ABSTRACT
Paradoxically, then, there are not two endings to Blade Runner (1982; 1992): one of Rachel and Deckard descending into the abyss of the dead-eye of power; the other of their fleeing into those spaces that subsist beyond the reach of Los Angeles 2019. Both endings amount to the same: a deep ambivalence with respect to the null hypothesis of what it is to be(come) human; and a deep ambivalence towards its others (Replicants, schizophrenics, ‘little people’…). In the lift-shaft descent into the nether regions of the ‘not-yet-falsified’ of ‘borrowed time’, Deckard and Rachel are swallowed and consumed by the dominant order. In the meandering drive through the ex-urban countryside, they are (temporarily) expelled and exiled from the dominant order-although there is nothing in the film to foreclose the possibility that this ‘escape’ is itself a staged experiment by the Tyrell Corporation, or that the film in its entirety is an implanted memory. Whether swallowed, expelled, on the run, or experimented upon, both Deckard and Rachel are given (borrowed) time, and are thereby obligated to live to the full the life that is credited to them on account of their enslavement to a slow death. ‘Only the counter-gift, the reversibility of symbolic exchange, abolishes power’ writes Baudrillard (1993b: 49). Only Roy manages to achieve the symbolic violence of ex-termination through His acceptance of death: ‘Perhaps death and death alone, the reversibility of death, belongs to a higher order than the code’ (ibid.: 4). There is more than a measure of irony, therefore, in the way in which virtually all existing readings of the film have missed the permeation of the world of Blade Runner by death, ex-termination, and symbolic exchange-and have merely contented themselves with the documentation of the sightings of the ghosts of the symbolic, around which all modern critical theories have continued to gravitate.
