\u201cAfter Fukushima\u201d designates the epistemic time of arriving and leaving after the catastrophically unthinkable happened, and continues to happen, in Fukushima and in our world. Destruction situated itself as a series of arrivals, from the natural disasters of the Great East Japan Earthquake and its consequent tsunami on March 11, 2011, to the technological breakdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Yet the upheaval upon arrival was matched by the devastation of departures, of territory, and of life itself. This double movement of arriving and leaving constituted the enduring philosophical collapse of meaning amidst unresolvable numbness, absent bodies, and the monumental work of mourning after Fukushima. What remains? What is left after disaster\u2019s crisscrossing motions of arriving and leaving? The question of the remainder after disaster challenges narratives of crisis, of events like Fukushima that cannot be\u200a\u2014\u200aand remain an ethical imperative not to be\u200a\u2014\u200adigested, normalized, and forgotten. This essay traces images of animals as a remainder after Fukushima, as seen in Pierre Huyghe\u2019s film Untitled (Human Mask)<\/em> (2014) and Yasusuke \u014cta\u2019s photographic series The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima<\/em> (2011).2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Pierre Huyghe\u2019s film Untitled (Human Mask) <\/em>(2014) was on view in Pierre Huyghe<\/em>: Human Mask<\/em> from April 27 to August 9, 2015 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Yasusuke O\u00afta\u2019s photographic series The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima<\/em> (2011) was on view as part of In the Wake: Japanese photographers Respond to 3\/11<\/em> from April 5 to July 12, 2015 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.<\/span> The animal emerges after Fukushima to unwrite the possibility of moving beyond it, traversing the penumbra between nature and culture as the limit case of sovereignty\u2019s suspension.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unwritten<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Rhetorical tension converges around the possibility of writing, following the animal, after Fukushima\u200a\u2014\u200aa two-fold undertaking to unframe the enmeshed precarity of animal and nuclear. Jacques Derrida\u2019s L\u2019Animal que donc je suis <\/em>underscores the homonymic economy of the animal that \u201cje suis<\/em>\u201d as both \u201cI am\u201d and \u201cI follow.\u201d\u20093<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Jacques Derrida, \u201cThe Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),\u201d trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry <\/em>28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 369\u200a\u2014\u200a418. See especially 371\u200a\u2014\u200a72.<\/span> To write the animal decentres the human and undermines language by doubly positioning the animal as both the mirror of the human and that which the human always follows, evolutionarily and philosophically. Attunement to a similar sense of descriptive fracture has been tasked to the nuclear critic. Drawing on Maurice Blanchot\u2019s notion that \u201cthe disaster de-scribes,\u201d Akira Lippit maintains, \u201cIf a history of the atomic bombing is to be written, it must first be unwritten.\u201d\u20094<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster<\/em>, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 7; Akira Mizuta Lippit, \u201cAntigraphy: Notes on Atomic Writing and Postwar Japanese Cinema,\u201d Review of Japanese Culture and Society<\/em> 10 (1998): 63.<\/span> Although Lippit\u2019s context is different\u200a\u2014\u200athe bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki\u200a\u2014\u200athe statement resounds urgently after Fukushima\u2019s traumatic continuation of nuclear disaster\u2019s \u201cthanatographic legacy.\u201d\u20095<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - On Hiroshima and Fukushima, see Nancy, After Fukushima<\/em>, especially 9\u200a\u2014\u200a14. For \u201cthanatographic legacy,\u201d see Akira Mizuta Lippit, \u201cPhenomenologies of the Surface: Radiation\u200a\u2014\u200aBody\u200a\u2014\u200aImage,\u201d Qui Parle<\/em> 9, no. 2 (Spring\/Summer 1996): 36.<\/span> Writing the nuclear event poses a challenge to language by its necessary heeding to the atomic domination of nature and technology. Or, in Avital Ronell\u2019s analogous characterization, which now mirrors the haunting footage of the March 11 earthquake, \u201cThis breaking of the ground is precisely what nuclear criticism must listen to.\u201d\u20096<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Avital Ronell, \u201cStarting From Scratch: Mastermix,\u201d in Finitude\u2019s Score: Essays for the End of the Millennium<\/em> (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 218.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n It is within the dissociated space between word and world that the animal remains for the human to follow after Fukushima in Huyghe\u2019s Untitled (Human Mask)<\/em> and \u014cta\u2019s The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima<\/em>. Fukushima\u2019s animal, like the nuclear power of its catastrophe, constitutes a spectral magnetism of attraction and repellence, arriving and leaving. Theorizing a hermeneutic of the \u201cmagnetic animal,\u201d Lippit states, \u201cThe animal is magnetic because it draws the world-building subject towards an impossible convergence with the limits of world\u2026 effecting an economy of the figure that is metamorphic rather than metaphoric.\u201d\u20097<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Akira Mizuta Lippit, \u201cMagnetic Animal: Derrida, Wildlife, Animetaphor,\u201d MLN <\/em>113, no. 5 (1998): 1118.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n The magnetic animal metamorphoses the figurative into the figured\u200a\u2014\u200afrom the poverty of language to the potentiality of its image. Through the magnetic apparatuses of cinema and photography, respectively, Huyghe\u2019s and \u014cta\u2019s animals resist both metaphoric reduction and the nuclear fission of signifier from the real. Rather, they arrive\u200a\u2014\u200afigured as metamorphic images amidst the ongoing irresolution of life after Fukushima.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Masks<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n A fast and bumpy ride through Fukushima\u2019s recognizable landscape of quasi-apocalypse opens Untitled (Human Mask)<\/em>. The pace of the short film is then slowed as it tracks an animal that presumably survived the catastrophe and remains in an abandoned interior. In Huyghe\u2019s film, Fukushima\u2019s animal is not any animal\u200a\u2014\u200ait is a macaque monkey that is dressed in girls\u2019 clothing and wears a long black wig and a Noh theatre-gone-cyborg white mask. Beyond the creature\u2019s humanoid likeness, its masked miming of quotidian human gestures in a confused state of non-sovereign anthropomorphism comprises the majority of the film\u2019s content. The animal\u2019s fictional figuration in the contextual reality of Fukushima after disaster reflects Huyghe\u2019s filmic aesthetic, \u201cto \u2018re-scenarize\u2019 the real.\u201d\u20098<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - George Baker and Pierre Huyghe, \u201cAn Interview with Pierre Huyghe,\u201d October<\/em> 110 (Fall, 2004): 105.<\/span> This hybridization of a fictional plot and protagonist into documentary reality, like the hybridity figured by the animal performing the human, necessarily serves as an unwriting of Fukushima from the ontological nullification of catastrophe\u2019s allegorical afterword. Instead, Huyghe\u2019s animal assumes a complementary image of what Giorgio Agamben theorized as the \u201canthropological machine\u201d: \u201cMan, looking at himself, sees his own image always deformed into the features of an ape.\u201d\u20099<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal<\/em>, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 26\u200a\u2014\u200a27.<\/span> Huyghe\u2019s film presents the other side of the same coin, in which animal misrecognition mediates the semblance of human life. Either way, this constitution of the human through the animal as figured in Huyghe\u2019s re-scenarized post-Fukushima thus functions to image the waning of worlds in which the sovereignty of meaning was once bound to the living.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Abandonment<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Two weeks after the natural and technological disasters of March 2011, Japanese photographer Yasusuke \u014cta entered the restricted zone around Fukushima Daiichi to look after the animals that had been left behind when the region was forcibly evacuated. What emerged was The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima<\/em>, \u014cta\u2019s photographic series that traces agricultural and companionate animals wandering in Fukushima\u2019s urban ruins\u200a\u2014\u200aanimals and landscapes in parallel states of slow death. As \u014cta writes, \u201cThis tragedy was for some reason not reported by the Japanese media at first\u2026. I felt I needed to inform the world and leave evidence of what really happened.\u201d\u200910<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Yasusuke O\u00afta, \u201cThe Abandoned Animals of Fukushima,\u201d Public Delivery<\/em>, Seoul, South Korea. http:\/\/publicdelivery.org\/yasusuke-ota-the-abandoned-animals-of-fukushima\/.<\/span> Despite \u014cta\u2019s investment in the precarious documentation of information, his photographs, like Huyghe\u2019s film, additionally serve to \u201cre-scenarize the real\u201d for evidentiary ends. The tragedy of the animal is matched in the narrative thrust of \u014cta\u2019s photographic conventions, or, as Judith Butler elsewhere advances, \u201cThe photograph itself becomes a structuring scene of interpretation.\u201d\u200911<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? <\/em>(New York: Verso, 2009), 67.<\/span> Panoramic landscapes with centralized animals\u200a\u2014\u200aa fl\u00e2neur<\/em>-like ostrich prancing down Fukushima\u2019s empty main street or cows hopelessly roaming the parking lot of deserted outlet stores\u200a\u2014\u200aaim for the viewer\u2019s cathartic irruption of empathy by witnessing the animal\u2019s desolation within the photograph\u2019s \u201cspace of political relations.\u201d\u200912<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - On photography\u2019s \u201cspace of political relations,\u201d see Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography<\/em> (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 16.<\/span> Yet, I want to suggest that rather than codifying suffering, culminating Fukushima\u2019s tragic arc, or galvanizing a praxis of animal ethics, \u014cta\u2019s photographic animals unassumingly figure the remainder of life after disaster as a perpetual state of non-belonging.13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - On photography and non-belonging, see Ulrich Baer, \u201cSeeing the Future in an Image of the Past: Hannah Arendt, Garry Winogrand, and Photographing the World,\u201d The Yearbook of Comparative Literature<\/em> 55 (2009): 244.<\/span> The animal\u2019s return to urban spaces of capitalist leisure after Fukushima, with nowhere to go, thus leaves exposed the abandonment of the animal, the departure of human life, and the voiding of political community in the unending re-scenarization of \u201cwhat really happened.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Undead<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Martin Heidegger notoriously asserted, \u201cOnly man dies. The animal perishes.\u201d\u200914<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - Martin Heidegger, \u201cThe Thing,\u201d in Poetry, Language, Thought<\/em>, trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), 176.<\/span> The animal\u2019s absence of human language, according to Heidegger, delimits its claims to an essence of Being, and thus it is not \u201ccapable of death as death.\u201d\u200915<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 15 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> Less acknowledged are Heidegger\u2019s observations of the nuclear that frame his later claims on animal death in the same essay: \u201cMan stares at what the explosion of the atom bomb could bring with it. He does not see that the atom bomb and its explosion are the mere final emission of what has long since taken place, has already happened\u2026. What is this helpless anxiety still waiting for, if the terrible has already happened?\u201d\u200916<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 16 <\/a> - Ibid, 164.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Heidegger structures arrival and departure\u200a\u2014\u200a\u201ccould bring\u201d and \u201calready happened\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aas \u201cthis helpless anxiety still waiting\u201d for both nuclear annihilation and the animal\u2019s not-death. Anxiety here marks the threatening possibility of the return of past terror in the present waning of the future. Reading the catastrophic persistence of anxiety through the animal of Fukushima, Huyghe\u2019s and \u014cta\u2019s filmic figurations stake a different critical currency to the animal\u2019s supposed incapability of death as death. Perishing as survival in the re-scenarized real, the image of what remains, Fukushima\u2019s animal unwrites the negation of words in catastrophe\u2019s wounds. Five years afterward in 2016, Fukushima\u2019s animal, like us, remains undead with nowhere to go, beyond remaining exposed for one another\u2019s arrival and departure.<\/p>\n![\"87_DO05_Kong_Huyghe-Human-Mask-2\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/87_DO05_Kong_Huyghe-Human-Mask-2.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"87_DO05_Kong_Huyghe-Human-Mask-6\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/87_DO05_Kong_Huyghe-Human-Mask-6.jpg\")
Untitled (Human Mask)<\/em>, video stills, 2014.
\u00a9 Pierre Huyghe \/ SODRAC (2016)
Photos : courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth, London; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Anna Lena Films, Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"87_DO05_Kong_Huyghe-Human-Mask-4\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/87_DO05_Kong_Huyghe-Human-Mask-4.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"87_DO05_Kong_Huyghe-Human-Mask-3\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/87_DO05_Kong_Huyghe-Human-Mask-3-scaled.jpg\")
Untitled (Human Mask)<\/em><\/em>, video stills, 2014.
<\/em>\u00a9 Pierre Huyghe \/ SODRAC (2016)
Photos : courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth, London; Esther Schipper, Berlin; Anna Lena Films, Paris<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"87_DP05_Kong_Ota_Deserted-Town\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/87_DP05_Kong_Ota_Deserted-Town-scaled.jpg\")
Deserted Town, <\/em>from the series The Abandoned Animals of Fukushima<\/em>, 2011.
Photo : \u00a9 Yasusuke \u014cta, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n