Reimagining the Human in Modern French Science Fiction

Abstract

Due to human activity and technology, such as deforestation, nuclear testing, and the burning of fossil fuels, many geologists and environmentalists agree that we have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The dangers posed by the Anthropocene – that is, the risk that the planet will potentially become an uninhabitable environment for humans and nonhumans – require a reworking of human imagination and knowledge. There is an impetus to reconfigure the human as previously the center of all things, completely independent of other complex systems of life on Earth and throughout the cosmos. While the posthumanist response calls attention to the interdependence and co-evolution of humans and nonhumans within a complex ecosystem of life, the transhumanist perspective to coping with the Anthropocene offers more pragmatic, tool-based solutions, rather than a reworking of the human imagination. Science fiction has always been a representational tool for examining these questions surrounding human identity and the human species encountering technological and environmental change. Given the French tradition of interrelations between philosophical thought and literature, French science fiction is even more predisposed to philosophical, ethical, and metaphysical inquiries surrounding reimaginings of the human. This study examines works by Franco-Belgian author J.H. Rosny aîné (Les Xipéhuz; Les Navigateurs de l’infini), French writers Ayerdhal and Jean-Claude Dunyach (Étoiles mourantes), Éric Chevillard (Sans l’orang-outan), and French filmmaker Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita; The Fifth Element; Lucy). I argue that their works engage in a posthumanist challenge to the centrality of the “human,” posit the co-evolution and necessary interdependence of humans and nonhumans, and engage in an ethical examination of the transhumanist agenda of technologically modifying our minds and bodies. By examining tropes of Otherness in French science fiction (alien, machine, woman, animal), this study demonstrates how the works of Rosny aîné, Dunyach and Ayerdhal, Besson, and Chevillard reveal a dialectic between transhumanism and posthumanism.