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

that they amount to nothing more than the infinite and self-evident
multiplicity of humankind, as obvious in the difference between me
and my cousin from Lyon as it is between the Shi’ite community of
Iraq and the fat cowboys of Texas.’ (Badiou, 2001 26).
58 Badiou is at his most provocative on this point, arguing that
‘post-modern’ ethics rests on the untenable position of a ‘radical
Other’ as it is understood by Emmanuel Lévinas. The ‘ethics of
difference’, ‘multiculturalism’ and any other political practice based
on the recognition of otherness appeals to Lévinas’ theory of the
Other as ‘a principle of alterity which transcends mere finite experience.’
Lévinas calls this the ‘Altogether-Other’, and, Badiou claims, ‘it
is quite obviously the ethical name for God’ (2001 22). Badiou makes
atheism an absolute condition of truth, which cannot rest on any
transcendental outside. Nevertheless, alien films have sometimes
explored the theological dimension of Otherness, most notably the
cloven hoofed aliens that finally help to re-install Mel Gibson’s faith
in Signs (Shyamalan, 2002), and the debate between science and faith
that receives its resolution in the divine aliens of Contact (Zemeckis,
1997). Despite the opposing roles for aliens in the two films (baddies
and goodies respectively), both argue for the necessity of faith in a
transcendental Other as the (religious) consequence of the phenomenal
appearance of aliens.
59 In this sense It Came from Outer Space poses the same political question
as Badiou: ‘Can there be a just politics? Or a politics which does
justice to thought?’ (2004 69) See also, ‘Politics as a Truth Procedure’,
in 2004a.
60 For Badiou this makes the production of truth an ‘infinite production’
irreducible to established knowledge and ‘determined only by
the activity of those faithful to this event, it can be said that generic
thinking is, in the widest sense of the term, militant thinking’ (1999
81).
61 I’d like to thank Arturo Silva for his inspiration and collaboration
on this essay. Without him it wouldn’t have started, and without his
insights it wouldn’t have been half as good.
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