Not Becoming-Posthuman in the Ultimate Postfilmic Posthuman Male Fantasy: Queer-Feminist Observations on James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)

This article examines mainly the following: In what way is the digital mobilized in Avatar and in what complex ways are the filmic and the digital mutually constitutive? If one ever assumes, that cinema has some kind of (historically changing) specificity, if not an essence, but as a medium, and if one further assumes that cinema is a cultural technology, then what types of images, what kind of narratives and discursive strategies are enabled through the digital in conjunction with the cinematographic in Avatar? Furthermore, if cinema is supposedly, in a Deleuzian fashion, a system with specific features to reflect on, to show and to tell mainly about time, movement and their cognition, then what does Avatar tell us about the relation to the real, about lived, embodied time proper and therefore about subjectivity in general? What kind of subjectivity is addressed here? Closely related to this question is the last one, very seriously raised, if Avatar can ever be called a serious reflection on the philosophy of the subject brought to the fore by Rosi Braidotti as Zoëism. This article will, finally, answer this question negatively in showing that Avatar is the ultimate postfilmic posthuman male fantasy in the spirit of capitalism’s schizophrenic spectral logic.