Eat me(at): phantom animality and spectral posthumanism in Antiviral (2012)

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship pays increasing attention to human-animal relations and the question of the animal. This article advances these developments by utilizing a cultural materialist perspective within the framework of animal studies to map the traces of a lost animal life embedded within the culture industry of director Brandon Cronenberg’s 2012 dystopian science fiction film Antiviral. Engaging with Akira Lippit’s concept of animetaphor and Nicole Shukin’s subsequent work on animal capital, this paper argues that a phantom animal(ity) pervades Antiviral, highlighting the haunting, ‘absent present’ status of animals in capitalist society. By replacing dead, dying, commodity animals with humans, Cronenberg’s work facilitates a spectral posthumanist perspective that raises awareness about the reality and lived experience of commodified animals. This particular utilization of phantom animality reinforces the idea that technology, far from preserving animal life in virtual form, actually incorporates animals into capitalism. By following the tracks of a phantom animal across a cinematic landscape of imagined bodies, technologies, industries and topographies, this article shows the ways in which the future cannibalism depicted in Antiviral is surrounded and haunted by animal life.

KEYWORDS:

• Phantom animality
• spectral posthumanism
• animetaphor
• crypt
• animal
• animality
• commodification
• meat

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lippit also talks about a ‘phantom animality’ at the end of his first chapter in Electric Animal but uses it differently to describe the disappearing state of the animal subject in the modern era, that which philosophical reason fails to acknowledge. For this reason, the animal who dies but cannot die becomes a phantom, a crypt of modernity. For a more detailed discussion see Electric Animal, 27.

2. For a more detailed discussion of animal remains in the making of gelation see Animal Capital, 104–14.

3. ‘Carnism’, a term coined by Melanie Joy (2011), describes the invisible belief system in which we live, one that normalizes the eating of certain animals. A carnist is not the same as a carnivore. A carnivore is an animal that must eat meat to survive, whereas a carnist – a human who eats meat – eats meat out of choice, not a necessity (30).

4. My use of spectral posthumanism is different from that of Adam Lovasz, who used the term in a 2018 article in Horror Studies seemingly to explain Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s subtle expression of Japan’s societal extinction through a futuristic story where humans are haunted by human ghosts in Kairo (2001), whereas I deploy this term to explicate how spectral animal and animality have haunted future humanity through bodies, technologies, economies and topographies in ways that collapse the human-animal boundary and challenge speciesist and anthropocentric views.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ece Üçoluk Krane

Ece Üçoluk Krane is a PhD candidate who has lectured at the School of Film, Media and Theatre at Georgia State University. She has presented at many conferences, including Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Film-Philosophy and Film and History. Recently she published an article on a related topic in The Cine-Files.