Kojéve and Blade Runner 2049

Who would Alexandre Kojéve consider human in Blade Runner 2049?

One of the most notable lines of Blade Runner 2049 is uttered by Freysa, who tells K that “dying for the right cause is the most human thing we can do.” A more Kojévean line could hardly be spotted anywhere else in cinema.

For Alexandre Kojéve, central to what makes a person is our capacity to subvert the Schopenhauerian will-to-life and stake our fragile existence for the sake of recognition. It is when we encounter the predicament where we would rather die fighting than continue as we are, that is when we become fully human.

This is what Kojéve calls anthropogenic desire:

For man to be truly human, for him to be essentially and really different from an animal, his human Desire must actually win out over his animal Desire. Now, all Desire is desire for a value. The supreme value for an animal is its animal life. All the Desires of an animal are in the final analysis a function of its desire to preserve its life. Human Desire, therefore, must win out over this desire for preservation. In other words, man’s humanity ‘comes to light’ only if he risks his (animal) life for the sake of his human Desire. Therefore, to desire the Desire of another is in the final analysis to desire that the value that I am or that I ‘represent’ be the value desired by the other: I want him to ‘recognize’ my value as his value, I want him to ‘recognize’ me as an autonomous value. In other words, all human, anthropogenic Desire – the Desire that generates Self-Consciousness, a human reality – is, finally a function of the desire for ‘recognition.’”^[1]

Alexandre Kojéve

One becomes fully human when they are willing to stake one’s life to fight for change. Not only, therefore, is dying for a cause one of the most human things we can do, as Freysa said, for Kojéve it is what constitutes the human qua human, what sets us apart from nature and our mere existence as biological entities. Perhaps person is a better term to employ for what Kojéve (and Blade Runner 2049) refers to as the human, leaving therefore “human” as a biological category that elevates itself to personhood when it stakes its life in such a form.^[2] With such an adjustment, we can say that the human animal becomes fully a person, as Boris Groys puts it, when their desire for recognition “values the mode, the form of their life more than life itself.”^[3]

The world of Blade Runner is premised on the work of slaves, the replicants. Niander Wallace, the owner of the Wallace Corporation, admits that all human societies have been sustained by a permanent underclass of slaves. Freysa, the Replicant, is a part of the Replicant Freedom Movement, for whom the fact that the replicant species (or, class) can replicate (the existence of Dr. Ana Stelline being proof of this) is a rallying cry for recognition and autonomy. Lt. Joshi, K’s boss, is clear about the catastrophic potential the spread of this information could have for their social order: “The world is built on a wall. That separates kind. Tell either side there’s no wall... you’ve bought a war. Or a slaughter.”

Humans thus are presented as a conservative force seeking to sustain a species (or class) fragmentation with humans at the top and replicants (alongside other digital entities) at the bottom as their slaves and servants. Thus, from a Kojévean standpoint, it makes perfect sense why Freysa says replicants are “more human than humans,” it is precisely because there is a replicant revolution on the horizon, that is, because the slave replicant class/species is staking its life for a cause, for freedom, for recognition of their dignity and personhood. As Christopher M. Innes wrote, “Freysa’s battle cry is not that different from Marx [and Engels’s] “Workers of the World, Unite!”^[4]

Would this not make the replicants a form of non-human persons? The Replicant Freedom Movement clearly articulates the preference of death through struggle than the preservation of life through submission and enslavement. From a Kojévean standpoint, therefore, they are persons (or, how Kojéve and Blade Runner would put it, “human”).

But what about Joi, the general digital entity you could personalize to serve you, whose sole purpose is serving you, bringing you “joy?” Hence, the marketing tagline for the Joi models: “everything you want her to be!” It is easier to consider the replicants as persons, even if not of the same kind as humans. But could the same apply for K’s Joi?

I think yes. Not only does she exhibit, as Chris Lay shows, an advanced degree of consciousness, self-consciousness, and sentiency, but in addition to this, she also dies for a cause.^[5] When Joi agrees to stake her existence on the well-being of the emanator, she understands that such a risky operation under conditions of imminent persecution makes her previous potential for infinite life null. Her life is now as, if not even more, fragile than anyone else’s. A break of the emanator, a task which doesn’t take much effort, would mean her death. Joi invites this possibility as her chance of being “like a real girl.” She accepts a predicament of inhabiting the world with the background of death, to put it in Heidegger’s terms, as the “possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all.”^[6] She throws herself, in other words, to live with the anxiety of an authentic being-toward-death.^[7]

In the end, Joi sacrifices herself to save K. She stakes her life for a cause, not just to save the man she loves, but to keep the horizon of their search for truth – their search to tear down the wall Lt. Joshi said their world was built on – alive. Joi, then, has taken the leap of preferring annihilation to an immortal will-to-life. In such sacrifice she precisely earns her personhood.

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^[1] Alexandre Kojéve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), 7.

^[2] For Kojéve, in good Hegelian fashion, a form of recognition is also achieved through labor, although “to attain true recognition, the slaves/workers must also risk their lives – or, in other words, start a revolution.” Boris Groys, Alexandre Kojéve: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Verso, 2025), 17.

^[3] Groys, Alexandre Kojéve: An Intellectual Biography, 34.

^[4] Christopher M. Innes, “Replicants of California, Unite!” Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2019), 233.

^[5] Chris Lay has a great argument for Joi’s autonomy as a person, not simply an artificial device set up to a priori submit to K’s will. For instance, consider the following argument from Lay, reflecting on what happens after K tells Joi, once he gets her the emanator, that “you don’t have to say that” when she tells him “I’m so happy when I’m with you”: “From this interaction, we can tease apart K’s instructions to Joi. By telling Joi that she doesn’t have to dote on him, he says to her that if she’s going to care for him, she should do it because she wants to and not because she’s programmed to cling to his every word. So, if Joi truly were “whatever K wants her to be,” she would either care for him independently of her programming, or, barring that, not at all. Since Joi continues to care deeply for K, it seems that she has either defied her programming and chosen to care for K on her own, or followed her programming and done what K asked—to reject her programming and, again, freely chosen to care for K. Either way, Joi’s affection for K seems authentic.” Chris Lay, “Is Joi a Person?” Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy, 13.

^[6] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 307.

^[7] Heidegger, Being and Time, 310-311.

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Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Party and as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido