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Aokigahara Forest: An Aesthetic Space of Residual Surplus

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Lacan and the Environment

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Abstract

In this chapter, I explore the aesthetic elements that constitute the interstitial space created by this forest and the humans who go there to die voluntarily. I propose to read the Jukai as a psychoanalytic paradigm, a singular example of a universal psycho-ecological relation, that is, a relation of the human with the environment in light of the unconscious. To advance such an argument, I first analyse the Aokigahara as a particular forest, an aesthetic and phantasmatic object shaped by the discourse of its own history, markedly associated with death. Second, I discuss the forest qua Forest, as a manifestation of the Real, Jacques Lacan’s theory of das Ding, and the subject’s recourse to aesthetic sublimation by Imaginary/Symbolic means. Third, I theorise the psycho-ecological relation within the Jukai through the late capitalist structure that organises the discursive mechanism of excess—surplus jouissance, and the consequent object a as loss. Finally, as a supplement to the reading of this forest in its Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real aspects, I propose the possibility of a discourse of Nature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    World Health Organization, “Japan Turning a Corner in Suicide Prevention,” World Health Organization, November 2015, https://www.who.int/mental_health/suicide-prevention/japan_story/en/ (accessed February 14, 2020).

  2. 2.

    Tony McKenna, “The Suicide Forest: A Marxist Analysis of the High Suicide Rate in Japan,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 27, no. 2 (2015): 294, https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2015.1007789.

  3. 3.

    Yoshitomo Takahashi, “Aokigahara-jukai: Suicide and Amnesia in Mt. Juji’s Black Forest,” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 18, no. 2 (1988): 173, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1943-278X.1988.tb00150.x.

  4. 4.

    Ryuunosuke Akutagawa in Marc Etkind, …Or Not to Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997), 92.

  5. 5.

    Anastasia O’Keefe, “Suicide in Japan,” in Confronting Death: College Students on the Community of Mortals, ed. Alfred G. Killilea and Dylan D. Lynch (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2013), 205.

  6. 6.

    Sigmund Freud talked about fantasy as a space between subject and object, in “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XVIII: 1920–1922: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth, 1973), 80. Jacques Lacan utilises the diamond shape to separate and unite subject from object, stating that the “Signifier does not designate what is not there, it engenders it. What is not there, at the origin, is the subject itself,” in Jacques Lacan, “Seminar 1: Wednesday, November 16, 1966,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XIV: The Logic of Phantasy, 1966–1967, trans. Cormac Gallagher, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/14-Logic-of-Phantasy-Complete.pdf (accessed February 14, 2020).

  7. 7.

    Nina Cornyetz and J. Keith Vincent, “Introduction,” in Perversion and Modern Japan: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Culture, ed. Nina Cornyetz and J. Keith Vincent (New York: Routledge, 2010), 13.

  8. 8.

    Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (1952; Florence: Routledge, 2002), 175, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/lib/sfu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=242097 (accessed February 14, 2020).

  9. 9.

    Mary Picone, “Suicide and the Afterlife: Popular Religion and the Standardisation of ‘Culture’ in Japan,” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 36, no. 2 (2012): 392, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9261-3.

  10. 10.

    McKenna, “Suicide Forest,” 294.

  11. 11.

    McKenna, “Suicide Forest,” 293.

  12. 12.

    Art of Now, “Atmosfears,” Featuring Jordan Smith, Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, Takako Arai, and Sayaka Osaki, Produced by Anishka Sharma and Barney Savage, on BBC Radio 4, aired September 10, 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0bh431g (accessed February 14, 2020).

  13. 13.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X: Anxiety, 1962–1963, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A. R. Price (New York: Polity Press, 2014), 241.

  14. 14.

    Sayaka Osak, in Art of Now, “Atmosfears.”

  15. 15.

    Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, in Art of Now, “Atmosfears.”

  16. 16.

    Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Judgment, 5:260, in The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant, by Robert Doran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 241, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316182017.

  17. 17.

    Doran, The Theory of the Sublime, 241.

  18. 18.

    Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xx.

  19. 19.

    Georges Bataille, Essential Writings, ed. Michael Richardson (London: Sage, 1998), 142.

  20. 20.

    Bataille, Essential Writings, 142.

  21. 21.

    In many languages, the etymology of the word “forest” comes from the Latin foris (outside) or forestis (wood outside), semantically related to the word foreign.

  22. 22.

    Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 183.

  23. 23.

    Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 184.

  24. 24.

    Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 185.

  25. 25.

    Rainer Maria Rilke, “Poem” 1924, quoted in Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 200.

  26. 26.

    Sigmund Freud, “Two Encyclopaedia Articles” (1923), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XVIII: 1920–1922: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 256.

  27. 27.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 112.

  28. 28.

    Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontent” (1930), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume XXI, 1927–1931: The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents and Other Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al.(London: Hogarth, 1973), 65.

  29. 29.

    Yotsumoto in Art of Now, “Atmosfears.” Fragment of the poem.

  30. 30.

    Lacan, Seminar XIV, August 3, 1967, in Book XIV: The Logic of Phantasy.

  31. 31.

    For a thorough discussion of Lacan’s theory of discourses, see Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Ronald J. Corthell, and Françoise Massardier-Kenney, eds., Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1994); Paul Verhaeghe, Beyond Gender: From Subject to Drive (New York: Other Press, 2001); Slavoj Žižek, “Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses,” lacan.com (2006), http://www.lacan.com/zizfour.htm (accessed February 14, 2020); and Stjin Vanheule, “Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis,” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2016): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01948.

  32. 32.

    The four discourses map structures that host overdetermined embodied practices in algebraic formulas that account for distinct social bonding: University, Master, Hysteric, and Psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).

  33. 33.

    Lacan, Seminar XVII, April 19, 1967, in Book XIV: The Logic of Phantasy.

  34. 34.

    Art of Now, “Atmosfears.”

  35. 35.

    Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (New York: Verso, 2015), 47.

  36. 36.

    Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 72.

  37. 37.

    Jacques Lacan, Seminar I, November 13, 1968, in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI: From an Other to the other, 1968–1969, trans. Cormac Gallagher, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-16-from-an-Other-to-the-other.pdf (accessed February 14, 2020).

  38. 38.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVIII: On a discourse that might not be a semblance, 1971, trans. Cormac Gallagher, 22, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-18-On-a-discourse-that-might-not-be-a-semblance.pdf (accessed February 14, 2020).

  39. 39.

    McKenna, “Suicide Forest,” 299, 301.

  40. 40.

    Picone, “Suicide and the Afterlife,” 397.

  41. 41.

    Picone, “Suicide and the Afterlife,” 397.

  42. 42.

    Jacques Lacan, Television, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson; A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Norton, 1990), 43.

  43. 43.

    Jacques Lacan, Talking to Brick Walls: A Series of Presentations in the Chapel at Sainte-Anne Hospital, trans. Adrian R. Price (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 25–26.

  44. 44.

    Hilda Fernandez-Alvarez, “Me phynai ‘Rather not to be’: The Tragic Logic of Suicide between Desire, Anxiety and Jouissance,” Lacunae: APPI International Journal of Lacanian Psychoanalysis 11 (2015): 28. http://www.academia.edu/download/41052776/H_Fernandez.pdf (accessed June 3, 2020).

  45. 45.

    Lucas Pohl, “Object-Disoriented Geographies: The Ghost Tower of Bangkok and the Topology of Anxiety,” Cultural Geographies 27, no. 1 (2020): 11 [82], https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019864984.

  46. 46.

    Jacques Lacan, “Seminar 2: Wednesday, November 20, 1968,” in Book XVI: From an Other to the other.

  47. 47.

    Diana Beresford-Kroeger, The Global Forest: Forty Ways the Trees Can Save Us (New York: Viking, 2010); Ryszard Hunka and Erna Buffie, “What Trees Talk About,” The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, starring David Suzuki, directed by Ryszard Hunka, CBC-TV. November 26, 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/episodes/what-trees-talk-about (accessed June 3, 2020).

  48. 48.

    Lacan, Seminar VII, in Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 233.

  49. 49.

    Stephan Lessenich states that “the negative external effects of the cost of economic activity [needs] to be ‘internalized’ somewhere and by someone.” Lessenich, Living Well at Others’ Expense: The Hidden Costs of Western Prosperity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019), 30.

  50. 50.

    Theodor Adorno, “Subject and Object,” in Subject and Object: Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology, Ontology, and Method, ed. Ruth Groff (New York: Bloomsbury 2014), 153. Adorno proposes that a possible “peace” between subject and object would be only achieved in the “state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other” (153); Eduardo Kohn believes that the forest thinks based on its ability to represent a present and a future based on Pierce’s semiosis, for which a sign represents something for someone. Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 24.

  51. 51.

    Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (1967; New York: Zone Books, 1988), 55.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Hilda Fernandez-Alvarez

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Correspondence to Hilda Fernandez-Alvarez .

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  1. English Department, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Clint Burnham

  2. Faculty of Environment, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

    Paul Kingsbury

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Fernandez-Alvarez, H. (2021). Aokigahara Forest: An Aesthetic Space of Residual Surplus. In: Burnham, C., Kingsbury, P. (eds) Lacan and the Environment. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67205-8_10

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