Japanuary I: NRT

Bewilderment at Die Apokalypse enttäuscht (The Apocalypse disappoints), my reading on the 13 hour plane flight. Nine contemporary academic answers to Maurice Blanchot's spectacular essay (or, review) with the same title – in French, that is – published in 1964 in response to Karl Jasper's Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen (1958). Jasper's 500 pages describe the confluence of two terrible forces threatening mankind: the atomic bomb on the one hand, bolshevik totalitarianism, sometimes simply called communism, on the other. Both, Jaspers argues, threaten to annihilate mankind, either by a massive suicide of the whole gattung through nuclear self-destruction (the factual annihiliation of life), or by the political extinction of the freedom that makes human life worth living (the ideal annhiliation of life via the abolition of freedom). This fatal confluence means that mankind finds itself at a threshold that must change everything, that requires a newfound way of thinking and acting; as everything 'old' will turn out to be part and parcel with the tendencies that led to the terrible duality of atomic bomb and communism in the first place.

Blanchot's 10 pages reply: There is no chance, at this point, to annihilate mankind 'as a whole', because mankind 'as a whole' does not yet exist; it is still waiting to be created, and creating it would require – or be – a communist act in the proper sense of the term. Before that, the supposed almight of the atomic bomb remains a myth that politicans use to cover the limits of their own factual power.

(What is crucial is that my summary of Jaspers' 500 pages seems fair to me; my summary of Blanchot's 10 pages feels like an inane decomplexification.)

The collision of these two texts is really a competition of quality vs. quantity (with the representant of quality, Blanchot, also touching upon the quality of Jasper's language: how can you, Blanchot asks, claim to stand at a historical threshold, be seized by a fundamental crisis that requires complete renewal, and then continue to use the same stalewart liberalism you were selling since ten years or twenty years before, continue to deal with the same old and false oppositions, to fall prey to the same mystifications that your politicans fall for, to remain, that is, bound to the same linguistic formulae, the same vocabulary, the same referents? How dare you say 'this changes everything' in an unchanged, unfazed old lingo?

Reading the replies to Blanchot collected in Die Apokalypse enttäuscht, I was struck by the impression that although virtually all authors seem to stand on Blanchot's side rather than Jaspers' (which might make sense seeing it's a book containing replies to Blanchot, after all, not to Jaspers), almost all of them adopt Jaspers' stance.

Except for two authors, the preferred gesture seems to reformulate Blanchot's points within the linguistic framework of their own habit; to explain what seem like the most challenging and ambitious points of Blanchot's texts by accomodating them within 'what a certain theoretical community already knows and has known for some time'. In its most extreme fashion, this 'already-known' is expressed in a contribution that, helpfully, alerts us to the fact that the apocalypse is quite an old concept, known even to one or two strands of religious thought.

The two exceptions from this rule are quite different from each other, and they divert from the rule in different ways (and only one truly does, I think). Danilo Scholz' contribution is characteristically and hilariously well-informed and treats us to a wealth of historical context of both Jaspers' and especially Blanchot's text. You learn a lot, in this short essay, about the difference between Germany and France, 1958 and 1964, with regards to atomic armament. The density of these few pages – although it is a factual density more than a philosophical density – manage to rival Blanchot's. But the contribution is refreshing for a different reason: By clearly adopting the stance of the historian rather than the theoretician or philosopher, Scholz actually gets out of the competition with Blanchot altogether and thus evades that problematic gesture of standing-with-B-but-performing-J. Nevertheless, one could argue that this historiographical gesture, in the dark light of Blanchot's text, makes for an avoidance, if not for mild cowardice. Still, it is much more interesting to read than the straightforward and pseudo-orthodox Lacanianism and Mixed-Bag-Marxism we see elsewhere.

My preferred text of the collection by far is Dietmar Dath's, nicely titled "Baumkronenwissen statt Bombengegrübel" ('Treetop-knowledge instead of bomb-pondering'). With a completely different (dare I say: alien) linguistic performance derived from a mixture of newspaper editorial, blog post and sci-fi text, almost ignoring Blanchot but actually accompanying him perfectly, this is the only text that seems to be able to search for and recognize 'something new'.

Am I being too severe, too strict, too pedantic? Not sure. The subtitle of the book is "Atomtod, Klimakatastrophe, Kommunismus". I think it is fair to expect thought to offer something when confronted with these three terms (at once!), offer something else than the retreat into comfort.

I am still fighting the temptation to read this collection as too much of a symptom of academia 'as a whole' (which probably exists about as much as 'mankind as a whole') as I get off the plane at Tokyo Narita, Japan's largest international airport, and site of a historical struggle ("Sanrizuka tōsō"), unleashed by the government's decision in the early 1970s to build the international airport in the middle of the Chiba prefecture without asking the local population for permission or support, instead disowning some of them for their land. Having led to death on both sides, and officially ongoing (with the last [characteristically minor] Guerilla attack striking the airport in 2017), the struggle has left barely any trace on the 'normal' airport's interface (although it is documented in the Narita Airport and Community Historical Museum on site, but that's not something you encounter as a common customer of the airport), barely, that is, if we take into account some police buildings strewn over the rough yellowish fields surrounding the airport as if besieging it, and a certain whiff of improvisatory, rough-and-ready quality to the airport, atypical for other large international layouts of the Tokyo region.

As little trace as this major confrontation between governing parties and opposition parties of Japan, rural farming communities and internationally oriented urban technocrats, students and capitalists, environmentalists and investors, has left on site, as little trace of it can be found in Western scholarship dealing with either Japan's economic miracle in the latter quarters of the 20th century, or insurrectionary politics oriented around mobility infrastructure projects, or with the global legacy of 1968.

In my colourblindness, I misread the colourcoding of the NRT Express Line, calling it 'red', and get corrected; it's actually green.