Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
ficção científica
Professores: Prof. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (PPGAS), Eric Silva Macedo (pós-
doutorando PPGAS), Prof. Déborah Danowski (PUC-Rio)
Quartas-feiras, 14h00
Starting in the Modern era, the concept of “the human” contained in the curiously self-
referential name of our discipline has been circumscribed by a cast of figures of alterity
which define it, or more precisely, through which and against which that concept
measures itself. Such figures function as elements of problematization of the anthrópos
— either through its “exceptionalizing” separation from them, or its subjective and
objective identification-hibridizition with them, or, finally, by having them acting as
lures for becomings (in Deleuze’s sense). Beyond the powerful magnetic poles of “the
animal” and “the machine”, which perennially repel-attract the anthrópos concept, and
the haunting (non-)presence of the “spectrological” world (Ludueña) — whose
exorcism instituted the domain of the modern political world since Hobbes — our
contemporary imaginary of the “human” has incorporated the maximally other figure of
“extraterrestrials” or “aliens”. The latter is the privileged subject of a branch of
speculative anthropology — the term used by the writer Juan José Saer to define fiction
in general — namely, the so-called “science fiction” or, more widely “speculative
fiction” (which amounts to a quasi-pleonastic reduplication of Saer’s definition). The
aim of this course is to explore the anthropological potentialities (in the disciplinary
sense of anthropology”) of contemporary science fiction, situating it within the
ominous context of the Anthropocene — the increasing and catastrophic process of
mutual entangling of “geopolitics” and “geophysics”, traditionally conceived as
ontologically heterogenous or at least spatio-temporally incommensurable dimensions.
In the figure of the extraterrestrial Alien the human, the machine, the animal and
certain liminal being such as the specter or the virus get fused into a many-faceted
representation of Otherness. It will lead us to probe certain specific “ways or
worldmaking” which emerge from the encounter with radical alteritiy. Alien alterity is
literally an alterity of worlds, the versions of which are as diverse as the worlds that can
be imagined, in all senses of the verb. In this sense, the theme of the extraterrestrial
alien is frequently associated with some others that offer a mirror image of “us”, the
Earth-beings (both human and extrahuman). In the narratives featuring encounters with
extraterrestrial agencies, there are almost invariably many aspects that point to
interspecific, interethnic, intercultural, gender-based and other differences, as well as
relations of predation, genocide, species extinction, slavery and imperial colonialism.
The figure of the alien unleashes a process of variation of the “indigenous”
relationships that articulate intra and interspecific dimensions, fragmenting the Human
according to its multiform antagonistic alliances with the extrahuman, be the latter
organic or inorganic. Special though not exclusive attention will be given to the theme
of “colonization” — of cosmic colonialism, to be clearer — , explorjng the two
hypotheses which SF pursues alternatively: either the colonization (or failure thereof) of
other planets by humans, or the colonization of the Earth by alien beings (technological
“superior” civilizations, lethal viruses, incorporeal super-intelligent ontic forms). In both
cases, a frequent problem, or the motive force for cosmic colonialism is the exhaustion
of resources in the colonizers’ world, something which obviously echoes the
anthropocenic Zeitgeist. In brief, we shall consider, from an anthropological point of
view, the sicence fiction “genre” as constituting the “folk metaphysics” of our era, the
site of production of our modern mythology — the major mythophysics of the
Anthropocene.