The symptoms of the just: psycho-pass, judg(e)ment, and the asymptomatic commons

The symptoms of the just: psycho-pass, judg(e)ment, and the asymptomatic commons

Set in a hypermodern and isolationist Japan, the first two seasons of the Psycho-Pass anime confront the spiralling consequences for the possibility of just law in the world of a panopticon—the Sibyl System—that gazes upon all people through a matriculated psycho-emotional ‘cymatic’ scan. Psycho-Pass challenges conventional approaches to law and justice in three interconnected ways: the reconfiguration of the sovereign through the cybernetic Sibyl System and the largely unconscious corporeality of Japanese citizens as a politico-legal body; the erasure of courts and displacement of the central zone of legal power into a type of surveillance that compels compliance through coercion, thereby raising the spectre of moral accountability for just violence in the absence of a positivist legal doctrine; and the Sibyl System functions as a legal formalism unmoored from social recognition and thereby constantly stalked by wider social recognition as a threat to its legitimacy and air of justice. This chapter investigates the tensions that envelope the spiralling psycho-legal effectiveness of the Sibyl System in the first and second seasons of Psycho-Pass.

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