The Body of This Death

"Examining the AIDS pandemic and Japanese A-bomb literature, this book asks the question of how the experience of unimaginable and unrepresentable loss affects the experience and constitution of the social and the discourses of history. It persuasively argues that those objects which are presumptively given to thought under the rubrics of "AIDS" and "Hiroshima/Nagasaki" pose an essential threat, in their existentiality, to conceptual thought and, ultimately, to rationality altogether. It therefore argues that any serious thinking about AIDS and nuclear terror must think the essential insufficiency of thought to its putative objects - the insufficiency of "society" to think sociality, the insufficiency of "history" to think historicity."--BOOK JACKET. "The author first attempts to think the incapacity of every invocation of historical consciousness (or, indeed, of "history" itself) to think the existential historicity of that event which is presumptively not only its object but its ground. Readings of works by Nishida Kitaro, Ota Yoko, and Takenishi Hiroko written in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki attempts to mark the limit of historical consciousness. The author then considers erotic sociality in the time of AIDS, specifically as articulated in texts by David Wojnarowicz, focusing on the themes of vulnerability, anonymity, the erotic, and nomadism."--BOOK JACKET. "Tanizaki Jun'ichiro is read to examine historiographical representation and to consider the possibilities of the parodic as a fundamentally perverse, queer practice. Finally, a study of selected essays by Sue Golding points a way to think toward the necessary conjunction of the ethical, the political, and the perverse; in order, that is to say, to think toward a politics of inconsolable perversity."--BOOK JACKET.