Contingency & Mechanical Evil | The Philosophy of Death Note

Light Yagami is the Lacanian Pervert

Death Note (2003 - 2006)

There is no utterance more terrifying than “It’s my destiny.” And this is precisely what Light Yagami proclaims. Death Note is about a disaffected genius, Light, who arbitrarily stumbles upon a notebook that grants its user the ability to kill anyone they desire by writing their target’s name on it. A few days after receiving this notebook of death, Light is visited by Ryuk, a “shinigami” (god of death), revealing that he dropped the book out of sheer boredom. From the get-go, we, the viewers, are informed that Ryuk didn’t choose Light to receive the Death Note. Unlike Abrahamic biblical motifs of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Light wasn’t the chosen one, nor did he receive divine providence by a higher power. Ryuk only made an appearance post hoc due to his amusement at Light’s action on receiving the Death Note. Regardless, Light earnestly declares and, more importantly, acts on his belief that he was meant to receive this notebook, which gives him God-like powers to eliminate any human being from this world as he sees fit. He becomes a vigilante known as “Kira”, embarking on his quest to carry out a worldwide massacre and social cleansing of those he deems immoral to create a crime and vice-free utopian society.  

Starting with the inaugural episode, “Rebirth”, the anime series highlights the Hegelian insight that necessity is inhabited by contingency. Let us flesh out these philosophical terms with regard to Light’s immediate shift in his existential orientation upon receiving the Death Note. Unlike Hollywood commercial flicks, Death Note’s writers, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata, don’t give the viewers any background into Light as a person nor establish the morality of his actions. There is no empathy building with the characters through psychological manoeuvres, which we commonly see in the likes of the Marvel & DC universe, making Death Note a superlative work of art as the viewer is left to judge Light by his actions alone. Indeed, it’s only much later we discover he’s a master tactician who would make Machiavelli look like an amateur. At first, Light seems like the typical quasi-emoistic high schooler with lingerings of nihilism and inner rebellion, all the while being a model student who’s a class topper and popular amongst his peers. Yet his ostensible excellence makes him bored of life. Amidst his boredom one day, as he’s looking outside the classroom window, he notices a strange notebook drop from the sky and picks it up, arbitrarily coming across the Death Note. On discovering that writing a human’s name on the notebook allows the beholder to kill them, Light sets forth on his quest to rid the world of criminals, taking justice into his own hands. Although initially petrified at Death Note’s eschatological power, Light adopts a utilitarian ethic of bringing forth his utopia to the world. With his newfound occultist tool, the world becomes his canvas. 

We should first be attentive to the contingent nature of how Light came across the Death Note. Metaphysically, the event of Light picking up the notebook on that random day in his high school wasn’t predestined. Light wasn’t the chosen one, nor was he a messiah (a motif commonly seen in contemporary Hollywood films). The events that radically changed reality through Light’s consequent actions stood on the groundless ground of sheer chance; the likelihood of Light not becoming a Kira was equally likely to what, in actuality, unfolded in the series. If, for instance, Light is juxtaposed with Neo (Keanu Reeves) from The Matrix (1999), we see how Death Note aptly points to the contingency of reality. Neo was necessarily chosen to be the Jesus-like figure to wake humanity up from the matrix to the so-called truth and save them from the enslaving machines. The Matrix leaves no ontological fissure, meaning, in any possible reality, Neo would be “The One” called to carry out his heroic duty, fulfilling his destiny.

On the contrary, Death Note points towards a reality of radical ontological openness, which (I postulate) is the true one. Ryuk says he dropped the notebook into the human realm purely for amusement to rid himself of his boredom and did not choose Light, or anyone for that matter, to receive the Death Note. And so, Light Yagami, like the rest of us, has no destiny, but he retroactively posits meaning to his life and the order of reality as such upon his subjective shift in becoming the Kira. To use a clichéd pop-psychological term, he develops his “messiah complex” by pure chance with no essential reason nor condition within reality to create that outcome. Indeed, Light, being the beholder of the Death Note, had to be an ex nihilo fully contingent event, arbitrary and not fitting into the immediate order of things.  

In that vein, Death Note should be experienced as a work of love. We all know soul mates don’t exist until they do. We find our soulmate after tomber amoureux [falling in love]. That is, there isn’t the perfect person somewhere we’re destined to be with. A person becomes our soul mate retroactively. We can be with a person for a while, casually dating or simply being friends, let’s say, and realise with time we have fallen in love with them and, in hindsight, experience it as it was meant to be. Yet the paradox of love is that they indeed were, but they become the one only after the fall, which isn’t preordained. Because, as Alain Badiou theorises, love hangs on nothing; it appears out of nowhere and in this enframing, our lover is someone who wasn’t necessitated to be in the order of reality. Even if the universe is deterministic, that determinism is something we posit post hoc after the love event, as we’re temporal beings blind to what the future holds, and indeed, the future doesn’t exist until we create it. An authentic love event changes our past as we experience our lover as the soul mate meant to be with us from inception despite none of it being destined by a transcendent order like an all-knowing God who, too, is surprised by love. This immediate subjective reality is no different to Light discovering the Death Note and his existential displacement in believing he was destined to be the Kira and become a messianic figure when we know through Ryuk that nothing unfolding in their timeline was predestined. So much like love, Death Note points to the timelessness of time. Perhaps through love and Death Note, we arrive at the same place Carlo Rovelli did in his insights into quantum gravity: time doesn’t exist outside of us.

Before we further analyse Light’s subsequent actions on receiving the notebook, we should first take a slight detour into exploring the vast theological implications of Death Note. There’s no shying away from the pronounced Christian themes of the anime. Much like the myriad biblical narratives, Light seeing himself as a grandiose messiah-like figure destined to save humanity from themselves is an evident trope in the series and doesn’t require much philosophising. But what sets Death Note apart is its portrayal of the divine. The shinagamis are depicted as figures almost unbearable to look at, grotesque and monstrous in their appearance. Ryuk is an absurd jester with an apple addiction, and as he admits, everything that unfolds from the time he drops the Death Note to the human realm is a mere farce. Ryuk, much like most humans, is a god that’s bored. Divinity in Death Note isn’t something to be taken seriously. The gods that call us humans to death aren’t pristine or solemn figures like The Architect in The Matrix, who comes off as being the paragon of rationality, level-headedness, and omniscience but are joker-like daemons unsure of what to do with existence and perhaps stupefied by their own power. The shinagamis aren’t transcendent deities but immanent to being and our lives. Accordingly, Death Note subverts the promise of religion by stepping outside of the contemporary atheist-theist dichotomy where the reality of the Absolute, be it God, the divine or the ground of being, is not denied nor asserted but rather reframed as being self-divided, unknowing and reliant on human beings for their beinghood—and let’s not ignore, the gods have a sense of humour. Much like the intimations of the German Idealists Schelling, Hegel, and the excommunicated Christian mystics, Death Note points at a God who created humanity to rid himself of his madness. Traditionally, we’re told God has all the answers, but what if he doesn’t either? We’re told no matter the mess we’re in, we will find wholeness as there’s salvation in a transcendental realm, be it in New Age spiritualism, pseudo-Buddhist enlightenment, technological singularity or a Christian God that saves us, but what if the divine itself made a mistake and cannot deal with the ramifications of its creation? I.e., the unspeakable suffering and destruction at the core of our reality. Perhaps humanity is the result of God’s condom breaking during a one-night stand with Mother Nature, and could the ultimate gift God gives us be the freedom to help him in his creation?

And yet Light in his megalomania couldn’t fathom the impotence of God. Viewing Light as a Nietzschean figure who willed himself ex nihilo to become a Kira is a mistake. He never acted from the groundlessness of nihilism bereft of metaphysical scaffoldings bolstering (and justifying) his actions. On the contrary, he believed that the divine Absolute necessitated the contingent event of him being the Death Note beholder; he repeatedly makes clear his arbitrary encounter with the notebook was essentialised (and justified) by destiny. To use a personal anecdote, I recall conversing with a friend at a party, and she told me everything that’s happened in her life has inevitably been good, so she knows that the universe has her back and whatever is meant to be will always be in her favour. Nothing for her could go wrong as, all in all, to quote Drake, she is a part of “God’s plan.” Of course, being a Hegelian, I had to dialecticise her argument. First of all, if her life is entirely determined by a divine plan, where does freedom come into the picture? In her case, how can she be a willing and choosing human being and not, let’s say, a mechanical toilet without agency? This dilemma emerges not only from life being predetermined by existing natural laws—similar to the claims of socio-biological reductionists like Robert Sapolsky—but also from the notion that God has already actualised her future, meaning what’s meant to be has already become and is unchangeable. Furthermore, isn’t her claim a typical instance of survivorship bias? Since, to this point in time, she’s been fortunate in life, much like Light, she sees contingent events as being necessitated and preordained by a higher power, be it God or the universe. Would she make similar claims if, let’s say, she was a Palestinian child in Gaza? I wager not. But let’s not fall into the trap of making naive, atheistic arguments against God through the age-old problem of evil—that line of reasoning is still too optimistic for my taste. We should instead concede my friend’s point. Indeed, she perhaps was a part of God’s plan, albeit not a God free from blunders. A God that’s unknowing and ontologically incomplete is what allows her to reorder the past and posit the contours of freedom within which she acts freely, all the while presupposing those to be objective conditions necessitated by a God that’s “on her side”, so to speak. This is the Absolute, the ground of our freedom, that Death Note points towards, a God that leaves the future radically open due to his weakness (to paraphrase John Caputo). The paradox of freedom is we are free to act in an objective reality that we subjectively create. As Slavoj Žižek states:

“The common-sense “dialectics” of freedom and necessity conceives of their articulation in the sense of the famous lines from the beginning of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” We are partially, but not totally, determined: we have a space of freedom, but within the coordinates imposed by our objective situation. What this view fails to take into account is the way our freedom (free activity) retroactively creates (“posits”) its objective conditions: these conditions are not simply given, they emerge as the presuppositions of our activity. (And vice versa: the space of our freedom itself is sustained by the situation in which we find ourselves.) The excess is thus double: we are not only less free than we think (the contours of our freedom are predetermined), we are simultaneously more free than we think (we freely “posit” the very necessity that determines us). This is why, to arrive at our “absolute” freedom (the free positing of our presuppositions), we have to pass through absolute determinism.

(Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, p. 465-466)

Thankfully, my friend wasn’t an authoritarian Stalinist and, therefore, didn’t become a ruthless tyrant who thought God (or History in the case of Stalinism) was on her side. But this wasn’t the case for Light, as his makeup was that of an authoritarian or, in precise psychoanalytical terms, a Lacanian pervert. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, Žižekian-Lacanian perversion has nothing to do with deviant social perversity or so-called “immoral sexual acts” but resides in how they relate to truth and language directly without the gap other subjects have. To use more Lacanian jargon, Light thought of himself as an instrument of the big Other¹, meaning, he believed in having direct access to the Will of the universe. He saw nothing more to his existence other than the object that unfolds the rightful destiny of what reality should be, claiming, “I have become Justice.” Notice the “I” in this proclamation lacks any semblance of subjectivity or, dare I say, humanity. Light seeing himself as yet another object in this universe dissolves him of the moral burden of a human being, which inescapably entails the responsibility of ethics, treating other humans with an inherent respect for their beinghood and encountering them as other self-conscious beings. Light the object could conveniently use people as mere tokens in his preordained project, so killing innocent people or manipulating Misa Amane’s love for him is an effortless means to an end, while for most people who aren’t psychoanalytical perverts, such a thing would be a near impossibility. 

Isn’t Light Yagami no different to dictators like Stalin or Hitler, who thought history was on their side, fundamentalist religious fanatics flying planes into buildings and bombing abortion clinics or modern-day Robber barons like Elon Musk? Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima says it best in The Brothers Karamazov: The more you love humanity in the abstract, the less you love the human being in particular. The perverse act of many 20th-century dictators and strongmen was to sincerely love humanity while simultaneously committing the most atrocious crimes against individual human beings. Indeed, it perhaps hurts them to do such diabolically evil things to another human being. But they saw it to be their Duty as instruments of historical necessity to let history unfold to what it should Be through them. The Jihadist who blows himself up directly believes God is working through him to rid the world of kafirs [unbelievers], and the Trumpian-Christian rightist sees Donald Trump situated by God to bring upon his kingdom. Likewise, techno-utopian billionaires see themselves as solely responsible for the future of humanity and find they’re uniquely placed by the cosmos to be the remedy for the ills of existence. Light professes to be an atheist, but one should respond to him with the Žižekian-Lacanian provocation, “God is Dead, but He Doesn’t Know It.” Unconsciously, Light is more religious than even the typical pedestrian believer, as his actions, in this case, speak not only louder than his words but make them meaningless. Psychically, he isn’t any different from the types mentioned above because, much like them, he instrumentalises himself to be the necessary object that carries out the Will of the higher ordering agency of the cosmos (reified best in a single agent: “God”). None of them can accept the inherent split of reality with its antagonisms and shortcomings but are perversely driven to let the Absolute (i.e. the big Other) become itself, bringing upon utopia while ignoring the immediate carnage they create in the process. Virtues aren’t just values, but they embody them. They are Justice. They are Truth. They are the Good.

1. “The big Other operates at a symbolic level. What, then, is this symbolic order composed of? When we speak (or listen, for that matter), we never merely interact with others; our speech activity is grounded on our accepting of and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions. First, there are the grammatical rules I have to master blindly and spontaneously: if I were to bear in mind all the time these rules, my speech would come to a halt. Then there is the background of participating in the same life-world which enables me and my partner in conversation to understand each other. The rules that I follow are marked by a deep split: there are rules (and meanings) that I follow blindly, out of custom, but of which, upon reflection, I can become at least partially aware (such as common grammatical rules), and there are rules that I follow, meanings that haunt me, unbeknownst to me (such as unconscious prohibitions). Then there are rules and meanings I am aware of, but have to act on the outside as if I am not aware of them - dirty or obscene innuendos which one passes over in silence in order to maintain the proper appearances. [...] This symbolic space acts like a standard against which I can measure myself. This is why the big Other can be personified or reified in a single agent: “God” who watches over me from beyond and over all real individuals or the Cause which addresses me (Freedom, Communism, Nation) and for which I am ready to give my life. While talking, I am never merely a “small other” (individual) interacting with other “small others,” the big Other always has to be there.” (Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan, p. 9)