Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life by David Wills (review)

David Wills’s Inanimation is the third installment of what now appears to be a trilogy of clearly Derrida-inspired works. It follows Prosthesis and Dorsality, which demonstrate respectively how what manifests as supplementary to be an underlying presence all the while and how what seems mechanically technological to be a natural process already underway. Inanimation, on its part, continues or animates that mode of Derridean deconstruction in relation to the topic of life. As stated in the Preface, it is committed to “thinking life outside of [the animate/inanimate or organic/inorganic] dualism” (xi), if not seeking out “inorganic instances” (x) in the living. The rest of Inanimation endeavors to do this through a coverage of rather myriad materials by a broad range of writers or thinkers: Descartes’s sic ego (or “so, I”); Freud; Derrida’s blush before his cat; punctuations or blank spaces in Mallarmé, Cixous, and Celan; Benjamin’s angel of history; war in Schmitt, Jünger, and Joyce; violent love in Bataille; the heart of stone in Nancy; the discourse of lovers waiting for each other’s call in Barthes; soundtracks and the filmic image in Godard; and natural and battery-operated birdsongs.

So, I blush a little whenever I read a work that is overtly Derridean, a work that is unfailingly faithful to Derrida’s deconstructive strategy and/or rhetorical idiom. To be sure, that is not a criticism of all such works; there are indeed some excellent ones that illuminate aspects of Derrida’s writings that have so far been left unsaid by scholars, or else push Derrida’s thinking to domains that remain unexplored by Derrida himself. Inanimation promises to be one such. Now, what Inanimation does more apparently is to prove that, in the wake of Derrida, the deconstructive spirit is alive and well, as it finds itself reiterated, or else its resonance, in Derrida’s faithful followers. These followers, truth be told, constitute no small machinery in itself: a publishing machinery that involves autobiographical gestures—such as the occasional insertion of anecdotes recounting one’s personal relation with Derrida, or else the desire to write one’s trilogy, as is Wills’s case, and the generation of translation of Derrida’s works into a variety of languages. Resonance, translation, and autobiography are in fact the three principal rubrics under which Wills meditates on the question of life, calling them “unheard of (but neither unknown nor inaudible) forms of life” (xi). In my view, however, these motifs, and the way Wills treats them, risk subjecting deconstruction once again to the criticism, launched decades ago, of it being all but a tiresome theater of a reductive “linguistic turn.” To avoid that charge, I wonder, therefore, if it could have been more critically productive or effective in elucidating and explicating further the life-death of some of Wills’s objects of inquiry, namely, the filmic soundtrack, the battery and the toy bird whose calls are driven by that battery, and the telephone in “being just a telephone” (22). Regrettably, Wills seems to have turned his back on them, preoccupied rather with the demonstration of interpretative ingenuity with regard to filmic images, to the response-reaction question subtending birdsongs, and to the existential anxiety of love as lovers wait for each other’s call. In my view, that significantly takes away attention from “inorganic life,” to which Wills’s “theory” is supposed to be devoted, according to his subtitle. On this note of “inorganic life,” one also wonders why Wills avoids any discussion of Object-Oriented Ontology, Luhmann’s systems theory or the “scientific turn” in contemporary theory. As it stands, the book reads rather like the (unconscious) concern for the animation of the author’s (organic) interpretative capabilities.

But to stay with the book’s immediate interests: what was potentially interesting to me was the reference to John Donne, as Wills points out the fact that that poet had already in the seventeenth century articulated the potentiality for life in the term “inanimation” (ix). It is somewhat unfortunate...