The collective will and our social contract has changed the world's political landscape over the last year or so. Azuma looks back at Rousseau and Freud then forward to Twitter and Google to express h
Azuma (Center for the Study of World Civilizations, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan) philosophically explores the Japanese subculture of the otaku, which typically involves males between 18 and 4
From Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon to Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, the worlds of Japanese anime and manga teem with prepubescent girls toting deadly weapons. Sometimes overtly sexual, always inte
An inventive philosophical study that reconsiders the figure of the tourist.Tourism is a characteristically modern phenomenon, yet modern thinkers have tended to deride the tourist as a figure of homogenizing globalism. This philosophical study considers the tourist anew, as a subject position that enables us to redraw the map of globalized culture in an era increasingly in revolt against the liberal intellectual world view and its call for the welcome of the "Other." Why has the tourist proved so resistant to philosophical treatment, asks Hiroki Azuma, author of Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals and General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, and Google. Tracing the reasons for this exclusion through the work of Rousseau and Voltaire, and subsequently in Kant, Carl Schmitt, Alexandre Kojève, Hannah Arendt, and Hardt and Negri, Azuma contends that the figure of the tourist has been rendered illegible by becoming ensnared in a series of misleading conceptual dichotomies and a linear model of
