ABSTRACT
The context in which the kamikaze emerged was thus richly steeped with autodestructive activity. The novelist Yukio Mishima claimed that the postwar constitution's repudiation of its war machine left Japanese culture grossly distorted by an extradition of the death impulse. The secret to a philosophy of life seems inevitable that Mishima would lionise in Meiji that which he saw as approximating Tsunetomo Yamamoto's decisionism: the kamikaze pilots. The aesthetic war machine which gave birth to the kamikaze by tipping the entire state assemblage into suicidalism. No less than Deleuze and Guattari, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek are occupied by the problem of the suicidal revolution. The similarities of Deleuze and Guattarii's problematizations regarding revolutions and destructive annihilation, however, stand in stark contrast to the choice between a metaphysic of lack and metaphysic of excess that draws them apart. Politics is to live for an idea for Badiou, which always risks taking it too far, becoming swept away by its absolutization.
