ABSTRACT
I have begun with this particular quote because initially I want to use Freud to ground Rickels’ reading of the dead in German literature. Following this I aim to develop a theory of flying saucers and alien legends. The part of Rickels’ book, Aberrations of Mourning (1988) that discusses the idea of flying saucers expands a reading of Kafka’s story ‘The aeroplanes at Brescia’ (1909) to consider the relevance of aliens to the development of the technological age and the prosthetic hypothesis. In this chapter of Aberrations of Mourning, ‘Warm brothers’, Rickels considers how Kafka’s story represents the birth of this technological historical period. In this case Kafka’s early cyborg is the ‘living airplane’:
Rather than the airplane modelling a bird, the bird, in the manner of a Kafkan metamorphosis, can be said to have been transformed into a living airplane.
