Electric Animal

Electric Animal

Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife

Akira Mizuta Lippit
Table of Contents

$25.00 paper
ISBN: 978-0-8166-3486-6

A foundational exploration of the figure of the animal hold in modern culture.

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 Hearne, 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 the repository 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.

“A large-scale re-evaluation of our cultural and intellectual history in order to understand how people and animals have coexisted through the centuries. Lippit re-examines the touchstones of Western intellectual development. In a dazzling interdisciplinary romp through Aristotle, Heidegger, Darwin, Freud, and up to the present with a discussion of Kafka, photography, and cinema, Lippit is keenly aware of how, throughout history, people have condescended toward animals—the flip side of valuing humanity above all else. Lippit deconstructs the masking of animal consciousness in our intellectual traditions.” —Randy Malamud, Chronicle of Higher Education Review

"Lippit traces the career of the animal from Aristotle to Derrida, via Rousseau, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the usual suspects, and tracks it to a wild new landscape that is still emerging. What Lippit pulls off in Electric Animal is, weirdly, the bringing together of nature and artifice in their joint opposition to language. Language is supposed to go with artifice, and with what is human, against what is natural, and what is animal. What is profound about this reshuffling of the metaphysical deck is the trick card it turns up. It's a portal to thinking otherwise. Lippit's last speculation points way beyond the confines of this meticulous little book." —Artbyte

"This book is, among other things, an extraordinarily promising preface to a, perhaps the, theory of cinema." —MLN

“This excellent, comprehensive overview and stimulating discussion that is intensely rewarding in its final, speculative moments will be of interest to many readers interested in different fields of inquiry, be it philosophy, psychoanalysis, ecology, ethics, cinema, or media studies.” —Semiotic Review of Books

Akira Mizuta Lippit is professor of comparative literature, East Asian languages and cultures, and cinema at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minnesota, 2005).

296 pages | 5 x 8 | 2008

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Remembering Animals
Animals disappear—paraneoplastic encephalopathy—separation of human and animal being—eros—biology—metaphysics of language—mourning animality—expression—toward cinema

1. Philosophy and the Animal World
Rue Morgue—animal disclosure—cognito and monad—palingenesis—imagination—mimesis—the animal cry—animal death—“the affect-phrase”—theriophily—phantom animality

2. Afterthoughts on the Animal World: Heidegger to Nietzsche
Heidegger’s world—“poor in the world”—under erasure, world—spirit—Nietzsche’s ecstatic animal—Zarathustra’s exchanges—affectivity

3. Evolutions: Natural Selection, Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis
Darwinian revolution—the end of history and the return to animality—Bergson’s apparatuses of consciousness—animal magnetism—the unconscious—Freud’s incorporation of Darwin

4. The Wildside: Theory and Animality
Hypnosis and the “splitting of the mind”—unconscious ideas—abreaction—Breur’s preliminal communication—electrical systems—animality and excitement—smell—memory and repression—“becoming-animal”—multiplicity

5. The Literary Animal: Carroll, Kafka, Akutagawa
Languages are dynamic organisms—Carroll’s other animal world—language and orality—Kafka’s deterritorializations and metamorphoses—incorporating humanity—Akutagawa’s satirical animal—body without organs, novel without plot

6. Animetaphors: Photography, Cryptonymy, Film
Animal dreams—animetaphor—pathic projection—cryptonymy—photography—economies of identification—technologies of incorporation—cinema

Notes
Bibliography
Index



Electric Animal *Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife* Akira Mizuta Lippit Table of Contents		$25.00 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-3486-6
A foundational exploration of the figure of the animal hold in modern culture. 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 Hearne, 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 the repository 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. “A large-scale re-evaluation of our cultural and intellectual history in order to understand how people and animals have coexisted through the centuries. Lippit re-examines the touchstones of Western intellectual development. In a dazzling interdisciplinary romp through Aristotle, Heidegger, Darwin, Freud, and up to the present with a discussion of Kafka, photography, and cinema, Lippit is keenly aware of how, throughout history, people have condescended toward animals—the flip side of valuing humanity above all else. Lippit deconstructs the masking of animal consciousness in our intellectual traditions.” —Randy Malamud, Chronicle of Higher Education Review "Lippit traces the career of the animal from Aristotle to Derrida, via Rousseau, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the usual suspects, and tracks it to a wild new landscape that is still emerging. What Lippit pulls off in Electric Animal is, weirdly, the bringing together of nature and artifice in their joint opposition to language. Language is supposed to go with artifice, and with what is human, against what is natural, and what is animal. What is profound about this reshuffling of the metaphysical deck is the trick card it turns up. It's a portal to thinking otherwise. Lippit's last speculation points way beyond the confines of this meticulous little book." —Artbyte "This book is, among other things, an extraordinarily promising preface to a, perhaps the, theory of cinema." —MLN “This excellent, comprehensive overview and stimulating discussion that is intensely rewarding in its final, speculative moments will be of interest to many readers interested in different fields of inquiry, be it philosophy, psychoanalysis, ecology, ethics, cinema, or media studies.” —Semiotic Review of Books Akira Mizuta Lippit is professor of comparative literature, East Asian languages and cultures, and cinema at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minnesota, 2005). 296 pages \| 5 x 8 \| 2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: Remembering Animals Animals disappear—paraneoplastic encephalopathy—separation of human and animal being—eros—biology—metaphysics of language—mourning animality—expression—toward cinema 1. Philosophy and the Animal World Rue Morgue—animal disclosure—cognito and monad—palingenesis—imagination—mimesis—the animal cry—animal death—“the affect-phrase”—theriophily—phantom animality 2. Afterthoughts on the Animal World: Heidegger to Nietzsche Heidegger’s world—“poor in the world”—under erasure, world—spirit—Nietzsche’s ecstatic animal—Zarathustra’s exchanges—affectivity 3. Evolutions: Natural Selection, Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis Darwinian revolution—the end of history and the return to animality—Bergson’s apparatuses of consciousness—animal magnetism—the unconscious—Freud’s incorporation of Darwin 4. The Wildside: Theory and Animality Hypnosis and the “splitting of the mind”—unconscious ideas—abreaction—Breur’s preliminal communication—electrical systems—animality and excitement—smell—memory and repression—“becoming-animal”—multiplicity 5. The Literary Animal: Carroll, Kafka, Akutagawa Languages are dynamic organisms—Carroll’s other animal world—language and orality—Kafka’s deterritorializations and metamorphoses—incorporating humanity—Akutagawa’s satirical animal—body without organs, novel without plot 6. Animetaphors: Photography, Cryptonymy, Film Animal dreams—animetaphor—pathic projection—cryptonymy—photography—economies of identification—technologies of incorporation—cinema Notes Bibliography Index