The Power to “Make Live”: Biopolitics and Reproduction in Blade Runner 2049

This book identifies and names the phenomenon of metagnosis: the experience of newly learning in adulthood of a long-standing condition. It can occur when the condition has remained undetected (e.g., colorblindness) and/or when the diagnostic categories themselves have shifted (e.g., ADHD). More broadly, it can occur with unexpected revelations bearing upon selfhood, such as surprising genetic test results. This phenomenon has received relatively scant attention, yet learning of an unknown condition is frequently a significant and bewildering revelation, subverting narrative expectations and customary categories. In addressing the topic this book deploys an evolution of narrative medicine as a robust research methodology comprising interdisciplinarity, narrative attentiveness, and creating a writerly text. Beginning with the author’s own experience of metagnosis, it explores the issues it raises—from communicability to narrative intelligibility to different ways of seeing. Next, it traces the distinctive metagnostic narrative arc through the stages of recognition, subversion, and renegotiation, discussing this trajectory in light of a range of metagnostic experiences, from Blade Runner to real-world midlife diagnoses. Finally, it situates metagnosis in relation to genetic revelations and the broader discourses concerning identity. Proposing that the figure of blindsight—drawn from the author’s metagnostic experience—offers a productive model for negotiating such revelations, the book suggests that better understanding metagnosis will not simply aid those directly affected but will also serve as a bellwether for how we will all navigate advancing biomedical and genomic knowledge, and how we may fruitfully interrogate the very notion of identity.

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Posthumanist Voices in Literature and Opera

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, Volume 2 ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190460242.013.6 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 627-651

Author(s):

Jason R. D'Aoust

Keyword(s):

Blade Runner ◽

Artistic Works ◽

Magic Flute

From a background that critically investigates conceptualizations and understandings of the relations and dialectics between the inner and the outer voice and the discursive implications of the posthumanist appraisal of vocality, Jason D’Aoust examines the “operatic voice” or the vocality of opera as it is practiced and understood in the present period. From a philosophically informed perspective, D’Aoust engages with recent reappraisals of phonocentrism in voice studies, and analyzes artistic works from different genres, comprising opera (Mozart’s The Magic Flute), literature (Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), and film (Scott’s Blade Runner), in order to show how opera practitioners, authors, and film-makers use the sonorous imagination to deconstruct the canon.

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The Romantic Roots of "Blade Runner"

The Wordsworth Circle ◽

10.1086/twc24043987 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 43 (3) ◽

pp. 165-172 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Mark Lussier ◽

Kaitlin Gowan

Keyword(s):

Blade Runner

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Chapter 10 Blade Runner, or The Interworlds

Apocalypse-Cinema ◽

10.1515/9780823264834-011 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 81-86

Keyword(s):

Blade Runner

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Warum Replikanten die besseren Menschen sind

10.5771/9783828877016 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Karsten Schmidt

Keyword(s):

Thought Experiment ◽

High Tech ◽

History Of Thought ◽

Blade Runner ◽

History Of

In addition to their visual qualities, Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER and Denis Villeneuve’s BLADE RUNNER 2049 present a profound reflection on what it means to be human under the conditions of high-tech, late capitalist information societies. The fictional scenario serves as a thought experiment: it provokes the question of what remains of being human if all traditional and modern concepts are no longer applicable. The book provides comprehensive explanations of the philosophical content and references, an analysis of their visual realization, and their background in the history of thought. It is thus also an answer to the question of whether it is possible to philosophize with films.

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