Part One: Sekai-kei and Asuka—Trauma of the Self

Title card: “Reconsidering ‘Love’: Divine Punishment and the Free Subject.”

Preface

How should we understand the ideas expressed in EVA? Most of you will already be thoroughly familiar with this work of anime. What follows is an exploratory attempt to reason from EVA’s own internal logic, examining its intellectual core and principal characters from a rationalist standpoint. Corrections are welcome.

I. EVA and Sekai-kei

At last, the madman’s final defences collapsed. He gave up. Mist accumulated in the tank faster and faster. His body trembled, changed, shrank; then the figure of a man appeared, superimposed on the seven-headed dragon. The tank was three-quarters full of mist. The dragon had become a blurred shadow, only a faint trace still suggesting what he had looked like when the “purging” began. Second by second, the man’s figure grew clearer. At last the tank was entirely full of mist, and a man of normal outward appearance lay in the silver light. He breathed heavily, his eyes shut, his muscles twitching involuntarily. “Purging complete,” Semph said. “Is that stuff still in the tank?” Linah asked softly. “No. It’s all been cleared out.” “Then…” “Just residue. Completely harmless. I’ve used a set of sensitizing agents to neutralize those dangerous negative emotions. The dangerous emotional essences, the energy lines forming the degenerate mental field… gone. The purging is over.” For the first time, Linah seemed uneasy. “Then where did they go?” “Tell me, do you love your fellow beings?” “Come on, Semph! I asked where they went… to what time?” “And I asked whether you really care about anyone else.” “You know my answer… you know me! I want to know. Tell me—at least tell me everything you know. Where did they go… to what time…?” “Forgive me, Linah, because I love my fellow beings too, whenever and wherever they may be. I have to do this. In my field of work, no humanity can be allowed in. I have no other choice. So… forgive me…” “What are you going to…” (Harlan Ellison, “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World”; Chinese translation by Zou Yunqi.)¹

The final episode of the television EVA takes its Japanese title from “The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.” Here I will not discuss its complicated historical background²—the 1990s, the bubble economy, the Japanese, withdrawal into oneself, earthquakes and religion, fin-de-siècle philosophy… Nor do I want to invoke critical concepts such as “otaku,” borrowing scholars like Hiroki Azuma or Tsunehiro Uno to pretend that this essay is terribly profound.

EVA itself wears a cloak of science-fiction mecha and religion to advertise its “mystery.” This essay will not “interpret” it through these various external perspectives—though it certainly has a pronounced existentialist dimension and offers material for psychoanalysis. Instead, I will return to the work itself and “reconstruct” it. Understanding EVA requires neither religious knowledge nor a stockpile of anime-cultural references. It requires only the resolve to face “the other” openly. In one respect, this reconstruction accords with EVA’s spirit; in another, it goes beyond its creator and criticizes him. The first section, which is also the longest, contains my overall reading of EVA. The other four supplement it in detail.

EVA is often called the pioneer of “sekai-kei anime.” Although sekai-kei has no strictly agreed definition, there is a broadly shared understanding of it: “A group of works in which small relational problems centred on the protagonist and the male or female lead (‘me and you’) connect directly to abstract, large-scale problems such as a crisis of the world or its destruction, without a concretely established setting mediating between them.” I use Wikipedia’s definition here.

So sekai-kei is also “individual-centred,” since its essence is the “direct connection” between an individual’s fate and the world itself. At this level, sekai-kei and the individual-centred mode are identical: resolving the individual protagonist’s fate is the reconciliation of the world itself. Sekai-kei is a product of the collapse of grand narratives, replaced by the individual’s “reflection on the self.”

From this perspective, EVA seems to be a textbook case of sekai-kei anime. It offers little depiction of states, nations, politics, ideologies, or competing strategies of struggle. Its protagonist, Shinji, knows nothing about these things and scarcely participates in them. Both features directly distinguish it from works with a strong social dimension, such as Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion and Attack on Titan. Its horizon remains primarily individual; social matters are reduced to mere background.³

Thus, whether Shinji Ikari cries out for “love” at the centre of the world in EVA’s last episode, or the original theatrical ending declares outright that “the sincere heart is Air,”⁴ Instrumentality proceeds by resolving a series of the protagonist’s problems with himself.⁵

The television EVA begins with a crisis interrupting “everyday life.” Episode 1 opens with the words “The year is 2015,” and Shinji Ikari’s battles with the various Angels unfold from there. Throughout the series, mecha combat forms the exterior and the characters’ self-conscious doubts the interior. This rigid opposition between “inside” and “outside” is not dissolved until episode 20. Only then does the protagonist, Shinji, truly realize what he ought to do; as the perspective reverses, we discover that his metaphysical enemy is not the Angels but NERV. The episode’s Japanese title is “The Shape of the Heart, the Shape of the Human.”

Before episode 20, Shinji merely goes along with his surroundings; the characters do not bother to think about meaning. Other people’s approval is enough. They simply keep their lives going in a meaningless cycle of repetition. Episodes 19 and 20 mark the first time Shinji pilots an Eva for a purpose other than “being approved of.” This meaning is distinct from other people’s approval. That distinction matters.

Chinese subtitle: “Yes. I have to fight the enemies everyone talks about.”

Chinese subtitle: “As long as you want wholeheartedly to go on living…”

Chinese subtitle: “…anywhere can be heaven.”

If Shinji’s mental activity in episode 20 expresses the work’s central concern, we can say that EVA does not endorse the Human Instrumentality Project. On the reading above, it endorses neither hedonistic ethics nor Aristotelian eudaimonist ethics: something is worth more than happiness. In this respect, EVA is instead a “philosophy of existence” in the broad sense.⁶

The later episodes also reveal that for EVA, being-in-itself continually tends towards fusion; the meaning of human existence lies in continually resisting this in-itself and becoming being-for-itself, an existence that always remains incomplete. This is Hideaki Anno’s central commitment. In interviews he has repeatedly said that he dislikes complete things—for instance, in the documentary Farewell, All Evangelions! Hideaki Anno’s 1,214 Days.⁷ My own position differs here: being-in-itself is already continually negating and differentiating itself—or, to put it another way, the in-itself is “in itself” for itself. EVA would say that human beings do not need suppression: because their mission is to resist suppression, it imposes suppression on them from outside, then has them resist it to find their meaning. I would say, rather, that this suppression gives their resistance its meaning. The difference is very subtle.

Chinese subtitle: “Humanity created Eva in imitation of God.”

This dialogue from The End of Evangelion goes straight to the heart of the matter.

Chinese subtitle: “That is the real purpose, isn’t it?”

Chinese subtitle: “Human beings can live only on this planet.”

Chinese subtitle: “But Eva can go on living for ever.”

Chinese subtitle: “Even if only one person survives…”

Chinese subtitle: “…although it will be terribly lonely, as long as they go on living…”

Chinese subtitle: “…the proof that humanity existed…”

Chinese subtitle: “…will remain for ever, won’t it?”

Continuing human existence, rather than attaining happiness: here, God means not perfection but continued existence, even if that existence is incomplete.

Viewed philosophically, then, EVA does attach great importance to life. Its advanced technology, for instance, can scarcely be called artificial intelligence; it is closer to a kind of biological intelligence—a sensuous mixture of religious metaphor and technology. In EVA, the living always takes precedence over the mechanical. Life means purposiveness and organicity, and tends towards the fusion of Instrumentality. At the same time, for Anno, life’s meaning lies in resisting fusion and achieving individual thought. Let us set aside for now what the characters gain through reflecting on themselves. They may well end up unchanged, having gained nothing.

The “Instrumentality Project” is, in substance, the overarching framework for this self-reflection. A common misreading of EVA, whether of the television finale or the original theatrical ending, is that all barriers have vanished: Human Instrumentality supposedly returns everyone to an original simplicity, leading to perfect reconciliation. But Shinji’s refusal of Instrumentality, and his still seizing Asuka by the throat at the sea of LCL, tell us otherwise.

This closely resembles the structure of the master–slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Master and slave do not walk hand in hand into a perfect Happy Ending. Both retreat into Stoicism. It is a Bad Ending. I think the television EVA, too, belongs to this kind of work with a Stoic inclination.

The Instrumentality Project is therefore no path to happiness. Instrumentality has defects of its own. Human nature seems precisely to refuse to express itself outwardly in a pure and truthful form, to refuse reconciliation with others. A project that goes against the human heart in this way obviously cannot make people happy. Rei Ayanami says, “This is a world in which no one will be saved.” Human nature consists in refusing happiness—Yes, you’re ready to suffer. It is those who suffer who are happy: this is both divine punishment and divine grace.⁸

Reconciliation is impossible. EVA cannot express a movement towards dialectical “reconciliation”; or rather, sekai-kei anime itself cannot express such a desire.⁹ When the self’s barrier of the heart—what EVA calls the “A.T. Field”—protects it from facing the other openly, this muttering to oneself is “chunibyo,” adolescent self-dramatization. Better to say that sekai-kei and chunibyo are two sides of the same thing. Just as excessive emphasis on the other leads to a “no-self” position that abstracts the entire world, excessive emphasis on the self leads to “solipsism.” A chunibyo self, shut away in itself, can naturally use psychoanalytic jargon to construct a complete imaginary world. This is one reason psychoanalysis is so fond of taking EVA as a case study.

As noted above, EVA’s ideology is a philosophy of existence in the broad sense: science should not be allowed to interfere with life and personal dignity. This may explain its insistence on continually inserting religion into science.¹⁰

Adam and Lilith are plainly modelled on human form and anatomy. Kaworu Nagisa, supposedly Adam’s soul, is not radically different from humanity—full, for example, of a merciless, cold, rational divinity. On the contrary, he is the most full of love and desire. MAGI, supposedly a strong artificial intelligence, turns out to have a “human brain,” not algorithms, at the core of its construction. If so, EVA is still discussing humanity when it discusses science and religion. It has not truly ventured towards what is other than humanity. Is this not another refusal to open the barrier of the heart? It certainly explains why the scientific and religious elements are so incongruous. They are present, but not as themselves; they are sensuous imaginings of human intelligence and form magnified to a superhuman scale. Here lies the work’s real contradiction and remainder: it advocates stepping beyond the barrier of the heart, yet “preserves” it here.¹¹

One cannot help thinking of the Romantics in the history of philosophy: whatever they encounter, they treat as a manifestation of God, endlessly stuffing predicates into the subject.¹² The resulting material looks rich, but inwardly it is monotonous. Within this structure, there is no encounter with a genuine other, and nothing genuinely new comes into being or changes. So it is with EVA: religion and technology are both discussed through the paradigm of “the human.” They have no content of their own; they are disguises with which an impoverished self conceals its impotence. The biblical allusions clinging to EVA’s surface really are unimportant.¹³ This contains an implicit contradiction of EVA’s call to step beyond the barrier of the heart and face the other.

This lifeless tranquillity repeatedly draws consciousness away from the movement of existence, from acting upon others and being acted upon, back into the bare reality of thought… Pure thought, however, lacks the fullness of life’s content; it is therefore only the concept of freedom, not living freedom itself. Insofar as this thinking consciousness possesses the character of abstract freedom, it is only an incomplete negation of external existence. Merely retreating into itself from finite existence, it has not accomplished within itself the absolute negation of that finite existence. (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapter IV, “The Truth of Self-Certainty,” B, “The Freedom of Self-Consciousness: Stoicism, Scepticism, and the Unhappy Consciousness.”)

Judging by its ending, EVA, with all its contradictions and reflexivity, gives form to an intensely pessimistic outlook. Yet it is also full of force: it dares to stand against dreams and ridicule their unreality, while pointing directly to reality’s own impotence.

In formal terms, once “Komm, süsser Tod”—“Come, Sweet Death”—begins in The End of Evangelion, the film intercuts a series of stream-of-consciousness passages. The animation leaps outside itself to speak hysterically from an external perspective. Images flash past, projecting layer after layer of the protagonist’s self. Finally, the picture flies straight out of the “two-dimensional” world of anime into the “three-dimensional” world: cinemas, audiences, voice actors, the details of everyday life. In the television series, Anno even puts the script on screen to produce this sense that the anime world is itself a dream—

Chinese subtitle: “Yes, this is a world too.”

Chinese subtitle: “There must also be a me who isn’t an Eva pilot.”

Anno continues this practice in the final Rebuild film, Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time. During the mecha battle between Shinji and his father, Gendo Ikari, the animated models look deliberately shoddy. At a glance, viewers can tell that this is animation, not reality. The director seems to be telling us: all this is false; what is real lies outside this falsity. We must not lose ourselves in it.

The depth of this stream-of-consciousness technique, this deliberate exposure of the illusion, is admirable. In this respect, EVA truly deserves to be called a great work of existential psychology. A more recent work that thinks along similar lines, approaching social questions from something close to a sekai-kei perspective, is Bocchi the Rock! Many people group it with K-On!: both carry the labels “girls” and “music,” making them seemingly perfect examples of “empty moe fluff.”

But the fundamental difference between the two centres on Bocchi herself. As episode 8’s depictions of office workers and Bocchi make clear, Bocchi the Rock! is better understood as a portrait of atomized individuals that just happens to be about music. In this sense, rock really is lonely. And by the end, Bocchi has not substantially grown: she is still socially anxious. The emphasis in sekai-kei anime is not on growth and reconciliation but, on the contrary, on maintaining a distance from the outside world, over and over—a “repetition of distance.” This corresponds to the naked reality of socially anxious people’s lives. Youth, a rose-coloured life, boys and girls—all phantoms. Some may criticize this view from the standpoint of society’s material foundations, what they call “reality.” Why is Bocchi socially anxious? How can she overcome it? What is to become of someone with social anxiety? How does social anxiety relate to the atomized individual? What solution does the discussion ultimately offer? In other words, the real challenge concerns “solving the problem,” not “posing it.”

Faced with this impasse, we can return to EVA itself. Posing a problem is easy enough; it takes only a little insight. The difficulty is how to solve it. Yet putting this question to EVA’s model of thought may generate a rebuttal on another level: there is no solution to be found in so-called two-dimensional anime. We should never look to anime for ways of solving these problems; indeed, no such “solution” exists even in “reality.”

Even if we adopt this pessimistic, dejected attitude, however, we cannot set dreams and reality in absolute “opposition.” Both the arguments above and Anno’s EVA suffer from this one-sidedness. Certainly, we cannot solve real problems in dreams. But dreams and reality cannot be separated from one another.

Anno wants to lead people out of anime and towards reconciliation with reality. What he overlooks is that reconciliation with reality does not mean giving up anime, literature, film, and television—the so-called “two-dimensional” realm. Reality itself has the structure of a dream: it is full of repression and expressions of the repressed, full of promptings from what is not real. Moreover, human beings are free precisely because they always plan their actions towards the future, which is plainly absent from the present. A person in reality lives not in their present but in their future; otherwise, they lose their actual life and cease to move. Negating what existence is, and expecting what it is not, they live in nothingness—in “what cannot be relied on,” in “dreams.”

Only through unreal dreams can a person set their life in real motion. Anno deserves support for directing people’s attention to reality, but he should not oppose reality to dreams, or being to nothingness. As Hegel says, even things in nature have their ought: what a thing ought to reach but has not yet reached is what it is; it contains an internal negation. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel puts his finger on the issue: to oppose reality to the ought is to reject reality’s self-negation and self-nullification. Such a position immediately turns one into a repellent conservative. Conservatives do not respect reality; they live in a dream, because they always imagine that reality can carry on as before, ignoring the struggles and violent actions already taking place.

This resembles another pair: conservatism and revolutionary thinking. The conservative wants to know what others need, then hysterically plays the part of the one who supplies it. The revolutionary knows what they want; others must make an “effort” to follow them. Yet this following is not an elitist act of self-determination, but “two steps forward, one step back.”

Ultimately, art and literature exist to disclose the dreams and negativity overlooked in life, to disclose a complete reality—not to repeat the worn-out abstract injunction to “embrace reality.” People do not need to embrace it: they are always already living in it. Attending closely to reality means attending to how it produces those dreams. For dreams are nothing else:

“Dreams are a continuation of reality; reality is the end of dreams.” (The End of Evangelion.)

Satoshi Kon is an outlier compared with Anno and EVA. In Paranoia Agent, in particular, Ikari says, “The reality in which I have lost my home is my true home.” Its spirit coincides remarkably with Hegel’s discussion of the active substantiality of the Concept in the Science of Logic.¹⁴ To me, this sentence possesses more of what we might call “reconciliation” than EVA does.¹⁵

Chinese subtitles: “My home is already gone. The reality in which I have lost my home is my true home.”

As for genuine reconciliation, a conciliatory account that understands a master–slave relation as “each side rationally respecting the other” misses the point. The issue is that “such a rational, calm acceptance of the structure of the master–slave relation is impossible.” In a thoroughly radical sense, neither side of that opposition can rationally and calmly absorb the other into its cognitive structure—or, in other words, fully realize this relation of subordinating and being subordinated. “Difference,” not “unity,” is thus the true mediating term of a negative relation. Within the master–slave opposition, “I” do not ally myself with “you” and form an alienated relation out of some simple identification. A shared “antagonism” prevents “us” both from being “selfish,” and so we enter into an alienated master–slave relation.

We should therefore accept reconciliation while rejecting abstract reconciliation that homogenizes everything. To the proliferation of happy-ever-after reconciliations, I respond with Marx’s criticism of Romanticism: “It is ridiculous to yearn for that original richness; it is equally ridiculous to believe we must remain in this complete emptying-out.”¹⁶

II. Asuka / Trauma of the Self

Do not dress yourself up as a victim. Do not take refuge in false excuses. Human beings are animals who insist on going on living, however great the difficulties they face. They say you attack anyone who wants to escape reality, without distinction. Does that set them free? Are you saying you want to save them? Please sit down. People are not as weak and shallow as you think. Sit down there, please. Your very existence is an illusion. (Paranoia Agent.)

The subject here is not Asuka Shikinami Langley from the Rebuild films, but specifically Asuka Soryu Langley from the television series and the original theatrical ending.

In my view, Asuka is the most controversial character in all of EVA, and the one in whom contradictions are most densely combined. Even at the level of characterization, the old and new Asukas differ in many ways. (1) The Rebuild Asuka no longer has a crush on Kaji—though in the original EVA, her feelings for him are not a simple crush either, but a distorted “projection of paternal love.” Instead, she likes Shinji in a way that even has something of a teenage romance about it. (2) The final film reveals that the Rebuild Asuka, too, is an artificial human, with Angel properties. Anno uses this identity to remake Shikinami Asuka’s personality, just as he does with Rei Ayanami. In fact, this flattens Asuka’s character, much as the Rebuild films marginalize Misato Katsuragi.

Perhaps Asuka gives us a direct glimpse of EVA’s innermost spirit: the subject is always hystericized. The boy does not want to become a legend; he only wants to be “loved.” Shinji is therefore not a tragic hero, nor does he need to become a mythical symbol of tragedy. The statue of Oedipus has not come crashing down to the secular earth; even Thrice Upon a Time is full of deliberately contrived reconciliations, false and perfunctory. This is not a simulacrum of tragedy congealing into otaku-pandering culture. It is bloody heads flashing into view, the night of the world strewn with corpses in the wilderness. Asuka is the reflexive side of Shinji’s longing for “love”: the one standing in the secluded night, a terrifying red apparition. She is this night, this empty nothing that holds everything in its simplicity. When Shinji looks at Asuka’s missing eye in the sea of LCL, he sees this night—a night become terrible.¹⁷

Let us turn to episode 22 of the television series, where Asuka first receives a full dissection:

Chinese subtitle: “I’m not a child any more.”

Chinese subtitle: “I want to grow up quickly.”

Chinese subtitle: “So please look at me.”

Chinese subtitle: “All right. I’ll die with Mama.”

Chinese subtitle: “So please don’t leave me.”

Chinese subtitle: “No. This isn’t me.”

To my mind, Asuka has nothing whatsoever to do with the “tsundere” type, with its prickly exterior and affectionate side. She is neither the proud, standoffish half nor the sweet, coy half of that label. The Rebuild films admittedly accentuate a simple tsundere personality that panders to otaku tastes, but television Asuka is completely different. She is profoundly insecure and badly needs affirmation. Paradoxically, she is also dissatisfied with the self that needs it. In other words, she resents her inability to be independent, yet needs other people: hence the contradiction of drawing close and pushing away.

Asuka’s condition is thus “either wholly dominating or wholly dependent.” At a deeper level, she cannot tolerate “the other.” This also explains why she never asks why the Angels must be attacked. The Angels are enemies; enemies must be destroyed. No other reason is needed.

Asuka really does resemble a human being—rather too much, in fact. We can see the concept of “the human” in her. In Christian terms, she is wholeheartedly in favour of leaving Eden, but cannot bear the consequences of leaving it. Inwardly, she remains a little girl, not arrogant at heart. Her “pride” is more like a child putting on a brave face—or, to put it more cruelly, an overgrown infant imagining herself a tough guy.

This is also the crux of “self-consciousness.” Asuka wants affirmation, but not mechanical affirmation: she wants the affirmation of another self-consciousness. That is why she hates dolls, and declares that she hates Rei Ayanami most of all. Yet if the other really is a free subject, they will certainly not always affirm her just to comply with her wishes. Here is the insoluble problem, the contradiction in the depths of the human soul throughout EVA’s horizon: the “barrier of the heart.”¹⁸

Asuka seeks to be “a person in her own right.” Paradoxically, however, her independence is merely a means; recognition is the end. Yet independence consists precisely in not taking recognition as one’s end. Mediated by this contradiction, her mental collapse is perfectly normal: her inward ends and means continually destroy one another. At its most extreme, this hysteria becomes the overflowing of subjectivity’s lack, an overload of happiness. Death and happiness really do have a curious affinity. Happiness is unattainable; to keep life’s purpose from becoming nothing, one must make the preservation of independence one’s purpose. Yet preserving independence means “abolishing the dominion of every end over oneself.” Nothingness therefore always permeates life—or freedom means nothingness.

Asuka’s fundamental contradiction, then, is “wanting to depend on others, while hating herself for wanting to depend on them.” In short, “freedom and independence” cannot coexist with “security and happiness.” This reflexivity is embedded in Asuka’s characterization, indeed in characterization throughout EVA. Reflexivity means that “wanting to grow up quickly” is precisely a child’s trait, while genuine maturity consists in “not caring” whether one is mature.

Understanding Asuka thus gives us a direct glimpse of the paradox of the characters as subjects throughout EVA: the characters’ reflection on themselves. But what is the inner background, or core, of that reflection? The answer: the self’s revolt against life, through which it gains its historical mission.

Even a villain’s criminal thought is greater and more sublime than the miracles of heaven. Or, to put it another way: incomplete reality surpasses illusory perfection; only what is actual is rational.