Dokument

Summary:
To talk of ‘living things’ seems paradoxical at first: the word ‘things’ seems to represent the inanimate, and thus exactly the opposite of living beings. Nevertheless, human encounters with ‘living things’ are not entirely unfamiliar. Late medieval miracle books are full of stories of weeping Madonnas, crucifixes that move, or speaking figures of saints. We read in missionary reports from the 17th century onwards, that so-called pagans consider certain dead things to be alive, and consequently worship them. We encounter ‘living things’ in fictional literature too, such as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816), and popular films, such as John Carpenter’s Christine (1983) or John Lasetter’s Toy Story (1995, 1999, 2010, 2019). Anyone watching a child interacting with a doll or teddy bear can immediately see that living things are at play here.

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