Talent? None!
Author-kun, my Superman.
In the pivotal chapter of Beautiful Fighting Girl, Saitō Tamaki introduces the concept of the “hysterical phallic girl.” Although this chapter comes near the end of Saitō’s book, we must begin our discussion here. A common criticism accuses Saitō of being a “phallocentrist.” According to this view, the “beautiful fighting girl” is “a being that exists purely to satisfy male desire”: in other words, she is a “being-for-another,” wholly reducible to an object of male otaku desire. Without question, this vulgarized “social criticism” misses the point entirely. Saitō has already anticipated and answered this excessively simplistic accusation:
“They say that the tremendous resonance of the beautiful fighting girl perfectly symbolizes contemporary society, especially the situation of women within it. This may be true … but it does not interest me much. The view is somewhat naïve: it treats fiction as a ‘true’ reflection of real life, yet this is precisely a textbook case of confusing fact with fiction.”
For Saitō’s critics, then, only the following position is adequate: one that fully acknowledges fiction’s standing and undertakes to examine its rationality on its own terms, exposing its internal contradictions and divisions from within fiction itself rather than from some unmediated “external reality,” and thereby moving beyond fiction. Yet isn’t the position that best meets this requirement precisely that of psychoanalysis—Saitō’s own position? We cannot help recalling Heidegger’s assessment of Hegel. Did Heidegger not likewise argue that the only possible way beyond Hegel begins with his system and proceeds from within—that is, by following Hegel’s steps and going a little farther at every turn? Perhaps this also suggests a way to criticize psychoanalysis: to treat the critical text itself as “symptomatic writing,” or, in other words, as an object of psychoanalysis.
This brings us to Saitō’s further analysis of the beautiful fighting girl, whom he regards as highly hystericized. Here Saitō strictly follows Lacan’s definition of hysteria: for Lacan, hysteria is a pervasive state of questioning that marks the subject’s ultimate interrogation of its own identity. As Saitō points out, the hysterical question concerns existence and meaning. On the one hand, the hysteric perpetually questions their own existence (“What do you want?”), pursues doubt as far as they can, and maintains a certain distance from their symbolic mandate throughout. On the other, meaning emerges as fantasy in answer to this question, forever attempting to make good being’s ontological loss. But this attempt is doomed to fail. Quoting Juan-David Nasio, Saitō observes: “Hysteria produces knowledge, but the answer to it is forever deferred.” Here we witness a certain productivity of the hysterical subject, through which the pleasure principle emerges from the void of impossible jouissance and is actualized.1 In Saitō’s account, this actualization reveals the entire process through which the phallic girl comes into being. (The phallus here is clearly the imaginary phallus: in Saitō’s own words, “it conceals the emptiness of the beautiful fighting girl’s existence.”) Only from this perspective can we understand his claim that “the hysterical subject possesses a certain realness.” Here, “the real” means the productive real: the real of the process in which jouissance is actualized as surplus-enjoyment. For Saitō, this realness guarantees fiction’s standing.
On this basis, Saitō distinguishes “eroticism” from “jouissance.” He associates “eroticism” with a certain kind of fantasy—for instance, sexual fantasies about women’s bodies—while treating jouissance as “something in the context of the Real whose effect on us is reality.” We have to concede that Saitō is entirely correct here. On the strength of this distinction, he opposes the beautiful fighting girl in fiction to women in reality. In reality, women’s bodies are always eroticized, and women exist as “embodiments of sexual desire.” In anime, by contrast, the beautiful fighting girl’s body is initially desexualized. (From his own observations, Saitō holds that images of girls in anime are invariably pure and unblemished.) She is therefore first an “image of jouissance”; only afterward do sexual fantasies about her—her eroticization—arise. This is Saitō’s definition of moe.2
We must now introduce Saitō’s second distinction. Alongside the opposition between “eroticism” and “jouissance,” he establishes one between “trauma” and “symptom.” He defines trauma as fantasy about trauma, pointing out that in clinical practice analysts need not become overly preoccupied with a hysteric’s subjective descriptions of their own “trauma.” The “symptom,” however, is crucial: in Saitō’s words, “it sustains the basis of the hysterical subject’s existence.” Although this distinction is unobjectionable, we should point out that perhaps the sinthome of Lacan’s later theory corresponds to what Saitō’s “symptom” really means. (Here we can see a clear tendency: Saitō’s almost paranoid insistence on Lacan’s middle-period structuralist theory.) In Saitō’s account, beautiful fighting girls have no trauma. Their trauma is artificially excluded by the narrative context of fiction. Lacking the support of fundamental fantasy, their existence is thus radically dematerialized. To sustain their existence under these conditions, beautiful fighting girls must turn to the symptom. What, then, is their symptom? Saitō’s answer is that their symptom is their fighting: to sustain their existence, they must fight ceaselessly, and it is precisely for this reason that otaku are fascinated by their images. Only on the basis of this fascination can the eroticization of the beautiful fighting girl’s body be accomplished.
Saitō is intensely interested in this eroticization brought about by the dematerialization of the bodily image. He declares that this sexual tension gives the fictional world its autonomy. But what exactly does “autonomy” mean here? He offers his own explanation:
“By autonomy, I mean that the economy of desire has an existence of its own within the space of representation, one that is no longer merely a projection of the viewer’s desire.”
In other words, the economy of desire within fictional space exists for itself. Once again, this is what is meant by sexual tension. For Saitō, this tension in the Real forms the kernel of fictional narrative, and it is on this plane that he discovers in otaku a certain “potential to go beyond conventional heterosexual desire.”
As his critics, however, we should go a little farther than Saitō here. We must point out the obvious ambiguities in his discussion of this question. As we have observed, on the one hand, what makes the beautiful fighting girl’s realness, her purity—or, in Saitō’s terminology, the immateriality of her existence—possible is the so-called “multiplicity of reality,” the so-called “high-context nature of Japanese space.” On the other hand, isn’t this “high-context” quality itself grounded in the beautiful fighting girl’s autonomous economy of desire—the very economy that, for Saitō, ultimately guarantees her realness? To escape this unresolved circle, Saitō is then forced to turn to obscurantism. Doesn’t his attempt to “return to Henry Darger” in the book’s penultimate section reveal a fundamental failure? It is here that he introduces the theoretical notion of “uncastrated imagination,” thereby missing the radical potential of psychoanalytic materialism. (Equally dubious is his notion of “Japanese space,” which inevitably recalls Marx’s late descriptions of the so-called “Asiatic mode of production” …) Thomas Lamarre’s criticism that Saitō is “more a Jungian than a Lacanian” is entirely justified.3 Our position here seems to coincide with Lamarre’s: we too acknowledge that Saitō’s failure lies in neglecting the “material basis” of representation. One qualification is necessary, however. What we mean by “materiality” is entirely different from what Lamarre means by it. From the psychoanalytic standpoint, the only materiality is that of impossible jouissance, of the Real kernel of existence. Saitō’s problem is the exact opposite of what people commonly suppose. On the question of jouissance, he is certainly not wrong for being “too radical”—according to that tiresome cliché, the beautiful fighting girl is wholly reducible to “market demand” in Japanese anime and manga, while Saitō’s theory is merely a flight of fancy … He is wrong for not being radical enough. He misconceives the position of the Real; in fact, he evades the actual rupture and impossibility through a kind of false posturing. This rupture and impossibility appear as an obstacle in the reproduction of surplus-enjoyment, an obstacle that is not merely ontological, as Saitō suggests, but also ontic. (It is worth noting that the English edition of Beautiful Fighting Girl describes beautiful fighting girls as “beings in a state of lack.” In my view, this rendering discloses, to some extent, the “truth” of Saitō’s theory: his examination of beautiful fighting girls is not thorough enough, remaining at the level of lowercase being—that is, of beings.)
Perhaps we should make a detour through Freud and revisit one of the most common criticisms of him: the accusation that he is a “pansexualist”—whatever we are doing, we are always thinking about that one thing. But is this really old Freud’s attitude toward sexual fantasy? Žižek’s rebuttal is that Freud’s true concern is “not that we think about that one thing while doing other things, but what we think about while doing that one thing.” Only that one thing—the impossible sexual relation—is truly unbearable. Everything else merely supplies the material for the fantasy screen that shields us from this impossibility. What, then, does the impossibility of the sexual relation mean, exactly? Clearly, it does not mean that we cannot have sex normally. It means that when we think we are having sex “normally,” we are not “really” having sex at all. That is to say, at the zero level, the world appears in a “non-cosmological” state of openness; it does not exist at all. Any attempt to “sexualize” it—to differentiate and order it—necessarily leaves a remainder that cannot be divided away. Sex is therefore contingent: the two logics of existence of the two sexes have nothing in common. This leads us to the following conclusion: on the question of sexuation, isn’t the traumatic gesture of “sexuation” itself more important than the economy of desire internal to sexuality? (Trauma here does not mean what it does for Saitō.) The logic by which sex itself operates derives precisely from an attempt to internalize, in some form, an external, impossible antagonism—the radical gesture of differentiation. The same applies to Saitō’s “fiction.” (Let us stress that it is precisely his neglect of this point that traps him in an excessive fantasy of imaginary wholeness, causing him to miss the antagonism of the Real.) Although Saitō quotes Lacan’s assertion that “Woman does not exist,” he still fails to grasp the point, considering it solely in terms of hystericization at the level of phenomena. Doesn’t nonexistence here correspond to a pre-ontological condition? Saitō’s beautiful fighting girl, rather, follows a masculine logic. To put it in the terms of a typical procedure of ideology critique: in his account, fiction’s internal division is transformed into a primal repression, built into its structure, of the beautiful fighting girl’s bodily image. The girl herself is thereby retroactively posited as the Thing of desire, which cannot be approached too closely. In this sense, Saitō is a typical structuralist, which is also why he so emphasizes the role of fiction and mediation. He recognizes that the signifier’s representation of the beautiful fighting girl produces a remainder called “emptiness.” Yet he fails to see that this remainder is not purely an effect internal to structure. It is also closely bound up with a stain in which jouissance takes on substance, with the drive’s stupid repetition, with pre-subjective disorder and the contraction of subjectivation, with the indelible traces left by the “forced choice” to enter the structure. It is just such a specter, emerging from the night of the world, from the abyss of freedom, that haunts everything, shattering the equilibrium of imaginary fiction and ending the pleasant dream of Saitō’s ideological loop. The charge of “pansexualism,” then, fits Saitō far better than it does old Freud. Isn’t this precisely Saitō’s attitude? When thinking about other things—otaku desire, the hystericization of the beautiful fighting girl, and so on—he is always thinking about that one thing: some particular feature of media, context, or “Japanese space,” and the structural repression it imposes on representation.
Let us now return to Saitō’s text. He observes that beautiful fighting girls are “loved because they fight,” loved because of “the absence of trauma.” Yet, as we have already discovered, this absence is also a remainder, and love for the beautiful fighting girl is precisely love for this remainder. As Saitō’s readers, we must ask ourselves what kind of love this is. Is it a symptomatic twist in the order of being, a pursuit of genuine impossibility, or the classic late-capitalist fantasy of love under another veil? This is the question Saitō himself evades. In short, although he stakes everything on the performative efficacy of interpretation, he misses the hard kernel of the Real on which that performative process depends. Saitō argues that “those who truly deserve criticism are those who accept anime but reject its sexual elements,” and that otaku can “acquire self-consciousness by falling in love with phallic girls.” Yet we have ample reason to doubt whether otaku really possess this radical potential. At the very least, we can now see an irreducible difference between the “sexuality” Saitō attributes to the beautiful fighting girl and Lacanian sexuation. For a genuine Lacanian, then, doesn’t this “self-consciousness” look more like a disguise, a deception? The following example perfectly illustrates our point. In Seminar XI, Jacques-Alain Miller asked Lacan whether psychoanalysis was anti-Hegelian, and Lacan answered in the affirmative.4 Miller acutely perceived the difference between psychoanalysis’s insistence on the hard kernel of the Real and classical Hegelian self-consciousness as “consciousness of the essence of one’s own being.” This is also the difference between a materialist Lacanian and Saitō. If there is such a thing as self-consciousness in psychoanalysis, isn’t it another name for the unconscious? Interestingly, Saitō himself seems to have noticed this. In a remarkably uncertain tone, he once wrote: “Perhaps Žižek is right that people who understand how fantasy works become even more deeply caught in it? Perhaps so. But this is not the only reason.”
Although Saitō devotes a great deal of his book to proving that otaku are not perverts, we believe this very attitude makes a certain “truth” in his theory self-evident.5 Doesn’t it correspond to one of the most obvious facts of psychoanalytic practice? When an analysand insists, “Not this,” the analyst should understand that what they want is “precisely this.” Seen in this light, isn’t the otaku “self-consciousness” on which Saitō insists a fantasy screen that feigns objectivity? Ironically, his argument for otaku self-consciousness as subjects is “object-centered” from beginning to end. It always revolves around the beautiful fighting girl as the object of otaku desire, while otaku themselves are excluded—as though, in desiring, they had also become observers of their own desire. For Lacan, this is unmistakably the attitude of a pervert. This posture reveals the “ultimate secret” of Saitō’s theory: to make the economy of desire / process of representation within fiction appear “complete,” he must make otaku themselves occupy the structure’s ontological void—the position of objet petit a, or object a. In short, what “self-consciousness” conceals is a certain perversion, and this perversion reveals the truth behind Saitō’s extraordinary fascination with beautiful fighting girls.
We can now return to Saitō’s discussion of the multiplicity of fiction, in which he introduces the concept of “dissociation.” In Deleuze’s terms, this points to the typically postmodern condition in which numerous planes coexist within the same space, with fiction and reality each occupying a place without interfering with one another. (In other words, fiction is not the endpoint: otaku can build further “fictions of fiction” upon it.) For Saitō, this opens a space for otaku jouissance in fiction:
“Otaku desire arises from further emphasizing and exposing the beautiful fighting girl’s nonexistence, accomplished through the simulation and parody of fiction.”
Yet this tendency suggests that fiction is not entirely closed in on itself. Its boundaries are blurred, constantly moving, constantly interacting with otaku’s creative reworkings. Although Saitō repeatedly invokes the independence of its economy of desire to insist on fiction’s autonomy, isn’t the excess of this independent economy obvious? At the same time, we already know that merely attributing this excess, as a fragment of the Real, to the beautiful fighting girl is far from sufficient. Instead, we must point out that this excess possesses an ultimate ambiguity: it is itself absolute movement. New fictions continually emerge and, in their encounters with otaku, turn into becoming-fiction. Excess marks the irreducible difference within this process, continually changing to elude the grasp of fiction as a whole. As a virtual, pre-subjective, anonymous plane, it witnesses countless, ceaseless instances of deterritorialization, reterritorialization, flight, and becoming. It is precisely this excess of fiction that marks the most radical aspect of “dissociation.” As Saitō’s critics, then, we should remain faithful to it. This is the fidelity Lacan insists upon: fidelity to the Real, to the impossible hard kernel of being. Let us not forget that, for Lacan, excess as object a is not only the object of desire but also the object of drive—and psychoanalysis’s ultimate position rests on identification with the drive. This identification compels us to turn from object to subject: more precisely, from the object’s surplus (object a) to the subject’s lack (the subject at the level of drive). This lack, entirely different from the lack Saitō describes, prompts a “zero-level,” pre-ontological reflection on otaku desire.
Finally, I would like to return to Deleuze to conclude this essay. Deleuze continually sought a viewpoint beyond the subject’s perceptual world, from which to think the world as a whole, including the subject itself. Through Deleuze, we can see that otaku desire for the beautiful fighting girl is desire for a whole. And what of otaku themselves? Aren’t they always already within this whole? Yet it is precisely for this reason that they need such a transcendent perspective. Although Deleuze himself opposed psychoanalysis, in my view Lacanian psychoanalysis attempts precisely to provide the subject with such a perspective. Contrary to what some people suppose, psychoanalysis holds that it is precisely because we are always beings “in the world” that we cannot be exempt from a radical responsibility: the responsibility to bear the weight of our own existence.
Editor’s Note: Today, when Saitō himself is no longer even mentioned, it may be necessary to think about him again: how he influenced the subsequent direction of otaku studies, or how his research reveals an inherent cowardice. The question Saitō sets out to address in Beautiful Fighting Girl is “Are otaku perverts?” His apologia ultimately leads him to succumb to the temptation of Jungianism. Today, we should not only criticize his (mis)reading of Lacan but also question his position politically. Yes, otaku captured by the anime-machine are normal; that matters far more than admitting “abnormality” or “disorder.”
Finally, as Jonathan Crary points out, contemporary visual politics differs profoundly from the “camera obscura” model in general. How does animation, a relatively recent creation, seduce and shape its audiences—especially now, when “movie theaters” have declined so dramatically? How is the observer’s body “becoming a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological”?6 These questions are far more complex than we imagine. Saitō has given us only a starting point. Beyond it, an entire field remains … blank.