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Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction positions 22:2 Spring 2014 shoddiest "nation-building projects" harbor the idealism of political false consciousness. Jie Li tenaciously muddied moral culpability and sought to complicate the way we grasp propaganda and the phantasmagoric elements of colonial violence. Baryon Tensor Posadas's "Fantasies of the End of the World: The Politics of Repetition in the Films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi" is not concerned with colonialist idealism. Yet, interestingly, he addresses how filmic violence and moral culpability are enmeshed in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's generic serial-murder plots. In Kurosawa's B-fantasy world, mass murderers are inexplicable even to themselves. Their actions are indecipherable because murder has become a quotidian activity. There is nothing exceptional about it, and consequently murderers "are unable to ascribe exceptional motives to their actions." It is not a bad metaphor for colonial idealism, this fantasy of murder's acceptability and quotidianization. Posadas then invokes Slavoj Zizek's distinction between subjective or personal and objective and institutional violence at the essay's conclusion to argue that in refusing to see injustice, Yoshioka, the film's protagonist, exemplifies the actual fact that no crime is innocent of the very institutional structural violence that makes things appear to be normal, inevitable, quotidian. The injustices he refuses to address haunt http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions asia critique Duke University Press

Editor's Introduction

Barlow, T.
positions asia critique , Volume 22 (2) – Mar 31, 2014
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Duke Univ Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-2413817
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Abstract

positions 22:2 Spring 2014 shoddiest "nation-building projects" harbor the idealism of political false consciousness. Jie Li tenaciously muddied moral culpability and sought to complicate the way we grasp propaganda and the phantasmagoric elements of colonial violence. Baryon Tensor Posadas's "Fantasies of the End of the World: The Politics of Repetition in the Films of Kurosawa Kiyoshi" is not concerned with colonialist idealism. Yet, interestingly, he addresses how filmic violence and moral culpability are enmeshed in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's generic serial-murder plots. In Kurosawa's B-fantasy world, mass murderers are inexplicable even to themselves. Their actions are indecipherable because murder has become a quotidian activity. There is nothing exceptional about it, and consequently murderers "are unable to ascribe exceptional motives to their actions." It is not a bad metaphor for colonial idealism, this fantasy of murder's acceptability and quotidianization. Posadas then invokes Slavoj Zizek's distinction between subjective or personal and objective and institutional violence at the essay's conclusion to argue that in refusing to see injustice, Yoshioka, the film's protagonist, exemplifies the actual fact that no crime is innocent of the very institutional structural violence that makes things appear to be normal, inevitable, quotidian. The injustices he refuses to address haunt

Journal

positions asia critique – Duke University Press

Published: Mar 31, 2014

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