Un influent critique littéraire et philosophe japonais, dont l'œuvre explore la relation complexe entre le langage, le corps et la culture. Sa pensée interroge souvent les mutations de la société moderne, analysant comment la technologie et les médias façonnent notre réalité collective. Par une analyse approfondie de la société contemporaine et de ses intersections numériques, il offre une perspective unique sur l'évolution de la cognition et de l'interaction humaines. Son approche critique des récits et des représentations en fait une voix significative dans la philosophie et la théorie littéraires actuelles.
Stay informed. Talk about the issues. Always be engaged. Liberal societies have encouraged their members to take part—or at least interest—in politics. Yet, even in developed nations where it is said to work, the democratic process as we know it routinely fails to give voice, on the one hand, and to appeal at all, on the other hand, to a good number of citizens. Whatever countervailing hopes the worldwide web gave rise to in its dawning years, far from restoring the “public sphere” of yore, the internet has completed its fragmentation. According to Japanese thinker Hiroki Azuma, the way forward must be sought through what network technology is actually good at: aggregating and processing the traces we leave (without always meaning to) every time we wade into the world of connectivity. Harking back to Rousseau and his idea of the general will, dropping by Freud and his discovery of the unconscious, taking inspiration from Google and the tenor of its innovations, revisiting Christopher Alexander and his highway planning, and making curious bedfellows of Twitter, Rorty, and Nozick, General Will 2.0 is a wild ride bound to delight not just citizens who “care” but those who find doing so to be increasingly difficult and false.
Tourism is a characteristically modern phenomenon, yet modern thinkers have tended to deride the tourist as a figure of homogenising globalism. This philosophical study considers the tourist anew, as a subject position that enables us to redraw the map of globalised culture in an era increasingly in revolt against the liberal intellectual world view and its call for the welcome of the 'Other'. Why has the tourist proved so resistant to philosophical treatment, asks Hiroki Azuma, author of Otaku: Japan's Database Animals and General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, and Google. Tracing the reasons for this exclusion through the work of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Kant and subsequently in Carl Schmitt, Alexandre Kojève, Hannah Arendt, and Hardt and Negri, Azuma contends that the figure of the tourist has been rendered illegible by becoming ensnared in a series of misleading conceptual dichotomies and a linear model of world history.In the widening gap between the infrastructure of globalisation and inherited ties of local belonging, Azuma's retheorisation of the tourist presents an alternative to the choice between doubling down on local identity and roots, or hoping for the spontaneous uprising of a multitude from within the great networked Empire. For the tourist is the subject capable of moving most freely between the strata of the global and the local. With explorations of the connection between tourism and fan fiction, contingency and 'misdelivery', the uncanniness of cyberspace, and dark tourism, Azuma's inventive and optimistic philosophical essay sheds unexpected new light on a mode of engagement with the world that is familiar to us all. Translated by John D. Person
