In Sublimes Territory: Tanizaki and the Aesthetical Program of Japanese Modernity

• Grant number: 24/13331-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: December 01, 2024
• End date: March 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Márcio Suzuki
• Grantee: Rodney Ferreira
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research project focuses on the relationship between the literary work of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) and what we call the "Japanese aesthetic program" (c. 1926-c. 1960). We believe that the bases of this relationship are placed in three layers, from which we define the three stages that make up the text and the project's path: 1) a socio-historical layer, characterized by the thesis that the modernization of Japan inserts the country in a time of the world and in a world-system whose material conditions shared with the West also imply the sharing of spiritual problems, leading to a conceptual exchange constitutive of modern Japanese subjective and national identity; 2) a philosophical layer, characterized by the thesis that the various stricto sensu aesthetic theories that emerged between the TaishM period (1912-1926) and the middle of the Showa period (1926-1989) have a common ambition, namely, the attempt to define, through aesthetics, a Japanese subjectivity, responding on a philosophical level to the socio-historical and political demands of modernity; 3) and a literary-philosophical layer, characterized, on the one hand, by the way in which the first two layers present themselves in the genesis and development of Tanizaki's literary thought, and, on the other, by the way in which the writer himself engages in this program aesthetic, not only at the literary level, but specifically at the philosophical level, based on aesthetic-anthropological reflections on the dark character of the Japanese, whose bases, we propose, are two aesthetic categories: the sabi and the sublime. We will try to present these theses and indicate possible ways to support them, considering the three stages in an increasing order of relevance - that is, moving from the socio-historical framework to the philosophical scenario and finally arriving at the vanishing point of Tanizakis literary-philosophical figuration.