Inanimate Life

By tracing the English word permafrost back to its Russian roots, this unique intellectual history uncovers the multiple, contested meanings of permafrost as a scientific idea and environmental phenomenon.

The first novel in ten years from the author of the beloved New York Times bestseller The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake, a luminous, poignant tale of a mother, a daughter, mental illness, and the fluctuating barrier between the mind and the world On the night her single mother is taken to a mental hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is staying with her babysitter, waiting to take the train to Los Angeles to go live with her aunt and uncle. There is a lovely lamp next to the couch on which she's sleeping, the shade adorned with butterflies. When she wakes, Francie spies a dead butterfly, exactly matching the ones on the lamp, floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before the babysitter can see. Twenty years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment, and two other incidents -- her discovery of a desiccated beetle from a school paper, and a bouquet of dried roses from some curtains. Her recall is exact -- she is sure these things happened. But despite her certainty, she wrestles with the hold these memories maintain over her, and what they say about her own place in the world. As Francie conjures her past and reduces her engagement with the world to a bare minimum, she begins to question her relationship to reality. The scenes set in Francie's past glow with the intensity of childhood perception, how physical objects can take on an otherworldly power. The question for Francie is, What do these events signify? And does this power survive childhood? Told in the lush, lilting prose that led the San Francisco Chronicle to say Aimee Bender is "a writer who makes you grateful for the very existence of language," The Butterfly Lampshade is a heartfelt and heartbreaking examination of the sometimes overwhelming power of the material world, and a broken love between mother and child.

Sidis entertains the idea that life originated on Earth from asteroids (as put forth by Lord Kelvin and Hermann von Helmholtz) while describing his theory as a synthesis of the mechanical and vitalist life models. Sidis also claims that stars are "alive" and go through an eternally repeating light-dark cycle, with the second law reversing in the dark portion of the cycle. Sidis' theory was dismissed upon release, only to be discovered in an attic in 1979. Buckminster Fuller (a Sidis classmate) wrote to Gerard Piel in response to this discovery: Imagine my surprise and delight when I was handed a xerox of Sidis' 1925 book, in which he predicted the black hole. His book, The Animate and the Inanimate is a tremendous cosmological work. I find him focusing on the same topics that fascinate me and reaching roughly the same conclusions that I have published in SYNERGETICS and will publish in SYNERGETICS Volume II, which has already gone to press. As a Harvard man of a later generation, I hope you are as excited as I am that Sidis went on to do the most magnificent thinking and writing after college. This is one of the few works by Sidis that was not written under a pen name. In The Animate and the Inanimate, Sidis says that the universe is endless and has parts where the laws of physics are backward, called "negative tendencies." Following these are sections where the laws of physics are forward-looking, known as "positive tendencies," which change over time. He claims there was no "origin of life"; life has always existed and only evolved.

Inanimation is the third book by author David Wills to analyze the technology of the human. In Prosthesis, Wills traced our human attachment to external objects back to a necessity within the body itself. In Dorsality, he explored how technology is understood to function behind or before the human. Inanimation proceeds by taking literally the idea of inanimate or inorganic forms of life. Starting from a seemingly naïve question about what it means to say texts “live on” or have a “life of their own,” Inanimation develops a new theory of the inanimate. Inanimation offers a fresh account of what life is and the ethical and political consequences that follow from this conception. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s observation that “the idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity,” the book challenges the coherence and limitations of “what lives,” arguing that there is no clear opposition between a live animate and dead inanimate. Wills identifies three major forms of inorganic life: autobiography, translation, and resonance. Informed by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, he explores these forms through wide-ranging case studies. He brings his panoptic vision to bear on thinkers (Descartes, Freud, Derrida, Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roland Barthes), writers and poets (Hélène Cixous, Paul Celan, William Carlos Williams, Ernst Jünger, James Joyce, Georges Bataille), and visual artists (Jean-François Millet, Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Klee). With panache and gusto, Wills discovers life-forms well beyond textual remainders and translations, in such disparate “places” as the act of thinking, the death drive, poetic blank space, recorded bird songs, the technology of warfare, and the heart stopped by love.