Sie besamt: Über das Geheimnis des Lebens in Claire Denis’ Science-Fiction-Film High Life (2018)

Abstract

English Abstract: As I will show in the following, High Life can be read as a complex philosophical commentary on the entanglement of sexuality, gender, reproduction, and the historicity of life under the current conditions of science and technology. High Life exposes the gendered and racially differentiated violence of thanatopolitics inherent in biopolitics, and shows the ways in which the death drive can become a resistant moment that opposes the current conflation of reproductive technology and thanatopolitics. With Gilles Deleuze, I will show that, in High Life, the secret of life is not revealed from the perspective of “individual life” but from the perspective of “between moments” of a “life that is impersonal and yet singular” (Deleuze 1997, 5). Indeed, despite the omnipresence of death, the question that High Life poses concerns not death itself, but the in-between of death and individual survival.