The death of the Other: a double death, for the Other is death already, and weighs upon me like an obsession with death (19).

—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

The mouth which says ‘I’ or the hand which is raised to indicate that it is I who wish to speak, or I who have a toothache, does not thereby point to anything (68).

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books

My books are forgeries. Nobody wrote them (2).

—Philip K. Dick, Exegesis

“Impostor” has long been recognized as among Philip K. Dick's most important stories. One of his earlier efforts, it establishes several of Dick's paradigmatic gestures and traces a problem increasingly important to poststructural thought: that of the double and its emblematic representation of alterity. Dick acknowledged its pivotal position within the development of his work in his 1976 “Afterthoughts by the Author,” interpretative notes appended to the Best of Philip K. Dick (1977) collection: “Here was my first story on the topic of: am I human? Or am I just programmed to believe I am human? When you consider that I wrote this back in 1953, it was, if I may say so, a pretty damn good new idea in SF” (rpt. The Collected Stories [The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick] 2:381). In SF, maybe. But in mainstream literature, the double has been a recurring motif for at least the last 200 years. Mary Shelley's manufactured monster, you'll recall, is “more human” than the demigod Victor Frankenstein. Arthur Rimbaud, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and many others have pursued the notion in startlingly various ways. Other SF writers have explored similar thematic territory (Theodore Sturgeon's “The Clinic,” 1953, or Frederic Pohl's “The Tunnel Under the World,” 1955, remain stunning examples), though none has done so with the power, precision, or consistency of Dick.¹

As Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the influential French philosopher and critical theorist, wrote in an essay entitled “Metaphysics and the Novel,” “the work of a great novelist always rests on two or three philosophical ideas. … The function of the novelist is not to state these ideas … but to make them exist for us the way things exist” (Sense and Non-Sense 26). This is surely the case for Dick. Critical accounts typically catalog Dick's ideas: the current state of humanity's self-alienation; our cultural and personal paranoia; the failure of humans to empathize; the ontological despair of living within an industrial and politicized culture that manufactures “reality”; and so forth. These large, fuzzy ideas are informed by complications that subordinate Dick's “two or three” ideas to one: the problematics of (postmodern) reflection. Employing an array of rhetorical devices, Dick's thematics develop a specific cluster of tropes—inversion, reversibility, parallelism, ironic reinscription, false dichotomies, paralogy²—all of which are conventionally grouped under the rubric of “the double.” Almost every use of these conventions or tropes isolates a specific problem within the general question of (self-)reflection, the problem of otherness, or alterity. Dick's particular obsession with the ambiguities of alterity combines a concern over what constitutes human subjectivity with what defines human (and humane) behavior.

The central importance of Dick's early work remains an unexplored territory, primarily because critical accounts of Dick's development usually summarily dismiss the 1950s stories, glossing them as juvenilia, mere studies for the longer and more convoluted novels. Kim Stanley Robinson, in The Novels of Philip K. Dick, says the relation of the early to late fiction resembles that between “pencil studies [and] oil paintings” (xi). Patricia Warrick holds that “his early short stories are straightforward metaphors, simple mirrors, presenting to us the bizarre possibilities his imagination sees. His later metaphors move into realms of increasing complexity and his mirroring device becomes a doubly ironic metaphor composed of opposites facing each other” (213). Warrick argues that the stories function as simple allegories and the later work as complex accounts, configuring the former as realistic mimetic representations and the latter as problematic ontological reveries. The image she selects to describe Dick's complexity—mirrors facing each other—unconsciously invokes the poststructural paradigm of reflexivity: the abyss of specular recursion, the mise en abyme.

Indeed, poststructural vocabularies provide the proper means for reading Dick, and I will argue that “Impostor” contains not just the later Dick inchoate; virtually all the themes and tropes of the later work are mapped within the story—as Merleau-Ponty says, made to exist the way things exist.

In his Exegesis, the massive journal kept to record the systematic explication of his hermeneutics and cosmology,³ Dick emphasized the importance of “Impostor” to the “Great Narrative” (167) of his oeuvre, summarizing its motif as “studying false inner identity & lost memories of the true self! The 2 identities war with each other, with an in-breaking of messages … [which] as the messages in UBIK, just break in ‘from the mysterious outside’” (165-66). Just as these two identities turn out to be functions of a single problematic, so too the early and late Dick differ only in matters of degree or style, not theme or philosophical sophistication. However overdetermined the coding of a short story may be, “Impostor” does have limits, and its length restricts the text to a single cluster of themes. Dick thought “Impostor” explicitly addressed a concern his latter work presupposed—only “Impostor” isolates a commentary on “our identity” (Exegesis 186). And just as a character in VALIS appears shaken when he realizes “this wasn't orthodoxy” (174), so “Impostor” treats personal identity as a phenomenon of heterology.⁴Heterodox is more than just a kind term for someone who defines the first-person pronoun as “disinhibiting stimulus restoring blocked memory” (Exegesis 180).

THE PARANOIA OF “IMPOSTOR”

The plot of “Impostor” (2:299-310) seems relatively simple, sufficiently linear for pulp product, and adequately stable for acritical consumption. Spence Olham—for ten years a researcher in “The Project” (299), a massive R& D effort to develop “a weapon for positive combat” (300) in humanity's war against the “Outspacers”—falls under suspicion as a double agent. “Impostor” follows twenty-four hours in Olham's life, opening in media res, amid the dirty dishes of a 7 a.m. breakfast with his wife Mary. Speculating on the possibility of personal peace, to be found only through a vacation in the bucolic woods, Spence reflects on the source of his exhaustion (300)—his unrelenting labors to design a way to defeat the “needle-ships” from Alpha Centauri that swept past helpless Earth ships until the invention of the “protec-bubble,” a defensive force field sealing off Earth from Outspacer weapons (299).

When his old friend and long-time colleague Nelson arrives, purportedly to transport both to the Project, the single page of exposition immediately gives way to a narrative inversion—Spence's arrest. Entering the “shoot” (a very fast, private air-car), Olham discovers that Nelson is accompanied by Peters, a major in “FAS, the security organ”; genuinely puzzled to hear Peters has come along “to see” him (300), Spence is astonished when Nelson thrusts a gun into his ribs and the “bug” vectors off into space (301). Peters explains that a needle-ship had penetrated the protec-bubble, murdered the original Spence Olham, leaving a “spy in the form of a humanoid robot” in his place (302); the robot was equipped with a “U-Bomb” (302) keyed to trigger with a particular, as yet unknown phrase (301, 303). The FAS plans to disarm the robot only in a safe location—the moon.

Authentically bewildered, Spence insists he is himself, not a robot. He tries to assure his old friend that he is the same, the identical man Nelson had known since they had been college roommates twenty years earlier (303). His interior monolog confirms that he isn't dissembling: He wracks his brain for ways to convince his captors that he is indeed who he says, repeatedly thinking that he needs to tell his wife, and then later fixing on the notion that a physician could resolve the false accusation with a careful medical examination. “I'm Olham,” he says. “I know I am. But I can't prove it.” Peters counters that the perfect robot would be “unaware that he was not the real Spence Olham. He would become Olham in mind as well as body. He was given an artificial memory system, false recall” (303); the sole difference between authentic and bogus Spence would be the U-Bomb, which could be discovered only by the scientific team ready “to disassemble” him. Landing on the moon (304), his death by dismemberment is imminent, though asphyxiation or decompression might come first, for Peters does not offer him a space suit. Suddenly fixing on a ruse, Spence warns Nelson and Peters that his bomb will explode, and the two men evacuate the space car, scrambling for safety. Spence seals and repressurizes the cabin and then returns to Earth (305).

Once back in his village, Spence phones his mystified wife, telling her to solicit the presence of Dr. Chamberlain on the pretense that she is very sick; Spence reasons that physical scrutiny by a respected scientist will “overcome their madness, their hysteria with facts” (306). Under cover of evening's darkness, he returns home by foot. Worried that like Nelson, Mary might also have been suborned by the maniacal conspiracy against him, he approaches his house cautiously, his dour suspicions confirmed by the terror shown in Mary's face. Hotly pursued by security officers who burst from within his home, Olham flees toward “the outskirts of the wilderness between the inhabited places” (307) where he'd left the bug, only to discover Peters already there. “You are still under the illusion created by your artificial memories,” Peters declares, adding that Spence was surrounded and within six hours would be discovered and shot on sight. Spence feels the pressure: The “cordon of armed men” was “coming all the time, squeezing him into a smaller and smaller space” (307). Since his wife, his best friend, and his very home have betrayed him, he realizes that his only remaining hope is to find the needle-ship's “remains” (308), to show Peters concrete proof of his innocence. The crashed ship, of course, would have to be in “some wild place, a remote spot where there were no people” (308).

“Sutton Wood,” where only yesterday morning he had dreamed of vacationing (301), is such a place. Indeed, Olham finds the ruined ship there and convinces the arriving Peters that the wreck merits investigation. Yet “suddenly doubt assailed him. Suppose the robot had lived long enough to wander away? Suppose his body had been completely destroyed, burned to ashes by the fire?” (309). At the crash site, they do discover a crumpled body, and “its mouth was open; the eyes stared glassily”—grotesquely twisted, says Peters, “like a machine that's run down” (309). Converted to Spence's innocence by the glint of metal from the chest of the “corpse” (310), Peters grimly expresses his apologies and suggests that Olham deserves a vacation. But Nelson then extracts the metal from the body—it is “an Outspacer's needle-knife,” the proof necessary to convince not Peters but Spence of his imposture (310):

He gaped.

“But if that's Olham, then⁵ I must be—”

He did not complete the sentence, only the first phrase. The blast was visible all the way to Alpha Centauri.

The trigger, therefore, is not a key phrase but a self-realization that Spence is not Spence but not-Spence, the alien substitute, which detonates the U-Bomb, a weapon which must destroy the entire planet if we are to believe that its flash would be visible 4.3 light-years away.

In most respects, “Impostor” is a very conventional tale. Yet as even this brief recitation suggests, certain story elements subtly introduce complications unusual for pulp fiction, the sorts of ontological complications that indeed make Dick one of the most important writers of his generation. Politically, the story allegorizes cold war paranoia, a concern common to much 1950s SF; while captive heading toward the moon, Spence thinks to himself, “Perhaps at some other time, when there was no war, men might not act this way, hurrying an individual to his death because they were afraid. Everyone was frightened, everyone was willing to sacrifice the individual because of group fear” (304). While unquestionably an important aspect of the story, especially considering its 1953 publication, this allegory is as transparent as the literal narrative and requires little commentary.

Since cold war paranoia frequently configured the red menace as infection or subversive infiltration, even the story's medium of transport—a “bug”—takes on ominous overtones. A revisionary reading could easily gloss “Impostor” as a parable of AIDS, for the imagery is of needles penetrating prophylactic bubbles, which—as is the case with retrovirus infections—progressively compromises the internal system's ability to defend itself; the explosion would then be a hyperbolic reversal, the bang attracting more attention than the actual whimper of implosion, the human suffering that demands our action. If less obvious, this reading is also clear, straightforward.

Nor is it profitable to devote time to reading the story as a biogram, as the allegory of an author's fantasies of conspiracy, the paranoia, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, or cultural vertigo that gave rise to such fantasies.⁶ (Dick was obsessed by the spectre of his twin sister Jane, who died shortly following their premature birth.) While addressed to texts other than “Impostor,” this political and psychological ground has already been covered. In his discussion of “the representation of conspiracy in Dick's fiction” (19), Carl Freedman has shown that such cultural paranoia implies a hermeneutics; biographical parallels have been ably documented by Gregg Rickman (see 271ff.); Christopher Palmer has examined the way Dick fits within a postmodern continuum (“Postmodernism”); Dick himself is the best exponent of the notion of cultural vertigo (see Dick's letter to Patricia Warrick qtd. 200).

The story's treatment of subjectivity, however, is far more opaque and merits careful scrutiny. As Spence is “squeezed into a smaller and smaller space” (307), the story becomes an allegory of the impossibly small space of subjectivity. It is a tale about Terrans and Outspacers, inside and outside, interior ipseity and exterior alterity. Similarly, this tale of doubles presents us with two separate problematics.

DOUBLES TROUBLE

The first of the story's two fundamental complications is its relation to the ancient, diverse, and enormously rich literary convention of the double. “Impostor” hinges on “2 identities [at] war with each other,” where one is a copy or false representation of the other. The catalog of topoi associated with the double includes twins, phantoms, clones, Doppelgängers, ghosts, alter egos, double agents, androids, and simulacra; its signature modalities include duplicity, duality, simulation, dissimulation, verisimilitude, parallelism, and metonymic substitution. In both figure and modality, the double disjoins or disrupts some sense of “normality”; its plays upon double codings serve to introduce what Freud called unheimleichkeit—the uncanny, oxymoronic subversion of the familiar by the alien and, in turn, of the alien by the familiar.

Careful reading of literary history reveals an extraordinary diversity for what might initially seem a pellucid allegorical trope. For instance, the ancient conception of duality within nature, as manifest in Gnostic and Manichaean doctrine, is neither “mythic” nor “ancient”; it produces the orthodox readings of much modern literature, as can be seen in most analyses of Melville's Ahab. The double might be concealed, as is the case in “Impostor,” only for readers who fail to recognize the import of the title; the double might play a game of duplicity, masquerading in a way similar to the cross dressing of Shakespearean comedy; or the double might be known only to the audience, such as in the dramatic irony of Oedipus' vigorous exclamations that he will stop at nothing in order to reveal Laius' murderer, and so on. The logic of imposture serves philosophy as well. Plato's metaphysics were based on the duplicitious relation of the eidos (or transcendental form) to the eidolon (its exteriorized, corporeal representation).

Particularly (but not exclusively) in modern and postmodern literature, the double also invokes thematic or structural coupling and uncoupling. There are double plots, double narratives, and double convolutions; the narrative structure of many mystery novels or films folds in on itself to shock the audience—from the double suicide in the film Dead Ringers (no surprise) to the incest of Chinatown (big surprise). Poe's “William Wilson” is a remarkable instance of this same narrative structure: A young man meets his mirror image, an alter ego who turns out to be himself. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the twins reappear in a coat of arms that, in creating an explicit mise en abyme, eventually implodes the house and the dynasty it symbolizes.

But structural doublings can be far more subversive than doublings of character or plot, such as Italo Calvino's play with narrative combinatorics in either The Cloven Viscount or If on a winter's night a traveler. Occasionally, doublings subvert even the mimetic paradigm that has, since Aristotle, structured our orthodox conception of literature itself. The early modernist Baudelaire's infamous indictment of the complicitous reader as his brother, his double—“hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”—remains almost as shocking as Rimbaud's postmodern claim that “Je est un autre”—a notion that, perhaps anticipating Nietzsche, regards even the self as a rhetorical construct, something modeled on syntactic possibility rather than ontic viability.

Scholarly attempts to create a clear and distinct taxonomy of this history have been fascinating failures. Robert Rogers, Otto Rank, and Karl Miller have carefully and cogently traced its history (or rather histories, for how one treats the term, as anthropologist, philologist, psychologist, or literary historian renders very different results). Freud's “The Uncanny” and Beyond the Pleasure Principle trace doubling to the repetition compulsion—the death drive.⁷ René Girard's influential Violence and the Sacred uses the narrative conventions of doubling to try to understand the codings of cultural anthropology; he observes that in any of its cultural forms, mimesis is already a form of doubling. “Man and His Doubles,” the penultimate section of Foucault's The Order of Things, argues that signification itself doubles, but in so doing bifurcates, producing not doubling but difference, alterity (326-27; 338-41). Gilles Deleuze, in his book on Foucault, comments that “the inside will always be the doubling of the outside” (99), for in the phenomenon of doubling, inside/outside dialectics repeatedly fold back on themselves, creating logical loops that resemble mathematical models such as the Möbius strip.

Theorists associated with linguistics, semiotics, and narratology have similarly offered engaging but finally limited insights. According to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky's doubles manifest or embody contradictions of the hero's existence, expressing what Bakhtin called the “dialogic quality” of subjectivity—that subjects (like history or cultures) cannot be totalized or foreclosed by any definition. Following A. J. Greimas's discussion (in Structural Semantics) of “double articulation” or “double isotropy”—the multivalences produced by either semantic or syntactic potentiality—in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language Umberto Eco argues that any individual work of literature always opens a dialogue with other texts. With the same intent but a different vocabulary, in Revolution in Poetic Language Julia Kristeva named this semiotic resonance intertextuality, a very familiar term these days, but really only the product of an ancient motif.

Taken together, all this scholarly and theoretical work serves to demonstrate that the relation between original and copy is fundamentally convoluted in a way that Jekyll/Hyde or chicken/egg dialectics only begin to approximate. Within this context, the project of poststructuralism has been to think through such problematics, what Jacques Derrida (modifying Mallarmé) has called the current “crisis of versus” (Dissemination 25; 233-44; 280-85). Derrida's position is that we are in an age of relations, not resolutions, and the motif of doubling renders simulacra—“with the exception that there is no longer any model, and hence, no copy” producing for us a “reference without referent” (206). Certainly less rigorous but perhaps more accessible than Derrida, Jean Baudrillard has also tried to trace the oxymoronic consequences of simulation, arguing that we live in an age of original simulations, doubles of nothing:

SF … has always played upon the double, on artificial replication or imaginary duplication, whereas [in Dick] the double has already disappeared. There is no more double; one is always already in the other world, an other world which is not another, without mirrors or projection or utopias as means for reflection. The simulation is impossible, unsurpassably checkmated, without exteriority.

(312)

What disappears in Dick is the conception that doubles are secondary copies, diluted substitutes, ghostly images without substance. But as Paul Ricoeur rightly holds, “what sedimentation has contracted, narrative can redeploy” (122).

One obvious curiosity of Dick's canon is its competing counterurges or doubleurges—one toward a thorough dismantling of human pretensions to certainty and the other occupied with totalizing transcendental absolutes. When Dick turns to theorizing such dialectics, he usually invokes one of two formulations: (1) dualisms—two worlds, two parallel domains (cf. Exegesis 176) divided between what Dick called the koinos kosmos (the public, common world) and the idios kosmos (the private, solipsistic world) (“Letter of Comment” 31); (2) dialectical interplay, his “two source cosmogony” of VALIS (91), what he eventually called “my 2 slit logic” (Exegesis 180).

Most of Dick's fiction inscribes the problematic of the double. In VALIS, for example, the narrative voice suffers the psychic splintering that creates a self-reflexive topology, articulates the agonistics between the alleged narrator (“I”) and the protagonist (Horselover Fat), whose name means, in Greek and German, “Philip Dick” (§10.168). Similarly, consider the Parsifal/Perceval twin: two names for the same character, they signify differences even as they denote the same being (§8.124-25, 130).⁸ The reader's constant and continual awareness of this uncanny narrator/character intimacy creates all of the novel's tension and most of its theme.

Copies and doubles fill Dick's infrequently read 1964 novel The Simulacra, which features President Herr Rudi Kalbfleisch, also called “Der Alte” (§3.22), the Other. The novel is given to rather reductive accounts of confrontations with simulacra doubles as alter egos or Doppelgängers. Naturally, the image patterns and plot feature a series of reversals (§12.141), such as that articulated when one of the main characters (Richard Kongrosian) wails “I'm turning inside out!” (§14.175). Similar narrative patterns can be found in the novella A. Lincoln, Simulacrum—written in 1962 then published in Amazing (1969-1970) before it appeared slightly revised as We Can Build You (1972)—and the story “Explorers We” (4:147-55). In this latter tale, astronauts returning from Mars and who “just want to see people again” (147) land to declare “we're back” (148). No greeting party awaits, and on wandering into the nearby town, the six men discover frightened inhabitants who flee in terror. The FBI arrives and executes the bewildered six, who we then discover are “mimicry” (154), Martian copies; Wilkes, a young, frightened “Bureau man,” wonders if the copies are human or not, but follow his instructions to their lethal conclusion, only to remember “it wasn't over” (154). The final page of the story has the tale beginning again, with more simulacra arriving with the same desire and again declaring “we're back” (155). “Explorers We,” which couples duplicity with recursion or iteration, inscribes doubling's signature: estrangement, for both the human and the alien.

Another extremely interesting example is the more familiar Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), where both humans and android doubles have become pawns in a system of industrial and domestic slavery. Rachael and Pris are copies of the same model (§6.59-60, §16.165, §19.195), although minor differences mark their asymmetry, a notion I will return to toward the end of this chapter. As clones—genetically precise doubles—they manifest Dick's obsession with the self-delusion or false recall that marks many of his doubles, identifying a primary conceit of doubling—authentic doubles do not recognize themselves as double. The novel also features mechanical animals (owls, snakes, horses) manufactured to substitute for real ones; the protagonist Rick Deckard will discard an electric sheep for a real goat but ends up with an electric toad. Even the humans have their ghostly twins: There are double police agencies (§10.98-112) and Phil Resch serves as Deckard's mirror image (§17.174), especially to provoke his own doubts about his status (§12.119, 124) and personal identity (§16.165), for he becomes “alien” even to himself (§21.204). Luba Luft tells Deckard that his lack of empathy makes him an android: “Maybe there was a human who once looked like you, and somewhere along the line you killed him and took his place. And your superiors don't know” (§9.89). And so Deckard's circumstances precisely parallel all of the androids', including Roy Baty's (§19.197).

Within the novel's narrative world, the very status of any “reality,” of any particular thing (person, place, idea, or emotion), is always in question. It may be “ersatz” (§4.38), a forgery such as the humans' emotions (which would mark them as human and demarcate their difference from the biologically identical androids [§5.45-48]), which are precipitated by the “Penfield mood organ” (§1.3). Everything has the aspect of reality but is really “a simulation” (§12.123); everything is covered by or immersed within the signs of cultural entropy—“kipple” (§6.57)—which leads humans toward the same “flattening of affect” (§4.33) that identifies androids. (Curiously, this same “flattening” will in VALIS identify the schizoid [§1.15].)⁹ With one's entire horizon forged, faked, duplicated, or simulated, all things seem emptied of meaning, as is shown in this description of the virtual-reality representation of a human being: “The echo of himself ascending: the echo of nothing” (§2.17). Here, even the original being is an absence, already empty.

AUTHENTICITY AND EMPATHY

Doubling therefore produces the parallel question of authenticity, which in turn precipitates the question of adequate proof: Which double is real and how can I know? Spence says, “I'm Olham. I know I am. But I can't prove it.” In Dick's story “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon” (5:359-73), a couple wonders whether a famous poster in their possession is the original or a forgery. They have “a letter of authentication,” but “suppose the letter is a forgery? What we need is another letter certifying the first letter is authentic” (5:365). Perception may be an illusion, but doesn't a text replicate the same uncertainty that a skeptic or a paranoid might find with perception? Sharing the joke, one character recalls the (probably apocryphal) anecdote of a dealer who brought a picture to Picasso “asking him if it was authentic, and Picasso immediately signed it and said, ‘Now it's authentic’” (365). In this story, the problem of authenticity is resolved by a signature, by human action.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, only Deckard acts on the ontological threat contained in problematizing perceptual or textual authority. Only Deckard experiences the acute anxiety Merleau-Ponty called the “perpetual uneasiness in the state of being conscious” (Sense 28) because he realizes the disconcerting truth that “the experience of the other is always that of a replica of myself” (Prose 135). This serves to underscore the novel's central thematic: Do humans authentically possess the empathy their manufactured doubles are said to lack? In popular SF, such questions receive formulaic, comforting treatment; any resultant anxiety serves only as dramatic tension to be released or resolved in the dénouement between final commercial break and production credits. For instance, whenever we ask if Data, the “Star Trek: The Next Generation” android, is really human, we are reassured to find our hopes confirmed. Do Androids Dream aggressively reverses the convention: Is Deckard really human? Dick's disconcertingly catholic answer curiously recalls Sartre's existentialist ethics—we are defined not by species or by chemical constitution but by actions, and the act in question is our ability to empathize with the Other by recognizing the originality of the replicas of myself. The novel's easy thematic of doubled characters gives way to doubled values and doubly inflected action—and the boundary separating the humans and the androids becomes increasingly blurred, uncertain.

Dick's universe is peopled by humans whose humanity is progressively compromised—some because of their actions, others because of their circumstances, though both situations lead toward epiphanies (what in VALIS Dick called theophanies [§5.75]) either for the characters or for the readers, resulting in the classical structure of dianoia—a new thought or insight deriving from the experience. Occasionally, the characters are compromised biologically (“Rautavaara's Case” 5:375-83) or cybernetically (Palmer Eldritch). For instance, Deckard may wake the next morning and return to his sorry labors, but readers realize his tragedy.¹⁰ All such effects serve the same double cast. First, they ironize an explicit boundary between human and machine (not merely invoke the man-as-machine metaphor, common since the Presocratics) by strategic reversals of plot and theme; this is conventionally called boundary ambiguity. Second, they ironize an implicit boundary between Homo sapien and humanity: Is humanity determined by certain DNA sequences or certain beliefs/behaviors?

For Dick, “humanity” is a quality defined by neither biology nor history. His stories “Progeny,” “The Father Thing,” and “The Electric Ant” demonstrate this claim. Whether alien, robot, or Homo sapien, only empathy makes one human: “empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community” (Do Androids Dream §3.26). As Isidore says in Do Androids Dream, the battle is not over biology but “our psychic souls” (§7.67). “Human Is” (2:257-67) provides the paradigm for all of Dick's explorations of this definition: A woman's husband is kidnapped by aliens who then send a double to take his place. Discovering the counterfeit, she refuses to agree with “authorities” who claim aliens are “parasitic and destructive entities. Terran ethics don't extend to them” (265) because she discovers that the alien is far more kind, caring, and considerate—more ethical in its relations with others—than the authorities are or her husband had been (267). Insofar as it has a moral, the moral of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is similar; human beings are members of a community, not separate selves at war with one another. “I do not ask how the wounded person feels, I myself become the wounded person” (56) Whitman wrote, articulating the dialectical ambiguities connecting an ethic of empathy with an ontology of the subject. (A detailed examination of the remarkable ethic shared by Dick and Whitman must remain the topic for another work.)

Hence the double significance of the reversal of identity in “Impostor”—only Spence seems to think of community and family, only Spence calls for an end to hostilities, only Spence confronts what he really is. The irony is that such authenticity disrupts the prophylactic measures we use to isolate ourselves from others. At the heart of these ontological echoes, doubles, Doppelgängers, illusions, reversals, and counterfeits is the philosophical conundrum of personal identity, which is the second of the fundamental complications within “Impostor.”

CRISIS OF VERSUS

In our current thought, still so dependent on Enlightenment and Romantic models, the self remains “the place of all obscurities, the mystery of all mysteries, and something like an ultimate truth” (Merleau-Ponty, Signs 198). Still, as Robert Nozick points out, philosophical views of subjectivity are themselves troubled: “So many puzzling examples have been put forth in recent discussions of personal identity that it is difficult to formulate, much less defend, any consistent view of identity and non-identity” (29). Currently, “ipseity” and “alterity” are the fashionable philosophic terms for self-identity and the question of otherness, respectively. Summarizing the thrust both of his own argument and the general trend of twentieth-century thought on this dialectic, Paul Ricoeur writes that “the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other” (3). Such paradoxes need unpacking.

Generally, modern (analytic) philosophers divide the problem of personal identity into four distinct but intertwined problems: uniqueness, endurance, unity, and the noumenal essence.¹¹ Uniqueness concerns our ability to see any distinction between the I that is me and the other I that is you; endurance questions how a (unique) self can be said to be the same self over the passage of time; unity inquires into the problem of the composition of the self—how perceptions, memories, thoughts, fantasies, experiences, bodies, and so on all somehow meld into a single essence, self; and the noumenal description (sometimes thought of as the “one true” self) investigates the possibility that beyond all social and psychological roles and descriptions of the phenomenonal self there exists a noumenal entity whose substance and content is available only to the individual and not to others.

Few people are analytic philosophers (thankfully), but most conceptions of subjectivity collapse the four problems into one view, usually invoking one or another notion of “common sense.” Common sense is, of course, simply an eclectic agglutination of those specific beliefs and methodologies we inherit from our culture, what the Greeks—always suspicious of “conventional wisdom” or “received belief”—called doxa. (The French have a similar conception—parti pris.) Doxa constitutes the core, the central node of orthodox “straight thinking” that heterology would subvert. Our doxa—common-sense psychophysical dualism—asserts that, above all else, there exists one true self, one I, one singularly identifiable essence properly denominated by a single proper pronoun. This entity is usually named “the Cartesian subject” after the French philosopher who first gave an analytic articulation to the thing-that-thinks, the res cogito. This incorporeal “I,” the ego cogito, is always distinguished with respect to its opposite (the material body) and in this sense is similar to the other primary, primitive oppositions which inform the self's aboriginal world view: soul/body, mind/matter, inside/outside, essence/existence, substance/shape, reality/appearance, and so forth. (These fundamental oppositions mark the first step in the self's self-alienating exile.) Ego cogito cannot be forgotten or misplaced, like manners or keys, nor broken and divided, like toes and friends—a distinction emphasized since Descartes, who discusses the contingencies of body and soul:

For even if all [the self's] accidents change—as, for example, if it conceives of certain things, wills others, and receives sense impressions of still others—it is nevertheless the same soul. But the human body becomes a different entity from the mere fact that the shape of some of its parts has been changed.

(72-73)

The ephemera of personality, mere surface ornamentation, may be stripped away without damaging the whole, for the noumenal self must be indivisible and immutable even where it is corporeal. These intriguing exterior effects may “come to me days and nights and go from me again, / But” as Whitman wrote, “they are not the Me myself” (26).

Nevertheless, this common view of personal identity also domesticates notions of change and loss.

Even that colloquialism “to lose one's mind” implies that the whole thing is gone, not just a separable part of it. So too Freud's idea of an unconscious, which posits separations between levels of consciousness, leaves the mind intact. Thus, insofar as a thought goes from a conscious to unconscious sphere, it is not lost, it is simply displaced. In fact, the notion that nothing can be lost from the mind is, in Freudian ideology, what causes trauma to the self.

(Cameron 165n13; emphasis added)

As the product of chemical, not ontological, imbalance, the (temporarily) insane man has only had his mind displaced to some dark corner, from which it may be possible to be retrieved. Or not so much dis-placed as dis-located, like a shoulder or an elbow.

What poststructuralism has done generally, and Dick's work specifically, is to put into question both the necessity and the desirability of such commonplace conceptions, such intellectual topoi, such ontologically secure categories. Richard Rorty has argued that the great question facing us now is the “whether we can give up what Stanley Cavell calls the ‘possibility that one among endless true descriptions of me tells who I am’” (Consequences xl). Unlike the cozy conceptions of Descartes, Wordsworth, or even Freud, careful analysis of the phenomenon of subjectivity (begun by Hume) reveals a fractured, fissured bundle of effects and feelings, constantly in dynamic flux but continually static, the same self with us this morning at toast and tea. In Rorty's more abstract phrase, the self is now conceived “as centerless, as random assemblages of contingent and idiosyncratic needs” (“Freud” 12). Much depends on this “knit of identity” (25) from which, as Whitman has it, “I weave the song of myself” (37).

How does poststructuralism weave the self from the catalog of its oxymoronic effects? Through rhetorical stitching, the weave of the text itself, the very fabric or textile of language. Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Lévinas's conviction is that the self's relation to the other is structured, predicated, and sustained by language. Merleau-Ponty began, but because of his early death did not finish, a model of alterity that conceptualizes self/other relations within the matrix of linguistic mediation, itself the sort of labyrinth Deleuze would call a rhizome.¹² As Dick says in VALIS, “There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it” (§3.40).

Language is that oxymoronic field wherein the private is expressed as the universal, the mystical made accessible, the solipsistic revealed:

In speech we realize the impossible agreement between two rival totalities not because speech forces us back upon ourselves to discover some unique spirit in which we participate but because speech concerns us, catches us indirectly, seduces us, trails us along, transforms us into the other and him into us, abolishes the limit between mine and not-mine, and ends the alternative between what has sense for me and what is non-sense for me, between me as subject and the other as object.

(Prose 145)

Here is Merleau-Ponty's description of the great problematic of subjectivity, and he argues that “our century has wiped out the dividing line between ‘body’ and ‘mind,’ and sees human life as through and through mental and corporeal, always based upon the body and always (even in its most carnal modes) interested in the relationships between persons” (Signs 226-27). His position is that the exclusive alternatives of binarism are simply false dichotomies with no basis in fact. Derrida has gone on to show that the brutal fact of language, through which and by which we understand (or not at all), is that it thoroughly scrambles the propriety of common-sense oppositions; self/other, inside/outside, original/copy—these are all cases of rhetorical doubling, not ontological fact.

To illustrate the poststructural conception of personal identity as a useful model for reading Dick, I have might have selected Rorty, Derrida, Deleuze, or Lyotard. But like Dick, Merleau-Ponty is also known for his obsession(s) with carnality, for his deep and abiding concern with empirical physicality and its effects.¹³ Indeed, Merleau-Ponty did not discuss the self but “the body-subject,” the way that the immaterial self is always already a material body. Like Dick, Merleau-Ponty respects the models generated by materialism but conceives of carnality as more than mere DNA sequences, neural pathways, or operantconditioning patterns. Similarly, other common-sense binarisms are “wiped out,” placed under erasure. There exists not a self and a world, but a lived world, a life-world that integrates ipseity within alterity. And for Merleau-Ponty, such oxymoronic relations are first and foremost manifest in the fact of language: “To the extent that what I say has meaning, I am a different ‘other’ for myself when I am speaking; and to the extent that I understand, I no longer know who is speaking and who is listening” (Signs 97). These are the structures of intersubjectivity—a position that Merleau-Ponty would later conceptualize as the chiasmic trope of perceptual reversibility, as in his famous example of the instance where two hands touching can no longer distinguish the toucher from the touched (Visible 9, 263), so too any conception of inviolable boundaries between self/other and ipseity/alterity is placed under erasure by the chiasmic reversals precipitated by the double touch of that medium within which we live meaning: language.

If Merleau-Ponty's analysis is correct, then Lévinas is right to point out that “the comprehension of the other is thus a hermeneutics and an exegesis” (“The Trace of the Other” 351). In other words, one's understanding of alterity always involves both a theory of meaning and an individual act of explication, a “reading-out-of,” which is literally what exegesis means. But the application of a general hermeneutics remains an eisegesis, a “reading-into,” another oxymoronic reciprocity manifest in the paradox of self and other.¹⁴ The turbulence of these two turning terms forms what Derrida calls “the regulated play” (Of Grammatology 44) of alterity, of the difference he names “différance,” the general problematic of reading the double movement, double inscription, double imperative of the dialectic of intersubjectivity.

The immediate problem for us is one Wallace Stevens struggled to describe in “Credences of Summer”—the “meaning of this capture, this hard prize, / Fully made, fully apparent, fully found” (376).

THE UNHEIMLICH MANEUVER

“Impostor” serves to erase thoroughly the sequatious certainty that any clear border demarcates self from other or original from double. Who is to say that “I” am not programmed by false memories? Even the ego cogito may turn out to be an electric ant. From the moment on the moon when Peters and Nelson flee, escaping from Spence's threat that his U-Bomb will explode, “Impostor” is a study in uncanny maneuvers. This thematic is developed, first, by Dick's ironic inversions, his “total reversal” (VALIS 160) of those qualities conventionally associated with being human. The robot Spence (hereafter Spence₂) is more human than humans, the humans more robotic than the robot. “Impostor” opens with the android listlessly wondering about peace: “In the last month I've gotten weary of all this. Everything seems so grim and serious, no color to life” (300). It is Spence₂ who wants new life rather than destruction, who is emotionally affected by the “barren, lifeless ground” (300). The humans, on the other hand, behave programmatically, thoughtlessly, as represented by Nelson's immediate and continual calls that “we should kill him now. We can't wait” (301) or Mary's betrayal of her husband without a shred of evidence, merely as the result of an anonymous authority's order. The humans act through fear and paranoid fantasy (304), but Spence₂ confronts and then accepts the truth; he is the only character to do so.

The story's imagery similarly supports the reversal of qualities and the transgression of orthodoxies. Although we initially meet Spence₂, we believe him to be Spence₁ despite repeated clues that he is an android. Finding the body of Spence₁, Spence₂ conflates “the robot” with “his [own] body” (309). After landing on the moon, Peters doesn't give Spence a space suit “because robots probably don't require oxygen” (304); Spence then survives the bug's decompression. Later, trying to escape through the woods, Spence runs “on and on” (306), like a machine. Indeed, when the story opens he declares that he's “run down” (299), not tired. Of course, the strongest clues come just before the plot's double reversal—where Peters converts to Spence₂'s innocence coupled with Spence₂'s almost immediate recognition of himself as the alien Other (both of these events happen within 100 words). On these last pages, Spence₂ repeatedly demonstrates otherwise inexplicable knowledge: He immediately recognizes his home compromised by fear (307) and later displays a remarkable understanding of Outspacer tactics, intuiting the needle-ship's method of infiltration and present location (307-8).

Yet the human Peters precisely replicates the robot's uncanny certainty, suggesting that he too functions mechanically. How did he discover the perfect double? “We received a report” (302) Peters says, and the passive verb construction conceals the agent of action. How did he find the camouflaged bug? And how did he get to it before the fleeing Spence₂? Such ironic reversals aren't exceptions—they are the story's rule. It is particularly the presence of the mysterious intelligence “report” that disrupts the apparent clarity of the narrative. At the level of plot, we can infer who authored this report—the Outspacers. Without a “report,” Peters would not have acted and Spence would not have been brought to the relevant recognition, for the explosion is entirely predicated on Spence's conception of self-identity. Then Peters also plays a role in the Outspacers' game; unwittingly, he becomes their agent, a “security organ” (300) of their machine, fed a program he executes to perfection. Even Peters ironizes the question of agency.

Of course, the twisted body Spence discovers in Sutton Wood (309) mirrors what Peters would have done to him had Spence not landed on a ruse to escape Peters while on the moon. The body of Spence₁ is initially recognized as Spence₂ because from the huge rent in the body's chest “something glinted, something metal” (310), presumably the bomb within the alien's chest. What should rest within the chest is the heart, that organ conventionally taken to signify humanity, for it is the seat of emotion, the site of empathy Dick defines as the human quality par excellence. Yet the metallic glint turns out to be the needle-knife, the very instrument permitting Spence₂ to become Spence₁, and simultaneously the instrument allowing the final plot reversal—for Spence₂ to recognize himself (linking the peripeteia, the anagnorisis, and the moment of dianoia into a single paragraph). That the instrument of reversal is the needle-knife synecdochically parallels the larger threat of the Outspacers to humanity: as needle-knives end the lives of single beings, the needle-ships threaten the entire race.

The trope structuring these repetitive reversals is metonymy, the figure of seamless contiguity; the alien invader replaces the human on the basis of similarity, not difference.¹⁵ Without the “in-breaking” (Exegesis 165) of the otherwise inexplicable intelligence report, this metonymic substitution would have gone unnoticed, unremarked. Spence₂ will be Spence without subscript; it would make no sense even to say Spence₂ would have “replaced” Spence₁, for not even Spence₂ would have known. And for readers who never “meet” Spence₁, Spence₂ is “the original” undermined by the simulacrum Spence₁. At the level of plot, this original must be concealed (not repressed) in order to effect the twist of the Hitchcockian convention: Innocent man falls into the shadows of invisible conspiracies; falsely accused, he finally returns from chaos into the ordered, real world when the true villain is fully unmasked. The plot's ironic twist of this convention requires the original's absence. On the ontological level, this absence is also necessary in order to establish the unresolvable dialectical play of absence and presence, of self and other that marks human subjectivity.

Yet Spence₁ and Spence₂ remain irreducible to one another. Spence₂ is a double but asymmetrical (because of the U-Bomb).¹⁶ Any double would need to be asymmetrical—in thought, in substance, in temporality—otherwise there would be no clear and distinct means to demarcate the one from the other. But if asymmetrical, then not double. Narcissus, bending over the pool, does not, cannot recognize himself. So what happens when we do recognize the self and its intimate echoes of the Other? Instability, rupture, irrupture, brisure—the stable self explodes. The paradox is that irreducibility and interpenetration aren't contradictory. They are irreducible, but reciprocally constituted, just like the reader and the author, just like Horselover Fat and Philip K. Dick.

What is placed under erasure¹⁷ is an image of self remaining symmetrical with itself—an image (as double or simulacrum), a model of self-separate, self-determined subjectivity responsible only to itself. This model is destroyed, exploded, erased by its traumatic encounter with the consequences of alterity: The self is already an other, always already predicated by its encounter with the other and structured in/through an ethical relation of responsibility for the other.

Olham passes through a crisis of subjectivity, a crisis of versus, affecting the complete shift of his subject position. He comes to recognize himself as the simulacrum—to know himself as the Other. It is an explosive moment, the “epiphany of the other,” to follow Lévinas's phrase (“Trace” 351): The uncanny moment when Spence realizes he is not-Spence, self really not-self, inside actually outside, human actually alien, inner(space) really outer(space). At this moment “I” becomes “you,” a reversal of the two prefigured by the lateral symmetry of the glyphs “I” and “U” and the homophones “U” and “You.” The “U-Bomb” is obviously a You-Bomb. Death cannot be singular. Bang.

INTERNAL SCISSION

Simultaneously an explosion and an implosion, Spence's double detonation is the solipsistic collapse into singular self, into the private oneness of unique Being, the eternal natal bond with one's own experience. But it is also a dehiscence, the epiphanic burst, the moment of recognition that this unique and singular self is other, open, several, double, expansive, fully predicated by the reciprocal gaze of self-reflection: simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal. “The reflection finds itself therefore in the strange situation of simultaneously requiring and excluding an inverse movement of constitution” (Merleau-Ponty Visible 45).

Spence's recognition (anagnorisis) comes from within, producing the kind of “secret” knowledge the Greeks called gnosis (re-cognition). Gnosis is self-knowledge, intuition, insight, creative production, not remembrance or remembering of the psychic body of memory (as in the Platonic “recollection” called anamnesis¹⁸)—it is an unveiling, what Parmenides called aletheia. As the un-concealment of forgetfulness, aletheia combines the Greek prefix a- (to be without, outside) with forgetfulness (lethe). Mark Taylor unpacks this notoriously difficult conception revived by Heidegger: “To un-forget the origin is to remember that one has forgotten and to recognize that such forgetting is inescapable” (51). In this view, truth is a state of Being that emerges, opens in a clearing or constellation of contradictions, a notion of truth and reality that dominates Dick's late novels (particularly VALIS). It is also a notion implicit within the early stories, and in rereading them this way we too access the moment of recognition, clarifying that this is a readerly moment, although it takes the form of dehiscence. For to read the story is to reproduce its crisis of reflection, to produce one's own dianoia, to recognize how I myself am an impostor.

“Impostor” explodes the modern myth of self-identity, showing its full reciprocity with and dependence on its other: If to be human is to empathize, to superimpose self on other, and if to be I is always to be you, then we must rethink all the old categories and conventions, both of ontology and of ethics. And to rethink received truths—doxa—is not this the “great task” of literature? The reason Dick must rank with the most important writers of our generation? “Impostor” mirrors the modern confrontation with what Merleau-Ponty called “hyper-reflection,” what Baudrillard calls “the pure simulacrum,” what Derrida calls “différance,” and what Dick calls—simply, directly, passionately—our life.

Notes

1. Whatever his failures as a stylist, and they are several, Dick is arguably among the major writers of the contemporary era. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, in his Introduction to On Philip K. Dick, goes as far as calling Dick “the single writer most responsible for the acceptance of SF as a dominant genre of literature in the second half of the 20th century” (v), an extraordinary declaration that, in true Dickian fashion, he immediately subjects to comment: “This is a bold claim. I can hardly believe I'm making it. But I simply can't avoid it.”

2. “Paralogy” is the heterological program proposed by Lyotard (60-67). For clear discussions of the history of reflexivity and the problematics of reflection, see, respectively, Gasché (especially 14-78) and Merleau-Ponty (Visible [28-49]).

3. A tiny portion of this journal was published as an appendix to VALIS; a substantial section has now appeared as In Pursuit of VALIS, hereafter Exegesis.

4. By heterology, a term which according to Blanchot derives from Georges Bataille, I mean to identify the specifically poststructural dialectics of ipseity (selfhood) and alterity (otherness); heterology, then, demarcates what in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty called “hyper-reflection” or “hyper-dialectics”—“dialectics without synthesis” (50-104). This unresolved but regulated play is crucial to any understanding of Dick's heterodox thematics.

   Heterodox is the antonym for orthodox, which in Greek literally means “straight thinking,” underscoring the fact that Dick's writing is marked by difference, the loopy lines of heterodoxy; in “Impostor,” difference operates as the ironization or problematization of doxa, the conventional wisdom we inherit from our culture and perpetuate as a kind of naturalized belief. First among these conventions is our notion of the subject, which we typically assume has the clear and distinct, unique and singular status Descartes assigned it. I will return to this notion later.

5. In The Collected Stories, this sentence gives “than” rather than “then,” which I read as a simple typographical glitch since earlier editions of the story offer “then.” The typo does, however, provide an inspired intensification of the alienation effect of the story's final lines. When the text first appeared in 1953, the title's spelling was “Impostor,” an acceptable alternate for the more conventional “imposter”; this alternate spelling is consonant with that in the Exegesis. Consequently, I use “impostor” throughout.

   Another revealing typo can be found in another story about reversibility and reinscription, “The Exit Door Leads In” (5:315-31). After spilling coffee on a friend's suit, a woman tries to clean the stain, and in failing she remarks “It won't come off”; to which her friend replies: “Symbolism” (326). Yet the text gives “I won't come off,” neatly marking how the stain of Cartesian subjectivity remains forever with us, forever inscribing an “it” that reflection cannot confirm. I'd like to read these typos as instances of parapraxis (the Freudian mistake or “slip” that reveals a repressed motif). Perhaps Dick would be pleased.

6. “Paranoia … is the fullest extension of the noniterability of personal experience, and it is aggravated, not diminished, by the specificity and precision of the language games applied and the language they furnish” (93); Sussman is discussing a question within Wittgenstein, but the definition of paranoia applies extremely well to Dick.

7. In “The Sublime Simulacra: Repetition, Reversal, and Re-covery in Lem's Solaris,” I provide a detailed reading of the Freudian problematic of unheimlichkeit in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 36:3 (Spring 1995).

8. In VALIS, Horselover Fat's alternate personality, who lived circa 45 C.E. during Roman/Hellenistic times, is “Thomas” (109-11, 155). Given Dick's concern in that novel with the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts, the conspicuous silence on “The Gospel of Thomas” (the “secret” sayings of Jesus), generally acknowledged to be the most significant of these books, is extremely odd, for this Gnostic gospel underscores the thematic of the double and was available in English in a popular edition as early as 1963 (trans. George Ogg, New Testament Apocrypha, London: Lutterworth). Thomas, tradition has it, was Christ's brother; in Aramaic, thomas means “twin.”

9. Dick's use of the phrase “flattening of affect” derives from his reading of 1930s and 1940s psychiatric descriptions of schizophrenia. See Gregg Rickman's discussion of Dick's conception of schizophrenia in Chapter 8.

10. Dick tellingly commented that readers do “the same thing when [they] read SF that I'm doing when I write it” (5:394).

11. Noumenon is Kant's neologism for the thing-itself, as distinct from the phenomenon, the only “thing” we experience.

12. See A Thousand Plateaus, volume 2 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

13. Naming Merleau-Ponty a poststructuralist will offend some. My reading of the later Merleau-Ponty finds him consonant with the poststructural models of Derrida and Deleuze, but there remain certain scholarly disputes over Merleau-Ponty's view of how, or if, language mediates “nonreflective perception” (Prose 138). See, for example, his own “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other” in The Prose of the World, or the disputatious commentaries collected in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty. Derrida's reflections on the problematic of otherness appear in Cinders and “Psyché: The Invention of the Other.”

14. In Lévinas, the two are linked by conceptions of ethical relation; “the … word other, in Lévinas, means the transcendence of another person: the infinite relation of one person to another obligates beyond any obligation” (Blanchot 109). See particularly Lévinas's Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence. I wish to thank Michael Beehler for suggesting to me the crucial significance of Lévinas' thought on this question.

15. Substitution on the basis of difference is a metaphor; Aristotle's definition resonates wonderfully with Spence's dilemma: “Metaphor is the application of an alien name” (295/1456b). Note that Dick's metonymy is itself structured metaphorically.

16. Rather than an antagonist, Spence₂ is what Mieke Bal calls “an anti-subject” (32).

17. To “place under erasure” is not to destroy but to problematize, and it does not result in “the death of the subject,” a phrase that recalls not only Barthes but Nietzsche. Durham addresses “the death of the subject” within The Simulacra (where Dick configures an I-world and a not-I [cf. 224-25]), Now Wait for Last Year, A Scanner Darkly, and VALIS. He argues that, for Dick, late-capitalist culture and hallucinatory drugs (and, we could add, religious mysticism) are isomorphic, since both serve to dissolve the Cartesian subject. Palmer thinks this a “retreat into textuality” (“Postmodernism” 338); but for Dick, even quotidian events are textualized, or intertextual, in the manner of Derrida's statement that “there is nothing outside the text” (Of Grammatology 158). Problematizing doxa, then, is a confrontation rather than a retreat.

18. Dick's understanding of anamnesis (VALIS §8.111), probably drawn from haphazard reading in secondary sources, is adapted not from Plato but instead conforms to doctrines of Plotinus' Neoplatonism. Partial confirmation of this point is that Dick's Greek is the Hellenistic koine (VALIS passim), the common Greek dialect used to write both the New Testament and the Septuagint. Dick's reading of the Gnostics (64-69) is similarly one-sided; gnosticism remains an umbrella term which groups together a fairly diverse set of doctrines and practices. Dick's identification of gnosis and anamnesis (96) is his own position, neither Plato's nor Plotinus'. Plotinus tried to refute the Gnostics even as they appropriated and altered his thought, just as he had done to Plato. See James Robinson in The Nag Hammadi. For Derrida's discussion of how Platonic anamnesis produces simulacra, see Dissemination (95-117, 168).

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