Our Kyōsei: How the Personal Works

This chapter draws on a variety of East Asian and Euro-American philosophical resources to articulate a philosophy of Kyōsei (Co-Becoming). Placing its reflections with the context of a response to the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami in the Tōhoku region of Japan, the chapter presents a series of philosophical vignettes which work cumulatively to argue that Kyōsei cannot be understood as a statist or militarist project of “Kyōsei Dōshi” 共生同死 (living and dying altogether). It is, rather, a challenge to rethink and re-practice, on the ground of specific “core sites,” the very nature of sovereignty and subjectivity. The chapter takes particular inspiration from the NPO (new public organization) known as the “Resurrection of Fukushima” led by Tao Yōichi 田尾陽一, which practices a form of local social regeneration based on a re-suturing of the relationship between humanity and the biosphere around it. Tao’s work can be placed into productive conversation with thinkers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Yuk Hui, who in their own way are each attempting to connect the modern technical sciences with local and indigenous knowledge ways and cosmologies. Finally, the chapter argues that in order for Kyōsei to become operative, it must become our Kyōsei, entailing a fundamental re-thinking of the questions of social ritual and human subjectivity, and particularly the concept of the personal.