RODNEY FERREIRA

We aim to define the relationship between the work of Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) and what we call the "Japanese aesthetic program". We believe that the bases of this relationship are placed in three layers: 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; 2) a philosophical layer, characterized by the thesis that the various aesthetic theories that emerged between the Taisho era (1912-1926) and the middle of the Showa era (1926-1989) have a common ambition: to define, through aesthetics, a Japanese subjectivity; 3) and a literary-philosophical layer, characterized by the way in which the first two layers present themselves in the genesis and development of Tanizaki's thought, and by the way in which the writer himself engages in this program, 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.