Carrying the Earth to the Sky: Claire Denis’s Perverse Ecologies

Abstract

Abstract Claire Denis and Gilles Deleuze have initiated some of the most radical questioning of the human figure in recent French culture. This tendency has escalated in recent years, as Denis turns her gaze towards interstellar matter in High Life (2018), while a growing trend within Deleuze studies has developed the idea of a ‘dark Deleuze’ intent on leaving behind the human once and for all. This article takes these developments as an occasion to broach ethical questions about the implications of Denis and Deleuze’s non-anthropocentric perspective: what happens to relations between humans in a world of heightened non-human animacy? By reading High Life alongside a key text for this ‘dark Deleuze’, ‘Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui’ (1967), I demonstrate how Denis and Deleuze’s parallel exploration of nonhuman ecologies eventually diverges. Where Deleuze dives head-first into a world of matter and molecules, Denis traces a more dynamic trajectory. Through attention to the racial and postcolonial dynamics of the environments she surveys, she inflects Deleuze’s fusional ontology with a more careful thinking of alterity. Antisocial drives, in Denis, are able to be recuperated into a renewed human sociality, one that is traversed and maintained by environmental processes.