District 9: Subverting Neoliberal Abandonment While Performing New Affective Alterities on the Planet

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze the science fiction narrative of the film District 9 as a dismantling device for the biopolitical strategies of contemporary liberal democracy. While obscenely legitimizing the utilitarian, post-colonial, and violent characteristics of its forms of representation and subjectivation, the film shows how this global order also sediments epistemic dogmas and regimes of truth, camouflaged through its multicultural recognition policies. As a counterpart, I identify the empathetic relation of the protagonists, and their seek for other possible bonds between the various human and non-human manifestations, making their conditions of possibility visible in the fictions of encounter that the narrative poses to spectators performative imitation. Finally, although I focus on textual interpretation, the predominant approach in the field of film studies, I outline the film’s ability to impact everyday practices and its possibilities beyond spectatorship. In fact, as a conceptual project, District 9 deploys some strategies that transcend conventional film reception to challenge the field of sociopolitical action.