Introduction

The Ethics of Aesthetics, first and foremost, interrogates the potential tensions and rapport between a political and a psychoanalytic ethics. On the one hand, as a materialist feminist, I am deeply concerned with literary and cinematic subtexts of domination and exploitation. Accordingly, one trajectory of this study is concerned with “ethics” in the spirit of Emmanuel Lévinas as he has been adapted by contemporary cultural theorists such as Iain Chambers, Rey Chow, and Naoki Sakai, or the interpretation and evaluation of representations of relation to the other in film and literature (or, a politics of representation of self and other).3 Following such cultural theorists, this study explores whether these representations permit radical alterity, or conversely, at the other extreme, whether they constitute an annihilation of the other, be it literally (in the form, for example, of aestheticized death) or through sublation into the self. (And of course there are myriad possibilities in between the two extremes.) Under the rubric of “relation to other,” I include relations that differentiate between individuals (such as that between a man and a woman) and those between imagined national-cultural communities (of us and them, such as Japan/the East and the West). In order to accomplish such an evaluation of ethics, the study is deeply attentive to the ideological impact of historical circumstances contemporaneous with the literary and cinematic texts under consideration, such as Japanese fascism in the prewar, debates on subjectivity after the

war, and the virtual collapse of the communist movement in the 1960s. That is, the study seeks to also elucidate what I deem the relevant problematics of coterminous intellectual, philosophic, and political issues in Japan.