“The Flower-­ Faced Wife”: between cyborg and scapegoat

Abstract

The article problematizes the figure of the excluded as a category circulating within the social mechanism and determining the balance of power between the participants of communication. As a case study we use a story from the Welsh epic Mabinogion, in which Llew Llaw Gifs, doomed to celibacy, gets magician Gwydion to make a girl out of flowers—Blodewed—to be his wife. According to the story, Blodewed (Welsh for “flower face”), proves to be an unfaithful and treacherous wife and attempts to kill Llew, after which she is turned into an owl by Gwydion as punishment. In the article, Flowerface functions as a conceptual figure at the intersection of such disciplinary fields as political philosophy, philosophical anthropology, bioethics, and feminist thought. Its history correlates equally with notions of the “machine” that revolts against its creators—the cyborg (that is, an instrument that ceases to be a means but claims the status of an end in itself), René Girard's notion of texts of persecution, and the notion of the excluded, which we take from political philosophy. The authors show the possibilities and limitations of a variety of approaches, of which the Cyborgian and Girardian approaches are chosen as key, in revising and reinterpreting texts that hide behind the mask of the beast of victims. It is argued that Girard has an implicit metaphysics that works not only to detect scapegoats, but prepares the ground through the opposition of the differentiated/indistinguishable for such sacrifice. It is also argued that “anti-historicism.” As a work of new dialectics and political economy, Donna Haraway's Cyborgian abandons the pair of distinguishable/indistinguishable, of “difference”—in favor of contradictions. But at the same time, the text itself turns out to be a pure manifesto that has limited political effects; this is exemplified in the reception of the cyborgian as a “metaphor.”