Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife

by Akira Mizuta Lippit
Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2008
296 pp. $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-8166-3486-6


Reviewed by Jan Baetens
University of Leuven

jan.baetens@arts.kuleuven.be



Lippit’s book is an impressive contribution to the discussion on the figure of the animal in modern, technological culture, and an example of what critical theory may bring to a wide range of disciplines that have –or in certain cases have not, or not sufficiently– been confronted with the particular relationships between the human and the animal, the organic and the technological, the rational and the unconscious, language and other types of semiotics.

The starting point of the book is a double observation: the disappearance of the animal in contemporary technological culture (as if the rapid vanishing of the animal and of wildlife in general was both the condition and the consequence of the spread of modern culture, with its cult of rationality, instrumentalism, calculation, technology, and so on); the difficulty to make it disappear completely, the failure of its repression, and the various forms of its return in that same modern technological culture (although Lippit’s demonstration will soon make very clear that this return is more than just the return of nature as superseded by culture).

In order to think this apparent contradiction, Lippit contests the validity of the traditional conception of the animal as non-human, mainly for its lack of speech and therefore of communicative aptitudes, of awareness of death, which represent since Aristotle the distinctive features of human beings. Lippit gives a very useful and well-written summary of the most important Western philosophies of the animal, completing them with no less useful and no less well-written chapters on Western thought on the same subject (pun intended) in the field of biology and psychoanalysis. This overview, extraordinary by the wealth of its material and the range of domains that it brings together, is not a simple enumeration on the best of what has been thought and said on the animal in the Western tradition. From the very beginning, Lippit reads this material in the light of a number of crucial insights inspired by a very careful reading of Freud, Derrida, Deleuze, and various other postmodern thinkers –Derrida being however the paramount reference throughout the whole book. In this regard, he underlines in the very first place the necessity to consider the animal a kind of “parergon” or “supplement”, i.e. an element that apparently belongs to the outside of a given concept or object, but that appears to be indispensable to its definition or its function. Corollarily, but in this case the foremost reference is Freud “with Derrida”, Lippit makes also very obvious how important. Man in this sense cannot be approached without his relationship to animal, and the disappearance of the animal is therefore inevitably the symptom of a certain dehumanization. Moreover, Lippit stresses also the need to de-ontologize the difference between the human and the animal. Instead of thinking the animal as non-human, anti-human, infra-human, post-human or whatever, what matters for Lippit, who is following on this point Deleuze and Guattari’s work on “becoming-animal”, is the shift from an ontological opposition or even from the impossibility to fix such an ontological opposition to an energetic relationship of permanent transformation of the animal into the human and vice versa.

Once established this theoretical framework and the central position of the notion of “becoming”, one can understand the most important dimension of Lippit’s book: the weaving of threads between the various fields he brings together, not in order to produce a unified meaning of the animal in modern technological culture, but in order to suggest how these fields –philosophy, psychoanalysis, technology, biology, and the arts– function as each other’s supplement, bringing forward a totally new approach of the animal. In Lippit’s view, the animal is neither a species, nor a metaphor, it is an “animetaphor” or “metamorphosis”, i.e. the impossibility to fix the becoming of a field in terms of “A” is “B” or “A” resembles “B”. In this regard, it becomes clear why Lippit does not speak of “animal” but of “electric animal”, which is a first way of establishing links between the animal and the field of magnetism, electricity, energy, in one word becoming (historically speaking, the “metaphor” of electricity in the discussion of the unconscious was strongly supported by Breuer, but it appears very rapidly that neither the notion of the unconscious nor that of electricity can be separated from other fields such as the animal and technology). The way Lippit manages to bring together the many challenges to the definition of the human put forward by the impossible distinction –and thus also reconciliation– of the human and the animal is remarkable, and his book offers an extremely challenging new reading of the recent tradition of the symbiosis of man, machine and animal as represented by Donna Haraway (although Lippit, who is not prioritarily interested in gender issues, does only mention Haraway in a very oblique way). Absolutely crucial in this regard is the reflection on communication technology –photography and cinema–, which Lippit succeeds in integrating in the more global discussion of Deleuze’s “becoming animal”. For Lippit, these new forms of visual communications share with the animal the characteristic of displaying a challenge to the crisis of verbal –“human” – communication, and the hint toward a profound shift from symbolic to energetic ways of symbolization.

One of the best compliments, finally, one can address to this hallmark publication, is that it deserves a readership that is as varied as the issues and disciplines it tackles. Lippit ought to be read by philosophers and cultural historians, obviously, but his work should no less be carefully discussed by scholars of visual culture, cinema, photography, and literature.