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Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque (Durham: Duke University Press 2010)
In this self-consciously revisionist study of Japanese imperialism, Mark Driscoll takes up the old question of "how Japan came to be a world power in a few short decades" from a subalternist, Marxist perspective. (ix) Criticizing the traditional focus on the metropolitan, Euro-American inspired core of Japanese élite leaders and institutions, he concentrates on the "peripheral marginalia" of Chinese labourers, Japanese pimps and forced female sex workers, and Korean tenant farmers, who he sees as the driving forces of empire. By examining Japanese imperialism at its outer edges, far away from the centres of power, he seeks to reveal Japanese imperialism's true logic, mechanisms of power, and horrific, exploitative nature.
Driscoll's Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque is informed by an elaborate theoretical framework which he lays out in his preface and introduction. Synthesizing a number of perspectives, including Marx's theory of capital, Foucault's biopolitics, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's critique of capitalism, Japanese modernist discourse of eroticgrotesque (ero-guro), Tanabe Hajime's absolute dialectics, and the bio-philosophy of Minakata Kumagusu, he argues that Japanese imperialism was characterized by a central, unresolvable struggle between two forces: the erotic - "the vital productivity of desire" - and the grotesque - "the violent usurpation of this desire by hegemonic power" (Marx's "capital"). (10) For the modern, biopolitical, capitalist Meiji state, the motor force of profits (surplus) and hegemonic power was human life and its erotic, creative, life-producing energy. In its colonies, the state condoned and expropriated ("grotesqued") it, and in the process became deformed by it, especially from the 1930s. At the base of this weighty theoretical structure is the Marxist view of Japanese imperialism as an advanced stage of capitalism, by which capital searches...