Beneath the Spiral
Absurdism and the Psychology of Fear in Junji Ito
Ito can make incredibly beautiful and incredibly terrifying art. I was going to use something more recognizable, but this panel caught my eye.
In anticipation of the release of the anime adaption of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, I’m releasing an unpublished essay of mine that I finished around two years ago. I wrote it after binge-reading almost everything Ito ever made. For me, the strength in this essay was always the identification of the binary of human and non-human spaces and realms, the application of Mary Douglas’ “schemes of cultural categorization” to the analysis of art and politics, and the distinction between what I call repressive or reactionary and emancipatory horror. Maybe politicizing Junji Ito is leaning too deep into human concerns for an author so committed to portraying a world indifferent to them, but the de-politicization of art, horror, and Existentialism in mainstream culture is far more harmful.
The Existentialists are often maligned on the Left because, for lack of a better term, they seem like basic bitch philosophy. Similar to the Stoics, capital largely removed them from their contexts, stripped them of everything that made them radical and challenging to the status quo, and either repackaged them as self-help sigma grindset bullshit or throwaway lines in adult cartoons about sad alcoholics. Camus’ critiques of communism are deployed across the political spectrum of France– including the far right and neoliberals– because as one of France’s many patron saints of literature, quoting him can provide an intellectual veneer to and an undeniably, quintessentially French answer to the question of class (insofar as you believe in such a thing as national quintessence, which I do not). Never mind his anarcho-syndicalism, or the varied political positions of equally quintessentially French authors including Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Breton. We owe it to ourselves– and to Camus at the very least– to draw out emancipatory politics from his thought, even if he himself was not the most sophisticated thinker in reality or in the mind of mainstream culture.
I’ve long suspected that horror and existentialism are deeply linked, whether it be high-concept weird fiction such as H.P. Lovecraft’s exploitation of our terror at the notion of the cosmos beyond everyday experience, Cronenberg’s challenges to human identity, or lowbrow slasher movies where death can come at any time and from any direction. A genre that is at its best when it targets common anxieties can always be expected to enter existential territories.
And yet, there is little discussion of the genre’s relationship with existentialism. Eugene Thacker made perhaps the greatest contribution to bridge this gap in his Horror of Philosophy series, alongside horror writer Thomas Ligotti’s work of uncompromising pessimism, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. In other studies of horror fiction however, there is little to no mention of it.
This is especially frustrating given the renewed popular, academic, and literary interest in Lovecraft, as well as frequent analysis of horror as commentary on societal fears, human psychology and even the queer experience. There is no lack of academic interest in this genre that is so widely perceived to be lowbrow, but existential explorations of horror are still underrepresented. I hope to help reverse this trend by examining the work of Junji Ito and other horror fiction through their relationship to Albert Camus’ philosophy of absurdism and the psychology of the unknown. Later, political implications will be drawn out by relating this to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari as well as Stirner.
Junji Ito, for the uninitiated, is a horror mangaka, or comic artist. He has gained fame, or infamy, in recent years for his painstakingly-crafted drawings, masterful storytelling, and, most of all, his surreal, horrifying and unique concepts for his stories.
Ito’s dedication to his work and boundary-pushing imagination have netted him a long and respected career, more than enough to make his work reach Western shores.
Ito exposes a crack in human knowledge, an irregularity in the continuum of conscious experience. In his work, one can expect reality to distort and the human body to distort with it. His stories and artwork present a particular vision of existence: a world that refuses to conform to human understanding, desire, and attempts at control. He does this not only by exploiting the fear of the unknown, but also by insisting that we can never be safe from it.
A Brief Detour for a Panegyric Upon Frankenstein: Knowledge and Existentialism in Horror
Horror is a game of knowns and unknowns. The unknown is, Lovecraft asserts in the opening lines of Supernatural Horror in Literature, the oldest and strongest fear in the history of humanity.1 This theme is also present in some of the oldest works of gothic fiction, namely Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a tale of the consequences of seeking to understand the world beyond well-tread territories. Its subtitle, The Modern Prometheus, is a direct statement as such.
Victor Frankenstein’s motivation is very much of the Enlightenment: to reduce everything to observable scientific phenomena, even life itself. In other words, he attempts to conquer something which was heretofore the domain of that which is beyond the human. Just as Prometheus gifted his creation, mankind, the stolen fire of the gods, Frankenstein transgresses the boundary dividing the human from the non-human, with one hand by stealing fire from the gods in the form of lightning, with the other by shaping this vital energy to his will. In other words, he gains knowledge of the forces governing the human, and therefore positions himself outside his own humanity. Reflecting the inherently terrifying nature of venturing beyond normal experience into the unknown and the new, things do not go well for Frankenstein or his monster.
This could be read in a transcendent or immanent way. We could say that just as Prometheus was chained to a rock for bringing humanity one step closer to unity with the divine, Frankenstein is punished by his own creation for daring to transcend his own humanity. This was likely Shelley’s intention, as all signs point to the right to give and take life being the divine’s alone in the novel, metaphorically if not literally. An immanent reading, however, would not moralize Frankenstein’s transgression.
Prometheus was not bound for crossing ethical boundaries. He helped humanity by giving them fire so they could have light, warmth and stop eating raw meat. The gods punished Prometheus for crossing them. Applying this reading to Victor Frankenstein, he was not punished, but endangered by his expansion of the territory of human knowledge into a chaotic world beyond good and evil. Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror supports this thesis that horror explores the danger of expanding beyond human knowledge and attempts at control.
The Interstitial and Unknown Spaces
Carroll observes that many horror monsters fall in line with Mary Douglas’ idea of “transgression or violation of schemes of cultural categorization.”2 They often exist somewhere outside or between these categories, a quality called interstitiality. He subsequently identifies three types of horror monsters: something that straddles the line between categories, is an incomplete example of a category, or is formless altogether. Ghosts straddle the line between life and death, zombies are an incomplete (i.e., rotting) human form, and the living slime from The Blob has no consistent shape at all.3
This disobedient tendency towards human conceptual categories, although not strictly an unknown, nevertheless stands as an example of the natural world resisting capture by the boundaries humans draw around it. Rather than conform to human expectations, interstitial beings stand as something outside one of the ways humanity has attempted to understand the world: through the creation of eternal, stable concepts. Much can be learned by examining how different cultures have characterized the unknown, namely in how they conceive of the known, the unknown, and other analogous binaries in their respective cosmologies and worldviews.
The interstitial is not found in horror alone. Greek myths feature a number of monsters that are just different animals stitched together. Loki, the god of mischief in Norse mythology, is a shapeshifter that crosses the taboo (to the Norse) boundaries of gender and sex, such as when he is impregnated while in the shape of a mare.4 Other examples abound.
The unknown is often consolidated into a particular space: another world, dimension, realm, area, etc. One of the great unknowns to our ancestors was the past beyond memory, and one of the first acts in the history of the cosmos was the separation of the world into conceptual categories. In Genesis 1:4-10, God busies himself with the separation of the earth’s constituent parts: night from day, land from sea and land from sky. In other words, the world prior to the intervention of God is not necessarily one of emptiness of matter, but of emptiness of form that is remedied through the creation of stable categories. However, even after the intervention of an all-powerful creator, there are realms beyond hard limits on human knowledge where the primordial chaos persists in defiance of divine order.
Carroll observes that interstitial beings often originate from spaces outside or marginal to the human world. The most common horror narrative structures either have a creature from an unknown space transgress into ours and upset the status quo, or one of our own entering an unknown space where the laws of reality are suspended. These are spaces such as the ocean, something the vast majority of us quite literally never see far past the very surface of, or places such as graveyards and abandoned houses.5
Human culture has a tendency to populate these realms not only with ghosts and vampires, but with all manner of gods, spirits and monsters. Often, they represent forces of nature and destruction. The ancient Norse religion made a distinction between the concepts of innangar∂r, inside the fence, and útangar∂r, outside the fence. This was a cosmological as well as a literal division between orderly civilization and the chaotic wilderness. The former is the umbrella under which the realm of Manheimr, man’s home, and Ásgarðr, the home of the Asa gods, resides. The latter is the realm of wild animals, trolls, and outlaws, whose ancient Norse name literally translates to “men of the woods'' to denote not only where they physically resided, but also their útangar∂r nature that was at the root of their criminality.6 More importantly, the útangar∂r includes Muspelheimr and Niflheimr, the primordial realms of fire and ice, the former being the home of the destructive fire giant Surtr.7 It also includes Jötunheimr, the land of the jötnar, the forces of nature and chaos that bring destruction to the gods at Ragnarök.8
One does not have to cross into entirely different realms to reach the wilds where hostile forces of chaos live. Jesus was said to have been tempted by Satan in the erémos, ancient Greek for “deserted place”, “wilderness” or “desert”.9 Pan, Greek god of the wilds, was said to inspire panic in humans and was considered the opposite of Apollo, who represented sophistication and civilization.10 Dionysus plays a similar role opposite Apollo in Nietzsche’s aesthetics, representing the chaotic, ecstatic force that not only makes people feel one with each other, but with the “Primordial Oneness”. Interestingly, Nietzsche points out that this is the only contradiction to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (everything that exists has a reason, cause, or explanation) that elicits ecstasy rather than horror.11
For more familiar stories of the unknown wilderness, almost any traditional fairy tale will do. Numerous stories take place in the woods, where both hostile natural and supernatural creatures reside, such as wolves that may devour children or witches and faeries that kidnap them.
This division became more abstract in modern times. In the world of television, one can think of the realm of the unknown as Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, a metaphorical physical space where the laws of reality are suspended. Another example is the Zone of the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, a mysterious abandoned space that houses inexplicable phenomena brought about by events beyond human understanding.
The binary expressed by these works is broader than a simple division between civilization and wilderness, order and chaos, or the human and nonhuman. All these stories feature a clear division between the known and the unknown. The wilderness is not only a residue of the primordial chaos, but an ontological wild west. All residents of the unknown are free from the confines of a normal understanding of reality. That which we do not know is a void, a blank canvas that could house anything; a dangerous predator in the tall grass which threatened our ancestors, a cryptid in the deep woods, or an all-powerful god in what Lovecraft called the outer spheres. It is no wonder that in the modern world, where the entirety of the earth is more or less altogether scientifically accounted for, that the source of mysterious lights in the sky are not said to be angels or fairies, but visitors from deep space. The vastness of the night sky is enough to keep anyone in a waking nightmare, giving shape to monsters to fill the horrible void. A void, whether it is a negative absence of existence or a positive formless chaos without meaning, is nothing less than the possibility of annihilation. The existence of an abyss that may swallow us up is far more terrifying than the existence of something to fill that void, even if its attitude towards us is hostile.
This process of dividing the human from the inhuman, the civilized from the wild, the familiar to the unfamiliar, the internal from the external, the orderly from the chaotic and the known from the unknown reflects a passage from Stirner’s magnum opus The Unique and Its Property: “Indeed, heaven has no other meaning than this: that it is the true home of the human being, in which nothing alien any longer determines and rules him, no earthly influence any longer alienates him from himself; in short, in which the dross of earthly things is thrown off and the struggle against the world has come to an end; thus, in which nothing is any longer denied him.” Of course, anyone familiar with Stirner knows he aimed to raze these heavens to the ground.12
Our ancestors found it altogether necessary to divide up the world into stable, eternal realms of the known and the unknown in order to understand it; it was an act of mental compartmentalization for the sake of convenience, no matter how much they came to reify it in the cosmologies of their respective cultures; as Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world.”13 The subversive element of Ito’s fiction is that, like Camus and Stirner, he attacks the human hope to make such a worldview a reality.
The Unknown in Ito
In some of his stories, Ito follows a traditional horror structure that maintains a separation between known and unknown spaces. In Black Bird, Tokyo resident Shiro Moriguchi ventures into the wilderness and suffers a fall that breaks his leg, rendering him completely helpless. In danger of starving to death, he’s visited by a large bird-woman creature that feeds him by vomiting raw flesh into his mouth, sustaining him until he is discovered and rescued. Despite having appeared to help him, the creature follows him back into the human world and continues to feed him against his will, culminating in the reveal that the creature is a time-traveler; it had been feeding him his own flesh from the future. The story displays Ito’s familiar theme of the unknown being a hostile place filled with alien forces whose actions have no rational motivation, let alone a concern for human suffering. In its body horror as well as its fictional cosmology, it reflects an anti-humanism likely inherited from Lovecraft. Despite it all, there is still hope of possible safety in Black Bird.
It was Moriguchi that had first crossed into an unknown space where he became the victim of forces beyond his all-too-human understanding. When he returned to the human world however, it was the creature that became the interloper. Through the sin of his transgression of boundaries, Moriguchi invited the vampire into his home. It could have all been avoided had he simply chosen to stay where he belonged, making it one of Ito’s more optimistic works. However, Ito’s most famous story, Uzumaki, does not give the indication that the characters are anything but doomed. Uzumaki takes place in Kurouzu-cho (lit. Black Vortex Town), a coastal village that has been “cursed by spirals.” It follows Kirie Goshima and her boyfriend Shuichi Saito, who helplessly watch as their friends, family, neighbors, classmates, and eventually entire town succumb to the spiral curse. Spirals begin to appear everywhere in nature and in the bodies of the residents. The clouds above spiral, centered on the cursed Dragonfly Pond. Kirie’s father, a potter, uses mud from the pond to make vases plagued with ghostly spirals and screaming human faces. Shuichi’s father has his mind broken by spirals, becoming obsessed with collecting spiral-shaped objects until he twists his body to merge with the cursed geometry. In one of the most disgusting and bizarre elements of the story, people begin turning into giant, humanoid snails. The town eventually fully succumbs to the spiral when the residents tear down and rebuild their houses in a large spiral shape, stuffing themselves inside and tangling their bodies together, waiting eternally for the cycle of the curse to repeat itself. Unlike, Black Bird, at no point do Kirie and her family successfully leave the town they call home and cross back into the human world. There is no human world.
The place they regarded as safe and familiar became hostile and foreign, not through the actions of an outside interloper but because of the spiral curse, something endemic to Kurouzu-cho itself. These sorts of “curse narratives”, where the source of the threat is not encroachment by the unfamiliar and external, but the familiar and internal itself, is rampant in Ito’s style of horror. He attacks the human body in Slug Girl, where a shy girl opens her mouth to reveal a slug has taken the place of her tongue. He introduces an agent of the unknown born of the human world in Tomie, a succubus figure whose first appearance is that of a normal schoolgirl. In other words, Ito subverts the notion that the known and unknown worlds are separate; sometimes he merely blurs the line, other times they are one and the same.
Case in point, Ito often spends hours rendering even normal things such as a housecat or a human face into something deeply disturbing. In his own words, he considers it “a challenge to see how strange I can draw something…”.14
This process of warping the familiar is central to his work. As he stated in an interview with Davinch Magazine, he creates his horrors by first taking things from his everyday life and then looking at them from a “backwards perspective”15, exaggerating or inverting them until they become horrifically surreal. One of Ito’s most disturbing creations, a fashion model with a creepy, elongated face, began her life as a model in a magazine Ito saw one day. “She was beautiful,” he told the interviewer, “but her expression was sort of eerie.”16
It brings to mind Eugene Thacker’s discussion of demons in the work of Renaissance demonology scholar Armando Maggi. If angels are intermediary beings who uphold the divine order and communicate God’s will to humanity, demons disrupt the natural order and “negatively mediate”; that is, instead of anything meaningful, a demon can only speak noise, chaos and nonsense. They enforce not unity with God, but inaccessibility.17 Per this interpretation, Ito’s various creations could be thought of as demons in the strictest sense: they are agents of confusion and opacity. If angels are agents of divine knowledge, demons are agents of the unknown. Perhaps, even, agents of the absurd.
To Ito, the primal hostility of the world is not something that is ever escaped through divine or human effort. His vision of existence is one that not only refuses to conform to, but actively undermines human understanding. The irrational and horrifying is not an externality that invades our homes, schools and workplaces, but has always been there, waiting only to be noticed. The unknown is part of us. The feeling of alienation from the world, of everything being strange, of being caught up in the impenetrable mechanics of the universe, should be as familiar to readers of Ito as it is to readers of Albert Camus.
The Unknown in Camus
The terror of Camus’ Absurd is that, like Ito’s creations, it is not separate from the human world and locked away in deep space or the dark forest. It’s coextensive with everyday human experience. As Camus writes, “At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man in the face.”18
Just as the protagonists of Ito’s manga stumble upon the horrific strangeness of their once-familiar world, stripping away the “illusions and lights”19 we impose upon the world to create meaning makes everything seem strange and foreign. Camus’ description of this alienation takes on a distinctly horrific character:
“A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is ‘dense,’ sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia, for a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice.”20
When the feeling of absurdity creeps in, people seem silly and mechanical. It occurs to us that they may be something other than individuals with free will. Maybe humans are just skin suits, an indeterminate void of humanity waiting for the one who erases surface appearance. We can scientifically describe the possibility of others’ intentions through psychology or the study of body language, but to understand them, to experience the same internal phenomena as them, is impossible. The condition of humanity is to live right on the edge of attaining oneness, powerfully driven by the instinct for understanding but constantly running into hard limits.
To Camus, we constantly attempt to surpass limitations on human rationality to fulfill a desire for unity. Unity can be thought of both as understanding: “… it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.”21 In other words, it is an impulse to overcome the feeling of absurdity that arises when we search for an ultimate purpose, value, and understanding in life, and an impersonal world meets us in turn with radio silence. As Bataille puts it in the The Cruel Practice of Art:
“As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were ‘perfectly natural,’ quite different from the one that used to exasperate us… Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us. We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.”22
The concept of unity can also be thought of literally, as the merging of one’s subjective experience with the environment and other subjects. From this arises the inherent contradiction in the search for external meaning: “[to understand] the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal.” Our attempts to solve this often involve anthropomorphizing the universe. All disconnect between internal and external would be solved completely if we discovered that the universe “can love and suffer”, if our internal mental experience allowed us to completely grasp ourselves and the universe in a “single principle”.23
And yet, we fail. For one, it’s altogether impossible to reduce the complexity of the universe to human rationality. For another, Camus borrows the argument from Aristotle that if we were to assert that everything is One, we would contradict ourselves by the fact that our mind exists separate from everything in order to express that assertion. The shadow of inhumanity will always stalk the world. Human rationality can only demarcate the location of absurd walls, the points past which understanding is impossible.
Camus identifies all attempts at demonstrating unity as leaps a la Kierkegaard, and identifies them with mysticism and religion. All leaps assert the existence of the transcendent, which by definition exists beyond human thought. To Camus, this means abandoning rationality and fleeing from the problem of the limits of reason rather than accepting the unknown. It’s a philosophical avoidance of the problem of absurdity.
In his radical agnosticism, Camus refused to move past absurd walls into that dark region of the unknown, even to declare that life is meaningless, a declaration just as irrational as the one that life has objective meaning.
This is the ultimate meaning of Ito’s horror. By denying all divisions between the known and the unknown, his manga becomes tales of humanity confronting the Absurd.
Freedom in the Interstitial: Repressive and Emancipatory Horror
Horror is an exercise in the violent disruption, and sometimes total dismantling, of conceptual categories. Political implications necessarily follow from this. At its worst, horror is apologia for the status quo: boundaries are reestablished once the offending transgression has been rectified, often by symbols of authority ranging from policemen to the psychiatrist. At its best, transgression of conceptual categories is permanent: they are exposed as illusory and the repressions and restrictions imposed in a vain attempt to conquer the unknown are abolished.
We can therefore outline the respective tendencies of repressive and emancipatory horror. Reactionary horror tends towards the attitude that there are clear boundaries between conceptual categories, most importantly the binaries of domestic/foreign and internal/external. The violation of these categories is a violation of the natural order, of how things are, and therefore must be righted by expelling the foreign being, which are almost always interstitial. John Carpenter’s Halloween stands as an example of the first in some measures and the second in others.
Regardless of Carpenter’s intentions while making Halloween, there is almost no better example of both the particular anxieties the movie preys on and the repression it defends if one reads it as a fundamentally repressive film.
The Shape, as its name implies, falls into the formlessness category of interstitiality. Everything about it is cloaked in mystery. Except for one brief moment, all indications of genuine humanity are obscured, rendering the potentialities of its existence infinite; for the most part, it is a formless, and therefore indeterminate shadow in human guise. As Slavoj Zizek explains in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, horror movie monsters such as the shark in Jaws may stand in as a scapegoat for any number of anxieties, be they immigrants, natural disasters, or simply that which is unknown and unfamiliar. The revelation that the Shape is just a man in spite of the insistence of Dr. Loomis is maybe Carpenter’s way of saying that everything we regard as indeterminate is in reality knowable; everything can, in fact, bleed. On the other hand, Halloween and other slasher films are nothing if not repressive paranoiac fantasies par excellence.
A crazed killer murdering random teenagers is the perfect encapsulation of what the fascist in your head wants you to believe would happen in absence of some authority figure. It is, after all, a fantasy. People who break into homes are not inhuman monsters with no motivation, but instead have causes behind their actions that can be understood and dealt with. The film is a nightmare scenario conjured up as if to say, “You see? When things really come down to the wire, you need the police officer, the psychiatrist, the repressor.”
Such an argument is inevitably followed by a tendency to tackle every problem as if it were a nightmare scenario, where brutal violence against foreigners is the only solution; whenever a terrorist attack happens, especially if it’s directly traceable to a botched (or executed exactly as intended, for that matter) intervention in the Middle East, the suggestion that we avoid destabilizing the region any further is often ignored; the infectious culture of the Other must be purged. Too often criminals and the mentally ill are reduced to being merely evil and crazy. The real question is not even if the fantasy acted out in the film reflects an attempt by the system to perpetuate itself, but the degree to which those who do perpetuate it do so unconsciously.
Halloween may be interpreted as repressive in this way. An external creature that stands for any number of threats, be they genuinely external or not, genuinely a threat or not, invades a suburb and preys on our most precious resource, children. When repressive paranoiac fantasies enter real life, faux-concern for children is weaponized for all manner of repressive, prejudiced beliefs. This is true of blood libel as well as the fiction that anti-gay and anti-transgender laws are there to “protect children”.
Parents are conspicuously absent from the neighborhood as the teenagers usher themselves into adulthood by drinking, having sex and caring for children themselves. In the absence of parental authority and protection, they find themselves helpless, or more accurately, careless; you invite the devil in if you are not careful. Notably, teenagers are themselves interstitial beings; not quite children, not quite adults, but people in a liminal period of their lives. In this dangerous period, only the police officer and the psychologist, adult figures of authority who repress the dangerous deviancy of the criminal and the mentally ill, can successfully intervene to protect the domestic world. And yet, their efforts are for nothing; riddling the shape with bullets merely appears to kill him. Trusting in repressive authority is a fool’s errand, as they are only slightly better-equipped to briefly stave off the unknown.
This is where it is clear, despite the mean-spirited, cathartic glee with which other slashers punish illegitimate sexual activity, Halloween has elements of an emancipatory horror film. The Shape is not just a man: in spite of the coat hanger to the eye and a two story fall, it survives again and again. The ultimate conclusion seems to be that the unknown persists in spite of our best efforts to reduce it to conceptual categories and that repressor are frauds. Reified conceptual categories and their most zealous enforcers cannot save us from the terror of the unknown.
Halloween is repressive in some measures and emancipatory in others. It may insist on the immortality of the unknown, undermining the credibility of repressors, but it nevertheless views it from a repressive perspective. It upholds an internal/external and domestic/foreign binary and structures its story around a foreign invader. In contrast, Ito frequently explores emancipatory horror as the boundaries between conceptual categories are obliterated without being reestablished and the unknown is accepted rather than captured and repressed.
The ending of Uzumaki is both bleak and sublime. Instead of successfully escaping their cursed town, Kirie and Shuichi return to the center to discover that everyone has merged with the Spiral, their bodies tangled together. They accept their fate, and the story ends as they stare up into the ceiling of a spiral cavern, merging with infinity.
This is where it is most obvious that Ito and Camus are incommensurable, as merging with the Spiral curse is a clear reference to the mystical unity found in many religious and philosophical traditions that Camus declared a logical impossibility. However, Ito and many mystics and philosophers agree with this assessment; rejecting individuation is a necessary aspect to unity. In place of Camus’ Absurdism, this is another form of making peace with the unknown.
It is the culmination of a thousand transgressions that led to the moment of unity. Even in a state of relative normalcy, Ito challenges the common boundaries a repressive horror story would uphold. Instead of a foreign interloper transgressing on the boundaries of the town, Ito chooses to make the horror monster the domestic world itself. Little respect is paid to boundaries of internal/external and domestic/foreign. The human/nonhuman binary is no exception as in almost all body horror. There is no monster that rips the human body apart, but instead a curse that twists it from the inside. All divisions, be they human/nonhuman, self/other, or even foreground/background fall away as everything under the Spiral Curse’s influence merges with it. When Kirie and Shuichi decide to stop resisting the dismantling of the conceptual categories they imposed on the world, the unknown is accepted. This style of horror clearly invites comparisons to the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari as outlined in Anti-Oedipus.
The schemes of cultural conceptual categorizations can be thought of as territories in Deleuzoguattarian terminology. The figure of schizophrenic (which does not necessarily reflect the reality of schizophrenia) pays these conceptual boundaries no mind. Whereas a reactionary unconscious investment, a strict reification of conceptual boundaries, would maintain segregative group identity (racism, xenophobia, nationalism)25, the schizo-nomad strolls across these regions as if the borders were not there: “(I feel that) I am becoming God, I am becoming woman, I was Joan of Arc, and I am Helioglabus and the Great Mongol, I am a Chinaman, a redskin, a Templar, I was my father and I was my son.”26 The schizophrenic, therefore, is an interstitial being. In fact, they are more than that, for they do not even possess a stable intersititality.
Of course, even Ito does not portray interstitial beings as something positive. His horrifying vision of the boundary-violating monster reflects a human, all-too-human view of them, the one that the repressor wants you to believe in. Deleuze and Guattari criticize the warnings of psychoanalytic repression as an unfounded fear: “Oedipus informs us: if you don’t follow the lines of differentiation daddy-mommy-me, and the exclusive alternatives that delineate them, you will fall into the black night of the undifferentiated.” However, there is arguably something far more terrifying than the unknown: “Would it be an exaggeration to say that in the unconscious there is necessarily less cruelty and terror, and of a different type, than in the consciousness of an heir, a soldier, or a Chief of State? The unconscious has its horrors, but they are not anthropomorphic. It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.”27 Indeed, they argue that in the most primordial societies, the motivation for repression was the terror of the uncoded, unquantified and unqualified flow28. In other words, the unknown.
Why is rejecting these conceptual boundaries so terrifying? Deleuze and Guattari argue that the schizophrenic stroll is what the unconscious imagines death itself to be, equating the movement towards deterritorialization with the Freudian death drive: “[Feelings of crossing conceptual boundaries] control the unconscious experience of death, insofar as death is what is felt in every feeling, what never ceases and never finishes happening in every becoming–in the becoming-another-sex, the becoming-god, the becoming-a-race, etc…”.29 A world without stable Being, only free-moving Becoming, is confused with non-existence; in other words, death. A state of absolutely deterritorialized flows, schizophrenia, is never really reachable, but is an absolute limit that the schizophrenic process is constantly moving towards: “As for the schizo, continually wandering about, migrating here, there, and everywhere as best he can, he plunges further and further into the realm of deterritorialization, reaching the furthest limits of the decomposition of the [social body] on the surface of his own [fully deterritorialized unconscious]... The schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfillment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel. He scrambles all the codes and is the transmitter of the decoded flows of desire.”30
Repressive politics, to a degree, is based upon insisting upon the transcendent nature of conceptual boundaries: racists, nationalists and other reactionaries insist that there is something special about Us that is different from Them. A division between the domestic and the foreign must be maintained, or else the nation or the race, often both, will be undermined. The nuclear family, the woman as mother and caregiver, property as an untouchable sacred right, borders and checkpoints; these illusions oppress and limit, and they were established not only because they benefit power, but because the horizon of total liberation is the looming shadow of the unknown. All of it has always been an attempt to stave off the terror of the Old Ones, the world of the nonhuman. It is the foolish notion that we can ever be completely safe that compels us to hyperfocus on the external as the source of danger and deny all possibility of domestic threats. Violent crime is far more likely to come at the hands of a US citizen than an immigrant, and yet crime is constantly brought up as a concern in immigration debates. A foreigner committing an act of terrorism, particularly if they are not white and have a strange religion, is considered a much greater threat than domestic terrorism, all evidence to the contrary. Examples go on and on.
This repression affects others as well as ourselves. In Stirnerian terms, we domesticate ourselves through a process of heaven-building. We act out of habit in the hope of being freed from worldly danger, but become imprisoned by that habit. We domesticate our identities by placing them into cages of nationality, race, the civilized person and the human, all of which must declare allegiance to those respective groups or be cast out. We have often tried to replace one heaven with a better one, but this is merely reforming our black iron prisons. The aspiration should be to destroy our heavens, once and for all. Stirner writes, “…I only want to take care to secure my property to myself, and to secure it, I continually take it back into myself, destroy in it every movement toward independence, and consume it before it can fix itself and become a ‘fixed idea’ or an ‘obsession.’”31
The only thing left to do is to do away with all limits on human behavior: violate every taboo, hold nothing sacred: “...the breaking with the sacred, or rather of the sacred, can become general.”32
Junji Ito can help us abolish the notion of stable conceptual categories that we imagine make us safe, make us human. In reality, they lay the foundations for our own imprisonment. That confrontation with something terrible and alien that we imagine may destroy us, will indeed destroy us as we currently are. This is merely another way of saying that it will change us. Ito may create monsters, but they are only monsters because they violate categories that mere humans created. Humans made them, and only the non-human can realize liberation through their destruction. As Deleuze and Guattari write in possibly the most beautiful sentence in Anti-Oedipus: “...such a man produces himself as a free man, irresponsible, solitary, and joyous, finally able to say and do something simple in his own name, without asking permission; a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego whatever.”33
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