Posthuman Care and Posthumous Life in Marjorie Prime

Abstract

Care is a pivotal idea for a branch of feminist philosophy that has sought to outline an alternative to moral philosophy traditions rooted in ideals of autonomy and individualism. Care philosophy privileges particularity, context, and emotion for analyzing human relations; it highlights vulnerability and interdependence as intrinsic rather than anomalous, treating (human) moral agents as embedded, encumbered, and embodied. Over the past decade, cultural theory has seen a number of “turns”—the nonhuman or posthuman turn, the animal turn, the affective turn, the ethical turn—that address the human as one affective, embodied, and ultimately vulnerable animal among many. This chapter explores a theory of care “turned” toward the posthuman, a theory of care that recognizes vulnerability, interdependence, and relationality as endemic across more-than-human worlds. It explores the idea and practice of posthuman care by analyzing the speculative film Marjorie Prime (2017), which offers compelling, if conflicted, scenarios of future care that can help us imagine posthuman forms and modes of aging, relating, and being while alerting us to the ethical consequences of such scenarios.