Speculative Taxidermy

168FOLLOWING MATERIALITY

the immanence of death,^12 whereas psychoanalysis focused on the rela-
tions between representation and finitude.^13 It is through the emergence
of this specific project that human/animal relationships become further
problematized in the ambit of modernity. Therefore, animals make con-
spicuous appearances in both psychoanalysis and anthropology, as mark-
ers of the extreme limits of discourses. But their very purpose is that of
demarcating the limits of human finitude—the essence of being human
as defined by the inability and presumed lacking of the animal. Thus, ani-
mals appear as transcendental symbolic entities (in psychoanalysis) or as
immanent measurers of otherness (in anthropology).
Cézanne’s paintings inaugurated a new epistemic space in which the
analytics of finitude could be mapped and constructed and in which ani-
mals therefore vanished from the canvas. And it is also not a coincidence
that this disappearance, one that involved the work of many other European
artists of this period, took place along the emergence of photography and
film. These new media simultaneously incorporated and challenged the
aesthetics of classical painting, causing a deep rupture in the discourses
and practices that characterized it until that point. Acknowledging the
role played by the new technologies of visuality in the modern age elucidates
why animals representationally migrated from the medium of painting to
that of photography and film at this very point in history. Tracking the
movements of this animal migration enables the identification of an early
anthropogenic loop that will become essential to contemporary specula-
tive taxidermy.

MECHANIZED VISION AND PERCEPTION:

A REPRESENTATIONAL ANIMAL MIGRATION

The animal migration I have just introduced problematizes Akira Mizuta
Lippit’s notion of modernity’s exclusion of animals as a rhetorical sacri-
fice.^14 In The Electric Animal, Lippit states that “modernity can be defined
by the disappearance of wildlife from humanity’s habitat and by the re-
appearance of the same in humanity’s reflections on itself: in philosophy,
psychoanalysis, and technological media such as the telephone, film, and