Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS

By William Haver

Book Overview

Examining the AIDS pandemic and Japanese A-bomb literature, this book asks the question of how the experience of unimaginable and unrepresentable loss affects the experience and constitution of the social and the discourses of history. It argues that those objects which are presumptively given to thought under the rubrics of "AIDS" and "Hiroshima/Nagasaki" pose an essential threat, in their existentiality, to conceptual thought and, ultimately, to rationality altogether. It therefore argues that any serious thinking about AIDS and nuclear terror must think the essential insufficiency of thought to its putative objects--the insufficiency of "society" to think sociality, the insufficiency of "history" to think historicity.

The author first attempts to think the incapacity of every invocation of historical consciousness (or, indeed, of "history" itself) to think the existential historicity of that event which is presumptively not only its object but its ground. Readings of works by Nishida Kitaro, Ota Yoko, and Takenishi Hiroko written in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki attempt to mark the limit of historical consciousness. The author then considers erotic sociality in the time of AIDS, specifically as articulated in texts by David Wojnarowicz, focusing on the themes of vulnerability, anonymity, the erotic, and nomadism.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804727287
• ISBN13: 9780804727280
• Release Date: February 1997
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

the politics of inconsolable perversity

It is a pleasure to read such challenging, rewarding and profound thinking in an age of stale academia. Haver's attempt is to think the unthinkable in relation to finitude, community and time - an attempt to approach a body that is both there and not there, both multiple and singular, both erotic and thanatotic. In trying to approach something we might call ethics, or the political, this book rethinks what is at stake when we claim to talk about politics, or what is at stake when it is the (erotic) body that is at stake. By analysing - though never conflating - the AIDS pandemic and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Haver is able to posit a theory of history that dares to address the body as limit, and as such he succeeds in disclosing "the fundamental contingency of any possible normativity". The chapter on Sue Golding is excellent in the way it pushes the thought of the erotic into new and sexy territory: to theorise promiscuity as the abject multiple singularity and therefore as a model of radical democracy is a genius move.

a challenging but ultimately rewarding book

Profesor W. Haver has written a book that challenges the reader to engage with "the apocalyptic sublime," in the guise of atomic destruction and the AIDS pandemic. Emotionally driven, powerful, with long-overdue discussion of sources from the Japanese, this book will force the reader to address his/her notions of historicity, sociality, memory, and, ultimately, his/her own finitude. An important work; badly needed in the field of, dare I say, "Japanology," a veritable industry in and of itself, largely domainated by American "scholars" and, for the most part, irrelevant to the phenomenon that is "Japan," or these "Modern" times in which we find ourselves. Also recommeded are texts by Harootunian, Koschmann, Sakai, Fujitani, Yoneyama (Lisa), Barshay, Najita, and Ivy.