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

Abstract

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.