Hiroki Azuma – författare

In Japan, obsessive adult fans and collectors of manga and anime are known as otaku. When the underground otaku subculture first emerged in the 1970s, participants were looked down on by mainstream Japanese society as strange, antisocial loners. Today otaku have had a huge impact on popular culture not only in Japan but also throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States. Hiroki Azuma's Otaku offers a critical, philosophical, and historical inquiry into thecharacteristics and consequences of this consumer subculture.

From Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon to NausicaÄ of the Valley of the Wind, the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual, always intensely cute, the beautiful fighting girl has been both hailed as a feminist icon and condemned as a symptom of the objectification of young women in Japanese society. In Beautiful Fighting Girl, Saito Tamaki offers a far more sophisticated and convincing interpretation of this alluring and capable figure. For Saito, the beautiful fighting girl is a complex sexual fantasy that paradoxically lends reality to the fictional spaces she inhabits. As an object of desire for male otaku (obsessive fans of anime and manga), she saturates these worlds with meaning even as her fictional status demands her ceaseless proliferation and reproduction. Rejecting simplistic moralizing, Saito understands the otaku’s ability to eroticize and even fall in love with the beautiful fighting girl not as a sign of immaturity or maladaptation but as a result of a heightened sensitivity to the multiple layers of mediation and fictional context that constitute life in our hypermediated world-a logical outcome of the media they consume. Featuring extensive interviews with Japanese and American otaku, a comprehensive genealogy of the beautiful fighting girl, and an analysis of the American outsider artist Henry Darger, whose baroque imagination Saito sees as an important antecedent of otaku culture, Beautiful Fighting Girl was hugely influential when first published in Japan, and it remains a key text in the study of manga, anime, and otaku culture. Now available in English for the first time, this book will spark new debates about the role played by desire in the production and consumption of popular culture.

A profound rethinking of the political categories of openness and closedness.In a new work building upon his Philosophy of the Tourist, Hiroki Azuma reconsiders the connection between the figure of the tourist and that of the family. Setting out from the reevaluation of the family as a figure of containment following the COVID-19 pandemic, in this exploration of the inside and outside of community, Azuma questions the shifting values of openness and security, challenging the distinction between the openness of civil society and the closedness of the family, which he deciphers as an artefact of a Western philosophical standpoint in which polis is opposed to oikos.Via Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance and Kripke’s interpretation of language games, Azuma develops a new concept of the family as a closed unit that is paradoxically open to drastic transformations of its own rules of inclusion. The tourist, an anomaloous agent that escapes Carl Schmitt’s opposition between friend and enemy, can then be reinterpreted as a familial figure.In this subtle rethinking of some of the most fundamental categories of modern political economy, the topology of the open society is reconfigured beyond the opposition between conservatism and liberalism: through close readings of Rorty and Arendt, Azuma sketches out a new vision of an open polis supported by the transformative sustainability of the oikos.

According to Azuma, the collective will and the general social contract has changed the world's political landscape over the last couple of years. Azuma looks back at Rousseau and Freud then forward to Twitter and Google to express how man deals with their part of the collective will through time. Azuma challenges society's perceptions of general will by looking at three philosophies through both time and technology. Azuma's unique analysis can be as compelling as fiction while making readers feel enlightened in the process.