While the dystopian science fiction film projects current physical, social, economic, or moral realities into the future to reveal often horrific results, the alien-encounter science fiction film raises existential questions about identity, memory, and coexistence. Stories about confronting extraterrestrial lifeforms do not leap us forward into the unknown so much as throw us into the known, the strangely familiar, the human. Similar to the films Le Jetée, Solaris, and Contact, Arrival argues that the work of ethics, that is, our relation with the Absolute Other, is inextricably linked to how we conceive of mourning and time.

 

The poststructuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida utilizes the term arrivant to challenge how we are to conceive of species, spectrality, and specialness. To Derrida, the arrivant refers to a lifeform; it is also what ecotheorist Timothy Morton calls the strange stranger. Derrida’s concept of the arrivant can help us understand the connection between Louise’s future child, specifically the meaning behind the death of her child, and the arrival of the aliens. Derrida’s arrivant, like the film Arrival, reveals how a certain approach to mourning is required for a responsible ethical attitude. We might feel better situated in this particular reading of the film if we outline Derrida’s overall philosophical project.

 

Derrida is a French philosopher whose thought is placed within the branch of continental philosophy known as poststructuralism. Derrida’s main goal is to critique the outstanding belief in “metaphysics of presence,” a metaphysical structure that assumes all meaning can be interpreted through a stable, unifying central concept. Derrida accuses Western thought of logocentrism, a “metaphysics of presence” that is founded on word-centerdness. A line from Genesis evinces this theory: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” God is presented as the origin of all things because God creates the world by speaking. Speech is favored over writing as a denotation of pure presence. Derrida is thus critical of how Western thought is structured primarily on this binary opposition of presence and absence. All metaphysical systems that derive their meaning from a pure presence, whether it is God, Self, Masculinity, or Speech, deny a sense of play and thus of an openness to the future. The notion that there is an Archimedean point through which all meaning can emanate from is debilitating for any sense of ethics. Any system built on stable or fixed meanings does not do justice to alterity.

 

Derrida refers to his own philosophy as a “Hauntology” because it is oriented toward deconstructing binaries and dichotomies. The ghost is thus his emblematic figure; it is neither present nor absent. The arrivant is conceived as a ghost who “does not yet have a name or identity.”1 Derrida suggests that we need a mode of waiting without the economy of expectation. To wait for somebody whom one cannot know and therefore whom one cannot expect, much less apprehend, means that this waiting for the arrivant requires an unconditional hospitality. It is a hospitality without condition because the coming of the arrivant can never be called upon or be reduced to its invitation. The arrivant’s visitation will always be radically unpredictable, its coming, a surprise. Here we can recall that the heptapods arrive on Earth without warning or invitation. We did not expect them, and therefore cannot critique their behavior based on any pre-existing forms of knowledge.

 

The implications of Derrida’s argument here is the way in which the arrivant unsettles any mode of thinking that takes not only our individual selves but, in the case of the film, all of humanity as self-sufficient and self-determining. In its waiting for the arrivant, the self remains constitutionally exposed to a radical openness and vulnerability to the completely other. Emmanuel Levinas, a huge influence on Derrida, posits that the Absolute Other or the Stranger is the individual “who disturbs the being at home with oneself.”2 The goal is to foster a philosophy of Being – a predisposed attitude towards ethics and life – that opens absolute dissimilarity in its irreducible and infinite transcendence. If we comprehend the ego of the other as analogous to our own then we end up reducing the other to the same. The scientists in the film, for example, do not even anthropomorphize the heptapods. Instead, they (including Jeremy Renner's character, Dr. Ian Donnelly) look at the aliens and project robots on them—they mechomorphize in hopes they can pin down their behavior to repeatable patterns. Coexisting with the heptapods will require a non-evaluative openness rather than judgment through any form of measurement or conceptual specification. We have a responsibility to affirm and do justice to the infinite transcendence of the Other, which always resists the attempt of the philosophical tradition to assimilate everything to the “totality” of presence and the same.

 

The impossible waiting for and responding to the arrivant includes not only the Other (think strange, extraterrestrial lifeforms such as heptapods, or think even more expansive, the nonhuman) but also the dead, those with or without a name, and the not yet born. Here belies how arrivant can help us interpret the “supplementary” narrative of Louise’s daughter: According to Freud, it is only by separating ties to the dead other and transferring our energies on to a new love object that we can overcome the trauma of mourning. We let the other go while internalizing them in ideal form. An unsuccessful mourning is what he calls melancholia. Derrida argues that a successful mourning in Freud’s sense would fail because it disrespects the singularity of the other and allow them a future. This keeps the actual other close, respecting the fact that they resist all our attempts to assign them their proper and final resting place. Despite the fact that Louise is aware of the inevitable death of her child, she does not “move on” to avoid the trauma and pain associated with Hannah’s death: instead, she mourns the death of her daughter by allowing her to live.

 

Most of the scenes with her daughter are notably centered on language. Either Louise is teaching Hannah how to spell or Hannah is asking her mother how to pronounce a specific word. Here, Louise repeats the linguistic gift-giving gesture of the aliens toward her daughter. However, a key distinction must be made: The gift-giving gesture offered by the heptapods reveals to be conditioned by our aid to the heptapods several thousands of years into the future, while Louise’s gift to her daughter is unconditional. As Derrida notes, the unconditional gift-giving shatters all economies of exchange and reciprocity. This unconditional gift is a giving without reason or explanation. What it is the importance of such a gift? It engenders intimate forms of human connectedness.

 

The logic of the gift and of hospitality is typically a circular economy of exchange that organizes itself around the mastery of the host. For the city and nation state it is: “Welcome to our country…provided you fulfill certain immigration requirements, restrictions.” For the personal it is: “Welcome to my house…now please take off your shoes and do not touch the furniture.” Arrival provides us with perhaps the best example of unconditional gift-giving and of unconditional hospitality in the form of Louise’s gift of language to her daughter. In a beautiful passage of his magnum opus trilogy Spheres, Peter Sloterdijk asks us to consider the following: “What could be a more powerful advertisement for human life than passing on the advantage of being able to speak to the speechless who are on their way to language?”3 We should also add that human life can only continue through allowing the speechless, that is, the dead, to speak to the living through the proper work of mourning. The resolute peace between humans at the end of the film is a result of Louise repeating the dying words of Shang’s wife. Through the words of the dead Louise is able to construct a considerably more peaceful future, one in which the nonhuman is incorporated into the political sphere.   

 

We are reminded throughout the film that Louise is a woman working in an atmosphere made up exclusively of men. There are three women in the film, and two of them are specters – Hannah does not yet exist, and Shang’s wife is deceased. Moreover, we only see Hannah and Louise. Fortunately, Arrival does not fall into the trap of representing women merely as a source of incestuous desires or as an exploitable source of nurturance.4 Louise is not the typical object of exchange that allows various segments of society to establish alliances with one another; instead, she embodies the messianic. Derrida’s concept of the messiah is not someone who will deliver the chosen people a determinate faith or message.5 It is an opening towards the promise and uncertainty of the future, one that affirms our responsibility to inherit and render justice to all those spectral others who are no longer, and are yet to come.

 

Kierkegaard makes plain in his Works of Love that respect for the dead is the ultimate expression of love because there is no repayment or reciprocal exchange.6 Because Louise’s child exists in the future, they way in which Louise mourns her death is literally weird: Weird from the Old Norse urth, meaning twisted, in a loop. As Morton points out, “the term weird can mean causal: the winding of the spool of fate. In this sense weird is connected with happening or becoming.”7 Through revealing that what we initially read as Louise’s past is actually to become her future, the language of the film, too, is weird. The non-linear language of the heptapods is thus reflected in the film’s temporally disjointed, yet overall cyclical structure. This semantic trick reminds us that film is a language, one that has its own lexicon, codes, and structures. Through representing Louise’s future as if it were her past, Arrival highlights how full presence is never achievable within language; meaning is actually a wriggling linguistic worm constantly turning and squirming.

 

The ethical insight of the film is located in the connection it creates between the impossible waiting for the arrivant and the work of mourning: Asking why the aliens have arrived will yield the same result as asking why the dead never truly leave. Their radical Otherness and spectrality shake our metaphysical grounding and make us think at temporal and spatial scales that are unfamiliar. The ethical imperative that Arrival presents is clear: We must acknowledge that our fate is inextricably tied both to the dead and to the nonhuman if we are to think of coexistence. 

 

1. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 34.

2. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 39.

3. Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres Volume I: Microspherology, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agents), 102.

4. Lucien Scubla, Giving Life, Giving Death: Psychoanalysis, Anthropolgy, Philosophy (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press).

5. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), 59.

6. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (New York, NY: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009).
7. Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2016), 5.