On the Animation of the Inorganic – Art, Architecture and the Extension of Life

“Essayism in its best form paired with a rich pictorial, at times poetic language on the one side, and minute research and philological exactitude on the other. . . . Papapetros looks at the stark yet miraculously animated pictorial world of Léger as an experimental field that embodies the contemporaneous discourses of cultural history, anthropology, and crystallography–a form of pictorial description that allows not only the history of animation but also the history of abstraction to appear in a new light.”
— “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”

“On the Animation of the Inorganic is a major contribution to cultural studies, a lucidly written work of dazzling scholarship and theoretical brilliance. For Spyros Papapetros, the vicissitudes in the history of animation from the mid-nineteenth century to the present are exciting chapters in the history of the mind’s incessant efforts to formulate the analogies and correspondences between the human subject and the spaces and objects of the world it inhabits. This ground-breaking study will be of great interest to students and specialists of several disciplines, including art history, architecture, psychoanalysis, and aesthetic theory.”

–Leo Bersani, University of California, Berkeley

“Spyros Papapetros is a most attentive reader and subtle interpreter, alert to nuance and innuendo, but equally weary of snap judgments and free of ideological blinkers. On the Animation of the Inorganic not only raises issues of enduring importance but also brings out many implications of their presumed significance, which leads to illuminating reconsiderations of the writings of Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer and opens up new perspectives from familiar ideas expressed by Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. There are many nuggets of insight and numerous felicitous formulations in this book that will help secure a place for it in current debates.”

–Kurt Forster, Yale University

“Things are not what they used to be, and perhaps they never were. The boundaries between inanimate objects and living organisms, so fundamental to norms of positive science and common sense, shimmer and shatter in this elegant history of animation in modernist art and architecture. You will never look at those annoying appliances and perverse pillars in quite the same way after reading this marvelous book, which should, by all rights, turn its own pages.”

–W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago