“It Is Time To Become A Part Of All Things”: Understanding Identity Outside Of Humanist Ontology

The following thesis analyzes two anime works by Japanese filmmaker Mamoru Oshii, Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, in order to theorize a way of being outside of humanist ontology through the subversive cyborg politics dramatized within the films. Both films reveal the failure of humanist paradigms in accounting for identity and provide an alternative, more holistic model of existence that emphasizes interconnectivity over human individualism that pivots on human’s self-made exclusivity. In Ghost in the Shell and Innocence, humanist paradigms are suggested to prescribe ready-made ways of perceiving and interacting with the world such that new ways of being are precluded. By embracing the hybridity of cyborgs, which inherently subverts dominant institutions and State ideologies, one may effectively resist (post)modern biopolitics, which appropriate life itself, and bifurcate to become a part of all things.