Aspects of the Urban Life in Tokyo!

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Cross-Cultural Studies 2021 KCI Impact Factor : 0.6

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pISSN : 1598-0685 / eISSN : 2671-9088

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Aspects of the Urban Life in Tokyo!

¹한국외국어대학교

ABSTRACT
열림/닫힘 버튼

Tokyo! is a 2008 French / Japanese / South Korean / German anthology film containing "Interior Design" by Michel Gondry, "Merde" by Leos Carax, and "Shaking Tokyo" by Joon-ho Bong, all of which were filmed in Tokyo. This cinematic triptych of three Tokyo-set stories is concerned with how the experience of self-alienation is related to urban life, that is, how to survive in a city as a self. The problem of life is the struggle for self-preservation. In Tokyo! the three film directors have shown that urban life is both self-deconstructing and self-preserving. In this paper, our purpose is to examine different modes of urban life by using two concepts reformulated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida: the urban ipseity and auto-immunity. According to Derrida, ipseity is a system subjected to a circular structure. Such a system cannot avoid the general logic of auto-immunity; i.e., the structure of ipseity functions as both self-deconstructing and self-preserving. The three episodes contained in Tokyo! testify, each in its own way, to the function of that logic. In bringing to light the three modes of self: appropriation, dis-appropriation, and in-appropriation, we claim that the modality of urban life is confronted with the autoimmune reaction.
KEYWORDS
열림/닫힘 버튼

Tokyo!, urban ipseity, auto-immunity, appropriation, dis-appropriation, in-appropriation

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