Posthuman Rights

If the primary human rights preoccupation of mainstream film and television is the ethical status of the human, the film Splice with biotech themes (Vincenzo Natali, 2009) is far more interested in the ontological status of the human. The article claims that this seems to reverse the human rights issue – rather than focus on which rights should be inherent to the human, Splice complicates matters by asking how the human is constituted and therefore which rights should be extended in liminal cases. In other words, if most recent catastrophe fictions express an anxiety over human descent into depravity and a loss of what makes us human, Splice asks the persistent question of what constitutes the “life” in the right to life. The article concludes: "We do need to ask ourselves if the rights of the human trump the rights to be human and what this will mean for the human rights to come."