Southeast Review of Asian Studies
Volume 37 (2015), pp. 60–72
Abjection, Projection, Introjection:
Notes Toward a Cyberpunk Ecology 3
KEITH LESLIE JOHNSON
Augusta University
This essay examines the biopolitical implications of a manga series by Nihei Tsutomu
(b. 1971), particularly in terms of three overlapping conceptualizations of the
body: abjection, or the monstrous body; projection, or the phantasmal body; and
introjection, or the replicable body.
Introduction—A BODY
The false dilemma that often conditions commentary on manga—form or
content—does little to commend the complexity of the art form and less
still to illuminate it. Better are those analyses that trace the dialectic of form
and content—the shape, symptom, or cultural logic of its historical
moment. Such analyses reveal the uncanny way ostensibly formal or
aesthetic elements of the medium can anticipate and even trump their
thematic articulation. The power of such elements in this respect often
seems directly proportional to their apparent triviality or arbitrariness.
“Postmodern” theories of visual- and character-design, for example, can
occasionally seem blinkered on this score, failing to discern amidst the
dazzling play of signs—whether conceived as bricolage or “database”1—the
authorizing signature of a cultural anxiety or preoccupation. In fact, we
might as well conclude that the postmodern insistence on the arbitrariness
of the sign is really itself just a symptom, masking foreclosures of the sign
in the guise of liberation. Put in more concrete terms, for my purposes here
visual- and character-design elements are not jujubes but indices. They
point up issues, at times indirectly or negatively, which manga often cannot
address otherwise to same effect. None of this is, I think, terribly
controversial, but bears repeating, particularly in light of prevailing
theoretical emphasis on character-design as an adaptive, protean
technology of interface between creator and consumer—“characters as
configurable objects” in James Tobias’ formulation (346). What can get lost
in this paper-doll model of character, and the story of consumer© 2015 Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies
Essays & Ideas: Abjection, Projection, Introjection
61
empowerment implied, is, for one, the difference between options and choice.
Ironically, the expansion of the former comes frequently at the expense of
the latter; the notion of character-design as essentially wardrobe +
accessories precludes or anyway retards the kinds of choice that make
ethical and political meaning possible. Characters cannot exactly assume an
allegorical function, for example, when they are only a reflection of the
individual’s taste at a particular moment, when they are less figures but
figurines. Azuma Hiroki’s term for this condition of semantic
impoverishment is “animalization” (dōbutsuka
)—the demotion of cet
obscur objet du désir to base physical needs.
In his manga series, Knights of Sidonia (Shidonia no kishi
2009-2015), Nihei Tsutomu seems to thematize precisely this animalized
notion of character by making the antagonists, or gauna, themselves
shapeless, protean, protoplasmic.2 To the extent that they possess no
particular qualities, but rather the potential for any particular quality, gauna
represent an ultimate character-design: a character that is nothing, it would
seem, but its design. To draw perhaps an impertinent parallel: Gilles
Deleuze writes of a thoroughly odd passage from Dickens’ Our Mutual
Friend in which an otherwise disreputable character (Riderhood), believed
drowned but clinging stubbornly to the merest flicker of life, strangely
galvanizes the sympathies of those around him, precisely because,
suspended between life and death, he represents not a fully-endowed
subjective existence, but what Deleuze calls “A LIFE” (2001, 27)—an
impersonal, pre-individual, purely immanent kind of existence; Riderhood
is thus an exemplar of “Homo tantum” or mere man (28). Gauna in their
essence are, I suppose, a kind of “creatura tantum” or mere creature, and
their mode of immanence, A BODY. —Because gauna in Knights of Sidonia
represent something more or other than a vital principle; theirs is a strange
kind of life without metabolism—closer, certainly to the pulsation of slime
molds than the machination of Martians. We see them pursue the hapless
seed-ship Sidonia through space; we witness their relentless sorties; we
marvel at the many and varied forms they assume—and yet at the same
time, there is an eerie lack of malevolence. There are, apparently, long
periods of indolence or even hibernation. Some gauna seem to “settle” in
various biomes along the way—ocean planets, airless asteroids. Their war of
attrition against humanity is sporadic at best, and it is only owing to
diligent propaganda activities on the Sidonia that human antipathy toward
gauna is even maintained. Factions of the human crew occasionally tire of
the war and even accuse their human superiors of fabricating it. At
moments like these, the reader becomes aware of a profound detachment
between his or her own temporal intuitions and those of the Sidonia crew.
(Otherwise, we wonder, how could the crew have forgotten about a gauna
attack that, for us, occurred only a few chapters or even panels before?) We
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K. Johnson
(that is, the reader and the crew) are living in different time scales. Time in
Nihei’s manga is often deranged, alternately dilated and contracted—a
function of biotechnologies enhancing speed and longevity, a function of
life adrift in space, time abstracted in the absence of a governing star,
unregulated by orbit and rotation. As a consequence, for the decidedly
human reader, the story often inexplicably leaps forward in time between
panels without indication, producing extraordinary, precipitous katabases:
crises are suddenly over; wounds healed; situations altered. It can seem at
first clumsy or lazy narration, a record skip, but in fact I think it produces
precisely the effect of disorientation Nihei intends. One must often infer
how much time has passed from clues in dialogue or setting.3 The narrative
is keyed to Sidonia’s time-scale, not ours.
The body itself is a biological clock, so it stands to reason that
alterations of the body would result in alterations of time-sense. Among the
human crew of Sidonia there are old and young, but it is unclear what
precisely this means. One major character, Izana Shinatose, appears only a
few years younger than his/her grandmother. (Izana belongs to a third,
neutral gender, at least at first. S/he later falls in love with the protagonist
and assumes a female form.) The ship’s captain, part of the so-called
Immortal Crew, is several hundred years old but youthful in appearance.
Other Immortal Crew members, however, are depicted as wizened old men
in hyperbaric chambers. Meanwhile, a group of clones, the 22 Honoka
sisters, appear fully grown on account of accelerated growth, but are
actually chronologically (and, to an extent, emotionally) five years old.
What do physical signs of age actually signify in such a situation? The time
is out of joint. If the human bodies of the crew no longer function (from our
perspective) as reliable markers of time, the physical narratives of a life,
then gauna bodies function even less so. The gauna body is, as I’ve said, A
BODY—it can be joined with others, reconfigured, almost completely
destroyed and regenerated: such A BODY cannot be the singular,
identifying possession of the creature that we imagine our own bodies are to
us. A BODY does not have an individual history, and even the few
exceptional cases presented—gauna that are labeled or named by the crew—
tend to enhance this sense of anonymous being.4
A BODY would seem to be a central figure of what I’ve been calling a
“cyberpunk ecology.”5 Cyberpunk seems to me less about the ascendance of
the virtual than the persistence of the material—the drag of living in
meatspace. Knights of Sidonia is not a cyberpunk title on any appreciable
level but is in this respect a translation of cyberpunk thematics into a space
operatic narrative. In a world that continually offers the lure of
disembodiment—technologies
that can
“upload”
and
transfer
consciousness, that can transcend or transgress biological limits, that can
alter the genetic code itself—the body itself becomes paradoxically
Essays & Ideas: Abjection, Projection, Introjection
63
accentuated, a site of personal inscription rather than one’s unavoidable
inheritance. Biotechnologies—even those that make the body essentially
disposable or replaceable—if anything intensify the body as the site of
human being. The plasticity of the body, in other words, does not erase it as
the horizon of being. If this is true of the (post-)human crew of Sidonia, it
can only be doubly true of gauna. A BODY is ageless, undifferentiated,
genderless, and yet the same time, this emphasis on gauna embodiment, on
spontaneous reproduction, on polymorphic organicity, codes them as
feminine in the sense discussed variously by Susan Napier6 and Elizabeth
Grosz. (Not for nothing is their outer layer referred to as placenta (ena
)
by the human crew—a word that can also mean “afterbirth,” suggesting
among other things anxieties regarding the inside-outness of viviparous
reproduction.) To the patriarchal mind that would transcend “mere” matter,
as Grosz points out in Volatile Bodies, “Women are somehow more biological,
more corporeal, and more natural than men” (1994, 14) and are thereby
objects of suspicion, even enemies to thought. To the extent that gauna are
similarly associated with absolute, fleshy materiality, with seemingly
“mindless” biological drives, they reinscribe this age-old prejudice: they
FIGURE 1
Nihei Tsutomu
Sidonia, vol. 3 (Vertical, 2013).
(b. 1971). “Gauna anatomy.” Panel from Knights of
represent a “maternalized,” embodied, non-hierarchical sodality, an anticulture. The same logic undergirds other categories of condescension (on
grounds of race, disability, sexuality, or what have you), where again the
status of the body—and an intensification of embodiment—is brought to
the fore. The body, then, is a site of profound conceptual ambiguity and
therefore a target of control whose discourse is biopolitics. Gauna
emphasize this ambiguity—the question the body poses to political
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K. Johnson
power—in several ways, which I will characterize as abjection, projection, and
introjection.
Abjection, Projection, Introjection
On the face of it, gauna are protoplasmic monstrosity, a Lovecraftian
“species-of-no-species, the biological empty set” (Thacker 2011, 103). They
would seem to be life reduced to its primordial form: more to the point, life
as flesh, as undifferentiated, vital tissue. Several expository panels
throughout the manga attempt, with unintentional humor, to lay out what
is known of gauna biology, which is effectively nothing. —Not because
humans are ignorant of gauna (though they are that too), but because there
really isn’t much to know, at least at the level of gross anatomy (Fig. 1).
Everything that one might know of them is inscribed in their name itself,
, which might be rendered “weird minor-beings”—creatures not
only strange ( ) but fundamentally so, a strangeness increasing in the
measure to which it is probed; creatures that are subordinate, that are lesser
or derivative (literally “children” ) of being ( ) itself. The cross-sections,
one of an “individual” and one of a “cluster ship,” reveal a creaturewithout-qualities, without organs or metabolic systems, without stable
morphology, without any real structures of any kind save one: the core or
“true body” (hontai
). The sample individual bears a cosmetically
humanoid head but otherwise resembles a squid or ginger root, something
blurring the distinction between animal and vegetable. The sample
collective displays their strange ability to bond to each other’s placenta to
form rigid structures. These structures include everything from armored
bulkheads and “gun” batteries to propulsion systems and more. Most of the
human crew view this malleability with disgust—and indeed gauna are
often depicted as vermicular masses, faceless gorgons, psychoplasms of
dread.7 Because gauna have no particular qualities, but rather any quality
required in the moment—we see them in all sorts of forms, from fungoid to
planetoid, from crustacean to cetacean—they represent a kind of life that is
at once infinite in possibility, but (humanly speaking) empty (Fig. 2).
In his own model of empty or “bare life,” Giorgio Agamben stresses a
mode of abjection activated by sovereign power; bare life is what is left-over
after “proper,” qualified life is violated; bare life is exposed, precarious,
excluded. In the classical model, the integrity of the sovereign is achieved
by the nomination and expulsion of bare life (i.e. “homo sacer”). By
designating an offender as outside the law, the sovereign negatively defines
the boundary of the law. The paradoxical figure of homo sacer is one who
no longer “counts,” juridically speaking, as human (or any other particular
thing, for that matter): homo sacer cannot be sacrificed, because a sacrifice
must have content or value to qualify as a sacrifice—and homo sacer is a
Essays & Ideas: Abjection, Projection, Introjection
65
no-thing; on the other hand, homo sacer may be killed with impunity since
to kill no-thing is not murder. Modern sovereignty, Agamben claims,
paradoxically incorporates bare life into itself, thereby creating permanent
“states of exception,” strange intramural zones (like Gitmo) at once inside
and outside the law. Modern sovereignty, then, begins uncannily to
resemble bare life itself, which is “a zone of indistinction and continuous
transition between man and beast” (Agamben 1998, 109)—this
FIGURE 2
Nihei Tsutomu
vol. 8 (Vertical, 2013).
(b. 1971). “Gauna 493.” Panel from Knights of Sidonia,
indistinction becomes the “concealed...nucleus [or dare we say “true body”?]
of sovereign power” (ibid, 6).
What goes unremarked in Agamben, however, is made explicit in Nihei:
the very blankness and muteness of bare life can amount to a kind of
resistance and aggression. Beyond, before, or beneath the law, bare life need
not answer to it. In his analysis of David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997),
Slavoj Žižek suggests that the proper way to consider the so-called Mystery
Man of that film is “to imagine somebody who doesn’t want anything from
us” (The Pervert's Guide to Cinema). This, he continues is “the true horror of
the Mystery Man: not any evil, demoniac intentions and so on; just the fact
that when he is in front of you, he, as it were, sees through you” (ibid). I
would suggest that the horror of gauna functions in a similar way, and it is
here precisely a horror activated, as it were, by abjection itself, by fleshwithout-reason, denuded of qualities, flesh that insists, repulsively, on
nothing but absorption and reproduction.
Part of the threat embodied by such flesh is the dim light it casts on
human culture, which seems increasingly pathetic (in both the technical
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K. Johnson
and colloquial senses): a massive squandering of bio-energy affording no
perceptible advantages; a filigree; a shoring up of vanities against eventual
ruins; a distraction from the business of survival—culture as a shirking or
denial of our most basic biological priorities in the name of an altogether
specious transcendence. Humans want to think of themselves as more than
the sum of their biological requirements, as superior to other creatures
precisely on account of aspirations beyond “mere” perpetuation of the
species. Such definitions have long (and unflattering) associations with
chauvinistic attitudes regarding the aspirational nature of men as opposed
to the materialistic nature of women. And so once again, the antagonisms at
the heart of Sidonia –human vs gauna; culture vs nature; mind vs body—
seem legible in gendered terms as if that were their ineluctable conceptual
horizon, even while gauna themselves, not to mention characters like Izana
Shinatose, scramble or otherwise complicate the binaries in question. Not
to put too fine a point on it, an outmoded conceptual model undergirds the
antagonisms and is in fact nourished by the illusion of binarism. It
therefore seeks, with ever greater desperation, to assert the fundamental
difference of its terms, which are ever in danger of collapsing into one
FIGURE 3
Nihei Tsutomu
of Sidonia (Vertical, 2013).
(b. 1971). “Gauna attack on Earth.” Panel from Knights
another. The series literalizes this prospect in the form of forbidden
experiments (past and present) with human-gauna hybrids. But I’m
suggesting it is already there in the weird blankness of gauna design, a kind
of abjection that is itself a threat. The “preternatural” flesh of the gauna, the
“placenta” enveloping and protecting their core is not, or not only, a
nurturing membrane but a weaponized surface, a figurative and literal
gender trouble. If the human subject must, according to Julia Kristeva,
Essays & Ideas: Abjection, Projection, Introjection
67
consolidate itself by rejecting the body of the mother, its fearful, mysterious
plumbing, then the crew of the Sidonia must likewise reject gauna in order
to consolidate their fragile identity as humans.8 What is psychomachy in
Kristeva is literal war in Nihei: like mothers, gauna see through us while
remaining themselves opaque.
Because of their opacity, gauna in Nihei’s work function as a screen
onto which humans project their anxieties, their innermost fears regarding
humanity itself. The science fictional context allows Nihei to amplify the
precarity of human definition—Sidonia’s crew reproduce asexually, through
direct genetic manipulation (or cloning); they photosynthesize to preserve
food stores; they experiment with radical prosthesis and life extension; at
least one character, the aforementioned Izana Shinatose, belongs to a new
gender; yet another character, Hiyama, has been transplanted into the body
of a bear, which she “wears” as a sort of life support suit; and so on and so
on. Taken together, these elements fall in line with traditional masculine
fantasies of rational society, of “clean,” controlled technological
reproduction, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Huxley’s Brave New
World and beyond—attempts to circumvent the mysterious plumbing and
reinstitute the species on a new scientific footing. And yet, such fantasies
are practically set up for subversion. Nihei increasingly stages not only the
resistance of biology, but the insistence of the biological, as the gap between
humans and gauna begins, uncannily, to close. The occasional
anthropomorphization of gauna in effect plays up not only their utter
alienness, but at the same time something inhuman at the heart of
humanity itself (Fig. 3). In other words, given all of their radical genetic
modifications, the difference between the crew of Sidonia and their gauna
aggressors is really one of degree, rather than kind. The potential for
human-gauna hybrids indicates, if nothing else, a fundamental
compatibility shared by living things, as does human photosynthesis. If
gauna are nightmarish, they also represent the residue of a very human
dream, alternately utopian and febrile, of collapsing the Great Chain of
Being, accordion-like, upon itself, of envisioning Nature as a single,
uncannily multiform creature, as A BODY.
At a more literal level, however, gauna represent an uncanny
phenomenon of scale, of projection in time and space: not only do
“individual” gauna dwarf humans, as a collective creature, they are
massively distributed in space. Timothy Morton recently coined the term
“hyperobjects” to designate things that, in scalar sublimity, beggar the
imagination—like 80,000-year-old colonies of aspen trees in Utah or the
Magellanic Clouds or, more abstractly, the sum of all raindrops to strike the
earth in a given period. Brute contemplation of such hyperobjects is
impossible for a number of reasons. They are, for example, “viscous,” by
which Morton means that they are woven integrally into the fabric of
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K. Johnson
everything else; they are “non-local,” meaning they cannot be apprehended
at once in their totality, and so on and so on.9 Whereas human life is
confined to the Sidonia, gauna seem to be everywhere; destroyed, they
disintegrate as foam or spores: even the mode of their destruction, if only at
a visual level, suggests endless proliferation. The image of their
disintegration is visually coupled to images of their generation: a recurring
sequence throughout Knights of Sidonia involves an initial radar contact
with a “mass union ship,” followed by a rapid spawning of individual units,
each designated with a tiny “ga” ( )—the katakana indicating not only
FIGURE 4
Nihei Tsutomu
(b. 1971). “Tsumugi Shiraui.” [Note shadowed human
figure on gantry at left for scale.] Panel from Knights of Sidonia (Vertical, 2014).
their foreignness (katakana being used primarily for loan words) and
abstraction (why a character and not some sort of icon or pictograph?10),
but the single syllable their abjection, diminution, or subordination. These
sequences, interestingly, and much of the actual battles, are in fact mediated
by radar screens, which I suppose only stands to reason for combat in deep
space. The speed, the distances, the darkness—all of these render the
human (or even posthuman) eye ineffectual. There is no other way to
process the action apart from the screen. Many panels depict characters
watching battles unfold on a bank of radar and computer screens, first of all
driving home our sense of gauna as a symbolic value—at some level an
abstraction even for the crew of Sidonia—and of the panels themselves as
(for us) metafictions in miniature, images of our own mediated interface
Essays & Ideas: Abjection, Projection, Introjection
69
with the action. Gauna thus become available as well to the reader as a
surface of projection.
The hallucinatory logic that undergirds human relations to gauna, then,
shades quickly from projection to introjection, particularly in the sense
Maria Torok retrieves from the writings of Sándor Ferenczi. In the standard
or Freudian model, introjection is more or less synonymous with
incorporation, the mental swallowing up of others’ traits or behaviors into
one’s own personality. In the context of a loss or absence, as when a child
loses a parent, introjection is a defense mechanism. The child’s egoic
boundaries being somewhat porous anyway, the buffetings of trauma can
lead to introjection as a way of compensating the ego for lost libidinal
investments. The lost object (the parent, for example) survives at some level
in the subject (the child, say) and can therefore “descend from the imaginal
pedestal where the ego’s need for nourishment has placed it” (Torok 1994,
116). The ego, remaining intact, can then “healthily” cast about for other
objects of libidinal investment; it can “move on.” But Torok, returning to
Ferenczi, notes another, slightly different, sense of introjection, one in
which the “unassimilated drives have congealed into an imago, forever
reprojected onto some external object” (ibid). Because the introjection was
incomplete, and the ego left wanting, the object cannot be released, but
must be perpetually resurrected, even if the result is a perpetuation of the
object-as-lost, a prolongation of pain: having unfinished psychic business,
“the ego needs to keep alive at all costs that which causes its greatest
suffering” (ibid).
Gauna as A BODY figure both senses of introjection—the first or
Freudian sense in a literal way (i.e. scenes of actual absorption and
incorporation of objects into gauna flesh); the second or Ferenczian sense
in a subtler way. For Ferenczi, introjection involves multiple, interlocking
elements: “extension of autoerotic interests”; “broadening of the ego
through the removal of repression”; and, further, the extension of the ego to
the external world (ibid, 112). So in addition to representing a horrific
fantasy of introjection in the sense of literal incorporation, gauna also
function as images of introjection in Ferenczi’s more plasmic sense: the
introjected object that remains external to the ego, an ego no longer solely
housed in an individual body, but distributed across A BODY. The human
crew’s relation to Tsumugi Shiraui is an interesting case in point. Tsumugi
is a human-gauna hybrid created by “impregnating” a captured sample of
gauna placenta with a human embryo (Fig. 4). The sample in question
actually possessed the more-or-less human shape of a squadmate, Hoshijiro
Shizuka, who had been earlier killed in battle and literally introjected (i.e.
consumed and then replicated). The crew tend to interact with Shiraui, for
practical reasons of scale, via an extruded appendage capable of worming its
way through Sidonia’s vents and ducts (Fig. 5). Nagate’s affections for
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K. Johnson
Hoshijiro seem, in the wake of her death, to shift to Tsumugi (who does,
after all, in an uncanny way preserve Hoshijiro) and a tender, if unlikely,
romance begins to blossom. Scenes of Nagate appearing to masturbate in
his sleep, supervised by Tsumugi (who may in fact be somehow generating
the erotic content of the dreams), suggest that modes of sexual rapport are
found through an “extension of autoerotic interests.” Tsumugi, or anyway
the appendage for interface, is “herself ” a congeries of genitalia, visually
speaking, a marvel of multipurpose biological design—at once oral, vaginal,
anal, and phallic. Nagate’s eventual marriage to Tsumugi and, more to the
point, child by Tsumugi suggest a complete introjection: Nagate, and by
extension the Sidonia crew, no longer tarries at the scene of trauma, whether
the personal loss of the beloved or the collective loss of the home-planet. If
there is a psychic détente in this sense, it is achieved through the
intermediary of A BODY.
In all three of these modes—abjection, projection, and introjection—
gauna present a challenge, not only to the crew of Sidonia, but to the reader
as well. The uncanny ontological
ramifications of gauna disrupt
many
of
the
conceptual
categories that subtend human
identity. They are, paradoxically,
at
once
subhuman
and
superhuman (or more human
than human), revealing how at a
biopolitical level subhumanity
and superhumanity are often
superimposed. Writing of the
2011 “bath salts” hysteria and
the police violence seemingly
authorized thereby, Rei Terada
points out how in biopolitical
terms “superhumanity functions
as subhumanity”: “[I]t allows
the nonhuman to be eliminated
while releasing the perceiver
from having to answer for seeing
FIGURE 5 Nihei Tsutomu
(b. 1971).
someone
as
nonhuman”
“Tsumugi and Nagate.” Panel from Knights of
(December 10, 2012). In other
Sidonia (Vertical, 2014).
words,
the
“superhuman
strength” reportedly exhibited by users (often homeless and/or black men)
justified police force that would in any other context have been viewed as
cruelly excessive. Knights of Sidonia presents a similar logic whereby the
superhumanity of gauna justifies their eradication. The manga—and in
Essays & Ideas: Abjection, Projection, Introjection
71
particular gauna design—deserve in this respect serious consideration as an
occluded form of speculative biopolitical inquiry. Nihei is perpetrating a
kind of philosophy-by-other-means, resonating with recent trends across
the humanities whereby we confront anew the question of the good life, one
in which not only humans but all creatures great and small are
enfranchised. These issues have assumed especial urgency in this, the
Anthropocene—the age of humanity’s technological ascendance and quite
possible extinction. Speculative works like Knights of Sidonia may well
prove the Enchiridion of such an age, helping us to think ahead of
technical imperatives hustling us toward erasure.
Notes
1
Azuma Hiroki’s notion of “database” (the referent here) is in fairness more a
theory of consumption than production. For Azuma, while “[m]odernity was ruled by
the grand narrative”—meaning a unified social field conditioning the reception of
literary and artistic concepts—postmodernity is defined by the disintegration of grand
narratives in lieu of “databases,” personalized collections of narrative elements to be
freely mixed-and-matched (Azuma 2009, 28 et passim). Nonetheless, the growing
prevalence of “database” consumption over other forms of narrative consumption—in
other words, the consolidation of otaku culture as such, a bloc of magpie-consumers
keyed less to overarching stories or subjectivities than to a set of visual fetishes—does
over time bend back toward the production end of things as otaku exert pressure on the
market and, over time, enter the industry as creators.
2
For those unfamiliar with this series, it is essentially about a space ship of human
survivors fleeing an apparently hostile alien species, the gauna. In many respects,
Knights of Sidonia, is a fairly standard “mechacademy” narrative, but all the genre
conventions in fact seem to be set-ups for Nihei’s subversive sensibility.
3
For example, the duration of the protagonist’s convalescence in vol. 14 is apparent
only when he returns home to find his roommates gone and the house itself covered in
thick foliage.
4
Gauna are typically nominated solely by their order of appearance. Certain gauna,
Gauna 493 for example, are highlighted or tracked because they present an especial risk,
but are not exactly accorded the status of individuals. The one instance of a singular
gauna, Gauna 490, designated “Crimson Hawk Moth” (Benisuzume
), resulted
from fusion with a human mecha pilot, whose form was then “mimicked” by the gauna.
Completing its uncanny replication, Gauna 490 was capable of parroting human speech,
but was incapable of actual communication. In this sense the very form of individuality
only serves to underscore the anonymity or interchangeability of gauna.
5
See Johnson 2013 and 2014.
6See Napier 2005, chs. 5-6.
7
David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979) features “psychoplasmics” as a hypothetical
therapeutic technique, a parodic extrapolation of the Freudian “talking cure.” Whereas
psychoanalysis attempts to treat neurosis by “raising” its precipitating trauma to the
level of consciousness, psychoplasmics attempts to manifest neurosis as a literal
symptom of the flesh, from hives to cancerous tumors. The film’s monsters, like gauna,
are fleshy extrusions of fear and angst.
8
Q.v. The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 3-15.
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K. Johnson
9
See Hyperobjects, pt. 1.
It is, I think, belaboring the point, but those unfamiliar with Japanese scripts
might be interested to know that the katakana “ga” ( )—the voiced variant of “ka”
(
—derives originally from
(increase, add), whose radicals mean “power” ( ) and
“mouth, orifice” ( ), respectively. The katakana character of course bears no lingering
traces of the kanji—it is abstract, phonetic—but given my invocation of Maria Torok, it
seemed appropriate to raise this cryponymic possibility. (See Abraham & Torok, The
Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy.) I should note at the same time, that Sidonia is
itself a loanword whose mecha “knights” are likewise registered on radar/computer
screens with the katakana “shi” ( ). Their battles with gauna when depicted on radar
are therefore “gashigashi”
(rough, boisterously energetic).
10
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