The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

Ein Fremder unter den Einheimischen, ein Einheimischer unter den Fremden: zur literarischen (Selbst)Repräsentation des nomadisierenden Subjekts

Anna Babka (Universität Wien)
The Days of the Human May be Numbered: Theorizing Cyberfeminist Metaphors - Rereading Heinrich von Kleist's 'Gliedermann' as Cyborg, as 'Ghost in the Shell'!

A lot has already been written on Heinrich von Kleist's "Über das Marionettentheater" ("On the Marionette Theater"). I will take my reading, that is based on deconstructivist approaches as well as on queer- and cyberfeminist-thought, as starting point for reflecting gender coherence and gender identity. Queer Studies provoke a thinking of the multiplication of difference as well as a thinking of difference within ('entities'), rather than of difference between ('entities'). Cyberfeminism explores the possibilities of manipulating and changing the physical body and provides metaphors for thinking 'posthuman' identities. Donna Haraway-in allusion to the hybridization of gender relations and gender conceptions-posits the cyborg as a leading figure/figuration of feminist politics.

The focal point of my reading is the so called 'Gliedermann', the godlike puppet on the strings-one of the protagonist figures in Kleist's text. I will conceptualize the 'Gliedermann', the puppet as cyborg and, in relation to the protagonist figure of a Japanese Manga and its cinematic adaptation, as a 'Ghost in the Shell'. Via the metaphor of the cyborg the theorizing of a new episteme, which is implicated in the technological revolution, can be carried out since the "cyborg identity, embodying both nature and 'other', belongs neither wholly to nature nor to culture and subverts all certainties" (Smith and Watson)-and this might add new aspects to a reading of Kleist's text.

My starting-point and basic understanding of the condition of human identities - that are always already gendered identities - is bound to the hypothesis that those identities, to follow Judith Butler's notion of performativity, are effects of a performative process of identity-construction. This performative process is closely connected to what Butler calls "the tropological inauguration of the subject" - as a result of the performative power of tropes. Those are reflections that obviously relate to Paul de Man's concept of a 'performative rhetoric' and that are crucial for her rhetorical-performative account of identity-construction. Hence I want to point out the importance of Butler's as well as de Man's drawing upon rhetorical figures or on the tropological system respectively, while theorizing the subject and the human condition.

The ways of the 'soul' of the 'Gliedermann' build crossroads with Masamune Shirow's 'Ghost in the Shell', protagonist of an animated film which is based on the Manga of the same title. What is the connection then between those two figures? The linkage is the question of what qualifies as human and of how this humanity is being figured, disfigured and refigured, as it will be shown in my reading through the figure of the monstrous, hermaphroditic cyborg or the godlike Gliedermann. Monsters, goddesses and cyborgs, are, as Nina Lykke puts it, all three signifiers of chaos, heterogenity and unstable identities and despite of their differences they are related through their metonymical closeness to the non-orderly, non-stable, non-identical and so on. The figure of thought of a world characterized by 'postisms' is the cyborg-or, as Donna Haraway would formulate it: "The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world......". This and more I'd like to contribute to the discussion.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES