Hiroshima Mon Amour and Kant's View of the Sublime

Hiroshima Mon Amour is a film about a Japanese man and French actress who have a love affair in Hiroshima, which was written by Marguerite Duras and produced in 1959. The film script begins with the Japanese man telling the French woman, "You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing." Although the women tries to convince him that she has seen Hiroshima because she has seen newsreels and museums, the Japanese man always replies that she has seen nothing.

Accusing her of "seeing nothing" is an odd accusation to make, but it can be better understood by using the concept of the sublime as developed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

In his explanation of the sublime, Kant says that, unlike the beautiful which is limited to a particular form, the sublime is formless and provokes an image of limitlessness. As he says in The Critique of Judgment, "For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns rational ideas, which although no adequate presentation of them is possible, may be excited and called into the mind by that very inadequacy itself which does not admit of the presentation through the senses."

That is, the sublime is invoked by events that are so enormous that our mind cannot contain them; they are too boundless to be grasped through the use of our sense. For Kant, the sublime is the inadequacy we feel when confronted with an event so seemingly limitless that the mind is powerless to represent in its imagination.

The nuclear denotation at Hiroshima, and all it entailed, was an event so immense that it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend it. This may be why the Japanese man stubbornly replies, "You have seen nothing" to her attempts to convince him that she has "seen Hiroshima." The museums, photographs, and videos she witnessed could only provide an artificial glimpse of the event. Even a video taken at far enough of a distance to capture the "whole" explosion at Hiroshima would only be able to represent the outermost surface of the explosion and the vast majority of what happen would remain unseen.

Like an earthquake or any other large and disastrous event, it is impossible for the mind to imagine the nuclear devastation at Hiroshima in its totality because of its magnitude; it is simply more than the mind can contain. So much occurred during the event on such a grand scale that to the human mind it seems limitless. One could go on imagining all the things that occurred because of that nuclear explosion forever.

Furthermore, as Kant notes, the sublime "concerns rational ideas" and this can also be seen in the French woman's understanding of Hiroshima. She can rationally understand the event in abstract statements of fact, such as "Two hundred thousand dead. Eight thousand wounded. In nine seconds," yet regardless of all she knows, the Japanese man still replies "Nothing. You know nothing."

According to Kant, the sublime ultimately directs our mind to moral thoughts. It is possible that by including this sublimity in the beginning of the script, Duras wants her audience to be oriented towards a moral interpretation of what is occurring in the film.

Love and death are both important aspects of Hiroshima Mon Amour, and since the audience is presented with the sublime in the very beginning of the film, this may direct their thoughts to the moral connection between the two.