The Life of the Flesh: Transwar Japan and the Crisis of Sensibility

This dissertation studies a lineage of Japanese writers and intellectuals who turned toward corporeal sensibility as a site of critical potentiality in moments of ideological disorientation. In the aftermath of Japan’s defeat in WWII, the political theorist and intellectual historian Maruyama Masao (1914-1996) wrote of the characteristics of Japanese literature: “[T]he minds of our writers cling like leeches to natural, sensual phenomena, and lack a really free flight of the imagination, so in one sense all of our literature is ‘carnal.’” This purported prominence of sensuality over detached scrutiny, Maruyama proceeds, contributed to a lack of critical reflexivity in times of political oppression, ultimately rendering Japan vulnerable to fascism. At once proclaiming Japanese literature’s excellence in capturing corporeal sensibility and decrying its alleged paucity in “ideas,” Maruyama’s cultural essentialism feeds into a plethora of discourses continually reified and contested by both Japanese writers themselves and a global readership that gradually accrued after the war. In lieu of a wholesale dismissal, however, my project recalibrates the affordances, both aesthetic and political, of Japanese literature’s attentiveness to corporeality during the tumultuous early decades of the Shōwa period (1925-1989). I do so by examining the writings of authors who resorted—often at moments of profound political and personal crisis—to corporeal sensibility as a productive site that resists full containment within ideology. Along these lines, I follow three generations of Japanese writers as the question of embodied life (seikatsu) became no longer self-evident but took on existential weight during times of intense political and intellectual setbacks. The writers are the modernist Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892-1927); the Marxists Kobayashi Takiji (1903-1933) and Nakano Shigeharu (1902-1979); and the postwar democratic thinkers and critics of fascism Maruyama Masao (1914-1996) and Takeuchi Yoshimi (1910-1977). Born roughly a decade apart from one another in the 1890s, the 1900s, and the 1910s, each of the three generations engaged with dominant ideologies of their times. In turn, they each struggled to come to terms with defeat when these ideologies became untenable and risked being “overcome” by new ones: when culturalist modernism (kyōyōshugi) was feverishly denounced by the proletarian movement during the transition between the Taishō and Shōwa eras in the late 1920s; when Marxism faced escalating government crackdowns and found itself powerless against the rise of fascism during the 1930s; and when, in the wake of Japan’s surrender, liberal democracy, imposed by the U.S. occupation forces and sustained by what became known as the postwar regime (sengo taisei), was believed to have settled accounts with the nation’s fascist past. During these critical moments, as I will demonstrate, the body as the locus of both thinking and feeling—hence a liminal sphere of indistinction between the ideological and the pre-ideological—became for these authors a crucial territory that had to be reconfigured as a vehicle of resistance

TTˉT\bar{T} flow as characteristic flows

We show that method of characteristics provides a powerful new point of view on $T\bar{T}$-and related deformations. Previously, the method of characteristics has been applied to $T\bar{T}$-deformation mainly to solve Burgers' equation, which governs the deformation of the \emph{quantum} spectrum. In the current work, we study \emph{classical} deformed quantities using this method and show that $T\bar{T}$ flow can be seen as a characteristic flow. Exploiting this point of view, we re-derive a number of important known results and obtain interesting new ones. We prove the equivalence between dynamical change of coordinates and the generalized light-cone gauge approaches to $T\bar{T}$-deformation. We find the deformed Lagrangians for a class of $T\bar{T}$-like deformations in higher dimensions and the $(T\bar{T})^{\alpha}$-deformation in 2d with generic $\alpha$, generalizing recent results in arXiv:2206.03415 and arXiv:2206.10515.Comment: 38 pages, 2 figures, references update

TTˉT\bar{T}-deformed Entanglement Entropy for Integrable Quantum Field Theory

We calculate the $T\bar{T}$-deformed entanglement entropy for integrable quantum field theories (IQFTs) using the form factor bootstrap approach. We solve the form factor bootstrap axioms for the branch-point twist fields and obtain the deformed form factors. Using these form factors, we compute the deformed von Neuman entropy up to two particle contributions. We find that the UV behavior of the entanglement entropy is changed drastically. The divergence is no longer logarithmic, but also contain a power law divergence whose power is controlled by the deformed scaling dimension of the twist operator. The IR corrections, which only depends on the particle spectrum is untouched. This is consistent to the fact that $T\bar{T}$-deformation is irrelevant.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figur

Spin-ss Rational QQ-system

Bethe ansatz equations for spin-$s$ Heisenberg spin chain with $s\ge1$ are significantly more difficult to analyze than the spin-$\tfrac{1}{2}$ case, due to the presence of repeated roots. As a result, it is challenging to derive extra conditions for the Bethe roots to be physical and study the related completeness problem. In this paper, we propose the rational $Q$-system for the XXX$_s$ spin chain. Solutions of the proposed $Q$-system give all and only physical solutions of the Bethe ansatz equations required by completeness. The rational $Q$-system is equivalent to the requirement that the solution and the corresponding dual solution of the $TQ$-relation are both polynomials, which we prove rigorously. Based on this analysis, we propose the extra conditions for solutions of the XXX$_s$ Bethe ansatz equations to be physical.Comment: 37 page