She Is InseminatingThanatopolitics and Reproduction in Claire Denis’s Science Fiction Film High Life (2018)

What Kind of Science Fiction Film?

[Denis, Claire]There’s a slowly changing, haunting electronic sound. A humid, green garden appears from the black screen. The camera moves slowly across the green plants, over dark green moss, ripe pumpkins, and through the damp fog, all the while this sound can still be heard. The setting is reminiscent of paradise, fertility, and perhaps even evokes the origin of life. At the same time, it recalls the beginning of Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic 1972 science fiction movie Solaris. But suddenly the camera passes over a dirty men’s shoe protruding from the ground. There is no time to pursue the riddle. The next scene is introduced by the image of a transparent door separating the garden from an outside. The plaintive crying of a small child replaces the fading electronic sound. A male voice calms down the child, while Beginning of page[p. 150] the camera, having unlocked its gaze from a metal ladder leading downward, moves into a point-of-view shot, as if this were a horror movie, through an ill-lit corridor, and finally discovers a one-year-old child sitting alone in an improvised playpen, now chattering quietly. The playpen reinforces the narrowness of the surroundings, which resembles a prison. We see white texts run across black screens and colourful lights. We are manifestly in a spaceship.

The toddler is playing and nattering; a male voice answers gently: ‘Dadada’. From where does the voice come? It comes from another outside, from outer space, which, in the course of the film, will turn out to be another inside. We see a young man in a space suit and glass helmet, played by Robert Patterson, talking to the toddler via telecommunication. His voice, coming from the black outer space, fills the small room in which the child is preoccupied in his playpen in front of the screens. The man, who we will come later to know as Monte, is holding a wrench in his hand and tightening a nut. He is moving slowly because of the lack of gravity, as if in a dream.

What kind of science fiction movie is High Life, a film that is so carefully composed and that operates in such an elaborate fashion with the difference between the seeable and the sayable, with sound, and with moving pictures? How does it manage to create and to destroy meaning simultaneously? How does it cause and dissolve affections? How can it, with such virtuosity, play with the power to anticipate, postpone, and contradict an effect?

High Life can be read as a complex philosophical commentary on the entanglement of sexuality, gender, reproduction, and the historicity of life under the current scientific and technological conditions. High Life exposes the gendered and racially differentiated violence of the Beginning of page[p. 151] thanatopolitics inherent in biopolitics; it shows the ways in which the death drive can become a resistant moment that stands opposed to the current conflation of reproductive technology and thanatopolitics. In terms of the significance of the death drive, one could think here of the influential and much-discussed book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive by queer theorist Lee Edelman.11Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2005). Edelman states that the figure of the imaginary Child symbolizes a reproductive futurism and that queer negativity is the only appropriate response to the violent exclusion of queers associated with said futurism. According to Edelman, to be queered is, as Penelope Deutscher has pointedly summarized, ‘to have the death drive projected onto you’.22Penelope Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason (New York: Columbia University Press 2017), p. 44. This violent positioning outside the symbolic order is linked to a possible insight into the structure of this symbolic order: ‘Those queered by the social order that projects its death drive onto them are no doubt positioned to recognize the structuring fantasy that so defines them.’33Edelman, No Future, p. 30. Edelman derives from this the political obligation for queer theory to affirm the death drive as the undoing of identity and in this way to reinforce the politically self-destructive moment of the social and the Symbolic. In the interpretation outlined in his book Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman strictly refers to the theoretical framework provided by Lacan’s structuralist interpretation of Freud.

Following Deleuze and his interpretation of the Freudian death drive, I will show that reproductive futurism in High Life is not considered from the perspective of ‘individual life’, but from the perspective of the ‘between moments’Beginning of page[p. 152] of ‘a life that is impersonal and yet singular’.44Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life…’, trans. by Nick Millett, Theory, Culture & Society, 14.2 (1997), pp. 3–7 (p. 5) <https://doi.org/10.1177/026327697014002002>. Indeed, despite the omnipresence of death, the question that High Life poses concerns not death itself, but the in-between of death and individual survival. Claire Denis combines astronomical speculations about the curvature of time in black holes with a critique of the thanatopolitics of reproduction and thus makes an original contribution to the understanding of queer temporalities. Her film opens up the possibility of thinking about time, reproduction, and biopolitics beyond the alternative of either ‘reproductive futurism’ or ‘no future’. The death drive is also a resistant moment here, but not in the Lacanian sense of being an ungraspable, formless, and horrifying real, but rather in Deleuze’s sense as ‘a moment […] of a life playing with death’.55Ibid., p. 4. High Life shows the violence of reproductive futurism from the perspective of the women in the film onto whom the death drive has been projected: women who have committed criminal offenses and do not want to carry and give birth to children.

No Space Odyssey

Two long, thin tubes connect Monte to the shuttle — like umbilical cords. While working, he continues to speak to the child. Some counter-shots, both medium and close-up, show us Monte in his spacesuit repairing the shuttle outside and speaking to the toddler without seeing her. One close-up shot shows the little child looking around, searching for the source of the voice.

Suddenly, on an LED screen, a historical scene from a black-and-white ethnographic film starts playing on 16mm,Beginning of page[p. 153] catching the toddler’s eye. Seen from a worm’s-eye view is a Native American sitting on a horse while another runs around a fire from which smoke is billowing (Fig. 1).

Images are being sent from earth to the spaceship. The child gets scared and screams. We see Monte lose his nerve as he hears the insistent screams. The tool drops from his hand and disappears into a black space. While falling, the wrench turns around itself.

All of a sudden, we see the memory of the iconic scene of the bone that gets hurled up into the air in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey: the wrench resembles the bone triumphantly thrown skywards by the prehuman ancestor, upon having discovered that a bone can be used as a tool and/or a weapon (Fig. 2).Beginning of page[p. 154]

In Kubrick’s movie, the sky-bound bone indicates the evolutionary step from ape to man, from nature to culture; it indicates the beginning of an evolutionary process that ends in the conquest of space. In Claire Denis’s High Life, however, things are completely different. The spinning wrench raises a traumatic memory, that of a bloody hand and a stone being thrown into a deep well, a stone that Monte had used when he was still a boy to kill a human being. It is Monte’s own hand that throws the stone, but it appears strange and disembodied, as if it were someone else’s (Fig. 3). The victim is a young girl who we later learn had slain Monte’s dog. These images, like all the other earth scenes, were also recorded on 16mm film, while the spaceship scenes were captured on a high-resolution digital Beginning of page[p. 155] camera, resulting in a change not only to the optics, but also to the acoustics, and the interplay between them. The film subtly plays on the aesthetic differences between the analogue and the digital.

As it disappears into space, the tool does not indicate a step toward a progressive future. It leads back to the past, evoking the memory of trauma and violence.

Thus, the temporality in Denis’s film does not adhere to the conception of the empty, homogenous time of progress,66Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, trans. by Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, ed. by Michael W. Jennings and others, 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1996–2003), iv: 1938–1940 (2003), pp. 389–400 (p. 395). and hence also does not refer to some progress-oriented Beginning of page[p. 156] rationality of evolution. The rhythm of time is structured by repetition and difference, not by continuity and progress; it persistently undermines the phantasm of reproductive futurism and the sentimentalized representations of the imaginary Child.77See Edelman, No Future, p. 27. The carefully considered use of technical-aesthetic means of expression chants the temporal rhythm of difference and repetition in which the past is the actual engine. This goes hand-in-hand with the very different functions of the figure of the child and the child’s origin in both movies.

Human Life in Space

In both High Life and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the figure of the child is associated with the question of the possibility of human life in space. In other words, it represents and guarantees the existence of a future in space. Conversely, this means that the future depends on there being human reproduction. 2001: A Space Odyssey ends with the magical transformation of the old astronaut Bowman into a foetus enclosed in a transparent orb of light. In the famous last scene, this angelic ‘Star Child’ floats in space beside the earth, gazing at it, suggesting a further evolution of humankind (Fig. 4).

There is no woman involved in this act of procreation. It’s a white man’s fantasy of spiritual self-creation carried out in the name of humanity, and is in keeping with the ideology and self-understanding of 1960s space science. The perspective of women on, and their contribution to, procreation have no place in this science-fictional overcoming of mortality. The film thus effects an exclusion of Beginning of page[p. 157] women that must in turn be understood as part of a heteronormative biopolitics.

In High Life, by contrast, women are very present. Their role, however, is not one of loving mothers. None of the female figures submits to the biopolitical task associated with women in human reproduction —the upshot of which is that the question of reproduction arises all the more urgently. By insisting on the bodily and material conditions of reproduction, the film brings to light the thanatopolitics that is the flip side of biopolitics, the goal of the latter being, as Michel Foucault showed, to multiply life. In critical engagement with Foucault, theorists of thanatopolitics have argued that the death of certain groups of the population is not only systematically accepted Beginning of page[p. 158] but actively administered.88See the fourth chapter ‘Immunity, Bare Life, and the Thanatopolitics of Reproduction: Foucault, Esposito, Agamben’, in Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures, pp. 105–42. Following Edelman and Foucault, the feminist philosopher Penelope Deutscher has argued, firstly, that reproductive futurism and the figure of the fetishized child are linked to the overvaluation of certain pregnant women, and, secondly, that there is a close connection between the abjection of queers and the abjection of abortion:

[T]he overvaluation of the pregnant woman is itself a principle of division: some pregnant women are overvalued, while others (figures of surplus pregnancy, of welfare benefit abuse or other kinds of irresponsibility) may be under- or devalued, and some pregnancies (such as the pregnancy of the illegal immigrant) are entirely debased.99Ibid., p. 50.

The connection between the violent rejection of queer lives and the violent rejection of abortion is in turn based on the fact that both serve as a projection surface for the death drive. As a result, according to Deutscher, abortion can be considered as ‘queer’s twin’.

The child in Denis’s film is the product of body-focused experiments that are performed by a female physician, Dr Dibs, who is obsessed with the idea of breeding a child resistant to radioactive rays in space. And the product of Dibs’s experiments, the baby girl Willow (Scarlett Lindsay), whose performance, alongside Monte’s, opens the film, is very real, in the sense of tangible — as is the relationship and interactions between Monte and Willow. One has, in fact, rarely seen such physical intimacy between a man and a baby in a movie. Monte cooks for the baby, feeds her, lays her down to sleep and Beginning of page[p. 159] watches over her, attends to her peeing; he helps her to take her first steps, teaches her what culture is, and what a taboo is. The baby is fully trusting of Monte, even when she cries. She stays in contact with him at all times. The baby’s reactions and gestures move time forward and give him a reason to live. The scenes between him and the toddler are impressive, fascinating, disturbing and, at times, even uncanny. Take, for example, when he says to her, as she sleeps, that he could have killed her as easily as a kitten. Or when the closeness between them, as they lie in bed together, becomes too intimate and physical, almost sexual.

According to Denis, the idea that, in order to explore space outside the solar system, children will have to be born while on the trip and protected from radiation comes from the physicist Stephen Hawking.1010‘Claire Denis on Sex as an Escape — in Space! High Life’, TIFF Originals (2019), YouTube (0:49–1:00) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pM0wXy77O4> [accessed 20 February 2024]. Exiting the solar system will take longer than one lifetime, which is why babies will need to be born in space: a consideration and a rather ‘down-to-earth’ one that is in keeping with current scientific speculation. Science fiction, as Denis laconically comments, forces you ‘to think about time’.1111Ibid., 0:18. Yet, since the physician, Dibs, played by Juliette Binoche, is also haunted by her past, one presumes that her strong desire for a space-born child results more from her traumatic experiences than from rational reasoning. But as Freud and, long before him, Kant both showed, what we think is rational very often turns out to be the rationalization of speculation.1212Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Praktiken der Illusion. Kant, Nietzsche, Cohen, Benjamin bis Donna J. Haraway (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2007), p. 11.Beginning of page[p. 160]

Reproduction

As becomes clear over the course of the film, Dibs has murdered her own children in their beds, stabbed her husband to death, and tried unsuccessfully to kill herself by stabbing herself in the uterus with a knife. This is not shown by means of a flashback, as is the case with Monte’s memories, but is revealed in a conversation between Dibs and Boyse in a very intimate and almost tender moment (Fig. 5). Boyse, played by Mia Goth, is one of the women on whom Dibs conducts her experiments.

Sentenced to death along with the other ten crew members (five female and five male), Dibs agrees to serve science by being part of a space mission to extract energy Beginning of page[p. 161] from a black hole. Dibs inseminates the female members of the crew against their will with the sperm of the male crew. None of the women want to get pregnant. They explicitly and violently refuse to serve as a medium of reproduction. They know for a fact that these experiments will expose their bodies to death (as is still the case with every birth). Moreover, they neither desire to have a child nor to reproduce at all. They have no hope and no future. At some point, Boyse says to Dibs, filled with anger and contempt: ‘It is our willpower that kills the foetuses.’ Only Dibs, who has destroyed her own reproductive organs, is obsessed with the idea of the artificial procreation of a child that will be ‘perfect’ and strong enough to survive in space.

The long-haired Dibs herself is strong, manipulative and powerful. She is not only a scientist obsessed with the idea of breeding the perfect baby, but also the only sexually active woman on board. One of the most impressive and unsettling scenes shows Dibs skilfully masturbating in the so-called fuck room, accompanied by an acoustic element of dramatic electronic sound made by Stuart Staples. With her waist-long hair wrapping itself around her body, her wild and yet concentrated movements, and with the camera so close to her and the music so intensely overpowering, the scene recalls a witch’s dance.1313High Life, dir. by Claire Denis (2018), 00:36:00. Actually, as Dibs states in a short exchange with Monte while leaving the fuck room: ‘I know I look like a witch.’ And Monte answers: ‘You are foxy and you know it.’ Asked why she still remains true to the scientific mission of their expedition, while everybody else has recognized that it is just a suicide mission, she answers: ‘I am totally devoted to reproduction.’1414High Life, 00:40:40. Dibs is totally devoted to a reproduction that does Beginning of page[p. 162] not happen through her own body. To her, reproduction means engaging with scientifically supported reproductive medicine of the sort that enables her to reproduce without getting pregnant or giving birth. Such reproduction is detached from her own sex and from the expectations of her gender affiliation. The elaborate masturbating machine itself is not a studio creation, but also stems from ‘real life’. Denis reports that it was bought on the Internet.1515‘Claire Denis, Mia Goth and the High Life Cast’, BFI in Conversation 2019 (11:52–12:52) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY_ln3tJDwU> [accessed 20 February 2024].

By daringly mixing reality and the surreal in this way, the film contradicts our expectations, makes us wonder, and forces us to think.1616See ‘Affective-Political Work with Documents: Sharon Hayes and Yael Bartana’, p. 68. In doing so, High Life also reveals, as the following example makes clear, the gender- and race-differentiated violence inherent in thanatopolitics. While Dibs, the strong woman, who even succeeds in raping the sedated Monte, and thus in obtaining his sperm against his will, is white, Elektra, played by Gloria Obianyo, is the first woman who dies from her experiments, and is Black. This is no coincidence. And that it is no coincidence is stated explicitly by Tcherny, the other Black crew member played by André Benjamin: ‘Even up here, Black ones are the first who have to go.’1717High Life, 00:52:30.(Fig. 6).

A Prison without Outside

2001: A Space Odyssey and Andrej Tarkovsky’s 1972 Solaris are clear influences on High Life. All three films use the genre of science fiction to raise the big questions of the technoscientific present in the medium and with filmic means. As in 2001: A Space Odyssey and in Solaris, the Beginning of page[p. 163] soundtrack in High Life is an active and important part of the film. It is composed and performed by Stuart Staples, the English musician and lead singer of the indie band Tindersticks, with whom Denis has worked for more than 20 years, ever since her 1996 film Nénette et Boni (Nénette and Boni). The music had been composed before the shooting of High Life began. The first piece completed, ‘The Yellow Light’, was composed for Denis and Olafur Eliasson’s short film Contact from 2014.1818‘Tindersticks feat. Robert Paterson — “Willow”’, Rolling Stone, 28 February 2019 <https://www.rollingstone.de/exklusive-videopremiere-tindersticks-feat-robert-pattinson-willow-1632605/> [accessed 20 February 2024]. Staples’s description of the work process gives a vivid impression of the central importance Beginning of page[p. 164] that the music has for creating the ‘bloc of sensations’1919Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 167. that is High Life:

[E]ach instrument/part was played into silence with arbitrary start points creating random movements and relationships when brought together. This theme/way of working runs through the entire making of the score for High Life. Musicians generally worked ‘in the darkness’.2020‘Tindersticks’.

The sound contributes in an impressive way to the creation of this atmospheric environment, in which human beings are no longer the centre of attention but rather perceived as being part of the becoming of the cosmos. This idea is also hinted at in Stuart Staples’s lullaby for Willow, which plays on the literal meaning of the name willow, as in willow tree. In the lullaby, Willow is playing hide and seek deep in the trees as spiders and centipedes crawl across her hands and feet. She is walking across the sand, playing with the waves. She is ‘listening to the city wheezing’. She is everywhere and beyond space and time. The musical theme of the Willow Song runs through the film and is sung at the end by Robert Pattison for the now sixteen-year-old Willow.

As in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, memory and the past also play a central role in High Life. In all three of these films (Solaris, High Life, and 2001: A Space Odyssey), the narrative form is elliptic. The cutting and the coupling of images, sound, and perceptions follow a surreal dream logic rather than a plot logic. Atmosphere, sensation, and aesthetic expression are more important than the storyline. The aim is not to tell a story but — to quote Kubrick’s famous statement about the meaning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, made Beginning of page[p. 165] in an interview in 1968 with Playboy Magazine — to ‘grip the audience on a deep level’.2121Quoted from Tabea Tietz, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, SciHi Blog, 2 April 2021 <http://scihi.org/2001-a-space-odyssey-kubrick/> [accessed 20 February 2024]. This also applies to High Life. All three films use the genre of science fiction as an experimental arrangement in order to learn more about the state of the present and the human psyche in its relation to technology, to nature and culture, and to sexuality and temporality.

And yet, as aforementioned, High Life differs fundamentally from these other two science fiction movies. This difference has to do with the fact that, unlike Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey, High Life is not a literary adaption but was written by Claire Denis together with Jean-Pol Fargeau (another of Denis’s frequent collaborators).

Apart from its sensitivity to the gender and race-differentiated violence of techno-scientific bio- and thanato-politics, High Life sets itself apart in its striking, unusual, concrete, and material treatment of the omnipresence of death. The foetuses and newborns in the film perish, and all ten members of the crew die, except for Monte and Willow, the latter of whom was born in space. Those who die perish as a result of violence, of various acts of suicide, from pregnancy, or from radiation. The captain, played by Lars Eidinger, develops leukaemia, suffers a stroke and is then tenderly euthanized by Dibs. Boyse, who was forced to give birth to Willow, kills the pilot (Agata Buzek) with a shovel, climbs aboard the shuttle, flies into the first black hole on the mission’s way, and then dies by so-called spaghettification, that is by being fatally stretched by the immense gravitational forces. Even Dibs, after having successfully fulfilled her mission,Beginning of page[p. 166] leaves the ship but gets seriously injured and disappears slowly into the blackness of space. Instead of being, as promised, an escape from the death penalty, the mission turns out to be just another form of this. The spaceship is not equipped with the latest technical gadgets, but is gloomy and cramped like a prison, with the difference that there is no outside of prison in space. In fact, High Life refers as much to prison films as to the genre of science fiction.

Take the impression of narrowness created by the poor lighting and the gloomy colours. Or the fact that there is no direct light or lustre in the whole film; that is bar the very last scene, which culminates in the yellow light installation by the artist Olafur Eliasson (I return to this last scene and the bright white light in more detail later on). The sense of a prison environment is also reinforced by many point-of-view shots in which one can hear the breath of the character whose point of view it suggests. The camera work condenses an atmosphere of eeriness, threat, and vulnerability, which is intensified by the soundtrack. Further, the crew members have no private space for themselves; they sleep in bunk beds, the women separated from the men. They get sedatives from Dibs, who is in total control of their bodies. For the delivery of their sperm, the men receive an extra dose of sleeping pills. Also reminiscent of prison films is the fact that the crew engages in physical exercise in which everyone has to participate. Outbreaks of violence and aggression are just as present as the increased sexual attraction, while at the same time sexual intercourse is not allowed.

Denis and cinematographer Yorick Le Saux have worked in the studio in close proximity to the actors, close to their very bodies. There seems to be no strangeness between the camera and the bodies, no sense of shame Beginning of page[p. 167] that comes from this exposure of the organic to the technological. The camera moves just as smoothly from one part of a body to the next as it had across the plants in the garden in the first scene of the film. Through effects of illumination, as well as the intimacy, and the unusual and strange beauty of their movements, gestures and facial expressions, the actors’ bodies sometimes appear like sculptures. This cinematic work done with and on the bodies of actors, and the resulting tension between sexual attraction, tenderness, care, and brutal violence, which extends all the way to cannibalism and incest, is something we are familiar with in other films by Claire Denis.2222I’m thinking of her first movie, Chocolat (1988), which, set in 1950s colonial Cameroon, is about a French family and the forbidden sexual tension that exists between the young white mother and the Black ‘houseboy’. This film, like all of her subsequent films, with the exception of L’Intrus (2004), was also written with Jean-Pol Fargeau. Nénette et Boni (1996) (the first film in which she collaborated with Tindersticks) is about Boni, the elder brother of Nénette, who fights for his newborn nephew, himself born against his mother’s will. In perhaps her best-known film, Beau travail (Good Work) (1999), which follows soldiers in the French Foreign Legion and is set in Djibouti, she explores male bodies in the desert. Trouble Every Day (2001), which explicitly refers to the horror genre, is about the way in which sexual desire interferes with cannibalism (the soundtrack is again by Tindersticks). L’Intrus is based on Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay about his heart transplant (soundtrack by Stuart A. Staples). White Material (2009) is about a young white French woman, a struggling coffee producer in a French-speaking African country that is facing an imminent civil war; and finally Les Salauds (2013), which deals with incest and the abuse a daughter suffers at the hands of her father (soundtracks of the latter two films are again by Tindersticks).

‘A Life’

The connection between the prison film and science fiction actually allows Denis to continue her cinematic exploration of biopolitical violence, an exploration that is even intensified under the very different temporal and spatial Beginning of page[p. 168] conditions brought about by space travel. And indeed, the collapse of space and time to a moment of eternity in a black hole plays a central role for the experience of temporality and sexuality explored in the film as well as for the cumulative elimination of any notion of an outside.

Following Deleuze and his last, short text ‘Immanence: A Life…’ (1997), we could say that in High Life reproductive futurism is not considered from the perspective of the ‘individual life’ but of the ‘meantimes (des entre-temps), between moments’2323Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life…’, p. 5. of ‘a life that is impersonal but singular nevertheless’.2424Ibid, p. 4. To outline more precisely what is meant by this phrase, Deleuze provides an impressive example from Charles Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend. Deleuze’s commentary on the passage in Dickens’s novel also clarifies the reference to the way in which the death drive is approached in High Life:

A good-for-nothing, universally scorned rogue is brought in dying, only for those caring for him to show a sort of ardent devotion and respect, an affection for the slightest sign of life in the dying man. Everyone is so anxious to save him that in the depths of his coma even the wretch himself feels something benign passing into him. But as he comes back to life his carers grow cold and all his coarseness and malevolence return. Between his life and death there is a moment which is now only that of a life playing with death. […] The life of the individual has given way to a life that is impersonal but singular nevertheless.2525Ibid.

In the scenes in which the protagonists in High Life die, and in so many different ways, exactly this moment seems Beginning of page[p. 169] to arrive, a moment that is no longer about the death of an individual life but about a life playing with death. In this moment alone the possibility appears that everything could change and the past might no longer determine the future. This is especially evident in the closing scene where Willow and Monte decide to fly together into/through a black hole.

Deleuze gives another example of the appearing of singularities that are constitutive of any life, in order to demonstrate that a life is that which occurs ‘everywhere, in all the moments a certain living subject passes through and that certain lived objects regulate’, and that it is not that which is ‘contained in the simple moment when individual life confronts universal death’.2626Ibid., p. 5. This second example leads us back to the beginning of High Life and the opening scenes with Monte and Willow as a baby girl. At the same time, it provides a possible explanation for Denis’s impressive cinematic work with the bodies of the actors; that is, an explanation of the meaning of their gestures and facial expressions, which are singular but not individual, affective but not conscious. In order to distinguish the singularities and events that constitute a life from the ‘accidents of the corresponding life’, or the life of an individual, Deleuze refers to very young children and their specific gestures:

Very young children, for example, all resemble each other and have barely any individuality; but they have singularities, a smile, a gesture, a grimace — events which are not subjective characteristics. They are traversed by an immanent life that is pure power and even beatitude through the sufferings and weaknesses.2727Ibid.Beginning of page[p. 170]

This description perfectly fits the scenes in which Monte interacts with little Willow and explains why the effect of those scenes is so intense. It is as if the gestures, the smile, and the screams of the little child were reflected in the gestures of Monte, involving him in a process of transformation. He is then able to remember his past and to have it define him less, even if his memories continue to haunt him. This point is explicitly expressed by Monte himself. In a central scene, Monte explains to the toddler, who listens to him without understanding a word, what a taboo is. A taboo forbids you, according to Monte, from ‘drinking your own piss’ and ‘eating your own shit’, even if, as he adds, ‘it is recycled. Even if it doesn’t look like piss or shit anymore’.2828High Life, 00:07:45. After having underscored that this taboo is not valid for Willow, the ‘sweet little girl’ who was born in space, Monte suddenly mentions his father, ‘If my old man could see me now’, and quotes him: ‘Break the laws of nature and you’ll pay for it, little son of a bitch!’

This statement has to be seen in relation to another in which it is stated that Monte was not raised by parents but by his dog, and also in relation to the fact that all of the members of the crew had been treated like trash, like ‘refuse that didn’t fit in’2929High Life, 00:28:50. until, to quote Monte again, ‘somebody had the bright idea of recycling us’.3030High Life, 00:28:58. Monte’s clarifying remarks come as a voice-over during a flashback to the time when Monte and Boyse were still on earth before they had been arrested. This reminiscence itself is preceded in the film by the daily report that Monte is obliged to give to the spaceship’s information system in order to keep the life support system, actually a recycling system, running. What this subtle lesson teaches us is that this perversion of the Beginning of page[p. 171] death penalty amounts to the reduction of life to a recycling system. This insight is clearly also valid in inverted form: life becomes a death penalty wherever it is reduced to a recycling system.

If we follow the two examples that Deleuze gives of singularities that can appear in ‘a life’, it no longer seems a coincidence that the film begins with scenes that show interactions between Monte and the little child. In these scenes we get a glimpse of the power of ‘a life’ that is ‘impersonal but singular nevertheless’, and that is not ‘contained in the simple moment when individual life confronts universal death’. In this way, the film begins with a moment of affirmation in which the power of change is felt. It not only allows Monte to access a memory, but also allows the film to tell the story in flashbacks, to show what had led to the deaths of all the other crew members.

The Death Drives and Their Intervention in the Perception and Rhythm of Time

In her study on Deleuze and psychoanalysis, Monique David-Ménard points out that, for Deleuze, death has to do with the impersonal, and that he borrows from Freud’s concept of the death drive to describe the ability of the ‘I’ to free itself from its own contents.3131Monique David-Ménard, Deleuze et la psychanalyse: l’altercation (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2005), p. 58. In his central work, Difference and Repetition, Deleuze distinguishes between two different aspects of death:

The first signifies the personal disappearance of the person, the annihilation of this difference represented by the I or the ego. This is a difference which existed only in order to die, and the disappearance of which can be objectively represented by a return to inanimate matter, as though Beginning of page[p. 172] calculated by a kind of entropy. Despite appearances, this death always comes from without, even at the moment when it constitutes the most personal possibility, and from the past, even at the moment when it is most present. The other death, however, the other face or aspect of death, refers to the state of free differences when they are no longer subject to the form imposed upon them by an I or an ego, when they assume a shape which excludes my own coherence no less than that of any identity whatsoever.3232Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 113; see also, David-Ménard, Deleuze et la psychoanalyse, p. 58.

This distinction corresponds to the description that Deleuze gives in ‘Immanence: A Life…’ when he states that between the life of an individual and his death ‘there is a moment which is now only that of a life playing with death’.3333Deleuze, ‘Immanence: A Life …’, p. 4. Yet here Deleuze describes as impersonal not death but a life that is beyond any distinction between a particular individual life and a particular individual death. In A Life, in any life, there is clearly a certain indistinguishability between life and death.

This leads me back to the question of reproduction and temporality as well as to Freud, who taught us that the sexual life unfolds in complex relations to both life and death. Sexuality does not — as Freud made thoroughly clear in his speculative text Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921) — merge with reproduction. If one assumes, as Freud suggests, that the compulsion to repeat is more original than the pleasure principle, and that the death drives are in constant tension with the life drives, then the secret of life is in fact hidden in the question of how, under those conditions, reproductive sexuality could even be possible.Beginning of page[p. 173] Equally mysterious is the survival of organisms and the existence of a continuous future.

As Freud says about the contrast between the death drives and the life drives:

It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey.3434Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), xviii: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works (1920–22) (1955), pp. 1–64 (pp. 40–42).

Only if we consider that the goal of life in Freud’s speculative consideration is death, does it become clear how complex this rhythm is, in which the future (and survival along with it) depends on the detour and on this ‘jerking back’. This rhythm is made even more complicated by the fact that Freud’s speculation is written from the perspective of one for whom the inorganic lies just as far beyond the horizon of experience as does death. Freud, in a nutshell, is well aware that the origin of life can only be thought of retrospectively. Thus, as Deleuze critically remarks, even if Freud identifies death with the return to inanimate matter, he nonetheless also knows that this is just part of a necessary speculation.3535Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, pp. 37–39; David-Ménard, Deleuze et la psychanalyse, p. 46.

Given the fact that both for Deleuze and for Freud, death is ‘the source of problems and questions, the sign of their persistence over and above every response’,3636Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 112. we have good Beginning of page[p. 174] reason to ask why Freud sticks to the death drive and the primacy of the repetition compulsion over the pleasure principle. As he admits at the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ‘the life drives have so much more contact with our internal perception — emerging as breakers of the peace and constantly producing tensions whose release is felt as pleasure — while the death drives seem to do their work unobtrusively’.3737Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 63. As a result, the death drives are much harder to prove the existence of.

The reason that Freud sticks to the death drives and to the primacy of the repetition compulsion is at once simple and surprising: it is the discovery that the psychoanalytic cure — die Kur — depends on the repetition compulsion and that it makes this compulsion useful to itself.3838Ibid., p. 18. As Freud underscores, psychoanalysis is not only an art of interpretation. The possibility of changing the vicissitudes of the drives (Triebschicksal)3939See Sigmund Freud, ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes’, in The Standard Edition, xiv: On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works (1914–16) (1957), pp. 109–40. depends on transference, and this means that the repressed must be repeated as a present experience and not only as a conscious memory. Hence, psychoanalytically speaking, the possibility of changing compulsive behaviour depends on an obsessive repetition. In sum, the death drive is intertwined with a concept of time as a reluctant, vacillating rhythm (Zauderrhythmus) that traverses the life of organisms and that is hence responsible for the fact that the present is defined by the past.4040Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 40. And yet, the possibility of there being any change in the vicissitudes of the drive or of any disruption of empty repetition also depends on the death drive. Deleuze recognizedBeginning of page[p. 175] this very clearly and so considered impersonal death as a ‘pure and empty form of time’. Taking up Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return, Deleuze concludes: ‘The form of time is there only for the revelation of the formless in the eternal return.’4141Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 91. Deleuze again follows a hint from Freud, who points this out in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’: ‘As a result of certain psycho-analytic discoveries, we are to-day in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian theorem that time and space are “necessary forms of thought”. We have learnt that unconscious mental processes are in themselves “timeless”’ (p. 28). Thus, to return to High Life: death in this impersonal aspect also shows a way out of the perversion of the death penalty, that is out of the reduction of life to a recycling system. In this way, as the film shows, the death drive can become a resistant moment that turns against the current conjunction of reproductive technology and thanatopolitics. This is evident not only in the women’s resistance to the compulsion to reproduce, which after all is nothing more than an extension of the death penalty that they had sought to escape by travelling into space, but also in the in-between-life-and-death moments that occur in the encounter between Monte and the baby Willow, as well as in the later decision of the two to voluntarily travel into the black hole.

High Life as Intensification of Life; or, the Point at which the Difference between Time and Space Vanishes

Freud also asks how sexual reproduction is to be explained. For, if one assumes the primacy of the repetition compulsion and the death drive, then ‘conjugation’, to quote Freud, ‘works counter to life and makes the task of ceasing to live more difficult’.4242Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p. 57. Freud then briefly considers Aristophanes’s theory of love presented by Plato in the Beginning of page[p. 176] Symposium. According to this theory of spherical beings, there were originally not two, but three sexes: the feminine, the masculine, and the androgynes. Everything about these beings was double: they had four arms, four legs, and two faces. But then Zeus decided to cut them in two. After this division, the two parts, each desiring to rejoin his or her other half, as Freud writes quoting Plato’s Symposium, ‘came together, and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one’.4343Ibid., p. 58. This theory attempts to explain the existence of the life drives or of the sex drives by the longing of each of the two halves to be joined together and re-united into a sphere.

Even if Freud admits that he himself neither believes this theory nor promotes it, and even if he ultimately leaves the question open,4444Ibid., p. 59. we can, with him, investigate the relationship between reproduction and sexuality more concretely than, say, with Deleuze, who shows little interest in the question of sexual reproduction. In High Life, sexual reproduction is viewed from the thanatopolitical perspective of women who are forced to give birth and men who trade their sperm for sedatives. From this perspective, human reproduction appears as a kind of recycling system. The film thus raises the question of how life is experienced under the technical, temporal, and spatial conditions of a prison in outer space without outside or beyond. Violence, death, and sexuality all become strategies to avoid being recycled.

In fact, Dibs and Monte are the only ones who choose other ways to escape this perversion of the death penalty. Monte opts for sexual abstinence and an ascetic, monastic life, while Dibs approaches reproduction from a scientific perspective with the aim of perfecting human life. For her,Beginning of page[p. 177] reproduction is associated with a scientific passion and the idea of living on in her scientific creation. According to Freud, both ways are guided by the death drives and by the ego drives, the latter of which serve the individual’s self-preservation. That is why it is so important that Dibs renders Monte unconscious using sedatives before she forcibly seduces him and introduces his sperm into Boyse’s uterus against her will. There is no heterosexual love involved, nor any desire for a child or for a family.

High Life artistically and perfectly brings to light the ‘unobtrusive work’ of the death drive.4545Ibid., p. 63. In so doing, the film also shows us that death, in its impersonal face, as ‘pure and empty form of time’, undoes the circle of the eternal return, which, to quote Deleuze ‘has as its content the passing present and as its shape the past of reminiscence’,4646Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 91. and thus points beyond pure repetition, that is, beyond repetition without difference. We do not see Willow growing up and getting bigger. In one scene Monte wakes up because his hands are caressing soft female hair. The hair is Willow’s; she has entered puberty and is lying in Monte’s bed (01:13:20–01:14:20). Upon waking, Monte throws her out of the bed and at this point she has her first menstruation. After all the crew members but Monte have died, and after Dibs has told him shortly before she disappeared into space that he was Willow’s father, we see Monte accepting the infant, in spite of his initial resistance. In the next scene we see the garden — the recycling system still works — and the sixteen-year-old Willow. Monte still ‘feeds the dog’, as he calls the odious task of keeping the system from shutting down with his daily reports. Their vessel approaches a spaceship inhabited only by dogs. Willow Beginning of page[p. 178] wants a puppy, but Monte refuses to allow it because the risk of infection is too high. Finally, they approach a black hole that is big enough to try to cross it. Willow wishes to approach the black hole; she says she can feel that the density is very low and that they will make it through. Monte agrees. While preparing, Willow asks him whether she looks like her mother. Monte denies this, and only when they are already on their way to the event horizon of the black hole and Willow answers Monte’s question ‘Shall we?’ with a ‘Yes’, does Willow rather suddenly and uncannily come to resemble Dibs. Along with the protagonists, we then enter into the shots of Olafur Eliasson’s yellow light installation from the 2014 short film Contact and the film ends as the screen is flooded with a radiant white.

Denis deliberately leaves open the question of whether this entry into a black hole’s event horizon means death for the two protagonists or an intensification of their lives. But she does make it clear that, even if they do not die, what they experience in the event horizon differs from mere survival:

The word surviving does not exist anymore. Shall we stay in eternity? Me, I am surviving every day when I get up from my bed. They have reached a point, which is called singularity, where space and time are zero. They are somewhere else. They get what they want.4747‘Claire Denis, Mia Goth and the High Life Cast’, 12:52.

This quote from Denis shows that she is making a reference to current astrophysical theories about black holes, singularities, event horizons, and to corresponding theories about the merging of space and time.4848Denis was advised by the French astrophysicist Aurélien Barrau, who has also co-authored a book with Jean-Luc Nancy (2014). She also might have Beginning of page[p. 179] referred to Deleuze, who himself refers to Freud’s concept of the death drive and to the tension between form and the dissolution of form, as well as to Hölderlin’s concept of the Unförmliche: ‘The extreme formality is there only for an excessive formlessness (Hölderin’s Unförmliche). In this manner, the ground has been superseded by a groundlessness, a universal ungrounding which turns upon itself and causes only the yet-to-come to return.’4949Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 91. In her film, Denis shows this ‘secret of life’ by using digital techniques and digital aesthetics, as well as the latest astrophysical theories; from a feminist perspective, she experiments with them all and combines them with a sharp critique of current thanatopolitical regimes of reproduction. By insisting on the bodily and material conditions of reproduction, High Life shows the violence of reproductive futurism from the perspective of the women onto whom the death drive is projected: women who had committed criminal offenses and did not want to carry and bear children. At the same time, the film opens up the possibility of thinking about time, reproduction, and biopolitics beyond the alternative of ‘reproductive futurism’ or ‘no future’.