement-will also have a fundamental impact on literary criticism in the West; and this in two ways, which are rather different from its effects in Japan itself. For The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature has some lessons for us about critical pluralism, in addition to its principal message, which turns on that old and new topic of modernity itself. I take it that any reflection on modernity-it is a little like the question about the self, or better still, about the nature of language, when you are inside it and cannot be expected to imagine anything which is outside-has known three renewals, three moments of an intense and speculative questioning. The first is presumably the moment in which the thing appears, which we call Enlightenment or Western science or industrialization, and which we might also call the last illness of God or the onset of the secular market, or capitalism and commodification. But in this first moment, the definition of science is at one with its defense, and the antediluvian Enlightenment heroes, like Auden's Voltaire, remain alert to the grim possibility of mythic regression: