Animation, Automata, Biomimesis

The animation-effect of the movement-image constitutes not only a form of life but also a machinic analogue for Husserl's and Kant's accounts of temporality, engendering what Bernard Stiegler calls ‘a cinematography of consciousness’. If autonomous movement is the hallmark of the living being as well as the inanimate mechanism, the movement-image likewise subtends scenes of human and artificial intelligence. Pairing a cybernetic reading of Lacan's mirror stage essay with reflections on the self-recognition dance of Machina Speculatrix (an early example of a biomimetic robot), this essay considers how exosomatic feedback loops enable a kind of ipseity for machinic life as well as the human being as technical being. Despite adopting Derrida's ideas of originary prostheticity and automaticity, rendering living beings as always-already machinic life, Stiegler sets arche-cinema against arche-writing.