Parabole d’un ‘éternel retour’ ou voyage vers une post-humanité ?

Abstract

Adapted from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, Kubrick’s film paved the way for the space opera genre in cinema. Made in 1968, the film poses a Nietzschean-style question about the evolution of humanity from both a philosophical and technological point of view. While the work is a feat in terms of special effects, it has left its mark on the public with its emblematic character: the robot HAL 9000. This artificial intelligence, pushed to its evolutionary peak, is undoubtedly the most human machine to emerge from science fiction cinema. Indeed, as a product of human intelligence, it becomes its imperfect, yet fallible mirror. Here lies all the ambivalence of a machine that is sometimes more human than the humans it serves. In fact, Stanley Kubrick’s film, like his entire body of work, can give rise to several levels of interpretation. He questions, through the robot, what defines humanity as a whole. But he also questions the limits of this humanity through what is foreign to it, with the recurring vision of a black monolith, whose form is strangely similar to that of HAL. This monolith could be perceived as the ultimate limit of human knowledge, an opening to an elsewhere in which humanity would no longer have its place… or could on the contrary reinvent itself? Thus, the aim of this paper will be to analyse the ambivalence of the machine, both familiar and inhuman. Through such questionings, the film points out the limits humanity is facing and questions the capacity of mankind to overcome them.. perhaps opening up an era of post-humanity.

Keywords

• Kubrick
• Clarke
• science-fiction
• space opera