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Abstract
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.