Atomic Light

by Akira Mizuta Lippit

Dreams, x-rays, atomic radiation, and “invisible men” are phenomena that are visual in nature but unseen. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) reveals these hidden interiors of cultural life, the “avisual” as it has emerged in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges and Jacques Derrida, Tanizaki Jun’ichirô and Sigmund Freud, and H. G. Wells and Ralph Ellison, and in the early cinema and the postwar Japanese films of Kobayashi Masaki, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Kore-eda Hirokazu, and Kurosawa Kiyoshi, all under the shadow cast by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

Akira Mizuta Lippit focuses on historical moments in which such modes of avisuality came into being—the arrival of cinema, which brought imagination to life; psychoanalysis, which exposed the psyche; the discovery of x-rays, which disclosed the inside of the body; and the “catastrophic light” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which instituted an era of atomic discourses. 

With a taut, poetic style, Lippit produces speculative readings of secret and shadow archives and visual structures or phenomenologies of the inside, charting the materiality of what both can and cannot be seen in the radioactive light of the twentieth century. 

Akira Mizuta Lippit is professor of cinema, comparative literature, and Japanese culture at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minnesota, 2000).

Genres: Philosophy, Film

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Akira Mizuta Lippit is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts, and Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures in the USC Dornsife College. His interests are in world cinemas, critical theory, Japanese film and culture, experimental film and video and visual studies. Lippit’s published work reflects these areas and includes three books, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005) and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000), and his most recent book, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012). At present, Lippit is completing a book on contemporary Japanese cinema, which looks at the relationship of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century Japanese culture to the concept of the world, and another on David Lynch’s baroque alphabetics.

His work appears widely in journals and anthologies, and has been translated into Croatian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. He is past recipient of the Fulbright-Hays and Japan Foundation awards.

Lippit is the General Editor of the journal Discourse, and is active in the independent film community where he programs events, serves on festival juries, and interviews filmmakers. He regularly teaches, lectures, and publishes in Japan, where he is a founding editor of the visual culture journal Ecce.

Reviews

[William West]

One of the few wholly successful attempts to apply Derridean deconstruction to film theory.

[Sara Sams · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who grew up in a Manhattan Project town and only, after years of looking the other way, began to understand how a nuclear legacy festers... this was crucial reading. Thank you to Akira Mizuta Lippit for inspiring my continued research and creative work. His critical and theoretical examination of Japanese film post Hiroshima/Nagasaki, how we understand our bodies after the science of Xray has shown us how to, in effect, see through them.... the implications of particle physics and the relativistic nature of reality, via an examination of Borges's library, and the "vast archive of atoms"... this is a book I will spend my life trying to understand, and the effort will sustain me.

something for would-be readers to think on, now:

"[Borges’s] The Library of Babel exemplifies the promise of all archives, the fantasy ‘and fundamental law of the Library’: totality. And so it ‘exists ab aeterno,’ in and toward the future, always promised, imminent, here already but only ever as yet to come. The totality of the archive affects an architectural temporality that is virtually universal. As a structure, an archê, it consumes almost all space, all future space, except for an irreducible sliver, which always remains as a surplus of the archive. In this small, indivisible, and atomic crevice in space and time, you reside, under the archive’s shadow… You are the limit and surplus of the archive— an irreducible, atomic shadow of the archive."

[Liz · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's unfair to rate this book so low, even though I disliked the experience of reading it and I truly hate the post-modern language that speaks its convoluted way around something without ever getting to or making a point.
Call me old-fashioned
Still, I was assigned this book and would never have picked it up without the impetus of class, so perhaps I'll refrain from being too harsh.
Or not.

[Andrea]

I love to see how he thinks through nuclearism, x-rays, psychoanalysis [ugh], and cinema. His insights in discussing secrets, avisuality, and shadows are worth the read.