Monstrous and Uncanny Ecologies: The Politics of Anamnesis in Ergo Proxy

Abstract

This paper establishes a dialogue between the Japanese anime series Ergo Proxy and environmental criticism on the metaphor of monstrosity within the capitalist world-ecology. By drawing on environmental inflexions of modes of the uncanny and the notion of symbiosis in ecocritical scholarship, it argues that the series articulates a politics of anamnesis that renders visible the immemorial agency of the nonhuman and the longue durée of multispecies extinction. Through its ecological reinterpretation of doppelgangers and the return of the repressed, the series complicates any stable notion of identity by showing the symbiotic presence of human and nonhuman aspects in each character. Precisely due to its post-apocalyptic setting, Ergo Proxy depicts this symbiotic outlook on the world-ecology as a political requirement to engage with the sublime realities of a sixth mass extinction event.