It has penetrated the discourse of science and particularly of the opposition to science in the name of humanism and/or conservative morality. The narrative of forbidden knowledge has reverberated through the millennia of Western culture, growing progressively more secularized as religion has lost its centrality. The enigmatic story of the Fall simultaneously encourages inquiry and condemns it as impious or at least dangerous. By telling the first couple not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge God makes it certain that they will. Injunction on knowledge presupposes the knowledge of the injunction. 1 In order to know that something is forbidden one has to know what it is. Scrutinized by numberless historians of ideas, theologians and philosophers, this concept combines two seemingly incompatible impulses: curiosity and prohibition or as Roger Shattuck describes it, ' liberation and limits '. I ultimately then work towards uncovering the ways particular visual exchanges can be supportive of a posthuman ethical strategy for better future interspecies relations.Ĭentral to the Biblical story of the expulsion from Eden is the paradoxical concept of forbidden knowledge. I argue that in order to foster an interspecies ethics through watching science fiction cinema those fictions must narrate intersubjectivity in a way that does not flatten that Other into knowability. I argue in favour of a valuation of alterity and the transformative experiences that occur on contact with an alien Other in fiction, but critique those figures who undergo a complete dissolution of self.

I also excavate their conceptualisations of intersubjective relations by comparing them to the relations between anthropologist and subject. I describe the visual and narrative forms these exchanges take – like speech, sign, movement and metamorphosis – and consider, by drawing on film phenomenology, how they affectively catch up the viewer. In this thesis I analyse examples of intersubjectivity in five science fiction films, two books and one TV show, between humans, and with fictional aliens.

Eden by Stanisław Lem