ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Japanese film at the juncture of Western critical methodology and cultural difference. At this juncture, contemporary methodology enables a critical reading of an alternative cultural context, while cultural difference conversely functions to help read the limits and character of critical methodology itself. The doppleganger is a figure that lies at the basis of Orientalist exoticism. Doubleness, as Derrida uses the term, functions to reposition difference from a dialectical or oppositional otherness within a closed system to a plural process of conflict and exchange where the ideological determinants of a system themselves come into question. Once recognized, the doubleness inhabiting texts cannot be “gone beyond” in the sense of reestablishing a new syncretic universal transparency of meaning, but idiosyncratic sites can be explored which foreground the displacements of meaning engendered by double contexts.
