neon genesis evangelion 3 in 1 edition vol 5

And so in this story personal longing and struggle is writ large to a cosmic scale. And why should the world, my world, the world one knows, be circumscribed by an Ultimate Authority inaccessible to oneself? Where did this unknowable mystery come from? The world is all there is there is no beyond for the abode of divinity. This significance does not derive from the premise that a particular individual is important objectively, from some impersonal point of view, but that personal, subjective experience, one's arena of consciousness, is ineliminable from the world itself.

These themes combine with and enrich one another, as the list of those claiming the position of god who need to be overcome is expanded through the course of maturity, while the vast cosmic stakes of the story highlight the significance of a single individual’s experience. In any event, this (to me) central theme of defiance and liberation through the death of killing of the embodied god is connected to NGE's other central theme of growing up, with the generational struggle, alienation, loneliness, romance, and becoming of that ongoing process.

No doubt I’m influenced in this reading by Žižek's Christian atheism, Martin Hägglund’s philosophy of secular freedom, Richard Rorty’s anti-authoritarian pragmatism, and the trajectory of my own experience. My own idiosyncratic interpretation takes NGE to express profound themes in philosophy of religion, dramatizing the achievement of secular freedom through the rejection and overthrow of theological domination. It is hoped that what I say here lives up to the grandiloquence of this sort of exegetical quixotism -) Surely it is fitting that Neon Genesis Evangelion - as a science-fiction epic imbued with Kabbalistic and early Christian imagery - has been the subject of so many differing and often convoluted exegetical forays, indeed traversing the tripartite, emanative interpretive hierarchy from the literal (body) to the moral (soul) on up to the rarified heights of the heavenly (spirit). “The Japanese expression bakku-shan means ‘a girl who looks as though she might be pretty when seen from behind, but isn’t when seen from the front.’ One of the lessons of the history of religion… is that the same holds for God himself… The problem of Judaism is precisely: how are we to keep this dimension of the divine madness, of gods as real, at a distance?” - Slavoj Žižek, Event, p.

“Dreams are in reality… and reality in dreams.”

Neon genesis evangelion 3 in 1 edition vol 5