Blade Runner and the Right to Life

Abstract

This chapter reads Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner alongside the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality in order to investigate the notions of “human” and “rights”. Foucault’s concept of sovereignty in many ways extends Schmitt’s notion of the sovereign’s right to declare the exception. Foucault develops a series of arguments on what he describes as the right to life. This right to life is one of the main themes in Blade Runner, which tells the story of a group of replicants (human-like robots) returning to Earth in search of more life. On Earth, however, they are outlawed, and most of the film’s plot consists of Deckard, the main character, hunting down and killing the replicants. I argue that Blade Runner explores what one could call the culmination of biopower, the imagination of a life whose absolute perfection is simultaneously the expression of absolute monstrosity, a threat to life that legitimizes the death penalty. Questioning and exploring the notions of “human” and “rights” in a sci-fi context, Blade Runner develops some of the implications of what sovereignty means when the border between natural life and artificial life erodes.