ABSTRACT

M. Night Shyamalan’s Split (2017) renders a dystopian vision of transhumanity as the result of this imposed label of disability on a pathologized human identity that is viewed as fragmentary and dysfunctional. The transhumanist interpellation to evolve from this physically and psychologically incomplete, merely human condition results, in Night Shyamalan’s film, into a transhuman superhumanity that is dystopically portrayed as monstrous by revealing the violent, savage drive in transhumanist evolutionary logic. Interpreting Split as a national allegory of the causes, discourses and policies developing around the national trauma of the 9/11 attacks, renders a complex dystopian image blending trauma, disability, and transhumanist discourses that shows certain affinities with critical posthumanism.