Published in Morena Campani, Mieko Matsumoto, A la recherche d’aïda, Va-et-vient de deux femmes entre Occident et Extrême-Orient, L’Harmattan, 2022.
Morena Campani and Mieko Matsumoto’s film “A perdita d’occhio” reveals the notion of aïda, which is very particular to Japanese culture. Here’s how it can be understood.
“Aïda”: space, interval, distance, gap, clearance, interstice, spacing… if aïda distances or distinguishes beings, it is above all because at the same time aïda connects them, makes a junction, realizes a conjunction of beings between themselves – and makes a link with the beings of nature.
Aïda is thus the opposite of a border; the latter separates, aïda connects, links. The border defines the foreigner, the “alien” – as we read when arriving at Tokyo airport – or even the enemy; it leads to war, xenophobia and racism; soon, it’s within borders that we’ll have to purify in order to achieve homogeneity, a totalitarian uniformity. On the contrary, Aïda links singularities, originalities and differences. Aïda is an apology for the love of difference.
Indeed, if there is an effective encounter between two beings, it’s thanks to aïda. Otherwise, everything either clings together in a pseudo-unity, unifying and undifferentiating beings, or isolates them in unbearable solitudes – even the hermit is only such because others exist.
Thanks to aïda, beings are no longer undifferentiated in the mass, nor are they isolated, insularized, in the illusion of superiority, of egotic primacy; the encounter can take place. Singularities can recognize each other in a genuine encounter, aïda providing modesty and openness, humility and wonder.
Philosophically, we shift from the primacy of the entity to the primacy of the relationship; aïda is the possibility of any relationship; aïda thus founds a metaphysics of the relationship, rendering obsolete an exclusive metaphysics of the entity.
So, if “mour” means “to die”, then a-mour, with its privative “a”, is the antidote to death. The death of entities is inescapable, but isn’t the relationship that unites them eternal?
Relationships with ancestors and the forces of nature form the spiritual basis of Shinto; aïda is thus the worldly access to Shinto spirituality. In Christianity, the Father creates the world through the Son in the Holy Spirit; the latter is, within the Trinity, the relationship of gift and love between Father and Son – showing that a Relationship can be a Person – and, in the universe, He is the divine immanent background that links all beings, He is the eternal Aïda.
