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※Identity as a Construct—The Duality of Hatsune Misumi and Sakiko Togawa, or a Diagnosis of Codependency
※The Wavering of Individuation and the Letting-Go of Identity — On MyGO!!!!! and Ave Mujica
※Mask, Mirror, Floor: The Metastability of Individuation in Ave Mujica
※General paper
Abstract — This paper analyzes the puppetification of Misumi Hatsune in episode 13 of the anime Ave Mujica as a case of de-subjectivation. Resisting the critical temptation to resolve this transformation univocally as a “loss into thinghood,” it shows that Hatsune’s status is placed at an undecidable point—the critical point of thingification—readable equally as evidence of consent extracted by Togawa Sakiko and as evidence of a mask operated by Hatsune herself at the last. From the material observation that all four phases of the transformation are rendered in 3DCG and never once pass through the bare face (2D), it follows that de-subjectivation occurs not by stripping the mask away but inside the mask. Through several layers—Jentsch’s uncanny (the living / non-living of the automaton), the confrontation between Stiegler’s désindividuation and the author’s own concept “de-individuation-B,” and the restriction of Agamben’s inclusive exclusion to the level of dialogue alone—the undecidabilities of living / non-living and loss / restart are held in suspension rather than hardened. The closing chapter frames this suspended structure as a fiction-mediated response to contemporary difficulties: the difficulty of possessing a unified self, and the failure of weak autonomy.
Keywords — de-subjectivation; the critical point of thingification; undecidability; the uncanny / automaton; de-individuation; 3DCG and mise-en-scène; Ave Mujica
Introduction: Two Prefaces
（AvemMujica OP 「Killkiss」 ）
What this paper treats is the sequence of transformations undergone by Misumi Hatsune in episode 13 of Ave Mujica. Yet the moment one summarizes it as “Hatsune became a doll,” criticism has already handed down a decision—the decision to fix what remains after the transformation as a “thing,” and to render the process leading there univocally as “loss.” This paper suspends that decision. Let it be said at the outset: the de-subjectivation this paper speaks of carries the sense of a critical point—a single point undecidable between thing and will, between living and non-living—and not the sense of a one-directional loss or stripping-away. The same caution applied later to the distinction around “de-individuation” (note 4) is placed early here as well, upon the governing term.
First preface: the undecidability of extraction / operation. Hatsune’s status can be read as evidence of consent extracted by Togawa Sakiko, and equally as evidence of a mask that Hatsune herself operated at the last. These two readings overlap at one and the same point in the image and do not come apart. This suspension—in which extraction and operation occur at a single point—is what the paper calls the critical point of thingification (notes 1 and 2), and it is set as the point of departure for treating de-subjectivation. This is not a problem to be solved but a structure to be preserved. Yet preservation stands not as a declared thesis but as the report that, once a resolution has been attempted, the material splits. The axis of extraction / operation, too, undergoes the same load-testing (Chapter 2) as the ontological axis (Chapter 3). To tip toward operation and fix Hatsune as “a subject who willed to the very end” would itself become an accident—the warning of Mutsumi taken up in the closing chapter (the reverse-directional reproduction of an asymmetry) named precisely this temptation.
Note 1. On thingification. The thingification this paper speaks of is a descriptive concept, designating only the state of affairs in which some entity is fixed as a “thing.” It is distinct from the thingification (wuhua) of Zhuangzi’s “On the Equality of Things” (the transformation of thing and self, typified in the dream of the butterfly, the flux of all things), and does not borrow that term. Nor does this paper mobilize the reification that Lukács developed as Verdinglichung in his commodity-form theory—the state in which human relations appear as relations between things. Thingification at the critical point names only the descriptive state of affairs in which, at an undecidable point of extraction / operation, an entity is fixed into a thing.
Note 2. On the critical. The critical here is a metaphor drawn from the phase transition in physics. At the critical point of a phase transition, two hitherto distinct phases (liquid and gas, say) become mutually indistinguishable. What this paper calls the critical point of thingification likewise designates a single point at which the two readings—extraction and operation—overlap and can be decided in neither direction. It does not carry the sense of a threshold (a boundary line) beyond which a one-directional transition is completed.
Second preface: the continuity of 3D-throughness. The four phases that make up the transformation—the entreaty in the play-within-the-play, the demand in the main story, the puppetification, and the return of the light in the eyes—are all rendered in 3DCG, and never once pass through a phase in which the bare face = 2D is exposed. By 2D here is not meant that Sanzigen’s toon shading looks flat. What the preceding second paper took as the sign of the bare face was not toon-3D but a shift into the drawn register—line art, or line drawing as cut-in. What this paper calls 3D-throughness designates the fact that the four phases remain within toon-3D and never once effect this shift into the drawn register. This is not a theoretical proposition but a material observation, and so, even placed at the outset, it does not violate the observation-driven method. The minimal proposition drawn from it is that de-subjectivation occurs not by stripping the mask away but inside the mask (3DCG = the medium of construction). The relation to the framework the preceding second paper established, “3DCG = mask / 2D = bare face”—inheritance and complication—is framed, by way of the observation chapters, in the closing chapter (a). These two prefaces are recovered there, at the level of framing.
The position of the method. One more thing the paper must declare: its own position. The very act of “reading” Hatsune is a construction that, from a point outside the work, decides “what she is,” and in that sense it is an exercise of sovereignty. The sovereignty meant here is of a different register from the marks of sovereignty the work withheld at 20:39 (Sachiko off-screen, not mounting the throne—Chapter 1), and from the Agambenian sovereignty called up only auxiliarily at the level of dialogue (Chapter 2). It is the sovereignty wielded by the position of interpretation—the unavoidable power by which a reading constructs its object. That the work withheld the marks of sovereignty at 20:39, and that this paper withholds reading Hatsune into a fixed subject, resonate as isomorphic gestures in different registers. This is not a theoretical identity but a structural correspondence the paper uses deliberately.
※Refference AveMujica ＃13話 20:39 Successfully scenery)
In order to bring this construction onto the stage as construction, the paper’s observation and reading are assembled not by a single critical subject but by operating a plurality of critical personas. These personas are a plurality of critical positions operated as dialogues with an AI, each directing a different angle of reading at the object. Yet—here is the paper’s protocol—none of the personas’ utterances functions as a source of authority. They are critical material and dialogue that press upon the object; the concepts and citations the paper mobilizes become sources only after being confirmed against the originals. The personas are positions of reading, not authorities.
Yet this method has a structural limit. A persona can direct a reading only within the range for which the designer’s knowledge has prepared that reading. Hence a point that will not split even after operating the four positions may be a sign of the object’s undecidability, or a sign of what the designer’s knowledge failed to reach; and the paper cannot, in the last analysis, decide between these two. The reach of the method has this undecidability as its ceiling.
And this very operation—holding the plurality of reading-positions in mutual tension, entrusting final judgment to none—renders visible the fact that a reading constructs its object. If handing down a single judgment is already an exercise of sovereignty, then scattering judgment across a plurality of positions and maintaining suspension without tipping toward either extraction or operation is a gesture that does not naturalize that sovereignty but keeps it on stage. This is nothing other than the formal correlate of the paper’s constraint: to preserve, unsolved, the core undecidability. What this constraint folds in as an ethical stake is framed, together with Mutsumi’s warning, in the closing chapter.
Chapter 1: Puppetification
(Avemujica, Episode 13: Hatsune Misumi, whose eyes seem to lose their light as if she were turning into a doll)
Episode 13, 20:39. First, let the observations be laid out. The cut is carried through entirely in 3D; there is no exposure of the bare face—as stated in the introduction, the shift into 2D = the drawn register, which the preceding second paper took as the sign of the bare face, never once occurs here. De-subjectivation proceeds without baring the face, inside the medium of the mask. Whether Hatsune’s gaze is directed toward the audience or into empty space is undecidable. The doll-quality begins from a terminal gesture—a single motion in which the head tilts about five degrees to the right and stops—and extends to the stillness of the whole body. The hair shows no inertial rebound after stopping; there is no rise and fall of breath, no minute wavering, no blink, no movement of the eyeball. (The hem of the skirt, however, lies almost off-screen, and its immobility, being a position natural enough even at rest, is not counted as evidence.) The stillness that remains is not the slackness of a corpse but is close to the arrest of an automaton. Sachiko is off-screen, at the same height, and does not mount the throne. That is, at this one point there is no mark of sovereignty. The sound begins not from silence but at the instant Hatsune grips the guitar. The voice is Doloris’s, but there is no vocal differentiation. And the iconographic isomorphism with the doll left behind by the mother is not here; what the two share is only hair color.
(Avemujica, Episode 13: Hatsune Misumi, whose eyes seem to lose their light as if she were turning into a doll)
There is another observation, concerning light. Until just before the disappearance, Hatsune’s eyes held four reflections—multiple white points of light, large and small, mirrored in the pupils. In the puppetification these four reflections all vanish, and instead the base of the pupil glows hemispherically, uniformly, from within. The eye that had mirrored the world becomes an eye that glows uniformly from within. At the same instant, Hatsune’s skin—face and flesh alike—drops in tone, while the hair, costume, and guitar go on dynamically reflecting the ceiling lights. A reversal occurs: the living surface loses the world’s reflection, and only the fabricated objects go on mirroring the world.
What these observations point to in common is the undecidability of whether she is living or not. Here the paper raises the uncanny (das Unheimliche) as the axis of its audiovisual diagnosis. What Ernst Jentsch (1906) placed at the core of the “uncanny” was the uncertainty (Unsicherheit), before an automaton, of “whether this is alive, or a lifeless thing.” Jentsch went only so far as to see this in Hoffmann’s narration in general, evocative of automata, and did not attribute it to particular characters such as the Sandman or Olympia. Freud (1919) renamed this uncertainty “intellectual uncertainty” (intellektuelle Unsicherheit), and, specifying it further onto the theme of the Sandman’s eyes = castration, demoted the theme of the automaton’s living / non-living to the secondary. This paper deliberately reverses that specification-plus-demotion—it takes precisely the uncertainty of the automaton’s living / non-living, which Freud pushed to the secondary, as the main line by which to diagnose Hatsune’s puppetification. The reason is grounded in the image. What is held in suspension here is exactly the automaton’s living / non-living, not the return of the repressed. For what the material details—the rendering of the pupils, the immobility of the hair, the absence of breath—name is the undecidability between a living eye and a manufactured eye, the very thing Jentsch’s uncertainty pointed to. Freud’s line will be called up later as a contrasting term.
And this living / non-living is materially inscribed in the very rendering of the pupils just observed. The reflection that mirrors the world is inhomogeneous—that several points of light are mirrored, scattered, is the sign of a living eye open to the world. The glow from within is homogeneous—a uniform inner light is the sign of a manufactured eye that mirrors no world. The turn from the disappearance of the four reflections to the hemispherical glow shows, at the level of rendering, the turn from a living eye to a manufactured eye. Jentsch’s uncertainty is observed here not as a concept but as the quality of the light in the eyes.
What matters is that this diagnosis does not tip toward the side of “Hatsune became a thing.” The body is wholly still, the pupils lose the world’s reflection—the automaton-quality is strong. But an automaton is a machine undecidable between life and non-life, not a corpse = thing. The light glowing from within is still “on,” and the gaze remains undecidable (whether toward the audience or into the void is not settled). The suspension of living / non-living is not a rhetorical reservation but is materially moored in the details of the image—the immobility of the hair, the absence of breath, the rendering of the pupils. It leans toward the automaton, yet no fixing into a thing is granted.
The same occurs on the side of sovereignty. The observation that Sachiko is off-screen and does not mount the throne does not, at the level of the image, support a reading that frames this point as “the completion of thingification by a sovereign.” Visual evidence that would tip toward extraction (that Sachiko extracted consent) is, at this one point, lacking. Here the temptation arises to bring Agamben’s inclusive exclusion into the audiovisual diagnosis, but that is confined to the auxiliary at the level of dialogue and is not raised onto the site of audiovisual diagnosis (Chapter 2).
Finally, let it be noted that the reversal by which the sound begins at the gripping of the guitar—the turn from silence to sound—may be read not as the stillness of death but also as the sign of some “beginning.” The turn from the pupils’ reflection to their glow, observed above, the paper does not here render univocally as terminus = death but places as a foreshadowing. For the vanished reflections return, in the phase of the return treated in Chapter 3, together with the single word “Let’s go.” The vertical thread concerning the light in the eyes—with a further stage added at the end of the next chapter (eyes closing → sound beginning → light disappearing)—is carried through to Chapter 3.
Chapter 2: The Utterance “If I Could Be by Your Side”
(Avemujica Episode 13: Hatsune Misumi – ‘If I Could Stay by Your Side’)
This utterance is the pivot of the paper’s main line. Here the undecidability of extraction and operation is materially enacted within a single utterance.
Let the observations be laid out. The same wish—the wish to be by Sachiko’s side—is presented, in two scenes, as contrasting edits. On the one hand (the play-within-the-play, 20:10). In the downcast-eyed entreaty “If I could be by your side… I would forget even this sorrow,” Hatsune closes her eyes—there is a body that offers a voice rather than a subject that emits one. But the scene does not end with the entreaty. After a few seconds of Sachiko’s pause, Hatsune turns to face Sachiko—“Then, take up the sword”—and immediately the cut gathers the full figures of the two, gazing at each other, into a single frame with the guitar held at the center. It is a two-shot of mutual face-to-face, with no reverse shot and no reverse-shot utterance on Hatsune’s side. The partner of the relation (Sachiko) is present not in a separate cut but in the same frame, as an equal full figure, together with her. On the other hand (the main story, 14:41). Verbatim it runs from “Please let me stay by Sachiko’s side!” to “I… I won’t cause the Togawa house any trouble.” Here the editing reverses. Hatsune’s demand is distributed to three parties by reverse shots—Hatsune facing forward in direct gaze, Sadaharu glaring at her head-on, Sachiko beside them, startled and biting back her chagrin. Hatsune shows the back of her head to Sadaharu, the addressee of the demand, and her frontal stance and direct gaze are directed toward the screen = the audience. The others are, rather than in the same frame, separated into distinct cuts by reverse shots. Both scenes are rendered in 3D, passing through no exposure of the bare face.
Here the editing itself becomes the axis that separates extraction and operation. Yet that axis is not “the presence or absence of a reverse shot”—for in both the play-within-the-play and the main story the partner appears, in different ways. The axis is rather co-presence (the mutuality of a single frame = the play-within-the-play) versus separation (the three-way distribution by reverse shots = the main story). Let one thing be said here. The reverse shot itself is a general grammar of editing for filming conversation and does not, of itself, carry a proper meaning. What is proper is what the reverse shot here distributes—whereas the reverse shot of ordinary conversation distributes the exchange of two parties, the reverse shot of the main story separates the addressee of the demand (Sadaharu) from the subject of reaction (Sachiko), and takes the demanding Hatsune only from behind. What is distributed is not an exchange but the making-dorsal of the demanding subject, and the recovery of that demand into Sachiko’s suffering. And either term of this axis reads as both extraction and operation. The co-presence of the play-within-the-play can be read as a mutuality facing off as equals across the guitar—the sign of an operation in which Hatsune, not yet fully extracted into a thing, confronts Sachiko as a subject who takes up the sword—and equally as the sign of two enclosed, as equals, within the fiction of the play-within-the-play: an equality in a fiction cut off from the actual relation, that is, a portent of extraction. The separation of the main story can be read as the sign of a reverse-shot editing that assembles the demanding subject—an operation in which Hatsune’s demand comes to hold through the editing—and equally as the sign in which Hatsune shows only the back of her head, her demand recovered into the mesh of relations between Sadaharu and Sachiko so that Hatsune herself is thinned out: the extraction of the subject. Neither reading of either scene is settled by the image alone. The undecidability set in the introduction is here folded into the interior of a single object—and this is what makes this chapter the pivot of the paper’s main line.
Here the paper imposes on the extraction / operation axis the same discipline as Chapter 3. Merely to state that something is ambiguous leaves undecidability as an assertion, not an achievement. Hence a heavy burden of proof is placed on the side that reads operation (a willing subject), and mere ambiguity is not counted as a win for operation. The material that positively supports operation is the frontal stance, the demand, the raised-brow direct gaze of the main story. But this direct gaze is no more than a single shot placed in the very midst of material that all leans toward extraction = the thing—the terminal gesture confirmed in the puppetification scene (the automaton-quality of the head tilting about five degrees and stopping), the absence of vocal differentiation, the undecidability of the gaze. Operation is not decisively supported beyond this single shot. Thus the suspension of extraction / operation stands as the report that, a resolution having been attempted, the material splits. It is an achievement that has passed the load-test, not an assertion that has not undergone it.
But the load-test still has one piece of material not yet imposed. An image that could support operation more strongly than the direct gaze of the main story lies just before the puppetification. Just before taking up the guitar, Hatsune is caught in a 20-degree low angle. The camera is placed on the side of the guitar, and Hatsune stands in the frame as though looked up at by the guitar—called the “sword” in the drama. In this cut Sachiko is off-screen. A thing looks up at a person; the person stands erect in a position looked down upon by the thing. Here Hatsune can be read as placed, for an instant, in the position of sovereignty, as a subject who wills to take up the sword. The operation side obtains here, for the first time, a firm image exceeding the single shot of the direct gaze.
But the same material does not let operation win. The cut of the erect stance and the cut of the puppetification (the disappearance of the light in the eyes = thingification; Chapters 1 and 3) are adjacent, with no other event interposed. The summit of operation—the sovereign erect stance of taking up the sword—and thingification—the sinking into the automaton—are continuous, cut against cut. At the very point where the stronger evidence of operation is obtained, thingification is placed right beside it. Hence this cut of the erect stance does not become evidence tipping toward operation. It is evidence that the strongest image of operation and thingification lie side by side at one and the same point; the critical point of thingification, set in the introduction as a concept, is here enacted by the editing itself. This adjacency—that thingification occurs at the summit of operation—is what inscribes the undecidability of extraction / operation upon the image.
Now that the audiovisual load-test has fixed this critical point at the level of editing, we move to what the same utterance does at the level of language. Here the level of dialogue is treated as a level distinct from the audiovisual diagnosis. The utterance is at the level of language = dialogue. The phrase “I won’t cause the Togawa house any trouble” takes the posture of offering itself while excluding itself from the burden—that is, from a term internal to the house. That being excluded becomes, on the contrary, a mode of inclusion—by the very fact of being shut out of the burdensome term, Hatsune is kept held within the sphere of Sachiko’s house. The puppetified Hatsune is nothing other than one who continues to be included in Sachiko’s sphere in the manner of being excluded from the seat of the subject—a “one who is kept in place.” Only with respect to this structure can Agamben’s inclusive exclusion be drawn as an auxiliary line. But it is strictly delimited. As confirmed in Chapter 1, the mark of sovereignty was withheld at the level of the image. Hence Agamben is kept to the auxiliary at the level of dialogue and macro-framing, and is not raised onto the site of audiovisual diagnosis.
At the chapter’s end, let the vertical thread of the light in the eyes advance a stage. After the demand of the main story, Hatsune closes her eyes, the sound begins together with the gripping of the guitar, and the light in the eyes disappears—the stage of eyes closing → sound beginning → light disappearing. Chapter 1 placed the disappearance in the same cut as the puppetification as a foreshadowing; this chapter records the temporal approach to that disappearance. This disappearance is received by the return treated in Chapter 3—the phase in which, together with the single word “Let’s go,” the light returns spontaneously. Hence the paper still does not render the disappearance univocally as terminus = death.
Chapter 3: The Disappearance and Return of the Light in the Eyes
(In Episode 13 of Avemujica, ‘Musica of the Celestial Sphere’, Misumi Hatsune regains the light in her eyes as the song begins)
Chapter 3 is the paper’s principal ontological confrontation. Around the light in the eyes, two readings—de-individuation-B and Stiegler’s désindividuation (note 5)—collide head-on. The proposition here is not that one or the other wins, but that one and the same material equally supports both readings, and neither can monopolize it.
Note 5. The paper writes Stiegler’s concept in its original spelling, désindividuation. Where a translation such as “de-individuation” is given, it is the paper’s descriptive rendering, not an established standard translation. The difference in spelling from Simondon’s désindividualisation (-ation versus -alisation) is preserved as in the originals (the distinction among the three is note 4).
First, let the side of the disappearance be fixed. The disappearance of the light in the eyes occurs in the same cut as the puppetification (foreshadowed in Chapter 1; its approach recorded at the end of Chapter 2 as the stage of eyes closing → sound beginning → light disappearing). As observed in Chapter 1, this disappearance is a turn from a reflecting surface that mirrors the world to a self-emitting luminous body—a change in which the four reflections are lost and the base of the pupil glows uniformly. This disappearance the paper renders univocally neither as terminus = death nor as the portent of a restart. For the observation of the return can be read either way.
Let the side of the return be laid out. The light in the eyes returns late in episode 13 (21:22). It is rendered in 3D, with no exposure of the bare face. The occasion of the return is the single word “Let’s go,” and it is spontaneous rather than given from outside. In this phase Sachiko is not linked—the return is not rendered as a resumption of the relation with Sachiko. It is placed in a separate cut and a separate time, accompanied by an independent finale, and bears the marks of the boundary of self / subject. And in the pupils themselves, the four reflections lost in Chapter 1 return—the pupil that had turned in the disappearance from reflecting surface to luminous body returns, in the return, once more to a reflecting surface, an eye that mirrors the world. The voice is Doloris’s, with no vocal differentiation (Chapter 1). Though it is the medium of construction, there is in it a trace of sorrow. And the mark of severance lies not upon the light in the eyes itself but is distributed across the independent axes of background, music, color, and editing.
Before entering the confrontation, let the difference in standing between the two terms be made explicit. De-individuation-B is a concept the paper has negatively recast from Simondon’s theory of individuation (note 4), whereas Stiegler’s désindividuation is a published concept. Since their standing is not equal, the burden of proof is placed heavily on de-individuation-B, the author’s own concept. In particular, because de-individuation-B is defined as “loss-neutral”—deciding neither loss nor restart—if left unchecked it could absorb into itself all undecidable material. To prevent this, the chapter counts de-individuation-B as supported only when the material positively points to metastability / restart, and does not count mere ambiguity of the material as a win for de-individuation-B.
Note 4. The distinction among the three terms. The paper’s de-individuation-B is distinguished from two existing concepts near it in name. (i) Stiegler’s désindividuation = the structural decline of individuation (Mélenberger trans., p. 36). (ii) Simondon’s own désindividualisation = rendered mukoseika (“de-individualization”) in the translation supervised by Fujii Chikayo (p. 466; original p. 276): an ascending, relational self-relinquishment toward the transindividual—a movement in which the individual opens onto the collective and lets go of its particularity, while individuality itself remains. (iii) The paper’s de-individuation-B = the re-foregrounding of an unfinished preindividuality, that is, the reopening of a metastable phase. Mukoseika (rising toward the transindividual while retaining individuality) and de-individuation-B (falling back toward preindividuality and reopening the metastable) run in opposite directions. None of the three bears the single term “de-individuation,” and so the names do not collide. Hence the paper forbids recovering them under adjectives such as “Simondonian” or “Stieglerian,” and treats each in its own spelling, translation, and provenance.
Under this discipline, let the several features of the return be examined. None of the features belongs to one reading; each reads in both directions. The spontaneity of “Let’s go” reads, for de-individuation-B, as the spontaneous restart of a phase bearing its past, but for désindividuation as an automatic repetition that starts up with no external occasion—a mechanical replaying that no one any longer set in motion. The independent finale reads both as the sign that a new phase has its own closure and as a performance flowing on by inertia after death. Sachiko’s non-linkage reads as showing that the return is not a return to someone but the reopening of the phase itself, yet on the other hand as the sign of the severance of the very relation that had sustained individuation = the loss of the capacity for individuation, and in this feature it leans rather toward désindividuation. The arrest of the automaton (Chapter 1) and the disappearance of light are, for désindividuation, signs of mechanization and loss, but for de-individuation-B read as a metastable phase, a foreshadowing. The absence of vocal differentiation in Doloris’s voice supports désindividuation as the loss of the voice’s individuating differentiation, but for de-individuation-B may read as a phase returned to a metastability prior to differentiation. The pupils’ return to a reflecting surface—the return of the world’s reflection lost in Chapter 1—is, in this examination, one of the few pieces of material that positively supports de-individuation-B. That the eye which mirrors the world returns reads as the resumption of reflective commerce with the world, that is, as a restart of living back into a metastable phase, and this feature can meet the burden of proof imposed on de-individuation-B (that the material positively point to metastability / restart). Yet the return to a reflecting surface, too, does not exclude désindividuation. For the reading remains in which a hollow sign that has lost its content simply begins once more to reflect external light mechanically—mirroring no world, only being lit by the world. The return to a reflecting surface is the material that leans most clearly toward de-individuation-B, and yet even it grants no settlement.
That the medium of construction bears a trace of sorrow likewise grants no settlement. The trace reads as an affect that still remains, supporting de-individuation-B, but for désindividuation as an affect emaciated into a hollow sign that has lost its content—a citation of sorrow, not sorrow itself. That there is a trace becomes both the proof that individuation is still alive and the husk of a sign remaining after individuation has fallen away.
As for the sound synchronization, the initial estimate is corrected. That the sound begins at the gripping of the guitar and is accompanied by an independent finale cannot be used, on the ground that “the stillness of death should have no sound,” as a counter-proof against the univocal reading of death. For the loss that désindividuation names is not a literal death = silence but the structural decline of individuation—the impairment of the capacity for individuation, that is, the fixing into a thing (Mélenberger trans., p. 36). A hollow sign can, rather, resound. A return with sound may still be désindividuation as automatic repetition. Hence the sound synchronization is placed as a neutral observation that grants a decision to neither side.
The negative observation—that the mark of severance lies outside the independent axis of the light in the eyes—also cuts equally toward both sides. This observation announces two things at once. First, severance is not inscribed upon the light in the eyes itself. Hence a reading that directly links the disappearance of light to “severance = death” lacks support so far as the light in the eyes is concerned (limiting désindividuation’s direct attribution to the light). Second, however, the mark of severance does exist on the other axes—background, music, color, editing. As a whole scene, a rupture is registered (limiting de-individuation-B’s reading of pure continuity / restart). Therefore this negative observation is not a device that favors one side. It goes no further than describing the arrangement in which the rupture, moved away from the light in the eyes, exists at the scene’s periphery, and it grants neither reading a monopoly.
From the foregoing, the material of the return is monopolized neither by de-individuation-B nor by désindividuation. The same “Let’s go,” the same finale, the same trace, the same return to a reflecting surface, read as both a living restart and a mechanical repetition. The ontological suspension is here preserved, and it touches the same point as the undecidability of extraction / operation set in the introduction—for read as a restart it leans toward operation (a mask willed at the last), and read as a mechanical repetition toward extraction (consent operated as a thing). Chapter 3 tips toward neither of these two leanings.
Closing Chapter: Sublation at the Level of Framing
The three observation chapters have left the core undecidability in suspension. The closing chapter is not a chapter that solves it. Here sublation operates only at the level of framing, and by sublation is meant the framing of undecidability as “that which cannot be solved.” Below, four threads are recovered.
(a) The recovery of 3D-throughness—inheritance and complication of the second paper’s framework. The continuity of 3D-throughness set in the introduction is here connected to the framework of the preceding second paper. The second paper established “3DCG = mask / 2D = bare face” and read the phase of the bare face’s exposure as the sign of de-subjectivation. This paper inherits that while complicating it. Hatsune’s transformation is carried through in 3D across all four phases and never once passed through the bare face (2D). Hence in this paper the binary of mask / bare face neither reverses nor peels apart. Instead, by the very medium of construction (3DCG) coming to bear a trace of sorrow (Chapter 3), the opposition of mask / bare face is folded into a difference of intensity within the mask. This difference of intensity can now be named concretely—the mask does not peel away, and within it the pupils oscillate between a reflecting surface that mirrors the world and a luminous body glowing from within, while the living surface loses the world’s reflection and the fabricated objects go on mirroring the world (Chapters 1 and 3). The trace of sorrow is this difference of intensity, at the level of rendering, occurring inside the mask that does not peel away. This is the substance of the inheritance-and-complication.
(b) The preservation of undecidability. Extraction / operation, living / non-living, loss / restart—the three undecidabilities were preserved in their respective observation chapters. The closing chapter does not solve them. Undecidability is not the paper’s suspension of judgment but the exact description that the object is placed at the critical point of thingification. Yet this “exact description” is not one that can be claimed without limit. The undecidability stated in the introduction—that whether what splits is a sign of the object or a limit of the designer’s knowledge cannot be decided—is the general ceiling of the method; only at a point that has passed the load-test (Chapters 2 and 3) does undecidability stand as a sign on the side of the object. What may be called “exact description” is confined to this one point. Sublation operates only in naming this as “unsolvable.”
(c) Mutsumi’s thesis 1—trilogy consistency and mutual inviolability. Here the series of Wakaba Mutsumi is set as a contrast. Episode 9, 2 minutes 48 seconds: what Wakaba Mutsumi’s utterance at her own home records is the dissolution of the two personae Wakaba Mutsumi / Mortis, and its wish is relation-oriented—“Saki, and CRYCHIC, once more…,” that is, an orientation toward being together with Sachiko. Mutsumi’s dissolution occurs within a relation toward the other (Sachiko). By contrast, the return of the light in Hatsune’s eyes was rendered as Sachiko-non-linked (Chapter 3). The return was not a return to someone but the reopening of the phase itself. The two, while both taking Sachiko as their pole, differ in drive—relation-orientation (Mutsumi) versus the non-linkage of relation (Hatsune). This difference sustains the mutual inviolability of each character’s type of dissolution across the trilogy. Hatsune’s de-subjectivation must not be reread into Mutsumi-type relation-oriented dissolution. And what Mutsumi herself warned of was the reverse-directional reproduction of an asymmetry. To fix Hatsune, on the side of operation, as “a subject who willed to the very end” would be to reproduce, in reverse, the very asymmetry Mutsumi named.
(Avemujica Episode 9: Mutsumi Wakaba: ‘With Sho, and CRYCHIC once more…’ Mortis: ‘So what? Are you saying it’s fine if I—as a person—disappear?’)
(d) The consequence of the social-layer withdrawal of Agamben—
(Avemujica Episode 13: Hatsune Misumi and Doris, looked up at from the guitar)
the ethical stake of “not tipping.” In the 01 phase, inclusive exclusion was confirmed to be absent at the level of the image and was withdrawn to the auxiliary at the level of dialogue (Chapter 2). The withdrawal meant here is a withdrawal from audiovisual diagnosis, not the abolition of the auxiliary at the level of dialogue—inclusive exclusion is still retained as an auxiliary line at the level of dialogue. This withdrawal is not merely a matter of theoretical arrangement. Were Agamben set up at the social layer as a sovereign frame, Hatsune would be fixed as “a victim of inclusive exclusion by the sovereign (Sachiko)” and would tip toward extraction. The paper withheld this. The cut of the erect stance observed in Chapter 2 reinforces this withholding from the image. The one who occupies, for an instant, the position of sovereignty (note 3) is not Sachiko but Hatsune herself (the erect stance looked up at by the guitar). The frame of extraction—sacrifice by the sovereign = Sachiko—does not hold in the first place at the level of the image, for nowhere is there a Sachiko looking down. That said, neither can Hatsune’s momentary erect stance be fixed, on the side of operation, as “a willing subject occupying the position of sovereignty.” The erect stance is adjacent to the puppetification that immediately follows, and the summit of sovereignty and thingification overlap at one and the same point (Chapter 2). This erect stance, too, tips toward neither side. Not tipping—not fixing Hatsune as either victim or willing subject—is the paper’s ethical stake.
Note 3. The two levels of sovereignty. When the paper says “the position of sovereignty” or “sovereign erect stance” in the scene of the erect stance looked up at by the guitar, it means B = compositional sovereignty, that is, the relation of camera and placement in looking down / being looked up at. This is of a different register from C = Agamben’s sovereignty (the frame of inclusive exclusion / the state of exception). Where, in C, “he who decides on the state of exception” is touched upon, that definition is Schmitt’s, in Political Theology, cited as a quotation-within-a-quotation by Agamben (Homo Sacer, trans. Takakuwa Kazumi, p. 25), and is not Agamben’s own definition. Hence the paper does not, from the absence of B—that no Sachiko looking down is on screen—adjudicate the level of C (Agambenian sovereign sacrifice) on its own.
The resonance of (c) and (d). Mutsumi’s thesis 1 (mutual inviolability) and the stake of “not tipping” are two appearances of the same gesture. Both withhold recovering Hatsune into an existing type—Mutsumi-type dissolution, or the victim of sovereign exclusion. By withholding, they preserve Hatsune’s de-subjectivation as its own proper critical point of thingification. What the paper described is neither that Hatsune became a thing nor that Hatsune willed to the very end. The critical point at which those two overlap, undecidable, at one and the same point—de-subjectivation is another name for that critical point.
Reservation | The frame of a drama of maternal sovereignty. It should be added that Hatsune’s de-subjectivation is staged within the frame of a play-within-the-play whose price is oblivion—a site in which the sovereignty of Sachiko, whom the second paper diagnosed as a maternal dystopia, frames Hatsune’s thingification as its blessing. The paper treated this at the level of a de-gendered ontology, on the ground that at the puppetification point of 20:39 the marks of the maternal are visually absent (the iconographic isomorphism with the doll left by the mother is absent; there is no mark of sovereignty. Chapter 1; closing chapter (d)). But this is not a denial of the execution by maternal sovereignty; it is a deliberate delimitation of scope. Why the critical point is staged in a female body and in a drama of maternal sovereignty—this question the paper sends to a separate essay, as a cost it did not take up.
Framing toward the Social Layer
(From the final scenes of Episode 13 of Avemujica, ‘Musica of the Celestial Sphere’)
Following the internal framing (a–d), let the level of framing be opened one stage further, toward the social. The three observation chapters dissected Hatsune’s de-subjectivation ontologically and aesthetically. But to close this dissection as a close reading of a girls’-band anime would run counter to the reach of this trilogy. The paper receives Hatsune’s de-subjectivation as a fiction-mediated response to two difficulties people face in contemporary Japanese society—the difficulty of possessing a unified self, and the failure of weak autonomy (the hakoniwa). Yet this social framing does not solve the core undecidability. It receives the very dissected structure of suspension as a response to the difficulties, and does not tip toward either extraction or operation.
First, the difficulty of the unified self. Stiegler’s désindividuation, set up in Chapter 3 as the ontological adversary, is not an ontologically neutral term. It is a diagnosis of consumer capitalism—symbolic misery, the deprivation of the capacity for individuation by the culture industry. What Chapter 3 described—“an affect emaciated into a hollow sign that has lost its content, a citation of sorrow and not sorrow itself”—is at the same time a social diagnosis. What matters is that the suspension of Chapter 3 (restart or mechanical repetition) is received, at the social layer too, as suspension. Read as restart, Hatsune is the figure of an individual that cannot possess a unified self and goes on wavering metastably; read as mechanical repetition, the figure of a subject whose capacity for individuation has been hollowed out. Stiegler described this hollowing-out as the state of affairs in which the individual (individu) is decomposed into a divisible fragment (dividuel) (note 7). Either way, these are different appearances of the difficulty of possessing a unified self—the theme running through this trilogy. Onto this diagnosis of the deprivation of the capacity for individuation, the argument of Ōtsuka Eiji’s Shin Monogatari Shōhi Ron may be superimposed as a corroboration from the Japanese-language sphere—a perspective that takes consumption and the expression of feeling themselves as free labor = unpaid labor (pp. 101–102), a device that exploits action itself as labor (p. 107). That Ōtsuka places derivative works in the lineage of Jenkins’s theory of fan fiction (p. 10) also supports this perspective. Where this diagnosis is compressed into the name “platform exploitation,” that is the paper’s own compression, not Ōtsuka’s own term. The social layer receives, as its response to this difficulty, the whole suspended structure of de-subjectivation.
Note 7. On dividuel. Stiegler’s Symbolic Misery (p. 143) describes désindividuation as the state of affairs in which the individual (individu) becomes a “divisible dividuel”—a process in which the narcissistic capacity is first intensified and then hollowed out. Stiegler attributes this term dividuel to Deleuze (and Guattari). The paper draws it only as the name for the consumer-capitalist mechanism of désindividuation, and does not alter the three-way distinction of Chapter 3 (note 4)—dividuel is a detail internal to the Stiegler line, not a fourth term standing alongside de-individuation-B and désindividualisation. [Source unconfirmed: the first occurrence of dividuel is said to be Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control” (1990), but its difference from Stiegler’s attribution to Deleuze–Guattari requires verification against the originals.]
Second, the failure of weak autonomy (the hakoniwa). Uno’s The Story of the Garden places weak autonomy (p. 301) beyond a withdrawal from the game of mutual evaluation (p. 285) (note 6). The preceding second paper named the pole at which this weak autonomy fails and the self is sealed into a thing “the hakoniwa,” and with that vocabulary read Hatsune / Sachiko as an anatomy of a thin self that has retreated from the economy of recognition; its closing chapter had written: the hakoniwa becomes the last place where the self is gathered up and sealed into a thing. The Hatsune of the third paper is that same Hatsune, reaching the point of thingification at the floor of that hakoniwa. A thin self that has retreated from the economy of recognition, reaching neither the garden nor weak autonomy, sealed into a thing—Hatsune’s de-subjectivation exists as the continuation of the hakoniwa theory handed over by the second paper. This continuation can be traced not as a mere relabeling but as a single mechanism. From the game of mutual evaluation—the back-and-forth of recognition in which one ceaselessly exposes oneself to others’ evaluation, appraising and being appraised—Hatsune first withdraws. But the weak autonomy that The Story of the Garden placed beyond that withdrawal does not come to be, for Hatsune. For what the withdrawn Hatsune retreated to was not a garden open to a plurality of evaluators but a closed domain in which a single evaluator (Sachiko) alone sets the value—Sachiko’s hakoniwa. When departure from the game of mutual evaluation lands not in a garden but in a hakoniwa closed to a single evaluator, weak autonomy fails to be established. And the floor of that hakoniwa is thingification. Withdrawing from the economy of recognition, retreating into the closed domain of a single evaluator, and fixed into a thing at the floor of that domain—withdrawal, hakoniwa, thingification form a single mechanism linked in this order. Hatsune’s de-subjectivation is placed at the terminus of this mechanism. Here, too, undecidability is preserved. Whether she was sealed into a thing (extraction) or chose to seal herself (operation) is not settled at the social layer either. The failure of weak autonomy is precisely this undecidable thingification.
Note 6. The provenance of “hakoniwa.” Weak autonomy (p. 301) and the game of mutual evaluation (p. 285) are terms of Uno’s The Story of the Garden (Kōdansha, 2024). But “hakoniwa” is not found in that book and is not Uno’s term. The hakoniwa the paper speaks of is a term of this paper’s own series, set up by the preceding second paper as the pole at which weak autonomy fails, and taken over here.
As a contrast, let Girls Band Cry be placed at a single point. Its protagonist takes defeat upon herself and yet disavows it, choosing to fly on tattered wings. There is a reading that calls the technique of her subjectivation “the return to life = the little finger.” Hatsune has no such little finger. The road of return to life is blocked by Sachiko’s hakoniwa. To disavow defeat and set the subject up once more, versus to choose (to be made to choose) to vanish as the price of a relation. Subjectivation by the cry, versus de-subjectivation by silence. The cry of Girls Band Cry remains in the position of a contrast, as a road of subjectivation Hatsune did not take, and does not enter the central theoretical handle.
Finally, let the independence from the ideology of cheering be confirmed. To read Hatsune’s thingification as “she willed it even so”—to tip toward the side of operation, of the willing subject—is the last entrance by which the ideology of cheering steals into the theme of de-subjectivation. The social framing resists this temptation. Neither the difficulty of the unified self nor the failure of weak autonomy is a matter of rescuing Hatsune as “a subject who willed it even so.” It is a matter of receiving the undecidable critical point of thingification, as such, as a response to contemporary difficulties.
But the ideology of cheering steals in not only from the affirmation of will but also from its symmetrical opposite—the aestheticization of vanishing, the solemnization of passivity. Hence, on the side that reads thingification as “the pathos of being made to choose to vanish,” the same heavy burden of proof is imposed as on the affirmation of will. Merely to look sorrowful is not counted as a win for pathos. The visual material that positively supports pathos is the “trace of sorrow” accompanying the return of the light in the eyes, but that was already made ambivalent in Chapter 3—an affect that still remains, or the husk of a sign after affect has fallen away, undecidable. Hence pathos, too, is not decisively supported. The aestheticization of disappearance is placed, symmetrically with the affirmation of will, beneath undecidability-as-achievement. Thingification is not the paper’s terminus but a critical point at which discrimination does not close. And that the paper’s subtitle called “the critical point of weak autonomy” is nothing other than this same one point. The critical at which weak autonomy tips toward failure, and the critical point of thingification at which Hatsune is fixed into a thing, are one and the same point bearing different names. Yet let it be said—these two names are both the paper’s own descriptive frames, and their coincidence is not the coincidence of two phases independently observed on the side of the object, but the convergence of the paper’s two framings onto a single material point. What the two names name is the puppetification at 20:39—the one point at which the erect stance and thingification are adjacent and the light in the eyes turns. As two phases lose their distinction at the critical point of a phase transition, so here weak autonomy and thingification, extraction and operation, at this one point lose their distinction and overlap.
References
Secondary literature (page numbers refer to the passages mobilized in the text).
- Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” 1906 (German original / English trans. Sellars; no Japanese translation. Unsicherheit = S. 196–198).
- Freud, “The Uncanny,” 1919 (Japanese trans. Nakayama Gen, Kōbunsha Koten Shinyaku Bunko, 2011; repetition compulsion = p. 172).
- Agamben, Homo Sacer, Japanese trans. Takakuwa Kazumi, Ibunsha, 2003 (zoē / bios = p. 7; the paradox of sovereignty = p. 25; inclusive exclusion = p. 34).
- Stiegler, Symbolic Misery 1, Japanese trans. Mélenberger / Mélenberger Maki, Shinhyōron, 2006 (the structural decline of individuation = p. 36; diagnosis of consumer capitalism, dividuel-ization = p. 143).
- Simondon, L’individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (Japanese ed. Kotaika no tetsugaku), supervising trans. Fujii Chikayo, Hōsei University Press, 2018 (de-individualization, désindividualisation = p. 466; original p. 276).
- Uno Tsunehiro, The Story of the Garden (Niwa no hanashi), Kōdansha, 2024 (the game of mutual evaluation = p. 285; weak autonomy = p. 301).
- Ōtsuka Eiji, Shin Monogatari Shōhi Ron, Seikaisha Shinsho 191, 2021 (free labor / unpaid labor = pp. 101–102; the device of exploitation = p. 107; derivative works = p. 10).
・Work | Ave Mujica, episodes 13 and 9.
Contrast (not mobilized in the text) | Girls Band Cry, “the cry” (taking the author’s short essay at yamaryoweb.site, 2025-03-16, as its horizon). Likewise the essay on Shirowa Azusa.
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