Abstract
As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginaryneeds to be symbolically confronted and undoneat national as well as global levels.As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōelamented, “To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there.” However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublimeas a trauma of geopolitical dominationand racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (rapturedby these technological forces of sublimity as manifesting and globally installingPatriot missilesas signs of theirglobal supremacy) and ordinary Japanese (citizens of the Empire of the Sun fascinatedby self-sublation into zeros of solar force) in the production of this nuclear sublime, we can begin to mutually recognize that a ‘post-nuclear’era offers new possibilities and symbolic ties between America and Japan as Pacific powers. This post-nuclear era emerges out of World War II freighted with terror and wonder as a double possibility:at once urging the globe towards annihilation andyet also towards transactional and dialogical unityat the transnational border of national self-imagining. The phobic masochism of the sublime can no longer operate in a transnational world of global/local linkages, although the technological sublimity of the Persian Gulf War had suggested otherwise, withits “sublime Patriot”missiles and quasi-nuclear landscapes lingering in the world deserts from Iraq and Afganistan to Nevada and North Korea.
Highlights
As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginary needs to be symbolically confronted and undone at national as well as global levels
On September 16, 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation [. . .] the money power shifted from New York to Tokyo, and that was the end of our [American] empire [in the Pacific]
The sublime unthinkability of this catastrophic event has much to do with its unprecedented magnitude and force – the material/ spiritual grandeur that I will here theorize after the language and novels of Kenzaburo Ōe, “the Hiroshima sublime” – and with its traumatic nature within the collective imaginary of the national subject
Summary
As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginary needs to be symbolically confronted and undone at national as well as global levels.
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