Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

seen. The apes awake and react with fear. But the monolith
neither runs away nor attacks, the monolith, and this is
the very essence of its alien appearance, does not move, its
black insistence the only unmoving thing in this world’s
infinite rhythm of fight or flight, of night and day, of life
and death. The monolith is what does not live, and yet is
not the same as death. Or, perhaps better, the monolith
stands outside the eternal and unchanging rhythm of
life and death, breaking up their symmetrical economy.
The apes hesitantly go to investigate, to touch and taste
and smell it, and further: to evaluate. The appearance of
the monolith has caused reflection. The apes have not
yet begun to think, but they have been forced to confront
their outside, an act that opens out a space between their
perceptions and their actions.
This space, a space Deleuze, following Henri Bergson,
will call the brain, has been very deliberately created by the
monolith for an act of insemination, a genesis that after a
very rapid gestation will bear remarkable fruit. As Deleuze
has pointed out: ‘The black stone of 2001 presides over
both cosmic states and cerebral stages: it is the soul of the
three bodies, earth, sun and moon, but also the seed of the
three brains, animal, human, machine.’ (1989 205-6) Kubrick
shows us this seed – the moon and sun – appearing as
if emitted from the monolith itself, a vision signalling
our first return (it will be repeated another three times)
to the cosmic alignment of the opening shot. The apes’
brain provides the womb now impregnated with a new
future, and within which this seed of the future will grow.
Emerging between sensation and action reflection gives
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