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

Introduction

Metal Gear Solid's Vulcan Raven, having just had his M1 Abrams tank disabled by protagonist Solid Snake, says of Snake that “in battle, he is as if possessed by a demon” (Metal Gear Solid, 1998). Raven's comment might be read as referencing the player, who functions as a possessive spirit controlling the game's main character. Such a reading would fit well within the robust discourse on player interactivity, agency, and control that has prevailed in the field of ludology and Game Studies for some time, as well as in popular conversations surrounding Metal Gear Solid's themes of meta-commentary and control (Brown, 2018; Stang, 2019; Youngblood, 2017). Yet if Solid Snake is possessed, haunted, it is not by an agency that can be reduced to the player. Raven senses, rather, the presence of some invisible, malevolent power occupying Snake's body that exceeds the player, that might haunt the player as well, that appears only as if it is a simple matter of direct command. Raven supplies here an invitation to interrogate the intrusion, possession, and spectral subterfuge of bodies and subjects, in a series of games that are about nothing if not infiltration.

This interrogation will unfold an argument of the undecidability of control and agency that weaves through the entire Metal Gear Solid series. The series complicates the distinctions between subject and object, irrevocably disturbing the boundaries of self and other that structure our understanding of games themselves and how we think of them. The guiding figure for this viscous ensemble of agency and subjectivity will be the hand, the symbol of control, possession, and conduct itself, which in the series becomes ghostly, demonic, and liquid.

The Metal Gear Solid series, under the guidance of auteur Hideo Kojima, spans from 1998's Metal Gear Solid (MGS1) to 2015's Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (MGSV). “As a franchise, Metal Gear Solid represents sophisticated and coherent world building that has allowed the brand to thrive for more than a quarter of a century” (Murray, 2018, p. 185). The franchise is, in fact, a long drama of possession and dispossession, of the threat of bodily obsolescence and the collapse of the self. “At the centre” of this commercially and critically successful series, Rachael Hutchinson (2020) suggests, is the “crisis of identity” (Hutchinson, 2020, p. 164). “Famous for its stealth action, odd humor, convoluted storylines, and its technically marvelous cutscenes” (Higgin, 2010, p. 252), Metal Gear Solid dramatically emphasizes the body as a site for catastrophe, as a fragile and slippery container for subjectivity—often in ways that are at once brutal, torturous, and supernatural. The series thereby carves out a coenesthetic intervention into the malleability of the human shape that is uniquely possible in the medium of video games, through an intense focus on bodies that are endlessly threatened, disintegrating, and reconstituting. Within that reconstitution lurks always the spectral other, the question of an origin animating life.

The series’ uncertainty about bodies reveals significant anxiety concerning the vulnerability of human life. This anxiety emerges repeatedly as disability, deformation, and disfigurement. Beyond the constant threats of harm ubiquitous to action games, Kojima's major characters frequently undergo intense violence, “extremes of torture and experimentation” (Hutchinson, 2020, p. 165), that have radical implications that are both physical and psychological (Girina, 2019, p. 142). Early in 1998's Metal Gear Solid, for example, series-spanning rival Revolver Ocelot's right hand is severed by a katana; in 2004's Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, protagonist Naked Snake—Solid Snake's forebearer and namesake—is blinded in one eye after it is shot out from a bullet fired at point-blank range. Such “instances of unabashed aestheticized violence” are a “franchise signature” (Stamenković et al., 2017, p. 18), and are emblematic of the remarkable vulnerability of its corporeal subject. Far from the endlessly regenerating, always whole, self-assured, sovereign masculinist action game hero of most popular military games, Metal Gear Solid is populated by characters gradually crumbling, ageing, and being picked clean. It is within these moments of breakage, through such disfigured and disabled characters, that Kojima stages a posthuman spectacle of life's defamiliarization and othering. ¹

This essay maps the collapse of human subjectivity in the Metal Gear Solid series (MGS). Although scholars have previously considered the series’ representation of corporeal and psychical violence (Green, 2017; Girina, 2019), as well as its commentary on player interactivity, agency, and control, this essay's intervention lies in framing this examination through posthumanist and deconstructionist discourse, primarily through the work of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Beyond any questions of authorial intent attributable to Kojima as its creator, MGS exhibits a theoretical affinity with the thinking of scientifico-techno-somaticity and ontological uncertainty. Possession, subjective destitution, and undeadness, which constitute a constellation of themes found within the work of Derrida and Lacan, dominate the Metal Gear Solid universe as well. Reading the series through the lens of posthumanist and deconstructionist thought elucidates its relationship not only with the othering of the self but with bodily modification and reappropriation.

Closely examining instances that confuse the liminal boundaries of life/death, human/machine, self/other, this essay reveals not only that Kojima and the Metal Gear Solid series are fellow travelers of posthuman thought, but that the series is itself a deconstructionist text that theorizes (post)human subjectivity, agency, and control. Like David Lynch's films, Kojima's series “undercuts the uniqueness of human subjects,” forcing us to consider “human beings as merely things to be copied or inhabited” (Weinstock, 2016, p. 43). The present inquiry, then, analyzes how the Metal Gear Solid series at large allows for a glimpse of subjectivity as viscous fluid, as movement, with and without form—animal, spectral, other. In case it is imagined that the spectral return of deconstructionist thinking to game studies belies an ahistorical approach, or that the applicability of such analysis is dependent upon the philosophical commitments of MGS's author(s), the reading below demonstrates the continued operation of what goes by the name of “poststructuralist thought” and what goes by the name of Metal Gear Solid at the cutting edge of how the terrain of the political, and of the living, are to be decided.

Technologies of (Dis)possessing the Self

One of the most well-known tropes of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (MGS2) is that political events are not really due to the democratic processes with which we are familiar, but rather are entirely orchestrated. In the game, this is attributable to a shadowy organization known somewhat ironically (or perhaps not?) as the Patriots. As James Johnson, fictional 44th US president, articulates: “Politics, the military, the economy—they control it all. They even choose who becomes President… Putting it simply, the Patriots rule this country” (MGS2, 2001). Eventually, however, the Patriots are revealed not to be a shadowy organization of persons deciding our fate at all, but a collection of artificial intelligences tasked with organizing the state. The Patriots are, according to MGS2's Colonel Roy Campbell, more of a consciousness beyond corporeality that will exist “As long as this nation exists” (MGS2, 2001). The Patriots, here, are pure ideology. Could not something similar be said of life itself, that it is a puppeteering that seems to originate nowhere else but in its subjects, who imagine its essence to be their own and which sets into motion nation and politics as the terrain of selfhood?

Burrowing ever deeper into the territory, the threat of alarm increases. This is a matter of difficulty. Possession names this surreal terror, the terror of becoming-surreal, of losing control, of never having had it, intertwined with the fantasy of control and total ownership. The ur-figure of control and of possession is the hand. The hand is surreal, disembodied—it has a life of its own. It arrives from nowhere and slices open the real, a fount for the swarm of life, giving life and taking it away, opening life up and holding it. ² The hand both releases and holds back the swarm of life. But that tension returns: is the hand a figure of control, or of its lack? Roberto Esposito contends that western culture is defined by “the absolute primacy of having over being” (Esposito, 2017, p. 18), that the very logic of our ontology refers ultimately to an economics of possession. From this vantage, in the notion of “our hand as the organ that humanizes the world by creating artifacts or sealing promises, there is a tendency to neglect a much more ancient act, that of bare appropriation. The thing belongs first and foremost to whoever grabs it” (Esposito, 2017, p. 19). The surreal hand, however, is nothing if not the specter of possession holding out to us its own (dis)possession. Its violent riotousness throws into question the premise of the owning grasp of Man, through which something of the held object always streams. Kojima's series will equip us to advance further into this domain.

The surreally alive yet disconnected arm, hand, or fist is the primary tool with which the MGS series exercises and exorcizes theories and ideas of possession. This possessing mandible, the para-phenomenon of the spectral grasp, also threatens the loss of control of mind and body. The series itself is a palimpsestic (meta)narrative of control lost: the guiding hand of the author/auteur increasingly eroded, as Kojima and Konami are less and less in agreement, resulting in a final series entry often criticized as unfinished; the tenuous grip of the player, who begins the first Metal Gear Solid under the assumption of controlling a durable and reliable protagonist, only to find themselves in Metal Gear Solid V operating Venom Snake, a damaged replica of Solid Snake's own clonic origin; ³ and the hands of characters themselves, cut and mangled until Venom Snake's “phantom pain,” his absent hand, shrouds the narrative world in mist. The machinations of the autonomous arm, hand, or fist, the phantom limb, are the series’ invisible hand, sculpting its subjectivities.

The character of Revolver Ocelot is a touchstone for this process. Appearing in some form in almost every entry in the series (and referenced in all of them), Revolver Ocelot is the container, the chamber, into which the series’ preoccupation with manipulation is loaded, his own positionality rotating, spinning, clicking into place—and, finally, sliding out of it. His subjectivity is ever re-staked, his narrative role never stagnant or predictable. He is constantly in a state of metamorphosis—especially beginning in MGS2—on account of a demonic hand, a hand that threatens to, and eventually does, overtake his body and mind. ⁴ Ocelot embodies a process of depersonalization engendered by the spectral authorial other, the agency from nowhere, the fixture manipulating life, the uncanny arm. We move then, like Matthew Weise (2018), to continue reading MGS2 here beyond its common reduction to some point on the invention of the internet, or (more recently) a “post-truth” (Weise, 2018) world, approaching it instead as a philosophical meditation on the production of the self.

In MGS2, it is revealed that the hand that Ocelot lost during the “Shadow Moses incident” (the events of the first game) has been surgically replaced with the arm of that game's primary antagonist, Liquid Snake, who dies at the close of MGS1. Via transplant surgery funded by the Patriots, Liquid's arm is grafted onto Ocelot's, retaining, as will increasingly become clear as the narrative progresses, the murderous, diabolical drive of its power-hungry original owner, and resistant to the will of Ocelot. As MGS2's “Tanker” prequel concludes, the eponymous ship, the USS Discovery, begins to take on water. Ocelot readies himself to hijack the new Metal Gear RAY walking-tank prototype housed in the ship's underbelly—suddenly his right arm begins to spasm, violently and uncontrollably. Unable to subdue the trembling, Ocelot loses control not only of his arm, but of his body, and seemingly his mind as well. Something demonic and supernatural emerges as the ship's hangar is rocked by explosions and water rushes in, as the ship is itself possessed by the liquid that will draw it down to the bottom of the Hudson River: Liquid Snake lives on through his arm, using Ocelot's body as a puppet. “It's been a while, brother” (MGS2, 2001), Liquid greets Solid Snake from Ocelot's mouth. In the coming years, Liquid's subjectivity will come to fill Ocelot's body, as water takes to its container.

The hand—clutching, gesturing, demonstrating, writing—has long been claimed as the somatic seat of essential humanity, the appendage within which grasping, language, and thinking coincide. “Only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can handily achieve works of handicraft,” as Heidegger (2008, p. 380) says. The hand emerges where the human being works itself into shape by touching, reaching out through language and thought to others. “The hand both gives and withdraws the meaning of the message” (Derrida, 2005b, p. 143); the human hands itself over, its message is itself. Heidegger loses touch with the human precisely where he handles it: the hand's reticent message, shared and not shared, is given in the language of an undecidability by which the human thinks itself, writes itself, presents itself with the gift of a unique species-life that is utterly tenuous.

Liquid's hand further confuses the narrative of a solid humanity as the narrative of the hand. Hardly the limb of an ineradicable humanness, the liquid hand seems to embody all the infectious, viral semi-life of the nonhuman as it creeps into the bodies of other characters. This hand is not what manifests and thinks human personhood, but what disrupts and subverts it—Liquid's hand is the human organ par excellence playing out its full inhumanity. This is not a contradiction of the Heideggerean point, but precisely the taking of it beyond its limit: if the hand of the human gives humanity, then the human is human only by virtue of holding onto its hands; the hand, then, truly is the site of “human nature” and so it is the living graft of that nature. Liquid's hand functions otherwise, as the “phantom limb” that has haunted, and will haunt Venom Snake, the Snake in disguise, in MGSV as absence and loss: this hand is itself haunted by the ghost of a shadow humanity. In his meditation on human and animal being in The Open, Giorgio Agamben (2004) traces the old theological questions of the integrity of the human body and its resurrection upon the day of judgment thus: “If, for example, a thief—who had later repented and been redeemed—had had a hand amputated, would the hand be rejoined to the body at the moment of resurrection?” (Agamben, 2004, p. 17). Metal Gear Solid twists this question inside out: what if a thief, unrepented and unredeemed, had a hand amputated, joined to the body of another, and was resurrected through them? The dark success of this operation is perhaps its own theological answer: the sundering and rejoining of our bodies promises only further divisions, and there is no final redemption.

The hand of MGS, like the phallus after which many of its serpentine primary characters appear to be named, takes on the uncanny sentience of an autonomous object that threatens depersonalization and dispossession even as it is the evidence of their impossibility. Not even the limits of the hand itself are clear, for the hand comes armed with the arm. Hence MGS2's repeated focus on Liquid's arm, rather than his hand: “This damn right arm….It's almost as if it's having its revenge” (MGS2, 2001) Ocelot complains; “I live on, through this arm” (MGS2, 2001) says Liquid, in an early moment of emergence through Ocelot's control. The arming of the hand, the possession of a weapon is the banal fact of the military genre. Yet the site and source of this possession are not at all clear in the face of arms that possess: the ID-tagged guns of Metal Gear Solid 4 (MGS4, 2008) withdraw their use from those without proper identity; Phantom Pain antagonist Skull Face disappears through the mist in the hand of walking tank Sahelanthropus; Venom Snake's own amputated hand is weaponized via an array of militarized prosthetics. The arming of the hand is no simple matter here of appropriating dead material, but the interrogation of the boundaries of the hand's very extension, writ somatically.

Animating its uncanny threat, the arm transplants the secret of alterity upon its subject, making possible the depersonalization and radical undermining of subjectivity, precipitating the complete evacuation of the embodied subject. As Jordan Youngblood (2017) frames the issues around an early entry in the series, “Much of MGS2 revolves around ripping down the idea of an ‘original,’ leaving instead a series of actions that add up to an identity” (Youngblood, 2017, p. 217). In this case, the ripping apart is literal, and from there no move to scrub the other away, to re-amputate, can succeed in reconstituting a whole self. Ocelot's attempt to do precisely this, when he has Liquid's arm removed and replaced with a mechanized prosthetic after the events of MGS2, utterly fails—Liquid's consciousness remains within his own, eventually superseding it. All of this suggests a drama of difference, of metamorphosis that “centers around the transformation and emulation into Otherness” (Cheng, 2009, p. 79). As that otherness multiplies, as particular others force themselves into the sovereign space of the self, neither the always-different other nor any original self can fully assert control. In MGS4, the series’ latest chronological entry, this leaves the player and an increasingly decrepit Solid Snake to confront a figure who is neither Liquid Snake nor Revolver Ocelot but their amalgam: Liquid Ocelot.

A nightmarish partial object, marked by “an excess of obscene life” (Žižek, 2006b, p. 182), Liquid's arm cannot only magically animate itself beyond death, but can radically undermine subjectivity as such. Whether it be “Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist . . . [or] feet which dance by themselves” (Freud, 2020, p. 606), there is an unmistakable uncanniness surrounding the impossible motion of the liberated organ that lives in estrangement from its original body. This life comes seemingly from nowhere, just where it should be missing. Liquid's hand lives this liberation, however, in attachment, until eventually it is Ocelot's body, his subjectivity, his entire being, that becomes the partial object, that no longer seems to fit.

During the Big Shell Incident of MGS2, taking place in 2009, Liquid's amputated hand is an undead machine, an excess of life that seems immune from death, that has gone on producing subjectivity beyond its biological function. By the time the narrative events of MGS4 take place, in the then-near-future of 2014, Ocelot is no longer able to sustain a safe difference from his coexistent double, enacting what Slavoj Žižek (2016), in his reading of subjective destitution in Shakespeare's Richard II, deems “a properly psychotic identification with the symptom” (Žižek, 2016, p. 215). The music that Richard hears while he is in his prison cell drives the character to such “painful madness” that the only way to relieve the “unbearable pressure” is “to directly identify with it” (Žižek, 2016, p. 215). Likewise, Ocelot's conflict of de- and re-subjectivization begins with an over-identification with the partial object: Liquid's autonomous hand. These objects, musical, conducting, lack nothing—it is rather their over-fullness of life's otherness that renders them partial to, disposed to, that previously-total body that now seems itself to be the object defined by a lack. Liquid's hand, the liquid hand that flows into the container of Ocelot's life and gropes for its corners, is partial “like the intensities under which a unit of matter always fills space…pure positive multiplicities where everything is possible” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2009, p. 309). The hand, structured as a double, stages “a mortal competition with the subject,” and Ocelot's consistency as a subject relies on this “symptom-double” (Žižek, 2016, p. 215). When it becomes “structurally impossible” for one to “get rid of the symptom,” the only way to relieve such tension, Žižek (2016) claims, is “to become one's own symptom” (Žižek, 2016, p. 215). And so Ocelot becomes his hand, and becomes L/liquid.

Prosthetic Sovereignty and Otherness

Ocelot's arm transplant—his prosthetic partial object—gives way to otherness. The prosthesis is not that which makes the subject's incomplete body whole again; rather, it is the very thing that deconstructs assumptions of wholeness (Wills, 1995, p. 43). To be sure, the prosthesis is neither a complication of “presence or absence,” or “of possession or dispossession,” but is instead that which calls into question bodily difference by “automatically inscribing its effect of otherness” (Wills, 1995, p. 43) onto the subject to which it is attached. MGS reveals how the replacement of a lost limb with a prosthetic portends an alienation of ourselves from ourselves.

Rather than simply being attached to the body, body and prosthesis become attached, become partial, to one-another. “No amputation,” David Wills (1995) writes,

is performed without the forethought of a workable prosthesis; the knife doesn't strike indiscriminately but is guided by the range of prostheses that wait, parasitic, for a suitable host. In this respect the prosthetic possibility determines the shape of the human, the artificial determines the form of the natural. (Wills, 1995, p. 29)

With respect to the Liquid/Ocelot conflict in MGS, we must ask a similar question: “who is [the] master and how can we be so sure that he controls the puppet and not the other way around?” (Oliver, 2011, p. 262). What/who, in this prosthetic contest of taking hold, controls control? To ask the foundational question of the hand in gaming: what are the controls?

The sovereign machinery by which agency and impotence are meted out is predicated upon a dichotomy between them, which is also, for Agamben, the dichotomy of the master and the slave (Agamben, 2016). Yet MGS explodes this—we do not simply have a hand controlling its body, a slave controlling its master, but two others supplementing one-another in a viral cohabitation where the sovereign site is by no means clear. True, an other might attempt to “rob us of our possibilities, alienate us from ourselves, and make us feel in [their] service” (Murphy, 1987, p. 114), but such an other loses their radical difference: no longer an other, they become a master. In MGS2, however, the other arrives radically, violently, from an unknown and unanticipated elsewhere, monstrously and through Ocelot's monstrations, his body and mind opened “like a door: opened to the stranger, to the other . . . . [to] the figure of the absolute to-come,” which “can only announce itself in the form of monstrosity” (Derrida, 2005a, pp. 56–57). This otherness takes shape, and keeps its difference. MGS2's official script explains that, during a conversation with Solidus Snake (another clone), “Ocelot tries to restrain [his] runaway arm in vain” as it “starts to move convulsively,” eventually pointing “the barrel of [Ocelot's] gun straight at his own temple” (The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2, 2002), prompting the following in-game conversation: Solidus Snake:

It's happening again?

Ocelot, speculating on what incites this spasmodic behavior, supposes that the arm animates itself whenever Solid Snake, Liquid's twin, is nearby. MGS2's script attests to this, explaining that the arm's increasingly conscious behavior is a “flag of [Solid Snake's] proximity” (The Document of Metal Gear Solid 2, 2002). Liquid's renegade limb pursues a spatio-temporal structured referentiality: cognizant of the proximity of its own, twin (br)other, the hand not only becomes capable of thinking and acting on its own, but of influencing its host.

As such, Liquid's uncanny arm bears witness to a special kind of desubjectivizing violence. Not only does the arm have the capacity “to impede or block the will and designs” of Ocelot himself, but it also functions as a “quasi-agent or force” with its own “trajectories, propensities, or tendencies” (Bennet, 2007, p. viii). Yet if the outcome of MGS2 is desirable for the Patriots, who succeed in executing what is revealed to be only an impossibly complex training mission for Raiden (the primary player-character of this entry) and consolidating their ideological and political control over the modern globe, it is through the simultaneous success and failure of the machinations of both Ocelot and the emergent Liquid. Operating as a thieving agent of chaos, the arm steals Ocelot's agency from himself, subverting his plan to support the Patriots into a showdown with Solid Snake. But Snake survives, and the Sons of Liberty anti-Patriot terrorist group is mostly wiped out. Liquid's arm, in short, divides flesh from flesh, purpose from purpose, introducing a contortion and caesura within the sovereign subject and its telos that will trouble, but not yet disrupt, ⁵ ideological dominance. If Ocelot's body and mind are stolen from him, then, he is also given the gift of an other agency and the opportunity of giving himself away, as he gives away his ultimate purpose at the close of most entries in the series.

In our relationship with the prosthesis, we are deprived of the supposed certainty of a sovereign self that instantiates space, distance, separation, and relation. According to Derrida (2009), the technology of “a prosthetic supplement . . . comes to replace, imitate, relay, and augment the living being” (Derrida, 2009, p. 187). The supplemental not only replaces any imagined original but creates originality, a simultaneous usurpation and collaboration by which the supplement mimics the sovereignty of the subject, both unmaking and remaking it. If one's relation to themselves, their sovereign subjectivity, is predicated on spacing and division from others, the prosthesis forecloses this precisely because flesh and object—the organic and the inorganic, the original and the copy—become confused. Object enters into flesh, subject becomes object; simultaneously and in fluctuation, “the dichotomy between interiority and exteriority breaks down” (Horton, 2023, p. 95). A prosthesis is, according to Derrida (1978), a “deprivation,” something that not only “institutes and informs my relation to my life,” but indeed with it “I no longer am my body” (Derrida, 1978, p. 226). MGS disassembles the fable of a prosthetic straightforwardly controlled or possessed by the one who uses it. Prosthetics render subjectivity impossible, placing the sovereign body in parenthesis.

The prosthesis embodies the paradoxical relationship between the impossibility of the subject's endurance, and its obscene preservation. As an instance of “the logic of the supplement,” the prosthesis refers not only to the literal appendages of a disability but more broadly to “the play of differance…the economy of differance” (Harvey, 1988, pp. 60–70). In this economy, language, writing, and the innumerable accouterments of our world arrive in supplement to a self itself a supplement. The supplemental shadow radically subdivides the subject, plunging it into an undecidable shade where it lives on, monstrously, as “desubjectivized living dead, frail specters” (Žižek, 1999, p. 51). Throughout MGS many characters, such as the Cyborg Ninja or the later, cyborg version of Raiden, “are augmented in various ways, testing the limits of human physicality” (Hutchinson, 2020, p. 166) epitomizing a radical “division into otherness” (Wills, 1995, p. 44). Yet so too are many of the series’ characters subjectival and “organic” cyborgs, which would include not only Liquid Ocelot but the three clones of Big Boss, as well as the many characters supplemented by the nanomachines and various parasites that frequently invade characters’ bodies. In this landscape of ubiquitous prosthesis is the obscene undeadness of life itself, propped up by its opposite. The prosthetic subject returns, again and again, not only as a rearticulated or differently stratified self but one “no longer structured in the same way, or structured at all” (Malins, 2004, p. 88). It is the structure of life that is itself contingent, remaining always to be (re)made with the other.

The Lamella; or, the Return of the Dead

Amy M. Green (2017) asserts that the Metal Gear Solid series is, at its core, an examination of physical and psychical violence. This violence is exemplified in the state of the bodies that populate MGSV: “Snake is missing an eye and his left arm from about the elbow down; the sniper Quiet is set on fire during the game's opening sequence but survives her gruesome injuries; Kazuhira Miller is missing an arm and a leg; Skull Face is drastically deformed” (Green, 2017, p. 58). No matter how critical their “physical and psychological wounds,” these characters have the peculiar capacity to “simply continue to endure and survive” (Green, 2017, p. 58). Characters such as “Liquid, Solid, Solidus, the Genome Soldiers, Gray Fox, and Raiden . . . suffer unimaginable pain and torment” (Hutchinson, 2020, p. 167) with varying degrees of physical destruction, and yet they persist in living.

The true tragedy of these figures is not the fact that many of them ultimately do die, nor is it that many of them fail to die and so suffer ongoing torment, but that, more precisely, they fail to die properly. “The ultimate resilience of humanity in Metal Gear Solid,” Rachael Hutchinson (2020) argues, “is the strength of the individual will to live, the sense of ‘myself,’ that continues despite almost complete loss of the original physical body” (Hutchinson, 2020, p. 167). As Revolver Ocelot asks the Cyborg Ninja in MGS1, “Can’t you even die right!?” ⁶ The obscenity of these supplemental and supplementalized subjects, who are caught in an endless cycle of destruction and reanimation, ⁷ is not their difference from a humanity that would actually be properly whole, but their capacity to introduce a caesura within the very limit of life itself, at the brink. The rightness of death disappears, and death comes to supplement and be supplemented by life, within the plane of play. The failure of failure that Rob Gallagher (2012) has diagnosed in the series around the theme of sex (Gallagher, 2012, p. 406) appears here as the very failure of the basic dualism of life and death and the teleology of life, the incapacity to follow through correctly upon the failure of the living body, particularly under extreme duress.

Liquid Snake, through the image of his persistent, possessing hand, is the series’ exemplary undead figure. He is the subject without subjectivity, indeed without object or body, “a subject who is no longer a person, whose objective correlative is no longer a body (organism), but only a partial object (organ)” (Žižek, 2016, p. 215). Neither living nor dead, Liquid embodies the haunted and haunting spirit-space of the undead, residing beyond the borders of ontology and life itself. This “uncanny excess of life” (Žižek, 2006a, p. 41), situated upon this undead, partial, liquid object, conjures the features of Jacques Lacan's lamella. The lamella is the “indivisible, indestructible, and immortal” (Žižek, 2006a, p. 41) remainder that survives death and dismemberment. “Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella” (Lacan, 1998, p. 197). ⁸ The lamella reverberates at the undecidable limit of life and death.

The lamella is undeadness without dying—again, an inability to die, to die right. Liquid's hand palpates in the lamellan texture: a “frightening phantasy image of fleshiness” (Stephens, 2021, p. 278) that “goes everywhere” (Lacan, 1998, p. 197). Liquid's hand fingers the lamella itself, infinitely divisible and ineradicable, proliferating in life where there should be death. Liquid's hand, embodying “the mucous membrane lining of the fleshy skin,” survives “any division” or “any scissiparous intervention” (Lacan, 1998, p. 197). Death too creeps here, coming to us in the guise of life. The lamella, “a representation of life,” is pure libido and therefore “indestructible” (Brousse, 1995, p. 114). “It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, or irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life. It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction” (Lacan, 1998, p. 198). Life possessing life, possessed by life. Liquid's hand takes hold of the lamella, flicking it about as it writhes.

This hand, this “stubborn attachment” (Evans, 2008, p. 3) that usurps the sovereignty of the subject and of life itself, is a guarantor of (dis)possession. Determined to supersede Ocelot's autonomy, depriving him of his subjectivity, stripping him of his control, the hand is an agent that divides and steals, “by effraction,” as it were, the subject from themselves, and institutes a “difference within the flesh” (Derrida, 1978, p. 226). For Derrida, the “persecuting arm” (1978, 228–229) is the exemplary dispossessory agent. The arm may be the occasional embodied place for a tremendous dispossession: “the deprivation of myself, the elusion of my existence . . . the simultaneous theft of both my body and my mind: my flesh” (Derrida, 1978, p. 225). Living on in the lamella, possessing and dispossessing, dispersing and disquieting life, Liquid is the alien hand within Ocelot that “pesters” (Ivanchikova, 2021, p. 72) and gives way to “decay, putrefaction, and death (Basu Thakur, 2020, p. 50). Existing as both “the loss of Being” and the “Being of loss” (Hardack, 2018, p. 174), Liquid plays an ontological role that personifies incompleteness; he “opens the lack through which the body becomes absent from itself” (Derrida, 1978, p. 234). While it's been argued, then, that video games offer a renewed vision of the body, that they posit a kind of “game body” (Crick, 2011, p. 261) into which we might invest ourselves, toward the ultimate end of securing our real-world somatic certainty, the Metal Gear Solid series upends any clear sense of where bodies might begin, end, or be located, or to whom they might belong.

Conclusion

In addition to the series’ manipulation of time and queerness (Youngblood, 2017), its critique of violence and the vulnerability of human life (Hutchinson, 2020), as well as its fraught attempts at accessibility (Weise, 2018), it also emerges as a rich tool or text in its own right for thinking about the questions of (post)human subjectivity, agency, and control. To play the Metal Gear Solid series is to play with the (un)certainty of sovereignty, to play in the space between possession and dispossession, to play in the interstices of life and death. Beginning with the coincidence of stealth, violence, and possession in MGS1, each game in the series evokes palpable anxiety about the source and ownership of mind and body. Life in these games is summarily rhizomatic, multiplying in ways that disrupt hierarchies and teleologies (Brown, 2010, p. 9).

By the same token, death in the series is never the name for the end but is itself the impossibility of an end. Death always becomes another life, and it is the undead figures of the series that establish perpetuity as being both a condition of suffering and possibility. In these “deaths,” there is the invitation for the coming of new life, in a renewal that is nothing if not messy. Life in MGS is emergent, and in all of its vicissitudes and changes it is never fixed but always open and contingent. Approached in this way, the series makes a philosophical argument about the plurality and différance of life, while also asserting a response to existing readings that a deconstructive analysis renders visible. Where scholars like Soraya Murray and Emil Hammar have argued that the series, particularly in The Phantom Pain, its final entry, has perpetuated hegemonic imperialist ideologies in a way that “reinforces Western consensus” (Hammar, 2019, p. 292), the case is not in fact so simple. In a game world where life and death are always deferred upon one-another, and where identity and subjecthood ceaselessly slip through the fingers of characters caught in the vicissitudes of this shifting terrain, it not only misses the point to bind the theoretical commitments of the games to set ideological grounds—it prevents the posthuman possibilities opened in the gaps of MGS's simultaneous subversion and entrenchment of life's known boundaries from flourishing.

What if life itself were allowed to morph into the possibility of a community of otherness? This is the potential promise of what might be called the Geschlecht of the Metal Gear Solid series. Geschlecht “can be translated by sex, race, species, genus, gender, stock, family, generation or genealogy, community” (Derrida, 1994, p. 162). In naming a peculiar destabilization and deconstruction of the categories by which agency and control are decided (player/character, human/nonhuman, life/death), MGS gathers the genre of gaming within a stealth ensemble where the furtive micro-movements across and beyond these divides can be discerned. The question of Geschlecht is one of humanity; specifically, who can be gathered together in the race of humankind? And it is, after all, the hand that distinguishes man “from every other Geschlecht” (Derrida, 1994, p. 169), so it is in the character of Liquid that we find a hand whose monstrosity not only writhes at the very limit of militarism, history, technology, and politics, but troubles their definitions and structures.

The hand itself figures defamiliarization, difference, and the uncanny, all of which tremble the liminal boundaries between life and death, animate and inanimate, self and other. Viewed through a viscous liquidity, the premise and promise of division—of final relief in clear separation, of the definitive gap between self and other, between life and death—ceases to exist. If we are to read and interpret video games in a mode enabling them to fully grapple with today's critical political and cultural issues, then the questions of ownership, possession, agency, and of the self are not easily resolvable here, nor in the series at large. While Metal Gear Solid's characters are always, however monstrous, identifiably human in form—even the walking tank from which the name “Metal Gear” is derived—they remain “resolutely different” (Garland-Thomson, 1997, p. 11) in their disability, deformity, dehumanization, and spectrality. Never completely whole, either in body or subjectivity, these characters are always in flux. The same might be said—as the series would now appear to be appealing to us to recognize—for the human and for life itself.

Transforming, diffusing, and defying categorical certainty, the world of Metal Gear Solid is one in which the classically sovereign human body is not only obsolete (technology intercedes in the management of ourselves; the facade of a humanity detached from its environment collapses), but also where there is nothing to replace it. Unique to the series, folded into its utterly posthuman vision of the videogame landscape, is an assertion that the seat and future of the edifice of the human will not emerge from some newly transhumanist technological synergy, nor from some rediscovery of humanist values and rights. In this series, life itself escapes categorization, and, otherwise, will come from elsewhere, and from an elsewhere that is within, bearing witness not to finitude but to interminability.

Life and politics coincide and coagulate here into a biopolitical co-haunting. Life: the terrain within which political action and inaction is always possible; politics: the terrain upon which life's affordances possess meaning. The body itself, that through which we navigate life and politics, becomes menaced by frailty as it traverses this spectral whirl. The specific images one confronts in the Metal Gear Solid universe—the disembodied yet animated hand, the absent eye— are artifacts reminding us that the encounter with life is always one of simultaneous possession and dispossession. Life is what we all have, that which we all possess in common; yet there is also the uncomfortable knowledge that life always eludes us, that we’re never quite sure exactly what it is.

As Metal Gear makes clear, we are haunted by life, spirited about by a force both obviously present and unlocatable. The deconstruction of Metal Gear is the deconstruction of life, from out of which its political valences can be rethought. In this sense, life itself is not only surreal and uncanny, but trivial; it is that which renders us machines that produce “agency” and “subjectivity” from the comfort of what is hoped to be an unassailable precipice. Life is what at once gives us bodies and lets us come to know them and put them to use, but is also that which always pesters us with the threat of loss and deprivation as we age, as we are harmed, as we die. Certainly, life itself—animation, force, what arrives and gives movement and the promise of death—is political and it represents the very terrain of modern politics itself (Agamben, 1998). The Metal Gear Solid series, then, is a thesis on life as the terrain of political being, on the liquidity and permeability of both—and the questions it continues to pose regarding (post)human subjectivity, agency, and control equip us to further advance into a domain that offers a renewed vision for considering the conceptual, political, and philosophical scope of Game and Media Studies.