Is it possible to remember Hiroshima and, if it is, what exactly is being remembered? This paper uses Resnais’s film Hiroshima Mon Amour as a way of asking this question. The problem of remembering is identified as being due to how nuclear explosions are beyond the human capacity to understand. The paper draws on the work of Günther Anders to explore the implications of Hiroshima for the human understanding of human possibilities.

Hiroshima was the first sign of the possibility of the human-inflicted devastation of the natural as well as the human world. But the potential for destruction is greater than it was in August 1945. It is now incumbent upon philosophy and critical though to consider the contemporary destruction of the non-human species and ecology upon which continued human life depends. This paper uses Hiroshima as a point of entry into consideration of the need now to think beyond anthropocentrism (...) and instead to think more ecologically. (shrink)

This paper uses two museum exhibitions to raise questions about how Hiroshima and Auschwitz are coped with in the present. The stake of the paper is to examine how it has been possible for different polities to come to terms with criminal pasts that should cause shame and guilt. The criminality of Auschwitz is established, but not that of Hiroshima. In the first instance, then, the paper establishes the extent to which the justifications for the bombing of (...) class='Hi'>Hiroshima were and remain controversial. The second part of the paper compares debates around two exhibitions: the Hiroshima exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC and the exhibition ‘Extermination War: Crimes of the Wehrmacht 1941–44’ which travelled through Germany and Austria in the late 1990s. (shrink)

As is made evident in Rosalyn Deutsche’s recent book, Hiroshima After Iraq, Hiroshima keeps returning through the way diverse artistic genres evoke parallels between the bombing of Hiroshima and subsequent atrocities. After contrasting US and Japanese perspectives on the event of the bombing and drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of temporal plasticity (while at the same time heeding the relationship between presence and grammar), this essay ponders the future anterior of Hiroshima, its continuous will-have-beens, as new (...) films and re-analyses of older ones (especially Hiroshima Mon Amour and The Cats of Mirikitani) continue to restage its significance. (shrink)

Many on the left lament an apathy or amnesia toward recent acts of war. Particularly during the George W. Bush administration's invasion of Iraq, opposition to war seemed to lack the heat and potency of the 1960s and 1970s, giving the impression that passionate dissent was all but dead. Through an analysis of three politically engaged works of art, Rosalyn Deutsche argues against this melancholic attitude, confirming the power of contemporary art to criticize subjectivity as well as war. Deutsche selects (...) three videos centered on the deployment of the atomic bomb: Krzysztof Wodiczko's _Hiroshima Projection_ (1999), made after the first Gulf War; Silvia Kolbowski's _After Hiroshima mon amour_ (2005-2008); and Leslie Thornton's _Let Me Count the Ways_ (2004-2008), which followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Each of these works confronts the ethical task of addressing historical disaster, and each explores the intersection of past and present wars. These artworks profoundly contribute to the discourse of war resistance, illuminating the complex dynamics of viewing and interpretation. Deutsche employs feminist and psychoanalytic approaches in her study, questioning both the role of totalizing images in the production of warlike subjects and the fantasies that perpetuate, especially among the left, traditional notions of political dissent. She ultimately reveals the passive collusion between leftist critique and dominant discourse in which personal dimensions of war are denied. (shrink)

This article addresses the relative silence of American intellectuals in the face of what can be termed the greatest act of terrorism ever committed by a nation-state, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I analyze this indifference by American intellectuals as partly due to their taming by a cultural apparatus that functions largely as a disimagination machine in conjunction with the neoliberal forces of commodification, privatization, and militarism. I argue that terror and violence are now addressed within a public (...) pedagogy driven by a spectacle of violence that defines itself as entertainment but is actually a form of public pedagogy that thrives on an excess of representation and an attempt to produce a collective surrender to political cynicism and apocalyptic despair. In this instance, despair and cynicism, if not a retreat from any sense of moral responsibility, are deeply embedded in a mode of politics in which education is central to a flight from social responsibility and an embrace of modes of depoliticization. The article concludes by calling upon educators, intellectuals, artists and others to create the institutions, public spheres, and other sites necessary to develop a critical formative culture capable of reclaiming public memory while simultaneously producing critically engaged intellectuals and a vibrant democratic polity. (shrink)

Attempts to comprehend the traumatic significance of Hiroshima in order to construct a new theory of history.

Philosophy after Hiroshima offers a philosophical analysis of the issues surrounding war and peace, and their challenges to ethics. It reminds us that the threat posed to civilization by nuclear weapons persists, as does the need for continuing philosophical reflection on the nature of war, the problem of violence, and the need for a workable ethics in the nuclear age. The book recalls the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the beginning of the nuclear age, the Cold (...) War, and subsequently of the hegemonic unilateralism of the sole superpower. Reviewing early critical responses to the first atomic bombings by such figures as Camus, Sartre, Russell, Heidegger, Jaspers and others, the authors themselves respond to contemporary threats to peace, including the US "global war on terrorism," the recrudescence of militarism, and the continuation of imperial power politics by other means. In the nuclear age, the use of military force as a political instrument threatens the future of humanity. This poses formidable challenges to philosophy and calls for its transformation. In using memories of the atomic bombings to help us to grasp the moral implications of the current escalation of global violence, the authors hope to show the urgent relevance of nonviolence in the contemporary context. Drawing on a range of philosophical traditions Taoist and Western the contributors take up a welter of philosophical and political concerns of topical interest, including human rights, toleration, the politics of memory, intercultural dialogue, the ethics of co-responsibility, and the possibility of a cosmopolitan order of law and peace. Going beyond postmodernism and deconstruction, several of the authors develop a post-critical, constructive paradigm of thinking a philosophy of the possible and a new methodology for the realization of the creative potential of the humanities. Philosophy is viewed as a peace-promoting global dialogue. (shrink)

What is considered ugly, grotesque or unpleasant by the fashion world? The first collection presented by Rei Kawakubo in Paris was classified as offensive to Western aesthetic standards, for it questioned the French ideal of beauty and elegance. Through silhouettes covered in frayed, perforated and monochromatic fabrics, Kawakubo disrupted the established notion of the beautiful body, stripping it of the clichés of femininity, explicit sexuality and glamour. Under the lens of Vilém Flusser’s philosophy, the Japanese fashion designer created the new, (...) the beautiful, that which is capable of expanding the parameters of the real. (shrink)

Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War, 1945?1990. By R. J. B. Bosworth (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) xv + 260 pps. £40.00 cloth.

This article examines historical transformations of Japanese collective memory of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by utilizing a theoretical framework that combines a model of reiterated problem solving and a theory of cultural trauma. I illustrate how the event of the nuclear fallout in March 1954 allowed actors to consolidate previously fragmented commemorative practices into a master frame to define the postwar Japanese identity in terms of transnational commemoration of "Hiroshima." I also show that nationalization of trauma of (...) "Hiroshima" involved a shift from pity to sympathy in structures of feeling about the event. This historical study suggests that a reiterated problem-solving approach can be efficacious in analyzing how construction of national memory of a traumatic event connects with the recurrent reworking of national identity, on the one hand, and how a theory of cultural trauma can be helpful in exploring a synthesis of psychological and sociological approaches to commemoration of a traumatic event, on the other. (shrink)

The atom bomb that annihilated Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, proved Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Mass became energy and the classic Western dialectic of three-dimensional space and linear time was displaced by the integrated concept of spacetime. On that day, modern physics also collided with the traditional Japanese understanding that space and time are interdependent phenomena. This collision speaks to conceptual parallels relating Buddhist thought, modern Japanese philosophy, phenomenology, and the physics of spacetime. The thirteenth-century Zen Buddhist (...) monk Dōgen said that all phenomena are made possible by the universal principle of emptiness and that our existence arises with each moment in what he termed Being-Time, where past, present, and future co-exist. The Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō, along with Tanabe Hajime and Watsuji Tetsurō, saw reality as a multi-dimensional field of space-in-time where the individual subject no longer stood apart from the objective world but instead arose dynamically as contingent activities rather than an autonomous thing. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger rejected the rational binary of subject and object in Western thought and grounded our “being” in phenomena that came from their temporal being-in-the-world rather than representing some preexisting objective reality. The physicist Albert Einstein radically rethought the dialectic of three-dimensional space and linear time, used to schematize the physical world in the West since antiquity, and theorized the relativity of spacetime, in which all phenomena occur in space in relation to their place in time. Interwoven, these intellectual threads stripped the bombing of Hiroshima of its historical inevitability. The story of human experience lost its customary sense of going somewhere predetermined and was revealed instead to be an endlessly discrete accumulation of moments that could go anywhere at every transient and directionless moment in time. (shrink)

This essay explores the faultlines, poetic pressures and social structures of feeling determining poetry “after” Hiroshima. Nuclear bombs, accidents and waste pose theoretical and poetic challenges. The argument outlines a model of nuclear implicature that reworks Gricean conversational implicature. Nuclear implicature helps to describe ways in which poems “represent” nuclear problems implicitly rather than explicitly. Metonymic, metaphorical, and grammatical modes of implication are juxtaposed with recognition of social attitudes complicit with nuclear problems. Mushroom and lichen metaphors are analysed and (...) distinguished. There are brief accounts of The Chernobyl Herbarium, The Nuclear Culture Source Book and poems by Aidan Semmens, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg and Gerry Loose. The argument attempts to keep open the fragile agency of writing in poems that confront nuclear power. Poetry after Hiroshima is also contrasted with Adorno’s provocative questions about poetry after Auschwitz, amid Cold War arguments that have distorted recognition of the reality of nuclear production. The essay concludes by considering the emergence of poetry within E.P. Thompson’s theoretical account of “Exterminism,” sketching ways in which poetics and theory might inform both the nuclear imagination and the difficulties of nuclear song. (shrink)

In this paper I question the morality of U.S. military supremacy or hegemony in terms of what constitute the legitimate use of military force and the proper preparation for using such force. I first discuss in a somewhat synoptic fashion how American hegemonic military force has been justified in dishonest ways and wrongly executed. Next, I show that Just War Theory needs to be revised in order to come to a convincing assessment of U.S. military hegemony and its use of (...) military force. This leads me to propose “just military preparedness,” consisting of five principles of just military preparedness, as a new category of JWT. The failure of the United States to satisfy the principles puts into question its very capability of justly resorting to military force, of lawfully executing force, and of establishing a just peace after war. The principles also point to a more humane alternative of how the United States could meet security threats and sustain a peaceful international order. (shrink)

The paper explores the relationships and interconnections in the philosophical and sociopolitical concepts of Günther Anders and Hannah Arendt. Both philosophers, who were married to each other for a short time, not only shared a similar fate in that they both had to flee from National Socialism, but both dealt with similar questions, albeit in different manners: with Auschwitz and the Holocaust, with the problem of totalitarianism, with the development of the Modern, which is defined by technology and industrial labour. (...) A comparison shows that many themes in the thinking of these philosophers are near to each other, but the methods and foci are other. At the foreground of Anders’ thinking is the question of the destructive influence of modern technology and weapons of mass destruction. However, Arendt concentrates on totalitarian political structures and the possibility of people to take action. Nevertheless, they both are concerned that people’s humanity is at risk under the political and technological conditions of the Modern. (shrink)

In response to the catastrophes of the twentieth century, contemporary writers were often led to revolutionize inherited forms of philosophical presentation. And now, in an age of Anthropocene extinction, such experiments have become necessary once again. To comprehend this most recent of disasters, the present essay develops a practice of the philosophical fragment which, by returning to contemporaneous accounts of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Chernobyl, seeks to demonstrate what was both anticipated by and wholly unforeseen from within the perspective of (...) earlier attempts at contending with natural and societal disasters. By tracking the changing status of the skies in such writers as Robert Antelme, Marguerite Duras, Günther Anders, Svetlana Alexievich, and Greta Thunberg, the present essay distinguishes this longer twentieth-century history of destruction from the work of extermination now underway. (shrink)

Introduction : first things : two black and blue thoughts -- Author's note I. a sewing needle inside a plastic and rubber suction cup sitting on a watch spring, or, an object for seeing nothing -- Elegy of milk, in black and blue : the bruising of La Chambre claire -- "A" is for Alice, for amnesia, for anamnesis: a fairy tale (almost blue) called La Jetée -- Happiness with a long piece of black leader : Chris Marker's sans soleil (...) -- Author's note II. She wrote me -- "Summer was inside the marble": Alain Resnais and Magurite Duras's Hiroshima mon amour. (shrink)

This study examines how Hiroshima atomic bomb survivors linguistically construct favorable selves – that is, selves that they want to present to others – in stories about events where they may feel survivors’ guilt. While discourse analysts started studying Holocaust narratives in the past decade, the field has not yet investigated narratives from Hiroshima survivors, nor has guilt been extensively investigated linguistically. In narrating those episodes where guilt can be attributed, Hiroshima survivors use various prosodic and syntactic (...) devices to maintain their favorable selves by describing their powerlessness in a chaotic situation. Focusing on the telling of the same experience by three different survivors, the analysis reveals that narrators use various linguistic strategies to protect their positions as moral persons. The study contributes to a better understanding of the linguistic management of emotion, especially survivors’ guilt. Furthermore, linguistic examination of Hiroshima stories brings a discourse perspective to the study of global tragedies. (shrink)

Film-Philosophy International Salon-Journal (ISSN 1466-4615) Vol. 9 No. 38, July 2005 Reni Celeste Love and Catastrophe: Filming the Sublime in _Hiroshima Mon Amour_ [1] This essay studies two scenes from Alain Resnais's film _Hirsoshima Mon Amour_ (1959) alongside the concept of the sublime in order to take film from a discussion of desire to one of love. Love is understood, according to philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's description, as an infinite alterity, rather than as totality or unity. Though Levinas insists on a (...) separation between love and tragedy, and argues that the work of art cannot achieve the ethical, I argue that Resnais's film expresses a sublime achievement by staging, or representing, the infinite tragically through failure and betrayal. (shrink)

Auschwitz and Hiroshima stand out as two realities whose uniqueness must be reconciled with their inevitability as outcomes of highly rationalized processes of technoscientific progress. Contrary to Michael Walzer’s notion of “double effect”, whereby unintended consequences and the particular uses to which warfare may lead remain outside the moral purview of scientists, this paper endorses the commitment of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science to argue that members of the technoscientific community are always responsible for their work and (...) the eventual uses made of it. In what follows four related views are outlined pertaining to modern situations within which the technoscientific community operates, so as to highlight the urgency of infusing a sense of responsibility for the products of their activities into this community. A provisional “code” is suggested that may serve as a guide for increased personal responsibility of individual technoscientists (academic scientists and industrial engineers). (shrink)

The article discusses a sustainable educational approach for developing a moral value of peace by using a historical event, the bombing of Hiroshima. To make the case, the article uses the care theory of Nel Noddings to discuss the interpersonal aspects of peace education. The article asks how care theory handles tragedies like Hiroshima and it can contribute to a moral value of peace. The idea of caring is also examined, through Hiroshima, from a different angle, of (...) the relationship between nature and human beings. The political position of this article is to expand the idea of sustainability by creating values for peace using material related to the bombing. (shrink)

Nishida’s analyses of human bodily existence, anticipating Merleau-Ponty’s, led him to accomplish his own “return to the lifeworld.” The later Nishida wrote: “I have now come to regard what I used to call the world of pure experience as the world of historical reality. The world of action-intuition is none other than the world of pure experience.” But Nishida’s attempt at a radical reconstruction of philosophy seems to suffer from a metaphysical optimism deriving from his notion of the “place of (...) absolute nothingness”; in 1945, when Japan’s defeat and his own death were approaching him as if competing with each other, Nishida wrote: “A world war must be a world war which aims to negate a world war and to contribute to eternal peace.” "Our motivation for philosophizing must be, not wonder, but the deep sorrow of life"---Nishida's often-quoted metaphilosophical prescription was meant to be a critique of Western philosophy's penchant to objectify Being. It is said, however, that the "philosophy in search of peace" in the "Post-Hiroshima Age" was occasioned with "fear." By way of critical reconsideration of Nishidaphilosophy, this paper intends to search for a new philosophy of history, one prerequisite for which would be to comprehend concretely the relationships between the various “dimensions of reality.” And it would be nothing but those cardinal questions accompanied with wonder, sorrow, or fear that can bring into lightthe principal dimensions structuring the multiple-reality of our times. (shrink)

As world leaders strengthen their nuclear arsenals, and fears of global nuclear proliferation increase, social studies teachers must be prepared to help learners investigate the devastating consequences on human life and property associated with their use. This manuscript presents an ethnological study of six atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Participants completed a qualitative questionnaire describing their experiences during World War II, and making recommendations to U.S. social studies teachers when teaching about the dropping (...) of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. Data was analyzed to identify patterns and themes, and two categories emerged related to our research question. Findings suggest participants support U.S. teachers imparting global perspectives that speak directly to the destructive power of the atomic bomb and its impact on humans and the environment for years to come. This includes a movement away from using the social studies curriculum to point fingers of historic blame in the use of atomic weapons, and towards empowering learners to become agents of change in actualizing a nuclear free and peaceful world. We discuss the implications of this study's findings in social studies and global education. (shrink)

A history of the Atomic Bomb from Marie Curie to Hiroshima. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” — Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the successful demonstration of the atom bomb. The bomb, which killed an estimated 140,000 civilians in Hiroshima and destroyed the countryside for miles around, was one of the defining moments in world history. That mushroom cloud cast a terrifying shadow over the contemporary world and continues to do so today. But how (...) could this have happened? What led to the creation of such a weapon of mass destruction? From the moment scientists contemplated the destructive potential of splitting the atom, the role of science changed. Ethical and moral dilemmas faced all those who realized the implications of their research. Before the Fall-Out charts the chain of events from Marie Curie’s scientific breakthrough through the many colourful characters such as Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer and Lord Rutherford, whose discoveries contributed to the bomb. The story of the atomic bomb spans 50 years of prolific scientific innovation, turbulent politics, foreign affairs and world-changing history. Through personal stories of exile, indecision and soul-searching, to charges of collaboration, spying and deceit, Diana Preston presents the human side of an unstoppable programme with a lethal outcome. (shrink)

Auschwitz and Hiroshima stand out as two realities whose uniqueness must be reconciled with their inevitability as outcomes of highly rationalized processes of technoscientific progress. Contrary to Michael Walzer’s notion of “double effect”, whereby unintended consequences and the particular uses to which warfare may lead remain outside the moral purview of scientists, this paper endorses the commitment of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science to argue that members of the technoscientific community are always responsible for their work and (...) the eventual uses made of it. In what follows four related views are outlined pertaining to modern situations within which the technoscientific community operates, so as to highlight the urgency of infusing a sense of responsibility for the products of their activities into this community. A provisional “code” is suggested that may serve as a guide for increased personal responsibility of individual technoscientists (academic scientists and industrial engineers). (shrink)