A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

casts the world, and the subject, into a vertiginous space, a space in which the both the “self” and
“world” appear to be utterly arbitrary constructions.
Bryson argues that both Sartre’s and Lacan’s account of the gaze posit such momentary
encounters as, rather than fundamentally disruptive of subjectivity, redemptive. “The je
reemerges from its encounter with nihility, reinforced in its position as the center of its
experience...the subject’s sense of being a subject is heightened, not undone.” 314
What does all
this have to do with the hypnotherapist and alien abduction? Just as Sartre’s encounter with the
other in the park and Lacan’s with the sardine can invoke a certain decentering of the self, so too
does the experience of alien abduction. Just as both Lacan and Sartre try to frame the
momentary encounter with the gaze as redemptive, hypnotherapy attempts to frame alien
abduction as benign and enriching. In some ways the description offered by abductees indicates
a space somewhere between Sartre’s watcher and Lacan’s can. The gray as figure seems to
potentially harbor some subjectivity, given its humanoid form, while simultaneously it appears to
be devoid of “personal” presence, appearing rather as some fundamentally inert machine blessed
by locomotion. In that subjectivity is often equated with the capacity for emotion (humans who
do not exhibit a full range of emotion or whose emotional responses do not hew to accepted
standards are often described as inhuman or monstrous) and the gray often appears to be utterly
devoid of emotion, its subjectivity is in doubt.
Through its apparent suspension of physical laws and its nightmare-like impact,
abduction ruptures the screen of socially convened conceptions of reality. The abduction
experience is a trauma in the most literal sense. The Greek root of “trauma” conveys the literal
sense of wound. A wound is an opening where there is supposed to be closure. The German
314 Bryson, 85, 86.
215