Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?

If Man and Dog is a domestic comedy (and a novel of domestication) from the man/master’s point of view, Virginia Woolf’s account of the relation between Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her dog, Flush, offers a domestic tale from the canine’s point of view. Both works cast a critical eye on the structures of domestication through which human as well as animal identities are produced. Both, moreover, look quizzically at the affective attachment that domestication can create to bind mastered and master alike. In Mann’s story, this affection troubles the Herr’s sense of his own Herrshaft, or mastery, and the manliness on which it appears to rely. In Woolf’s story, love between dog and mistress affords the latter a new source of strength and authority that ultimately translates to newfound freedoms for her and her dog. What I call “dog love” (borrowing the term from Marjorie Garber)¹ in Flush is paradoxically a bond that frees not only because of the perspective it offers on domesticity and the roles to which dog and mistress are confined, but also because it reveals, even as it acts to change, the patriarchal foundations that link domestic or private and public worlds. Written in 1933, five years after A Room of One’s Own and five years before Three Guineas, Flush marks a transition from the aesthetic and economic feminism of the former work to the tougher, political feminism of the latter. “Too slight and too serious,”² Woolf wrote in her diary of this book that rehearses, in almost fairy-tale form, the observations she will make in Three Guineas regarding the “infantile fixations” of fathers who demand the sacrifice of their daughters. “It was the woman, the human being whose sex made it her sacred duty to sacrifice herself to the father, whom Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Barrett had to kill,” she wrote in 1938; the “tyrannies and servilities” of the private world are the “tyrannies and servilities” of the public world, and if women are fettered to the domestic realm and not allowed to participate freely in the public, wars will never end.³

Flush sets up parallels between dogs’ and women’s domestic situations, but without claiming sameness between the two worlds. Indeed, it tries to investigate a dog’s particular perspective and to represent the world from that perspective. Written as the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s King Charles Spaniel and begun partially as a joke on the biographical style of her friend Lytton Strachey, Flush confronts head on the role of anthropomorphism in understanding and representing animals.⁴ Although critics have found fault with the spaniel’s humanlike features, I argue that Woolf’s anthropomorphism is a deliberate strategy, the flip side of a zoomorphism that, according to Kate Flint, was visible in Woolf’s “constant habit” of finding “animal correspondences” for her friends and acquaintances: Vanessa was a sheepdog, Leonard a mongoose, and so on.⁵ Anthropomorphism can be compared to what, in feminist studies, has been called the problem of “saming” or seeing likeness where others have seen difference. Saming, as Naomi Schor explains, is to be contrasted with the mechanisms of othering exposed by Simone de Beauvoir whereby women were denied the intelligence, rationality, and full subjectivity of men and denied consequently the status of historical beings.⁶ Almost thirty years after de Beauvoir, French feminist Luce Irigaray exposed the mechanisms of “saming” by which women are refused their difference—a difference, moreover, that cannot be defined simply in terms of a comparison or contrast with men. Saming is like anthropomorphism in that both reduce or disallow difference, whether differences between women and men or differences between nonhuman animals and humans. Like saming, however, anthropomorphism also acts as a corrective to what Frans de Waal has called “anthropodenial,” a process that refuses to acknowledge the ways that nonhuman and human animals (or men and women) are alike, the ways certain so-called human characteristics are also characteristic of some nonhumans.⁷ In Woolf, the practices of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism work to dislodge the reader and author from an objective standpoint from which to judge what is exclusively human or animal. The focus is instead on what is shared by domestic animals (human and nonhuman) as creatures—“Dearest Creature” was how Woolf addressed her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West—whose desires or longings for attachment and affection take shape within social structures that precede them.⁸

The importance of acknowledging anthropomorphism and, for that matter, zoomorphism as strategies is to underscore not only the degree of invention involved in writing any life, but also and more important the limitations of the Umwelt or world in which our writing takes place and that we may not be able to escape other than by refuting our own situatedness within history. As French philosopher Elizabeth de Fontenay writes, “It can help the friends of animals to understand that we cannot entirely purge ourselves of anthropocentrism except by taking ourselves for the God of Leibniz who is capable of seeing from all possible perspectives. This egoist, or even speciesist point of view (if one accepts the term) … is the effect of our finitude before being the mark of our power.”⁹ Woolf questioned what she saw as the role and authority of the Ego in writing by men and the way their particular point of view asserts itself as universal. In A Room of One’s Own, she discusses the writing of “Mr A”—a random example chosen from a long patriarchal tradition of literature—which she admits to enjoying for its directness, evidence of a “freedom of mind” and “confidence … which had never been thwarted or opposed.” But she eventually grows tired of it. “A shadow seemed to lie across the page … a shadow shaped something like the letter ‘I,’ a shadow that made it difficult to distinguish any other creature or reality; trees and women were equally ‘shapeless in its mist.’”¹⁰

Like much of Woolf’s own writing, Flush takes on the task of giving shape to other “creatures” and “realities” outside the self, all the while acknowledging that the representations of such “realities” are also shaped by one’s own particular perspective. But the antidote to the authoritarian, overpowering, and patriarchal “I” (who will reappear in Flush in the dark, imposing figure of Mr. Barrett, who appears to speak with the “voice of God”)¹¹ is not and cannot be an egoless or even sexless writing, she explains. Speaking to women in particular, she writes that they must write as women, but as women who are not conscious of their sex. “It is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple.”¹² Five years later in Flush, Woolf seems to suggest that it can also be “fatal” to write with the restricted consciousness of one’s species. Indeed, already in A Room of One’s Own she advises that one way to move outside the obstructions of self and sex consciousness is to see oneself in relation to the more-than-human world: “to escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky, too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves.”¹³

Woolf had first attempted such an escape in the make-believe biography Orlando (published shortly before A Room of One’s Own), in which a male protagonist born during the Elizabethan era comes of age over a period of three centuries to awaken as a woman writer under Queen Victoria (though one whose sex is not ascertained until the twentieth century). In Orlando’s virtual transcendence of sex and time, Woolf sought to understand more clearly the constraints they place on our lives and our writing. Flush adds to this effort by seeking to understand how such constraints are compounded by our so-called humanity and how they blind us to “other realities” that lie in the shadows. The project of Flush is to transcend the boundaries of human perception in order to evoke the social world as it may be perceived by a dog—through smell instead of sight and in meanings that cannot rely on the lexical for translation. The connections between Orlando and Flush thus reach beyond their status as mock biographies. Written as respites from the more difficult works To the Lighthouse and The Waves, respectively, and focusing on the historical and material conventions of culture that shape our lives and our consciousness, these biographies also search for an androgynous and mongrelized reality outside the cultural conventions that restrict what we know of such creatures as women and dogs and what we allow them to be. Orlando and Flush thus go around the authority of the imposing “I” to search in the shadows for truths found not in conventional designations of identity, but in a kind of love. Held by his mistress before a mirror, Flush rejects the (mis)recognitions of the mirror stage and of a selfhood defined visually by others. “Was not the little brown dog opposite himself? But what is ‘oneself’? Is it the thing people see? Or is it the thing one is? So Flush pondered the question too, and unable to solve the problem of reality, pressed closer to Miss Barrett and kissed her ‘expressively.’ That was real at any rate” (32).

Dog love thus pits the “real” body language of affection against the often unreal signs of identity that otherwise structure human relations and human–animal relations alike. The openings of Orlando and Flush are similar in their simultaneous invocation and critique of the conventions by which identities are established and hierarchized. Whereas the first line of Orlando addresses the “fashion of the time” that both reveals and disguises sex,¹⁴ the first chapter of Flush calls attention to the fashion in dog breeds and the rules for eyes, muzzle, and skull by which a dog may or may not be accepted into the “Spaniel Club.” “Light eyes, for example, are undesirable; curled ears are still worse; to be born with a light nose or a topknot is nothing less than fatal” (7). And “fatal” is hardly an exaggeration because only dogs exhibiting the cherished points will be allowed to breed. Thus, where gender designation in Orlando is seen to structure and limit the kinds of affective relations Orlando is permitted, in Flush pedigree similarly structures canine lives; indeed, it does so to an even greater extent because it determines whether a dog’s sexual instincts will be gratified or denied altogether. What thus begins in both as an ironic gaze upon the marketplace of fashion ends with an exposure of the way convention, if not fashion, authorizes desire. Writing against such conventions in Flush, as in Orlando, Woolf conceives of a love that does not rely on fashionable or conventional identities or on permission from authority. Such is the “realness” of dog love. Because dogs and pets are considered of the family even as they are outside the species, pet love, Mark Shell explains, combines even as it transcends and traduces two practices that are normally taboo, bestiality and kinship, turning each into potentially chaste forms of affection.¹⁵ If Elizabeth Barrett’s love for Flush is anthropomorphic, moreover, it is so in a way that ultimately links humans to animals and to gods such that the bestial and the spiritual, the forbidden and the conventional, cannot be distinguished.¹⁶ Daydreaming of a “hairy head pressed against her,” Elizabeth asks herself, “Was it Flush, or was it Pan? … And did the bearded god himself press his lips to hers? For a moment she was transformed: she was a nymph and Flush was Pan” (27).

The first meeting of Elizabeth and Flush recalls the Platonic figure of love as the androgynous and narcissistic union of two opposed halves, one male and one female, each searching to complete him/herself in the other. Here, however, recognition of self in other takes place between male canine and female woman: “Each was surprised. Heavy curls hung down on either side of Miss Barrett’s face; large bright eyes shone out; a large mouth smiled. Heavy ears hung down on either side of Flush’s face; his eyes, too, were large and bright: his mouth was wide. There was a likeness between them. As they gazed at each other each felt: Here am I—and then each felt: But how different! Hers was the pale worn face of an invalid, cut off from air, light, freedom. His was the warm ruddy face of a young animal; instinct with health and energy” (18). The overlay of species difference onto gender difference works, however, to rewrite age-old descriptions of love as the completion of self or what Lacan, drawing on Plato, describes as an effort to restore the original wholeness lost or “lacking” as a result of sexual division—a “fusion making one out of two.”¹⁷ Such a union, as I have argued elsewhere, is more properly described as the destruction or appropriation of the other to the one.¹⁸ Here, instead, uniting takes place imperfectly across the acknowledgment of unbridgeable difference. “Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould could it be that each completed what was dormant in the other? She might have been—all that—and he—But no. Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate one being from another. She spoke, He was dumb. She was woman; he was dog. Thus closely united, thus immensely divided, they gazed at each other” (18–19).

Dog love in Flush is thus described against this notion of completion in order to begin to imagine a form of desire/need that allows both likeness and difference to evolve. The two are alike in aspects of their appearance, in their common bright-eyed openness, yet separated by “the widest gulf,” and this initial, reciprocal gaze signals the limits of love founded on narcissistic or, by extension, anthropomorphic projection (something neither Elizabeth nor the biographer can wholly escape) and the importance of acknowledging that the other will never be totally accessible to one’s knowledge. For Woolf, moreover, the fact that in this instance speech cannot compensate for what the gaze cannot secure only increases the possibility for intimacy, albeit a “peculiar” one because it cannot rely on a shared language. “The fact was that they could not communicate with words, and it was a fact that undoubtedly led to much misunderstanding. Yet did it not lead also to a peculiar intimacy? ‘Writing,’—Miss Barrett once exclaimed after a morning’s toil, ‘writing, writing …’ After all, she may have thought, do words say everything? Can words say anything? Do not words destroy the symbol that lies behind the reach of words? … But suppose Flush had been able to speak—would he not have said something sensible about the potato disease in Ireland?” (27, first ellipses in original).

That Flush avoids the comedies caused by words does not mean, however, that, as Woolf’s narrator reminds her reader, a dog’s life is “a Paradise where essences exist in their utmost purity. … Flush lived in no such paradise” (88). On the contrary, if Elizabeth is “prey to language,” as Derrida might argue,¹⁹ Flush, as property, is prey to his various owners’ language and conventions. The relation between Flush and Elizabeth is from the start one of affinity across difference and across inequality. From the bedridden writer’s perspective, Flush would offer what is inaccessible to her—knowledge of the world outside of words or, more simply, knowledge of the world outside, knowledge that comes from the ability to move freely through the world and consequently to follow one’s own appetites and desires. But those masculine privileges are immediately taken from Flush upon entering Elizabeth’s life and room. From Flush’s point of view, life with Elizabeth is initially framed only in terms of loss—both his animal and his masculine freedoms are taken away: “Door after door shut in his face … they shut on freedom; on fields, on hares; on his adored, his venerated mistress” (17). In sum, the biographer writes, “all his natural instincts were thwarted and contradicted” (24).

Susan Squier was one of the first readers to underscore the similarities between Flush on his chain and Miss Barrett confined to her sofa—both restricted by patriarchal laws to a domestic world, both shaped by the poetry and philosophy of their masters as by the physical and institutional structures of their masters’ lives.²⁰ But to the extent that Flush represents dogs and women alike as victimized creatures of their times, it also suggests that dogs and women can begin to change those structures and to shape, even as they are shaped by, the “spirit of the age.” Indeed, the dog Flush is instrumental in this respect. Much as he was seen to inspire Elizabeth Barrett’s poetry and as her accounts of that affection inspired Woolf to rewrite their love story, so does dog love become a civilizing force, but for a civilization that is not defined against or through the exclusion of animality and, by association, femininity. Although the attachment that grows between Flush and Elizabeth, in other words, might be seen as a symptom or product of domestication, an institution that confines women like animals, it also reminds us of those very social instincts that allowed for domestication to happen in the first place, the same instincts that allow Flush to “choose” his confinement with Elizabeth and to prefer the “thrilling tightness” of their bond to his freedom (25). Darwin attributes to these same instincts the very development of “moral qualities” we share with some animals: “These instincts are highly complex, and in the case of the lower animals give special tendencies towards certain definite actions; but the more important elements are love, and the distinct emotion of sympathy. Animals endowed with the social instincts take pleasure in one another’s company, warn one another of danger, defend and aid one another in many ways.”²¹

Darwin’s laudatory consideration of the social instincts is in stark contrast to the negative appraisal of animal instincts—understood as aggressive and divisive—evident from Thomas Hobbes to Freud. According to Freud, “The word civilization describes the whole sum of the achievements and regulations which distinguish our lives from those of our animal ancestors.”²² In Civilization and Its Discontents, first published in 1930, he cast the aggressive instincts as the greatest threat to civilization and consequently as what makes civilization necessary in order to protect individuals and communities from their animal or lupine nature.

Man is a wolf to man, Freud writes, accepting Hobbes’s view of the state of nature. The only way man can protect himself against the dangers of nature is to submit those aggressive instincts to a greater rational authority and to the laws of civilization. Freud repeats the Kantian view that it is by means of such willed submission to law that man oxymoronically asserts his freedom and thereby distinguishes himself from animals. “Animals have a will,” Kant wrote, but they do not have their own will, only the will of nature. “The freedom of humans is the condition under which the human being can be an end himself.”²⁴

Written three years after Civilization and Its Discontents was published, Flush offers a contrasting view to Freud by examining “civilization” from a dog’s point of view (and through the dog from his mistress’s point of view). Aggression is not what civilization protects against, but rather what it produces when Eros is restricted and when “natural” impulses of cooperation and sympathy are stifled. Woolf thus agrees with Freud’s assertion that “people commonly use false standards of measurement … and that they underestimate what is of true value in life,”²⁵ but her work casts a critical eye on his statements concerning women and animals as necessarily the foes of civilization. The story of Flush demonstrates that it is rather because of women’s commitment to Eros, defined in the unconventional form of a dog love that transcends the exclusive commitments of kin and kind, that they act as a counterforce to a civilization organized by the either/or terms Freud describes: prey either to the aggressive instincts (the laws of animal nature) or to a dominating authority; either driven by the egoistic, sexual urges for love or having to repress those instincts in light of the political and social needs for community. Flush is a lighthearted but also serious consideration of how the pet–human relationship might contribute to the ongoing project of Enlightenment by contesting what we believe to be the human–animal divide and ultimately the anthropocentric opposition Freud sets up between satisfying so-called animal instincts and finding happiness.²⁶

“If people like Flush choose to behave like dogs savagely, they must take the consequences indeed, as dogs usually do,” Elizabeth Barrett writes to Robert Browning in Woolf’s novel (47). If people are like Flush, then we may assume that Flush is like people who choose to be aggressive. Flush, indeed, suffers the consequences of giving in to his aggressive instincts early in Robert Browning’s courtship of Elizabeth. A stranger to the Barrett household and one who slowly begins to take Flush’s place by Miss Barrett’s side and in her affection, Mr. Browning initially inflames Flush’s jealousy. “The very sight of him, so well tailored, so tight, so muscular, screwing his yellow gloves in his hand, set his teeth on edge. He resolved to meet his enemy face to face and alone” (41). To Flush, Browning is the “neighbor” who, as Freud would say, is really more of an enemy, even though the Bible commands us to love that neighbor as oneself. “Why would we do it [love our neighbor], what good will it do us?” Freud asks, wondering especially how we are to achieve this when the neighbor “has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred.”²⁷ For Freud, such an injunction is evidence of the inevitable conflict between egoistic and altruistic urges, between happiness and the demands of civilization, and between the exclusiveness of sexual love and the friendships formed through civilization. In Flush’s case, however, this opposition turns out to be a false one. Flush comes to understand that a friend of his mistress must also be a friend of his. He thus learns to check or, more correctly, to sublimate his aggressive instincts and become for the reader an exemplar of moral freedom, which Kant (like Rousseau) explains is to be governed by a law one has freely chosen oneself.

In his demand for love, Flush undergoes “whirlpools of tumultuous emotions” and emerges to “survey a world created afresh” (47), a world where boundaries between sex and species as well as between hatred and love dissolve. Flush, in other words, sets the stage for the kinds of open relations that Bloomsbury was known for. To show his changed emotions for Mr. Browning, he offers to eat the cakes Mr. Browning had brought, not out of hunger—they were “bereft of any carnal seduction”—but out of a symbolic communion. “He would eat them now that they were stale, because they were offered by an enemy turned to friend, because they were symbols of hatred turned to love” (48).

It is perhaps more correct to say that, for Woolf, dog is “a wolf to man.” Recent studies have shown that the aggressive, macho behavior that, for Freud, is such an integral part of the life of human males, is rare in canids and that canids may have “invented” that very “humaneness” that is considered to be the highest achievement of humanity.²⁸ Such “humaneness,” according to ethologists, is what “makes it easy for wolfish families to form mixed, multi-species packs: humans, dogs, cats, goats, sheep, horses, living in harmony.”²⁹ It may be Flush’s wolfish ancestry that allows him to move from imaginary to symbolic not through renunciation or lack, but through an ever-widening acceptance of kinship across boundaries. Woolf, in other words, sees civilization and its animal origins in a manner that is less like Hobbes and more like Rousseau. Natural instincts may give rise to fear and distrust when an other is introduced, but as Flush’s relations with Robert Browning and later with Robert and Elizabeth’s baby demonstrate, aggressive instincts turn to accommodation as difference turns to likeness, and the enemy becomes an object of affection: “The baby was set on his back and Flush had to trot about with the baby pulling his ears. But he submitted with such grace, only turning round, when his ears were pulled ‘to kiss the little bare, dimpled feet’ that before three months had passed, this helpless, weak, puling, muling lump had somehow come to prefer him, ‘on the whole,’—so Mrs. Browning said—to other people. And then, strangely enough, Flush found that he returned the baby’s affection. Did they not share something in common—did not the baby resemble Flush in many ways?” (84).

Flush resembles the baby in that his desires and pleasures are not organized according to oedipal prohibitions and laws of kinship. Indeed, before the baby, Elizabeth’s love of Flush empowers her to turn against those structures and institutions of domestication that are founded on abusive forms of domination and to stand up to her father’s “civilization” in its refusal to recognize the value of love. This rebellion is most evident in the episode where Flush is stolen. Elizabeth understands that he is stolen because of a market system that turns dogs as well as “wives, slaves, horses, oxen, turkeys and geese” into commodities. Thus, Flush is thrown into the slums of Whitechapel together with a range of dogs, birds, bracelets, rings, and brooches. Whitechapel, as Squier has argued, is the underbelly Wimpole, opposed by class but linked not only by the economic dependence of each upon the other, but also by their masculine values:

That Elizabeth chooses the love of Flush over the “law and justice” espoused by her father and Mr. Browning is a watershed moment for her as perhaps also for her biographer. Elizabeth’s statement “Think of Flush” is comparable to the momentous “Chloe liked Olivia” of A Room of One’s Own, a statement about women’s independence that initiates the bringing to light and to literature a realm of “underestimated” and unrepresented values. Having defied her father and lover with her refusal to sacrifice Flush for an abstract sense of justice, Elizabeth refuses to sacrifice her own love for her father’s “law,” eloping with Robert Browning and Flush to Italy, leaving “tyrants and dog stealers behind” (72). The Italy that Elizabeth and Flush discover, furthermore (far from the Italy of the 1930s),³¹ is one where dogs and women are unfettered, free to roam and explore their hungers and desires. “He had no need of a chain in this new world; he had no need of protection … Fear was unknown in Florence; there were no dog-stealers here and, she may have sighed, there were no fathers” (77–78).

With Flush, Woolf thus begins to envision an alternative civilization to that of the fathers. Whereas Freud wrote that women represent all that is in “opposition” to civilization—family, sexual life, an incapacity for “instinctual sublimation”³²—Woolf shows that even a dog can sublimate instincts and does so for family and for love, not in opposition to it. For Woolf, women and family life are not the obstacles to civilization, as Freud suggests, but harbor overlooked values that civilization needs to survive. The real threat to civilization is not women, but a male oedipal complex that turns women and other beings into coveted objects that can be exchanged or stolen and thus demands unwarranted restrictions upon their sexuality and their lives. “You are not fighting to gratify my ‘sex instinct,’” Woolf writes to the imagined male recipient of her letter in Three Guineas, “nor to protect myself or my country.” “‘For,’ the outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’”³³ Flush, too, breaks free of the bonds of nation and family in Florence to become “the friend of all the world.” “All dogs were his brothers” (77). In Florence, Flush is able to experience “what men can never know—love pure, love simple, love entire; love that brings no train of care in its wake; that has no shame” (78–79). Liberated from his chain but still bound to Elizabeth by a “tie that was ‘undeniably still binding,’” Flush has a life in Italy that redefines family because it offers an idealized image of the kind of love that humans have been denied to the detriment of civilization.

Two years before writing Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud was presented with the first of a succession of chows who would accompany him through his later years in life. In that book, however, dogs appear only in a footnote, and there as the abject and shameful unrepressed of civilization. They reveal what humans left behind as they assumed an upright posture. In particular, dogs are held in contempt because they never evolved to repress either their sense of smell or their sexual instincts: “It would be incomprehensible, too, that man should use the name of his most faithful friend in the animal world—the dog—as a term of abuse if that creature had not incurred his contempt through two characteristics: that it is an animal whose dominant sense is that of smell and one which has no horror of excrement, and that it is not ashamed of its sexual functions.”³⁴

Dogs and smell, too, would take on very different meanings in later years and especially during the last year of Freud’s life, however. That was the year he read and translated Marie Bonaparte’s biography of her dog Topsy, a dog whose battle with cancer had parallels with Freud’s own battle. On December 6, 1937, he wrote a letter to Bonaparte explaining his appreciation for the biography and, through it, for the love of animals: “It is, of course, not an analytic work, but the analysts’ search for truth and knowledge can be perceived behind this creation. It really gives the real reasons for the remarkable fact that one can love an animal like Topsy (or my Jo-fi) so deeply: affection without any ambivalence, the simplicity of life free from the conflicts of civilization that are so hard to endure, the beauty of existence complete in itself. And in spite of the remoteness in organic development there is nevertheless a feeling of close relationship, of undeniably belonging together.”³⁵

Coming to regard dogs and dog love as something to be admired rather than to grow out of, Freud would also come to regard a dog’s keen sense of smell as a capacity for truth telling rather than something to be ashamed of. Indeed, he would learn from his favorite chow something he would perhaps rather not have known. His cheekbone, gangrenous from cancer, produced such a stench that Lun reportedly shied away from Freud and crouched in the corner. If shame is really about “isolation from community,” as Alice Kuzniar writes,³⁶ then it would appear that dogs and humans alike fear shame, as they also fear the smell of death as that which isolates absolutely. Lun was the instigator of Freud’s shame, much as Derrida’s cat provoked shame over his own exposed nakedness, his unclothed or unrepressed nature. “Shame is by nature recognition. I recognize that I am as the Other sees me,” claimed Jean-Paul Sartre,³⁷ or, in this case, I recognize that I am as the other smells me. I am, in other words, a body that desires and that dies. Indeed, with smell, it is difficult if not impossible to disavow shame and project that unrepressed “nature” onto the dog or women. As Todd Dufresne writes, “Freud knew what that meant and looked at his pet with a tragic and knowing sadness.”³⁸ Pace Heidegger and like Flush, Lun knew death and shared that knowledge with Freud—whether that knowledge meant the same thing to each or not. Heeding Lun’s sign, Freud let his physician know that life was no longer worth living.³⁹