Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life (Volume 35)

by David Wills

Inanimation is the third book by author David Wills to analyze the technology of the human. In Prosthesis, Wills traced our human attachment to external objects back to a necessity within the body itself. In Dorsality, he explored how technology is understood to function behind or before the human. Inanimation proceeds by taking literally the idea of inanimate or inorganic forms of life. Starting from a seemingly naïve question about what it means to say texts “live on” or have a “life of their own,” Inanimation develops a new theory of the inanimate. Inanimation offers a fresh account of what life is and the ethical and political consequences that follow from this conception. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s observation that “the idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity,” the book challenges the coherence and limitations of “what lives,” arguing that there is no clear opposition between a live animate and dead inanimate. Wills identifies three major forms of inorganic autobiography, translation, and resonance. Informed by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, he explores these forms through wide-ranging case studies. He brings his panoptic vision to bear on thinkers (Descartes, Freud, Derrida, Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roland Barthes), writers and poets (Hélène Cixous, Paul Celan, William Carlos Williams, Ernst Jünger, James Joyce, Georges Bataille), and visual artists (Jean-François Millet, Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Klee). With panache and gusto, Wills discovers life-forms well beyond textual remainders and translations, in such disparate “places” as the act of thinking, the death drive, poetic blank space, recorded bird songs, the technology of warfare, and the heart stopped by love.

Genres: Philosophy

328 pages, Paperback

Published March 25, 2016

About the author

Australian-born David Wills is an author, independent curator, photographic preservationist, and editor who has accrued one of the world's largest independent archives of original photographs, negatives, and transparencies. He has contributed material to many publications and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Wills has produced a series of photography exhibitions based on images from his archive. His shows include Murder, Models, Madness: Photographs from the Motion Picture Blow-Up; Edie Sedgwick: Unseen Photographs of a Warhol Superstar; Blonde Bombshell; James Bond; Women with Issues: Photographs from the Motion Picture Valley of the Dolls; and Warhology.

Wills's books include Ara Gallant; Marilyn Monroe: Metamorphosis; Audrey: The 60s; Hollywood in Kodachrome; and Seventies Glamour. He is also the co-author of Veruschka.

His books and exhibitions have received major profiles in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, American Photo, Vogue, Interview, and Time. He has also written articles on photography and popular culture for publications including the Huffington Post, V Magazine, and Palm Springs Life.

Reviews

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed Wills's earlier deconstructive work _Prosthesis_ (see my review of that book), and I was intrigued by the title of this one and looked forward to reading it. But... there are issues. Some of my problems with this work are the same as the problems I had with _Prosthesis_ as a work of scholarship. From my viewpoint, deconstruction, while sometimes fun to read and (I'm sure) fun to write, ultimately is a scholarly dead end. In fact, I would have said that it had died at least 20 years ago. Yet here Wills is, still explicating (and being inspired by) the huge corpus of Derrida (the living dead), using deconstruction (and whatever you call Deleuze's method: _A Thousand Plateaus_ plays a huge role in the work here as well) to dig into continental theory and philosophy, particularly the issue of where the line between living and dead becomes more than a little messy and uncertain. At least, that's what he _tries_ to do, because it feels like the book lost its focus in the later chapters (the chapter on Godard's films and music, in particular, seems out of place, although it was one of the most coherent in the book). Wills frames his analysis with Descartes, and that makes a certain amount of sense: Derrida's work, although it plays with dualistic binaries, really is monist in thrust. So deconstructing the source of modern Western philosophy's dualism seems appropriate, using theory descending from Spinoza (the source of modern Western philosophy's branch of monism). However, Wills doesn't quite make his larger case (at least with me; and I readily admit that, especially the parts of his argument deriving from Deleuze, I may not fully grasp the theory). The main problem is that Wills (and Derrida more generally) commits a single logical fallacy repeatedly: he makes an analogy and then turns that analogy around and treats it like it is a homology. You just can't do that; yes, that's a dualistic binary, but it is one that (logically) _cannot_ be deconstructed without the fabric of _your own work_ unravelling (when you really meant to unravel the object of your study). You can't just say (for example, and not that Wills uses this example at all), "Life is like a box of chocolates," and then conclude by saying, "Therefore a box of chocolates IS ALIVE." That makes no real sense; it may make for interesting thought experiments, but ultimately it MEANS NOTHING. And that's the larger problem I have with this book (and deconstruction more generally): what's at stake here? Why does any of this argument really matter? It has (as far as I can tell) absolutely no material effects on anyone's lives (even the chapter that _should_, such as "Raw War" are made entirely abstract by the method and choice of objects analyzed). Where _Prosthesis_ was grounded in Wills's father's _lived experience_ (and, via a footnote in the exploitation of the Global South by the Global North), this book is not grounded in anything real (or, rather, what it is grounded in doesn't matter beyond the experience of one or two theorists: he does write about Cixous's grief over Derrida's death...but Cixous wrote more movingly of her own grief, and why does Wills care, anyway? Just because Derrida is the theoretical guru of his academic career?). Wills does mention that he wrote an article about unmanned drone strikes, but he never mentions anything so important or concrete again. THAT chapter I would LOVE to read: that MATTERS NOW and affects the lives of everyone on this planet. Where is that book? It isn't this one, more's the pity.