Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?

“A dog should die like a dog,” writes Richard Klein, “not cruelly, but with a respectful matter-of-factness, unaccompanied by the rituals of human mourning.”¹ Writing against what he sees as a dangerous tendency in postindustrial society to humanize pets in such a way that we may be encouraged alternately to animalize humans, Klein would approve of the death of Woolf’s Flush, which is striking in its simplicity, its matter-of-factness. Flush, apparently with knowledge of his impending death, suddenly rushes home “as if he were seeking refuge” and leaps onto the couch where his mistress is seated. Turning his eyes toward her face, they share one last exchange of looks before Elizabeth Barrett-Browning continues her reading. “Then she looked at Flush again. But he did not look at her. An extraordinary change had come over him. ‘Flush’ she cried. But he was silent. He had been alive; he was now dead. That was all. The drawing-room table, strangely, stood perfectly still.”²

The stillness of the table, signaling the absence of those communicating spirits that populated Barrett’s drawing room to make table legs move and give signs of life after death, signals also the finality of the dog’s death. Is Woolf reminding her readers that dogs have no soul, or does the finality of Flush’s death call attention to the shared mortality of all animals—human and nonhuman alike, in spite of the way such drawing-room practices might seek to hide it?

Humans, of course, are not the only animals who bury their dead. We know that elephants, for example, have elaborate grieving practices that include a form of burial and visits to gravesites. But, for Tolstoy, humans are the “dead who bury their dead.” In death, as in life, we embalm our bodies with useless ornaments and so preserve them from serving others, from offering a gift of life in death. According to Heidegger, humans are nevertheless said to be the only animals who “properly” die because only humans know of death “as such”—only humans live life with the knowledge of their finitude. “Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do this.”⁴ But such knowledge of death has little to do with funereal rituals that defy finitude in the attempt to hold onto life’s property, if not life itself, even into death. The elaborate, jeweled casings over Serpukhovskoy’s body suggest that even it must be preserved in its proper form, along with the property he accumulated while living. In contrast to his horse, Serpukhovskoy illustrates what French feminist Hélène Cixous describes as the masculine “realm of the proper” “set into play by man’s classic fear of seeing himself expropriated … deprived.” History itself, she writes, is a response to this fear: “Everything must return to the masculine.”⁵ For Tolstoy, it is not the feminine, but the animal who resists this economy of return to the masculine by giving without return. The very propriety, if not property, of mortals, he intimates, is what stands in the way of a life and death that can serve others, of what we might call an ethical death even if an improper one. Perhaps, then, for Tolstoy, a human should die like a dog or a horse, unaccompanied by rituals of mourning.

What, indeed, is a proper death for a dog or a human, and what, if anything, determines what are “proper” rituals of grief and mourning? I pursue these questions by examining a range of representations (and experiences) of animal death, beginning with the questions raised by Woolf and Tolstoy regarding the differences between human and animal death or between the deaths of pets and other animals and the kinds of mourning or grief that each may or may not allow for. These questions have become especially pronounced in the face of a current theoretical and aesthetic fascination with animal “becomings” or “becoming animal”—to use the term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari that, in my mind, leaves the question of death behind. As I argue, the fascination with becomings functions as a kind of melancholia that resists or even subverts practices of mourning, while categorizing “the animal” as the living dead.⁶

In his Second Discourse, Rousseau writes of the “knowledge of death and of its terrors” that humans acquired in their move away from the animal condition, “for an animal will never know what it is to die.”⁷ Nevertheless, the experience of loss is not foreign to animals. On the contrary, writing of “the mournful lowing of cattle entering a slaughter-house,” Rousseau claims that animals deeply feel sentiments such as pity for the dead. Indeed, he argues, identification with “the suffering animal” was much stronger in the “state of nature,” and humans lost their capacity for pity and empathy as they moved out of that state. Rousseau’s emphasis on how we respond to the death of another rather than to the idea of death or to our own death (if that were possible) offers a different perspective about what it might mean to “die properly.” Indeed, if his mention of the slaughterhouse seems less than arbitrary, so, too, the endings of Flush and “Strider” ask us to consider, on a first level, what constitutes a “proper” death and whether it is determined by the ontic cause or by the ontological relation to death. Few animals die of old age, as Flush does, while gazing into the eyes of a beloved. Strider’s killing by a “knacker” comes closer to the manner in which most domestic animals die, even as their deaths may be regarded as “easing” the “burden” of their miserable lives.⁸ Strider lives to an old age (something few “farm animals” today are allowed to do), which may be as much blessing as additional curse. Evidence of grief or identificatory suffering is strangely absent from both Flush and “Strider,” where, moreover, the absence of ritual surrounding the horse’s death is what allows for his body to offer life to others. Are we to understand this becoming meat for another as a form of ethical ecology rather than another instance of animal sacrifice, though for whom or in whose name it is not clear?

The question was brought home to me at the death of my “own” horse, the horse whose guardian I had been for close to fifteen years. Guardian, as I explained earlier, has become the preferred term for those who have and care for pets, but because horses are considered livestock rather than pets, it is really ownership (and money) that can make a difference in terms of how they die and what happens after their death. Cacahuète, “Peanut”—the nickname she earned from her rich, peanut butter color—stopped eating in her old age and was sickened from what appeared to be a lymphoma. After discussions with the vet, I decided that euthanasia was the best response, though not an easy one. It was made more difficult by the fact that at the moment I made my decision, I also had to make arrangements for her “remains.” If I did nothing, the renderer would come to pick up the body in the morning. Such an idea struck me as indecent. Cacahuète, I thought, deserved a better afterlife; she would not be turned into glue or, even the more likely, dog food—even if that might mean her life fed others. There was an alternative. The vet gave me the name of a woman who had recently begun a cremation service for horses (there are very few in the country); her mother had also opened the first equine cemetery in the area. When I called her, her first questions were about my horse—what she had been like, what she looked like, what I most missed about her. She seemed to know that I wanted this for my horse. In hindsight, I could be cynical about it—wondering if getting me to cry was a business ploy. But in hindsight I also realize that mourning means attesting to a life. We are not only autobiographical animals; we are biographical animals who seek to acknowledge those whose lives have been entangled with ours, whose lives have changed ours. Ownership may be the legal term with which we describe such relations, but on an emotional level the term does not describe our mutual dependence. I wanted such a testament to my horse’s life, and I believed that such a testament depended on “proper” treatment of the body—one that did not grind it up to be sold on the market. What I wasn’t prepared for was the cost of cremation or the realization that the high cost was due to the amount of time and energy it took to burn a horse’s body. A dog’s body can be cremated in a matter of minutes—a horse can take a day. I thought of the ecological effects, the toll on the environment. Is such a ritual of mourning selfish? I wondered. Is it worth it? For whose sake am I doing this? I thought, remembering Coetzee’s character David Lurie in Disgrace, who asks the same question as he makes sure each euthanized dog in the animal clinic has a proper burial.

Much of recent art and theory has nevertheless come to focus on those places of linguistic imperfection—wrong naming, overnaming, or impossible naming—that stand as evidence of our deficiencies as humans, if not of the hubris of our presumed separation from nature even in the act of mourning it. Death has become that which we cannot name properly, that which defies our linguistic skills and creates disorder in our conceptual abilities. A recent video piece by the British-born artist Sam Taylor-Wood is a case in point. Beginning with an image of a dead animal, it proceeds to investigate the processes of life after death in the form of endless transformations of the body as it is eaten away by some sort of unidentifiable maggot or organism. Entitled A Little Death (2002), the video begins with an art historical reference to a still life in the style of the eighteenth-century French genre artist Jean-Siméon Chardin. A dead hare is nailed by one foot to a bare wall, its head and arms resting on a table beside one perfect peach. Like Bill Viola’s video examined in chapter 2 and even more like Viola’s later videos, this film, too, is a study of time and especially of the incremental moments between life and death, if not of life in death. Slowly, very slowly the still life begins to move and change under the invasive force of whatever it is that eats away at and turns the hare’s dead body into dispersed traces of bodiless fur. What is most stunning, if not repulsive, is how, midway into the four-and-a-half-minute video, the force of those organisms appear to breathe life into the hare as they lift the body into the air, only for it to fall again to a second, “little death.” An erotic reading of this video as a narrative of erection and detumescence is enforced by “little death” in the title—the translation of a French term for orgasm (la petite mort) or, more precisely according to French philosopher Georges Bataille, to the moment of loss after orgasm. The peach, by contrast, remains untouched, impervious to change, and a witty reminder of the ways art and technology can manipulate our perception of time and bodies.

More important, perhaps, is the way that Taylor-Wood forces her viewer to confront the collusion of death and the erotic, art and sadism, nourishment and violence, if not also the tragic and the comic. This is also the focus of Bataille’s discussion of the petite mort in The Tears of Eros. There he describes a drawing from the caves of Lascaux where a man lies prostrate before a dying bison, his (the man’s) penis “unjustifiably” erect. “We cannot imagine a more obscure contradiction,” writes Bataille, “nor one better conceived to guarantee disorder in our thinking” than the “essential” and “paradoxical accord … between death and eroticism.”¹⁰ That this “complicity” of the tragic and the erotic should take place around the animal’s death should not be surprising from Bataille’s perspective, given his view of the advent of the human “out of the animal” and into a state that is conscious of death and eros alike.¹¹ If animality is the first state of unknowability because “nothing … is more closed to us than the animal life from which we are descended,”¹² eros and death constitute secondary states of which we are conscious (unlike animals), but whose arrival—whether in the moment of erection or in the moment of death—is inexplicable and unknowable. For Bataille, it is thus not only through consciousness of death that man is distinguished from animals, but also through the taking on of the erotic as a conscious project—perhaps in defiance of our lack of mastery over it. Unlike nonhuman animals, humans “calculate” pleasure and thereby substitute “play” for instinctive reaction.¹³

Taylor-Wood evokes this space that is outside or between “proper” distinctions between animal and environment, subject and object, and life and death through the dissolution of form into illegible shapes and shades of light. Death is visualized as Derridean “aporia”—“the crossing of a border … a trespassing … or … a transgression.”¹⁴ Her piece offers that experience of “visual intensity combined with conceptual instability” that Steve Baker understands to be characteristically postmodern.¹⁵ Quoting Donna Haraway, Baker argues that postmodern art and philosophy share an enterprise for taking “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries, and for responsibility in their construction,”¹⁶ although I would contest the extent to which “responsibility” is a postmodern trait. Taylor-Wood’s postmodern aesthetic seems closer to Bataille’s own aesthetics of transgressive “excess,” not only in terms of a willed “disorder in thinking,” but also in the way such aesthetics appear to sidestep (if not fly in the face of) ethical and political concerns. Not unlike in “Strider,” where the horse’s corpse becomes food for the wolves of the forest, in Taylor-Wood’s video the hare becomes food (and life) for a host of maggots. But this representation of death as a gift of life has a very different status in the two works. Tolstoy’s death scene is a moment in a work that otherwise seeks to reconstruct the “story of a horse.” The ending contributes to this story by leaving us with a confusing combination of emotions—sorrow over Strider’s death mixed with a hesitant joy over the way nature has reclaimed him—that makes us wonder about the rights and wrongs of the horse’s death. In Taylor-Wood’s video, death happens not in a moment, but over time, denying the moment of “perishing” that for Heidegger defines animal death. But neither is this “proper death” because it disregards and undoes the identities of character and plot set up by the initial still life.¹⁷ Taylor-Wood mesmerizes her audience by focusing on the process of ingestion and incorporation that makes it impossible to know who or what is doing the eating or being eaten. Epistemological uncertainty takes precedence over any ethical concerns.¹⁸

That postmodern art has shown a distinct preference for such epistemological questions over ethical ones has led Steve Baker to asks specifically, “Can contemporary art address the killing of animals?” Baker suggests that the concern to “straightforwardly right wrongs may be hard to reconcile with postmodern art’s fascination with a sense of the rightness of things gone wrong.”¹⁹ Dominick LaCapra has voiced a similar worry over the postmodern “fascination with excess” and its effect on historical practice. Speaking specifically to the concern for violence done to animals, LaCapra writes that “this concern becomes acute when violence is not only seen (however contestably) as useful or necessary to achieve certain results (a basic reform a transformed polity, a hoped-for experimentally discovered cure for a human disease even if it means doing violence to other animals) but is also transfigured in sacred, sublime, redemptive, or foundational terms.”²⁰ LaCapra sees a danger in the attention that historians and literary critics are giving to a “post-secular” or “negative sublime” (and it is in such a category that I would include Taylor-Wood’s video)—a sublime that is conceived within a paradigm of trauma because it exceeds our capacities for intelligible expression. This negative sublime “may well induce an evasion or misconstruction of specific historical, social and political problems, including the status and use of the animal in society.”²¹ It is significant, in this respect, that Taylor-Wood’s A Little Death begins not with the actual killing of the hare—that event is obscured by the entrancing “little death”—but with its nailed, Christ-like body. Unlike Flush and Strider, whose (fictional) biographies stand as testaments to lives that impacted others,²² the hare as well as the material manifestation of death and its lively undoing become objects of visual fascination, what might be called a “sublime livingness,” that are ultimately detached from the dying animal.²³ “What’s that on the wall?” we ask at the end, or “Why is the peach unchanged?” but not “What happened to the hare?”

LaCapra advocates a process of working through and mourning in order to retrace the events and move beyond such immersion in the blinding intensity of existential trauma. Both terms, working through and mourning, he takes from Freud, for whom mourning is understood to be a healthier response to trauma and loss than melancholia—a state characterized by an immersion in ambivalence and excess.²⁴ Indeed, despite the often liberatory and deliberately subversive nature of Baker’s The Postmodern Animal, much of the animal art discussed in it can be called melancholic because of the way it resists the working through of mourning.²⁵ This is especially true of works associated with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming animal” that foreground the inadequacy or impossibility of assigning singular identity to “assemblages” that appear to exist between or beyond boundaries of species, gender, and even life and death.²⁶ Baker begins his article “What Does Becoming-Animal Look Like?” with Deleuze and Guattari’s statement, “Either stop writing or write like a rat.” A challenge to the writer and artist alike, this statement asks both to draw on the power of the animal pack in order to prolong “moments of upheaval” of the self. “Who has not known the violence of these animal sequences which uproot one from humanity, if only for an instant, making one scrape at one’s bread like a rodent or giving one the yellow eyes of a feline? A fearsome involution calling us toward unheard-of-becomings,” ask Deleuze and Guattari.²⁷ Becoming animal is about undoing identity, exploring the aporias or in-betweens of identity, presumably in order to challenge and even explode conservative, bourgeois expectations of who we may become in life, if not to contest what it might mean “to be” at all. But such melancholic “becoming” runs counter to the work of mourning, which cannot be accomplished except by making the kinds of distinctions and reconstructing the identities that “becoming animal” resists, if not undoes. As LaCapra writes, “Processes of working-through, including mourning and modes of critical thought and practice, involve the possibility of making variable, complex distinctions—not dichotomous binary oppositions—that are recognized as problematic but still function as limits, bases of judgment, and resistances to the blurring of distinctions.”²⁸ Put simply, mourning depends on knowing who or what is lost.

The tension between the process of “becoming animal” as a melancholic undoing of identity and the work of mourning is at the center of Hélène Cixous’s short story “Shared at Dawn,” where, moreover, there are species becomings as well as gender becomings. It is a brief story of intense emotions inspired by the narrator’s efforts to prevent her pet cat from coming into contact with a bird that has been trapped in the house. Told in retrospect, the story begins from the perspective of failed mourning (failed because there is no dead body) as the narrator recounts the aftermath of the two creatures’ thwarted meeting:

As the title intimates, this story is about those moments described by Deleuze and Guattari when “something shared or indiscernible” is revealed among bird, cat, and woman and when boundaries are transgressed to produce “zone[s] of indetermination or uncertainty.”³⁰ The instigator of such “becomings animal” are traces of life caught in the latticework—a what or who that turns into what Derrida has called the “absolute arrivant,” the guest who annihilates “the very border that delineated a legitimate home.”³¹ Thought alternately to be a leaf and then a bird, dead and then alive, this creature “traps the narrator” herself with its “threatening strangeness” and throws her into a “state of irresolution” as she struggles with the idea of death in her home and a dead bird taunting her cat. The upheaval multiplies as the thing reveals itself to be a bird “on this side” of the lattice and not the other, alive and not dead. “Concerning the dead body, I have the feeling of being violently attacked. Everything is aiming at me: stability, solidity, the creature must have spent the night lying in wait for me, nothing could make it let go, not even a storm, and death gives it a monstrous force, stand up to us, knowing no time, no fatigue. What it inflicts on me is the strangeness of the other side. Faced with a dead creature, there’s nothing we can do, Right?”³²

What ensues is a series of events that throw all domesticated (and oedipalized) identities into question, revealing the fragility of the domestic and domesticating structures that try to keep such identities in their proper place and form. Finding only remnants of the bird, the cat is caught in “uncertain mourning” and retreats to her bed “in the form of a bird.” The narrator herself, meanwhile, identifying with the cat’s frustration, turns feline as she searches for the bird’s “lukewarm body” so that she might “give it sharp little blows with [her] paw” and offer its body to the cat, whom she calls “my counterpart, my betrothed, my little bride.”³³

How are we to understand such identifications between species and genders and between grief and predation? In Cixous’s story, I argue, “becomings” must be understood as manifestations of melancholia, where, as Freud explains, “the object has not perhaps actually died, but has become lost as an object of love” (or even of hunger) and where, despite the belief in loss, “one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost.”³⁴ Expounding on this state, Freud explains that identification with the lost object becomes a mode of preserving it within the self in an act that is central to ego formation. Building on Freud’s theories, Judith Butler has linked such identification with a lost object to the means by which the ego assumes a gendered status. This is especially true, she argues, when that lost object has been prohibited as an object of love—such as for a homosexual attachment.³⁵ Gender must thus be understood as the effect of the arduous processes of assumed and refused identifications. Can we say the same about ourselves as a species—that our understanding of ourselves as human is a similar accomplishment achieved through a series of repudiated attachments or that we become human by growing out of our childhood identifications with other animals? In Cixous’s story, both gender and species appear as sublimated identifications with a lost or abjected animal other—whether bird or cat—that has been internalized. The liberatory potential of “becoming” is thus connected to the melancholic’s refusal (or inability) to subscribe to the law of sex or species, to erase boundaries between kin and kind, pet and lover, but also between love and violence, emulation and ingestion.

But if Cixous’s narrative appears to respond to the Deleuzean call for the writer to prolong such instants of “becoming animal,” it does so only by calling attention to the loss that accompanies such moments—a paradoxical loss of mourning. The narrator (if not also her cat), “emprisoned” in a state that she cannot move beyond, is stuck in a painful melancholia because what is lost to her is unknown and unavailable to representation. Insofar as this state entails a loss of bearings between life and death, it takes on a gendered character that links the cat’s loss to a mother’s loss and both losses to the narrator’s lost identification as mother. “The cat’s sorrow is that of a mother who can’t find her baby in the house anymore,” we are told, at which point the narrator questions her own status as mother. “I know that it’s the mother who is supposed to struggle with death. And I couldn’t, I can’t.” Unable to “touch” the “dead” animal and so clear death from her daughter’s house, she asks herself, “Will I still be able to assert that I’m your mother?”³⁶

Animal death and animal loss thus share something with the mother’s loss and the loss of motherhood in Cixous’s story, and although their connections are never explicit, I would like to pursue what appears to be their link to a loss that cannot be worked through by mourning.³⁷ Indeed, as Cixous and Luce Irigaray suggest elsewhere, the loss of the mother goes unmourned because it “radically escapes any representation.”³⁸ Entry into the realm of the Symbolic—which is to say, into language—happens only through separation from the mother’s body and thus through a loss of that which never was present to representation in the first place. This is why Cixous claims that women have a different relationship to mourning. “I believe women do not mourn and this is where their pain lies.”³⁹ Elaborating also on the psychoanalytic background to women’s melancholia, Butler writes: “As in the Lacanian perspective, for Abraham and Torok the repudiation of the maternal body is the condition of signification within the Symbolic. … In effect the loss of the maternal body as an object of love is understood to establish the empty space out of which words originate. But the refusal of this loss—melancholy—results in the failure to displace affect into words; indeed the place of the maternal body is established in the body, ‘encrypted,’ to use their term, and given permanent residence there as a dead and deadening part of the body.”⁴⁰

Cixous admittedly understands this lack of mourning as a sign that women do not need to hide over or compensate for what it is they may themselves have lost in the lost object—there is no need for those elaborate rituals described in Tolstoy. With regard to loss, a woman “lives it, gives it life,” rather than putting it behind her or outside of her. In relation to loss, she is “neither outside nor in.”⁴¹ This neither/nor relation to loss is what produces the “uncertain mourning” of Cixous’s narrator as well as the seductive violence of Taylor-Wood’s video. Both are narratives or antinarratives that find it difficult to represent what is lost or loss itself, asking instead, “Who/what is it?” “Who/what am I?” and “What will I become without you/it?” These questions are unanswerable except as they reveal the fundamental and inescapable fact of our interdependence as living beings and hence our reciprocal implication in others’ lives.⁴²

Living loss in such a way that it becomes impossible to represent what has been lost has both personal and political risks. This is why Cixous and Irigaray’s elaboration of a feminine melancholia is coupled with efforts to write, remember, and mourn the mother. In this way, they hope to call attention to and eventually change the repression of motherhood within patriarchal culture. And here lies the important link to the animal, over whose similarly abjected or sacrificed body the foundations of culture (as opposed to nature and hence “the animal”) have also been constructed. To put it in the more blunt terms of the British Animal Studies Group, “Almost all areas of human life are at some point or other involved in or directly dependent on the killing of animals [ … ]. This killing is ubiquitous and omnipresent … largely invisible in the public domain.”⁴³ And because the loss produced by this killing is invisible, because it too largely escapes representation, it also remains unmourned.

Mourning, Butler has argued more recently, is not the “goal of politics,” but “without the capacity to mourn we lose that keener sense of life we need in order to oppose violence.”⁴⁴ Might mourning the dead animal also be a means of counteracting the silence that exists over its loss and a means to acknowledge and possibly work to change the ways that culture is also constructed over its dead body? There is, of course, no guarantee, but the very possibility should lead us to be wary of those “becomings animal” that imprison Cixous’s narrator and of our own attraction to a melancholic or negative sublime that refutes distinctions between life and death as between human and animal. By foreclosing the reconstruction of identities on which a successful mourning depends—and thus what Butler calls a “grievable life”—these becomings may also foreclose the possibility that mourning be a resource for a political or ethical response or both.

“What makes for a grievable life?” Butler asks in Precarious Life, and how does grief consequently become a political issue? Written after the events of September 11, 2001, and concerned especially with persons and peoples who have been the targets of violence and military warfare even as their deaths are prohibited from “public grievability,” Butler’s book focuses on the ways that grief contributes to the norms by which “the human” is constituted and, alternatively, the ways that some are dehumanized by having their deaths unrecognized or unmourned. Violence against such targets doesn’t count as violence because it leaves no mark or because, unacknowledged, it “leaves a mark that is no mark.”⁴⁵ And how can one protest a violence that isn’t seen as such? This question has particular valence for the animal killings that happen on a daily basis, deaths—whether in factory farms or oil spills—that are consequently calculated in economic terms, but not in terms of grief. Of course, for Butler, death of an animal is by definition not grievable—grief being reserved for and constitutive of what is human. As Chloe Taylor has also remarked, “Again and again [Butler] equates being a ‘real life’ or a ‘grievable life’ with being a human life.”⁴⁶ Transferring Butler’s reasoning to animals’ situation, Taylor continues that it thus stands to reason that “if to be a real life is to be a human life, whereas to be inhuman—to be another species of animal, for instance—is to be ‘already dead’ and something which ‘cannot, therefore be killed’ then animal lives were never real and their deaths are not real either. Thus we can kill them with impunity—as we do—and make them suffer continually during their short lives—as we do—since those lives are not lives at all and no murder has, therefore, taken place.”⁴⁷ Indeed, we do kill animals with impunity—this, Derrida reminds us, is one of the effects of the category of “the animal”—and with legal disregard for the pain we cause given that so-called “food animals,” for example, are largely exempt from anticruelty laws.⁴⁸ The majority of domestic animals raised in factory farms or experimental cages or impounded in shelters are “not quite living,” to be exact, and this definition may contribute to the fact that if there is much of a “discourse” at all concerning the lives and deaths of these animals, it is a “silent and melancholic one,” in which, as Butler describes for certain dehumanized people, “there were no lives and no losses.”⁴⁹

My point is not to reopen questions of whether violence done to animals is the same as violence done to peoples (it may be analogous without being the same, as Marjorie Garber has argued)⁵⁰ or even to set up a scale of comparison. Rather, I want to emphasize how not only with regard to matters of killing but also with regard to matters of grief, nonhuman animals belong to the constitutive outside of the human, designating the boundary between what or who is and is not grievable according to what or who is or is not humanized. As evidenced by the dehumanizing prohibition of public mourning for some peoples and the ever-expanding grief industry for pets (including cemeteries, support groups, and interfaith blessings to ensure the protection of their souls after death), a proper death is clearly refused to some humans but granted to some nonhuman animals. Indeed, if grief is foreclosed to Taylor-Wood’s hare, unlike to Flush or Strider, this is also because of its status as a nonindividuated, undomesticated animal who belongs with the pack (as Deleuze and Guattari would say) rather than with the humanized world of pets. It has the status of the bird in Cixous’s story, but also of the many animals in factory farms whose undistinguished deaths we are not meant to witness and to which we are unsure how to respond.

The power of grief, whether melancholic or worked through, is undeniable. Grief can strip us of those very qualities by which we distinguish ourselves as humans—our ability to speak, to reason, to explain—and as individuals. Those of us who have lived with animals are “undone” by the animals we have lost, and many have witnessed animals who similarly seem to lose part of themselves when they lose their friends—whether “guardians” or “siblings” (biological or acquired). Both LaCapra and Butler understand grief and mourning to have an ethical valence because they foreground our shared vulnerability and interdependence and consequently remind us of our responsibility to others. This responsibility, I believe, is especially significant with regard to others whose vulnerability is greater than ours. Both LaCapra and Butler want to insist, moreover, that the power of grief need not be privatizing or render us passive.⁵¹ Indeed, for LaCapra, the ethical potential of mourning is a function of the activity of “working through” such that “affirmed vulnerability … does not exclude agency.”⁵² Nevertheless, the responses to grief, as to the realization of shared vulnerability (as humans and animals), are varied, bringing some to build a communal response to violence, as Butler argues, and leading others to assert boundaries of difference that allow for preemptive strikes or for what Derrida might express in terms of eating the other before becoming a meal oneself.⁵³

“Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other,” Butler writes. “And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”⁵⁴ When Klein says that a “dog should die like a dog,” he denies the fact that we humans often grieve the dogs and other animals we live with—grieve them not necessarily because they are humanized, but because they do transcend boundaries of kin and kind by becoming integral to our lives as social partners rather than as resources. Woolf and Mann and Tolstoy understood this, even as their modernist works respect species differences in their representations of animal deaths. The postmodernist becomings in Taylor-Wood’s video and Cixous’s story work to dislodge the representations of death and by extension the ethics of grief from the anthropocentric prejudices of species difference. But they do so by destabilizing and perhaps disabling the representations of those who may be and should be grieved.