1946년에 태어났다. 토오꾜오대학 문학부를 졸업하고, 시카고대학에서 박사학위를 받았다. 현재 코넬대학 아시아연구과 교수로 재직중이다. 다언어잡지 『흔적』(Traces)의 책임편집을 맡고 있다. 전공인 일본사상사의 벽을 뛰어넘어 정치이론, 문화이론의 분야에서도 날카로운 논리와 성실한 윤리를 겸비한 활발한 비평활동을 하고 있다. 저서로 『사산된 일본어•일본인』(死産される日本語•日本人, 1996), 『일본사상이라는 문제: 번역과 주체』(日本思想という問題: 飜譯と主體, 1997), 『과거의 목소리』(過去の聲, 2002), Voices of the Past(1991), Translation and Subjectivity(1997) 등이 있다.

Born in 1946, Sakai Naoki studied literature at the University of Tokyo (BA) and at the University of Chicago (Ph D). Currently a professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Cornell University, he is the chief editor of the multilingual journal Traces. Going beyond the history of Japanese thought, his specialty, the author actively engages in critique in the fields of political and cultural theories with his keen rationality and unswerving moral sense. He has authored Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse(English; 1991), The Stillbirth of Japanese as a Language and as an Ethnos(Japanese; 1996), and Translation and Subjectivity: On “Japan” and Cultural Nationalism(English and Japanese; 1997) and co-edited Traces: Specters of the West and the Politics of Translation (English; 2002).