Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife

Moving beyond the dialectical framework that has traditionally bound animal and human being, ELECTRIC ANIMAL raises s series of questions regarding the idea of animality in Western thought. Can animals communicate? Do they have consciousness? Are they aware of death? by tracing questions such as these through a wide range of texts by writers ranging from Nietzsche to Derrida, Freud to Hearne, Lewis Carroll to Kafka and others Lippit arrives at a remarkable thesis, revealing an extraordinary logical consensus in Western thought: animals do not have language and hence cannot die.