Abstract

The concept of the ‘island’ constitutes a unique theme in Deleuze's thought: desert islands and perversion, continental islands and isolated islands, the connection between the emergence of life and orogeny, the relationship between imagination and islands, and the sea as a rhizome. To think from this point of view on Japan, it is neither an isolated island nor an oceanic island in Deleuze's sense. Rather, it is a place where a unique stratum of thought has accumulated like a multilayered plateau. Japan has often been portrayed as a malignant kind of rhizome, as an oriental land, a land of animism. However, the Japanese islands, as part of the Pacific Rim island arc, and, on the other hand, as a place which bears the forces from the continent, can also be depicted as a manifold location, bearing the rhizome called the sea in a unique way. Not only does it have only a virtual signifier = signifiant of One-ness, but it can also be said to hold multiple strata of signifiers = signifiants within its arc between the continent and ocean. My aim in this paper is to explicate this place called ‘Japan’ as a case study of what Deleuze calls geophilosophy in his last book with Guattari, What is Philosophy?