Seite - 8 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

declaration of (brain) death and then turning off the machine. To pay for the life support is also seen as the family members' manifestation of gratitude towards their (older) relatives and future ancestors. 2. Anime We have seen that although the situation has been changing lately, a general distrust towards the notion of brain death and transplantations in general is still prevalent. However, probably everybody who has ever seen some anime, i.e. Japanese animated movies or series that are extremely popular both inside and outside of the country, knows that deformations and reformations of space and human or humanoid bodies in particular are very common themes. These can be connected to some Western scholars as well. Donna Haraway in her famous ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ from 1985 describes three dichotomies typical for our Western type of thinking which, according to her, it is now high time to abandon: human/animal, organism/ machine, physical/nonphysical. (Haraway 2016) Many anime cross all of these three boundaries. The human/animal can be seen in the internationally renowned work of the director Miyazaki Hayao, but for me, the other two boundaries are more interesting. The famous anime Ghost in the Shell (Oshii 1995) is about a state employee, the cyborg Major Kusanagi whose only organic part is a small piece of a brain and she therefore longs for exploring a mysterious identity with which she feels to have a lot in common. The entity is not only entirely artificial (i.e. without any organic part), but most importantly, it originated in virtual space (so it does not have a fixed material identity) and came into existence solely on its own. In one of the scenes, the major, inspired by the questions the cyberspace entity provoked, talks about her own personality and the problem of identity in general: “We can quit but we'd have to give back our cyborg parts and augmented brains to the government. All components that make me up as an individual. There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind. A face and voice to distinguish oneself from others, the hand you see when you wake up, your childhood memories and feelings about your future. And that's not all. There's also the ability to access vast amounts of information from an infinite network ... All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me, and gives rise to my conscience.” In the screenshot (Figure 1), there is Kusanagi trying to get access to the cyber entity. Her body is falling apart, which she does not care about and probably also does not feel. After that, she managed to merge with the cyber entity and with cyberspace. Figure 1 8