Derrida's Death Note

So I'm watching through Death Note this week (which, again, is super awesome and I highly recommend. Probably my favorite animated show). If you don't know the premise, this guy Light has a notebook and if he writes someone's name in it while thinking of their face, that person dies. Cool premise I think, plus the mystery/suspense/crime-drama angle that get woven into the story that keeps it going at a pretty good pace for most of the show.

The thing that is sticking in my mind though is a quality the characters call the Shinigami Eyes, and it's my English Nerdism and Poststructuralism that's making it distracting for me. The Death Notes in the show are usually attached to a god of death (called a shinigami) who follows the note around until the human using it dies. The shinigami, in order to kill whoever they want, can see someone's name and lifespan above the person's head. They can also grant this ability to others.

Part of the rules of the notebook, though, are that misspelling someone's name is an important mistake. You have to spell someone's name correctly for them to die. If you misspell someone's name six times, they become immune to the Death Note, and if you misspell someone's name purposely six times you'll die. The implication of this kind of rule are manifold and interesting to consider. First is that in-universe someone's name is intrinsically attached to them as much as the days of their life are. Throughout the series, the name has power and one could say that the whole story is about the struggle over learning someone else's name. For Light, someone knowing his name would give them the power to stop him, and for others, Light knowing their name would give him the power to kill. The signifier and signified are thus inextricably linked in Death Note: your written name isn't arbitrary at all, but holds the secrets of life and death for you.

The relationship between signifier and signified is even deeper than that, however. Watching the series, there are times when you get to see from the shinigami's perspective (or someone with the Eyes) and you can read other people's names. The thing is, Japanese people's names are written in Japanese kanji, but English and American names are in English above their heads. Not only your name, but also the language and the specific spelling of that name are stamped onto you. In Death Note, then, human beings exist as stable instantiations of language. In that single body during that specific time-frame, a person's name (and perhaps even a thing's name) corresponds directly and essentially to the person themselves.

Lest we think that somehow Death Note stands athwart Jaques Derrida shouting "stop", there are exceptions which seem to make the story present a semiotic stance that fuses essentialism and Poststructuralism. On the one hand, the signifier is fixed to the signified and immutable: people go around with fake names all the time in Death Note, but only their "real" name has power. Yet intention is apparently important and the only strong link is between written names and physical objects. For instance, someone's linguistic name doesn't necessarily correspond to their written name as solidly as the name points to the person. The name of the main character is written with the character Yuè (月), which transliterates as "moon." Someone with the Shinigami Eyes remarks upon seeing him how strange it is that his name is written as "moon" but spoken as "Light," indicating some ambiguity about the connection between written and spoken signs. There is also a sense that while the signifiers are fixed, they're also temporary. When someone is killed, the name vanishes from above their heads - even in pictures and films where the person with the Eyes could normally still see a name - meaning that the name is only linked for a set span: that person's lifetime.

What this seems to set up is a fusion of semiotic ideas: a place in which language is fixed, but also contextual. Signs do point to specific things in Death Note, and meaning matters, but only for a limited time. Gone is the "endless chain of signifieds" and replaced with the original binary, though in this context it is unstable.

A fixity of meaning, but compartmentalized in a certain place and a certain time. If language works this way, then the next question becomes, who sets the lifespan on that meaning? Who gets to decide how long that name is connected to that object?

(The answer, in Death Note at least, is that no one knows who sets the original lifespan and no one can make a name last longer than it should. The only thing anyone can do is destroy a name before its time.)