Ichi the Killer

*Ultimately a mediocre and disturbing film that depends too much upon aesthetics. I can’t with good conscience encourage people to watch this. However, it presents some interesting philosophical meditations (that I’ve touched on briefly below) on violence and the limitations of empathy for those who are overly pretentious or just plain Incels* * *“There is no love in your violence” Violence is only meaningful insofar as it is relational and, moreover, cannot be reduced to a mere act imposed upon a passive subject. Edmund Husserl’s account of intentionality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied perception complicate any such simplification. For Husserl, consciousness is always consciousness of something, structured through its relation to others and the world; while for Merleau-Ponty, the body is an expressive medium through which meaning is constituted. In this sense, violence must be understood as an intersubjective encounter, an event that reinforces the other as a responsive subject in a mutually destructive I-Thou encounter. If attention is truly the purest form of love, then the purest form of attention may in fact be violence as an extreme reification of the other’s existence. It is at this precipice of reason that Bataille locates in extreme experiences a drive toward the dissolution of discontinuous being. Yet this position contains an internal contradiction that cannot be resolved through escalation. Intersubjectivity, as both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty insist, is not something that can be forced into existence unilaterally. It depends upon reciprocity. Without this, the encounter collapses into solipsism. The other is reduced once again to an object, and the relational structure that violence sought to intensify is nullified. Thus, the assertion that there is “no love” in a certain kind of violence reveals an unexpected precision. Love, however distorted, requires recognition. It requires the other to appear not merely as a surface upon which force is inscribed, but as a subject who shares in the moment. What is longed for is an encounter that cannot be reduced, ignored, or dissolved—a moment in which two consciousnesses meet with undeniable intensity. But if that encounter cannot be mutual, then no degree of extremity can compensate for its absence. Without recognition, nothing, no matter how visceral, amounts to anything at all.