Richard Iveson

Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animals by Richard Iveson offers radical new possibilities for encountering and thinking with other animals, and for the politics of animal liberation. Arguing that the machinations of power that legitimize the killing of nonhuman animals are thoroughly entangled with the ‘noncriminal’ putting to death of human animals, Zoogenesis shows how such legitimation consists in a theatrics of displacement that transforms singular, nonsubstitutable living beings into mute, subjugated bodies that may be slaughtered but never murdered. In an attempt to disrupt what is, quite simply, the instrumentalizing and exploitative economy of genocide, Iveson thereafter explores the possibility of interventions that function in the opposite direction to this ‘animalizing’ displacement – interventions that potentially make it unthinkable that living beings can be ‘legitimately’ slaughtered. Zoogenesis tracks several such disruptive interventions or “animal encounters” across various disciplinary boundaries – stumbling upon their traces in a short story by Franz Kafka, in the bathroom of Jacques Derrida, in a politically galvanising slogan, in the deaths of centipedes both actual and fictional, in the newfound plasticity of the gene, and in the sharing of an inhuman knowledge that saves novelist William S. Burroughs from a life of deadly ignorance. Such encounters, argues Iveson, are zoo-genetic, with zoogenesis naming the emergence of a new living being that interrupts habitual instrumentalization and exploitation. With this creative event, a new conception of the political emerges which, as the supplement of an ethical demand, offers potentially radical new ways of being with other animals.

This article considers Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology and its place within the broader context of neomaterialist philosophy. The question of Insect Media, and indeed of neomaterialism more generally, can be summarized as follows: how might one open oneself to radically alien durations, while remaining politically sensitive to the concomitant risk of technocapitalist capture? Moving through the wide range of subjects engaged with by Parikka, from entomology and cinema to the most advanced forms of programming ecologies, I focus on Parikka’s organizing notion of insects as figuring the molecular disruption of the phantasmatic molar body. For Parikka, it is the swarm that serves as his privileged example, which he locates at the intersection of animal studies, posthumanism and media theory. After outlining Parikka’s important reworking of Bergson’s conception of instinct, understood as ‘intensities’, which functions equally well within the domain of new media, and some of its implications for neo-Darwinism, I then consider Parikka’s ‘melodic’ conception of both nature and technology. Such a conception, I suggest, is problematic in its conflation of nonhuman animals with, for example, software, technologies, viruses and parasites. This in turn puts into question Parikka’s ‘use’ of insects in relation to the claim, common to neomaterialism in general, to have moved beyond an anthropocentric viewpoint. Rather, I argue, such a conception rebuilds a humanist enclosure, albeit one in which, following Guattari, subjectivity can no longer be identified with the individual. Insofar as Parikka designates every nonhuman animal and every machine as beings prior to language and thus prior to intelligence, the non-unitary subject is as a result restricted to the experiencing human subject. This, as Eugene Thacker points out, has serious political implications as regards the attribution of value, or not, to this or that life. However, insofar as Parikka considers instinct as habitual rather than as predetermined and, moreover, extends it to technical beings, I suggest that such a placing of instinct as ‘prelinguistic’ cannot be maintained. By way of conclusion, I appeal for the opening of a dialogue between neomaterialism and deconstruction, with its focus upon language understood in a much broader sense.