Abstract
Through a combination of actor-network theory’s anti-essentialism and Badiou’s ethics, this article seeks to explore what cyberpunk can mean today, using the film Casshern as a case study. For Latour, the path to the social as an event, opens only when no pre-given abstract categories as ‘nature’ and ‘society’ enclave human action. Technological and biological, human and nonhuman actors or actants, both can co-exist and co-work to make the social, as the difference between the natural and the technological is rendered unimportant. Badiou’s universal ethics also begin when differences between self and other become unimportant. In this sense, cuberpunk, rendering the human-nonhuman difference unimportant, can be a truly universal genre, indicating that human identity is still a goal to be reached; and this goal does not recognize the ‘human’ as a solid category.