Blade Runner and the Right to Life

Abstract

This article takes a closer look at the notions of “human” and “rights” in connection with a discussion of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, and the film Blade Runner. Foucault develops a series of arguments about what he describes as “The ‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfactions of needs, and beyond all the oppressions or ‘alienations,’ the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be.” This right to life is likewise one of the main themes in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic Blade Runner, which tells the story of a group of replicants — or human-like robots — returning to earth in search of more life. On earth, however, they are outlawed, and most of the film’s plot essentially consists of Deckard, the main character, hunting down and killing the replicants. In my article, I argue that Blade Runner is a film that explores what one could call the culmination of biopower, the imagination of a life whose absolute perfection at the same time becomes the expression of absolute monstrosity, i.e. a threat to life that legitimizes the death penalty. Questioning and discussing the notions of “human” and “rights” in a sci-fi context, Blade Runner develops some of the implications of Foucault’s ideas about “an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.”