X-Men, Emerson, Gnosticism

[Dave Monroe]

Continuing his work in How to Read Superhero Comics
and Why Geoff Klock, in “X-Men, Emerson, Gnosticism,”
argues that two writers of the superhero comic book
the X-Men suggest a whole new definition of the
Post-Human, an alternative to what Hayles, Haraway,
and Moravec have to offer. He begins by connecting a
moment in Mark Millar’s Ultimate X-Men with a passage
in Ralph Waldo Emerson: an ancient heretical
second-century sect of Christianity called Gnosticism
is the common factor. Klock argues that Millar’s X-Men
incorporates Gnosticism’s radical notion of
subjectivity into its Post-Human narrative, but not
without cost: Millar’s depiction of team leader
Professor X shows the ways in which Post-Humanism,
particularly in the realm of ethics, easily veers into
the inhuman. This pessimistic Post-Humanism, which is
held out above every alternative, is reflected in the
serial nature of the superhero comic book series
itself, in which decades pass without the book’s
heroes being able to significantly effect their world
for the better. In the paper’s conclusion, Klock
examines Grant Morrison’s New X-Men story "Assault on
Weapon Plus" as a Gnostic Post-Human allegory that
suggests that our inevitable evolution into the
Post-Human will yield something darker than, say, a
cyber-utopia or a collective robot heaven....

http://www.reconstruction.ws/043/Klock/Klock.html


		
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