“As if Possessed by a Demon”: Subjectivity, Possession, and Undeadness in Metal Gear Solid

Abstract

Engaging with psychoanalysis and philosophy, this essay maps the collapse of human sovereignty in Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid video game series by pursuing the figure of the liquid hand that moves between characters, undercutting identity and selfhood. A unique theoretical intervention in the discourses of posthumanism and deconstruction, this essay carves out a coenesthetic intervention into the malleability of the human shape and reimagines how Game and Media Studies can equip us to analyze the relationships between self and other, bodily modification, prosthetics, and violence. Playing out the threat of agential uncertainty and destabilizing the safe markers of self and other through which life and bodies define themselves in media, the series establishes a Geschlecht, a genre and community all its own, but one predicated upon the disorganization and defamiliarization of subjectivity.