ABSTRACT
In the fierce debates associated with the philosophy of posthumanism – from Donna Haraway’s 1980s cyborg utopianism (1985/1991) to the technophobic pessimism of Ernest Braun (2010) – Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) represents an unusual and unsettling intervention. A.I’s complex and layered engagement with the issues of decentred selfhood and otherness is lent a peculiar emotional salience by the film’s predetermined foregrounding of a theme widely recognised as endemic to Spielberg’s oeuvre yet seemingly remote from the discourses of the epoch in which we live – the visionary innocence and vulnerability of childhood (Gordon, 2008). The persistence of this theme as the driving narrative impulse in the film has earned the reproach of many reviewers and commentators, who discern in it the reactionary assertion of an exhausted and anachronistic domestic piety calculated to deter enthusiasm for the film’s otherwise provocative exploration of possible posthuman futures – a dimension strongly associated with its original auteur, Stanley Kubrick (Burnetts, 2009; Jaques, 2015, 209-237).
