Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This essay is an expanded version of a talk given at a workshop entitled ‘Figuren des Unvermögen’ organized by the Graduate Program ‘Representation‐Rhetoric‐Knowledge’, Europa‐Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt‐an‐der‐Oder, December 2004. 1. John Locke's § 63 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (in Some Thoughts Concerning Education and Of the Conduct of the Understanding, eds. Ruth W. Grant and Nathan Tarcov. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996.) is typical of the ambiguity. 2. Franz Kafka,' Vor dem Gestez’, in Das Urteil (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1990), p.82. 3. Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [434], in Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft und Andere Schriften (Köln: Könemann, 1995), pp.231‐32; Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals [4:434], in Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.83‐4. 4. Here I am greatly indebted to conversations with Dr Yuh‐huey Jou, Associate Research Fellow specializing in Family Psychology at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica (Taipei, Taiwan). I am also indebted to experiences with my beloved (and bewildering) students. I add that, by bizarre coincidence, in a Berlin production of Turandot, staged a few days after I delivered this talk, the eponymous heroine was portrayed as a Japanese ‘cutie’! 5. Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Passion of Facticity’, in Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller‐Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp.185‐204. 6. Giorgio Agamben, ‘In Playland’, in Infancy and History, trans. Liz Heron (London:Verso, 1993), pp.65‐88. 7. Alas, I am relying on memory. I read these articles in Taiwanese newspapers and only mentally noted them before I had come to the understanding of this ‘thing’ as a coherent phenomenon. 8. Sharon Kinsella, ‘Cuties in Japan’, http://www.kinsellaresearch.com/Cuties.html. 9. Sharon Kinsella, ‘Cuties’ and my own investigations. 10. Although I have not seen these, the interested reader is invited to go on‐line and type in the key words ‘japanese anime porn’ to find stunning confirmation of what I am discussing. 11. Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Idea of Infancy’, in The Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), p.95‐8. 12. Sharon Kinsella, ‘Cuties’, and my own observations. 13. Sharon Kinsella, ‘Cuties’, reports that underpants marketed for adult women come in kid sizes (but are sufficiently elasticized to fit adult sized rear ends.) 14. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp.161‐62. 15. For a discussion of the phenomenon in Taiwan in the context of post‐colonialism, see Hsih‐shin University Communications professor Yu‐fen Ko: ‘Hello Kitty and the Identity Politics in Taiwan’, http://msittig.freeshell.org/docs/HelloKitty_IdentityPolitics_Taiwan.pdf. 16. Exactly like Melville's Bartleby who ‘would prefer not to […]’ (I thank William Large for pointing out this parallel.) 17. Thomas Carl Wall, Radical Passivity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), p.154. 18. A characteristic assessment of childishness can be found in Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), pp.41‐5; original in Œuvres Complètes V (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp.54‐8. 19. This is why I would want to distinguish childishness from masochistic comedy (with which it shares many characteristics) such as in the films of Jerry Lewis as brilliantly analyzed by Steven Shaviro in his book The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp.107‐25. Shaviro writes that Lewis's comedy is ‘oddly based on an exaggerated respect for social values and norms, rather than a gleeful defiance of them’, or that it ‘results, inadvertently, from Lewis's anxious concern for propriety and his excessive deference before the artefacts of high culture’ [p.110]. Lewis never surrenders or experiences the insufficiency of his desire to be a subject. He never laughs at himself, at his own desire. Moreover, he never derisively and studiously reduces himself to nothing. There is never a catharsis, as Shaviro points out, and there is never a break in the pathos of the child who ineptly seeks always to be the other: Buddy Love (or Dean Martin). Instead there is a Sisyphean resumption of the task. 20. The reader new to Levinas and startled by such formulations is directed to the latter of his two major works Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998) especially the chapter entitled ‘Substitution’, pp.99‐120, as well as to the interviews with the philosopher collected in Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard C. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985). 21. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Philosophy and Awakening’ in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean‐Luc Nancy, trans. Mary Quaintance (New York: Routledge, 1991), p.215. 22. For his analysis of suffering the reader new to Levinas is directed to ‘Useless Suffering’ in Entre Nous: Thinking‐of‐the‐Other, trans. Michael Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp.91‐102 as well as the fine essay by Paul Davies, ‘Sincerity and the end of theodicy: three remarks on Levinas and Kant’ in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp.161‐87 from which the latter portion of my essay borrows and departs somewhat; for enjoyment the reader is directed to ‘The Phenomenology of Eros’ in Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 1969), pp.256‐66 as well as Luce Irigaray's now classic response ‘The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas’, Totality and Infinity, ‘Phenomenology of Eros’, trans. C. Burke and G. Gill, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp.185‐217. 23. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, p.122. 24. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, p.142‐45. 25. Maurice Blanchot, ‘after the fact’ in Vicious Circles, trans. Paul Auster (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1985), p.68. 26. See Adamov's and Massignon's ecstatic responses to Bataille's tone after they heard him deliver a talk on sin. The responses are published in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp.44‐47. 27. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Affirmation and the passion of negative thought’ in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp.202‐11. 28. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Destroy’ in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp.113‐16.