Document Type
Honors Project
Publication Date
6-11-2026
Abstract
Beginning with the social phenomenon of hikikomori—individuals who withdraw from society into prolonged isolation in Japan—this paper examines what their chosen disappearance reveals about the nature of social existence itself. Rather than treating hikikomori as a problem requiring intervention, I argue that their withdrawal constitutes a form of social death that illuminates the conditions and limits of social life. Please note that the word “hikikomori” refers to both the phenomenon and the recluse themself, so this paper also employs the same word usage. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's philosophy, particularly his concepts of différance and the constitutive role of absence, I argue that hikikomori occupy an undecidable space between social life and social death. Their withdrawal doesn't simply negate social existence but reveals how social presence itself is never fully present. It is always deferred through recognition from others, always constituted by what it excludes. The socially dead, in this sense, aren't outside society but rather expose the impossible conditions that sustain the fiction of social aliveness. I characterize social death as the dissolution of the social self through exit from the web of mutual recognition, marked by social identity loss and spatio-temporal isolation. Their withdrawal functions as a kind of negative values, showing us what social existence requires. Ultimately, I propose that examining this deliberately chosen “death” in Japan opens questions about whether and how we might relate to existence differently. Social death, then, becomes not an ending to overcome, but a vantage point from which to reconsider what counts as a valuable life.
Level of Honors
cum laude
Department
History
Advisor
Brigid Vance
Recommended Citation
Nguyen, Anh Minh, "Social Death: Another Way to Look at Life" (2026). Lawrence University Honors Projects. 231.
https://lux.lawrence.edu/luhp/231