Customer Reviews

The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS

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It is a pleasure to read such challenging, rewarding and profound thinking in an age of stale academia. Haver's attempt is to think the unthinkable in relation to finitude, community and time - an attempt to approach a body that is both there and not there, both multiple and singular, both erotic and thanatotic. In trying to approach something we might call ethics, or the political, this book rethinks what is at stake when we claim to talk about politics, or what is at stake when it is the (erotic) body that is at stake. By analysing - though never conflating - the AIDS pandemic and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Haver is able to posit a theory of history that dares to address the body as limit, and as such he succeeds in disclosing "the fundamental contingency of any possible normativity". The chapter on Sue Golding is excellent in the way it pushes the thought of the erotic into new and sexy territory: to theorise promiscuity as the abject multiple singularity and therefore as a model of radical democracy is a genius move.

Profesor W. Haver has written a book that challenges the reader to engage with "the apocalyptic sublime," in the guise of atomic destruction and the AIDS pandemic. Emotionally driven, powerful, with long-overdue discussion of sources from the Japanese, this book will force the reader to address his/her notions of historicity, sociality, memory, and, ultimately, his/her own finitude. An important work; badly needed in the field of, dare I say, "Japanology," a veritable industry in and of itself, largely domainated by American "scholars" and, for the most part, irrelevant to the phenomenon that is "Japan," or these "Modern" times in which we find ourselves. Also recommeded are texts by Harootunian, Koschmann, Sakai, Fujitani, Yoneyama (Lisa), Barshay, Najita, and Ivy.

There may be a few good ideas buried somewhere in this book, but it is written in such impenetrable, obscurantist, often laughably absurd, postmodern jargon that these ideas are near impossible to unearth.

If you enjoy reading chapter after chapter of sentences such as "Sociality is the very existentiality of historicity" (p.60), then you'll probably enjoy it... but even those with a decent understanding of their Lacan, Lyotard et al will find this work frustratingly and unnecessarily convoluted.

Haver may be trying to give the impression that the complexity of his language matches the complexity of the problem, but he ends up being utterly incomprehensible. It is saddening to think that many areas of the humanities have become so intellectually inbred and deliberately detached from the rest of the world.

one should not have to carry a dictionary and a thesaurus to enjoy a book. i was very frustrated at how the sentences were structured and the vocabulary usage. i want to read a book not decode one!!