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Ask which was the best new anime of January 2020, and the usual verdict is that everything apart from Interspecies Reviewers was mediocre. Zhibushao is not usually one to follow seasonal anime, but at friends’ urging began following this one midway through its run. It is unquestionably a masterpiece of a kind rarely seen in recent years. Both its underlying ideas and its wild flights of imagination deserve discussion; it gives us plenty to marvel at.
Precisely because it is a masterpiece, it is worth discussing critically. The anime and its source manga undoubtedly use “working girls”—in plain terms, prostitutes—as a selling point. Yet the story’s center of gravity ultimately lies with its “interspecies” premise and its fantasy world: a world where different species supposedly coexist as equals, and which inexplicably exhibits the postmodern condition of respecting cultural diversity and dissolving grand narratives. On the Chinese question-and-answer platform Zhihu, for instance, several answers hail the work as an exemplar of racial equality and sexual liberation. We can see how ridiculous this opinion is; the work itself exposes just how ridiculous it is. If support for cultural diversity leads people to take the parody at face value, that plainly shows that multiculturalism in reality is itself a joke.
1. Respect for Marginal Cultures, Brothel-Style
One rather stupid question on Zhihu asks, “Does Interspecies Reviewers tend to objectify women?” I call it stupid because the answer is beyond doubt. The sex industry is, almost self-evidently, a form of self-commodification. Perhaps one could argue that these women offer a slight measure of resistance by saying that they are having fun themselves, or satisfying their own needs and desires. But this resistance cannot counter what they undergo, even at the level of signs. Then there is the argument that “you shouldn’t use your own morality to understand other species.” In other words, other species have moralities, ethics, and ways of life absolutely distinct from “ours,” so we should abandon all further questioning and simply tolerate them. Can we really call this respect for marginal cultures? All it does is keep producing stereotypes of marginalized cultures and, in effect, induce the cultures being watched to organize their own spectacle around those stereotypes. It is as if someone were to say, “Japanese culture has no sexual taboos, so its women are promiscuous and porn actresses enjoy high status,” or, “Black people have no sense of responsibility or family and do nothing but use women”—then deliver a politically correct lecture: “Even so, you must tolerate all this!” This is the most immediate point the American literary critic Edward Wadie Said sought to make in Orientalism: the Orient represented by the West is merely an Orient constructed by the West, disregarding anything the Orient has to say for itself. Or, to go further, there is no Orient of the kind the West posits. Western discourse produces it and substitutes it for the reality to which it refers.
In this series, the working girls are actually called “succu-girls” (サキュバス嬢, literally “succubus girls”). Just as Japanese law prohibits prostitution but permits the “sex industry,”1 the establishments in this world operate under the pretext that their prostitutes are really succu-girls. In Western fantasy, a succubus is a creature that feeds on sexual energy absorbed through intercourse with humans. Presumably, under the principle that “members of one species have absolutely no standing to judge another species’ values,” establishments run by girls who really are succubi have escaped prohibition. Other species therefore evade the restrictions by claiming that their workers have succubus ancestry. Demanding tolerance in the name of race for something already banned—or something that ought to be banned—or, in other words, invoking race to excuse the revival of naked sexual exploitation and oppression, not only naturalizes that exploitation and oppression but also stigmatizes the race itself. Can succubi simply be equated with prostitutes? In episode four, the establishment for low-ranking succubi earns most of its income from payments made by the succu-girls, not by the men who buy sex. Even within the stereotypes the work constructs, then, succubi cannot be regarded as beings with sexual appetite but no reason, and no legitimate source of income apart from prostitution.
“Filthy. Disgusting.”
Stranger still than defending succubus establishments by making the succubi’s “way of life”—“given” and “impossible to overcome”—an object of respect, even reverence, is the intersection between reviews of succu-girls and identity politics. As the opening tells us, humans, elves, fairies, monsters, angels, and demons all coexist in this world. It undoubtedly contains multiple cultures. But just what is the relationship between marginal and mainstream cultures here?
In episode two and the final episode, Demon Lord Death Abyss’s propaganda minister runs into the protagonists during the Demon Lord’s campaign speech. The minister urges them to visit a demon-run succubus establishment and write a review that will improve the demons’ image, in the hope of raising support for the Demon Party. There are three problems here. First, marginalized cultures cannot really be seen. Second, the mainstream is willing, at most, to get to know them by “buying sex”—a safe method. Finally, how much can being seen and finding a voice really improve their position as the other of the mainstream’s desire, rather than another subject? If the demons have to make their culture understood through reviews of succu-girls, they can only remain forever defined by the mainstream gaze, losing their subjectivity. If Black people are reduced to “singing, dancing, RAP, basketball,” who will care who the people in those marginalized communities really are? What is objectified here is not merely the women of other races, but those other races as constructed entities! As for the notion that “marginalized cultures should be tolerated and seen,” the problem is not what the familiar accusation of “political correctness gone too far” makes it out to be. Tolerance is not genuine respect: this is certainly not too much, but too little. The mainstream is not “groveling” before the margins. It still treats them from the unquestioned position of the master—only now a kindly master who respects the “children’s” “individual freedom and wishes.” Nor does “too little” mean that not enough has been “given” to the other. It means that the entire order and system have undergone no fundamental emancipatory change. There is no excessive antiracism or feminism here, only disavowed racism and male chauvinism, all the more shameless now that they have shed the rhetoric of cultural superiority.
“This is Interspecies Reviewers.”
The way to unite people from different cultures—or the masses who ought to be raised to the status of the people—is not to call for “tolerance of our (absolute) differences.” It is to share our intolerance and unite in the same struggle for human emancipation. We should not accept a prejudiced account of difference translated into the terms of our own mainstream assumptions, but respect one another’s absolute differences without necessarily tolerating them. As the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek puts it, Christianity’s “Love thy neighbour as thyself” should become “Fear thy neighbour as thyself.” Against a tolerance without fear, fear is true love. And as the Zhihu contributor Shizai Gouzi argues, “Genuine communication means preserving the other’s otherness.” To communicate with the other—demons, elves, and so on—as equals, we must continue to acknowledge and respect an otherness we can neither understand nor tolerate, rather than erase it with the crude formula of a “tolerable way of life in another culture.” Nor is this the “bleeding-heart” behavior that racists think they can lump together with multiculturalism. It is a matter of “saving the other from me; only then might I save myself.”
2. Sexuality in the Atonal World
If this series, for all its apparently medieval Western-fantasy setting, exhibits a postmodern condition at odds with its economic base—meaning relations of production, not productive forces—this must extend beyond rules about tolerating other species and marginal cultures. It also lies in the nihilism and the social consciousness devoid of truth that pervade the protagonists’ circle. In episode one, Stunk and Zel rescue the angel Crim, who has been struck down by a magical beast. They agree to take Crim in, since the angel can no longer return to Heaven, but say they hope that, once recovered, Crim will take them up for a look—to visit Heaven’s succubus establishments! They even begin discussing whether goddesses might receive customers there. Can we call this blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy: their remarks still acknowledge the separation between gods and humans. But what do they show? The attitude is: rather than concern myself with the truth a god represents, I would rather try having sex with one. These remarks do not desecrate the supposed divinities. They express an attitude that drains the truth behind them of its seriousness.
“So it’s not OK to play in ways that bother the public?”
This is not confined to our band of lechers; it is an atmosphere pervading the whole society. The ruling party in the series is the Orc Party, and the elected king is a pig-man. The governing platform is to concentrate on food production and keep food prices down, cut taxes on trade to increase the circulation of goods, and devote any surplus budget entirely to developing the sex industry, so that the public can enjoy food, goods, and sex to their hearts’ content. In short, let everyone immerse themselves in enjoyment without having to think about anything. On the surface, this is a consumerist utopia. Yet under the ceaseless superego injunction “Enjoy!” there are no values worth upholding, no truth or wisdom worth loving—only endless enjoyment.
The French philosopher Alain Badiou developed the concept of the “atonal world.” Drawing on Badiou’s Logics of Worlds, Žižek describes it as follows: “the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally. Every Master-Signifier meant to impose some order on it must be deconstructed, dispersed: ‘… is really nothing but a generalized desire for atony.’”2 But it now seems rather inadequate to define this feature of the postmodern condition as a dissolution of order. This is not like the emancipatory practice with which these currents of thought began. It is precisely the effect of their having been co-opted by the order. The complexity of the world must be affirmed unconditionally, and so the actually existing order must also be affirmed unconditionally. Try advancing an emancipatory position as true, and you are trying to establish an oppressive system built on a grand narrative! The existing order has merely chosen to rule by brazenly relying on the balance of power and on a nihilism disguised as “ideology-free,” rather than through false truths. It dissolves truth in step with currents of resistance, leading people to believe that once the master’s discourse has disappeared, oppression has disappeared too. Yet the elephant is still in the room.
It is easy to see the protagonists’ fondness, especially Stunk’s, for Meidri, the winged waitress at the Ale & Eats tavern. And although Meidri always resorts to physical punishment when they act like idiots, she has clearly cared about Stunk all along. Sadly, love never emerges here. This is hardly surprising: it is difficult to imagine how a crowd who do nothing but haunt brothels could know love. Every expression of Stunk and company’s affection for Meidri turns into nothing but aggressive sexual harassment and stupid, desire-driven propositions. In the final episode, for instance, after staying up to see in the New Year, they discuss which establishment to visit on the first night of the New Year. Saying that the winged people’s succubus establishment is too far away, Stunk asks Meidri:
“How about we do it tonight…”
In the section “Sexuality in the Atonal World” of Violence, Žižek discusses the complete commodification of sex in Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, quoting Nicholas Sabloff within his account: “sex is an absolute necessity, to renounce it is to wither away, so love cannot flourish without sex; simultaneously, however, love is impossible precisely because of sex: sex, which ‘proliferates as the epitome of late capitalism’s dominance, has permanently stained human relationships as inevitable reproductions of the dehumanizing nature of liberal society; it has, essentially, ruined love.’” “Sex is thus … simultaneously the condition of the possibility and of the impossibility of love.”3 We must note that “sex” here means the sexual enjoyment encouraged by the maternal superego, not the traumatic (nonexistent) sexual relation.4 These stupid enjoyments lack the trauma of sexuality and the abyssal otherness of the object of sexual desire. They therefore dissolve the radical dimension of sexual relations that belongs to love—what I described in the previous section as “love the other as you fear yourself.” This is not a sexual relation between two people, but nothing more than stupid masturbation involving another body.
“There really are all kinds of people in the world.”
Even so, although “sexuality in the atonal world” makes love impossible, the crucial point lies not in sexuality but in the atonal world—even if this form of sexuality is its epitome. As Badiou says, whether we realize it or not, love is always love of truth. What makes love impossible is not merely the proliferation of sexual enjoyment, but the background against which it proliferates: the dissolution of truth. Love is dead. Truth is dead. Or rather, in this postmodern condition where no meaning remains, “it would be a surprise if anything were still alive.”
Yet this indictment is no call to return to old authorities and traditions. Truth is ultimately unsayable. The master-signifiers that once usurped its place did indeed deserve to die, and cannot come back to life. But as already noted, being “ideology-free” under the postmodern condition means nothing more than unconditionally affirming the actually existing order—or non-order—as “natural” and “common sense.” It is precisely a wholesale suppression of genuinely emancipatory views in the name of “opposing oppression.” Thus, although truth is ultimately unsayable and unattainable, we must nevertheless reawaken the demand of philosophy—that is, the demand to “love truth.” We should go further, to emancipate ourselves.