Critical Connections: Forum on Cultural Studies in Asia and Beyond
16 March 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand
CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SCHOLAR AND GUEST SPEAKER
Dr. Christophe THOUNY (New York University)
email: <cthouny@yahoo.com>
"Nighthead: Criminalizing the Freudian Robot"
In her most recent work, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), the Chinese Literary Scholar Lydia Liu proposes the idea of the Freudian Robot to criticize the condition of the Human in the Neo-Liberal Empire and argue for a return to humanism. Notwithstanding the obvious problems raised by the claim for a humanism centered on a Chinese universal tradition, Lydia Liu does succeed in making us wonder how the increased control of space and of spacing as homogenization and automatization of a communication field ends up in the absolute criminalization of the human. As societies of control succeed to disciplinary societies, the neo-liberal criminalization of the social would shut down any possibility for social life by aligning the social with crime, and the human with the criminal. Under these conditions, what can be a crime against the Empire? In order to start thinking about those questions, I want to examine an early 90's Japanese TV drama, Nighthead, aired by Fuji TV between 1992 and 1993. In difference with Fuji TV's staple product, trendy drama focusing on a love story between young Japanese heterosexual individuals, Nighthead demarcated itself by its provocative recipe, a combination of road travel, social deviance and millenarianism. In this presentation, I will discuss how Nighthead problematizes and potentially challenges the entrance of Japan in the Neo-Liberal Empire by proposing a politics of distance that disrupts the homogenization of the communication field. In conclusion, I argue that this politics of distance generates a new form of queer subjectivity exemplified by the dyad of the Kirihara brothers.
| Christophe Thouny has a M.A. in Japanese Modern History from Lyon II University, an M.A. in East Asian Studies from McGill University, and recently received his Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from New York University. His field of expertise ranges from Global Urban Studies, to Modern Japanese Culture (History, Literature and Subcultures), Visual Culture and Critical Theory. He has published on Japanese subculture and animation in the academic journal Mechademia and is currently working on a book manuscript expanding on his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Dwelling in Passing: Urban Cartographies of Imperial Tokyo.” |