This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud

This Perversion Called Love: Reading Tanizaki, Feminist Theory, and Freud

Margherita Long

Language: English

Pages: 200

ISBN: 0804762333

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


This Perversion Called Love positions one of Japan's most canonical and best translated 20th century authors at the center of contemporary debates in feminism. Examining sexual perversion in Tanizaki's aesthetic essays, cultural criticism, cinema writings and short novels from the 1930s, it argues that Tanizaki understands human subjectivity in remarkably Freudian terms, but that he is much more critical than Freud about what it means for the possibility of love. According to Tanizaki, perversion involves not the proliferation of interesting gender positions, but rather the tragic absence of even two sexes, since femininity is only defined as man's absence, supplement, or complement. In this fascinating work, author Margherita Long reads Tanizaki with a theoretical complexity he demands but has seldom received. As a critique of the historicist and gender-focused paradigms that inform much recent work in Japanese literary and cultural studies, This Perversion Called Love offers exciting new interpretations that should spark controversy in the fields of feminist theory and critical Asian studies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Haruo In studies of Japanese literature, the details of how Tanizaki’s best friend came to marry his first wife are exceedingly well known. Here is the basic chronology, in list form: 1915 Tanizaki marries Ishikawa Chiyoko (known as “Chiyo”). 1917 Tanizaki and Sato- become friends. 1918–1919 With Tanizaki’s backing, Sato- publishes some of the works for which he is still best remembered: Den’en no y↜uutsu (Rural melancholy) and Utsukushiki machi (Beautiful town). 1920 Tanizaki has

acts to which I gave my young self over, impetuously—and now I find that what was excessive in the past remains always bound in excess so that, to the degree they can never be cut free and left behind, they only haunt me more with the passage of time. I suppose this is why I have naturally been made to think back over events of the past, moved to a state of mind to ponder the traces of my deeds.╯.╯.╯.╯ (309) Although the essay promises to detail “brazen acts” and “reckless deeds,” -

points out that, according to Lacan, what I see within my field of vision—inside this angle that opens out from my eye, or my camera, in straight lines according to the laws of optics—is limited not by the power of my personal or prosthetic eyesight but rather by my uniquely human conviction that there is always something beyond. I would like to see this “more,” but I cannot, so I imagine instead what the world must look like from its perspective. More specifically, I imagine what I myself must

sensibility of 1930s Japan. Discovering the overdetermination of film codes does not convince him that one can struggle against them only from within. Instead, he is impatient, suspecting from the start that they will be all but impossible to change. In Portrait of Shunkin, the twist that Tanizaki adds to his astonishingly Freudian depiction of fetishism makes this clear. Freud identifies the fetishist as the little boy who, like all boys, greets the “unwelcome fact of women’s castration” with

unassimilated “oriental” unconscious—an “imaginary, phantasmatic, racialized archive” (13). I like Lippit’s association of this logic with what is unconscious and even “outlaw” (11), but we differ on whether it is part of an attempt to “express a national and nationalist sensibility” (108). Interestingly, Lippit reads Tanizaki’s cultural particularlism—especially the shadowy Japanese body that “writes on others, infect[ing] them with darkness” (107)—as a prescient 1930s alternative to the 1940s

Download sample

Download