Vicious Circles: Intersections of Gender and Species in Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain

Abstract

Darren Aronofsky’s 2006 film The Fountain presents itself to a productive reading into the ways in which intersectioning discourses of oppression are coded into film and operated on as ideologies. This article will look on the differences of gender, species, and race/ethnicity in the film, and on how they are constitutively articulated in order to enable the “immanence” of the Other in each of these discourses of oppression so as to produce the “transcendental” Subject. I will set out from a philosophical understanding of the essential role of the species difference (and the privilege of the human status) in the intersectional constitution of other vectors of difference, such as gender, sex, race, ethnicity, and ability. I will attempt to articulate this broad form of intersectional approach with a discussion of the supposedly exclusively human relationship with death which allows humanity to be constructed as opposed to animality.