村上春樹『世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド』- 現在への固着 -

Abstract

In contrast to the monotonous and calm atmosphere of the ‘End of The World’ (the realm of the unconscious of ‘I’), where even the passage of time has stopped, the ‘Hard-Boiled Wonder-Land’ (the real world of ‘I’, the realm of the conscious of ‘I’) seems very complex and dynamic: crowded megalopolis, information warfare between two powers(‘organization’ and ‘factory’), highly advanced technologies, and complex social structures, etc. However, considering that the unconscious is a realm in which the subject represses harsh reality experiences to prevent them from emgering into conscious because they are too unbearable to accept, it can be said that the temporality of the ‘End of The World’ (fixation to the ‘present’) reflects the ‘Hard-Boiled Wonder-Land’. In a closed permanent political system where there is no real alternative and no real change, in a consumer society where people recognize changes of the world only in cyclical fashion, and in financial capitalism that damages the value of the real economy achieved by the accumulation of diligent labor and makes social members draw attention to only the movements of stock prices that fluctuate up and down for unknown causes every day, people cannot establish a long-term perspective (historical consciousness) and are forced to live only in the fragmentary present and limited vision that lacks context. To live in a reality programmed for the benefit of a large private corporation, with political progress and intervention of the subject’s free will virtually blocked, is to live only in the present in which the flow of time is not advancing toward a future on which a utopian dream is projected. This temporality is the trauma of this era that must be suppressed below the surface of the conscious for the human subject.