Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

224Demonic Texts and Textual Demonspresence was. A Mercerite sensed evil without understanding it. Put in anotherway, a Mercerite was free to locate the nebulous presence of TheKillers wherever he saw fit. For Rick Deckard an escaped humanoid robot,which had killed its master, which had been equipped with an intelligencegreater than that of many human beings, which had no regard for animals,which possessed no ability to feel emphatic joy for another life form’s successor grief at its defeat – that, for him, epitomized The Killers. 97The exclusion of machines from “natural” human identity in Dick’snovel does not amount to a denial of heterogeny. As the Mercerites identifywith the passion of Wilbur, they become aware of their deep unity with theother sentient beings, humans and animals. The merged state is polyphonic:“He [the Mercerite] experienced them, the others, incorporated in the babbleof their thoughts, heard in his own brain the noise of their many individualexistences.” 98 Because the empathy box is also, after all, a piece oftechnology, the merger through it is also interwoven with ambivalence andheterogeneity. In a gesture opposing the cognitocentric bias, mere intelligenceis not enough to classify someone as truly living; connection to otherlife is needed. Android’s relation to language is analogous to the desolatelandscape surrounding Wilbur Mercer: only fragments of life remain, deadand decomposed. Rick Deckard notes how the female android had no “emotionalawareness, no feeling-sense of the actual meaning of what she said.Only the hollow, formal, intellectual definitions of the separate terms.” 99 Anandroid is the subject of technological word, or demonic aspects of language– “perverse and artful.” 100 When Deckard tries to fix the identity of one android(Luba Luft), she can masterfully exploit the anti-communicative potentialsof language. 101 All the signifiers are detached from their intendedcontexts, and the attempts of Law (Deckard) to capture the real identity andreferent are deflected.According to the traditional logic of opposing dualisms ‘male’ is associatedwith ‘reason’ and ‘good,’ whereas ‘female’ groups with ‘irrational’ and‘evil.’ 102 In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep the unconnected rationalityis demonised, whereas a certain type of irrationality is treasured. The androidsare both male and female, but Deckard is most confused in his relationto the female androids. The story of Deckard bears witness to the enduringcapacity of the demonic Other to provoke reconstruction of identity.The opening scene of the novel shows Deckard and his wife in an absurd argumentover the use of a “Penfield mood organ” – a device that artificiallymanipulates the brain state to induce the desired emotion. His wife wants to97 DA, 27.98 DA, 18.99DA, 166-67.100 See the discussion on Derrida and writing in chapter three.101 “‘O nein,’ Luba broke in. ‘I wouldn’t be there. That’s easy to answer.’ – ‘That’s notthe question!’ – ‘Did you get the wrong question? But I understand that; why is a questionI understand the wrong one? Aren’t I supposed to understand?’” (DA, 92.)102See above, chapter four.