Tree of Souls - An Avatar Community Forum - Watching Avatar through Deleuzian 3D, Desire, Deterritorialization, and Doubling

Avatar inspires many thoughts and philosophical reasonings. Here is an example.

The full article: Jea Sophia Oh, “Watching Avatar through Deleuzian 3D, Desire, Deterritorialization, and Doubling: A Postcolonial Eco-Theological Review.” Journal of Postcolonial Networks Vo1. 1, Issue 1 (September 2011): 1-27. | POSTCOLONIAL NETWORKS

The abstract:

Abstract

Quote:

By employing Deleuzian conceptualizations of “desire,” “deterritorialization,” and “doubling,” this study examines Avatar (James Cameron’s 2009 film) as a hybridity of becoming the Other. This paper sketches the contours of an oppositional politics within the figure of Empire (or the American capitalist empire which is almost always transcendental). The binary structure of the movie oscillates between two utterly opposing modalities (deploying high-tech military force against eco-friendly indigenous culture, weapons against trees, killing to healing, earth to space, human to nonhuman-nature, white skin against blue skin, etc.) This dualistic tension seems to create a Neo-Platonic Augustinian confrontation between Good and Evil. Nevertheless, the Avatar’s ambivalent body provides us with a post-human fable of becoming with an eco-theological edge. This paper suggests a reading of this movie as an allegory of the history of the Human (or American) Empire’s colonizing influences—even though the movie is a science fiction story set in the future (year 2154) and the “native” Na’vi people on the planet Pandora have blue skin—through Deleuzian 3D (Desire, Deterritorialization, and Doubling), focusing on the postcolonial term “hybridity,” in order to provide a postcolonial eco-theological analysis. The primary conceptual repertoire of Deleuzian 3D enables us to view Avatar as the rhizomatic interplay of 1) Desire and Empire, 2) Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization, and 3) Doubling and Becoming. Through these multi-dimensional glasses, this study provides a postcolonial ecotheological review of Avatar. In conclusion, this paper suggests a new power against the destructive forces of human civilization, namely the power of Life (nature), interconnectedness, and “becoming together.”

http://postcolonialnetworks.com/wp-c...Sophia-Oh2.pdf