Re-theorizing the Problem of Identity and the Onto-Existentialism of DC Comics’ Superman
Re-theorizing the Problem of Identity and the Onto-Existentialism of DC Comics’ Superman

Summary/Abstract: One of the central onto-existential tensions at play within the contemporary comic book superhero is the tension between identity and disguise. Contemporary comic book scholarship typically posits this phenomenon as being primarily a problem of dual identity. Like most comic book superheroes, superbeings, and costumed crime fighters who avail themselves of multiple identities as an essential part of their aesthetic and narratological repertoire, DC Comics character Superman is also conventionally aggregated in this analytical framework. While much scholarly attention has been directed toward the thematic and cultural tensions between two of the character’s best-known and most recognizable identities, namely ‘Clark Kent of Kansas’ and ‘Superman of Earth’, the character in question is in fact an identarian multiplicity consisting of three ‘identity-machines’: ‘Clark’, ‘Superman’, and ‘Kal-El of Krypton’. Referring to the schizoanalysis developed by the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (orig. 1972), as well as relying on the kind of narratological approach developed in the 1960s, this paper seeks to re-theorize the onto-existential tension between the character’s triplicate identities which the current scholarly interpretation of the character’s relationship with various concepts of identity overlooks.

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