[lbo-talk] "Mechanical marxists"

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Fri Apr 4 23:28:06 PST 2003


At 12:54 PM +0800 4/5/03, Grant Lee wrote:
>Hey, where can I get one of these things? Can they be programmed to
>automatically take out individual elements of capital, or do they
>have to be guided to their targets?

***** _Blade Runner_...gives a double twist to the commonsense distinction between human and android. Man is a replicant who does not know it. Yet if this were all, the film would involve a simplistic reductionist notion that our self-experience _qua_ free 'human' agents is an illusion founded upon our ignorance of the causal nexus that regulates our lives. For that reason, one should supplement the former statement: it is only when, at the level of the enunciated content, I assume my replicant status, that, at the level of enunciation, I become a truly human subject. 'I am a replicant' is the statement of the subject in its purest....In short, the implicit thesis of _Blade Runner_ is that replicants are pure subjects precisely in so far as they experience the fact that every positive, substantial content, inclusive of the most intimate fantasies, is not 'their own' but already implanted.

(Slavoj Zizek, "'The Thing That Thinks': The Kantian Background of the Noir Subject," _Shades of Noir: A Reader_, ed. Joan Copjec, London; New York: Verso, 1993) ***** -- Yoshie

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