ABSTRACT
Shirow Masamune’s cyborg manga Kōkaku kidōtai: The Ghost in the Shell, which began serialization in 1989, proposes the cyborg as a techno-philosophical challenge to Cartesian dualism. Shirow’s manga oscillates between two different kinds of challenges, sometimes emphasizing the pragmatic dimension of making cyborgs and of regulating the generation of new kinds of intelligence and existence; sometimes stressing the speculative dimension through the surprise of the emergence of new life forms. The dominant paradigm emerges, however: that of securing the ghost within the shell and subordinating the speculative to the pragmatic, culminating in a politics of suppressing or overcoming threats to personal and national sovereignty. Yet another tendency persists, with a different relation between the pragmatic and the speculative. This minor tendency does not simply stress the speculative power of the ghost over and above the shell. It strives for a fusion of different dimensions without loss of difference. If we are to contest and move beyond the dominant tendency toward personal and national sovereignty in The Ghost in the Shell, we must stick to these moments when the ghost (and the speculative) is not in the shell but in its world. These moments open into cyborg empiricism.
