Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 12:27:04 -0700 From: Akira Mizuta Lippit <alippit-AT-sfsu.edu> Subject: PLC: Electric Animal Dear PHILLITCRIT subscribers, I wanted to alert you to my new book, which addresses a range of issues in the hybrid territories of PHILLITCRIT. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. With best regards, Akira Mizuta Lippit University of Minnesota Press 2000. Cloth $22.95 ISBN 0-8166-3485-8 Cultural Studies/Philosophy Akira Mizuta Lippit Electric Animal Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife A fascinating exploration of the symbolic place animals hold within our culture. The break from animals helped to establish the specific 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 emergence of psychoanalysis and 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 an array 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 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 phantasmatic 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 questions of language and mortality, subjectivity and technology, Electric Animal brings to light fundamental questions about the status of representation-of the animal, the human, and non-human being-in the age of biomechanical reproduction. Akira Mizuta Lippit is associate professor of film studies and critical theory in the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University. --- from list phillitcrit-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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