(preconstituted panel: At Death’s Insistence: Theorising Animation and Death)
Abstract: This
paper will elaborate animation’s centrality to contemporary culture, the paramount nature of animation’s relation to the uncanny in that centrality, and the profound implications of that centrality for the contemporary world and subject. To that end it will foreground the assertions of animation theorist Taihei Imamura in 1948 and philosopher Slavoj Žižek in 1991 of the relevance of the return of the dead for contemporary culture, then turn to Jean Baudrillard for a larger vision of the (lifedead) matter. Biographical statement: The paper I propose is part 3 of the paper whose first part I presented at the 2007 Animated Dialogues Conference in Melbourne and second part at the 2007 SAS conference at Portland. It extends my theorizing in those parts of the relation of animation to death, as well extends that theorizing in my Introductions to The Illusion of Life and The Illusion of Life 2 and in a number of my articles.