Part Two: The Completed World, Instrumentality, and Textual Interpretation

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

III. The Completed World

Many viewers regard the television EVA’s finale—by which I mean the stream-of-consciousness reflections in both episodes 25 and 26—as an unfinished product, thrown together by a production team that had run out of money. This view is not only logically untenable; empirical evidence also refutes it.

First, Anno has said more than once in interviews that he thought seriously about the finale’s ending:¹

Anno: In episodes 25 and 26, the methods—the visual presentation and the dialogue—are different, but essentially what I wanted to express at the end is the same.

Interviewer: Really? I thought you were running out of time and decided that, rather than make a mess of the original plan, you might as well take a gamble. [Laughs.] I thought you wanted to make something that at least looked the part, even if it failed.

Anno: No, although that was part of it too. But that was only a matter of method. I did come up with the idea of a play within a play, or a theatrical presentation, at the deadline. But I wanted Shinji to look at other people—not just their surfaces, but their pasts too… Everyone has something dirty in them, don’t they? But when you interact with someone, especially when you don’t want them to dislike you, you try not to show them your bad side. You want to show as much of your good side as possible. Yet you have to see not just someone’s good side but their negative side too. Only then are you seeing that person as an independent individual. (Interview with Hideaki Anno, JUNE, 1996.)

Second, one can certainly treat the finale as its creator irresponsibly “losing his mind.” But that amounts to abandoning any reading of the television series, which violates the principles of textual interpretation. Interpretation begins by assuming that the author is not simply raving; otherwise, no interpretation has meaning. To interpret is to understand and articulate the text, whereas “raving” means “unintelligible,” “beyond reason.” The problem with this approach is that it immediately coincides with the self-centred practice of calling the author mad whenever one fails to understand something. If we must encounter a work’s unreasonable aspects, we must do so through an interpretation’s failure, not by abandoning interpretation at the outset. Abandonment implies an arrogant certainty that one understands the author completely: “The author has simply gone mad; there is nothing worth interpreting.” It is a self-contradictory mode of reading, claiming both complete understanding of the author and the author’s unintelligibility.

Having refuted, through both logic and evidence, the claim that the finale is irresponsible hackwork, we must take it seriously as something to interpret. First, though, I should distinguish this reading from what is called “overinterpretation.” Overinterpretation means speculating excessively about the creator’s own thoughts, forcing one’s subjective ideas onto the work without the corresponding evidence.

What I mean to do here, however, is reason from the anime’s internal movement of thought, determine what EVA’s finale is “expressing,” and offer a corresponding “reconstruction.” Before us, first, is a sequence of stream-of-consciousness images from episode 26:

1. Human beings are fragile and cannot survive without relying on others (Gendo Ikari). To survive, therefore, they must carry out Instrumentality (also Gendo).

Chinese subtitle: “So we have to complete one another.”

Chinese subtitle: “Because we cannot go on living unless we do.”

3. Why go on living? Do we live in order to discover why we live (Asuka, Rei Ayanami)? We must therefore investigate the reason for living.

4. First hypothesis—pleasure:

a) We live to do pleasurable things; running away from painful and unpleasant things is therefore justified (Shinji).

b) Yet why does Shinji still think he must not run away? Because “it will hurt after I run away.” In other words, “running away from pain” is painful. This is a contradictory dilemma: it means that whatever one does, pleasure is unattainable.

c)

Chinese subtitle: “Even though it was to get away from something painful…”

d) Why? Because running away will cause greater pain:

e)

Chinese subtitle: “That’s because you think running away will hurt even more.”

f) Episode 26’s conclusions so far:

• i. Living has meaning: we live for pleasure, or to avoid pain.

• ii. Although running away from pain is also painful, it is necessary to avoid greater pain. The total amount of pain is therefore reduced and the total amount of pleasure increased.

• iii. In other words, we live to obtain the greatest pleasure; pleasure consists in avoiding pain as far as possible.

g) This reasoning neatly resolves the contradiction that “running away from pain is also painful.” All of it is painful, but there are different degrees of pain. The contradiction is resolved; Instrumentality seems ready to conclude.

h) Further reflection: why does running away hurt? Because those who run away are despised and cannot gain others’ approval. What has actually emerged here, then, is the proposition that “pleasure consists in being approved of by others”:

Chinese subtitle: “Because if I run away, no one will want anything to do with me.”

i) Yet “not running away” in order to “win other people’s approval” is effectively “running away from their dislike of me.” It is still running away. Running away is supposed to win others’ approval, but the act of winning their approval is itself “running away”—from their dislike. Either way, then, it is running away.

j) Far from winning approval, such behaviour therefore attracts contempt once again:

Chinese subtitle: “You’re afraid of getting hurt, aren’t you?”

k)

Chinese subtitle: “That’s just your wishful thinking, isn’t it?”

l)

Chinese subtitle: “You just think it’s easier to think that way.”

m) The logic so far is therefore:

• i. We live for pleasure, and pleasure consists in being approved of by others.

• ii. Without their approval, then, there is no pleasure.

• iii. Running away does not earn others’ approval.

• iv. Yet trying to win their approval will be seen as running away from their hatred of us. So it is also running away; running away wins no approval, and without approval there is no pleasure.

• v. Therefore, whether we gain others’ approval or fail to gain it, there will be no pleasure. Pleasure in life is therefore impossible.

• vi. Final conclusion: a life without pleasure has no value; therefore life has no value. Only by facing the fact that “I will never gain others’ approval” can I maximize pleasure. For although I will run away and suffer whatever I do, I am no longer running away as I once did from the fact that “pleasure is unattainable whatever I do.” This minimizes the total amount of running away, thus also minimizing pain and maximizing pleasure. Once again, comparing pleasure and pain resolves the dilemma. Instrumentality seems to have succeeded.

Chinese subtitle: “It doesn’t matter what happens to me.”

Chinese subtitle: “You’re always so quick to give up on your own worth.”

Chinese subtitle: “You get stuck on one thought again and decide you have no value.”

Chinese subtitle: “Do you think that way of thinking will keep you from getting hurt?”

n) Yet this conclusion is negated once again:

o)

Chinese subtitle: “I sustain my existence by having other people pity me.”

Chinese subtitle: “That’s just your wishful thinking, isn’t it?”

Chinese subtitle: “That’s just you…”

Chinese subtitle: “…being convinced from the start that you have no value.”

p) In other words, if one starts by accepting the “fact” that “I cannot attain pleasure whatever I do,” one will become reconciled to being unable to attain it and no longer suffer over that fact. Yet this means once again that one has run away from pain. The preceding course is therefore a perversion, not an approach to the truth.

q) The failure of this reasoning does not, however, mean pleasure no longer exists. Through experience rather than reasoning, Shinji once again discovers a path to pleasure: piloting an Eva. He does not know why, but as long as he pilots, he receives approval:

r)

Chinese subtitle: “If I pilot Eva, everyone praises me.”

s) Shinji concludes: all he has now is Eva. As long as he pilots it, he can gain approval and find value in living. “Why does piloting Eva win approval?” does not matter. That question goes unexamined.

t) The proposition “piloting Eva brings pleasure” is therefore merely empirical, not necessary; it depends on something external rather than arising from within. This dooms that pleasure to uncertainty and contingency too. To place one’s hopes for pleasure in something uncertain is merely to run away temporarily from the fact that “pleasure is unattainable.”

u)

Chinese subtitle: “But if you keep depending on Eva…”

Chinese subtitle: “…Eva will become you.”

Chinese subtitle: “Eva will become everything to you.”

Chinese subtitle: “The real you will vanish without a trace.”

Chinese subtitle: “If Eva disappears, you’ll be worthless.”

v) Since “piloting Eva” does not arise from within oneself, one cannot control it. One cannot control its coming into being and passing away, and therefore cannot control one’s pleasure. If Eva disappears, pleasure is lost and life becomes utterly worthless. Only value one acquires through oneself is real:

w)

Chinese subtitle: “Then you have to acknowledge your own worth yourself.”

x) At this point, both the deductive and the empirical plans for obtaining pleasure and happiness from others have failed. The self is worthless. A worthless self is equivalent to no self; no self means that “self” is an empty sign. I have no value that transcends me and points towards the other. I am myself, and nothing more. The self is completely enclosed: only I can know myself, understand myself, comfort myself, bring myself pleasure. This is a purely self-determining, free world.

y)

Chinese subtitle: “A sign called ‘me.’”

Chinese subtitle: “They’re all just things that represent ‘me.’”

z)

Chinese subtitle: “Am I nothing but myself?”

Chinese subtitle: “What am I?”

aa)

Chinese subtitle: “Because the only person who can comfort and understand you…”

Chinese subtitle: “…is you yourself.”

ab) Once again, it seems we have reached completeness. If we cannot obtain pleasure from others, we need only obtain it from ourselves. There is no barrier or difference between oneself and oneself; the self will not cause itself pain.

ac) Yet to bring oneself pleasure, one must understand oneself. If the self is empty, with no content to understand, how can it bring itself pleasure? “Satisfying oneself” is therefore nothing but self-deception.

ad) A purely free, self-determining world is therefore an empty world without content. Nothing can be obtained in it, and so neither can pleasure or recognition.

ae)

Chinese subtitle: “A world in which you can obtain nothing.”

On-screen text: “That is freedom.”

af)

Chinese subtitle: “Even if you say that, I still have no self.”

Chinese subtitle: “I don’t understand myself.”

Chinese subtitle: “How could I possibly cherish myself?”

ag) Besides, the self is not actually without content. It interacts with its surroundings, changes, generates new content. Since change and difference arise between one self and another state of that self, it is impossible to use this self to satisfy another, different self. “Self-satisfaction” is possible only for an unchanging self.

ah)

Chinese subtitle: “Your time is always flowing.”

Chinese subtitle: “Your world is always changing too.”

ai) By now, both the plan for obtaining pleasure through oneself and the plan for obtaining it through others have been negated. Pure freedom has not produced pleasure either, only a void.

aj) Whatever happens, however, pleasure must rest on existence, not nothingness. Although we still do not know the way to pleasure, we can be certain that “first acquiring existence” is absolutely necessary. How, then, does one acquire existence? The answer: relinquish freedom and enter a finite world of constraints.

ak)

Chinese subtitle: “Impose a constraint.”

Chinese subtitle: “Look: now there is sky and ground.”

Chinese subtitle: “But now you’ve lost one freedom.”

On-screen text: “That is reality.”

al)

Chinese subtitle: “If nothing existed apart from you…”

Chinese subtitle: “…you would not know your own shape.”

am) The self loses freedom because there is an other; yet limitation gives it content, content makes it intelligible, and intelligible content provides the basis for recognition by others. If the self is to be an actual existence, it must accept an other different from itself. The self is therefore always shaped by the distance and difference between itself and others.

Chinese subtitle: “Only by recognizing your differences from other people can you give shape to yourself.”

an)

Chinese subtitle: “But other people really are shaping my heart too.”

ao) The logic at this point is therefore:

• i. At the very least, one must first exist before one can obtain pleasure, whether pleasure proves possible or not.

• ii. Actual existence, however, means being limited. The self cannot limit itself: using oneself to limit oneself is equivalent to no limitation. Only an other different from the self can limit it.

• iii. The self therefore depends on an other who differs from it. Its existence depends on the existence of the barrier of the heart.

• iv. Yet the barrier of the heart is the source of pain as well as the source of existence.

• v. Pain therefore guarantees one’s existence. Without pain one cannot exist, and therefore cannot obtain pleasure.

• vi. Pain is therefore the precondition of pleasure. Without pain, there is no pleasure.

ap) This seems merely to establish pleasure’s precondition. Once “existence” has been secured, how pleasure is to be obtained remains a mystery.

aq) At precisely this moment, however, EVA abruptly ends the inner deduction and substitutes approval from others.

ar)

Chinese subtitle: “You finally understand.”

as) What follows is a wholly imagined, peaceful everyday life, contradicting the preceding commitment to “facing actual existence and actual others.” Immediately afterwards, a problem of reality is suddenly transformed into a purely inward one: reality need not be painful; seen from another angle, it is happy.

at)

Chinese subtitle: “This real world isn’t necessarily bad either.”

Chinese subtitle: “Your mind has switched reality and truth around.”

Chinese subtitle: “You think reality is bad, so you come to hate it.”

Chinese subtitle: “If you look at reality from a slightly different angle, with a slightly different approach…”

Chinese subtitle: “…your mind will change a great deal.”

Chinese subtitle: “There are as many truths as there are people.”

au)

Chinese subtitle: “A different way of accepting things produces a completely different result.”

av)

Chinese subtitle: “You’re just not used to being liked.”

aw)

Chinese subtitle: “Perhaps I can stay here.”

ax)

ay) Next comes the scene in which everyone congratulates him and wishes him well.

az) My entire interpretation up to this point has failed. I am utterly stunned.

The interpretation fails at the moment the background music “Good, or Don’t Be” begins.² The preceding analysis reveals an anti-Stoic movement of thought. Yet it is immediately followed by a sudden abandonment of self-reflection and self-interrogation in favour of a relativist ethics: “Simply change your perspective and the world will change.”

More than that, the final scene of television episode 26, where everyone surrounds Shinji and applauds him with “Omedetō”—“Congratulations”—may not be as harmonious and lovely as we imagine. These “congratulations” seem more like a satire in the manner of the self-development seminars of the 1990s. Not to mention the original theatrical ending, where Asuka refuses Instrumentality and, at the sea of LCL, bluntly tells Shinji, “Kimochi warui”—“How disgusting.”

“Surrounded by the entire cast, Shinji, the protagonist who has discovered himself, is applauded as everyone says ‘Congratulations…’ to him. Some will recognize this final scene: it is a perfect match for the conclusion of a self-development seminar’s curriculum.” (Eiji Ōtsuka, ‘Otaku’ no seishinshi [An Intellectual History of “Otaku”].) Self-development seminars (jiko keihatsu seminā) were a popular form of psychological counselling at the time. The seminar group constituted a miniature society. Participants received self-development counselling through a particular question-and-answer format, similar to the many exchanges in EVA’s final television episode. At the end, with the other members’ good wishes, they acquired a sense of self through recognition within the group. For Ōtsuka, this ending ironically demonstrates that “in this era, personal growth can be achieved only through something like a self-development seminar.” (“Everything about the 1990s: The Suicide Manual, Reincarnated Warriors, the Final War, EVA”.)

Rather than an Instrumentality in which everyone recognizes Shinji, his inner life, and his courage, dissolving the barrier of the heart completely, the finale is better understood as a “refusal” of perfection. Judging by the ending of The End of Evangelion, Anno himself also seems opposed to Instrumentality.

In a certain sense, the television EVA botches its ending. Not its plot: at the end, the work’s own logic and theme collapse. EVA profoundly expresses the great insight that “without others, the self has no content—so how can one hold fast to a self without content?” It plainly recognizes that the “true self” is a wholly metaphysical self-deception: the self is real only in a field where others necessarily distort it. Yet this anti-Stoic impulse is still obliterated by the ending’s strongly Stoic harmonious unity.³ After a struggle with the outside world, freedom is finally discovered in an abstract mind.

This group therapy of surrounding someone and applauding is itself questionable. Whether others will recognize us lies entirely beyond our control; using something uncontrollable as a treatment is irresponsible. Yet if we force others to recognize us as a ritual—whatever they really think, they must at least politely congratulate us—recognition becomes false. And false recognition is actually the truth of the Instrumentality Project. This vividly exposes the sekai-kei problem:⁴ “world problems are solved through an individual’s inward decision.” Perhaps we can reconstruct the reading as follows: the television series’ fantasy world is satire, while The End of Evangelion’s psychoanalytic ending is the true ending. That would preserve the greatest possible depth in EVA’s content.

My immediate response to the “Congratulations” sequence is that it is both healing and absurd. It is as if nothing objective is collapsing any more, so we might as well stop thinking. Everything has dissolved itself, and everyone begins to “applaud.” All objective structures of contradiction have thus been made subjective. The television finale becomes a sarcastic ending: “Ha, ha, ha! You really think you suffer because you think too much? Fine, then. Congratulations!”

Perhaps, from our outsiders’ perspective, the irony is particularly apparent: the self needs false encouragement to become complete. Imagine people from whom you are already separated by barriers and distance, smiling and saying “Congratulations!” after you have shut yourself away in reflection and then pulled yourself together. The design is so dizzyingly absurd that it feels like performance art; more like performance art still is the fact that the ending really treats this design as “encouragement.”

Yet this ironic ending, introduced through pseudo-Stoicism, seems at odds with the director’s own thinking. In an interview from the same period, he views his design as follows—

Chinese subtitles in the montage (translated): “With EVA, I feel I pushed too hard. In a sense, I found that EVA had become a place to escape reality. When depressing material was added during production, I really disliked that. The intention was simply to cater to the audience and also give them some encouragement, so that after watching they could pick themselves up and keep loving life.”

In another interview, Anno goes further:

Anno: Why make “You mustn’t run away” the theme?

Interviewer: What!? Well, when you put it that way… [Laughs.] Yes, Shinji isn’t always right.

Anno: Exactly. Why does everyone think whatever the protagonist says or does must be right?

Interviewer: I see. The protagonist says, “It’s all right even if you run away.”

Anno: Yes. That’s the theme. There’s nothing wrong with running away.

Interviewer: Then he wouldn’t have had to kill Kaworu.

Anno: If Kaworu was someone he could connect with, he didn’t have to kill him. You can criticize someone who says he mustn’t run away and then does. But assuming that not running away is the right thing is also a fixed way of thinking, isn’t it? Was everything I’ve done right? Of course not. Episodes 25 and 26 also contain the line, “If you want to run away, then run away.” Running away has gains and losses. As long as human beings live, they make choices; there are gains and losses. If you do nothing, you gain nothing and lose nothing. That’s no different from being dead. But there are plenty of people like that. In short, if you gain something, you are bound to lose something. Human beings cannot move forward without hurting others. If you’re afraid of hurting people, you can only stand still. It isn’t that everything is fine as long as you don’t run away. You don’t run away only because something very unpleasant would happen if you did. If running away makes things easier for you, then there’s nothing wrong with it…

Interviewer: You create in order to fill the void?

Anno: Yes. That’s expression. All expression is like that, which is why décadence is impossible. In the field of animation. No, I think all expression is like that. A voice actor’s performance, a key animator’s drawings—I consider all that work expression.

Interviewer: Is the Instrumentality Project also meant to fill this void, then?

Anno: I think living is the continual act of filling that void.

Interviewer: I see.

Anno: But compared with other people, I feel my void is much bigger. Unless I go as far as I have, I can’t be satisfied. Even having gone this far, I’m not satisfied. (Interview with Hideaki Anno, JUNE, 1996.)

Perhaps we can say that Anno did play down the contradictions, deliberately erasing the sharper conflicts in order to encourage viewers to find the courage to live. Then, after the television series aired, he discovered that viewers were using this solution to run away again, and The End of Evangelion followed. Of course, this is only a guess. Whatever the case, the television ending has an irreparable defect: an abrupt logical turn leaves EVA essentially a typical form of Stoicism. And it is this defect that causes my deductive analysis to fail.

Through episode 25 and the earlier part of episode 26, the television EVA is therefore almost perfect. Episode 25 in particular shows Anno finally deciding to stop mystifying things. He abandons all the mecha, scientific, and religious elements, confronts the difficulties and themes that need to be addressed, and begins a purely inward deduction. That episode consequently contains more information and greater depth of reflection than all the preceding episodes combined. Even past the halfway point of episode 26, the standard remains extremely high. It works through the relations among happiness, pain, existence, and mutual recognition with great speculative rigour, arriving at the exceptionally sophisticated proposition that “other people and pain do not diminish existence; they are precisely its conditions.” Regrettably, however, at around the nineteen-minute mark, an abruptly imposed message—“change your mind and you can change your world”—utterly destroys all this earlier depth. The work is reduced to an ordinary sekai-kei anime, forcing us to interpret it through a Stoic retreat into the mind. This leaves a scar that is hard to ignore and that no interpretation, however exhaustive, can repair. It is a genuine pity. We must therefore move on to the next section: The End of Evangelion.

We have to admit that the original theatrical ending offers a more reasonable solution.

IV. Sweet Death, and Instrumentality

Such prophetic discourse imagines itself at the very centre and in the profoundest depths. It despises determination and precision, deliberately shunning the Concept and necessity just as it shuns reflection, supposedly confined to the finite world. Yet just as there is an empty breadth, there is also an empty depth. Just as substance can extend into the multiplicity of the finite world without the power to hold it together, there is also a depth without content: sheer force without extension. Such insubstantial depth is no different from superficiality. Spirit’s force is only as great as its expression; its depth is only as deep as it dares to expand and lose itself in its unfolding. (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, “On Scientific Cognition,” I, “The Scientific Task of the Present Age.”)

To understand the ending of The End of Evangelion, Air / My Sincere Heart, for You, we must understand the Instrumentality Project itself. I will attempt another way of making sense of it:

1. Shinji refuses Instrumentality because he chooses reality. Only real people are free, and so their recognition of him is not unconditional. The unconditional self-recognition of the Instrumentality world effectively amounts to no recognition at all. Such a world would have no pain, but no happiness either. A world where “others recognize me unconditionally” is actually a world “without other people.” A world without others is meaningless, because all meaning must point beyond itself towards an other. Shinji wants to avoid pain, but wants meaning to exist even more.

2. Shinji chooses reality, but not only the reality of the world: he chooses his own reality too. Otherwise, it would be hard to understand why, after refusing Instrumentality, he hurts Asuka as though he contradictorily hates reality. Shinji has already seen clearly that, just as others will inevitably hurt him, he will inevitably hurt others. By now he has fully accepted Asuka’s judgment of him: “timid, selfish, cowardly.” Such a self plainly cannot grow up overnight as if in a dream, suddenly becoming mature and tolerant of a hellish other. Nor could refusing Instrumentality possibly make him unwavering, rendering Instrumentality unattractive ever after. He is therefore full of regret and pain. His nailing Misato’s cross to the wall shows that he accepts this cruel divine punishment and atones for it: “Human actuality comes at the price of losing perfection. One is therefore destined either to lose one’s reality or to be unable to attain happiness.” Human beings must understand themselves as existences that have to move towards what they know to be nothingness.

3. Shinji’s sincerity therefore consists in no longer running away from what is true of himself, but displaying his aggression and his truth. An outpouring of the heart naturally provokes disgust, because every instance of nausea means inner contents turning outwards—as with the organs and tissue that spilled out when Unit-02 was dismembered earlier. The heart’s outpouring is disgusting because it exposes a side of ourselves that we deliberately hide in everyday life. Yet it is also moving: at the risk of being attacked in return, one exposes one’s most vulnerable interior. It is the resolve to face others truthfully even at the cost of wounds all over one’s body.

4. Only this explains why Asuka soothes Shinji even as she calls him disgusting. What deserves soothing, what deserves a response from the other, is precisely the will that actively expresses its interior. Such an act is equivalent to exposing oneself to the risk of death, laying one’s vulnerable interior bare. A subject that actively determines its own death is a free subject, exceeding the limits of its life. Only such a subject can obtain recognition. Thus it is precisely in their life-and-death struggle that Asuka recognizes Shinji, and Shinji and Asuka thereby attain an Instrumentality in reality, not in a dream.

5. Finally, this interpretation has the following advantages:

(1) It treats Shinji, to the greatest possible extent, as someone who has grown, rather than as an unchanged coward. The principle of script interpretation is that a reading which makes the script meaningful is always better than one which renders it meaningless. If Shinji has not grown at all, his experiences—the story of his refusal of Instrumentality—become entirely meaningless.

(2) It achieves what almost every previous interpretation has failed to achieve: a reasonable explanation of the script’s obvious contradictions that shows how the two sides are connected. A further advantage is that we no longer explain Asuka’s behaviour with the simplistic “tsundere” label. Once television Asuka is classified as tsundere, tsundere becomes synonymous with the bizarre and deranged. This explanation rejects such preconceived, label-driven readings.

(3) This interpretation accords with Anno’s will to the greatest possible extent, achieving mutual understanding with him.

The script of The End of Evangelion is riddled with contradictions, abrupt scenes, and blurred transitions. It is therefore easy to suppose that Anno has introduced something from outside the script: his revenge on, and mockery of, otaku losers. This seems to explain its abruptness reasonably enough. It feels abrupt because it is caused by something outside the script, rather than arising naturally from within it.

Anno’s approach merely shows that he and his audience cannot understand one another. Any attempt by viewers to impose their private wishes on the script, interpreting it arbitrarily to fit their own narrow world, is a refusal to step beyond their barrier of the heart—and therefore deserves EVA’s ridicule. From this standpoint, the reading above can scarcely be said to accord with Anno’s will. It is precisely the behaviour of a cowardly OTAKU who refuses to accept that “the script does not match my wishes,” who refuses to confront contradiction and pain.

Yet, as I have already said, accepting reality also means accepting one’s own reality. Anno has plainly accepted this. He displays to the audience the creator’s distortion and interference, things that should not have appeared in the work. In doing so, he shows that he cannot stand aloof from everything, free of all desire: he too wants to attack and ridicule his audience. The appropriate response is therefore not “I understand you,” but “I do not understand you, just as you do not understand me.” A fitting interpretation can no longer disregard the script’s contradictions with the simple explanation, “The creator did it deliberately; there’s no need to bother explaining it, there aren’t all these deeper meanings.” Such a reading in fact shows that the viewer thinks they understand Anno and EVA, while abandoning one of EVA’s central concerns: how difficult it is for people to understand one another. A genuine response boldly tackles these contradictions, proposes hypotheses, and tests them repeatedly until a hypothesis is found that minimizes the work’s contradictions as far as possible and makes the greatest sense of it.

Of course, every textual scholar is bound to cry, “This does violence to the work!” But “mutual misinterpretation and violence between people are unavoidable” is precisely EVA’s central concern. Only such a reading—a reading that minimizes the work’s contradictions—is therefore the one interpretation truly in accord with Anno’s will. Only an explanation that declares “Anno and I cannot understand each other” breaks through our respective barriers of the heart and lets us understand one another.

I have also said that the television EVA’s core is Stoicism, while The End of Evangelion’s is psychoanalysis. This section’s detailed argument has now given that conclusion firm foundations. We can specify and summarize it further:

First, The End of Evangelion refuses illusory Instrumentality and returns to reality by choosing “not to turn contradictions into merely inward problems.” Its insistence that “the distance between the mind and reality cannot be ignored” distinguishes it from any Stoic-like solution that holds that “the answer lies in the mind.” Second, after returning to reality, Shinji does not naively embrace it or reconcile himself with it. Still troubled and struggling, he continues openly to fight against reality. This distinguishes the film from solutions that hold that “the answer lies in life”—vulgar existentialism, for example. The only conclusion The End of Evangelion expresses is therefore this: the Absolute, infinite divinity, is neither mind nor reality. Both are incomplete. Only the activity of continually struggling and filling the void is itself complete. There is no answer that solves the problem once and for all. Give up the idea that your symptoms can be cured. Do not deceive yourself.

This is precisely Lacan’s summation of psychoanalytic ethics: “Do not give way on your desire.”⁵ Do not submit to the satisfaction of desire sustained by fantasies supplied by the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Recognize instead that desire persists eternally, that its satisfaction is impossible—that lack is eternal—and keep questioning life eternally. At the same time, “Do not give way on your desire” also means accepting this reality: do not run away from your desire. Accept both the impossibility of your desire and the impossibility of overcoming it. This immediately distinguishes the position from “My desires can’t be fulfilled anyway, so I might as well lie flat and give up.” That view treats freedom from all desire as the solution—vulgar Buddhism. Yet if one really wanted nothing, one should not want to overcome desire, nor undertake various disciplines out of a wish to return to perfection. One should let things take their course, fully accepting the reality of one’s incompleteness rather than running away.

The End of Evangelion does precisely this. After refusing Instrumentality, Shinji still accepts and acts on his aggression. Through that act, he shows that he will never again try to imagine any solution that could overcome defects and pain: “This is ‘you’re ready to suffer’; this is ‘enjoy your symptom.’”

V. Conclusion: A Reading against Author-Centred Interpretation

The Bible’s lost angel preaches again
But the world’s deceit and corruption have not changed
The people Noah saved are long since gone
Let this Eden turn to fine sand after the fighting
With a loving heart, dream that an angel of the soul will exist
In the exhausted city, with you there is a spark
Watch coldly: through all the upheaval, the sky leaves behind
The loveliest last glow of sunset
Resisting, raging, with a dream in my heart, yet I
Cannot pluck Eden’s wildflowers
In the Old Testament, a lost angel is preaching
Going berserk, fighting furiously, changing in the fall
Every fantasy collapses, leaving nothing
But I want to know: is the world wrong?
With a loving heart, exist entwined with her soul
In the exhausted city, with you there is a spark
(Yehuo Dahong, “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis,” Cantonese version.)

The interpretation of EVA offered here proceeds from the philosophical standpoint of “dialectics.” The explanations and conclusions above suggest that dialectics is close to EVA’s core, yet in a certain sense cannot be entirely reconciled with it. This essay aims to identify both that difference and their identity. Accomplishing this amounts to grasping EVA’s thought anew.

In my view, EVA remains so popular and so widely discussed for several reasons. One is its outstanding character designs, along with its many pioneering character types and scenes—the grounds on which people call it the starting point of “otaku-pandering culture.” Another is the psychological resonance of the questions EVA itself discusses. The former draws to some extent on assorted otaku-pandering or mystical surfaces. The latter is what calls for our sustained thought.

My reading of EVA naturally does not obey the “original.” The fourth section’s interpretation of The End of Evangelion, especially its final scene, runs wholly counter to Anno’s design. But what matters is not how to “remain faithful to the original.” It is how to obtain from an existing work an interpretation more useful to the present—especially when EVA is already more than twenty years old. Such a “living” interaction may be more meaningful.

Take any original text. Interpreter A, in one era, understands it in a way that accords with the ideas of that era, and the excellence of that interpretation makes it a gloss upon the text. Many years later, reader B produces a different understanding… A “historical” cycle unfolds in succession. We should not treat A’s or B’s glosses as useless philological dust. On the contrary, what is truly worth doing is interacting not only with the text itself, but also with its interpreters. This “sequence of interactions” constitutes the proper “model of interpretation.”

This is not a mushy compromise, and we have no need of one. Apply the most thoroughly subjective principle of interpretation directly. Take a framework straight to the text and carefully test whether the text confirms your ideas in full. What is wrong with an idiosyncratic reading is not its subjectivity, but its disregard for the contradictions that its subjective perspective generates—the parts of the text that reject and resist this particular reading. Face the “textual evidence against this reading” that your interpretation leaves behind, and make further adjustments: you will find that everyone’s diverse perspectives increasingly converge.

There are only two principles of textual interpretation. First, do not fear subjectivity. Second, do not fear its “failure” either.

It is precisely the “failure” of a subjective reading that brings us face to face with the text’s true spirit. Although EVA calls upon a mass of scientific, social, religious, even supernatural-fantasy elements, these ultimately remain wholly subordinate to an “individual” horizon—the truth of sekai-kei. In relation to its theme, they are cumbersome and useless. Their presence contributes nothing decisive to its depth; instead, they obscure a theme that ought to be very simple. The task of interpretation is precisely to disclose that obscured “simplicity,” to reveal what unifies these disorderly elements: the “relation” between unity and difference.

The Angels attack in order to fuse with Adam; Human Instrumentality seeks perfection; Asuka wavers between independence and recognition; Shinji hesitates between existence and meaning… All partake of the same simple structure. Once we uncover this central theme, the mystical shells ought to be sublated, yielding to the rational kernel and being demoted to mere symbols. This is the contradiction between EVA’s simple inner core and its redundant mystical elements.

Anno, similarly, often likes to explain EVA’s story from an external perspective. He inserts “three-dimensional” elements from outside the work, continually piling up different viewpoints. Nor does he gradually develop EVA’s setting through the story itself; he explains it through supplementary setting books, interviews, and so forth. In this respect, EVA is not a classical work either. “Classical drama” contains all its elements within the drama itself; it does not require outside information to be understood.

As an artistic classification, I prefer to call EVA “symbolic art.” Divinity and sensuousness are not separated at all, but interwoven and fused, with an abundance of concrete forms used to express abstract themes. The sublime attempts to express “infinite divinity,” yet cannot find any sensuous medium adequate to it. Infinite divinity therefore remains, in the end, unsayable and indescribable. The truly sublime breaks and tears apart every form with which we try to encompass it. Beauty in the strict sense, by contrast, consists precisely in infinite divinity finding its complete, adequate expression in a sensuous embodiment, bringing the two into perfect harmony. This is what classical art requires. Its artistic function is to reveal the “completeness” and “unity” overlooked in human existence. In other words, classical art aims at “unconcealment,” not deconstruction.

Judged from the standpoint of classical art, then, EVA would receive something like this verdict: it has indeed grasped the truth, but has failed utterly to find a suitable form in which to express it, remaining instead within a hazy and indistinct divinity. Parts of the story even tend towards mystical modes of expression. Of course, Anno himself acknowledges that here he is “making a mystery of things”—

Chinese subtitles in the montage (translated): “I actually don’t understand philosophy at all. To this day, I haven’t reproduced that kind of philosophical inquiry in another work. People always say EVA is full of philosophical reflection. But honestly, it isn’t philosophy—it’s more a matter of mystification. Most of the preaching from a God’s-eye perspective in a work is a technique.” “A God’s-eye perspective?” “Yes. But talking like this makes me sound impressive. That’s how EVA is. These seemingly profound parts of a work leave viewers impressed at first, even though they don’t understand; then they start wondering whether something is hidden behind the work. That’s a technique I use.”

And we can do better than the creator. Our task is to carry through EVA’s central principle that “violence between people is unavoidable,” violently digging out EVA’s soul—just as Shinji dug out Rei Ayanami—and raising it to a higher level. The interpretive violence we exert from outside the work is precisely EVA’s finest embodiment, and the only appropriate response to Anno’s introduction of extraneous elements.

As Nietzsche says, “He who knoweth the reader, doeth nothing more for the reader. Another century of readers—and spirit itself will stink.”⁶ Yes: if people relinquish their freedom, we should force them to be free. Readers have never had the right to refuse the violence an author inflicts on them. The core spirit of this essay is actively to “reconstruct” the spirit expressed by EVA through a mode opposed to “author-centred interpretation”: “The past is created in the future.” Human beings are merely animals who weave stories of love while creating history.

Naturally, we could put it still more “relativistically”: faced with something given—an anime, a text, an event—people differ in how they think and act towards it. Yet within each specific historical context, Hamlet will emerge “historically.”

(End.)