"Are you alive?" New materialities and shifting power relations in "Battlestar Galactica"

The re-imagined science fiction TV series Battlestar Galactica (2004) is an example of what I identify as a shift in the mode of representing the Other in late modern science fiction: from the non-human object Other as aesthetically different from the “real” human to humanoids that are almost impossible to tell apart from an “authentic” human. This shift raises interesting questions about ontology in relation new materialities, but also in relation to questions of human values or ethics: doing/being right or having the right. In this presentation I show how BSG makes visible how a new world order of posthuman materialities disturbs conventional notions of humanity. Humanity is here taken to mean both the materiality of the human race and the notion of the “human” as an ethical point of view (being “right” or just and doing the right thing). I am particularly interested in how dynamics of “old” and “new” materialisms affect structures of power and privilege (having the right).