Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (a first printing)

Differentiation from animals helped to establish the notion of a human being, but the disappearance of animals now threatens that identity. This is the argument underlying Electric Animal, a probing exploration of the figure of the animal in modern culture. Akira Mizuta Lippit shows us the animal as a crucial figure in the definition of modernity -- essential to developments in the natural sciences and technology, radical transformations in modern philosophy and literature, and the advent of psychoanalysis and the cinema.Moving beyond the dialectical framework that has traditionally bound animal and human being, Electric Animal raises a series of questions regarding the idea of animality in Western thought. Can animals communicate? Do they have consciousness? Are they aware of death? By tracing questions such as these through a wide range of texts by writers ranging from Friedrich Nietzsche to Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud to Vicki Heame, Lewis Carroll to Franz Kafka, and Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Deleuze, Lippit arrives at a remarkable thesis, revealing an extraordinary logical consensus in Western thought: animals do not have language and hence cannot die. The animal has, accordingly, haunted thought as a form of spectral and undead being. Lippit demonstrates how, in the late nineteenth century; this phantasmic concept of animal being reached the proportions of an epistemological crisis, engendering the disciplines and media of psychoanalysis, modern literature, and cinema, among others. Against the prohibitive logic of Western philosophy, these fields opened a space for rethinking animality. Technology, usually thought of in opposition to nature, came to serve as therepository for an unmournable animality -- a kind of vast wildlife museum. A highly original work that charts new territory in current debates over language and mortality, subjectivity and technology, Electric Animal brings to light fundamental questions about the status of representation -- of the animal and of ourselves -- in the age of biomechanical reproduction.

This work explores the figure of the animal...
This work explores the figure of the animal and the rhetoric of animality in four disciplines: philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and the visual arts. It situates the animal as a crucial figure in the definition of modernity, arguing that the radical transformations in modern philosophy and literature, the developments in the natural sciences and technology, the advent of psychoanalysis and cinema relied, in part, on a reconceptualization of the place of the animal in the world. In six chapters, the book seeks to interpret three distinctive shifts in the dynamic of modernist thought and art.

An introductory chapter locates the book's subject in the context of contemporary critical discourse. The introduction frames the role of the animal figure within a critique of humanism, the evolution of speculative anthropology, and developments in technological and cultural theory. Its purpose is to emphasize the prominence of the rhetoric of animality in the humanistic disciplines and to open a space for the readings that follow.

The first two chapters address the function of the animal as metaphor in western philosophy. Presented as a historical overview of the trope of the animal, the first chapter surveys the appearance of the animal as a philosophical subject in the work of classical philosophers such as Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, and Aristotle, as well as in their modern counterparts, Descartes, Kant, Hegel. The second chapter moves from a survey of the animal in western philosophy to a more focused interpretation of the differing notions of animality in Nietzsche and Heidegger.

Chapters one and two establish that the animal is frequently characterized, in philosophical discussions, as lacking the capacity for language. Because the function of language occupies an increasingly important place in modern philosophical thought, the unspeaking animal is often positioned as the antithesis to human existence. The essential remove at which animals are situated came to represent, by the late-nineteenth century, a kind of metaphysical crisis.

The third and fourth chapters address the theoretical interventions that followed the crisis and include readings of Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution and Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud's Studies on Hysteria. Each chapter attempts to show how the crisis in metaphysics generated a number of new discursive trajectories which, in turn, transformed the concept of animality. These two chapters argue that the advent of psychoanalysis and later semiotics, under the influence of Darwin's revolutionary biology, began to reconfigure the status of the animal and its relation to humankind. The notion of the unconscious, in particular, created a formal structure for a new ontology of the animal. Freud himself understood the unconscious as a place apart from the site of language and often characterized it in animal terms.

The fourth chapter concludes with a discussion of animal semiotics and examines the work of Jakob von Uexkull, Vicki Hearne, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, with an emphasis on the notion of "becoming-animal." It includes a section on animal sensuality and smell in the work of Freud, Adorno and Horkheimer, and Alain Corbin. This chapter charts the reinscription of early twentieth century thinkers such as Bergson and Freud in contemporary critical theory.

The final two chapters of the book focus on literary representations of the animal and the relationship between cinema and animality. The section on literature consists primarily of readings of Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke and their attempts to render new modes of animal being. It serves as a passage to the book's final subject, visual arts and the advent of cinema.

The discussion of cinema begins with an interpretation of the role that animals play in the pre-history of the medium, especially in the photography of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard James Muybridge. Through the analyses of early twentieth-century filmmakers and theorists such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and Germaine Dulac, this section seeks to establish the manner in which film came to be understood as a form of electric life or anima. The final section of the book closes with a speculative analysis of film as a form of animal "language."

The concluding chapters recapitulate the role of the animal in affecting the dynamic of modernism. By shifting the place of the animal in relation to human consciousness, language, and identity, certain forms of modernist thought and art developed a radically different epistemological frame. Cinema, one of the emblematic technologies of the twentieth century, is seen as having cast the question of the animal in an entirely new light.