Semblances of Intimacy: Separating the Humane from the Human in Blade Runner 2049

Abstract

Denis Villeneuve’s film Blade Runner 2049 can be read as a postmodern detective story that explores the indeterminacy of whether its protagonist, K, is human or replicant. I argue that it is through the search for clarity between these two ontological categories that the film concurrently investigates how the aesthetic and ethical category of the humane becomes, or can become, separate and distinct from the ontological category of the human. Through this separation, I argue that the humane is characterized by the desire to establish and build connections of emotional and affective intimacy regardless of whether a sub- ject is, or can be, ontologically characterized as human. Furthermore, through my reading of the film’s engagement with artificial memory, I argue that this allows us to reconsider the relationship between the notions of authenticity and intimacy, wherein the latter is not necessarily founded upon the former, but rather rests on the embodied capacity to feel and be affected. The construction of the humane in Blade Runner 2049 consequently develops as a posthumanist critique of a humanist cultural imagination in which the humane necessarily would be the exclusive domain of the human.