A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

their lives and have a strong bond with him, experiencing a powerful, and even reciprocal, love
relationship. At the same time, they resent the control he has exercised in their lives.” 299 Whitley
Streiber describes experiencing contact with one such creature as if he were seeing a reflection of
himself at the bottom of a very deep well. This experience suggests to Streiber that the tall gray
is somehow an extension of some fundamental part of him—as if the gray were a projection of
his anima, his spirit guide, his familiar. This sense of deep connection points to a collapse of the
abductee’s sense of self as clearly delineated. The sense that the leader is both fundamentally
alien and an extension of oneself is an experience that shatters any unitary sense of self, leading
to an understanding in which the self exists in a multiplicity of forms and places—an
understanding that shatters the subject that has been the object of such sustained philosophical
inquiry and critique.
One way of reading the inscrutability of the gray is to posit that if humans are to reach for
the utopian space over which so much blood and ink has been spilled, they must first become
something other than human, something unfathomable to our current selves. This is the
understanding that runs through the heart of the deconstruction of the human that begins with
Nietzsche and continues through Bataille and then the postructuralisms of Lacan, Foucault and
Deleuze. The project of disassembling fundamental assumptions about humanity (and thus the
attempt to disassemble humanity itself) is simultaneously the height of misanthropy and a labor
of great and abundant love. It is misanthropy in the sense that it sees the intractable links
between what are professed as the greatest achievements of humanity—reason, beauty,
progress—and that which is most base and reviled—humanity’s capacity for destruction, the
extremes of cruelty, the elevation of pleasure above all. It is humanity’s collective pretension to
having transcended its animal origins that most grates as hypocrisy and most readily invites
299 Mack 1994, 23.
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