This essay was a prizewinner at the Rags Drum 2021 Eve Festival.
Prologue: No Legends for the Living Dead
A “dark world” run from the shadows by men in black suits, thick with gambling and illegal deals, is a subject that film and television love to make much of. This mysterious heterotopia satisfies our fantasy of a “backstage” to reality, and on screen it becomes a place of thrilling experience: banknotes flung into the air, gunfights erupting in the streets, secret transactions in the back alleys after midnight, the tension of betrayal among schemers each nursing their own designs. All the “hidden workings” that could never happen in everyday life feed our daydreams to the fullest.
The protagonists of such works are either gambling gods with dazzling skill at the table or heroes who can take on a hundred men and thread their way through hails of bullets. They are tightrope walkers dancing on the edge of danger, “performing” the sense of crisis at death’s approach to the utmost, letting the audience savor the thrill of these repeated feints toward death. Yet the audience also knows that the protagonist cannot blow it. A street juggler may sometimes miss, but that will not happen on screen. However high the odds of failure are made to look, failure is certain not to occur—the performance requires it. The perilous gamble and the flying bullets are only simulated threats of death, and their sole function is to set off the protagonist’s ambitious exploits. This is the thing we call “formula”; but as long as the thrill of chips and bullets remains, even a bad film will always find an audience.
In short, works of this kind take the “dark world” as their subject, yet they can present it only at the price of castrating the core signifier that keeps it running: death. Removing death’s lethality—so that the chips no longer flow at random, so that no bullet ever happens to strike the protagonist—such works substitute a simulated threat of death for death itself and exempt the protagonist from the universal law of death, thereby cloaking him in a kind of sacred aura. The crux is not whether the protagonist gets shot in any particular story, but that from the very beginning he is already the figure of a hero standing beyond the law of death. In other words, works of this type are founded precisely on the abolition of death’s law of exchange: there is no true fight to the death here, because the protagonist’s death has already been packaged as a commodity within the dazzling “performance”; it cannot become a universal equivalent open to exchange. The fundamental purposiveness of this kind of adventure story requires it to suppress the death drive: some meaning or mission always guides the protagonist, keeping him from blundering into the death game, which has no purpose—only the iron rule of equivalent exchange.
The protagonist at the center of this essay, however, is precisely a lost sheep who plunges headfirst into a suicide game driven by the death drive. Nobuyuki Fukumoto’s Kaiji Itou is a hopeless gambler who idles away his days, scraping together small change by petty theft and borrowing left and right, only to squander it at once on dice and pachinko. Just once, he unwittingly cosigns a loan for another lowlife; after that lowlife skips town, the debt collector comes knocking, tells him this is a debt he could never possibly repay, and pushes him into a high-stakes gamble among social refuse like himself, with their freedom and even their lives on the line. Kaiji’s gambling story begins with this gamble, and remains sunk in it. Every time he manages, barely, to escape a deadly game, Kaiji reverts to a muddling good-for-nothing, is easily conned again, and falls into the next one. Most of the series therefore revolves around how Kaiji “gets out alive”: he always loses his life at the very start of the gamble, and all his efforts amount to nothing more than snatching back the life he so carelessly threw away.
Kaiji hands over his death in exchange for a stake with which to buy his death back. Handing over one’s death is already a suicide; through this symbolic death he becomes a “gambler,” and thereby gains the right of entry to the suicide game. The identity of “gambler” stands precisely for the lack of identity: only those who have lost all footing in the “surface world” sink into being gamblers. Such people are the “living dead,” and among all the story types left to them there is no more adventure or legend—only the search for resurrection, or for utter death.
I. The “Economics of Gambling” as Paradigm
Only gambling can so easily leap across nationality, age, the gulf between rich and poor, sex … across all these barriers, and let people speak with one another … you might call it a common language …!
1.1 The Chip Is Code
In the casino there is no political economy: it has no need of general labor as its basic referent; value finds expression solely according to rules—the chip-conversion schedule and the way the odds are calculated. Value here becomes pure code, information assigned by a structure, without any fixed referent. The chip is the paradigm case of casino economics: it represents nothing but a string of data and circulates unobstructed within the casino; it is not produced but stands in exchange from the outset; and every exchange is a reproduction, since in the process the chip multiplies or depreciates. There is no production in the casino, but reproduction is everywhere, and it is perfect reproduction—no actual labor need be invested, and there is no risk of the “perilous leap” faced in selling a commodity, because only capital is exchanging: capital cycles in purposeless circulation, and the infinite demand for reinvestment is thereby continuously satisfied. The slogan “free trade” proclaims nothing more than its literal sense: only trade is free; it determines itself, and everything else is determined by it.
The chip is the money of money, money’s final form; it completes the last mission of the universal equivalent—breaking free of every purposiveness and every social referent to become “substance” in the strict sense: by the law of reproduction it posits itself as its own cause, and is at the same time the cause of every other thing (everything else depends on it). Common sense tells us that “chips are merely simulated money”; the conclusion we actually witness is therefore the reverse—the wholesale replacement of the real by the simulated, or the becoming-simulation of the real itself. For the concept of the “real” no longer has any “value”: it cannot enter the sphere of circulation, cannot be converted into value through exchange; and only what is most convenient to exchange is what the capitalism of our era needs. This is why simulacra run rampant.
The monetary sign is severed from every social production: it then enters into speculation and limitless inflation … The disconnection of wages from the “rational” value of labor power, the disconnection of money from real production: in each case, reference is lost.
Emptied of the finality and the affect of production, money becomes speculative. From the gold standard to floating capital and generalized floating, it passes from a referential sign to a structural form. This is the logic proper to the “floating” signifier … the signifier freed from every signified that might check its proliferation and its unlimited play. Money can thus reproduce itself by a simple game of transfers and bookkeeping entries, by an incessant splitting and repetition of its own abstract substance.1
Baudrillard is discussing the transformation of money in present-day capitalism, and it accords with exactly what we see in the casino. His analysis rests on the state of affairs in which “dead labor overwhelms living labor,” in which the input of human labor power is pushed ever further to the margins of the whole production process; under these conditions, general labor can no longer serve as the standard of value. Baudrillard even holds that it never was the standard—only a productivist fantasy. Capital never bowed beneath productive labor; from the birth of capitalism it has been “making a god” of itself: in an infinite reflexive movement it absorbs workers, factories, technology, consumption, and all the rest into its own system, turning them into signs, into “floating” signifiers that obey nothing but the grammar of capital.
1.2 The Production of the Living Dead
The process by which elements are drawn into capital’s operation and homogenized is precisely the process from which capital draws its lifeblood. The “surplus” does not occur in deductions from the price of labor; it occurs originarily at the moment labor is priced, when labor power is traded on the market. Once the concrete elements of production are converted into strings of code, strings of numbers, the “surplus” has already been produced; from then on, the elements that enter circulation are forever already in servitude. Baudrillard describes this originary selling-out as “handing over one’s own death”: people in society are hostages already, for their deaths have been handed over to the mechanism of symbolic exchange, and in return they receive a quantified death as the standard of social life—“general equivalence is death.”2 An equals sign seems to have been drawn between value and death, whence the widespread fantasy that the accumulation of value can postpone death to the infinitely distant endpoint of linear value. The infinity of capital coincides with the infinity of time, lending the act of amassing wealth a spurious progressiveness. But this is nothing but a swindle: exchangeable death is not, in the end, real death; real death is only worn away, bit by bit, in the course of this accumulation—and it is from this wearing-away that capital steals the life that keeps it running.
For ordinary work this wearing-away is slow: life usually ends before the accumulation is complete, which protects the fantasy just described. For the gambler, however, the stake borrowed against his life is always squandered before his life ends, which means his symbolic death comes far ahead of his real death. This puts him in a paradoxical state: he has been ordered out of the field of symbolic exchange, yet his flesh still lingers there—something incomprehensible to capital. In the Kaiji trilogy such people are everywhere: the losers of the shipboard gamble who forfeit their stars and are stripped naked and shut in the glass room; the men living in the lightless underground labor facility; the gambling-den boss who loses everything in his showdown with Kaiji and is hauled away on the spot. Here the ever-present black suits of the Teiai Group play the role of cleaners, promptly removing these “unnamable things” that have lost their symbolic identity from view, like a city’s garbage-disposal system. Fukumoto tries to make the symbolic death of losing one’s whole stake resemble real death (the terrible fate of being taken away by the suits), but in fact the life lived in this paradoxical state can be seen in the protagonist Kaiji Itou himself: whenever he is not in a gamble, he either lies about in a filthy room all day or, his fingers “itching,” loses what little money he has at some small-time gambling stall or a pachinko machine. This muddled loafer is the very picture of the term “living dead” in its literal sense—a man symbolically dead whose body has not died.
In truth, “stake exhausted, only the flesh left over” is not yet true symbolic death—for is the flesh not itself a form of stake? The “leap” of treating the body directly as a stake shows us that the distinction between symbolic death and real death is itself only an expedient: the symbolic possesses a lethal force of its own (“power” is, at bottom, the manipulation and administration of death), only this is usually kept concealed from open view. On some occasions this cruel face of symbolic exchange is laid bare, and we accordingly call it the “dark world.” What Fukumoto depicts is exactly this cruel dark world, in which the body, too, is merely one chip among others. The body-devouring “economics of gambling” shows us the very paradigm of the capitalist economy of the present.
II. Limbs with Price Tags
2.1 Cruel Chips
The chip is free; its holder, on the contrary, is the one imprisoned. His entire fate hangs on that string of numbers—one might even say that his whole life was converted into a string of numbers the moment he stepped into the casino, and entered into the calculations. Here we can perhaps discern a mutated form of “surplus value”: by proclaiming the freedom and fairness of gambling, the casino attracts customers bearing stakes; little do they know that the chip is only the surface object of exchange, and what the casino truly covets is the customer’s life. If some casinos are glad to lend gambling money to customers unable to settle up, it is precisely in order to draw down their “life value” in advance (wrapped in the modern insurance industry and medical technology, life can be converted into value in the literal sense—or, put the other way around, life is one of modern society’s resources, and it already carries a price tag). And this life value is generated in the process by which money becomes “cruel.”
Money today has become “cool”—“cool” designating a close but affectless correlation of terms, a play that draws its nourishment solely from the rules of the game, from the substitution of terms and the exhaustion of these substitutions … We are in the cool phase of the sign. The present system of labor is cool, money is cool, the structural configuration in general is cool.
Cool is the pure play of the values of discourse and of the permutations of writing; it is the ease and distance of those who now toy only with figures, signs, and words; it is the unlimited power of operational simulation … When the medium becomes the message, we enter the cool era. This is exactly what has happened to money. Once it reaches a certain stage of disconnection, money is no longer a medium, no longer a means for the circulation of commodities; it becomes circulation itself—the form the system takes as it realizes itself in its spinning abstraction.3
The meaning of money has been reduced to its minimum: from now on it is merely a string of numbers. It can be neither “sweat-and-blood money” nor “dirty money”; all that is left to us is a tautology—money is money. Money obeys only the rules of exchange, and any operation upon it is likewise nothing but a “game.” Baudrillard calls money “cool” because it submits only to the rules of the game, substituting term (sign) for term in infinite, purposeless play; but this does not yet name money’s “cruel” side.
First, everyone who uses money is forced to take part in this “game of exchange”: such is money’s universal coercive force. Second, the codification of money widens its range far beyond its basic carrier, “cash,” bringing about a kind of pan-monetization (or pan-informatization): money seeks to draw every element into the field of exchange, into the infinite loop of circulation. Everything is “appraised,” and the meaning of “value” is no longer confined to “price” but expands into the property of being exchangeable, circulable; anything can be exchanged, simply because everything has become a sign—user data traded between websites, the compulsive exposure and exchange of personal information in WeChat “Moments,” and so on. Circulation becomes the sole principle and the categorical imperative; whether what circulates is money, information, signs, or something else no longer matters—or rather, the process of circulation molds every element circulating within it into the same thing. And this process is cruel in its very character:
The very possibility of quantitative equivalence already presupposes death. The equivalence of wages and labor presupposes the death of the worker; the equivalence of commodities among themselves presupposes the symbolic destruction of objects. It is death that everywhere makes possible the calculation of equivalence and the regulation of the arbitrary. This death is not violent, not physical; it is the arbitrary substitution of life and death, the neutralization of each in survival—or, one might say, a death in différance.4
Circulation carries an originary symbolic violence, and it is under this violence that all elements become identical dead things. When symbolic violence is brought to bear upon the organic body, its destructiveness appears at once. We will see this below, in the passages cited from A Thousand Plateaus.
2.2 Bodies for Sale
The plane on which the code runs is precisely the “plane of consistency” in the strict sense:
The plane of consistency does away with all metaphor: all that exists is the real. They are electrons themselves, veritable black holes, real cellular units, genuine sequences of signs. Only, they have already left their own strata—destratified, decoded, deterritorialized—and it is exactly this that makes it possible for them to draw near and interpenetrate one another on the plane of consistency. A silent dance. The plane of consistency knows nothing of differences of level, orders of magnitude, distances. It knows nothing of the difference between the artificial and the natural. It knows nothing of the distinction between contents and expressions—all of these exist only through the strata and in relation to the strata.5
What Deleuze calls “strata,” simply understood, are the mechanisms that qualify and partition things: the mechanism of the family determines what counts as father, mother, and son; political economy determines what counts as capital, proletariat, and labor; the social division of labor parcels out the different occupations. These strata are preserved within the plane of consistency; they give things form and establish them as systems. The process of deterritorialization passes through these strata, undoes their partition of things, breaks the boundaries, and lets things of different kinds run once more, in undifferentiated form, upon the plane of consistency. Deleuze vividly describes this running as a “continuum of intensities”: the circulating particles-signs differ only in numerical value (intensity or magnitude), and therefore form a continuous, unbroken flow. On the basis of the concept of the plane of consistency, Deleuze describes a “body without organs”:
The BwO (body without organs) is exactly what remains once you have taken everything away. And what you take away is precisely the phantasm—the whole constituted by signification and subjectification.6
In the final analysis, is not the great book on the BwO the Ethics? The attributes are types or genera of BwO, while substance, force, and the zero point of intensity serve as the matrix of production. The modes are everything that comes to pass: waves and vibrations, migrations, thresholds and gradients, intensities produced from a given matrix within a given type of substance.7
The BwO is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency proper to desire.8
A body without organs—for Deleuze, the drug user’s body, the masochist’s body, and so on—is a body that has lost the demarcation of “organs” drawn by modern medicine; more precisely, a body that has lost the functional partition of the “organism.” The organism means hierarchization, functionalization, and centralized administration; in Deleuze’s eyes it is just such “strata” that shackle the body. Only by forgetting the organs does the drug user attain an “intensity of coldness,” the masochist an “intensity of pain,” for the body has become a plane of consistency on which desire can flow freely. Deleuze treats the body without organs as a goal of a certain practice: we ought to attempt to form such a body, one neither bound by the limits of the strata nor destroyed by too intense a destratification. But our concern here is not personal desire; for the sake of our theme, we may substitute “money” for desire in Deleuze’s account.
In Deleuze’s view, the body is most of the time bound by strata imposed from outside. Though the operation of capital depends on hierarchized systems, money, as circulation itself, carries a destratifying force of its own; what produces the body without organs is nothing other than the flow of money, into which the body is thrown, appraised, and bought and sold. We can even find a more suggestive formulation in Deleuze: he regards Spinoza’s Ethics as the great book on the body without organs, because the body without organs stands to “intensity” (or to the “matrix that produces intensity”) as the attributes stand to substance in Spinoza’s metaphysical system. The former is not a being independent of the latter, but only a certain “expression” of it; the former is multiple and the latter unique. The multiplicity of the attributes brings no mutual conflict, since they are unified in substance; strictly speaking, only substance exists, and the attributes are merely different “instances” expressing it. This means that the body without organs is a secondary thing, a channel for letting intensities circulate, replaceable and cancelable at any moment. One might say that organic bodies are kept in storage within the system (the strata), and that when intensities need to be let through, these bodies are broken down into bodies without organs to serve as channels.
What we saw in the foregoing analysis of money’s “cruelty” is exactly this process: the flow of money can at any moment make some body its channel. But where this differs from Spinoza’s vision is that money is not a true god; it does not embrace all things—rather, it packages itself as a god by devouring all things. The univocity (compatibility) Spinoza imagined therefore does not exist here at all: because everything has been alienated into value, the circulation of value produces an unbearable “amalgam” of human body and commodity, accompanied by a certain destruction of the human body. Smuggling that hides drugs in the rectum or the stomach, organ theft, even life insurance: the “bodies without organs” these operations exhibit, in which human body and commodity are made consistent, are no different from those Deleuze describes. In the end, the plane of consistency demanded by the circulation of value can achieve only a symbolic consistency, while the fleshly and the concrete are necessarily repressed and expelled; what this process produces are deformed, cobbled-together bodies—bodies for sale.
The body for sale: this image recurs throughout the Kaiji gambling series. In the opening shipboard gamble, the losers are all stripped naked and shut in the glass room. The middle-aged man who had jeered at Kaiji is ransomed out by his companions not because of any fellow feeling, but because the medicated plaster on his back conceals jewels of no small worth—thus forming a body for sale. The eliminated gambler is stripped bare and isolated from those still in the game; the nakedness, the mere flesh this operation produces, is exactly the gambler’s “remainder,” his residue, and the only way to keep such residue from being disposed of as garbage is to affix a remedial “plaster” to the flesh, splicing flesh and commodity together so that its symbolic value is not utterly exhausted. In this sense, jewels worn on the body as ornament and jewels hidden (“smuggled”) inside the body differ very little: both are coverings that mask the flesh’s character as refuse.
In these examples we see death quantified and calculated—a quantification concretely embodied in the price of the valuables embedded in a human body, in the price tags on limbs, in the payout of a life-insurance policy. What matters is that this quantification imposed on the body directly threatens life: the code’s deterritorialization of the body is nothing less than a sentence of death. Only, before the sentence is carried out, its subjects are granted a span of time; for gamblers, this is the time they stand at the gaming table. Seen in this light, all of Kaiji Itou’s efforts amount to nothing more than winning a stay of execution.
III. Kaiji Itou’s Survival Game
3.1 A Minimum of Fairness
Once one enters the gamble, one’s life is already out on loan; but this threat of death does not expose itself at once—it is masked by the surface form of the game. Symbolic exchange operates within a system that has definite rules and an allocation of roles. Though we analyzed the deathly character of symbolic exchange above, that was an analysis at the meta-level; the exchangers inside the game can see only what the system gives them from within. They know only the “how” of exchange and its “effects”—concretely, how to play the game and whom the rules favor. The character of the game itself they have no leisure to consider, for they have already invested all their energy in “playing” it, above all when the game touches their vital interests. In this frame of mind, the shrewd gambler naturally chooses the rules easiest to tamper with and the most advantageous allocation of roles; all that remains is to wait for a sucker to take the bait.
An advantage in power and in the rules is the capital on which Fukumoto’s minor villains preen themselves. These men are either small-timers who use their position to force underlings to gamble with them and then squeeze out profit by cheating, or gambling-den bosses who lay traps, dangling large prize money that looks winnable on luck alone—“reeling in suckers.” The representative of the former is the foreman of the underground labor facility in the second series, Tobaku Hakairoku Kaiji; of the latter, the den boss who sets up the “Bog” in Hakairoku and the den boss who runs the “minefield” mahjong game in the third series, Tobaku Datenroku Kaiji. These insatiable local tyrants hold the surface rules of the game, the covert methods of cheating, and the violence that maintains this order; theirs is virtually a risk-free business: as long as the cheating is not exposed there is no problem, and even getting caught red-handed merely means one customer less to fleece. They believe this unequal trade can go on forever—that as long as the advantage stays in their hands, they can only profit and never lose.
Because the rules are unequal, Kaiji is always at an extreme disadvantage. Even if he sees through the opponent’s fraud midway, he cannot win back what he has already lost by denouncing it, for the law of the gaming table runs: the fault lies not with the cheat, but with the one who fails to see through the trick. And yet, even if every rule can be rigged, once the gambling has begun nothing can be altered—the rules are grossly unfair, but even rules as grossly unfair as these will assuredly remain in force until the moment of final settlement. That the rules cannot be changed midgame is the necessary condition for the game to proceed, and the basis on which symbolic violence takes effect. If the holder of power were to change the rules at will to crush his opponent, that would no longer be symbolic violence but direct violence, and such a breach of the rules would become a “scandal,” disgracing his own authority; he could then no longer maintain his symbolic identity, and would either have to step down or strain every nerve to bury the scandal. In short, the immutability of the rules is the minimum of “fairness” (being the minimum requirement for symbolic exchange to operate at all), and it is also the only way Kaiji can make use of the rules. For Kaiji:
Legitimate places are all no good! It has to be underground … that is … a place with a guaranteed way to win, where the other side holds some secret that makes certain it wins …! In other words, what I most look forward to is exactly the kind of place where cheating is possible! Because they may cheat—so look at it from the opposite angle: behind that guaranteed win, if I can just break through that one barrier, it amounts to a guaranteed win for me!
What Kaiji has seen is a metatheorem of the logical system called “gambling”: whatever the concrete rules may be, such rules necessarily possess a certain reversibility; if a rule can make the house win without fail, then, turned around, it can make him win without fail—and it is at this level, and at this level only, that Kaiji, who has nothing, is “equal” to his opponents. Hence the people who gamble with Kaiji all take him for irredeemable, worthless scum, fit only to be toyed with in the palms of their hands; and at the moment this minimum of fairness comes to light, an unbearable dread rises with it—the rules of the game they have always relied on seem suddenly to have defected, becoming a thing that binds them. But in truth the rules take orders from no one; gamblers who rely on rigging the rules are mere small fry. (In the Kaiji gambling series, about the only one who is not such small fry is Chairman Hyōdō.)
The gamble with the foreman of the underground labor facility provides the most typical example of this “minimum of fairness.” Kaiji learns in advance that in the crucial round the foreman will cheat with special dice bearing only fours, fives, and sixes. In the gamble, Kaiji exploits a moment of carelessness to snatch the dice away (the foreman grows suspicious at first, but unwilling to lose a match with five hundred thousand at stake, he cheats after all) and denounces his cheating. But Kaiji does not accuse him of “breaking the rules”; he accuses him of “concealing a rule.” Having unmasked the foreman, Kaiji—in order to continue the game—declares that the “special dice” are a hidden rule of this gamble, and that the gambling can be maintained with that rule added:
Of course … this continuation, just as I said before, uses the special dice. You needn’t worry about being found out—use them with an easy mind! Because we too will be using this kind of … similar thing …!
Kaiji then brings out dice of his own making—fashioned from the steak bones the foreman had left half-eaten and from his own blood, with all six faces reading “one” (since rolling three ones pays the highest odds)—forcing the foreman to concede that the rule “special dice may be used among companions” is in effect. Moreover, the foreman, to make his own cheating less conspicuous, had deliberately amended the rule that a winning dealer keeps the bank indefinitely, so that “the dealer, win or lose, must hold the bank for two consecutive rounds.” These two rules turn what was originally a five-hundred-thousand wager into losses of more than ten million perica for the foreman, emptying out the coffers he had accumulated over years.
Looked at this way, though, gambling would seem to become a kind of game anyone can pick up once they grasp the knack, victory a mere matter of who is the cleverer player. Yet Kaiji does not join a gamble in a mood of idle play or money-grubbing. He recognizes with full clarity that what he stakes is his entire life, and even more: in the gamble with the foreman, for instance, his “entry fee” is the money he and five companions had saved over three months of work, and defeat would mean they must slave at least fifteen more years under the foreman’s oppression—while the conditions of the underground facility make it nearly impossible for them to last fifteen years. Kaiji takes part in gambling by repeating the “act of suicide”; the only capital left to him is his body, and once symbolic life is lost (no means of repayment, no personal freedom), bodily death is only a matter of time. So Kaiji stakes not only his life but more; were he not to, this living dead man could never be “resurrected.” Wagering his life and even more: this is the most fundamental reason Kaiji is able to win in the extremity of the gamble. Fukumoto, through the mouth of Kazuya Hyōdō, calls it “the caliber of a gambler,” and it is what sets Kaiji apart from the small fry who know only how to toy with the rules—he always throws himself in with “his whole body and soul,” and every gamble is for him not merely a game but a suicide game bearing directly on death.
3.2 The Only Possible Way to Challenge
If Kaiji wants to redeem his life, he has no choice but to let the stakes swell without limit, to let “gambling for money” expand into “gambling for one’s life”—or rather, to make the true face of money-gambling as life-gambling appear. Here lies the very theme of the Kaiji gambling series. Kaiji Itou has no personal assets, still less any “credit,” so when he borrows, his only collateral is his body—that is, his personal freedom and his organs. The moment he steps into a gamble, he stands under the threat of death.
But conversely, does this mean that the rich, so long as they gamble within the bounds of their own assets, can escape the exchange of death? Not so: what the exchange of chips demands always far exceeds the limits of the assets one holds. Perhaps the sentence should be turned around: the body is not one part of one’s “held assets” but their entirety—at the gaming table there is no boundary between flesh and banknotes. The gambler always stakes his life, for only death is sufficient to serve as the chip, and it treats everyone alike. Though it looks as if only Kaiji must pay with his life, the mark of gambling as a form of trade is precisely that it makes the stakes swell as if by magic, for it is the very incarnation of capital’s bottomless desire. Gambling’s demand for money therefore always overwhelms what any individual can give; it covets the life of every participant.
The staking of death transforms in its substance what is, in itself, a kind of “game”—just as Russian roulette and a toy shark that snaps at your finger are utterly different in nature. The price of death is always excessive, because the symbolic order is founded on the expulsion of death: death is where meaning ends; it wrecks the process of exchange and circulation. (Hence, to close this rupture, society must conquer death. “Natural death,” the modern mode of dying, is the clean, sanctioned, “good” death, for it announces that a life has reached the end of its own “biological” capital, whereas accidental death is regarded as a failure to discharge one’s social obligations.9) In death’s place spreads a pervasive symbolic death, or “simulated death”—the death already discussed above, which can be quantified, calculated, and admitted into circulation. This death rendered “harmless” imprisons unexchangeable real death within the body and prevents its exposure. Gambling, however, calls real death back into exchange: as we discussed in “Bodies for Sale,” the body in the gamble is the one most easily traversed by the flows of deterritorialization—or rather, in the “setting” of gambling, real death, ordinarily veiled, most easily resurfaces, showing its irrational, unbearable original face.
The body in the gamble is like a listed stock or bond: name the price and its “title of ownership” can be had. In the gamble against Tonegawa, Chairman Hyōdō, in his perverse humor, proposes that Kaiji stake his own hearing in the showdown with Tonegawa:
Simply bear the risk of possibly losing something of your own, and you have a chance at one hundred million yen … For you, Kaiji, who just now wagered your life, it is only a small risk … an eye, or an ear …!
For our side, that ear of yours amounts to a hostage. Half the rights to it already belong to us—we can’t have you doing as you please with it! For now it is merely on loan to you, and when the outcome is revealed, your hearing will be … confiscated by me!
But this ear held in pledge becomes Kaiji’s breakthrough. He realizes that the device mounted on his ear, built to pierce the eardrum, is the very thing Tonegawa is using to cheat; so, on the pretext of going to the toilet, he feigns a fit of impotent rage in the washroom and pounds the mirror, saws that ear clean off with a shard of glass, then covers the wound with a towel in one hand to conceal the fact that the device has been removed. Afterward he has a companion hide in the washroom cupping the device in both hands, so that it keeps feeding a steady heart rate to the monitors, deceiving Tonegawa. Here, too, what Kaiji does is nothing more than “use the rules in reverse”; but one can see clearly that he has wagered death, and even more: he has staked the deepest distance the device can pierce into the ear—the highest stake he can put up—which means that losing would be far from a simple matter of losing his hearing: the needle would pierce the semicircular canals, and death would be the likely result. But in this game of E-Card, whose symbolism could hardly be plainer, Kaiji chooses to fling his challenge at the “Emperor” by exactly these means:
You remember what you said, don’t you? You said the Slave is the one who has nothing—beyond all doubt … the one who is trampled on …. But that man who has nothing … a slave who has staked his all can defeat the Emperor …! Take this—it is … the last voice my companions and I send out from the edge of death … our last stand …!
In the latter half of Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji, the first part of the trilogy, Kaiji and others in the same plight are forced to run deadly “gauntlets” staged for the viewing pleasure of the rich. By the time he reaches this gamble, Kaiji has drunk his fill of humiliation and deception and witnessed the fear, despair, and death of countless companions; the story’s emotions have gathered to their utmost, and the come-from-behind victory at E-Card is without question the climax of the entire plot. Kaiji wins, gains money enough to clear his debt, and can walk away from it all; Tonegawa, so high above him, is forced to perform a groveling dogeza on a red-hot iron plate and pay his price; the story, it seems, could pause here. But Kaiji decides to carry the challenge onward, to continue his righteous “revenge.” He has grasped that the slave who has nothing can use his own death to hurl a challenge at the emperor—and that this is the only possible way to challenge—and so he proposes a gamble to Chairman Hyōdō.
Many readers hold that Kaiji’s decision to challenge Chairman Hyōdō is a plot development Fukumoto forced in for the sake of a sequel, but there is also a necessity to it. In the worldview of the Kaiji gambling series, Chairman Hyōdō represents a kind of highest order and authority, and the rebellious Kaiji must have his reckoning with exactly such authority. As noted above, gambling’s “minimum of equality” is what allows Kaiji to win by using the rules in reverse. But this reverse use is possible not through any power of the rules themselves; it is possible because a higher, external authority provides the arbiter: in the gamble with the foreman, had the Teiai Group executive Yoshihiro Kurosaki not presided over the proceedings, the foreman would surely have tried every trick to weasel out of paying. This “higher authority” guarantees the order—the order of oppression, the order that heaps pain and humiliation on people like Kaiji—and therefore the ultimate goal Kaiji pursues is precisely the negation of order. Fukumoto set up a “spokesman” for order, a “target” to serve as the object of Kaiji’s challenge—Chairman Kazutaka Hyōdō—and it is exactly here that the image built up since the opening of Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji, the indomitable gambler-“hero” brimming with a sense of justice, is thrown into question.
3.3 The End of the Hero’s Image: The “Suicide Game”
By the conventions of manga, Hyōdō would without doubt be the “final boss” to be defeated; Kaiji’s arduous journey would be sublimated in the moment of Hyōdō’s defeat, becoming an immortal legend for people’s admiration. But as we already said in the prologue, Kaiji’s story is neither adventure nor legend; if it must be called anything, it is merely the story of a gambler struggling to survive at the edge of death—and what reveals this fact is precisely this gamble with Hyōdō.
Kaiji sets up a purpose for all his efforts in the gamble: after winning back his life, to defeat Hyōdō. To go a step further: Kaiji’s “survival” means retaking his standing in the symbolic dimension (settling his gambling debts and returning to society), and his challenge to Hyōdō is likewise meant to humiliate order and authority on the symbolic plane. This path of thought is in fact a continuation of the theme of Tonegawa’s speech aboard the ship at the very beginning:
At best, all you people think is “how nice it would be if I could win”—that is why you are the trash standing here. You must not think how nice it would be to win … you must think you have to win! You people, it is because you have been losing all along … that no one cares for you now! Poor and irresolute, at the bottom of life … crawling, crawling, crawling … crawling on and on …. And why? It is because you … have kept on losing, from back then to this very day! There is one thing only: to win …. If you do not win, you are trash … you must win, you must win … you must win!
Tonegawa is the model striver: through examinations, social skill, and the like, he climbed step by step into the upper ranks of the Teiai company, and his creed is the pursuit of victory, for only victory can raise one’s symbolic standing. Kaiji, down at the bottom, in fact follows a similar logic; what he opposes is only the face of Tonegawa’s logic that “offends human feeling,” the cruelty by which losers are cast down into a hell on earth, and so he issues his challenge to the symbolic order at the price of death. In symbolic exchange there is no object of exchange “greater” than death, because death exceeds what symbolic exchange can bear; and for exactly this reason, the death gamble reveals another aspect of symbolic exchange: as a site where “pleasure” is generated.
Hyōdō is less the personification of order and authority than the image of the gambler pure and simple, the man who delights in gambling itself; he is not the majestic “Big Brother” but the Name-of-the-Father inverted—the anal father sunk in pleasure. If the foregoing interpreted Kaiji’s gambling as a “challenge staked on death” and thereby lent it a certain degree of the revolutionary, the entrance of the figure of Hyōdō reintroduces the dimension of desire into gambling. He rewrites the whole of Kaiji’s righteous cause into pleasure—the pleasure of “playing the game”:
I imagine you too must have tasted it by now, Kaiji …. Crossing that steel bridge and coming out alive, and just now, the victory at E-Card … the elation, the relief, the joy of that instant—how intense they must have been! Struggling at the brink of death is bitter, yes, but so fulfilling …. As for escaping death by a hair, it is the sweetest thing in this world—call it the supreme blessing …! I should think that pleasure has long since been branded into your brain! In all likelihood, Kaiji, the life ahead of you … will be one unending journey in pursuit of that pleasure …!
We will notice that the purpose Kaiji establishes for himself is a hypothetical imperative, one that permits the infinite postponement of the “final end,” so that under the self-hypnosis of this mission he can repeat his “survival.” Hyōdō’s words puncture Kaiji’s self-deception, forcing him to acknowledge his desire, to acknowledge that he simply craves that ultimate thrill of walking the edge of death—only Kaiji himself has never recognized this, never realized that his fierce desire to “seek life” springs solely from a mad drive to “seek death.” It is exactly this drive that makes Kaiji, again and again, enter the death gamble of his own accord; it is in this sense that gambling becomes the “suicide game” that draws Kaiji in. And it is only under the stimulus of death that Kaiji possesses his so-called gambler’s gift: he can win only where this pleasure is wagered, and cannot win at the ordinary wagering of signs (gambling that concerns money alone)—no better than any mediocre gambler. The gamble with Hyōdō proves the point, as does the minefield mahjong gamble of Tobaku Datenroku Kaiji.
After Kaiji cracks the “Bog” pachinko machine and escapes alive from the underground labor facility, his former companions Miyoshi and Maeda seek him out and tell him that the boss of the gambling den where they work constantly peeks at customers’ cards with the help of his employees—so the two of them, as employees, can use this to turn the tables, peeking at the boss’s cards for Kaiji instead so that he can win big. In reality, the two had long since colluded with the boss, telling every customer that “our boss cheats” and then “reeling in suckers” with the enticing offer of helping the customer cheat. It is precisely because this gamble looks profitable and risk-free that Kaiji agrees—and falls squarely into the three men’s trap. So it is, too, with the gamble against Hyōdō: Kaiji goes astray through his own petty cleverness. He tries to use the rules to engineer a gamble in which he cannot lose: he plants slips of paper marking the winning lot in the side of a boxed tissue pack in the toilet beforehand, then feigns proposing that he himself decide on a fair method of play, steering Hyōdō into agreeing to settle the match by drawing lots from the tissue box. Kaiji’s design is completely seen through by Hyōdō, and the gamble ends in his total defeat and the loss of four fingers.
It is precisely because Kaiji is the despised “living dead” who has lost all place to stand that his counterattacks from desperation display such enormous force; each of his “escapes from the jaws of death” floods the spectator with intense pleasure—not because justice has been served or the oppressed have carried off their “revenge,” but simply because the suicide has been “reborn,” or rather because the death brought on by suicide (staking one’s life in the gamble) has in the end redeemed him. Though this looks like a process of sheer repetition—no one has really lost his life, and the symbolic value before and after the exchange is unchanged—within this process, the “passion” that belongs to death is performed to the full: the increment occurs not in symbolic exchange but in libidinal exchange. Artificial death (above all “suicide”) possesses aesthetic value: it exceeds the cold, tedious game of exchanging signifiers and delivers an experience that resists symbolization—which is exactly the mark of the object of the “aesthetic.”10
Conclusion: The Suicide Game as a Genre of Performance
The story of Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji is, in a certain sense, also nothing more than the “death performance” we described in the prologue—except that formulaic films stage adventure and legend, telling the stories of heroes, while the Kaiji gambling trilogy belongs to a different genre: with the “living dead” man stripped of social identity as its protagonist, it tells of survival sought after repeated plunges into death traps; more precisely, what it displays is the “suicide game”—no longer any final realization of value, only the reproduction of pleasure carried on within the cycle of death and the struggle to live.
We have already watched the process by which money becomes cruel; and yet it is from this very cruelty, from scenes of cruel dismemberment and death (or from the process of escaping such scenes—that is, “survival”), that people manage to find the most extreme pleasure. And among the types of death, the entrancing vertigo aroused by suicide makes for the better spectacle, since it harbors the imagined subversiveness of “wresting back from the hands of authority the right of disposal over one’s own life”; this subversive quality, however, can never quite enter the dimension of politics. That is to say, the meaning of suicide cannot be completely explicated at the political level of individual and society, and so this voluntary death can only dissolve into the aesthetic. In fact, when it comes to the “subversive act of self-sacrifice,” it is not so much that its justice-laden ethical part (the subversiveness) rouses people’s sympathy and admiration as that people are simply entranced by the “self-sacrifice” part; when a subject throws itself wholly into an activity that hastens the arrival of its own death, its every movement is invested with an inexpressible charm.
Suicide accomplished has the character of rupture and negation; but Kaiji Itou labors to prevent suicide from being accomplished—say rather that he merely lets suicide cling about him as an allure. Suicide never to be realized: this guarantees that suicide can continue forever as a game, as a performance; that the reproduction of pleasure can continue forever. It is exactly here that we see a coded death: death becomes a self-proliferating sign, entering into infinite reproduction. If the performative character of those formula films that recount heroic legend is founded on the exclusion of death, the performative character of Kaiji’s gambling is founded on the codification of death; and the relation between the two is, perhaps, just like that between political economy and the economics of symbolic exchange.
In fact, the Kaiji gambling series is not only still running today (the latest installment is Tobaku Datenroku Kaiji: Kazuya-hen, and counting from the first series it has been serialized for twenty-five years); it has also spawned works of a spin-off character such as Mr. Tonegawa: Middle Management Blues. This is of course directly connected with Fukumoto’s prolific output, but the Kaiji story itself possesses the reproductive character described above, and however long its derivations grow, it would be no surprise; Kaiji’s suicide game, exactly like the everyday comic vignettes of Mr. Tonegawa, can go on proliferating without limit—as performance, as the spectator’s pastime.