Toward Post-Revolution—Concrete Revolutio Revisited

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Source editor’s note: Reading this essay may require some grounding in psychoanalysis and related theoretical fields.

“Protecting my freedom will disturb the peace; insisting on your justice will infringe on my freedom.”

I. Superhumans as Objet Petit a, and Other Matters

Before we begin our formal discussion of the anime, we should first consider the ambiguity of superhuman status within it. Here we can see an irreducible rift between signifier and signified. On one side are subjects manifesting themselves in all manner of supernatural phenomena—spirits, witches, robots, and yokai—among whom, of course, we can find no empirically observable common feature. On the other is the blanket designation “superhuman.” But what connects the two? Is not the concept of the “superhuman” itself their only bridge?

This closely resembles Badiou’s definition of the event: for Badiou, “an event opens itself only to those situated within it.” The same holds for the “superhuman.” By definition, superhumans exemplify the not-all, that is, “inconsistency/boundlessness”: a subject must first be designated a superhuman before it can retroactively find its place in the set of superhumans.

Yet we should go further and examine what lies behind this ambiguity. Do not forget the Japanese government’s definition in the anime: “Superhumans are nonhuman.” Its resemblance to Kant’s “infinite judgment” is not difficult to detect. Infinite judgment expresses a radically negative stance: superhumans neither belong to humanity nor constitute its opposite. Infinite judgment arises when we encounter an antinomy: every attempt to symbolize the Thing fails, and these attempts inevitably contradict one another. This is precisely why, in defining superhuman identity, the big Other exposes its own lack and places itself in a position of inconsistency. For the Other, are superhumans not intimately connected with the incomprehensible, inaccessible Thing? We cannot help asking: what, then, is the solution? What is the appropriate response to the antagonism of an antinomy?

For Kant—and for the Japanese government in the anime—the only way is to acknowledge lack and treat the antinomy as a pure antinomy. This gives us infinite judgment: an attempt to “draw a boundary,” to establish the limits of phenomena. On one side lie sensible phenomena; on the other, noumena, the elusive “nonphenomena”—which, to repeat, correspond to what the anime calls “superhumans.” Is this not precisely what the anime wants to tell us?

—If we apply human justice to superhumans indiscriminately, all we will get is savage violence, endless bloodshed and sacrifice.

For the Kantian, then, withdrawal is the only correct course, as the anime’s ending shows: only by keeping our distance from superhumans can we attain a stable justice. This justice is, of course, limited, and its very limits guarantee its validity. Or, to adapt Wittgenstein’s words: “Before superhumans, humanity must remain silent.”

What we must avoid here is an intuitive error: treating superhumans and humanity as two poles locked in a struggle to the death, their antagonism a real conflict between substantial entities, with postwar Japan in the forties of the Shinka Era as its background—in Kant’s terms, its public sphere.¹ This view imagines human society as a unified organism and superhumans as external invaders who disrupt the whole’s enduring harmony. What it overlooks is Laclau’s most basic lesson: what we experience as two contradictory sides is precisely one side’s inconsistency with itself, the split within the One itself. It is here, too, that Hegel goes beyond Kant. Does Hegel’s contribution not consist in showing that the antagonism between noumena and phenomena is actually a split within phenomena themselves?

We can therefore assert that the relationship between superhumans and humanity must be counterintuitively reversed. Want to solve the problem of superhumans? The only solution is to return to humanity itself, to look for the shadow of superhumans in the fractures of human society. It is the antagonism running through society’s very foundations that brings superhumans into being. This involves the basic operation of ideology: social antagonism is externalized and attributed to a nonexistent enemy. Perhaps this offers one possible route to a correct understanding of the superhuman: taken literally, does “superhuman” not mean “beyond the human,” representing humanity’s own excess and discordance? “Excess” is used here in the following sense: good and evil are the two sides of a Möbius strip. When we go too far along one side, we pass from human good to superhuman evil, from justice to injustice.

Defining superhumans as humanity’s remainder gives us Lacan’s definition of objet a. It is a kind of “excrement”: a by-product of the symbolic order that represents the order’s own excess. At the same time, it is “the remainder that no division can eliminate”; it is precisely because this remainder is present that every attempt at symbolization ends in failure. Where does the threat to humanity come from? We can say this: humanity’s greatest threat is certainly not the mysterious “power of superhumans.” Quite the contrary, its greatest threat is what humanity itself has abjected—the “Muselmänner of the concentration camps,” regarded as so much filthy excrement.² They have no fixed abode, drifting through society’s nooks and crannies. Are superhumans not precisely Kafka’s “Odradek”? The resemblance is striking. Nothing in the anime astonishes us more than that family of “immortal superhumans.” Like Odradek, they may look perfectly ordinary, yet we cannot find any way to destroy them: even the “Bio-Destroyer” is powerless against them. Is this not a perfect example of the excess of life? To borrow Žižek’s words, they have “lived too long,” becoming spectral apparitions that threaten the consistency of human society as a whole.

On another level, however, objet a changes guise, becoming the fantasmatic foundation that supports the edifice of ideology. The symbolic order has two constitutive fictions. One is the Name-of-the-Father, a conceptual fiction. We know that the actual father is always a feeble, dispirited figure; it is through the Name-of-the-Father that we construct the image of an imposing father, and this image ensures the symbolic order’s proper functioning. (To go further, the actual father’s imperfection is itself a positive condition of that functioning: “Only a dead father is a good father.”) The other is the “conceptual Jew,” held responsible for every failure of society. This figure is a paradigmatic objet a, filling the blank between the “subject of enunciation” (the actual father) and the “subject of the statement” (the imposing father). The crucial point is this: the “conceptual Jew” is not a person. As a guarantor of fantasy, it is a structural function that makes up for the gap in the symbolic order, $S(\bar A)$.³

Agamben’s homo sacer is precisely such a person: stripped of all dignity, reduced to bare life, treated as a body for labor. Only on these terms can such people secure the bare minimum needed to survive. Yet beyond this, they really ask for nothing.

Let us return to the anime. In the final episodes of the second season, under Master Ultima’s plan, illegal superhumans become fuel for generating electricity in the underwater city. Their lives are treated as nothing but expendable materials; yet it is precisely this that makes “humanity’s eternal future” possible. Could there be a more explicit metaphor for homo sacer? I cannot help but say that they are “social specters” in the fullest sense. The social specter is the universality of every society: it is present in the form of absence, and society constructs itself around this very absence. In Japan in the forties of the Shinka Era, these specters simply went by the name “superhumans.”

Is this not precisely Hegel’s lesson? The totalization–reflexivization of our lives produces its own brutal immediacy. In other words, every attempt to imagine human society as a closed whole inevitably leads to an immediate eruption of violence, inevitably producing the obscene remainder called the superhuman. Put differently, an eruption of violence always presupposes a symbolic impasse. Yet this alone is not enough. Here we have, on one side, the stain of the gaze, and on the other, a wandering voice. The voice both “gives life to what we have never seen, gives life to what eludes our gaze” and constitutes an obscene, inert presence that undermines the subject’s attempts at articulation. Once again, we witness the identity of the big Other’s lack and “Odradek.” Finally, we can add one more element to this opposition: what Žižek calls “Id-Evil.” It is both driven and structured by the most elementary imbalance between the ego and enjoyment (jouissance)—and by the tension between pleasure and the foreign body of enjoyment at its very heart. Perhaps we can now grasp the true meaning of Benjamin’s maxim: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”⁴

Now we can see the obscene knot behind ideology. In short, it consists of two things: the law and its obscene supplement. Let us return once more to the beginning of this section, to superhumans as the Real. Does this not suggest a crucial fact? The ideological knot is anything but perfect. On the contrary, it is always accompanied by terrifying ruptures; it is already “wounded all over.” Perhaps this is precisely the perspective from which we should understand Concrete Revolutio’s fragmented narrative: the real danger is the danger of silence, the blank between one event and another. We must recognize that the story’s silence is by no means natural. It presupposes the exclusion of the real object—and there, with the real object, all we have is the murmur of the Real, swathes of discordant noise.

Is this not exactly what happens in the anime? In repeating these clichés—magical girls, monsters, robots, and aliens—has Concrete Revolutio not missed the truly radical dimension of the superhuman? Has it not overlooked the genuinely terrifying “excesses of the human”? Here lies the ultimate paradox: we must admit that without recourse to fantasy, we would lose even a minimal “social reality”—yet fantasy is always intent on gentrifying the neighbor, doing everything it can to conceal what is real. For this reason, the story of superhumans has been incomplete from the outset, already owing a “symbolic debt.” And as a repetition of this original trauma, what we finally get is the symptom named Concrete Revolutio.

Tell me, superhumans. Do you struggle for justice? For peace? Or for humanity’s freedom?

—Concrete Revolutio ~ Superhuman Phantasmagoria

II. What Kind of Revolution? What Kind of Justice?

The end of the anime’s first season presents us with this scene: to defend justice for superhumans, Tokyo’s students mobilize, taking to the streets to protest the American government’s atrocities against superhumans, even clashing with the police. Of course, as expected, this “revolution” ends in failure within a few hours. What awaits the superhumans afterward is brutal repression… The usual view treats this movement as some kind of “great event,” an “eruption of the passion for the Real.” But what comes after that? We must press the question further: why does the anime’s Shinjuku movement ultimately fail?

Think of Master Ultima’s attitude during the Shinjuku movement: compared with his interest in the battle between Jiro and Claude, he is utterly indifferent to the students’ violence. Their seemingly radical actions are reduced to a backdrop, an obscene supplement to ideology. Is this not precisely the utopia the students fantasize about? They hope to establish a direct relationship with enjoyment without passing through prohibition. Here we need to recall Hegel’s basic dialectical motif: in the dialectical process, the thesis, in order to realize itself, must go to the opposite extreme, must exchange places directly with the antithesis. The students aim to protect superhumans. And the result? They instead provide a pretext for tyranny against them.

What we find here is a general social structure of the “post-Oedipal” era. “Post-Oedipal” is meant in Jacques-Alain Miller’s sense: he points out that in late-modern society, enjoyment has taken the master’s place in issuing commands to us. In the students’ actions at Shinjuku, does the superhuman Claude, who acts as their master, not occupy precisely this position of enjoyment? Do not forget our earlier definition of superhuman identity: the superhuman is precisely the object-cause of desire that arouses human desire. This accords with Miller’s insight. Miller once suggested that Lacan’s fourth discourse—the analyst’s discourse—has already become dominant in contemporary society: objet a represents the superego injunction of surplus-enjoyment, driving the barred subject to act. Moreover, the truth of this society is $S_2$, corresponding in the anime to the Teito corporation, which does whatever it pleases behind a façade of neutrality. In this sense, the act of “Revolutio” becomes a superego injunction, a byword for obscenity. In a certain sense, this accords with Lacan’s formula of perversion: the pervert always makes the big Other’s enjoyment their first responsibility. The students’ attempt is an attempt at transgression—and for the later Lacan, “transgression is an obscene word.”

But this alone is still not enough. We should now turn our attention from Claude to Jiro in the first half of the second season. We move from Miller to Agamben. Agamben’s position is diametrically opposed to Miller’s: his solution depends on dissolution. Despite the various problems it faces, his insight is correct. Today’s task is not synthesis but separation: separating what seems to form a whole within the social bond. First and foremost comes the separation of violence from law. Is this not the very ground on which Jiro and Raito stand in the second season? They seek to open up a new space of “pure” violence, quite unlike violence committed to opposing the law.

But is this really the final solution? Does it not place us in another predicament? As Jiro discovers, once he resorts to “pure violence” to realize his justice, he instead begins gradually to lose that justice. This is also the paradox of the universal justice on which he insists: to realize itself, universal justice must resort to the excessive Real, to objet a. Universal justice thus becomes a justice “in excess,” unable to find any proper place in the social edifice. In other words, universal justice is reduced to the justice of superhumans. Only on a superhuman foundation can it posit itself as universal; we can therefore call it a justice of the utmost particularity. At last we can understand Yumihiko’s challenge to Jiro: “Is this really the justice you insist on?”

Perhaps this is also the crisis facing normative ethics. Is the absolute justice on which Jiro insists not just such an axiomatic norm—justice treated as the starting point of action rather than its goal? It gives meaning to all his acts of resistance. But:

There is a kind of circular-retroactive temporality at work here: we endeavor gradually to realize the prescribed axiom by treating it as already realized.⁵

Justice always wagers on the power it will ultimately acquire, and thus becomes a paradoxical loop. Yet we must emphasize once more that this loop always contains a rupture, the sudden emergence of something unexpected. Without doubt, that unexpected something is objet a. From another angle, then, we arrive at the contradiction mentioned above: universal justice is always intimately connected with the exception.

What, then, is the truly decisive moment in the anime’s second season?

It comes in the final episode, when Jiro rises out of the shadow of self-negation and gives his life to stop Satomi’s plan. Do we not see the return of “justice” here? We should go further and point out that this “justice” differs from every kind of justice discussed so far. The justice of the final moment arrives after the violent moment of pure negation. That moment opens a new space outside the established symbolic order; justice then fixes its meaning. This also marks the anime’s truly radical dimension. At least, in the final moment, Sho Aikawa avoids a certain “postmodern” trap: the claim that there is no guarantee of any ultimate justice, that all justice is instead limited, justice as appearance, and that all we have is the interplay of appearances. What this position overlooks is the dimension of enjoyment in justice. Do not forget that this dark, obscene thing dwells at the very heart of the symbolic order, and that the fundamental identity of the superhuman is intimately connected with it.

Thus, at its conclusion, Concrete Revolutio takes the same path as the late Lacan: after the symbolic order has been thoroughly saturated with enjoyment—what Lacan calls the “point of the apocalypse”—after a concentrated eruption of enjoyment, humanity attempts to establish a new society. Within it, we witness the return of the superhuman as a signifier.

We must take seriously Lacan’s claim that psychoanalytic discourse paves the way for the emergence of a new master. After the passion of Revolutio, we will have to confront the reconstruction of a new order, moving from the negative gesture of “traversing the fantasy” to the constitution of that order. Lacan’s final lecture, “Toward a New Signifier,” points precisely to this theme.⁶ We must not treat this as a resigned conservative wisdom. On the contrary, an opening for Concrete Revolutio lies hidden within the new signifier. Badiou, too, has pointed out that today’s capitalist world is in fact “worldless,” and that the master-signifier offers us a new experience of meaning in this era. Meanwhile, Miller repeatedly emphasizes that the unconscious has the structure of the master’s discourse: its representative, $S_1$, marks the unconscious quilting point of the subject’s space of meaning. In this sense, the psychoanalyst’s task is no longer to dismantle, but to devise new master-signifiers—ones that allow us to name our new space.⁷

Returning to the anime, we have, on one side, superhumans using violence to open up a new world and move into a new space—a genuine act, exemplary of “traversing the fantasy”—and on the other, superhumans becoming a new signifier within human society. The relationship between the two is intimate, representing the transition from Revolutio to post-Revolutio. The new signifier gives us the capacity for Benjaminian repetition: it is an index linking us to the past, allowing us, in the age after Revolutio, to recover the passion of “Concrete Revolutio~.”

This is what Hegel calls “the actuality of possibility.” Possibility as potential always remains not yet actualized, yet it is precisely this not-yet-actualized possibility that guarantees our actuality—“given the power possibility possesses, demanding its further actualization is superfluous.” Here we see the ultimate ambiguity of the master-signifier. Is it not precisely the so-called “index of the impossible”? Through it, we can “touch the Real.” Perhaps this is the key to Žižek’s “politics of separation”: the relationship between alienation and separation corresponds to that between metaphor and metonymy in the signifier. The arrival of a new master is inevitable. For this very reason, this is a journey without an endpoint: “Concrete Revolutio ~ Superhuman Phantasmagoria” is forever an unfinished undertaking. But we should not fear this, for we will direct our attention to the unrealized potential of Concrete Revolutio, to objet a—which, of course, differs in meaning from the objet a discussed earlier. By identifying with objet a, we move toward the next separation.

Perhaps this is the anime’s final lesson for us. Let us repeat: the superhumans’ choice is withdrawal, a departure toward another, unknown world. This is a genuine choice, one that truly changes the coordinates of a situation. After a gesture of pure withdrawal, “nothing will happen; the position remains unchanged.” This keeps open the site where violence can erupt. In other words, it is the choice of “I would prefer not to.”⁸

References

1. The Grimaces of the Real — Slavoj Žižek.⁹
2. The Parallax View — Slavoj Žižek.
3. The Plague of Fantasies — Slavoj Žižek.
4. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life — Giorgio Agamben.