The vicissitudes of postnational affects: Visuality, temporality, and corporeality in global East Asian Films

One of the salient changes East Asian films have undergone during the past decade of globalization is their increasing tendency to foreground affective intensities that are excessive in relation to their thematic or signifying aspects. My dissertation, The Vicissitudes of Postnational Affects: Visuality, Temporality, and Corporeality in Global East Asian Films , explores political implications of these affective features as expressed in some of the recent East Asian films, focusing on their relationships with the postnational condition that has increasingly swept over East Asia during the past two decades. By the term postnational condition, I mean the recent remarkable change in the mode of socio-political power, which is characterized by the gradual simultaneous processes of the decline of sovereign and disciplinary powers and the rise of global neoliberal governmentality. As such, the postnational condition needs to be understood as a double-edge sword in the sense that it makes it possible for hitherto unrepresentable affective others to emerge at the same time that it prepares for a new condition that makes it possible to manage and rationalize them in such a calculative manner that it may preempt subversive forms of affective otherness from appearing. My dissertation calls attention to how recent East Asian films have responded to this postnational condition in different ways by developing various kinds of narrative and stylistic strategies that can cinematically express, as well as cope with, this affective otherness.;My dissertation focuses on three aspects of film experience—its visual, temporal, and corporeal ones—in which affective otherness is expressed in films. Part I focuses on the phenomenon of global exoticism and discusses and compares different ways East Asian films deploy the aesthetics of the exotic vis-à-vis the dominant neoliberal tactics of valorizing visual alterity or excess. If Kim Ki-duk's recent films such as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring (2003) and 3-Iron (2004) show how the exotic can undergo generification, thereby losing its singularity in accordance with the neoliberal governmental management of visual excess, Hou Hsiao-hsien's recent films, such as Flowers of Shanghai (1998) and Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) illustrate the possibility that the residual, unvalorizable exotic can appear in the cinema of the era of neoliberal governmentality.;Part II addresses how affective otherness can be expressed through contingency and temporal heterogeneity. The compulsive repetition characteristic of Hong Sang-soo's Tale of Cinema (2005) serves to turn otherwise singular contingencies into probabilistic, and thus valorizable chances. This examination of Hong's film shows how neoliberal governmentality regularizes these temporal disturbances through the process of the real subsumption of time. Yet, alternative thoughts on time such as Deleuze's notion of the empty form of time and Benjamin-Agamben's notion of the dialectical image indicate the possibility that unvalorizable temporal excess can remain in the form of a potential for becoming other. Kore-eda Hirokazu's Distance (2001) expresses this possibility by employing narrative and formal strategies that fill the time for repetition with immeasurable possibilities and hesitations.;Part III shifts its focus to the dark underside of these seemingly subversive affects. Biopolitical valorization of affects accompanies, as its underside, the thanato-political suppressions of unvalorizable bodies and gestures. Yet, thanato-politics is not simply a matter of processes of suppressing corporeal otherness, but is crucial to maintaining neoliberal biopolitical governmentality because as it justifies the need to remove unvalorizable corporeal otherness by negatively regularizing it. Park Chan-wook's Thirst (2009), though performing this thanato-political valorization, discloses how unvalorizable corporeal otherness is already internal rather than external to neoliberal biopolitical valorization, thereby problematizing the call for the thanato-political suppression of others. Part III also examines how unvalorizable corporeal otherness can elude the thanato-political valorization process and subsist in the form of the pure means without ends. Kore-eda Hirokazu's Air Doll and Jia Zhang-ke's Useless illustrate how these films allow audiences to encounter unvalorizable gestures and corporeal residues beyond the Sadean fantasy and thereby enable them to imagine a new community grounded on pure communicability without end.