Bodies and Things: Technology and Violence as a Vehicle for Posthumanist Ontologies in Julia Ducournau’s <i>Titane</i>

Abstract This article explores how the polyvalent nature of violence in Julia Ducournau’s film Titane (2021) orients viewers towards posthumanist ontologies and epistemologies. Titane follows the film’s polymorphously perverse female protagonist, Alexia, as she undergoes a physical and phenomenological transformation following a sexual encounter with a car. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s assessment of violence as the assertion of power, I examine the disarticulation – and rearticulation – of Alexia’s body as she transforms from human to cyborg. I argue that Ducournau uses violence on the mutable body to produce sites for potential liberation of the subject.