This paper will consider Hegelian and post-Hegelian discussion of the struggle of life and death in relationship to Starship Troopers. Robert Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers in 1959 and it has been interpreted as a right-wing, “fascist,” and Greco- Roman-inspired discussion of citizen-soldiership. At the centre of Heinlein’s work lies an explicit political and civil morality: there are many human bodies, but only some that have earned full political citizenship by staking their life in military service. But what significance does the Other have in Heinlein’s book? Why is the Other destroyed, occupied, alienated? How does this struggle form the basis of subjectivation? This paper will consider how we can interpret the Other, the alien, on the basis of Hegelian and post-Hegelian discussion of the struggle of life and death. It will utilize Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Hegel to interpret the struggle for life and death in Heinlein’s work and the Film interpretation by Paul Verhoeven (1997). This struggle is a central pivot of Hegel’s social ontology: selfconsciousness exists only through an explicit staking of life and struggle (the famous dialectic of Lord and Bondsman, or Mastery and Servitude as interpreted by Kojève). Further, Foucault—in his attempt to escape dialectics and Hegel— utilized the struggle over life and death, and war, as the basis for power and subjectivation
