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Notes on Anime and Politics—
1. The Japanese language has built into it the structure of the Law.
2. Animation makes direct contact with the realm of imagination (fictional representations of mental content).
3. Politics is an imaginary relation to the Law (State Power)
(1.—
1. The Japanese language has built into it the structure of the Law.
2. Animation makes direct contact with the realm of imagination (fictional representations of mental content).
3. Politics is an imaginary relation to the Law (State Power)
(1.—
1.a. Honorifics are the obvious case (-Chan, -San, etc). Yet, the equivalent of the copula ‘is’ in Japanese has embedded within it social reality, ie, ‘politeness’. The ‘normal’ expression is “Desu”, but it changes depending upon the level of politeness (the social relation).
1.b. ‘Being’ = ‘Society’. You can’t escape from others who exist under/within the same structure. And the structure is always fundamentally linguistic—to speak means to speak-with. An authority is set up that oversees communication and guarantees its validity: primordial Law.
1.c. Freud called it the ‘super-ego’. Lacan abstracted to ‘signification as such’ in terms of the ‘phallic function’. Daddy tells you what things means. Japanese is unique insofar as it explicitly represents the Law. Hence, the infamous ‘repression’ of the Japanese.
1.d. Actual Japanese politics, however, runs against the legality of the language. Listen to a Japanese political speech; nothing means anything. But an authentic politics isn’t impossible in Japan (which would be absurd to say). It is just difficult, for reasons we now explore.
1.e. For—isn’t the impossibility to formulate a Politics, with a deadening sense of hyper-scrutiny, the very position of the Left as such? Or: that all the Left now amounts to is just this hysterical self-reflection, self-judgement? Childishly trying to play at its own parent?
1.f. The modern (post-war, if not before) Japanese experience is just this: to fall into a terrifying and unending nightmare of infantilism. America was the parent that earned the ambivalence of the child. (A certain brand of conservatism emerges from this antagonism.)
1.g. But isn’t this precisely the coordinates of the left, after the failure of the Soviet Union? Since at least the 60s, the Left has not been properly able to construct a new idea of state power. (Who’s our Historical daddy?) Instead, state power—the Law—has dominated us.
1.h. Lenin found, at the end, that the utopic ‘withering away’ was nonsense. The NEP represented such a recognition.
On the other hand, Stalin’s takeover was the repression of the “state” in the left’s unconscious, the ‘return’ of which came in the form of a paranoiac terror.
On the other hand, Stalin’s takeover was the repression of the “state” in the left’s unconscious, the ‘return’ of which came in the form of a paranoiac terror.
1.i. the same paranoiac terror operative in ‘identity politics’: infantile self-policing, simulating state power without ever actually achieving it. Stalin’s terror apparatus too avoided the real political questions: the organization of the economy, cultural regulation, etc.
1.j. Any serious study of the Soviet Union will find that Stalin never had a real position on anything; he, for example, tried to blend the mutually exclusive position of the right and left wing of the party on the question of industrialization. He was thoroughly anti-political.
1.k. The left has remained in the lurch; today, it’s been forced (rightly) to regress back to the Keynesian formula. Nowhere besides Keynes and Lenin has the Left found an actual political hero, in the Communist sense: politics essentially concerns the Law (State power).
1.L. Thus the left remains trapped within its own fantasies of/around the Law, without ever actually confronting the Law itself. The Japanese language instructs us on that.
Art is by definition imaginary (fantasmatic). Japanese art may touch upon our experience of the Law...
Art is by definition imaginary (fantasmatic). Japanese art may touch upon our experience of the Law...
