I
Life is not defined by success, but by failure. And my life has been a series of failures. Experiments that remain unresolved. One of these experiments was the attempt to analyse 100 Films of Asian Men. I thought, naively, that if I analysed enough, I might start to recognise something of myself, moving from what Tommy J. Curry might call the Zone of Non-Being to the Zone of Being.1
But what is an Asian man? The films didn’t teach me belonging. They showed me the opposite: a collection of gestures, glances, deaths, silences. I came to see that what I related to wasn’t identity, but its failure. As Viet Thanh Nguyen reminded me: Belonging is overrated.
Of the hundred, I thought back to one film yesterday, Hiroshima mon amour.2 When I first saw it, I didn’t grasp the weight of it. I couldn't. Not the war. Not the genocide. Not the occupation or the holocaust. I saw only fragments: a European woman and an Asian man on a tatami. Memories of destruction. Sentences repeating old wounds.
“You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”
In Hiroshima mon amour, she is French. He is Japanese. They try to bridge a gulf through touch, through confession, through the fantasy of mutual wounding. They walk through enactments, on the streets, in their words. The wound is not shared. The gaze is not neutral. And memory is not symmetric.
I write from the inverse of their staging. I have not come to possess the trauma of others, nor to have my legibility within Western memory. I am not the bombed nor the bomber, not the lover nor the innocent. I write from the position of the unremembered. The subject who appears as a metaphor but is denied subjectivity. The one whose pain is used to clarify someone else’s redemption arc.
But who's?
This is the terrain of sadomasochism. The structural terrain of history, racialisation, of disavowal. Of the intimacy after empire. Here is the psychic economy of guilt, projection, and capture. About what it means to be used. And what it means to refuse.
What remains after the bomb is not clarity. It is the residue—the moist, uneasy residue of survival.
II
Modern love does not emerge from mutual recognition. It emerges from asymmetry. From the inability to remember together. One party forgets to survive. The other remembers in order to breathe.
What we call attachment is often reenactment. What we call chemistry is often capture. Wear a mask long enough, the face becomes the mask.
Lauren Berlant called this cruel optimism.3 The condition in which what you cling to in order to live is what keeps you from living. The fantasy that love will repair what history destroyed. The belief that intimacy will save you from the social. That desire, once properly aligned, will deliver you from structural grief.
But cruel optimism is not just about individuals and their poor choices. It is about the affective infrastructures that form under conditions of prolonged crisis. Neoliberalism doesn’t just privatise the economy. It privatises grief. It tells you to locate the problem inside your attachments, not in the systems that produce them.
So we stay. We try harder. We spiritualise the abuse. We innocentize one another. Sanitize. Defang. Domesticate. Depoliticize. Violence becomes sensuality. We think masochism is intimacy because we’ve been trained to eroticise our own negation.
What Berlant helps us see is that intimacy itself is broken. Not because we are broken people, but because intimacy has become a holding pattern for desires that have nowhere else to go. The dream of reciprocity, of recognition, of being seen and held, these are not wrong. But they are leveraged. And what is the fantasy that we have inherited from our masters?
The lovers in Hiroshima mon amour don’t just fail to understand each other. They perform the very optimism that sustains the system. She wants to be forgiven through him. He wants to be humanised through her. But neither can give the other what the structure has made impossible.
So they circle.
Sounds like another terribly boring French film, Junshin exclaimed, rolling his eyes. I hate this kind of film.
I laugh. He's right.
Cruel optimism is not the absence of hope. It is hope distorted by the conditions of its impossibility. You want something. You reach for it. But what you’re reaching through history, race, affect, reshapes what’s possible before you even touch it.
So we re-enact. We confuse collapse for closeness. We speak of healing when what we mean is surviving one more day in the ruins.
And still we hope. Because the alternative, letting go, feels like death. But death already came and left.
Or perhaps the real death is in the repetition. Refusal is not the loss of love, but its first condition.
III
Saidiya Hartman names it plainly in Scenes of Subjection.4 The fractal recursivity. Intimacy, care, therapy, sensuality. All become theatres in which domination is re-enacted under the fantasy of repair. The enslaved are not only in chains. She is also in bed, in treatment, and in apology. Her body is present, but only as a function. To absorb, to witness, to be used.
This is not about Blackness as a demographic. It is Blackness as a position. A signifier. Zone of Non-Being. An epistemic formation through which intimacy is structured, often violently. The Zone of Non-Being is not with; they are situated as for. For reflection. For redemption. For meaning. Care has now become extractive.
I write this not to collapse the distinction between Black and non-Black experience. The distinctions must be named. Not to flatten difference, but to locate its structure. To address it rather than dissolve into it. I am not Black. But I have been used. In the grammar of whiteness, the Asian man is another type of function. Not property, but proxy. The eunuch in the palace. The spiritual translator. The soft intermediary. The ghost who doesn’t interrupt. A cul-de-sac.
He nods. He listens. He waits.
In Hiroshima mon amour, the scene plays out quietly. She speaks of the past: the boy in Nevers, the humiliation, the shaving of her head, the collapse. He listens. Unmoved. Not unkind, but distant. As analyst. As dom. As an empty signifier. She narrates her trauma as a gift, a performance, an offering. He does not respond. He doesn’t inoculate. There is no reciprocity. He is there to absorb, not to remember.
Herein lies the structural non-neutrality. She performs loss. He withholds his. Not because he lacks it, but because the racial script permits her confession and expects his silence. She is French. He is Japanese. But within the frame of European postwar cinema, he becomes the stoic. The inscrutable. She is pain. He is surface.
This is how the grammar of use operates.
To be Black in the American racial schema is to be foundational, disposable, and enduring all at once. To be white is to disavow one’s position while insisting on one’s primacy. And to be Asian is often to be the conduit. The one who translates pain across the divide, who explains suffering to power in a register that soothes it. Not too angry. Not too sharp. Useful. But for whom?
The danger here is overidentification. To see your own usage and assume equivalence. But naming structure is not claiming sameness. It is the precondition for any analysis at all.
Use must be named. So must the fantasy that drives it.
Who is allowed memory? Who is called on to carry it?
Who narrates, and who listens without speaking?
Who is touched, and who becomes the surface for someone else’s contact?
These are not psychological questions. They are historical positions, repeated daily in scenes that misidentify themselves as love, as sensuality, as therapy, as solidarity, as healing.
Until we refuse the fantasy of being used well, we remain within the terms of capture.
IV
Avgi Saketopoulou asks something the polite world cannot:
What if trauma isn’t just endured, but used? Not healed, but staged. Repeated. Pulsating. There, at the edges of language. Where it leaks.5
BDSM (both Bondage, Domination, Submission and Masochism, and Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement) becomes the beginning of speech, over and over and over. To become intimate with the Real.
The scene returns because there remains life. There remains the naive fantasy of a Final Solution, that never was. Only a setting. The moment when consent becomes a moan, or silence, or a break. Moist.
Most scenes today have become cheap copies. Costumes decay. Though on occasions, you become submerged once again. The stage disappears. You're being used. Or using. It is no longer an allegory.
Saketopoulou’s fixation with Slave Play6 brought this into focus. A white woman kneels. A Black man hesitates. The plantation is back, now as a theatre. Aestheticised. Lit. Tickets sold and bought. In the repetition, the rupture occurs, night after night. Sometimes over matinee. Not just of character, but of desire. What does he feel? Want? Refuse? His disgust is part of the scene. So is his arousal. There's nothing that can purify this. It only makes it thick.
The audience gasps. Some leave. Others masturbate later, alone. There’s no catharsis. No redemption. No closure. Just exposure, for all to see.
There's no healing from this. It’s residue. Wet. Rancid. Sacred. A memory you didn’t agree to keep.
And you stay. You stay, not because you’re strong, but because you can’t leave. Because you can't leave yourself. You can't pretend that you didn't feel the heat.
Winnicott said an object must be destroyed to be used.7 And if it survives, relation is born. But survival is too clean a word. What if the object doesn’t survive, not entirely? What if something else survives in its place? A mark. A rhythm. A hunger you now have to carry.
In Hiroshima mon amour, she says, “I had a German.”
He replies, “You had Hiroshima.”
They don’t meet. They perform grief. But for whom?
Words, words, words. Trades like currencies.
They touch, but don’t rupture. They fuck, but don’t fall.
Saketopoulou calls it traumatophilia—the drive to return. Returning to feel. Again. Differently. Or just again. Because the body remembers what speech cannot. Because sometimes it is not the repair we want, but pressure. There might not be recognition. And you might not reemerge. But you register something. In your breath. In your throat. In your stomach. Between your thighs. In the tempo of the retreat.
You’re not free. But you’re warm. You’re not whole. But you’re leaking.
No more understanding.
Just heat.
V
Moist against the dry. Against the clean scalpel of rational mastery. Against objectivity. Against the bureaucratic precision of the imperial superego. Moist is what seeps through: sweat, tears, come, grief. Moist is memory when it refuses to petrify into a monument or a pathology. Moist is what survives the fire.
To be used is not inherently to be degraded. To use is not necessarily to dominate. What Winnicott began to describe as the destruction of the object and its survival must be wrested from the sentimentalism of white maternal recovery and returned to the field of struggle: erotic, colonial, psychic.
In the wreckage of capture, in the long afterlife of the plantation and the camp, the subject is neither pure nor sovereign. We are not Hiroshima. We are not Nevers. We are not proof of anyone’s guilt or innocence. We are not the screen onto which whiteness mourns its lost moral clarity.
We are subjects. Leaky, porous, relational. We survive by refusing the fantasy of invulnerability. Refuse transcendence.
“You saw nothing of me. Nothing. And yet, I stayed.”
This is not masochism. This is not forgiveness.
This is the most ethical of staying, not as the good object, but as the remainder.
Not reconciled.
Not pure.
But still here.
The terms Zone of Non-Being and Zone of Being originate in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952/2008), where he describes the ontological rupture experienced by colonised Black subjects. Tommy J. Curry expands on this in The Man-Not (2017), arguing that Black males are often permanently situated within the non-being zone by both dominant cultural scripts and academic frameworks.
Curry, T. J. (2017). The Man-Not: Race, class, genre, and the dilemmas of Black manhood. Temple University Press.
Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1952)
In both Hiroshima mon amour and The Lover, Duras constructs the Asian male not as a speaking subject but as a screen for the white woman’s affective and historical burdens. The Japanese architect in Hiroshima is never named, and functions less as a character than as an echo chamber for the French woman’s guilt over wartime complicity. Similarly, the Chinese lover in The Lover — also unnamed — serves as a mute and racialised site of forbidden desire, framed entirely through the lens of colonial intimacy and retrospective narration. In each, the Asian man exists not to speak, but to receive: confession, eroticism, and the residues of European collapse.
Annaud, J.-J. (Director). (1992). The lover [Film]. Renn Productions.
Duras, M. (1984). The lover (B. Bray, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published in French as L’Amant)
Resnais, A. (Director). (1959). Hiroshima mon amour [Film]. Argos Films.
Duras, M. (1960). Hiroshima mon amour: A screenplay (R. Seaver, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original screenplay published 1959)
Berlant defines cruel optimism as a relation in which “something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (Berlant, 2011, p. 1). The object of desire — love, intimacy, belonging — sustains the subject precisely by blocking transformation. The fantasy endures because the alternative (loss, detachment, structural recognition) feels more unbearable than repetition.
Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.
In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman exposes how violence persists not only through spectacular cruelty but through scenes of care and intimacy, where the performance of affection, apology, or healing masks domination. She writes, “the violence of captivity appears as a condition of intimacy.” Sentimentality becomes a technique of power: it demands the Black body’s availability to be moved, to be touched, to be reformed, without ever being released.
Hartman, S. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford University Press.
In Sexuality Beyond Consent, Saketopoulou proposes that trauma is not always something to be cured or worked through. Drawing on psychoanalysis and queer theory, she introduces traumatophilia, the psychic orientation that seeks not to escape trauma, but to return to it, use it, and at times derive jouissance from its repetition. Trauma, in this frame, becomes “less a wound to be closed than a site to be worked,” staged, eroticised, at the limits of symbolic containment.
Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality beyond consent: Risk, race, traumatophilia. NYU Press.
Harris, J. O. (2019). Slave play. Theatre Communications Group.
Winnicott’s theory of object use suggests that for an object to become real, to be related to rather than fused with, it must first be destroyed in the child’s psychic reality. If the object “survives” this destruction (i.e., remains present, non-retaliatory), then true relationality can begin (Winnicott, 1971). But this model assumes a kind of clean survival. Your formulation questions that premise: What if the object does not survive intact, but leaves behind a trace, an erotic scar, a repetitive hunger, a partial object in the Lacanian sense? What survives may not be the object, but the drive it awakens.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. Routledge.
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