1. "Without love, there is no love, so there is no sorrow."
On that night, the "Last Night on Earth," Asuka brought the indifferent Fudura to a sex party called "Shabbat." It is said that "evidence of the existence of demons" can be found there.
The two left the city far away and drove straight to an abandoned housing area. There are few people here, and everywhere in disrepair, it looks like a drifting place outside civilization. A door was opened—a fragile boundary between two worlds—and the monotonous scene of ruins was replaced by a maze of splendid flesh, and the audience was greeted by uncontrolled promiscuity, the pleasure zone burst.
The name Sabbath is taken from the Bible, on which people "shall not do any work " (Leviticus 23:3). This is a prohibition promulgated by God, and the infinite accumulation of prohibitions constitutes a civilized life and a human life paradigm. Bataille said that "taboo brings us a peaceful and rational world", but eroticism is a transgression of the taboo, and the sex parties called Sabbath use the name of the prohibition to ironically commit adultery: the normative mode of sex is the Constructed, and "carnival-style erotica", "is the disorder of life." Such transgressions, which cannot be accommodated by prohibition, are the excrement of civilized life, and their domain is the social subconscious beneath the stratum. Just like the subcultures such as hip-hop and rap that frequently appear in the play, it is a manifestation of the vitality imprisoned by the social order-why does the devil show up at the promiscuous party? Because "demons" first and foremost metaphorically symbolize visitors from another world, heretics of the civilized world.
It is conceivable that, in most cases, this transcendence is only a temporary transcendence of the daily order. Aristophanes in Symposium extols that the eros in the social world serve only to appease the passions (and to reproduce), so that people settle down, "and then go and fuck yourself. day-to-day work and worry about other life necessities". The act of transcendence punctures the mundane life while keeping it orderly for most of the time, and the silent rebellion of the night against the day is just to usher in another day and night cycle.
But this is just a transcendence that takes place in the symbolic plane. And man is no better than a machine, he is still an imaginary animal, he can imaginatively transcend, and overcome the time difference between transcendence and prohibition. Our reverie of another world is a ghost that is both absent and present, "the factory worker has her own dream", which makes reality take on a certain unreality. Fire, chance encounters, television, the ending of Watchmen: they can all be singularities that lead to another world outside of real life, but at the same time as human society—for the word “society” Structural, orderly meanings expressed - in a subtle peer.
Note that a transcendence of one order may only be for the return/reestablishment of another, and a complete transcendence must be distinguished from any kind of conscious aggregate so that the only prohibition is the "prohibition prohibition" . This disorder, therefore, celebrates the dynamism of force and energy, the eternity of flow and play, what Rancière calls Vertov's "Machine-Eye", "the movement of A synchronised dance of unanimity and communism of all forces". The subject is canceled, and there is only endless movement: when we refer to/imaginary "this person", "this person", we have always fixed man as an object, but man cannot be understood as a variety of A synthesis of traits ("good character", "good looks"), he is open, amorphous, and a flow point of various forces and energies. In a word, man becomes inhuman: everything is, anyway, not "man" (a concept, a name, a symbol). It is in this sense that man can become a demon, he/it shreds everything and pours blood into the sanctuary. This is the second metaphor of "devil" , symbolizing the moment when man becomes inhuman.
"After Auschwitz, writing poetry is barbaric" - hopefully Adorno will allow me to distort this passage, or, rather, reveal its Konstellation - complete anarchism cannot be enacted The ethical boundaries of action, since the subject is no longer important, the killing of people by demons is also irrelevant. However, as the audience, in front of the massacre scene, are we only intoxicated by the emergence of power and energy, enjoying the surge of adrenaline?
"There is no love, there is no love, so there is no sadness." No matter whether it is love or sadness, it is difficult to describe the two interlaced forces. For them, there is only convergence or separation. Asuka's conclusion is based on this logic. He understands the relationship between people and people and between people and animals as a pure power relationship, and even goes further: not only reducing people to inhumans , and the justification for overriding and enslaving them is derived from the comparison and suppression of power. Since I was a child, I couldn't understand why we shed tears for the dying animals. After all, "the weak will die" - but life or death, whether the goal is achieved or not, will it affect our pity for the weak? The fundamental reason is that the weak are absent from Asuka's vision, and the Devil Awakening plan he planned later aims to establish a ruling order where the strong come first, but the concept of "power" that separates the strong from the weak has actually been narrowed. Disintegrated: Anarchism/communism sung by Rancière et al. distinguishes the abundance and barrenness of force, a force that is sufficiently rich and diverse enough to seem to incorporate the infinite vitality of the entire world into abstraction The Asuka version is a vulgar version of Nietzscheism, giving strengths and weaknesses to forces that are incomparable to each other, thereby shaping the opposition between higher and lower, ignoring the way forces relate to the outside world. .
Human faces were annihilated, and it was a dangerous noon.
2. "No...", nothing?
Is the moon that blue?
Is it only in Tokyo?
And no one seemed to notice.
——"The night sky always has the greatest density of blue" (Ishii Yuya, 2017)
In the sixth episode, the irrational Koda transformed into a bull demon, trampling the huge stadium into a sea of blood. I, the spectator, stared at these helpless faces, trying in vain to escape the death to come.
It's hard not to have empathy, or it's impossible not to have empathy.
When Mencius saw that "the rookie will enter the well", he would arouse "compassion" ("Mencius Gongsun Chou Chapter One"), and what he described was the occurrence of ethical consciousness. What connects Mencius and Ruzi, and me to the mourning characters on the screen, is a kind of inspirational relationship that spills over into language and over writing—I don’t even know why I sympathize with others. But empathy just happens, and I just have an ethical connection with other people. Hume said:
Any emotion that can arouse a person is always felt to some extent by others. Just as when several strings are evenly stretched in one place, the motion of one is communicated to the rest; so also all feelings are quickly transmitted from one person to another, and in each The corresponding activity occurs in the mind.
What he proposes is a real presupposition that can only be verified in human experience. In the childhood flashback at the beginning of the first episode, Fu Ming has already shown a completely different attitude towards life from the indifferent Asuka: he has been a crybaby since he was a child, but his tears are for others, Flowing toward others signifies an ability to compare one's heart to one's heart. As his name suggests - "Fudo Myo", a Buddhist monk with unshakable compassion - he even became a devilman and devoted himself to killing other demons who harmed others. The point is that ethical appeals are passive and subjective, and "conscience" is the presence of something outside the body—not that I choose to have a conscience (as normative ethics induces it), but to pose "wish there is a conscience." ", a gesture of prayer ethics. Thus, the anarchism described in the previous section, while it can abolish a conscious, active thinking self (le Moi), cannot abandon what Levinas calls the accusative ego (moi): that is the ethical The passive bearer of responsibility maintains a minimal identity of the self in the sense of connecting with others.
But our quest is not over yet: is there a person who shows a fundamental indifference to the other, without ever wanting to respond to the call in the ethical space? The Devilman's answer is: not only there, but many, many more. The bird that is Satan is the rudiment of this image, and the group of hooligans who later sent the same kind to the stake and nailed it to the cross is its ultimate state. But the ability to sympathize engraves a person's social identity. If he/she wants to be called a "person" in the ethical space - Ming himself will say that those "mortals" who harm Meishu and those executioners are the ones "Demon"? - It must be able to perceive, or understand the suffering of others.
We will see Miki, who is always full of confidence in the world, subjected to unwarranted suspicion and abuse on social media. She has encountered evil, and her experience has disproved her beliefs. But Miki never gave up sympathy for others, and likewise, the hateful rabble never changed their appearance. Prometheus once brought the spark of enlightenment to the world, but the small baton never reached Ming's hands.
The baton represents hope like the child hugging the demon (Ming) in episode 9, but it's just a false hope. Human beings are always dead, and finally the demons who challenge Satan are left to "fight hand-to-hand in the dark night of emptiness." (Lu Xun, "Hope")
From the childhood flashbacks of the first episode, to the entrenched goodness and stubborn malice, what The Devil suggests is the essentialism of human nature : good and evil are decontextualized, nonconstructive, and indeed there is People are born to be good, and there are people who "will do evil voluntarily". This plunges the anime into the paradox of melodrama itself: time passes, images move, but characters don't grow, and the audience can expect nothing more than the folding and unfolding of a single signifier -- until it's exhausted : The thunder of heaven destroys everything.
On the contrary, in Jin Yong's novels and hot-blooded anime, the protagonist's martial arts skills are always accompanied by their insight into life, and if we consider Freud's conceptual framework, the reason why people are keen on such growth novels / Anime is because they set up an ideal self (Idealich) ["free and easy Linghu Chong"], allowing the more empty, actual self (wirkliche Ich) ["fat house"] to move towards him , and endow the "self" with an inner time dimension that stretches from the present to the future. But in the world of The Devil, the actual ego banishes all other possibilities, and the wicked and the good are immersed in endless rotation—as if everyone sees only the red moon hanging in the sky , and only in my eyes is blue.
The thought experiment in Devilman abstracts the capillary-like reality into a grand confrontation of good and evil, which is ultimately because it outlines a post-human scene: demons (people) in appearance, body and ability They are very different from ordinary people, and the foundation of symbolic order has been destroyed by them. Just like the plug-ins in the game, the "genius high school students" who can easily break the five sprint world records have actually heralded the irreversible decline of human society. They are actually some kind of post-human beings living outside the rules of the game. The moment Koda was pronounced a demon, the safety bubble that enveloped the entire human community was suddenly burst. The political disintegration of the enemy and our own, this is a "war between alien creatures" with disparity in strength, and the scattered survivors enjoy endless despair.
This apocalyptic scene is more like a worrying warning or exhortation, and fortunately, we are only dealing with real society and real people. They need to be a little more complicated, and they need to be treated with a little more nuance. The way "Devil Man" is written is like a grand myth, without a touch of the ups and downs of life. This sense of life is given by the encounter and entanglement of people in specific situations. Our sympathy, remorse or other emotions are not only innate, they are enriched because they point to specific people and thing. As a counter-example, we can imagine Rawls's "veil of ignorance": under a veil of suspended specific scenes, law-makers sit together and their social identities are abstracted away. Although Rawls's gaze penetrates our fixed identity stereotypes, the "model of justice" (Platonic) he extols ignores or abandons the dimension of becoming, which leaves one An abstract idea (“justice”) to weigh and formulate morals. But this kind of morality does not seem to be able to accommodate a thick ethical life, and it cannot allow the fleeting flow of emotions to meander in it. Only superheroes wearing masks can ensure that the idea of justice descends into the world of perception, while we mortals create justice in real life.
3. "There is no love... - I used to think so."
What we talk about when we talk about love?
—Raymond Carver
At the end of the episode, which is also the end of the world, Asuka clings to the upper half of the dead body on a silent star and weeps. His evening has come.
This scene reminds me of "Evangelion", the same bloody ocean, the same dead land, the same two people, and the same love. In the final scene of the theatrical version of End of Evangelion , Shinji is pinching Asuka by the neck—the end of the old world and the original scene of the new. Shinji, the tormented Adam, seems to want to reject Asuka, the Eve.
In his previous experiences, Shinji always prayed for his loneliness, that his loneliness could get a response or even rescue from others, but the experience of encountering the wall of the heart again and again caused these wounds to scab on the body, and the response to the pain. The aggressive dodging left an inexhaustible legacy, and finally vented on the white ground as resentment for Asuka.
Cheeks were caressed, hands clenched shaking; tears dripped with whimpering. Shinji finally let go. It declares that both of them, the new Adam and the new Eve, will drag their bruised and frail bodies and their great weariness on their shoulders as the sinthome of the prehistory of the world, in the vast wasteland where God has died waiting for some kind of future. There has never been an innocent person in the Garden of Eden, and there has never been any love, but only "I need you."
So, when Asuka cried "Don't leave me alone", did you understand what love is?
In the fifth episode, Huai Meng was willing to sacrifice her life to join her in order to save the dead Li Rui. Ming asked, is there love between demons? To answer him, the devil is a simple animal, only act according to instinct, that is not called love. Ming Que said: "In my opinion, it's like love." Huai Meng's sincerity in that moment seems to have surpassed biological instincts, rather it is ethical, based on empathy and understanding of Di Liheng. Life and death decisions.
Compared with them, Fei Niao is more like an incompetent ant. If it is said that Fuming, Huaimeng and their love are based on sympathy for others, then Asuka's "love" is just the opposite based on not being able to sympathize. While judging the world, he also knelt down at the knees of God, looking extremely humble. What he calls love is a drive (Trieb), cryptically directed towards the immobility that always haunts the mind. And under the shroud of the other (Autre)/God, the driving force that this repeating flow can never be satisfied, Asuka's fatal attachment to the invisibility is displaced into the paranoia that destroys the world - he ( Subconsciously) thinking that clearing everything will bring Ming's embrace again.
But they were strangers from start to finish.
At first glance, Ming appears to be a very ordinary person, but in the context of psychoanalysis he is a special case: his bond with his parents, or family romance, is not revealed. Into the retrospective mechanism of the mind, he and the host family only retain the respect between the guests, and the death of both parents in the fourth episode (Fu Shi!) makes him get rid of the subject history that constitutes the symptoms and achieve the highest The purity of : the indiscriminate love for all beings. And if we pay attention to the scene at the end, we will be surprised to find that Ming's death frame is only the upper body - the lower body that shows the male sexuality has disappeared, and he is asexual ! Only the asexual, only the flawless without the slightest lust, can escape Nietzsche's critical gaze and practice a truly altruistic ethic—of course, the asexual does not yet belong to the possible. What's more interesting is that Asuka is androgynous as a seraph, and has the sexual characteristics of both men and women. This apparent completeness reflects his inner imperfection as well as his glossy social status (professor, "genius"): his "love" is like a giant baby, with no real other in sight, but only The retention and extension of self-liberal desires, and only when everything is lost will they be willing to face the truth of their own desires: "Don't leave me alone"--isn't this like the "Human Completion Plan" in "Neon Genesis Evangelion" ? They all think that "returning everything to the starting point" can break through the barriers in their hearts, but have they ever thought that this is just a fundamental self-deception (mauvaise foi)?
In this regard, the other two sister animations directed by Masaaki Yuasa, "Four Layers and a Half Myths" and "The Spring Night is Short, Let's Go Girls!" " can be seen as the antithesis of "Devil Man".
The narrow and endless "four-fold and half-space" is like a spiritual cage built by Asuka, presenting a comfortable illusion, but also a sign of cowardice. The prisoners are not yet what Sartre calls pour-soi--but they can also be. Following in the footsteps of existentialism, people will realize that the moment of transformation is to bear the burden of existence with tragic heroic courage, and realize that they can give meaning to the broken and messy situation at hand. Although freedom can be dizzying, "meaning" is only a beacon of light that flickers with difficulty—perhaps indistinctly—in the dark night. But this first step he took signifies that he no longer needs to worry about being thrown away, but can actively devote himself to the world he is in, and enter into the conversational situation of interacting with others. It is a "human life".
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