The Prosthetic God: Memory, Mortality, and the Posthuman Condition in the Death Note
Keywords:
Posthumanism, Prosthetic Amnesia, Existential Ennui, Manga, Distributed AgencyAbstract
In this paper, the author develops a posthumanist reading of the manga Death Note, claiming that the series works as an important literary-visual commentary on the instability of the human subject. It puts forward three primary arguments that question the traditional techno-centrism of the posthumanist theory. The first argument sees Death Note as a supernatural prosthesis and the Shinigami Ryuk as a non-human agent, the relationship between which form a network of distributed agency that functions within the plane of the magical. Second, this paper theorizes the strategic memory loss of Light Yagami as an instance of so-called "prosthetic amnesia", performing an analysis on his self-reprogramming as an example of so-called prosthetic identity in which the self is shown to be an externalized, programmable entity. It lastly juxtaposes the existential boredom of its main character, the defiantly immortal Ryuk (a gerontological commentary on the fantasy of eternal life) with the "gerontophobia" of the mortal Light, whose divine ambitions in the god-like powers of the devil are marked as a violent escape of mortality. Through its discussion of these overlapping themes, the paper shows how a well-known graphic narrative might be used as a crucial thought experiment in the diffusion of posthumanist theory beyond the machine to consider perennial questions of agency, identity, and mortality
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