Morbidity and vitalism: Derrida, bergson, deleuze, and animal film imagery

Configurations

Volumn 14, Issue 1-2, 2006, Pages 157-179

  Burt, Jonathan ^a  

^a Animal Studies Group   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 47949126434     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.0.0008     Document Type: Review

References (64)

1. Jacques Derrida, "The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)," Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 369-418, quote on 401.
2. John Berger, "Why Look at Animals?" in About Looking (London: Writers & Readers, 1980), pp. 1-24;
3. on the impact and implications of this essay, see Jonathan Burt, "John Berger's 'Why Look at Animals?': A Close Reading," Worldviews 9 (2005): 203-218.
4. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), chap. 3.
5. Akira Lippit, Electric Animal: Towards a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
6. Derrida, "The Animal That Therefore I Am" (above, n. 1), p. 390.
7. Ibid., p. 389.
8. Jacques Derrida, "And Say the Animal Responded?" in Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal, ed. Cary Wolfe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 121-145. This and subsequent quotes can all be found on page 134.
9. Wolfe, Animal Rites (above, n. 3), pp. 100-101.
10. Derrida, "The Animal That Therefore I Am" (above, n. 1), p. 393 (emphasis added).
11. Ibid., p. 395.
12. Ibid., p. 397. Derrida returns to the notion of the war against animals with a different tone in the second section of this essay, as yet untranslated: "[I] believe that Cartesianism belongs, under this mechanist indifference, to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition of a war against the animal, of a sacrificial war as old as Genesis. And this war is not a mode of applying technoscience to the animal even when another mode would be possible or foreseeable; no, this violence or this war has been, up to now, constitutive of the project or the very possibility of technoscientific knowledge in the process of humanisation or of the appropriation of human [homme] by human, understood here in its most elevated ethical and religious forms"; see Jacques Derrida, L'animal que Donc Je Suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006), p. 140.
13. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 17.
14. See, for instance, Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion, 1998), chap. 2;
15. Jonathan Burt, "Slaughter in Modernity," in Killing Animals, ed. Animal Studies Group (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), pp. 120-144.
16. Derrida, L'animal que Donc Je Suis (above, n. 11), pp. 140-146.
17. Derrida, "The Animal That Therefore I Am" (above, n. 1), p. 418.
18. Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 36.
19. Lippit, Electric Animal (above, n. 4), p. 17.
20. See, for instance, Robert Pepperell, The Post-Human Condition (Oxford: Intellect, 1995);
21. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston, eds., Posthuman Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995);
22. Mark Poster, "The Information Empire," Comparative Literature Studies 41 (2004): 317-334.
23. Lippit, Electric Animal (above, n. 4), p. 36.
24. Andreas-Holger Maehle, "Literary Responses to Animal Experimentation in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain," Medical History 34 (1990): 27-51;
25. Andreas-Holger Moehle and Ulrich Tröhler, "Animal Experimentation from Antiquity to the End of the Eighteenth Century: Attitudes and Arguments," in Vivisection in Historical Perspective, ed. Nicolaas Rupke (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 14-47.
26. Lippit, Electric Animal (above, n. 4), p. 48.
27. Derrida, L'animal que Donc Je Suis (above, n. 11), p. 213: "And endlessly Heidegger speaks of deliberately contradictory things, to the effect that the animal has a world in the mode of 'not having.' The animal is 'deprived' and this privation implies that it has a sentiment: 'feels itself impoverished,' 'Ar-mut' [German: poverty], is a 'manner of feeling itself to be,' a tonality, a sentiment: the animal experiences the privation of this world. Thus no hierarchy, no teleology, no finalism, nor mechanism, and great tradition of Aristotelian negation, privation. Finally, the animal is described as 'enclosed' in this privation - and Heidegger speaks of an 'encircling,' of an engrossing, of a dazedness (Benommenheit), it is enclosed in a dazedness but with the sentiment of privation." On stunning during this period, see Jonathan Burt, "The Illumination of the Animal Kingdom: The Role of Light and Electricity in Animal Representation," Society and Animals 9 (2001): 203-228.
28. Akira Lippit, "The Death of the Animal," Film Quarterly 56 (2002): 9-22, quote on 18.
29. Ibid., p. 12.
30. Derrida, "The Animal That Therefore I Am" (above, n. 1), p. 416.
31. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 209.
32. On vitalism, see Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass, The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
33. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London, 1757), p. 16.
34. Ibid., p. 13.
35. See, for instance, Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2003);
36. Gregory Flaxman, ed., The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
37. D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
38. On the contrasts in Bergson's notion of perception and photography in Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution, see, for instance, Flaxman, ed., The Brain Is the Screen, pp. 97ff.
39. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 8;
40. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone, 2002), p. 36.
41. Deleuze, Cinema 2 (above, n. 26), p. 156.
42. Deleuze likens his cinema project to a exercise in classification akin to natural history; see Gilles Deleuze, "The Brain Is the Screen," in Flaxman, ed., The Brain Is the Screen (above, n. 30), pp. 365-373.
43. Henry Bergson, Creative Evolution (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 132.
44. On notions of life in Deleuze and Bergson, see Flaxman, ed., The Brain Is the Screen (above, n. 30), pp. 16-46.
45. Bergson, Creative Evolution (above, n. 34), p. 123.
46. Deleuze, Cinema 2 (above, n. 26), p. 180.
47. For instance, see Bergson, Creative Evolution (above, n. 34), pp. 109-110.
48. Deleuze, Cinema 2 (above, n. 26), p. 29.
49. Deleuze comments on this in Cinema 1 (above, n. 31), pp. 60-61. For a comprehensive account of Bergson's theory of the image, see Keith Ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life (London: Routledge, 2002), chap. 6.
50. Bergson, Matter and Memory (above, n. 31), p. 36.
51. Ibid., p. 9.
52. Ibid., pp. 38-39.
53. Ibid., p. 81.
54. Bergson, Creative Evolution (above, n. 34), pp. 350-351. The first cinematic example in Laura Mulvey's Death 24x a Second is of the galloping white horse in Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, which is suddenly frozen into a still image. This marks, as she puts it, the transition from animate to inanimate, from life to death. Mulvey's thesis is that each still frame is a death;
55. see Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), p. 13.
56. Deleuze, Cinema 1 (above, n. 31), p. 2.
57. Bergson, Creative Evolution (above, n. 34), p. 358.
58. Bill Viola and R. Violette, eds., Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995), p. 143.
59. For an article very pertinent to Bill Viola and the themes of this essay, see Mark Hansen, "The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life," Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 584-626. Note his point that "technical expansion of self-affection allows for a fuller and more intense experience of subjectivity, that, in short, technology allows for a closer relationship to ourselves, for a more intimate experience of the very vitality that forms the core of our being, our constitutive incompleteness, our mortal finitude" (p. 589 [emphasis added]); see also his remarks on the interstice and time (pp. 590-591).
60. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone, 1988), p. 238. For another version of humans as being almost like animals but not, see Deleuze, Cinema 1 (above, n. 31), pp. 123-124: "Here the characters are like animals: the fashionable gentleman a bird of prey, the lover a goat, the poor man a hyena. This is not because they have their form or behaviour, but because their acts are prior to all differentiation between the human and the animal. These are human animals."
61. See Pearson's critique of becoming animal as an example of human narcissism and solipsism and his suggestion for the need for an "animal becoming"; Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 186-189.
62. For a background account of this film, see Nathan Richardson, "Animals, Machines and Postnational Identity in Julio Medem's Vacas," Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 10 (2004): 191-204.
63. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion, 2000).
64. Viola and Violette, eds., Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (above, n. 47), p. 143.