Those who cry foul over the Yasusada seem to feel that his imaginary life toys with historical veracity and authenticity of a profoundly painful event […] But in the stress given to the empirical they seem to forget that empathy, commemoration, and memory are not reducible to the positivistic “accuracies” of history — for these aspects of human response are often nourished by the mythic indirectness of imagination and its elaborations. These, in turn, also become history, and add […]
Double Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada
… l’être du language n’apparaît pour lui-même, que dans la disparition du sujet.
Michel Foucault. “La Pensée du dehors” Critique No. 229 (June 1966)
The Yasusada affair, in the end, throws the politics of identity into question: the cherished liberal image of one marginalized group after another stepping from darkness into light, the parade of celebratory self-identification (“I am woman, hear me roar”; “Say it loud — I’m black and I’m proud”; “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”). Yasusada makes you wonder whether the twentieth-century radicals were really radical enough — whether the power to name oneself affirmatively, authentically, is enough to deliver a gender, race, or sexuality from subjugation. Whether, at the philosophical root, there’s sufficient distance between minority pride movements and hegemonic self-celebration. Whether authenticity might be the sickness instead of the cure.
Alex Verdolini “Desert Music, Hiroshima: The Poetics and Politics of Pseudonymity” in Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums
“Radical empathy” seems not to include carrying the Yasusada part to its logical conclusion and, for example, purchasing a couple grams of plutonium from some renegade Soviet scientists in order to more authentically method-act the effects of Yasusada’s radiation sickness. This is radical empathy without the hair loss and diarrhea, radical empathy as a problem of technique, as just one more aspect of “author function.” But here I am launching an ad hominem attack against […]
Dave Wojahn “Illegible Due to Blotching: Poetic Authenticity and Its Discontents” in Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums
The dream: to know a foreign (alien) language and yet not to understand it: to perceive the difference in it without that difference ever being recuperated by the superficial sociality of discourse, communication or vulgarity; to know, positively refracted in a new language, the impossibilities of our own; to learn the systematics of the inconceivable, to undo our own “reality” under the effect of other formulations, other syntaxes; to discover certain unsuspected positions of the subject in utterance, to displace the subject’s topology; in a word, to descend into the untranslatable, to experience its shock without ever muffling it, until everything Occidental in us totters and the rights of the “father tongue” vacillate — that tongue which comes to us from our fathers and which makes us, in our turn, fathers and proprietors of a culture which, precisely, history transforms into “nature”.
Roland Barthes translated by Richard Howard “The Unknown Language” Empire of Signs
At the end of the exhibit was a long, carpeted hall with a few televisions, each programmed to play an hour-long video of survivors’ testaments. The survivors spoke Japanese, and their statements were translated below in English and French. For the entire hour, I sat and watched the videos. Person after person spoke, some with horrible disfigurements, some with a legacy of cancer, some looking untouched but deeply haunted. Here was horror and fear, grief, resignation, forgiveness, rage. I will never forgive America, one older gentleman said, practically spitting into the camera. I will never forgive a country that could commit such evil. His face contorted as he spoke. The glass windows behind me filled with sun, making it difficult to read the translation. I flinched and squinted. The video had captured a variety of responses to preserve some idea of what Hiroshima meant to the people who had experienced it: there was no one reaction, and though I knew each person speaking was a singular identity, I also understood that the collection of responses was meant to suggest that all of them together did compose a single identity, the identity of the Hiroshima survivor, a concept that did and did not exist. I forgive them. I despise them. I am suffering. I have made peace with it. They are evil. I was embarrassed, chagrined, stunned. I could not stop watching. There was nothing coy or elliptical in the phrases the speakers used. One after the other spoke: man, woman, man. They blended together, enraged and pained and haunted, a voice full or ruin. The video spooled and spooled. The effect of listening, even for a single hour, was agonizing.
Paisley Rekdal “Doubled Flowering: Charles Yu, Araki Yasusada and the Politics of Faking Race” in Scubadivers and Chrysanthemums
