A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

eing that the experience calls her toward. In any event, whether as a function of the abductee’s
desire to regain some of the agency lost via the abduction scenario (you will recall the current
nomenclature has shifted from abductee to experiencer) or as function of the overarching logic
of the abduction narrative (read as our own desires viewed through the scrim of a fantastic
encounter with the Other), the point seems to be that in order to confront that which is wholly
Other without disappearing, one must surrender the desire for the cohesive self. More
accurately, one must forgo the logic via which the self and Other are incommensurable.
This sense of moving toward a space in which the self and the Other can be fully copresent,
jettisoning the logic of the Gaze, under which one is cast into the darkness of
objectification by becoming the seen, is what drives the utopian reading of the abduction
narrative. The wholly overwhelming strangeness of encounters with the grays is that which most
distinguishes the abduction scenario from the earlier encounters discussed in this dissertation.
The gray departs from the comforting contours of the human so richly embodied by those earlier
Others. To address the question of why encountering such a figure as the gray without
surrendering to either of the paired impulses of subsumption or eradication (a binary that
parallels a series of like tensions discussed herein: centrifugal/centripetal, the desire for
maintenance of self v. the desire for the return to the Real, the desire to enter into a dramatically
altered set of social relations without giving up anything of the self) might be considered a
worthy goal, let us turn to the final argument of this dissertation, an argument that recalls our
ongoing discussion of identification and the abject.
The postmodern condition implies a highly mobile subject, one that encompasses, as Kaja
Silverman has it, “an infinitude of contradictory identifications.” 323
Silverman argues in The
Threshold of the Visible World that “while most of us are in fact quite peripatetic when it comes
323 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996) 1-2.
233