ACG—animation, comics, and games—discussion session (trial run), organized and hosted by Fudan University’s Feidian Comics Club
Speaker: 🐟
Respondent: Zhang (addressed as “Teacher Zhang”)
Speaker 🐟:
Let’s start with Freud’s famous Oedipus complex, a model of the bourgeois nuclear family.
Within the structure of the Oedipus complex, Freud places greater emphasis on the subject’s identification with the father. Of course, the subject first identifies with the mother; the father then interrupts this identification through the castration complex, making the child identify with him instead. Freud’s daughter Anna Freud, along with the Anglo-American schools of psychoanalysis, places greater emphasis on identification with the mother. Jacques Lacan, by contrast, claims to remain faithful to Freud’s path precisely because he insists on identification with the father. But that is not all. Lacan isn’t a machine playing Freud on repeat. He also substantially rewrites Freud, introducing structuralist methods, for example. Broadly speaking, structuralism applies some of the findings and methods of twentieth-century linguistics to the study of human activity in other areas of philosophy and the social sciences. By introducing structuralist methods, Lacan retains the Oedipal structure of father, mother, and subject, but transforms the father. He is no longer a biological father. He becomes the first guiding thread of today’s talk: the Name-of-the-Father, the father’s name, Nom-du-Père.
To give a simple explanation of the Name-of-the-Father, let me repeat a Žižek joke Zhang once told. Journalists sometimes ask the philosopher Žižek very boring questions about his private life—what his relationship with his children is like, for instance. Žižek will reply, “I’m not a good father.” In an everyday context, we might take this to mean that his scholarship and work keep him too busy to look after his children. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, though, the answer has another significance: a living, flesh-and-blood father will not be a good father. A good father is one in whom the word has killed the thing, who has become a father’s name, a symbolic function. To explain this, I can quote a passage from Joyce’s Ulysses:
Joyce as quoted in the Chinese article; translated from that quotation.1
“As a matter of conscious procreation, fatherhood is unknown to human beings. It is a mysterious estate, an apostolic tradition, passing from the sole begetter to the sole begotten. The church is founded not on the Virgin Mary whom treacherous Italian intellectuals flung to the multitudes of Europe, but on this mystery—founded unshakably on this mystery. For, like the world in both macrocosm and microcosm, it is founded upon nothingness. Upon uncertainty and impossibility. A mother’s love, whether in the nominative or the accusative, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity is a legal fiction. Who is the father loved by all sons and loving all sons?”
What Joyce is talking about here is really the Virgin Mary bit in Christianity. He very perceptively notices a problem: for a considerable stretch of human history, who our actual blood father was remained uncertain. Unlike the certainty that we were born from our mother, the question of who our father was remained open. Yet the vast majority of us, in the vast majority of periods, have not lacked a father. Why? Because the father is a fiction imposed on us by such arrangements as the family, symbols, and law. But that’s all right, of course. It is precisely through this fiction that we obtain our ego-ideal out of the void.
With this understanding of the father’s name and authority, we can move into today’s first ACG text and its famous father figure: Gendo Ikari. He certainly counts as a good father. Let’s look at the first episode of the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series—EVA—and the first scene in which Gendo appears.
This is the first scene in which Gendo appears in his capacity as father. Why do I call him the best possible father? Think about it. Before this scene he has fulfilled scarcely any of his parental responsibilities. Yet the moment he appears before Shinji, he starts ordering him around with an imperious manner and absolute authority. And this command is also a prohibition. Why a prohibition? Lacan plays a word game here: Nom-du-Père → Non-du-Père, from the father’s “Name” to the father’s “No,” which sound alike in French. What is the function of the father’s name? To issue prohibitions. Remember the model of the bourgeois nuclear family we just discussed. Initially, the subject has a forbidden desire for the mother. Through the threat of castration, the father cuts off this desire and establishes the subject’s identification with him. That is the usual understanding of Freud. Lacan offers a different interpretation. For Lacan, the father does not simply barge in and interrupt the subject’s identification with the mother. Instead, he makes an exchange, obtaining the subject’s desire for the mother. What kind of exchange? He gives the symbolic phallus in exchange for the subject’s imaginary phallus .
What is the phallus? In Greek it originally meant a man’s dick. But after Freud brought it into psychoanalysis—especially with Lacan and afterward—its meaning ceased to be the same as penis, the bodily organ. The symbolic phallus is a signifier, or a word. What does this word mean? It represents the subject’s desire. The phallus is a word that represents the subject’s desire. The father gives this word/signifier in exchange for the subject’s desire for the mother. Why interpret the Oedipus complex as this sort of exchange? And why use EVA to explain it? Notice that the scene we just saw is not only Gendo’s first appearance. It is also Rei Ayanami’s first appearance. Gendo orders Shinji to pilot EVA, and the object Shinji gives up in this scene is Rei: the imaginary phallus, whose flesh-and-blood body is actually a clone of Shinji’s mother, Yui Ikari. The reference to the Oedipus complex could hardly be more blatant. I can therefore show the whole exchange in this graph of desire.
English-edition image key: The heading reads “Name-of-the-Father → anal father → humiliated…”; the Chinese names label Gendo Ikari at A and Shinji Ikari at the barred S. “Che vuoi?” means “What do you want?”; “das Ding” means “the Thing.”
This is what Lacan calls a graph of desire, in its simplest version. S stands for “subject,” with a bar through it—like Shinji at the beginning of this scene, a helpless loser who hasn’t a clue what to do. Shinji sets out from identification with the symbolic father. This capital A—the capitalized Other, the big Other, the paternal Other—is Gendo, of course. By identifying with the Other, Shinji acquires the meaning of his own desire. Of course, he acquires that meaning through its representation by a word, and the thing in question is, of course, EVA. In doing so, he must give up the imaginary phallus: his [incestuous] desire for his mother.2 Through identification with the father, the subject produces the signifier that represents its desire, the capitalized phallus. The subject can then acquire something that gives it certainty about itself: the ego-ideal, which we can understand as the subject’s ego. The subject then goes from something empty to something with content.
If we know something about Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, we will know that the paternal signifier has a dual aspect in the father’s [incest] prohibition—at least in Lévi-Strauss’s studies of less developed primitive tribes. On the one hand, the father forbids his children to have contact with women of the same clan; on the other, he guides the clan’s marriage arrangements. The subject may not have contact with women of its own clan, but may marry women from another clan. This duality is also very apparent in EVA. For the subject Shinji, there is Rei, who is of course both the object of [incestuous] desire and an object forbidden by the [incest] taboo; Asuka, by contrast, is a permitted object. The Name-of-the-Father is a strict father who issues prohibitions, preventing Shinji from obtaining Rei. Who, then, regulates the subject’s relationship with Asuka? This brings us to today’s second thread: the anal father. Unlike the severe father who issues prohibitions, this is a thoroughly self-indulgent father who demands that his children enjoy things. In EVA, the representative of this anal father is Misato Katsuragi. Here we can appreciate what Lacan’s structuralist reworking of psychoanalysis makes possible: Misato is biologically female, yet she now stands in for the anal father. Lacan once said that woman, too, is one of the names-of-the-father. The father’s name amounts to symbolic functions, symbolic positions, which anyone can occupy. First there are these structures; then particular individuals fill their functions.
Why call Misato an anal father? Think back to the later story in the EVA TV series. Shinji moves into Misato’s home, and then Asuka comes to stay there too.3 Misato actually spends quite a lot of time trying to get the two together. As the anal father, she encourages the subject to enjoy himself—to enjoy this woman, Asuka. Now we have a problem. At first glance, of course, we can say that the anal father and the prohibiting father are opposed. But are they really? Look at EVA. In terms of social roles, Misato is Shinji’s superior and Gendo’s subordinate: she mediates between the two. Seen this way, the opposition between Gendo and Misato no longer seems so pronounced.
To understand the anal father and the father’s name better, let me introduce a famous Lacanian proposition: Kant with Sade. Kant elevates human beings and human reason to the position of legislating for all things. His ethics excludes subjective material from the highest good: it excludes such things as individual pleasure and suffering, which he considers pathological, making the highest good a universal law of pure form. What does that mean? Kant thinks that ethics—the highest good—cannot take anyone’s happiness as its starting point. Not anyone’s. These are particular things, not universal ones. Ethics should begin with a universal form. Whether something is moral depends not on its particular content but on its form. Sade, as we know, is a notorious sex maniac. The S in S&M comes from his name. Not only was he extremely perverse, he also wrote down his perverse experiences, in works such as Philosophy in the Bedroom. Lacan was not the first to bring Kant and Sade together. Horkheimer and Adorno had already done so in Dialectic of Enlightenment. They regarded Sade as the outcome of Kantian ethics: through an ethics that elevates human beings to the position of legislating for all things, Sade was liberated from certain traditional constraints. Sade is the bourgeois subject freed from those constraints. Lacan did not know about this discussion in Dialectic of Enlightenment. His later formulation was a coincidence.
So how does Lacan approach this proposition? On the basis of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Lacan develops his own “critique of pure desire.”4 What do I mean? Kant considers human beings endowed with universal reason. Lacan would add that they are also creatures endowed with universal desire. Take an example. Kant once described a libertine lusting after a sexual object in a room. Of course the libertine can hardly wait to rush inside and satisfy his desire. But suppose you erect a gallows outside the door and tell him: certainly, you may go inside and satisfy your desire, but when you come out you will be hanged. Kant thinks the libertine will weigh things up rationally and desist. Lacan finds this idea rather naïve. Human beings also have universal desire. There are precisely such perverts as Sade who would rush inside to satisfy their desire regardless of the gallows. Lacan goes further: what draws a pervert like Sade inside is not the object in the room, but the gallows—the possibility of being hanged.
Before Lacan, Bataille had already perceptively sensed this. He said that we need institutions, and we also need excess. Only when we have institutions, when prohibitions forbid things, can we enjoy the pleasure of violating those prohibitions. To paraphrase Bataille: law, as a merciless prohibition, intrinsically calls for its own transgression; people obtain enjoyment through this transgression. Law transgresses itself from within. Lacan goes further, declaring law the gravest of the many crimes humanity has committed since time immemorial.
First, let’s picture Freud’s topography: superego–ego–id iceberg diagram.jpg.
Lacan would ask: how does a prohibition issued by the paternal Other take effect in the subject? Through the superego. Previously, the Other imposed law/prohibition on me from outside my subjectivity. Now my superego takes it in and issues orders to my ego. Of course the ego suffers terribly under the law’s torment, but meanwhile the superego has successfully obtained some pleasure. The superego has duly enforced the law; watching the ego suffer gives it pleasure. We can identify with the law because it gives at least one part of the subject’s psyche pleasure. We take pleasure in the law’s tormenting us. That is why law is the most heinous of our many crimes.
On the one hand, law calls for its own transgression; on the other, law itself is a crime. Together these clarify the proposition of Sade with Kant. Once we have completed this argument, we discover that the Name-of-the-Father and the anal father are actually the same thing. In a dialectical process in the Hegelian sense, the Name-of-the-Father turns into an anal father. By issuing prohibitions to the subject, the Name-of-the-Father torments it and takes pleasure in doing so. And now things become complicated again.
We just said that an exchange takes place between the subject and the father’s prohibition. The subject gives up the imaginary phallus—[incestuous] desire—in exchange for a symbolic phallus: the father’s promise, a signifier/word that can represent the subject’s own desire. If the father maintained the severe stance of the Name-of-the-Father, this exchange might be able to continue. The arrangement seems to be an even exchange. But precisely because the father obtains illicit enjoyment from the transaction by tormenting the subject, by subjecting it to symbolic castration, the exchange now seems out of balance from the subject’s side. The father seems to retain more and lose less. The subject seems to give up a little more than it receives. This thing—the thing the subject loses—is what Lacan calls objet petit a, object a. So what happens when I plot this change in the exchange, this symbolic castration of the subject, on the graph of desire? The subject now sees a surplus in what it has given up over what it has received, a surplus called objet petit a. Its desire is precisely desire for this objet petit a. The subject therefore urgently throws a question to the father, calling him to account, demanding that he actually complete the exchange, make it an even exchange, and give objet petit a back.
But what form does this challenge take? It becomes the question: What exactly do you want me to do? The subject asks its father: what exactly do you want me to do before you’ll return the objet petit a—the filthy remainder—you confiscated from me? The subject throws this question to the father. The trouble is that the father himself has no idea what this objet petit a he confiscated from the subject actually is. And that brings us to the third thread of today’s argument: the humiliated father.
What is a humiliated father like? Let’s look at the utterly discredited Gendo in The End of Evangelion.
In this scene, Gendo has undergone a dialectical reversal, from the imposing Name-of-the-Father into the anal father of enjoyment. Now, precisely through that enjoyment, he has destroyed the authority of the Name-of-the-Father and become a humiliated father. Why does Gendo finally collapse? He is not merely brought down physically. He also collapses as a name, as a symbolic function. What exactly went wrong? He exposed too much of his own desire in this situation. And what is Gendo’s desire? It lies in his inability to face his own child, Shinji. The key is this question: what exactly do you want me to do? This is the message the subject Shinji sends to Gendo—to the order of the paternal Other. But Gendo cannot answer it. So he is desperate to throw the question to the other end. To whom? To the Other of the paternal Other, a mOther: the English word “mother” with a capital O. But here Lacan insists that there is no “Other of the Other.” In other words, the father cannot pass the question any further. No one can answer it. The mOther corresponds to a Freudian concept, das Ding—the Thing, rendered in Chinese as 原质 (yuanzhi). It is the imagined person capable of answering “What exactly do you want me to do?” The problem is that this person does not exist.
Thus the challenge “What exactly do you want me to do?” travels along this line of the graph of desire, thrown from the subject to the paternal Other. The paternal Other wants to throw it to another Other, but there is no “Other of the Other,” so the question is left hanging in midair. The subject, too, is left hanging along this line, without being given a secure place to stand. Both Lacan and Freud call the emotion the subject experiences at this point “anxiety.” This “anxiety” is an affect without an object, because its object has been left hanging within the question.5 It is not an affect thrown toward an object, but an affect thrown toward lack. There is an imagined Other who could answer the question, but this Other does not actually exist.
This brings us to another concept Lacan discusses: the limit of Atē, which he draws from Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone in one of his seminars. In Antigone, it is the name of a goddess; Lacan interprets it as a boundary. From one side of Atē, the subject sees the truth of its desire: the object it ultimately desires and ultimately loses. But once the subject crosses Atē and comes into contact with this object, the subject disappears, because the object exists only in the imagination, not in actuality. Atē, this boundary between life and death, takes us to today’s next ACG text: Makoto Shinkai’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days.
Before that, one more thing about the humiliated father. This figure also appears in another anime, Flip Flappers, whose central story pays homage to EVA in many places. It contains a thoroughly embarrassing humiliated father. Who humiliates him? A mother figure: the object believed capable of answering his question. Back in EVA, after the scene we just saw, giant white Rei appears to carry out the Human Instrumentality Project. This giant white Rei is das Ding. She is actually the imagined object thought capable of answering the question, an object that does not actually exist. If the subject really reaches the point where “What exactly do you want me to do?” receives an answer, the subject’s desire disappears, and the subject consequently disappears too.
How does Lacan define a human being? Through this formula of fantasy. On this side is the human subject; on the other is its desired objet petit a. Between them is a very strange diamond-shaped symbol: discordance, development, connection, and divergence.6 In other words, the ultimate absence of the desired objet petit a is a positive sign for the formation of the subject. Only by seeking objet petit a and failing to obtain it can the subject become human, escape the animal-like inertia of immediately realizing its own essence, and become a subject. Now we know what Atē means. Atē is this strange diamond, which ensures that the subject and the object of its desire ultimately remain separate. If it turns into a horizontal line and the subject crosses Atē, the subject finally disappears.
Let’s turn to The Place Promised in Our Early Days. Japan is divided into northern and southern territories under separate rule. The male lead, Hiroki, lives south of the strait. In the north stands an immensely mysterious tower: an object of phallic worship—not the symbolic, capitalized phallus, but the imaginary phallus. As a boy, Hiroki gazes across the strait at this enormous tower. The female lead, Sayuri, promises him that they will build a small airplane and go to see it. But then Sayuri falls into a deep sleep and is transferred to a hospital in Tokyo, and Hiroki loses his motivation. Years later, Hiroki is living aimlessly in Tokyo when, at some point, he begins to dream frequently of Sayuri. By chance, he learns that she has been suffering from an unexplained memory disorder ever since that summer when she was fifteen, and has remained asleep in the hospital.
Then, for no very good reason, Hiroki revives his dream of building a plane and going with Sayuri to see that phallus. Taking advantage of the chaos of war, he brings the sleeping Sayuri aboard and flies across the Tsugaru Strait, crossing Atē to come into contact with the imaginary phallus. Then, after she and Hiroki come into contact with the tower, Sayuri wakes up. And the story ends.
You’ll notice that The Place Promised has the same structure as a fairy tale: at a certain point, the whole story abruptly stops. From a psychoanalytic perspective, then, we can say that something must have been repressed here—something that wants to be said but cannot be. Fortunately, I think Shinkai did manage to say it in 5 Centimeters per Second. 5 Centimeters per Second is an ending that The Place Promised never gave concrete form. It also introduces the last thread of today’s main argument. This is not another kind of father figure, but the father’s ultimate absence, because the father has already come crashing down at the stage of humiliation. I call this fatherless subject the post-Oedipal subject.
Giant white Rei in EVA shows us the ending in which the subject crosses Atē, comes into contact with the ultimate truth of desire, and disappears. The Place Promised is rather cleverer: it discreetly omits what happens after Hiroki and Sayuri reach the tower. The story abruptly stops. In 5 Centimeters per Second, meanwhile, Takaki encounters Akari at the end of the film. After passing her at the railway crossing, he turns and walks away, becoming a post-Oedipal subject. The post-Oedipal subject has a melancholic structure. Freud explained this structure in “Mourning and Melancholia.” The symptom of this melancholic subject is to regard an object of desire it has already obtained as already lost. What does that mean? After his chance encounter with Akari, Takaki does not pursue her. Instead, he turns and walks away, putting a great distance between himself and this object of desire. If I splice this scene back into The Place Promised, you’ll see what happens after Hiroki and Sayuri reach the tower: they break up. Takaki knows he cannot cross Atē and come into contact with Akari.
Let’s look at the final scene with Asuka and Shinji in The End of Evangelion, and recall the proposition of Kant with Sade. What really attracts the pervert is the possibility of being hanged. But now the severe Name-of-the-Father has collapsed in humiliation; the gallows has been burned down. Once the mediator between sexual objects disappears, the sexual relation disappears too. Why do I say Takaki is rather wise here? If he really went after Akari, we can imagine the actual outcome from the state of his life and the ring on her finger—and, of course, from the allusion to Japan’s social conditions. The reality that the sexual relation does not actually exist would be exposed. So through his melancholic structure, Takaki avoids catastrophe, avoids Akari, avoids the fact that there is no sexual relation. As Žižek says, he evades nonexistence through prohibition. Das Ding does not exist. The maternal Other who would satisfy all our desires does not exist. The subject desires something that does not actually exist and experiences tremendous anxiety. Now the father intervenes with his prohibition, forbids desire for the maternal Other, and the subject returns to normal. The subject has found a “person” to blame. It is not that the maternal Other does not exist; it is that the father has forbidden it.
In the Oedipus complex, then, the father plays the role of a rescuer, saving the subject from anxiety under the glare of the Thing. But now, in the passage from the Name-of-the-Father to the anal father to the humiliated father, the function of the Name-of-the-Father has collapsed. What is the subject to do? Think back to the superego. The authority of the father’s name is now gone. The superego issues prohibitions to the subject instead. The subject now avoids catastrophe and its own object of desire of its own accord, and this ultimately structures the subject within a symptom. Through this symptom, the question “What exactly do you want me to do?” no longer hangs in midair: it has something concrete to rest on. What gives it that support? The prohibitions the superego issues to the subject.
Do I still need to explain what a post-Oedipal subject is? Think about how we become subjects who try to lose weight of our own accord. Does anyone actually show up and demand that we manage our weight? No. It is really our superego issuing prohibitions to ourselves: work out, go on a diet, torment the subject like this. But through this torment the superego obtains pleasure, and now we know what we’re supposed to do. That’s all. This concludes the main line of my talk. I have a few additional thoughts of my own.
What do I think this progression—from the Name-of-the-Father to the anal father to the humiliated father to the post-Oedipal subject—actually reveals? I call it a psychoanalytic historical materialism. The gradual passage from Kant’s Enlightenment subject, held in check by discipline, to the neoliberal, Deleuzian body without organs is actually the development of capital—or capital’s libidinal model. It is the development of a libidinal economy. Today’s globalized world, especially Europe and America, has received neoliberalism’s promise: the promise to lift the prohibitions of the Name-of-the-Father. It is the promise offered under the slogan “It is forbidden to forbid”: we will abolish every prohibition. And what is the result? The post-Oedipal subject. We have not been liberated. We cannot be liberated. The libidinal economy will not allow us to be liberated. We can only structure ourselves within a symptom.
Lacan says that all those subjects who seek a psychoanalyst’s help because their symptoms torment them are actually enjoying their symptoms. Where desire has disappeared, the symptom is the only thing that allows the subject to keep going. That is why I say you cannot cross Atē. If the father does not give you a prohibition, the superego has to give you one instead. If anyone here takes an optimistic, progressive, Enlightenment view of humanity, what I’ve said today may be rather despair-inducing. When we abolish all prohibitions and live as ourselves, what we are actually undergoing is an enormous exercise in blackmail by the superego. Being ourselves amounts to nothing more than being selves formed within a symptom.
Does it end there? Is there no way out? Can psychoanalysis offer us no historical alternative? Let’s look at the graph of desire. After the post-Oedipal subject has structured itself within a symptom, there is still another part.
The line of the father’s law is a symbolic line. The subject’s mirror image belongs to an imaginary line, and the line we discussed earlier, leading from anxiety to the symptom, is still an imaginary line. In the Imaginary—in the Imaginary—the subject regains the satisfaction of its desire. What is the part I have added? The line of the Real. The Real is strictly distinct from reality: where there is reality, there is no Real; where there is the Real, there is no reality. How do we explain this line? The subject previously identified with the father, but the father was revealed as a humiliated father. So the subject threw its desire outward, beyond the paternal Other. Now, guided by drive, it has reached this position. What position? A signifier missing in the paternal Other, the big Other.7 This is the position that offers a possible alternative within psychoanalytic historical materialism. But it is a missing signifier/word, and here I can only give it a makeshift name: X. Or, to use one of Lacan’s strange formulations: Woman does not exist.8 This X does not exist either. The ultimate historical alternative is woman.
To explain this strange literal formulation, let’s turn to the formulas of sexuation. We won’t discuss the other quadrants today. Look at this part. Here again is a subject marked by lack, S. This is a male subject, and you can quite reasonably regard this line as Atē too. The male subject crosses Atē and sees his a. This is still a formula of fantasy; [a is] the cause of his desire, but he cannot actually come into contact with it.9 The subject La on this side is a female subject, who also crosses Atē and identifies with the father. Of course, no subject can escape the father. She identifies with the phallus the father gives her, which represents desire. But at the same time, woman also turns toward the signifier missing in the Other, beyond the phallus.
Finally, let me remind you that I will not give an extensive explanation of this signifier missing in the Other. I will only point to what it shares with the ideas put forward by twentieth-century radical thinkers. Why couldn’t the signifier missing in the Other be Badiou’s “passion for the real,” Derrida’s Specters of Marx, or the “void” in Althusser’s late manuscripts? Finally, we return to the Messiah. Why isn’t the signifier missing in the Other the catastrophe and corpses toward which Benjamin turns, through Angelus Novus, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”? For this missing signifier can enable us, in messianic time, in change at a standstill, to free the subject from the pseudo-action of hysteria and melancholia, and to encounter the Real that persists in stillness.
Zhang’s response:
This is the furthest I’ve ever ventured from my own field in a talk. Faced with this sort of situation, there’s always a cunning maneuver available: bring the subject back to familiar territory. You’re only safe from defeat when you speak with your own theme music playing. I learned quite a bit from listening to Yuban. When I read psychoanalytic books, I don’t usually think in terms of such a large framework, and I haven’t worked out such a long chain. From my perspective as an academically trained scholar, I really admire the ability to sustain an argument over that distance and grasp the larger picture.
In the animated scene we saw during the discussion of the humiliated father, I noticed for the first time how dark the shadow behind Gendo is. He lies on the ground looking utterly done for. Perhaps this scene suggests that he has only ever dressed himself up as an absolutely unassailable image of authority. As an actual person, he cannot attain that unassailable authority. At the very end of his life, he finally separates from this image of authority—the dark shadow. The authoritative image represented by that dark shadow is something he can never truly attain.
Now I’m bringing the discussion back onto my own battlefield, hahaha. For today’s subject and the ACG works we’re discussing, there seem to be theoretical resources we can draw on besides psychoanalysis. I’m thinking of Butler. One of her theories is quite well suited to EVA and the Shinkai works discussed today. Let me briefly sketch its basic approach.
First, everyone who obeys an order faces a problem, a form of blackmail: either you obey or you die. Take the first EVA scene we watched. Shinji is ordered to pilot EVA. Commander Ikari: either pilot EVA or get out. That is social death. You can go on living, but not in the way you hoped to live; you are expelled from the community. So in practice, your only choice is obedience. This is the basic problem Butler addresses. One of her fundamental arguments is that, although the situation looks very bleak, once you make that choice there is actually some possibility, some potential, for liberation. After you choose to obey, this leads to—well, there is a basic premise here. Initially, what you obey is an external authority. But that authority cannot actually watch everything around the clock and hold your hand, teaching you how to obey. For any external authority to take effect, it must therefore be internalized: you yourself must identify with it and follow it to some degree. An external authority that originally stood high above you is now internalized by the subject. Once obedience to commands becomes an expression of your own will, two possibilities arise:
- You get into bed with external authority, put yourself in its place in your own mind, and become its most loyal lackey. Without needing external supervision, you willingly obey and demand obedience from others—a lapdog and a servile lackey, more fanatical about following orders than the indifferent authority itself.
- Through internalization, we acquire a measure of agency. We originally thought that we simply obeyed external authority in a one-way relationship. But now we see that, for external authority to be implemented and take effect in reality, it always needs our own strength, will, and willingness to cooperate. So we have some leverage of our own. This means you can adopt resistant and disruptive stances and undertake resistant and disruptive acts in your own life.
Think back to EVA. In many later scenes, Shinji takes a resistant stance. He soon realizes that, often, he alone can pilot EVA and save the world. Clearly Gendo and the institutions need his cooperation. Shinji’s repeated displays of resistance and weariness fit very well with the two possibilities Butler describes here. Commander Ikari seems to run everything, but Shinji actually has some power to decide, some ability to control the situation. He can use that power to resist.
With Shinkai, things are a little more complicated. There is also an immediate real-world, sociohistorical reason why his works are so popular in Japan—in Japan. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but I used to see lots of comments at the end of Shinkai videos on Bilibili saying “[Name], I’m sorry” or “[Name], I like you”: viewer comments scrolling across the video itself. (Editor: They’re still there, hahaha.) As you know, contemporary Japan is a society with an acutely low birthrate. So much of the lofty rhetoric of its mainstream culture instructs and entices people to hurry up and have children: having children is good. But conversely, as you know, ACG culture distances itself from mainstream ideology. In this sense, Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters per Second is a “single dog” film—danshen gou, the self-mocking Chinese label for people without partners.10 That is, it takes a deeply skeptical, cool, even resistant attitude toward the mainstream ideological message to “hurry up and have children”: being a “single dog” is pretty good too. Why have children?
Here, then, we encounter the difficult situation Butler describes. “Japan,” the external authority, seems to control everything, yet the subject retains some leverage. Ultimately, after all, the right to choose whether or not to have children remains with people themselves. The family and the state cannot actually take the whole business of having children into their own hands. Here too, we face two possibilities, can choose one, and can use our own initiative to resist: well, I’m not having children. Being single is pretty good too. This underlying choice of singleness appears in Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters per Second and other works. Butler’s theory can help us discern certain features of EVA and Shinkai’s works, offering us a way to understand them.
Finally, I want to flag a problem with this theory of Butler’s. Does the path to liberation she proposes really have much liberating force in practice? Take Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters per Second. The film tells a “What’s wrong with a single-dog ending?.jpg” story. But if you really want a further, genuine improvement in the world, what further difference does simply going on being a “single dog” make? Although this is a form of resistance, does it really rise to the level of liberation? Resistance is not the same as liberation; its effects may be very limited. In EVA, Shinji may have won some say through repeated resistance, perhaps even an opportunity to come into contact with Rei, but he is still forced to pilot EVA. Resistance alone may not bring any genuine improvement to Shinji’s world.
Editor’s note:
I’m sure all of you with those motion-tracking eyes have understood every last bit of this lecture.