ABSTRACT
The cyborg is often said to challenge the subject-object and mind-matter oppositions associated with Cartesian dualism. Haraway's cyborg implied a blurring of ontological distinctions between humans and machines, and this blurring of machine-human distinctions appeared to subvert received social distinctions and hierarchies related to nature and artifice, machine and human. Building on Haraway's commitment to thinking the relation, the chapter considers Shirow's cyborgs from the angle of expanded empiricism, drawing on the radical empiricism of William James and the non-dualism of Nishida Kitaro. These thinkers share with Haraway a commitment to posing questions of the self and subjectivity beyond the normative framework of dualism. Serialized between April 1989 and November 1990 and released in book format in Japanese and in English, Shirow's The Ghost in the Shell consists of eleven story-chapters set between 2029 and 2030. While the manga distinguishes between having a "ghost" and not having one, new entities appear that undermine that distinction.
