The unconscious—or the absence of ritual?1
Preface—Nova
After leaving Madhouse to work freelance, Tensai Okamura maintained a working relationship with the newly founded Bones studio through his involvement in Cowboy Bebop. One day around the turn of the century, he was walking down a city street when a window suddenly opened in a traditional Japanese four-and-a-half-tatami apartment beside him, and a Black man leaned out. It was just like the scene in which Li Shenshun moves into the Umitsuki boardinghouse. That encounter sparked the idea for Darker than Black, a work of yojōhan SF, or “four-and-a-half-tatami” science fiction.
—If Tensai Okamura Can’t Answer It, Ask Lacan!
A project that allowed extraordinary creative freedom, Darker than Black (DTB) brings together everything Okamura had developed as a creator. Drawing on his experience and insights as a storyboard artist for Cowboy Bebop, he chose a two-episode story structure so that newly introduced characters could be more fully realised. His inspirations included not only Japanese television dramas of the 1970s and 1980s—Kizu darake no tenshi (傷だらけの天使), Kogarashi Monjirō, and Detective Story (Tantei monogatari)—but also such celebrated works of Soviet science fiction as Stalker and Roadside Picnic. In DTB, the world-building, full of mysteries and allegorical meanings, is closely bound up with the story’s concern for human lives. Viewers are left to feel their way through their bewilderment as they search, and at its core the work independently converges with the ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis: an ethics directed towards jouissance (enjoyment). This essay will approach the work from within, using the straightforward method of examining its characters, plot, and setting to uncover that core. It will reveal how DTB guides both its characters and its viewers through layer upon layer of fantasy towards the impossible sublime object.
Ⅰ. Interrogation by the Gate of the Real
1.1 The City’s Sore Point
Ten years ago, an unidentified ray from outer space passed through the Earth, leaving regions known as Gates at either end. Near the Gates, common sense and the laws of physics no longer hold; the phenomena there are incomprehensible. Five years ago, Heaven’s War rendered Heaven’s Gate in Brazil physically inaccessible. Now, agencies from across the world are conducting operations around Hell’s Gate in Tokyo. Pandora is one such international organisation. It brings together the world’s leading scientists to investigate the area around the Gate and discover its physical principles. Yet scientific explanation always ends in failure here; even description is extraordinarily difficult. In episodes 11 and 12, Pandora’s scientists send a probe vehicle into the Gate, only to discover that the terrain has changed again without their noticing. They have no choice but to redraw the map once more. In episodes 3 and 4, the sole survivor of an expedition into the Gate brings back two flower seeds. Even after years of painstaking cultivation, the plants fail to bear the fruit that would bring hope, and finally wither. The fundamental reason for this failure of mastery is not that human technology is insufficiently advanced. Understanding the Gate is itself impossible. Its appearance invades reality, opening a wound onto the Real, where description and symbolisation are no longer possible. And so the investigator who barely escaped the Gate alive warns everyone: “This is no place for human beings.”
[The Gate] is something incomprehensible. What I wanted to convey was “absolute incomprehensibility” itself. The mysteries won’t be solved. What I want viewers to experience is this: even though you can’t understand it, you can feel that something is there.
—Tensai Okamura
There is no doubt that the Gate’s appearance is an unmitigated catastrophe for the city and its people. The surrounding area is sealed off, and humanity erects walls hundreds of metres high around it. Within those walls lies a dead, deserted city. The Gate is like the sore point of the entire city; the towering wall is merely a futile sticking plaster, an illusion. Reflecting the city and sky like a mirror, it gives them a false continuity when seen from afar, concealing the city’s own incompleteness. The Gate behind the wall inflicts an irreparable trauma on the city, and the city is driven by it. Scientists, governments, churches, intelligence agencies, and even ordinary Tokyo residents act and change because the Gate has appeared.
1.2 The Interrogation of Desire
Near the Gate, people often come too close to trauma. In episodes 11 and 12, written by Shōtarō Suga, the CIA spy Carina arrives at Pandora’s research facility inside the wall. Repeatedly, she sees family members who should be dead condemning her betrayal of her country and her family. Unable to bear it, she finally breaks down. Hei, who has also infiltrated the institute, catches an unexpected glimpse of his long-missing sister during his mission and is thrown into extreme confusion and anxiety. This gaze from something obscure and unseen is dizzying, unbearable. For Lacan, the gaze comes precisely from objet petit a: it guides the subject to look and has already filled the entire field. Consciously and unconsciously, the domesticated subject builds a screen of fantasy to conceal it. By turning a blind eye to it, the subject maintains a comfortable yet fragile sense of reality, making things less unbearable. But the Gate can easily shatter this false sense of reality, leaving any subject who approaches it constantly exposed to incursions of the Real.
Okamura acknowledges that the Gate was inspired by the Zone left behind by alien visitors to Earth in Roadside Picnic. At the centre of the Zone stands the wish-granting Golden Sphere. After enduring countless hardships and sacrificing his companion, Redrick finally reaches this wish-machine—only to find himself unable to articulate his own wish. This ironic ending illustrates the paradox of desire. The subject can never fully grasp the object of desire, objet a, because that object is itself pure lack. Lack drives the subject to keep desiring, to miss it again and again. The position of this object of desire is both internal and external to the subject: Lacan calls this extimacy.
The Zone is thus not a purely mental fantasmatic space in which one encounters (or onto which one projects) the truth about oneself, but (like Solaris in Lem’s novel) the material presence, the Real of an absolute Otherness incompatible with the rules and laws of our universe.
—Slavoj Žižek, “The Thing from Inner Space”
By contrast, DTB’s Gate lends impossible desire the rhetoric of myth, making it “possible.” When Nick and Hei actually enter the Gate’s inner space, Nick touches the impossible objet a on the far shore and fulfils his wish (through visual metaphor): he becomes a child again, recovers the true starry sky, is reunited with his sister, and flies into space in a rocket that looks like a child’s drawing. At this moment, Nick recovers the object of desire that has remained in suspension and enters a state of wholeness. He is no longer a “barred subject” (), but a complete subject exists only in the dimension of myth. Having attained completeness, Nick therefore disappears/fades away (aphanisis). In this sense, the Gate is the ultimate interrogation room. It easily shatters the fantasy that sustains the subject’s reality, exposes desire to the subject, and forces a choice: go on living while facing lack, or embrace impossible fulfilment/completeness at the cost of existence.
Ⅱ. Three Kinds of Subject and Their Symptoms
2.1 Slaves to the Law of the Contract—Contractors
Contractors are a group of people with supernatural powers. Under the influence of the Gate, they undergo ideological interpellation in an entirely different way. They abide by Contractor rationality, have little emotional attachment, and are people who “never hesitate when faced with a choice, but proceed straight towards their goal.” Okamura also points out that Contractors get their name because it is “as though” they have entered into a “contract” with something—not because they have actually struck a bargain with some entity. The original “contract” is therefore an empty master signifier, firmly anchoring the Contractor-subject in a symbolic order whose values differ from those of human society. The castration imposed by the “contract” inhibits Contractors’ investment of libido in human emotions and morality, directing more of it towards their symbolic identification with Contractor rationality.
Yet Contractors, whose actions appear to follow a seamless logic, have their exception: the price they must pay, their “remuneration,” a fundamental lack in the Real left by the contract’s castration. Contractors do not understand why they must perform such irrational, meaningless acts after using their powers, but their unconscious tells them that they must. Remuneration is a response to the trauma at the core of a Contractor’s unconscious, not the trauma itself. Suō, for instance, who was copied and implanted with memories, pays through origami, which she learnt before her original body died. The singer whose baby choked to death on a cigarette must swallow foreign objects and vomit them up. Hazuki, a lesbian, must kiss men. Remuneration breaks the continuity and completeness of Contractors’ adherence to rationality, compelling them to return repeatedly to the original trauma. It is a manifestation of the Contractor-subject’s objet a—and this is precisely the human core that distinguishes Contractors from pure killing “machines.”
Here we must consider a special case: Contractors with possession abilities who pay their price in full, all at once. For them, the death of their original body is a permanent loss. But that does not mean everything is settled once and for all—that after making a single payment they can become perfect agents of “the contract’s rationality.” In episodes 7 and 8, a body-possessing Contractor has already paid his price through the loss of his body, yet he still repeatedly smells his socks as a ritual, because they are the only medium that retains the scent of the body he once had. Through this spontaneously arising compulsion, he can still return repeatedly to the original lack. Mao, another who has paid in full, has no obvious compulsive ritual. Does this not show that, psychically, Mao is not so much of a “Contractor”—that is, a slave to the law of Contractor rationality? The more they pursue perfect rationality, the more fiercely their compulsive symptoms strike back, and the more divided the subject becomes. They must therefore seek rationalisation to mend that division. In this sense, are Contractors not a particular kind of obsessional subject?
2.2 Psychosis That Refuses the Contract—Moratoriums
If Contractors are obsessional subjects, belonging to the structure of neurosis, then Moratoriums—those whose payment is deferred—are psychotic subjects in Lacan’s sense. The psychologist Erik Erikson used moratorium to describe adolescents still searching for an identity. The Japanese psychiatrist Keigo Okonogi brought the concept of “moratorium people” into the Japanese context to describe those who had reached adulthood but still failed to integrate into society. His emphasis was on a loss of sociality—that is, a separation from the Symbolic. Returning to DTB, we find Moratoriums portrayed through a logic similar to both. When a subject who has already become a Contractor refuses to pay the price, refuses castration, and insists that jouissance remains possible, this ultimately causes the Name-of-the-Father to fall away. The subject descends into the condition of a Moratorium, with the unconscious out in the open and powers out of control. This is precisely what Lacan calls the psychotic subject.
It is an accident in this register and in what occurs in it—namely, the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father in the place of the Other—and the failure of the paternal metaphor that I designate as the defect that gives psychosis its essential condition, along with the structure that separates it from neurosis.
—Jacques Lacan2
In the story told in episodes 3 and 4, Mai suddenly becomes a Contractor as a young child. To seal his daughter’s contract, her father implants a seed brought back from the Gate in her wrist. From then on, Mai no longer identifies with the law governing Contractors and naturally does not understand what remuneration is. When the seed’s seal weakens, she can no longer exist as a Contractor. She becomes an out-of-control Moratorium, a monster rampaging through the city streets. Screenwriter Yūichi Nomura’s most ingenious move is to bring this change in Mai’s status back into her family relationships. To cultivate seeds that will continue to seal his daughter’s contract, her father shuts himself away in his laboratory for years on end. The paternal figure is thus absent throughout Mai’s childhood and adolescence, indirectly destabilising her identification with paternal law. Her loss of control over her powers and the death of her friend then sever her entirely from the symbolic order that constructs reality. At the same time, Mai has always held to a fantasy of her father as ideal and perfect: someone who could give her care and companionship and fulfil the wish she truly cherishes. But no such father exists in reality. When he finally admits that he is a terrible father and is killed before her eyes, Mai truly recognises the “death/nonexistence” of the “primal father/jouissance.” She relinquishes impossible enjoyment and once again accepts the contract’s interpellation, returning from psychosis to being a Contractor.
2.3 From Doll to Human
Dolls are another group transformed into something other by the Gate’s appearance. They can transmit observer spirits through particular media. Like Contractors, they were originally human. Unlike Contractors, however, Dolls are beings marked by material lack: they have lost desire, they have lost memory, they have lost agency—in other words, they have lost “loss” itself. In the series’ setting, they can carry out basic commands through implanted programs, just like puppets being manipulated. They are the beings closest to machines. Yet programmed Dolls are not in a static state. They are undergoing a slow transition from Doll to human, and only by crossing a threshold can they truly return to human subjectivity. That threshold is desire. The series points to a clear route by which Dolls can return to being human subjects: entering the space of language. With the aid of programming language, they interact with humans and gradually enter the Symbolic. As Lacan famously puts it, “the unconscious is structured like a language.” Awakening a Doll’s unconscious therefore requires the functions of language: metaphor and metonymy can enable Dolls to recover the core trauma/objet a that belongs to them as humans.
In episodes 13 and 14, written by Shinsuke Ōnishi, a familiar piano melody repeatedly returns, awakening Yin’s sleeping memories. Along with her past, she recalls the accidents of her childhood: her parents’ deaths. The awakening of memory allows Yin to recover her trauma, and her desire turns once again towards objet a on the far shore. With the death drive at work, she regains agency as a human subject: she refuses the pianist’s request and actively chooses to remain as Hei’s companion. At the end of the story, Yin opens her arms to welcome back her observer spirit, as though embracing her awakened unconscious. She accepts her painful memories, and the tears she sheds are human tears.
Ⅲ. Passing Through the False Starry Sky
3.1 The Place of the Sublime Star
The starry sky is a key image running throughout DTB. The true starry sky has already been lost; the Contractors’ sky has taken its place. When a Contractor comes into being, they enter the observable scopic field, receive a Messier designation (such as BK201), and acquire a symbolic “identity” in the sky of the contract. This is just as being a member of society means occupying a symbolic position in a society constituted by laws and contracts. In Romanian folklore, each star represents a person’s soul, and a falling star signifies a death. In DTB, the stars of the contract signify Contractors’ deaths in a similar way. More than this, the stars are the Contractors’ other bodies: symbolic bodies in the heavens.
Five years ago, Bai discovered the Syndicate’s plot to eliminate all Contractors and resolved to resist it. But she did not want her brother Hei to be caught up in the conflict. She sent him away from the battlefield, then disappeared into Heaven’s Gate herself. Although her physical body no longer exists, her star has not fallen. Between the death of the symbolic body and that of the biological body—the two deaths proposed by Lacan—we find the place of the sublime. This is where the sister Hei has searched for so desperately is to be found: Xing, Bai’s real name, meaning “Star.” “My brother is my brother,” says the sister who resisted the Syndicate to protect Hei and now exists between the two deaths. It is hard not to think of Antigone in Greek tragedy, who defies Creon to bury her brother and, shut away in a tomb, enters the space “between two deaths.”
“As far as I am concerned, the order that you dare refer me to doesn’t mean anything, for from my point of view, my brother is my brother.”3
This place “between the two deaths”, a place of sublime beauty as well as terrifying monsters, is the site of das Ding, of the real-traumatic kernel in the midst of symbolic order. This place is opened by symbolization/historicization: the process of historicization implies an empty place, a non-historical kernel around which the symbolic network is articulated.
—Slavoj Žižek4
3.2 The Stargazer Who Traverses the Fantasy
Heaven’s War five years earlier deprived Hei of his only family, Bai. He was not there, and he does not know her true purpose in disappearing. For him, it is an inexplicable loss in the Real, a trauma the subject can scarcely face. Hei therefore constructs a fantasy: he believes that he lost Bai because Amber betrayed him, and so he hates Contractors and traitors. The opening of the first episode depicts the subject’s “symptom” with stark directness. In an irrational rage, Hei executes a Contractor who is still worth keeping alive, because the man sold out his teammates to save himself. Yet meeting Nick in episodes 11 and 12 shakes Hei’s conviction—his fantasy. Having witnessed the wish of Nick, a Contractor, Hei has no choice but to question it: perhaps Contractors are not all liars/traitors; perhaps Contractors dream too; perhaps Contractors are not fundamentally different from humans.
As his missions bring him into contact with different groups of people, Hei gradually changes his view of Contractors and realises that he has simply been unable to come to terms with that loss. Through Amber’s unstinting efforts, Hei chooses to trust her again and learns the truth about South America: Amber and Bai have been fighting all along to protect him. For Hei, his sister is the sublime object that drives his relentless search. When he traverses the fantasy of hatred and that false starry sky, finally reuniting briefly with his sister in episode 25, he too stands beneath the true stars. In his final choice, his farewell to her shows that he has come to terms with this loss. Unlike other Contractors, Hei has not accepted the “contract’s” interpellation. He has been human from beginning to end. That loss is precisely what drives his character arc: he loses his way in fantasy and suffers loss in the search.
[Hei] seems cold and unapproachable at first, but there is kindness and nobility in his heart. In the end, circumstances force his hand, yet he still holds on to his anger. I suppose that’s the kind of hero I like.
—Tensai Okamura
3.3 The True Starry Sky
In episode 23, Shinsuke Ōnishi questions the characters about the starry sky of the past. An urban legend is circulating: on this particular night, people will be able to see the true starry sky. Everyone puts on a show of not believing it, yet when night comes they all look up, seeking the true stars they hold in their hearts. Unfortunately, the weather refuses to cooperate. Rain falls that night, and nothing can be seen. It is as though heaven has played a gentle joke, concealing the fact that there is nothing there and using the rain as an excuse to protect people’s cherished hopes.
What, then, does the true starry sky signify? There are many ways to put the answer: a memory, a longing, someone important, or a name for something beautiful. But none of that matters. The answer differs for each character and each viewer: it is a parallax view. Whatever the sky represents, what matters more is that it is always a lost Thing (das Ding), the stargazer’s objet a. Concealed by the screen of fantasy that is the false starry sky, it is invisible, yet it keeps driving the subject to desire and pursue: it is a sublime object. Only by traversing this false starry sky, passing through fantasy, through symbols, through language, can one see the true stars glimmering in the depths of the unconscious. But the truth already awaiting the subject beneath those stars is nothing but lack—absurd and laughable, yet something the subject must shoulder.
—An Impossible Undertaking
Yet the age when we could readily look up at the stars has long been in decline. Now, only when the dazzling, glaring lights of university discourse go out one by one can we discover that the faint starlight on the horizon is, after all, a reliable guide.
—A Gleam in Eternal Night5
DTB is a work about “loss.” Mission after mission, Hei witnesses the characters’ many tragedies: Havoc has lost her past; Misaki could not protect an old friend; Hitotsubashi has lost something more precious than life. Viewers, in turn, witness Hei’s tragedy: after losing his sister, he loses Yin as well. This meaning can also be read radically into the title Seiji Takeda gave the work, much as Lacan radically reads Freud’s “testament.” Black is the absence of light, a signifier of “nothing.” DARKER THAN BLACK therefore means less than nothing: lack in the Real. Once the work has guided us through layer upon layer of fantasy and we finally arrive before that lost thing, is everything over? Certainly not.
Precisely because of “loss,” DTB is also a work about “searching.” Misaki searches for her own justice; Suō searches for the truth about her family; Hei searches for his sister and Yin, and for that lost starry sky. In their continual searching, subjects accept their incompleteness, accept their lack, repeatedly eliminate symptoms, and construct new orders of reality—while further losses bring them new symptoms in turn. As Misaki tells Kobayashi at the end of the second season, “This isn’t an ending. It’s a beginning.” The subject can never be complete. This is an impossible undertaking. But for Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is precisely by starting from this impossibility that genuine possibility can open up.
References
- Slavoj Žižek, “The Thing from Inner Space.”
- Ma Yuanlong, “Antigone and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis” (《安提戈涅与精神分析的伦理学》).
- Wu Qiong, “The Gaze of the Other: Lacan’s Theory of the Gaze” (《他者的凝视——拉康的“凝视”理论》).
- Li Xixiang, “From the Base to the Sublime: The Logic of the Transformation from Lacan’s Objet a to Žižek’s Sublime Object” (《从卑俗到崇高——论拉康之“对象 a”到齐泽克之“崇高对象”的嬗变逻辑》).
- Wu Qiong, Jacques Lacan: Read Your Symptoms (《雅克·拉康：阅读你的症状》).
- Shen Zhizhong (沈志忠), A Gleam in Eternal Night: Lacan and the Unending Revolution of Psychoanalysis (《永夜微光：拉岡與未竟之精神分析革命》).6
- Darker than Black Official Fanbook—Tokyo Explosion Investigation Report (『DARKER THAN BLACK OFFICIAL FANBOOK—トーキョーエクスプロージョン調査報告』).
- Nikkei Business Online, “It’s the ‘Useless Heroes’ of the Seventies We Can See Our Own Lives In” (「70年代の“だめなヒーロー”にこそ、人生を重ねられるんだ」).
- Nikkei Business Online, “‘A Winding Road of Wrong Turns’ May Be the ‘Shortcut’ to a Long Run” (「『迷い道くねくね』がロングランへの“近道”かも」).