/lit/ - Literature

this is a pretty interesting puzzle for ethics. one cardinal rule - never draw your knife on another soldier - immediately presupposes the next: what constitutes the soldier? after all, most of the soldiers at Mother Base are themselves forcibly kidnapped from Afghanistan, and given new directives. what you don't see - Eli accepted - is a lot of bucking of that system. the Boss is not a tyrant, and most seem to be pretty satisfied with his rule, even to hilariously masochistic degrees ('It is a pleasure to be held in your iron grip, Boss!')

there is nothing to 'deconstruct' underneath this. but Eli/White Mamba/Liquid - who is Kefka by another name, and perhaps even Sun Wukong in the absence of the Buddha - understands that if there are no rules, there are also no reasons to follow them. down this road leads his own very authentic brand of antagonism. nor is it to be overlooked that Venom himself later becomes the tyrant of Outer Heaven, but this too because he is himself not entirely outside of this world of exchanges and deceptions; he is a clone himself, a copy without an original.

even in GITS the same questions about the nature of identity and originality are asked in ways far more prescient than modern ideologues over in the West can do. Kusanagi doesn't go looking for an irreducible core of her own identity; in the end, GITS closes with a view of the city, the net vast and infinite. or, conversely, a core of identity tapped into might as well lead only to Akira's tetsuo becoming-monstrous.

i wonder if Deleuze ever saw Akira; my guess is that he didn't, which is a pity. Tetsuo's final form seems like a pretty horrifying Spinozistic being, all expansion to the limitless, quasi-divine and hideous at the same time.