Lacanian Perspectives on Blade Runner 2049

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. From Voight-Kampff to Baseline Test: By Way of an Introduction

   • Calum Neill

   Pages 1-11

3. Do Filminds Dream of Celluloid Sheep? Lacan, Filmosophy and Blade Runner 2049

   • Ben Tyrer

   Pages 13-39

4. Blade Runner 2049: A View of Post-Human Capitalism

   • Slavoj Žižek

   Pages 41-51

5. Between the Capitalist and the Cop: The Path of Revolution in Blade Runner 2049

   • Todd McGowan

   Pages 53-81

6. ‘To Be Homesick with No Place to Go’: The Phantom of the Sinthome and the Joi of Sex

   • Daniel Bristow

   Pages 83-102

7. Home Bodies: Prosthetic People and Economies of Desire

   • Timothy Richardson

   Pages 103-119

8. Object Oriented Subjectivity: Capitalism and Desire in Blade Runner 2049

   • Matthew Flisfeder

   Pages 121-138

9. What Happens When the Replicants Become Extimate? On the Uncanny Cut of the Capitalocene in Blade Runner 2049

   • Alexander Bove

   Pages 139-165

10. In Anxious Anticipation of Our Imminent Obsolescence

    • Scott Contreras-Koterbay

    Pages 167-187

11. “Before We Even Know What We Are, We Fear to Lose It”: The Missing Object of the Primal Scene

    • Isabel Millar

    Pages 189-207

12. Women Between Worlds: A Psychoanalysis of Sex in Blade Runner 2049

    • Sheila Kunkle

    Pages 209-227

13. Back Matter

    Pages 229-234

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This book provides a collection of Lacanian responses to Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 from leading theorists in the field. 


Like Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner film, its sequel is now poised to provoke philosophical and psychoanalytic arguments, and to provide illustrations and inspiration for questions of being and the self, for belief and knowledge, the human and the post-human, amongst others. This volume forms the vanguard of responses from a Lacanian perspective, satisfying the hunger to extend the theoretical considerations of the first film in the various new directions the second film invites. Here, the contributors revisit the implications of the human-replicant relationship but move beyond this to consider issues of ideology, politics, and spectatorship. 


This exciting collection will appeal to an educated film going public, in addition to students and scholars of Lacanian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, cultural studies, film theory, philosophy and applied psychoanalysis.

• psychoanalytic film theory
• Lacan
• posthuman
• nonhuman
• artificial intelligence
• scientism
• capitalism
• subjectivity
• fantasy
• desire
• consumption
• New Materialism
• Object Oriented Ontology
• dystopia
• psychoanalytic theory
• Denis Villeneuve
• applied psychoanalysis

• School of Applied Sciences, Edinburgh Napier University, Edinburgh, UK

  Calum Neill

Calum Neill is Associate Professor of Psychoanalysis & Cultural Theory at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland, and Director of Lacan in Scotland. He has written a number of monographs, including Without Ground: Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity (2011) and Jacques Lacan: The Basics (2017). He is the co-editor of both the Palgrave Lacan Series the three volume guide Reading Lacan’s Ecrits (2018-2021).

Policies and ethics