The postmodern is characterised by an incredulity towards the universal truths which mark modernity. Kuki Shuzo, like many intellectuals in Japan during the twenties and thirties, anticipates this discourse by attempting to confront the hegemonic claims and universal pretensions of modernity. Using the latest European methodologies, Kuki attempted to define a site of difference--a site that could escape the putative universality of Western modes of dealing with historical development and consciousness--through a particular reading of cultural artefacts, especially Edo poetry and painting. Yet Kuki would ultimately locate this special site within the temporal, spatial, and subjective boundaries of the modern nation implicating the geopolitics of modernity and providing an interesting context to study the complicity of art, ideology, and aesthetics in modern discourse.

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Kuki Shuzo was a philosopher at the margins of the Kyoto School; his most significant contribution was the short work 'Iki' no kozo, in which he located Japanese uniqueness in the Edo demimonde aesthetic of iki, style or chic. This thesis surveys the major Western critiques of Kuki's aesthetics, focussing particularly on the work done by Peter Dale, Leslie Pincus, and Harry Harootunian revealing Kuki's borrowing from European modernism, especially fascist modernism, and attempts to uncover an alternative genealogy for Kuki in Japanese Pure Land thought. It finally asserts that Kuki's valorization of resignation, and his own retreat into the aesthetic, can be read as a form of resistance to Japanese nationalism.

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