ABSTRACT
The abridged version of Manuel Yang’s translation of Yoshimoto Taka’aki’s ‘Contemporary Times and Marx’ introduces the reader to the broad sense of translation in Yoshimoto’s work. ‘Translation’ in this context looks beyond the rendering of texts in new languages to encompass the adaptation of ideas and contexts. Human relationships that make up these economic categories as their base are what produce the world of ideas or the world of communality, and, if this is so, transplanting the various relations of life in this civil society or various economic categories into the category of communal illusion is alienation. The reason the Japanese state was called the familial state in the wartime period was because the residual institution of the clan system remained intact for the part. The logic is established as a crossing point between the philosophy of nature as a theory of alienation and historiography of nature which sees the history of the humanity as the process of natural history.
