In Traces: The Human and Posthuman in 2001: A Space Odyssey Mack Hammond College

In itself, the term “posthuman” publicly pays its respects to that which it moves past – the human. As is implied, the posthuman will often hold valuably many qualities of the human that precedes it. Stanley Kubrick’s multiple visions of the posthuman in his landmark 1968 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey do just this. In all of the film’s masterful ambiguity, we are still provided with clear presentations of the story’s higher beings and posthuman entities, including their more traditional human qualities that have carried over with them in their respective extensions of the human. In closely observing the film’s story and presentation of the posthuman along side a number of established writers and their original essays, namely Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattarri, and Katherine Hayles, we gain insight toward just what exactly Stanley Kubrick was theorizing in 2001. Each form of higher consciousness and the posthuman in 2001: A Space Odyssey is individually haunted by traces of the human in which it has apparently moved past; this makes the statement that there is no form of the posthuman that can exist without possessing qualities of the principal human from which it stems from.

Kubrick’s film...