Ango the Schizo: Deleuze, Daraku, Downgoing

Abstract

This chapter diagrams the Body without Organs (BwO) of the Japanese post-war existentialist and literary writer Sakaguchi Ango (坂口安吾) (1906–55)—henceforth designated by his nom de plume, Ango. His BwO will be informed through an interpretation of “decadence”—and read in the light of Deleuze and Guattari and Nietzsche. The purpose of this is twofold. First, in order to understand Ango’s heterodox interpretation of decadence vis-a-vis Buddhist thought, a schizoanalysis of the immediate chaos experienced in post-war Japanese society is undertaken to show how Ango’s iconoclastic, counter-discourse against institutionalized Buddhism and Emperor worship illuminates a conspicuous lacuna regarding the notion of decadence in Deleuze and Guattari’s own work, although Deleuze explores decadent sexual forms in Masochism (1989) too. This is important because while we may discern an overall philosophy of affirmation in Deleuze’s oeuvre, it remains the case that the concept of decadence receives little explicit treatment or reference. While there is a hint of it in the overall tone of Anti-Oedipus (1983) this is expunged somewhat in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), given the latter’s caveats against too-rapid destratification. To make this point clear, this chapter will hone in on Ango’s conception of the body and decadence (堕落, daraku) in order to explore the extreme limits of Deleuze’s reformulated Kleinian-Artaudian notion of the BwO. Second, the passage from a becoming-fascist to becoming-decadent in post-war Japan is explained using the philosophical vocabulary in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s singular and collaborative works. It is argued that their philosophy is heuristic in explaining the movement away from the pre-war focus on the national body (kokutai) to the body or flesh itself (shintai). This is the passage from the abstract machine of overcoding (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) or, in extremis, suicidal fascism (Virilio 1998) to decadent existence as such.