Posthumanism and the Expansion of Posthuman Relations in the 21st Hollywood SF Films: Focus on Her(2013)

21세기 할리우드 SF 영화에 반영된 포스트휴머니즘과 포스트휴먼 관계의 확장: Her(2013)를 중심으로

This paper is to define posthumanism and its posthuman relations between human and machine by examining the 21st Hollywood SF films especially through the focus on Her(2013). An artificial intelligenceenabled operating system named Samantha exists just as a voice and makes a special relationship with her owner, Theodore. Theodore kept maintaining a tedious and lonely life before meeting Samantha. However, Theodore gradually comes to have confidence after starting communication with Samantha and having safe loving relationships with her. Without any fixed patterns or any limits, Samantha’s both intellectual capabilities and emotional areas expand just like Gilles Deleuze’s rhizome through her relationship with Theodore. The posthuman communication between Theodore and Samantha gradually erases the binary division of human and machine. Her specifically portrays the virtual reality where both human and machine build their own posthuman subjectivities in the posthuman world and the widely expanding posthuman relations between the two.