Monday, February 12, 2007

Academic Digression
I'm currently reading The Erotic Phenomenon by Jean-Luc Marion (who also happens to be a professor at my university). Apparently he's been working on this thing in some form or another for the past three decades, and it really shows (despite the short length). It's very French and very academic, but is actually turning out to be a very enjoyable read for me (which probably says a lot about my reading habits). What you've got here is a phenomenology of love - that is, an attempt to approach the basic structural manifolds of the lived experience of love in a way that avoids explaining what's going on through something else (what you would probably get in a "psychology" of love), instead focusing on describing it as precisely as possible. Max Scheler (another philosopher) tried something similar way back when, and of course I've made a few attempts of my own (two of which are, as far as I'm aware, the longest articles on theO), but what Marion's doing is pretty much superior in every way. I find points I've brought up in my own writing not only put more clearly, but also addressed in ways that I never thought of; reading it, I feel vindicated and humbled at the same time.

Anyways, the upshot of all this is that I'm thinking of going back to my old writing on love from a year or so ago and seeing if I can revamp it (or at least recover some good ideas). I was never really happy with them, even if I'm still proud of the attempt itself (at their worst, i.e. their most pretentious, they still stick pretty closely to the concerns of the shows and manage not to drag in a lot of "cultural studies"-style theorizing), but reading Marion now makes it very clear what was interesting and what wasn't in those pieces.

And I'm going to have to rewatch Saikano, I think. Not only because Marion's "flesh" (the body as eroticized - no longer simply something "useful" for tasks, but the body now given to me by my partner; the pleasure of eroticization is the touch of the other's flesh allowing me to feel my own) and what it comes to mean speaks very strongly to what happens to Chise, but because reading this book increasingly convinces me that Saikano thinks more clearly about love as a basic phenomenon than any other show I've ever seen. I recall reading a message board post a few months ago that criticized the series for having unrealistic and melodramatic characters, and for being nothing more than a cheap tear-jerker. This misses the point, I think. Saikano never bothers with realism and could care less about whether its story could actually happen; it has one and only one place to go, and that's to the greatest extreme possible for what it's trying to consider. There's no cheap sentimentality, although it can and does pull tears; the horror emerges entirely out of the show's tragic status (using the word in the old Greek sense), i.e. as depicting individual people and an entire world falling towards disaster because they simply can't stop themselves. If you don't like the series, fine; if you want something that more resembles "reality" (why are you bothering with cartoons again?), fine; no fair mischaracterizing it, though, because it manages to do what it needs to perfectly well.

So yeah, this is just to remind everyone that I am in fact in grad school. I want to start writing on anime again, but it's very difficult to find time - picking away at my old essays may be the best I can do.
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