By Yanis Iqbal

What is a human being? Poor Things reveals the political stakes of this question by interrogating the social barriers between  the human and the non-human. In this schema, social recognition is limited to a  specific image of humanity. Whatever lies outside this circuit becomes a non-human figure deserving indifference, or an inhuman threat requiring organized hatred. The stability of a political system is founded on a disciplinary equilibrium between the human and the non-human: the latter should never overwhelm the integrity of the former. However, when non-human subjects achieve political autonomy, the equilibrium is disturbed. Two options exist in this situation: either the existing humanity can be overthrown to create an a-human future, or categories of humanity can be merely stretched to accommodate and neutralize this threat. Liberalism follows this latter strategy: it has confronted the emergence of anti-racist, feminist, and queer movements by diversifying the ruling class to include more people of color, women, and queer individuals. Thus, in “Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto”, Cinzia Arruzza, Nancy Fraser, and Tithi Bhattacharya discuss “liberal feminism,” which wants to ensure that a few privileged women “can attain positions and pay on a par with the men of their own class. By definition, the principal beneficiaries are those who already possess considerable social, cultural, and economic advantages. Everyone else remains stuck in the basement.”

In Poor Things, the subaltern figure resists this incorporation. Instead, the film shows what happens when a woman insists on her resistant inhumanity. The plot centers on  a pregnant woman who killed herself by jumping from a bridge. London surgeon Godwin Baxter performs a heterodox surgery, replacing her brain with that of her fetus and naming the new woman with an infant’s brain “Bella Baxter”. Godwin’s aim was to control Bella as an experimental subject. When Bella becomes curious about the outside world and gains intelligence, however, his plan is foiled. She soon runs off with Duncan Wedderburn, a libertine lawyer hired by Godwin to draft a nuptial contract between her and his medical assistant, Max McCandles. Throughout their journey, Bella refuses to devote exclusive attention to Duncan, insisting on her right to explore. Realizing Duncan will not accept her as “a flawed experimenting person,” she leaves him. After working as a prostitute in France, she returns to London to visit a dying Godwin and to marry Max. Their wedding is cut short by Duncan and General Alfie Blessington. The latter addresses Bella as Victoria and reveals that she was his wife before disappearing. Bella leaves Max to learn about her previous life, but realizes that it was Alfie’s violent and sadistic character that had driven her to commit suicide. When Alfie tries to force Bella into motherhood through genital mutilation and rape, she fights back. In the struggle, Alfie accidentally shoots himself in the foot and passes out. After Godwin’s death, Bella decides to become a surgeon. She lives with her new polyamorous family – Max and her lesbian lover Toinette. Alfie, meanwhile, becomes a goat through a brain transplantation surgery.

What is striking about the movie is its cold ethics, an intransigent refusal of the need for social recognition. For instance, when Bella becomes irritated by a crying baby, she balls her fist to punch it, stopping only when Duncan intervenes. This dispassionate decision-making, unchecked by social norms, stages an ethics of instinctuality that presses towards satisfaction without consideration for consequences. As Bella stands to punch the baby, she shows no hint of aggression. Instead, her face and body act as neutral devices registering her needs.  This transparency appears selfish from the viewpoint of tradition, whose dominance is maintained by re-routing all instincts through a thick network of duties and responsibilities. A person who ignores this network appears cold and self-interested. This emotional binary of humanity/inhumanity maps onto a metaphysical distinction: the unvarnished, bare instincts of the “selfish” individual conventionally denote the machine-like deadness, whereas the desires of the socially embedded person travel throughout a seemingly vital fabric of tradition. In short, Bella represents mechanicism of death-like instincts opposing the vitality of symbolically recognized norms.

In her commitment to this taboo mechanicism, Bella flaunts the norms of society and instead dissects the world into self-serving, concrete structures. The status quo regards this dogged pursuit of self-enhancement as purely negative, a contamination of the smooth workings of tradition. Bella, on the other hand, experiences her mechanicism as a positive tool, not simply of transgression or rebellion, but of deconstruction and re-assembly. This way of thinking marks her rebirth. She dies as a conventional Victorian woman, and rises anew as a woman capable of building her own reality. Her “cold ethics” allow her to disaggregate components of social life and re-combine them in novel and liberatory ways. For this reason  Duncan calls her a “devil…that cannot be satiated and a mind that picks people apart stitch by stitch like a bloodied and burned rag doll that has been shat out an elephant’s arse!”. 

Neither life nor death – Bella is a third thing, a mechanical “monster” dissatisfied with the conventions of compartmentalization. When Bella asks about her past, Godwin tells us: “Well, technically you are your baby. And also I suppose you are your mother. But also neither. No memory survives. No experiences survive.” Here we come upon the motor of the experiment: the joining together of different things is not a process of seamless harmonization but a dynamic of torsion that produces an entirely new entity. As Bella deforms the identities of people into bloodied and burnt pieces, she generates an alternative structure that arises from the edges of what is given before us. In normal life, we are not acquainted with the edge. Life is a crust of stability that polices any sign of instability i.e. death. Bella foregrounds this instability as a new form of production. As she disintegrates seemingly stable matter and social conventions, everything becomes an edge. Thus, a radical experimentalist view emerges that treats matter as a mechanism for the continuous production of the new. As Bella says: “it is only the way it is until we discover the new way it is and then that is the way it is until we discover the new way it is and so it goes until the world is no longer flat, electricity lights the night and shoes no longer are tied with ribbons.”

Reviewers have criticized Poor Thing’s mechanical worldview, asserting that it devalues the uniqueness of human subjectivity. Pietro Bianchi, for instance, writes that Bella is reduced to a “complex sedimentation of experiences,” while the “world turns out to be nothing more than a well-oiled machine”. Bella’s classification of sex as “furious jumping,” a form of masturbatory enjoyment indifferent to others, has been held out as an example of this mechanicism. Against this, Bianchi sees sex as “desire that derails the mechanisms of the machine and rearticulates them in unpredictable ways”. This critique posits that Bella’s existence springs from a determinist worldview. However, her commitment to cold, mechanical experimentation exhibits her desire to demolish ideological certainties. At one moment, Bella frankly suggests, “Let us touch each other’s genital pieces.” Divested of any ultimate meaning, sex becomes a stupid act that “offers assurance of nothing at all: neither identity, nor survival, nor any promise of a future.” Taken aback by Bella’s technical description of “genital pieces,” Max replies that she is “special” and that they should have sex only when they are wed. In this way, he refuses to confront the meaningless of sex, its sheer contingency, by elevating it into a noble deed that is sanctified by tradition in the form of the marital ritual. 

As opposed to this marriage-directed sex, masturbation plays a crucial role in Bella’s development. Her desire for freedom is ignited when she masturbates for the first time and learns how to be “happy”. This masturbatory act represents a mechanical assembly of a new relation that potentiates the subject. Bella’s first masturbatory experience is shown with a focus on her legs, whose quiver and movement gesture towards the emergence of autonomy, a desire for freedom. This marks the moment when Godwin’s experiment goes out of control, with Bella coming to prioritize her own happiness over the goals of the surgeon. However, Bella’s awakening does not entail organicism. The same legs that experience the tremor of masturbatory enjoyment also possess a robotic, rigid way of walking that is determined to discover the world.

Salvador Dali, “The Great Masturbator” (1929)

Bella’s robotic physicality is analagous to the themes of Salvador Dali’s painting “The Great Masturbator”. Here, a distorted face is positioned in the center of an arid landscape. The face is joined to the ground by a curved rock formation that also constitutes the base of bruised legs and a male crotch that is about to receive fellatio from a woman. Here, we again have legs that are fixed, soldered to the materiality of their surroundings through tight vines and concrete etchings. Sex becomes a spatial infrastructure in which the features of the face are dilated in order to outline the angles of exteriority that constitute the supposed interiority of masturbation. Auto-eroticism is not the deterministic execution of a simple natural need but a mechanism that is produced through the arrangement of matter in a certain way. Thus, we get a mechanical ethics in which the capacities of the body are enacted through a multiform complexity that exposes it to varying encounters, making sex an opening into possibility rather than a closure into patriarchal normativity 

Bella prefigures this ethics when she becomes a prostitute. Rather than treating sex work as a moral failing, she wants to understand its conditions. Similarly to Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s defense of sex worker’s rights, Bella’s attitude demystifies the view that sex is “something intrinsically too special to be sold – something intimate reserved for meaningful relationships.” As they argue, “Implicit in this view is the sense that sex is a volatile substance for women and must be controlled or legitimized by an emotional connection.” Bella’s priorities and behavior illuminate the inherent meaninglessness of sex. Rather, sex is a form of materiality that can be changed according to different situations. This attitude unleashes what Duncan angrily calls a “tsunami of destruction,” wherein “spirit” is ripped to “shreds”. Politically, this tsunami represents an a-human politics that burns down the entire citadel of humanity, bringing down with it the patriarchal, capitalist premises of “thick” tradition. Rather than expanding the boundaries to assimilate the most privileged strata of former outsiders, Bella represents an insurrectionary ethics. In her world view, there is no common “spirit” of humanity that can be invoked as a guarantor of inclusion. There is only the machinic, a-human body that props up the process of disorganization and reorganization, wherein limits are confronted and overcome.

Yanis Iqbal is studying at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He has published over 300 articles on social, political, economic, and cultural issues. His forthcoming book is entitled “Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia”.