The Resistance of Dolls: Motifs in Hanada Kiyoteru's “Mineral-ism” and his Vision of Revolution

Abstract

In his essay Don Juan Ron (“On Don Juan”) (1949), Hanada Kiyoteru asserts that modernity cannot be overcome without a paradigm shift from humanism to “mineral-ism.” As if to defy his contemporaries, then in the midst of a heated debate on subjectivity, the aim of which was to reestablish the subjectivity of the alienated postwar individual, Hanada emphasized the need to “perceive one's self as non-ego, an object, a physical entity,” (Waga Buttaishugi). Under the rubric of “mineral-ism” he presents a variety of motifs on this theme, such as the automaton, the moving statue, or the proletariat transformed into objects. In this paper, I use the image of human-into-object, which appears to belong to alienation theory, to fully explore Hanada's vision of revolution, which he constructed through non-ego subjects, such as dolls, and to reexamine the possibilities of his revolutionary vision.