ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the Japanese Marxist philosopher Umemoto Katsumi (1912–1974) and his relation to Nishida Kitarō’s critique of linear time. Umemoto engaged the problem of time in a unique way by infusing Marxism with both a temporality of return and a time of subjective action. Before becoming a Marxist, Umemoto wrote an undergraduate thesis on the medieval Buddhist thinker Shinran under his mentor Watsuji Tetsurō, who was a famous traditionalist thinker. Hence, he had a foot in both the so-called conservative and progressive Marxist camps. This put him in a unique position to develop a theory of subjectivity based on a critical reflection on both conservative philosophers and his contemporary Marxists. The significance of Umemoto’s thought lies in the fact that he returns to Shinran to formulate a theory of subjectivity to take Marxism beyond the sphere of technological determinism and philosophy beyond liberal conceptions of politics and civil society. He then attempts to reconnect this idea of subjectivity and political practice to a Marxist conception of history. This conception of history accounts for the space of openness that makes subjectivity possible while at the same time affirming a logic of history that paves the way for socialism.
