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MLN 115.5 (2000) 1171-1178



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Book Review

Electric Animal:
Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife


Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 286 pp.

Akira Mizuta Lippit's important new book Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife begins with a definition of modernity:

Modernity can be defined by the disappearance of wildlife from humanity's habitat and by the reappearance of the same in humanity's reflections on itself: in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and technological media such as the telephone, film, and radio. During this period, the status of the animal itself began to change--at the very point that animals began to vanish from the empirical world. "Public zoos came into existence," [John] Berger writes, "at the beginning of the period which was to see the disappearance of animals from daily life. The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to their disappearance." A new breed of animals now surrounds the human populace--a genus of vanishing animals whose very being is constituted by that state of disappearing. The modern animal became, to borrow Jacques Derrida's expression, "a memory of the present." (2-3)

In other words, according to Lippit, modernity could be understood as that moment when the animal "enters, for the first time, the phenomenal world" (184). This moment is precisely when they begin to disappear from the phenomenal world and the agent of their entrance is also that of their exit--the reproductive media whose origins we find in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This definition brings to mind another, more implicit definition of modernity, one given by Althusser. It also moves by delineating a special set of the age's inhabitants. In Lenin and Philosophy, in an essay called "Freud and Lacan," Althusser begins by invoking that great triumvirate whose proper names are often called to stand for modern thought.

In the history of Western Reason, every care, foresight, precaution and warning has been devoted to births. Prenatal therapy is institutional. When a young science is born, the family circle is always ready for astonishment, jubilation and baptism. For a long time, every child, even the foundling, has been reputed the son of a father, and when it is a prodigy, the fathers would fight at the gate if it were not for the mother and the respect due to her. In our crowded world, a place is allocated for birth, a place is even allocated for the prediction of a birth: 'prospective".

To my knowledge, the nineteenth century saw the birth of two or three children that were not expected: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. 'Natural' children, in the sense that nature offends customs, principles, morality and good breeding: nature is the rule violated, the unmarried mother, hence the absence of a legal father. Western Reason makes a fatherless child pay heavily. Marx, Nietzsche and Freud had to foot the often terrible bill of survival: a price compounded of exclusion, condemnation, insult, poverty, hunger and death, or madness. I speak only of them (other unfortunates might be mentioned who lived their death sentences in colour, sound and poetry). I speak only of them because they were the births of sciences or of criticism. 1 [End Page 1171]

What is now striking in this passage, in a way that Lippit only now makes possible, is that the strangeness of these great bastards of, and not of, the Western philosophical tradition, is, by way of its naturalness, definitively marked by the irreducible stain of animality. When we think Marx, Nietzsche and Freud together it is often in acknowledgement of the massive interventions each of them makes to the theory of value and of the way those interventions delimit, and thereby endanger, man. But returning to Althusser by way of Lippit allows us now to hear not only that the vanishing and reappearance of the animal was the condition of possibility of this delimitation, but that this intermittent sound of the animal already constituted a destabilizing force within...

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