EP10: Margherita Long: A Flow Connecting Everything

Live Theory

Margherita Long, Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches courses on Japanese feminism, the modern novel, war narratives and peace activism, and eco-semiotics, discusses the introduction to her manuscript Care, Kin, Crackup: Fukushima and the Intrusion of Gaia. In 2018 she won a five-year grant from the Japan Foundation for a faculty line and a series of international symposia on Japanese Environmental Humanities at UCI. Her interest in the ethics of material indebtedness dates from her first book on psychoanalysis and the maternal-feminine in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, by Stanford University Press, 2009. Here, she discusses the tension between a politics of resistance and a literature of affirmation in the post-Fukushima work of feminist writer Tsushima Yuko (1947-2016).

Attendees

Margherita Long
Bert Winther-Tamaki
Jonathan Alexander
Stephanie Renee Payne
Yuki Nagamine
Ryan Leack
Ellen Wayland-Smith
Selected References

Anna Tsing
Baruch Spinoza
Donna Haraway
Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy (2010)
Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art (2008)
Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies (2016)
Friedrich Nietzsche
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (1969)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1991)
Giorgio Agamben
Henri Bergson
Isabelle Stengers
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (2010)
Judith Butler
Kenzaburo Oe
Michel Foucault
Ogata Masato
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies (1923)
Sabu Kohso, Radiation and Revolution (2020)
Simone Weil
Slavoj Žižek
Tanizaki Jun’ichiro
Tsushima Yuko
Notable Quotes from Margherita

“In turn, when we read activist texts as narratives that make themselves responsible to the event of radiation by affirming and channeling rather than resisting and turning back, I think we can say they become ‘literary’ in a distinctly environmental way. That is, they become artful and philosophical—they move us as art and philosophy—in proportion to their ability to think with the material world, to attune themselves to ‘life.’”

“Kohso sees revolution shifting from something that takes place in defiance of a totalizing capitalism to something that takes place in humble and tentative co-production with the Earth’s ‘omnipresence.’ What does this co-production look like? It’s a compelling question for those of us who teach literature because it connects so clearly to Tsushima’s love of aboriginal Dreamings, and the way they enact a kind of thinking that ‘takes place in the relationship between territory and earth.’”

“If radiation epitomizes the kind of vastness that deranges our thinking even while it prompts and fuels it, how could some other encounter be more profound? I call these feminist questions because they are tightly bound to questions of care-work vis-à-vis the intensity of the encounter, and the need both to honor this work in the those whose texts we study, and to practice it when we read these texts with our students.”

“That is, if the merciless temporality that the Aboriginal dream-world had no choice but to traverse is a timeline of invasion by modernity, why do we feel it moving so powerfully also in the opposite direction? After the nuclear explosions, it is the voices of the Aboriginals that arrive in Tsushima’s ears, riding the same connections, the same power lines, the same ‘flow connecting everything’ that she describes as a force of colonial erasure. Could this force be something else in addition? Something useful? Something ‘environmental?’”