Nobuyoshi Araki’s Archival Corpo-Rapture
Nobuyoshi Araki’s Archival Corpo-Rapture

Summary/Abstract: Nobuyoshi Araki is one of the most famous and controversial Japanese photographers,whose work amounts to several hundred publications. Over the course of nearly fivedecades, this prolific artist’s ‘photo-mania’ dealing with, among various subject matters, a depictionof human bodies, often eroticized and graphic, has been both celebrated and heavilycriticized. Instead of contributing to those discourses of either support or disdain of his artisticvision – especially on the issue of fetishized female nudity – this paper focuses on Araki’sinsatiable lust for capturing Japan’s corporeality. His unrelenting inspiration to encapsulateJapanese bodily images has generated an immense collection of not only personal(ized) memories,but also of various types of archives – intimate and public – of the spontaneous and thestaged, reflecting the ephemeral, transitory or epochal. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of archivein realtion to Freudian death drive, this paper explores Araki’s archive fever as a mechanism ofsubjective power imposed on the collective body. The proliferation of his photo series unveilsAraki’s tendency to ‘destroy’ the previous encounters while simultaneously adding to his ultimaterepository of somatic images with each new volume.

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