Oshima blurb

Anne McKnight amck
Thu Nov 13 05:08:27 EST 1997


Ditto on thanks for the blurb.  

Bill Haver is an associate prof of history at SUNY Binghamton, so sez the
back of his book, _The Body of This Death: History and Sociality in the
Time of AIDS_, Stanford UP, 1996.  

This is kind of a blurt of a description, but  to give a brief outline,
it's a collection of essays which take up various projects of postwar
continental philosophy (Heidegger, Blanchot & J-L Nancy seem frequent
intertexts) and investigations of "otherness" and the category of
"experience."  Through this optic, as well as an optic of the questions
that the materiality and "object" of AIDS pose, he reads a series of texts,
which are mostly but not exclusively Japanese-language fiction, historical
& philosophical writings:  these include Sue Golding, David Wojnarowicz,
and Foucault as well as OTA Yoko, Tanizaki, and theory-heads of modernity,
overcoming it & its discontents, especially NISHIDA Kitaro.  

TBOTD (an earlier version of some parts was in _positions_, if I reckon
correctly) is a really really interesting book, trying to put
post-structuralist discourses which populate Anglo-Euro-lit (postwar
continental philosophy, some strains of "radical democracy") departments in
dialogue with those that more often populate East Asian Studies
departments, and could actually be quite interesting in the context of
debates about filmic realism, I think, also in thinking about the objects
of "Japan" and "nationalism."  I think you can see traces of his work in
some of Judith Butler's recent stuff.  (Markus -- this book might be
interesting to you in the context of shutaisei-ron stuff.)   There is a
substantial treatment of image discourses (photos, films) in discussions of
the object of "AIDS."  I've never read anything Haver has written
specifically on Japanese film, but it's just as likely I just don't know
about it.  

Hope this helps, I'd be totally into discussing this book (meaning Haver's
since the Oshima thing isn't out yet -- here or elsewhere) if anyone else
is interested in it. 

amck.





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