ABSTRACT

I would like to exploit the notion of the symptom in order to think Japan’s socalled postwar, through a close cross-reading of two specifically connected materials – Maruo Suehiro’s violent manga which bears the aggressive title Planet of the Jap and the so-called Kokutai no hongi (Cardinal Principles of the National Polity/National Body, published in 1937 by the Ministry of Education [Monbusho¯]). This notion of the symptom, here, is exactly what is paraphrased as follows by Slavoj Zˇizˇek when he positively refers to Eric Santner’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. Zˇizˇek quotes from Santner:

[S]ymptoms register not only past failed revolutionary attempts but, more modestly, past failures to respond to calls for actions . . . They hold the place of something that is there, that insists in our life, though it has never achieved full ontological consistency. Symptoms are thus in some sense the virtual archives of voids – or, perhaps, better, defenses against voids – that persist in historical experience.2