Beyond the Body: Kafka’s ＂The Metamorphosis＂ and Gibson’s ＂Neuromancer＂

This essay explores the problem of the human/non-human interface, or the transition from human to non-human, in Kafka's ”The Metamorphosis” and Gibson's ”Neuromancer”. I begin by reading Gregor Samsa's transformation in the light of Kafka's ”On Parables”: here we get the notion of a human subject's ”becoming-parable,” which I interpret in terms of a possible equivalence (or equivocation) of what Lacan calls the énoncé (statement) and énonciation (speech act). I then read Gregor's becoming-animal as a becoming ”parable-subject”: his crucial problem is that he is caught in-between the human-state and insect-state, unwilling to let go of the first and afraid to fully enter into the latter; my analysis of ”becoming-parable” as a move-across into the incomprehensible that leaves us in ”infinite suspension” offers a way of interpreting this. Gibson's Case is similarly caught between human body-subject and something Other, in this case no-body (”digital body”). He has ”become-digital” to the degree that he has been able to freely jack into cyberspace, but (as in the derivative ”Matrix” films) this has always allowed a return-to-body: Case, however, dreads the extreme of being ”pure meat.” On the other hand he fears to become machine/matrix intelligence fully ”translated into binary codes,” or into cyberspace. The key issue for both Kafka and Gibson is that of subjectivity and its possible limits, which are tested and perhaps transcended by such notions as animal-subject, digital-subject and parable-subject.