The "Alien" Experience: Satyajit Ray's Posthumanism

Abstract

abstract:As an ethical project, critical posthumanism acknowledges that lifeforms have intertwined histories. Life, both human and nonhuman, is about mutual interconnections, relationality rather than about isolation, separation, and boundedness. The article seeks to examine the posthumanist vision of Satyajit Ray as expostulated in his films and scripts. His swansong, Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991), acknowledges that environment-induced science/technology outmatches modern rocket science and the launch of the Voyager. His proposed science-fiction film The Alien (1967) conjectures the possibility of a visit of an alien from a technologically superior planet to earth and predates the films about extraterrestrials in the decades to come. Ray explores the idea of artificial intelligence in a short story named "Anukul" (later filmed by Sujoy Ghosh), which raises some pertinent issues about the degree of autonomy reached by robots and the pressing need to develop new rules to manage them. As robots become more autonomous, the notion of computer-controlled machines facing ethical decisions becomes much more complicated.