Transhuman Traditionalism

The Monstrosity of Materialism in the Alien Film Series

Abstract: In the Alien Film Series, the cosmos is dominated by the personification Materialism in the interstellar corporation. Materialism understands matter to be both intrinsically self-enclosed and extrinsically other-caused. This dual relation results in the paradox of Materialism, in which matter is both enclosed within itself and caused by what is other than itself. The paradox of Materialism is concretely embodied in the alien monster, which is the monstrosity of Materialism. The greatest of all monsters is that which profanes the sacred order of the cosmos by threatening to disintegrate its absolute self-identity. The disclosure of the monstrosity of Materialism causes consciousness to become alienated from and opposed to itself. The violent battle with the alien is thus a spiritual conflict for the absolute identity of self-conscious mind. The alien terrifies audiences because it threatens to negate, falsify, and annul this idea of an essential identity between man and God.

Self-Alienated Horror

In Ridley Scotts 1979 film Alien, the crew of the commercial salvage ship the Nostromo is directed by the Weyland Corporation to investigate a distress signal on an uninhabited world whereupon they discover a mysterious derelict craft of extraterrestrial origin. The cargo chamber of the wreckage contains thousands of mysterious leathery eggs. Each egg appears to hatch a spidery-limbed "face-hugger" that envelopes human faces, penetrates their oral cavities, and implants an alien zygote which, after a brief period of natal gestation, violently bursts forth from within the bodies of their unwilling hosts. The infant alien which emerges from within a human host rapidly matures into a murderous beast which indiscriminately assails, assimilates, and annihilates all advanced living organisms within its surrounding biosphere.

In David Fincher's 1992 film Alien, the alien is smuggled by the survivors of the events of Aliens aboard an escape pod to crash-land upon on the isolated penal colony Fiorina 161. The meteoric arrival of the alien within their midst leads them, in faith and ignorance, to understand the beast as an omen of the forthcoming apocalypse. Through the collective activity of the alien hive, the alien monstrosity assumes the overriding purpose to exponentially expand to contaminate, corrupt, and consume all life in an endless entropy of self-annihilation.

The alien monster assimilates the appearance of man without his essential reason: it shares a human figure yet expresses neither pity nor remorse. In the alien man's physiology and technology become indiscriminately conjoined. The alien appears as a vicarious embodiment of the technical constructed-ness of human nature. Through this indissoluble fusion of mans naturality and artificiality, the violent exterior battle with the alien dramatizes an interior conflict over the essential nature of man between the opposed notions of necessarily inherited naturality with contingently produced artificiality. Yet the conclusion of the Alien film series appears to leave this conflict unresolved in a dramatic aporia. Neither the nature of man, nor the alien, nor even the relation of man and alien are conclusively elucidated. The alien thus haunts our essential self-understanding as a monstrous living paradox that symbolically dismembers the integral coherency of life, nature, and the human spirit.

"The Titan Prometheus wanted to give man equal footing with the gods. For this purpose he was cast out of Olympus. Well, my friends, the time has finally come for his return."

The expedition of the eponymously named space-ship Prometheus embodies this same mythic quest to wrest forbidden knowledge from what is absolutely other-than mankind. The events which transpire prior to human history have important consequences for the relationship between man and aliens, as the seeding of the Earth by the Engineers announces a wholly new relation between this alien race of supermen and man that, once discovered, transforms our collective idea of human nature, the essence of life on Earth, and the ultimate purpose of human life.

In our space-faring future, we discover a sub-human alien contagion that attaches to a human host, assimilates the essence of man, and is birthed with the cancerous potential to destroy all life. In the pre-historical past, the natures of man and alien have been designed by the superhuman Engineers. The continuity and coherence of human nature is thus doubly threatened by negation at both its original beginning and its final end: the essence of man is designed as a monstrous material artifact, just as man's future purpose is consumed by material monsters. The beginning and end of man is thus altogether enveloped in matter and determined by Materialism. Materialism suppresses form within matter, and then negatively individuates material atoms from one another and within themselves. The consequence is the paradox of Materialism in which all beings are thought to be negated, divided, and annulled. The furthermost negativity of this paradox terminates in the absolute annihilation of being and the logic of nihilism. The horror of the alien is the result of this furthermost alienation of the human nature from itself through the absolute negation of its original nature and final purpose.

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Transhuman Traditionalism