Authors: Kawamata Chiaki

Death Sentences (38 page)

2. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, ig81), 270-73-

3. Peter Sloterdijk, 7errorfrom the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2009), 76.

4- Ibid.

5. Andre Breton, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1928): "Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all."

6. Michael Greenberg, "The Novelist Who Can't Be Stopped," New York Review of Books, 13 January 2or1, www.nybooks.com/articles/ arch ives/2oII/jan/13/novelist-who-cant-be-stopped/. Accessed May 2011.

7. Sloterdijk, Terror, 77-

8. James Fenton, "Shock Absorbed," New York Review of Books, 23 May 2002, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2oo2/may/23/ shock-absorbed/. Accessed May 2or1.

9. "The 1934 Dialogue" between Andre Breton and Marcelle Ferry is quoted from Jennifer Mundy, Surrealism: Desire Unbound (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 21. Because I am working with Fenton's point here, I follow him in omitting some examples between these latter two.

io. Fenton, "Shock Absorbed."

11. For an account in English of prewar and postwar surrealism in Japan, see Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011).

12. Fenton, "Shock Absorbed."

13. Doug Slaymaker, "Confluences: An Introduction," in Confluences: Postwar,japanandFrance, ed. Doug Slaymaker (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, soon), 5-

14. Nishikawa Nagao, "France in Japan: An Essay on the Matinee poetique Group," in Confluences: Postwar Japan and France, 71.

15. Kato Shuichi, "Thinking beyond Parallel Traditions: Literature and Thought in Postwar Japan and France," in Confluences: Postwareapan and France, 54.

16. Nishikawa, "France in Japan," 82.

17. Udi E. Greenberg, "Criminalization: Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin's Concept of Criminal Politics," journal ofEuropean Studies 39, no. 3 (2009): 3o6-307-

18. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 53-54.

ig. Greenberg, "Criminalization," 308.

20. Ibid., 310.

21. Michael Lowry, "Walter Benjamin and Surrealism: The Story of a Revolutionary Spell," Radical Philosophy (November/December 1996): 1.

2 2. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 218.

KAWAMATA CHIAKI has written many critically and popularly acclaimed science fiction novels, including Hanzaishi no kagami (Mirror of an antiexistent soldier); Kaseijin senshi (A prehistory of Martians); and Kasei kokakudan (Martian armored-suit army) and its sequel Wairudo mashin (Wild machine). Death Sentences, originally published in Japanese as Genshi-gari, received the Japanese SF Grand Prize in 1985.

THOMAS LAMARRE is professor of East Asian studies and communication studies at McGill University. His books include TheAnimeMachine: AMedia TheoryofAnimation (Minnesota, song) and UncoveringHeian,Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription. He is on the editorial board of Mechademia.

KAZUKO Y. BEHRENS is assistant professor of developmental psychology at Texas Tech University.

TAKAYUKI TATSUMI is professor of English at Keio University and the author of several books, including, most recently, Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk,Japan and AvantPopAmerica.