Akira Mizuta Lippit. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 208 pages.

The technology of vision changes the way we see. As it is driven by our desire to see “more,” it aspires to make the invisible visible. A simple way to understand this is when an artificial light illuminates: light encroaches on the domain of shadow and makes what it hides visible. Likewise, the visualization of the invisible has been undertaken in various fields, from optics to media industries. But what if we see “too much,” to the extent that vision itself is dissolved by the very visualization of invisibility? And how do we conceive our subjectivity under the condition that what we see destroys ourselves? In Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) , Akira Mizuta Lippit takes on these questions through analyses of imaging technologies (such as cinema and the x-ray) and post-war Japanese film, using the theories of Jacques Derrida and psychoanalysis.

Lippit points out that the emblematic case of this extreme vision is the one brought by the atomic bomb. As the atomic bomb reveals that the pursuit of technology results in the self-destructive potential of artificial apocalypse, “to see” the atomic light is also “to burn ” the subject who sees it (50). In this extreme case, vision paradoxically lies in the impossibility to see. Lippit locates the origin of this phenomenological understanding in the early stages of cinema and the x-ray, both of which were developed in 1895. When watching cinema, the images one sees are understood only as a sense of loss. Due to the unceasing movement of images in cinema, when one recognizes one's experience of it, the sequence of film just seen has already moved away; Lippit stresses this phantasmagoric nature of cinema. The technology of x-ray, the scientific origin of the atomic bomb, radicalizes this impossibility of experiencing to its extreme; when seeing the invisible x-ray, one is literally losing oneself, as the very materiality of the ray of radiation physically destroys the body. In this annihilation of vision, the domain of invisibility opens up. The dissolution of visibility “visualizes” the invisible. Since the destroyed subject can be conceived as a loss or an index, it no longer resides in the domain of visibility but in that of invisibility, where the image of the subject reemerges. Radiography and ghost are the representations Lippit focuses on for this peculiar mode of visuality. He terms this visuality that calls for the visualization of invisible subject “avisuality” (30-33).

In Atomic Light , Lippit is particularly interested in the prevalence of representations of avisuality in post-war Japanese film. As an aftereffect of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the representation of the avisual literally haunts and binds the psyche of post-war Japanese culture. Lippit shows that this can especially be visible in the numerous post-war Japanese films that deal with the themes of invisible subjects, ghosts, and the afterlife, such as Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953), Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (1964), Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman In The Dunes (1964), Hirokazu Kore-eda's Maboroshi (1995) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure (1997). Lippit's theorization of cinema and the x-ray converge in these films. The characters' subjectivities, when overshadowed by external and uncontrollable forces of the invisible, leave indices or traces, while the interiority of their souls and the exteriority of their bodies are destroyed or absorbed into the afterlife. Like the moment of the radiation of the atomic bomb, in which “to see is to burn,” the desire to see leads to the destruction of the subject who can only be represented as an invisible corporeality; the subject no longer exists except as a phantom. Therefore, the subject, arising from the domain of invisibility, possesses a haunting effect that is visual yet unrepresentable.

Lippit's theorization of avisuality through the examples of cinema and the x-ray is supported by various insights quoted from the fields of literature, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and other cultural theories. Among them, Lippit's thesis of the impossibility of experiencing cinema and the x-ray and of the consequent phantom subjectivity is developed from Jacques Derrida's theorization of the archive. Here, Lippit introduces his own concept of “the shadow archive.” He argues that the archive is only available in the impossibility to access it, due to the archival impulses to collect what has been said. In other words, the subject who enunciates must be negated or “killed” in order to archive his or her enunciation. Therefore, the archive only emerges as a “cinder” or a ruin (26). Because of the archive requires the physical disappearance of the enunciating subject, the archive essentially resides in the domain of death or afterlife, where the enunciation can be seen as the subject's trace or index while the subject becomes invisible, like a ghost.

The other theoretical figure that consolidates Lippit's argument of avisuality is Sigmund Freud. Because psychoanalysis is the science of examining the invisible interiority of the unconscious, it functions similarly to the technologies of cinema and the x-ray in making the invisible visible. For Lippit, 1895 is a historically remarkable year not only for cinema and the x-ray, but also for psychoanalysis; it is the year that Freud discovered an avisuality in his “dream of Irma's injection.” “As he moves closer to the source of the pain that assails Irma, the patient, Freud's vision begins to dissolve and becomes increasingly formless” (37). Lippit sees the same paradox here as in the experience of the x-ray: the more Freud wants to see the inside, the more the inside shows its infinite depth. This infinite depth can only be visualized in “flat depth,” like the flat dimension that x-ray photography brings to our eyes, as vision itself is destroyed and absorbed into invisibility.

The concept of avisuality – that too much visibility destroys the subject and leads to the paradox that visibility is only conceived as the invisible – can be extended to the issue of race and identity politics. Lippit refers to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man alongside Japanese sci-fi films about invisible men whose bodies become transparent in technological experiments. The former reflects the issue of racial visibility on multiple levels while the latter reflects national identity in post-war Japan. 1 The human body or skin, as a border between the interior and the exterior, functions as an index of the construction of subjectivity.

Although requiring its readers to decipher a highly philosophical argument overloaded with wordplay, Atomic Light provides a refreshingly new way to look at the mode of vision with the concept of avisuality. Lippit situates the issue of avisuality in the dichotomy between the visible and the invisible, and examines the location of subjectivity. His concept of avisuality is a crucial contribution to the theoretical implications of Derridian philosophy and psychoanalysis, both of which are merged into various avisual modes of visual culture.

1. One of the titles of these films in Japanese is Tomei Ningen Arawaru (1949), which can be translated into “transparent man appears,” inspired by the U.S. film Invisible Man (1933) based on H.G. Wells's novel.