[In the following essay, Lingis explores the significance of Mishima's ritual suicide in his writing and overall system of thought.]

Yukio Mishima found himself in words. Consumed by words.

“Any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away—of their corrosive function—just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid. … It might be more appropriate, in fact, to liken their action to that of excess stomach fluids that digest and gradually eat away the stomach itself” (Sun and Steel, trans. John Bester [Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1970], pp. 8-9).

If words can be the medium of artistry—and Mishima was a master of words at a prodigiously early age, publishing his first novel at the age of thirteen—it is because words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction. In psychoanalytic terms, a medium that displaces the libido from pleasure-surfaces to phallic objects, idealities or absences. Words fix objects, objectives, termini. They themselves die away at these termini.

In doing so they have the ability to eat away at, disintegrate, time. Prisoners under death sentence, we have to wait for the end, for the moment when the gates will be opened and we will step forth to do what we have to do, each of us: go face our death, ourselves, with all our own strength and weakness. But meantime we have to wait, twenty-four more hours, twenty-four more days, twenty-four more years.

It is this void of the present progressive tense with which [words] deal. … [I]n marking the void, [they] dye it as irrevocably as the gay colors and designs of Yuzen fabrics are fixed once they are rinsed in the clear waters of Kyoto's river, and in doing so consume the void completely moment by moment, becoming fixed in each instant, where they remain. Words are over as soon as they are spoken, as soon as they are written. Through the accumulation of these “endings,” through the moment-to-moment rupture of life's sense of continuity, words acquire a certain power. At the very least, they diminish to some degree the overwhelming terror of the vast white walls in the waiting room where we await the arrival of the physician, the absolute. And in exchange for the way in which, by marking off each moment, they ceaselessly chop up life's sense of continuity, they act in a way that seems at least to translate the void into a substance of a kind.

(68-69)

This verbal existence, this corroded, castrated, decomposing verbal existence, comes to long for the flesh; this word longs for incarnation.

The body-mind split is not simply a categorical distinction made within discourse, in particular within Platonic, metaphysical discourse. Discourse posits the body as its ideal opposite. But first, what is meant—what is first meant—by body? The body that arises as the ideal of discursive existence, the body that the one who finds himself in words longs for, can be summed up, Mishima says, in taciturnity and beauty of form. This body-fetish or body-ideal is counterposited to the negativity of words as “existence.”

Mishima found that the more one finds oneself in words the more one idealizes the body, the more one seeks the body with the words. The sensations die away, the words fade out as soon as they are proffered or imagined, leaving the mind in the presence of the signified, the ideal. The nitric acid, after having eaten away the copper plate, corrodes itself. With words one constitutes ideal objects, in Husserl's terminology; one constructs fictions, in Mishima's. Husserl, however, identified these ideal identities with the reality of the phenomena. Husserl did not really bracket metaphysics but, Derrida says, formulated its structure most rigorously; Mishima became not a metaphysician but a man of letters—but the difference is perhaps only a distinctio formalis a parte mentis.

My composition teacher would often show his displeasure with my work, which was innocent of any words that might be taken as corresponding to reality. It seems that I had an unconscious presentiment of the subtle, fastidious laws of words, and was aware of the necessity of avoiding as far as possible coming into contact with reality via words if one were to profit from their positive corrosive function and escape their negative aspect—if, to put it more simply, one was to maintain the purity of words. I knew instinctively that the only possibility was to maintain a constant watch on the corrosive action lest it suddenly come up against some object that it might corrode.

(9-10)

Constantly aware of the corrosive effect of the words, Mishima used words positively only to construct fictions, vigilant always to avoid touching reality with words. This practice maintained reality, and the body, as an ideal region at an absolute distance from words. And this ideal in turn gave its telos to the only possible positive usage of words; the ideal in the verbal arts must lie solely in the imitation of the formal beauty of the taciturn and statuesque body. It is what made Mishima a classicist in literature.

But what was it that drove Mishima to words? What was it that drove him to find himself, in the corrosion, the castration, the disintegration of words? The world, whose shrouds were lifted by the sun.

My first—unconscious—encounter [with the sun] was in the summer of the defeat, in the year 1945. A relentless sun blazed down on the lush grass of that summer that lay on the borderline between the war and the postwar period—a borderline, in fact, that was nothing more than a line of barbed wire entanglements, half broken down, half buried in the summer weeds, tilting in all directions. I walked in the sun's rays, but had no clear understanding of the meaning they held for me.

Finespun and impartial, the summer sunlight poured down prodigally on all creation alike. The war ended, yet the deep green weeds were lit exactly as before by the merciless light of noon, a clearly perceived hallucination stirring in a slight breeze; brushing the tips of the leaves with my fingers, I was astonished that they did not vanish at my touch.

That same sun, as the days turned to months and the months to years, had become associated with a pervasive corruption and destruction. In part, it was the way it gleamed so encouragingly on the wings of planes leaving on missions, on forests of bayonets, on the badges of military caps, on the embroidery of military banners; but still more, far more, it was the way it glistened on the blood flowing ceaselessly from the flesh, on the silver bodies of flies clustering in wounds. Holding sway over corruption, leading youth in droves to its death in tropical seas and countrysides, the sun lorded it over that vast rusty-red ruin that stretched away to the distant horizon.

(19-20)

It was about the year that Mishima was writing those words that I, one evening, went to a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion with a friend. When it was over, we stood outside the hall, in the night, with the epic depiction of the crucifixion of God still thundering about us, the powers of the orchestra writhing with the storm clouds, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes with which all nature had, in Bach's conception, agonized over the death of its creator. And then my friend, who is Dutch, said to me how alien all that had become to the Europe he had fled. He had been in primary school, in second grade, when the Nazi blitzkrieg overran the Netherlands. During the first years, Nazi authorities were irreproachably correct with the Hollanders, whom they regarded not as a conquered people but as Low Germans being reunited into Greater Germany; only the Jews were in danger. In the small town where my friend lived, one merchant's home was a station of the underground railway through which Jewish children, hair bleached, were passed secretly out of the Netherlands on the way to southern France. The merchant's son occasionally carried messages on his bicycle, the merchant and his accomplices thinking no one would think to suspect this third-grade child of anything. One afternoon in early spring my friend was sitting in his classroom when the school assembly bell rang. All the classes filed out into the courtyard and lined up in rows with their teachers. When everyone was assembled, the school principal appeared, accompanied by two SS officers, and the merchant's son. It was the first really warm day at the end of winter, and my friend remembered now the sunlight flooding over the budding trees and the already yellow forsythia bushes, in which glittered and chattered the birds that had returned. Then the black boots of the officers flashed in the sun, again and again, striking with muffled thuds the soft body of the boy long after he was dead.

Mishima wrote twenty-five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, remembering the sun over the blood and flies. Our nation has now stockpiled two and a half tons of nuclear explosives for every man, woman, and child on the planet, and the current administration has budgeted three trillion dollars for a new nuclear buildup. Israel, South Africa, Pakistan, the most unscrupulous political regimes, now have nuclear arsenals; thirty nations are now working to create nuclear arsenals. We who read and write this know that it is improbable that there will be anyone to read what we write twenty-five years from now, to see the wings of the flies glittering over the blood of humankind.

The sun that in 1945 streamed over the defeat, the blood, and the flies illuminated the space of a meanwhile. General MacArthur had forced Emperor Hirohito to declare that he was not the divine pivot of all Japanese heroism but a man, and in fact quite a stupid man. Between Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the final bomb, an interim. In which what was destined for Japanese was to screw in the little screws in transistor radios and computers and accumulate capital. Yet one day, in this interim, Mishima ran to his window to see young Japanese men, brawny and shouting, flooding down the street, eyes turned to the sun.

They were bearing an old and heavy shrine on their shoulders. Bodies gleaming with sweat, struggling under its weight, which seemed to compress power into them, they crashed through the gates of the Mishima home and trampled the courtyard to ruins.

They were intoxicated with their task, and their expressions were of an indescribable abandon, their faces averted; some of them even rested the backs of their necks against the shafts of the shrine they shouldered, so that their eyes gazed up at the heavens. And my mind was much troubled by the riddle of what it was those eyes reflected.

As to the nature of the intoxicating vision that I detected in all this violent physical stress, my imagination provided no clue. For many a month, therefore, the enigma continued to occupy my mind; it was only much later, after I had begun to learn the language of the flesh, that I undertook to help in shouldering a portable shrine, and was at last able to solve the puzzle that had plagued me since infancy. They were simply looking at the sky. In their eyes there was no vision: only the reflection of the blue and absolute skies of early autumn. Those blue skies, though, were unusual skies such as I might never again see in my life—like a fierce bird of prey with wings outstretched—one moment strung up high aloft, the next plunged to the depths; constantly shifting, a strange compound of lucidity and madness.

(12-13, 14)

What spoke to Mishima so eloquently was the massed bodies of the shrine bearers. It is an eloquence one believes—one does not believe the intoxication of feeble or debauched bodies; what they say one consigns to pathology and compensations. One believes the eloquence of health and power. The body insists on correspondence and fittingness—strength in the body is this insistence. The shrine bearers shared something. A communication not through words, signs exchanged, but in the burden and violent physical stress. As they bent under the weight they sustained together, their eyes were open and intoxicated—by what? Not by an idea, from the old religion, that would have its own consistency, maintained through a verbal construction, and that would justify the world laid bare under the skies. Is there any such idea that could redeem the ashes and the blood of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Not by a religious image or participationist myth—Buddhism has never secreted such things. Mishima's mind, his imagination, or his verbal speculations were not able to join the ecstatic vision of the shrine bearers. When his body had become massive enough to shoulder the shrine with them, he discovered that what they saw with such intoxication was the skies, the empty skies that illuminate all that is real, illuminate anicca, the impermanence. “Glory was surely a name given to just such a light—inorganic, superhuman, naked, full of perilous cosmic rays” (101).

The possibility, then, of existing in the sun, in the sun that poured its perilous light over the impermanence, had spoken to Mishima in the carnal eloquence of the shrine bearers. But to open one's eyes to the skies it was necessary to find for oneself not the taciturn form of the ideal body one seeks with words, but such an eloquent body.

This body Mishima went to find in the tempering of his organism by steel—“heavy, forbidding, as though the essence of the night had in [it] been still further condensed” (25). He fitted his arms, legs, torso to the inertia, dense opacity, mineral death of the steel.

This is not gearing into the world of implements—the inhabiting of one's body as an intentionally conducted functional system—which existence philosophy declared to be the primary form of comprehension and the fundamental form of selfhood. The eloquent body Mishima sought was an excess beyond the intentionally structured organism Merleau-Ponty had isolated and distinguished from the body as an objective form and substance. Body-building, which was unknown in traditional Japan, is introduced now that massive musculature has become superfluous both for productive labor—where every body limit is relayed by machine power—and even for warfare, now mechanized. Mishima did not undertake building musculature in order to appropriate a world of instrumentalities but in order to exist in the tragic light of the sun.

How strange to seek in death and night the body that could open to the sun and the skies! If what one is seeking is the open skies and the universal light that illuminates all reality, all impermanence, is not this ascent to the universal necessarily through words, all generic, all universals? Is it not language that Being inhabits, that discloses earth and skies, mortals and immortals as such? Does not the body, as all Western classicism has understood, represent the particular, the here-and-now, that which is to be transcended in order to accede to the universal?

But Mishima had found that all the artistry of words, all the appropriation of words, all the appropriation of oneself in words, consisted in using words in singular, deviant ways. There once existed, to be sure, essentially impersonal and monumental words with which epic art was composed. But the conditions for their functioning are lost to us today, and Mishima will come gradually to divine the reasons for this.

As the relentless pressure of the steel progressively stripped my muscles of their unusualness and individuality (which were a product of degeneration), and as they gradually developed, they should, I reasoned, begin to assume a universal aspect, until they finally reached a point where they conformed to a general pattern in which individual differences ceased to exist. The universality thus attained would suffer no private corrosion, no betrayal. That was its most desirable trait in my eyes.

(30-31)

The night and death of the steel drove out the psychic penchants that had materialized in the body in the form of habitus—indolence incarnated in a slovenly posture, sensuality or impressionability materialized in dry, lusterless skin and flaccid abdomen—it brought out, empowered, affirmed, the generic, the racial type, the animal, in the individual body.

Ideas are … essentially foreign to human existence; and the body-receptacle of the involuntary muscles, of the internal organs and circulatory system over which it has no control—is foreign to the spirit, so that it is even possible for people to use the body as a metaphor for ideas, both being something quite alien to human existence as such. And the way in which an idea can take possession of the mind unbidden, with the suddenness of a stroke of fate, reinforces still further the resemblance of ideas to the body with which each of us, willy-nilly, is endowed, giving even this automatic, uncontrollable function a striking resemblance to the flesh. It is this that forms the basis of the idea of the enfleshment of Christ and also the stigmata some people can produce on their palms and insteps.

(16)

The flesh, divested of its individuality, its eccentricity, by the steel, the night and death of steel, the universalized body, is the locus of ingression of ideas, is ideal.

In the coupling of organism with steel, the vital substance with the extreme condensation of night and death, there was not intentional function being transmitted through the inertia of implements, but a transference of properties. The properties that come to compose the excess musculature came from the steel, and were its own properties; the flesh becomes ferric.

But once Mishima found himself within this ferric substance, this body was no longer the taciturn and resplendent ideality of form which discourse posits and opposes. “Muscles, I found, were strength as well as form, and each complex of muscles was subtly responsible for the direction in which its own strength was exerted, much as though they were rays of light given the form of flesh” (28-29). There was not a unitary intentional arc mobilizing and activating a postural or motor diagram, as in the body that operates equipment; there was distribution of multiple seats of power-vectors, each activating itself. “Nothing could have accorded better with the definition of a work of art … than this concept of form unfolding strength, coupled with the idea that a work should be organic, radiating rays of light in all directions” (29).

There arose then a new artwork ideal—an existent formed into splendor not by virtue of the proportions it fixed but by its distribution of rays of power. This carnal ideal was to counterpoise itself to the words, to replace Mishima's first classical writing with a muscular style. Whereas Mishima's first classicism was animated by a constant and vigilant sense of the corrosive effect of words, his art now is purged of the morbid and voluptuous imagination that dreams of an efficacy in fictive constructions. The juxtaposition of action and art in one life makes each dissipate the dreams of the other. “… I was conceited enough to believe that my technique in dealing with words was sufficiently practiced for me to choose impersonal words, thereby enhancing their function as a memorial and putting an end to life of my own free will. This—it would be no exaggeration to say—was the only revenge I could take on the spirit for stubbornly refusing to perceive ‘the end’” (84-85).

The idea of art is justified not only because this mode of radiant and depersonalized power came to figure as an ideal for the artifice of words to imitate, but also because this body abstracted itself from mundane dependence—and one day from the steel itself—to figure as an absolute—“transparent, peerless power that required no object at all” (23).

… [t]he sense of existence by which strength cannot be strength without some object represents the basic relationship between ourselves and the world, and on that I depended on steel. Just as muscles slowly increase their resemblance to steel, so we are gradually fashioned by the world; and although neither the steel nor the world can very well possess a sense of their own existence, idle analogy leads us unwittingly into the illusion that both do, in fact, possess such a sense. … Thus our sense of existence seeks after some object, and can only live in a false world of relativity. … Away from steel, however, my muscles [now] seemed to lapse into absolute isolation, their bulging shapes no more than cogs created to mesh with the steel. The cool breeze passed, the sweat evaporated—and with them the existence of the muscles vanished into thin air. And yet, it was then that the muscles played their most essential function, grinding up with their sturdy, invisible teeth that ambiguous, relative sense of existence and substituting for it an unqualified sense of transparent, peerless power that required no object at all. Even the muscles themselves no longer existed. I was enveloped in a sense of power as transparent as light.

(32-33)

The relationship with steel, to which the sun had driven Mishima, had resulted in a displacement of his sense of himself. One that had, the summer of the defeat, fled the sun in horror, Mishima had become an intellectual, had fled into the intellectual's cave, that dark, amorphous, warm, visceral inwardness. Now the steel had routed the self from this retreat, displaced its locus onto the surfaces. Onto the contours of the musculature, whose ridges and reliefs he does not feel from within, out of his visceral ego, but contemplates in the gleaming surfaces of mirrors and feels in the expanses of pain. The self had become a surface self, a self no longer in inwardness but in distension, exposure, and exhibition. Whose sense of the world exposed to the sun is a surface thought. For whom thought no longer means identifying the inwardness beneath the dispersion, the substrates beneath the phenomena, the principles behind the appearances.

Yet why must it be that men always seek out the depths, the abyss, why must thought, like a plumb line, concern itself exclusively with vertical descent? Why was it not feasible for thought to change direction and climb vertically up, ever up, toward the surface? Why should the area of the skin, which guarantees a human being's existence in space, be most despised and left to the tender mercies of the senses? I could not understand the laws governing the motion of thought—the way it was liable to get stuck in unseen chasms whenever it set out to go deep; or whenever it aimed at the heights, to soar away into boundless and equally invisible heavens, leaving the corporeal form undeservedly neglected.

If the law of thought is that it should search out profundity, whether it extends upwards or downwards, then it seemed excessively illogical to me that men should not discover depths of a kind in the “surface,” that vital borderline that endorses our separateness and our form, dividing our exterior from our interior. Why should they not be attracted by the profundity of the surface itself?

The sun was enticing, almost dragging my thoughts away from the night of visceral sensations, away to the swelling of muscles encased in sunlit skin. And it was commanding me to construct a new and sturdy dwelling in which my mind, as it rose little by little to the surface, could live in security. That dwelling was a tanned, lustrous skin and powerful, sensitively rippling muscles. I came to feel that it was precisely because such an abode was required that the average intellectual failed to feel at home with thought that concerned itself with forms and surfaces.

(22-23)

We have seen first the fission and polarization that posited the ideal taciturn and formal body in opposition to the discursive existence; now we have seen the self come to inhabit the eloquent and surface body which opposes itself to the verbal artistry. This body seeks words—impersonal and monumental words that depersonalize and conduct one to the fields of death illuminated by the perilous rays of the sun. The thought that now conducts this search does not seek an origin, principle, or cause prior to the split of words from flesh, the split of inwardness from exposedness, the splintering of the forms and surfaces under the absolute dispersion of the light; it is also not a dialectical thought that seeks at each moment to return the one back into the other. The surface thought rather pushes on to the outlying regions, the farthest edges of body and of spirit, seeking there the point of contact. The point of contact—and this was the ultimate principle of this Buddhist metaphysical thought—was not at the origin, the base, the summit nor even the end, the telos. It was at the outer limits. “Things that are farthest removed from each other, by increasing the distance between them, come closer together” (91). The great serpent coiled back upon itself at the outermost sphere of the cosmos.

The great serpent of Buddhist metaphysics Mishima saw not in participating in a traditional religious ritual, but on the day he flew the F104, the most advanced supersonic jet fighter of the Japanese air force.

Pushing on his mind, not back into his body, but toward his mind's own outer limits was to push it outward across the most remote surfaces of the universe; it was also, Mishima knew, to push it to its own death. “Motionless before his desk, [the thinker] edges his way closer, ever closer, to the borders of the spirit, in constant mortal danger of plunging into the void” (92). Death itself is not just a negative operator of the dialectical mind; the earth is physically surrounded by death, and Mishima resolved to take his body to this locus of death.

First he had to undergo physiological flight training. His body was immobilized, strapped to the apparatus of the pressure chamber. Even the movements of the lungs were pushed toward immobility. He felt the panicky brain crave desperately the air that was being sucked out of the chamber; death stuck fast to his lips.

Finally came the day of the first flight. “Erect-angled, the F104, a sharp silver phallus, pointed into the sky. Solitary, spermatozoon-like, I was installed within. Soon, I should know how the spermatozoon felt at the instant of ejaculation.”

The plane was fired like a dagger into the stratospheres of death, ascended to thirty-five thousand feet, passed the speed of sound. “For a moment, my chest was empty, as though a cascade of water had descended with a great rush and left nothing behind it. … Everything was quiet, majestic, and the surface of the blue sky was flecked with the semen-white of clouds” (100).

At the summit: Mach 1.3, at forty-five thousand feet:

“Nothing happened.

“The silver fuselage floated in the naked light, the plane maintaining a splendid equilibrium. Once more it became a closed, motionless room. The plane was not moving at all. It had become, simply, an oddly-shaped metal cabin floating quite still in the upper atmosphere.”

In the pressure chamber the body had been immobilized to the point that it pushed up against the limits of motionlessness of the mind, to the point where its lungs had to be forced by the mind. Now, encased in the fastest engine for motion the technological mind had invented, Mishima found the outer limits of supersonic speed rejoining the absolute rest of the pressure chamber.

There was even no suffocating sensation. My mind was at ease, my thought processes lively. Both the closed room and the open room—two interiors so diametrically opposed—could serve equally, I found, as dwellings for the spirit of one and the same human being. If this stillness was the ultimate end of action—of movement—then the sky about me, the clouds far below, the sea gleaming between the clouds, even the setting sun, might well be events, things, within myself. …

This silver tube floating in the sky was, as it were, my brain, and its immobility the mode of my spirit. The brain was no longer protected by unyielding bone, but had become permeable, like a sponge floating on water. … Anything that comes into our minds even for the briefest of moments, exists. Even though it may not exist at this actual moment, it has existed somewhere in the past, or will exist at some time in the future. This simple realm of cloud, sea, and setting sun was a majestic panorama, such as I had never seen before, of my own inner world. At the same time, every event that occurred within me had slipped the fetters of mind and emotion, becoming great letters freely inscribed across the heavens.

It was then that I saw the snake.

If the giant snake-ring that resolves all polarities came into my brain, then it is natural to suppose that it was already in existence. … It was a ring vaster than death, more fragrant than that faint scent of mortality that I had caught in the compression chamber; beyond doubt, it was the principle of oneness that gazed down at us from the shining heavens.

(102-3)

The body—“transparent, peerless power that required no object at all”—was seeking what lay on its own farthest edges. It breaks through the taciturn splendor of the formal body imagined by the words—that dream of immortality. The eloquence of the surface body, the musculature, that is what feeds the imagination. The imagination of others does not feed on one's visceral inwardness or on one's functional body—or even on one's orgasmic carnality. But musculature had come to eat away at itself, leaving only the pure transparent complex of radiating vectors of power. “It was a special property of muscles that they fed the imagination of others while remaining totally devoid of imagination themselves. …” Mishima sought an existence, an exposedness that dissipated all imagination, whether of the self or of others. That situation was pure action—combat. Mishima trained in karate and kendo. “It was natural that my rephrasing of the pure sense of strength should turn in the direction of the flash of the fist and the stroke of the bamboo sword; for that which lay at the end of the flashing fist, and beyond the blow of the bamboo sword, was precisely what constituted the most certain proof of that invisible light given off by the muscles” (34).

The confrontation with the other occurs in the world of the seen, that of exposedness. Wherever one looks one is seen, and what one sees is the other's power galvanized into a look fixed on oneself.

We might think that the world, its trees, mountains, and clouds are arrayed for our look without guile or clandestinity. But in fact the surface that we view in the world, and that does not return our scrutiny, is the presumptive outcome of a series of profiles already passed by; the tree or mountain we face is a fact, factum, trace of a passage. There is no contemporaneousness between it and ourselves; there is a distance of time, and the imagination that fills in that interim. There is time for the word that names the object, about which the objectification settles, about which images accumulate like barnacles on the rusting hulk of a wreckage. With people, too, there are always contractual rules that govern every exchange of smiles, words, gestures, goods, pleasures—rules, and the scum of the imagination that collects on them. With time, even the morning face one confronts is a mask.

In most people, alas, the unsophisticated habit of exposing the face, quite unconsciously, to the dazzling light of the morning persists to the end. The habit remains, the face changes. Before one realizes it, the true face is ravaged by anxiety and emotion; one does not perceive that it drags last night's fatigue like a heavy chain, nor does one realize the boorishness of exposing such a face to the sun. It is thus that men lose their manliness.

The reason is that once it has lost the natural brightness of youth, the manly face of the warrior must needs be a false face; it must be manufactured as a matter of policy. The army, I found, made this quite clear. The morning face presented by a commanding officer was a face for people to read things into, a face in which others might immediately find a criterion for the day's action. It was an optimistic face, designed to cover up the individual's private weariness and, no matter what despair he might be plunged into, to encourage others; it was thus a false face full of energy, spurning and shaking off the bad dreams of the previous night. And it was the only face with which men who lived too long could make obeisance to the morning sun.

(70-71)

In combat there is immediacy. One knows the bulk, position, momentum, rhythms, nerves, insight, foresight of the opponent with one's own eloquent body. There is contemporaneousness, no interval of time between oneself and the opponent, no time for the scum of imagination to form.

Victory, of course, does not consist in assaulting the opponent to destroy him with the superior quantity of one's own force and momentum. One combats not with those weaker than oneself but with equals, and through combat one becomes the equal of ever more powerful opponents. One's own blow, then, is not a direct onslaught on the substance of the other; it is shot off as a provocation for a certain kind of blow on the part of the opponent. Victory proceeds out of perfect nonverbal knowledge—the knowledge one has, in the power of one's own body, of the power in the perfectly matched body of one's opponent. One's own blow creates a kind of hollow in space into which the fatal blow it provokes on the part of the opponent fits perfectly. Then one has absolutely mastered the power of the other.

The victory occurs in pure eloquence.

At the height of the fray, I found the tardy process of creating muscles, whereby strength creates form and form creates strength, is repeated so swiftly that it becomes imperceptible to the eye. Strength, that like light emitted its own rays, was constantly renewed, destroying and creating form as it went. I saw for myself how the form that was beautiful and fitting overcame the form that was ugly and imprecise. Its distortion invariably implied an opening for the foe and a blurring of the rays of strength. … [T]he form itself must have an extreme adaptability, a matchless flexibility, so that it resembles a series of sculptures created from moment to moment by a fluid body. The continuous radiation of strength must create its own shape, just as a continuous jet of water will maintain the shape of a fountain. Surely, I felt, the tempering by sun and steel to which I submitted over such a long period was none other than a process of creating this kind of fluid sculpture.

(40-41)

One does not see, look at, the opponent—if one waits to see where and how the other positions himself it will be too late; one must foresee where he will be in a fraction of a second. One also does not observe the figure of one's own power; every distance from it taken to see it subtracts from that power. The victor is one who reserves nothing for a life after, casts himself totally, absolutely, into the present, into the unseen hollow he makes of himself.

The victor was the subject of the highest art in Greek classicism. This art was necessary to make a spectacle of what is a spectacle only through art—victory, understood only by combatants, where neither oneself nor the opponent can be a spectacle at the moment victory occurs. This necessary art formulates the classical judgment that the moment of victory is the supreme moment of existence; there is nothing after it or beyond it. What we sense “in the bronze charioteer of Delphi, where the glory, the pride, and the shyness reflected in the moment of victory are given faithful immortality—is the swift approach of the spectre of death just on the other side of the victor” (42).

Victory, then, issues in nothing. That excess, that superfluity which is the peerless power of the musculature, achieves a sovereignty which is itself gratuitous. Victory is only in unconditional combat, in which everything was cast, but it is not a conquering of death. Its glory is a purely worldly glory, this side of death—which is never defeated by any human prowess, and which always overcomes.

And it is indeed this pressing contiguity with death that saves the creation of an artwork—the highest form of art, which, according to Nietzsche, is made of the most precious clay and oil, flesh and blood—from being absurd. This excessive preoccupation with one's own body, on the part of a male, would otherwise be only comical. “A strict rule is imposed where men are concerned. It is this: a man must under normal circumstances never permit his own objectification; he can only be objectified through the supreme action”—the absolute exposedness to “another sun quite different from that by which I had been so long blessed, a sun full of the fierce dark flames of feeling, a sun of death that would never burn the skin yet gave forth a still stranger glow” (46).

That which lay at the end of the flashing fist and beyond the blow of the bamboo sword, reality without images, was death in person. Aristotle listed courage as the first virtue; it is not one virtue among others on the list, for without courage no virtue is possible. Socrates claimed for himself none of the intellectual virtues; the sole virtue he claimed for himself, citing the proofs at the trial, was courage. In the Phaedo he argues not only that courage is the specific virtue of the philosopher but that only philosophers are courageous, utterly fearless, for warriors show no fear of death and are courageous only because they fear something more—dishonor or the enslavement of their families and kin. “However much the closeted philosopher mulls over the idea of death, so long as he remains divorced from the physical courage that is a prerequisite for an awareness of it, he will remain unable even to begin to grasp it.” In the tensity of physical courage, “the flesh beats a steady retreat into its function of self-defense, while it is clear consciousness that controls the decision that sends the body soaring into self-abandonment. It is the ultimate in clarity of consciousness that constitutes one of the strongest contributing factors in self-abandonment” (44).

This highest acuity of consciousness that sends the body into self-abandonment is, however, not the surface of inscription of words; it is suffering. At its limits, consciousness becomes suffering when it invades the body. “For I had begun to believe that it was the muscles—powerful, statically so well organized and so silent—that were the true sources of the clarity of my consciousness. The occasional pain in the muscles of a blow that missed the shield gave rise instantly to a still tougher consciousness that suppressed the pain, and imminent shortage of breath gave rise to a frenzy that conquered it” (46). It was thus the power of the body that provoked this supreme lucidity in the suffering consciousness.

When one turns to witness the eloquence of the flesh, one's own flesh or that of another, one senses this inner agon, which stills the comedy of a man objectifying himself. This inner agon by which consciousness, whose extreme limits are resolutely extended into the physical substance in the form of suffering, sending the body in self-abandon to its mortal limits. This intuition of an agon with death that is being waged in the gravity and dignity of the body.

Victory is a purely worldly glory this side of death; death is not defeated. Death is also the master of its own meaning. One shall not be able to make one's death serve one's own cause, this side of death. “Here must always arise a discrepancy between the absolute concept of death and the man-made, relativistic concept of righteousness. … We do not possess the standard for choosing to die. The fact that we are alive may mean that we have already been chosen for some purpose, and if life is not something we have chosen for ourselves, then maybe we are not ultimately free to die” (The Way of the Samurai: Yukio Mishima on “Hagakure” in Modern Life, trans. Kathryn Sparling [New York: Basic Books, 1977], p. 104).

“And now, kept in reserve for the end,” Marguerite Yourcenar wrote at the end of her book written after Mishima's seppuku,

the last and most traumatizing image: so overwhelming that it has rarely been reproduced. Two heads on the rug, surely acrylic, of the General's office, placed alongside of one another like ninepins, almost touching. Two heads, inert balls, two brains that the blood no longer irrigates, two computers stopped in the midst of their job, no longer sorting out and decoding the perpetual flux of images, impressions, incitements and responses which by the millions pass every day through a being and form what we call the life of the mind and even that of the senses, motivating and directing the movements of the body. Two severed heads, gone on to other worlds where another law rules, that, when one contemplates them, produce more stupor than horror. Judgments of value, whether moral, political or aesthetic, are in their presence, momentarily at least, reduced to silence. The notion that forces itself upon us is more disturbing and simpler: among the myriads of things that are, and that have been, these two heads have been; they are. What fills these eyes without any look is no longer a banner unfurled in political protest, nor any other intellectual or carnal image, nor even the void that Honda had contemplated, and which suddenly seems to be nothing but a concept or a symbol that is in the end all too human. Two objects, already quasi-inorganic debris of destroyed structures, and, once passed into the fire, will they too be but mineral residue and ashes; not even subjects for meditation, because the data are lacking for us to meditate on them. Two pieces of wreckage, rolling on the river of action, which the immense wave has left for a moment dry on the sands, before washing them on.

(Mishima, ou la vision du vide [Paris: Gallimard, 1981], pp. 124-25)