In the article about Misima, «purifying dirt”—a death ascribed the ability to cleanse corruption. I agree with this completely: as we know, Christ rose from the dead, death conquered death. But fastidiousness does not justify the annihilation of the living, and failing to meet the ideal of purity does not make a person a mistake that must be corrected by erasure from the ontological plane. But the reverse is also true: by acknowledging his right to be, I do not assert that he is pure.
The genesis of this polemic was Kebbrot Gattava’s article, «Yukio Mishima: The Darkness of Shintoism. The Emperor’s Void and the Aestheticization of Death, ” specifically its central paradox: death, which is traditionally associated with impurity in Shintoism, is purified in the author’s reading of Mishima—meaning dirt becomes a hygienic agent. This logic culminates in Mishima’s voluntary death: the ideal is achieved at the cost of the life of one who strives for it.
To beat them over the heads with a ceremonial Bible featuring golden letterpress.
In Gattawa’s recommended text, he compares Mishima’s writings and actions to mythological plots, and on that basis, he names the deities the author purportedly served. To define their nature, he employs a decidedly theological title—the «Absolute Transcendent Evil.» Well, this article brings me back to that debate on the nature of evil that I had with Gattawa several months ago.
To explain exactly where I disagree, I must briefly step away from Japanese literature. Gattawa defines himself as a profoundly rigorous person of the Scripture—in his correspondence with me, he insists that a person who has broken the Law does not deserve forgiveness, even after repenting. In his understanding, the Law is certainly just, but I will object.
To execute, or not to execute.
The Credo of Kebbrot Gattava is as follows: human beings are sinful and therefore do not deserve leniency even after repentance, and the annihilation of a person is considered the just conclusion of human history.² It is precisely this moral argumentation that requires examination.
The first difficulty arises with the word «evil.» Gattava justifies ruthlessness by appealing to justice, attributing a moral superiority to his ideal: he is too just to indulge human depravity. Evil is preferred precisely because it is held by the good. If «absoluteness» signifies the absence of all good within a given force, these assessments are incompatible.
However, one could define evil as a force that is antagonistic to humanity while simultaneously acknowledging its rightness before an inhuman judgment—this is not a formal logical contradiction. But in that case, one must explain what exactly has been declared absolute: the hostility toward humanity or the inherent moral corruption of the force itself. These characteristics can coexist, but one does not prove the other, and the moral evaluation must be substantiated separately. One meaning cannot subtly substitute for another—everything can be substituted for «absolute evil,» certainly, but the distinction between them does not disappear because of it.
Another problem is the implication from sinfulness to annihilation. To move from the former to the latter, an additional premise is required: the sinful being must cease to exist. The refusal to consider repentance requires another assertion—no subsequent change in a person negates this requirement. One can subscribe to both propositions, but neither sinfulness nor the acknowledgment of a transcendent order justifies them in themselves.
The move away from an anthropocentric perspective in moral evaluations does not necessitate the annihilation of humanity. The world can exist independently of our conceptions and is not obligated to serve our interests, while still accommodating human life. However, in Gattava’s narrative, the cosmic conflict unfolds around the question of whether humanity deserves continued existence. Renouncing humanity as the ultimate measure of all things is entirely compatible with this picture, but by wishing to bid farewell to human exceptionalism, we fall into it again—this time into the very structure of the plot. The human privilege to live is replaced by a sentence of disappearance, yet humanity still retains the leading role in this cosmic drama.
Yes, one can cover up the evasion of responsibility with the grace promised on the Cross. This is particularly evident when forgiveness is offered to the victim for the convenience of the one who caused harm. However, repentance does not negate the responsibility for the harm caused, nor does it obligate the victim to forgive. Sin is real—acknowledging its reality establishes the starting point for repentance, and in that movement, the person changes while continuing to be accountable for what they have done. I operate from the premise that the capacity of the guilty party to change and take responsibility for the harm inflicted carries moral weight and must be considered when deciding on their future existence. When past guilt is declared a sufficient reason to destroy a person regardless of their repentance, the starting point of repentance becomes diffused across the entire moral landscape—everything thereafter is pre-judged as irrelevant to the sentence—and that is bad news.Acknowledging objective good does not yet provide a person with infallible knowledge of what that good demands in every encounter with another. In The Republic, Plato notes that the differences between people and the variability of their actions prevent a general rule from predetermining the best solution for every case.3 Even fidelity to an unchanging ideal requires a living judgment about a specific case, and the constancy of the ideal itself does not prohibit revising that judgment. Citing scripture does not exempt one from this work either: one still has to explain why a specific interpretation of the Law devalues repentance.I call it a mortal judgment when it preemptively denies a person the ability to influence their own fate and asserts the right to seize and execute the living. I am interested in the grounds upon which one living entity is taken to definitively determine another living entity when both are in a state of becoming.
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In the thirteenth chapter of «Nigredo, ” “The Grid, Prison, ” I examine the extreme case of order that governs becoming. Its visible image is the labyrinth from „Inferno II.“ Revolving above it is Leviathan—a dark polyhedron whose geometry demarcates the territory of hell, assigning each inhabitant their place and role; this structure is fueled by a vaguely defined desire (Deleuze and Guattari also show that desire can produce the unfreedom of the desiring subject), and suffering confirms that the inhabitants are still capable of feeling.This hell is highly functional: one can move through it, experiencing new and novel torments, and even change specialization to take on a different role—though the law governing role allocation remains in effect. Frank’s desire is perpetually aroused and remains unfulfilled: the object is promised, but the encounter with it is always postponed. Many events occur, yet the same thing is reproduced without change—eternity is spent (and this resource is inexhaustible) on ensuring nothing substantial happens.Hell is an eternal embedding in stasis, but this does not imply physical immobility: one can act frenetically while all activity permitted by this order serves a once-adopted form.
In the debate over repentance and forgiveness, I see the same mechanism: we have a human capable of beginning to reform, but a priori, the death sentence declares this step insignificant. While repentance is provided for in the protocol, revisiting the verdict based on its results is not.
However, the film «Hellraiser II» is rather optimistic and posits a limit to this power (Pinhead’s rediscovered memory of his human past disrupts the entity’s conformity to its assigned function). I take from the film precisely the tension between the system and its inhabitants: the power of the scheme is great, but the material is not exhausted by it.
As a «designer, ” this problem is well-known and understood by me. First, we build a modular grid to work with text and image, but we encounter difficulties when we start mistaking the sleekness of the solution for the right to manage any material within the system (a photograph is cropped to the module’s dimensions; an inconveniently sprawling paragraph is shortened along with the thought contained within it). The easiest way to treat every new difficulty is to blame the content, and the possibility of revising the layout rapidly vanishes. A well-formed system is given too much authority.
It is understood that a human being is not equivalent to a text block, nor is an editor’s work equivalent to the unpleasant task of the Court of Judgment. I dispute the human who interprets the Law regarding what this court ought to be. Even a flawlessly executed verdict does not grant the authority to declare the future of the living as insignificant.
It came for free—do not give it to anyone.
Another depiction from the same chapter: the guardian helps the beings under his care develop, but soon begins to view their lives as his own property. He knows how much effort he has invested in his wards, remembers their mistakes, and is genuinely capable of protecting them from certain dangers. They seem to him to be an unnecessary squandering of resources—after all, he invested so much in them—and therefore he does not allow them freedom until they reach a complete state of readiness, which the same guardian will assess.But this readiness will never come if the guardian demands complete predictability from independent living and counts any unexpected behavior as a new reason for guardianship. Care transforms into control of conformity to the guardian’s design, and even gratitude is interpreted as an obligation to remain within his reach—for supervision and punishment.Such a jailer belongs to his own prison. His capabilities are broader than those of the inmate, yet the commitment he has undertaken not to permit separation from others ties his own life to surveillance. Maintaining this immobility requires continuous, arduous work, and he can force the entire world to pedal the dynamo that maintains the electrical charge in the bars of his cell.
I understand that sustaining life in captivity and requiring its destruction are different choices, but in both scenarios described, the predetermined order grants the right to define the permissible future of the regulated entity. In one case, a person is allowed to live under conditions of absolute submission; in the other, existence is denied due to failure to meet an ideal, and any disobedience is preemptively counted as an argument against the living.
This is crucial when discussing evil. The Keeper gains access to another person’s life through care, and then uses that person’s vulnerability for coercion. This is achievable with real gifts that have been managed in a specific way—they have decided to hold onto them. These gifts do not contain evil as an ingredient, some sort of «dark matter»; the evil lies in how the gift is appropriated and how the right to care becomes the right to never let go.
Evil lacks subjectivity; the malefactor possesses it. The formula «evil exists as a corruption of good, ” which I defend in Nigredo, does not negate the agent nor does it render suffering an illusion: Dionysius Areopagite distinguishes between the positive nature of the actor’s existence and the evil they commit. The capacity to live and to think remains a good in the ontological sense, even if it does not guarantee moral innocence.5 A subject expends resources granted to it when caring for another, and it can utilize the same energy to inflict carefully calculated harm on another. The non-existence of a degrading substance does not make the humiliation any less real.Therefore, recognizing evil will is still far from grasping Absolute Evil as an independent principle. Naming someone the source of suffering means pointing to the agent, but this does not make them an independent source of being—now „evil.“ The described mechanism can be explained through the corruption of good, but this does not lead to dualism, nor does the ancient schema of cosmic opposition between the conditional Ormazd and Ahriman substantiate it.My position, of course, is vulnerable: if the ability to act is granted by God, why does He permit its use to cause pain? Distinguishing the source of being from the direction of will allows us to speak of the creature’s responsibility, but it does not eliminate questions about the Creator. It would be dishonest to present Gattave with a metaphysics of a God who has supposedly settled all accounts with the afflicted. I do not attempt to construct a theodicy and leave this gap open in Nigredo (through it leaks Caputo’s „theology of the weak God“: God does not exist; God insists; I hear in this the voice of a God who insists with all his might but cannot compel).
What Doesn’t Fit in a Box
We can now return to the article about Mishima. I am convinced by the reading of the aestheticization of death through the paradox of purifying defilement; however, a distance remains between this interpretation and the assertion that the writer himself unconsciously served certain gods of Evil—a distance that cannot be bridged merely by the similarity of images. Gattawa first writes that Mishima’s actions are «akin to a ritual of worship, ” and then asserts: „Kami Mishima were Magatsuhi-no Kami and Amatsumikaboshi.“ The very status of the assertion shifts between „akin to“ and „were.“ A researcher is entitled to compare a literary gesture with a mythological narrative—such a comparison provides a mode of reading whose productivity can be discussed. But assigning the writer to a specific mythological power requires separate substantiation. The word „unconsciously, ” in itself, does not shield such an interpretation from scrutiny: a person is capable of overlooking contradictions within their own worldview, and a researcher is entitled to expose them through the texts. The question is what exactly we are establishing: a way to describe Mishima’s views, or his actual service to the named gods.
The phrase «Absolute Transcendent Evil» requires a similar degree of caution. The myths presented by Gattava describe the origin of malevolent kami from miasma and ascribe harmfulness to them, but they do not yet explain what makes their evil absolute or to what extent it is transcendent. The origin of the kami itself does not rule out their inherent evil nature, provided that absolutism refers precisely to this quality. Stepping beyond human experience also does not necessitate independence from any source of being. However, to assert the existence of a self-sufficient evil origin, this independence must be substantiated. Which of these propositions does Gattava intend to derive from his myths?In this work, I differentiate between a structure that changes under the influence of the material filling it, and a structure that demands the material confirm its immutability. This distinction applies to reading as well: what specific features of Mishima’s texts might lead us to prefer one interpretation over another? The writer’s own words are not obligated to resolve the dispute, but they should not be arbitrarily stripped of weight beforehand. If coincidences are counted in favor of an interpretation, and any discrepancies are explained away as unconscious oversights, the interpretation gains a convenient defense against criticism—any reading outcome can be declared confirmation. But such invulnerability makes it impossible to distinguish a successful reading from a flawed one.
Yes, my own work with darkness requires the same scrutiny. The unknowability of God and the inaccessibility of things to our knowledge are not synonymous with the evil inflicted by the living. This is visible in the thirteenth chapter when comparing the two black suns. The image of the wasteful excess in Batayev’s rendering—excess that goes beyond intended use—cannot be equated with the black celestial body above the hellish labyrinth that subordinates all movement to prescribed paths. The Batayevian sun is capable of burning even without demanding anything in return. They are related by their blackness, but that says nothing about the fate of the creature bathing in their black rays. Will it be allowed to leave—or will it be held accountable for every opportunity it received?I know that not every order is good, and not every chaos is good. Form is necessary for action; boundless choice can paralyze the will, and in the absence of barriers, it is impossible to jump over them. Restrictions can indicate a direction of movement, and the unrestrained nature of another can be truly dangerous. In Nigredo, I call a structure the workshop that a person chooses for their work—one they are still capable of changing. Its difference from a prison is that its inhabitants can participate in reviewing the rules and leave it freely. The ability to rearrange furniture in a cell is too little for that.
Gattava is relentless in its unquenchable demand for righteousness. But I continue to object to the notion that this mandates a final judgment on the living. When even repentance and correction fail to alter the Terrible verdict, the Universe can continue to function perfectly—any change in the living is predetermined to be insignificant to its outcome. Mercy, however, leaves the future open, a future that the perfect design closes within its walls.
In the article about Mishima, «purifying dirt”—a death ascribed the ability to cleanse sin. I agree with this absolutely: as is known, Christ rose from the dead, conquered death, and gave life to those in the tombs. But fastidiousness does not justify the annihilation of the living, and failing to meet the ideal of purity does not render a person an error that must be corrected by erasing them from the ontological plane. But conversely: while acknowledging their right to exist, I do not claim that they are pure.
