Inanimation is the third volume in a series of attempts to analyze the technology of the human. Following Prosthesis (1995), where our attachment to “external” objects was traced back to a necessity within the body itself, and Dorsality (2008), where technology was understood to function behind or before the human, Inanimation proceeds by taking literally the idea of inanimate or inorganic forms of life. Such an idea is presumed, for example, by our referring to a work of art that “lives on” after its author. My book takes its inspiration from Walter Benjamin, who states in his famous essay “T ... More

Inanimation is the third volume in a series of attempts to analyze the technology of the human. Following Prosthesis (1995), where our attachment to “external” objects was traced back to a necessity within the body itself, and Dorsality (2008), where technology was understood to function behind or before the human, Inanimation proceeds by taking literally the idea of inanimate or inorganic forms of life. Such an idea is presumed, for example, by our referring to a work of art that “lives on” after its author. My book takes its inspiration from Walter Benjamin, who states in his famous essay “The Task of the Translator” that “the idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity,” continuing that “even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought, there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality.” On that basis Inanimation questions the coherence and limitations of the category of “what lives,” and argues that there can be no clear opposition between a live animate and dead inanimate. Three major forms of inorganic life emerge from the discussion--autobiography, translation, and what I call “resonance”—and each is examined and expanded by means of three “case studies.” Inanimate life forms are uncovered not only in textual remainders and in translation, but also in “places” as disparate as the act of thinking, the death drive, poetic blank space, the technology of warfare, the heart stopped by love, visualized music and recorded bird songs.