Electric Animal Akira Mizuta-Lippit Since animals do not have language, they cannot reflect on their own mortality. It is a human capacity only to imagine nothingness, non-being, or death. Through an analysis of Western philosophy, Lippit reveals that animals cannot die. The lack of language “prevents animals from experiencing death; this in turn suspends the animal in a virtual, perpetual existence. The figure of the animal determines a radically antithetical counterpoint to human mortality, to the edifice of humanism” (73). The modern era, through scientific and technological advance, enforces a severance from direct contact with nature and animals, and therefore this counterpoint has been weakened. Through the separation from nature and the animal, the very definition of humanity has begun to falter, and humanity becomes dehumanized.
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