Introduction
1. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 29.
2. See the discussion of Heidegger in Matthew Callarco, Zoographies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 50.
3. Gustave Flaubert, Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1957–1960), 2:239.
4. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 154.
6. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 89.
7. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
8. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980’s,” in Elizabeth Weed, ed., Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1989), 174.
9. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 92.
10. See, for example, Carol Adams, Neither Man nor Beast: Feminism and the Defense of Animals (New York: Continuum, 1994); and Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan, eds., Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995).
11. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Animal Relations, Difficult Relations,” differences 15, no. 1 (2004), 15.
12. I take the categories “humanist posthumanism” and “posthumanist posthumanism” from Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 124, 166–167. The distinctions Wolfe makes between the artists Eduardo Kac and Sue Coe are similar to those that I make between Viola and Noelker, especially insofar as Noelker, like Coe, depends on a subject who sees and who knows through sight. Viola reminds us that, as Wolfe writes with regard to Kac, “what must be witnessed is not just what we can see but also what we cannot see—indeed that we cannot see” (167, emphasis in original). Noelker shows us what is wrong with what and how we do see.
13. Richard Klein, “The Power of Pets,” The New Republic, July 10, 1995, 23.
14. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 20.
15. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? 99.
16. Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Carey Wolfe, Philosophy and & Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 45–46, 74.
17. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999),74.
18. Timothy Morton, “Guest Column: Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125, no. 2 (March 2010), 275, 277. The volume of essays entitled Queer Ecologies, edited by Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), appeared as I was finishing this book.
19. Morton, “Guest Column.”
1. A Report on the Animal Turn
1. Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, “A Declaration on Great Apes,” in Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 4.
2. In her discussion of the concept of women’s rights, Wendy Brown comments that rights are founded on notions of individuality that “are predicated upon a humanism that routinely conceals its gendered, racial and sexual norms.” Wendy Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes,” Constellations 7, no. 2 (2000), 238.
3. Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271–313 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
4. Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in Collected Stories, ed. Gabriel Josipovici, 195–205 (New York: Knopf, 1993); subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.
5. On the problems of speech in relation to trauma, see Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer, Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); and see Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 59–89.
6. Costello’s identification with Red Peter is not, she says, to be taken “ironically.” Rather, it comes from a woundedness the two share as human (or woman) and as animal, a woundedness that makes it impossible for them to deliver the papers they were invited to give. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 18.
7. See my discussion of this point in Lacan’s work in Kari Weil, Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 5–9.
8. Quoted in Cary Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion: Language, Ethics, and the Question of the Animal,” in Cary Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1.
9. René Descartes, “Animals Are Machines,” in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds., Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1976), 15.
10. On language acquisition in apes, see R. A. Gardner, B. T. Gardner, and T. E. Van Cantfort, Teaching Sign Language to Chimpanzees (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (New York: Wiley, 1996).
12. Reaction and response are the terms that Lacan uses to oppose animals’ and humans’ language capabilities, an opposition that Derrida begins to deconstruct in The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), especially in “And Say the Animal Responded,” 119–140.
13. Hamilton, “Voluble Visit.”
16. Wolfe, “In the Shadow of Wittgenstein’s Lion,” 1.
17. Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Common Reader Editions, 2000), 42.
18. Paul Patton, “Language, Power, and the Training of Horses,” in Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies, 91.
20. See Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
21. Quoted in Hearne, Adam’s Task, 115.
22. See Frederick Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975).
23. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 9.
24. For some, consciousness should be added to this list, especially if consciousness is understood to be coterminous with or dependent on conceptual or linguistic capacities—a belief that much research on animals (and on infants) would disprove.
25. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaction Books, 2000), 20.
26. Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 34.
28. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 93.
29. F. R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 333, emphasis in original.
30. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 257.
31. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 238.
33. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 22.
34. For an excellent discussion of a counterlinguistic or “postlinguistic” turn in literary studies and its relation to sublime/traumatic experience, see James Berger, “Falling Towers and Postmodern Wild Children: Oliver Sacks, Don Delillo, and Turns Against Language,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005): 341–361.
35. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 30.
36. LaCapra, History and Its Limits, 170.
37. This is especially the case in the notion of “écriture” put forth by French feminists. See my discussion in Kari Weil, “French Feminism’s ‘Écriture Féminine,’” in Ellen Rooney, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, 153–171 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
38. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 108.
39. Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 17.
40. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
41. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980’s,” in Elizabeth Weed, ed., Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1989).
42. Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, “Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations,” differences 15, no. 1 (2004), 15–16.
43. Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 5.
44. Like Kelly Oliver’s in Witnessing, Haraway’s ethics plays with the notion of response that is integral to ethical responsibility. Because animals have been denied the capacity to respond (rather than merely react), however, Haraway goes further to invoke Derrida’s questioning of whether we really know what it means to respond. See Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 71, and Derrida, “And Say the Animal Responded,” in The Animal.
45. Lorraine Daston and Greg Mitman, “Introduction: The How and Why of Thinking with Animals,” in Lorraine Daston and Greg Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 11. I use gendered pronouns to acknowledge that animals also have sexes and sexualities, if not genders.
46. Paul S. White, “The Experimental Animal in Victorian Britain,” in Daston and Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals, 79. Lorraine Daston’s research would appear to counter Samuel Moyn’s argument that empathy is grounded on humanism and necessarily takes humanity as its object. See Samuel Moyn, “Empathy in History, Empathizing with Humanity,” History and Theory 45, no. 3 (2006): 397–415.
47. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 34.
48. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 10, emphasis in original.
49. Thanks to Ellen Rooney for helping me think through some of these issues.
50. Derrida, The Animal, 31.
53. Jacques Derrida and Elizabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … a Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press 2004), 64.
54. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 190, 193.
56. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 73.
59. For an alternative discussion regarding the value of how animal studies may productively inform women’s studies in the classroom, see Lori Gruen and Kari Weil, “Teaching Difference: Sex, Gender, Species,” in Margo de Mello, ed., Teaching the Animal: Human–Animal Studies Across the Disciplines, 127–145 (New York: Lantern Books, 2010).
60. Cary Wolfe, “Introduction,” in Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies, xi.
61. What we search for, as Herrnstein-Smith writes, is an “ethical taxonomy” that would help sort out the claims of kinship along with other categories of sameness and difference for establishing our responsibilities to others. See Herrnstein-Smith, “Animal Relatives,” 2.
2. Seeing Animals
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 5. I discuss Nietzsche’s work at greater length in chapter 4.
3. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 32.
7. Aristotle, “Animals and Slavery,” in Tom Regan and Peter Singer, eds., Animal Rights and Human Obligations (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989), 4.
8. René Descartes, “Animals Are Machines,” in Regan and Singer, eds., Animal Rights, 14.
9. Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” 2, 3.
10. In this respect, we might say that we humans are “not all” in comparison with animals, much as Lacan wrote that women were “not all” in relation to men because they lack the penis. Jacques Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of the Woman,” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York; Norton, 1982), 144.
11. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 197.
12. On the anthropological tradition, see Tim Ingold’s discussion of what he calls “the building perspective” influenced by Clifford Geertz’s “assertion that culture—or at least that kind of culture taken to be the hallmark of humanity—consists in ‘the imposition of an arbitrary framework of symbolic meaning upon reality.’” Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (New York: Routledge, 2000), 178. On the participation of animals in the transmission of culture, see Frans de Waal, Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist (New York: Basic Books, 2001), and the discussion in Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaction Books, 2002), 133–134.
13. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 23.
14. Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans, trans. Joseph D. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 42.
15. In the use of the pronoun it as translation of the gendered pronouns demanded by the German, we already see a problem that might not be apparent in the original. Do we ascribe subjectivity to an “it’ or only to a “he” or a “she”? To what extent is a legible gender a defining aspect of subjectivity?
16. Uexküll, A Foray, 94.
19. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 49.
20. Derrida, The Animal, 48.
21. The fantasy continues even among postmodernists such as Rosi Braidotti, who asks, “What if consciousness were an inferior mode of relating to one’s environment and to others … no cognitively or morally different from the pathetic howling of wolves in full moonlight. What if, by comparison with the know-how of animals, conscious self-representation were blighted by narcissistic delusions and consequently blinded by its own aspirations to self-transparency.” Rosi Braidotti, “Between the No Longer and the Not Yet: Nomadic Variations on the Body,” available at http://www.women.it/4thfemconf/lunapark/braidotti.htm.
22. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (New York: Penguin, 1979), 86–87.
23. Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1989), 193.
24. Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005), 8, emphasis in original.
25. In his reading of Heidegger, Matthew Calarco gives a concise definition of anthropocentrism as “simply the dominant tendency within the Western Metaphysical tradition to determine the essence of animal life by the measure of, and in opposition to the human.” Matthew Calarco, “Heidegger’s Zoontology,” in Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, eds., Animal Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2004), 29.
26. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 65, italics in original.
27. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Physics, 255.
29. David Ross, “Foreword,” in David Ross, Bill Viola, Lewis Hyde, and Kira Perov, Bill Viola (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1997), 25.
31. Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Physics, 79.
32. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 186–187.
33. Quoted in ibid., 186, emphasis in original. Ingold takes the inseparability of dwelling and building further than Heidegger, who would restrict building to “world forming” and thus to humans. For Ingold, animals, too, are builders who adapt to environments fashioned by their forbears and develop specific “skills, sensibilities and dispositions” (186) within those environments.
34. Catherine Russell, “Subjectivity Lost and Found: Bill Viola’s ‘I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like,’” in Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, eds., Documenting the Documentary (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 356.
35. Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy,” 193.
36. According to Michel de Certeau, the writing of history depends on a corpse. See Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), especially the introduction and chapter 1.
37. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 4.
39. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” in About Looking (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 28.
41. Rilke, “The Black Cat,” in Selected Poetry, 65.
42. Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy,” 193.
43. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977), 129.
45. Russell, “Subjectivity Lost and Found,” 348.
47. Agamben, The Open, 27.
50. Such a project of letting be is envisioned as the endpoint of Agamben’s own hope for history insofar as it provides a means of bringing the anthropological machine to a standstill. “To let the animal be would then mean: to let it be outside of being…. But what is thus left to be outside of being is not thereby negated or taken away; it is not, for this reason inexistent. It is an existing, real thing that has gone beyond the difference between being and beings.” Ibid., 91–92, emphasis in original.
51. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, trans. Carleton Dallery (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 162, quoted in Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 263.
52. Frans de Waal, “Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial,” in Primates and Philosophers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 5.
53. Rilke, “The Panther,” in Selected Poetry, 25.
54. Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” 28.
55. Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 221.
56. See, for instance, Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, “Introduction: The How and Why of Thinking with Animals,” in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, 1–14 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
57. Chimp Portraits was on view in conjunction with Who’s Looking: A Collaborative, Multi-Disciplinary Investigation of Human Relations to Chimpanzees, an exhibition organized by Lori Gruen at Wesleyan University, November 3 to December 2, 2007.
3. Is a Pet an Animal?
1. Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaction Books, 2002), 27.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 240.
6. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” in About Looking (New York: Vintage, 1992), 14.
7. Kathleen Kete, The Beast in the Boudoir: Pet Keeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 95.
8. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 115.
9. Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance and Affection: The Making of Pets (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 2.
11. Juliet Clutton-Brock, “The Unnatural World: Behavioral Aspects of Humans and Animals in the Process of Domestication,” in Aubrey Manning and James Serpell, eds., Animals and Human Society (London: Routledge, 1994), 26.
12. Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 15–16.
13. Richard Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 43.
14. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 138–139.
16. Steven Budiansky, The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).
17. Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2008), 3. See also Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, “Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: An Introduction,” in Chris Philo and Chris Wilbert, eds., Animal Spaces, Beastly Places: New Geographies of Human–Animal Relations (London: Routledge, 2000), and the discussion in Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaction Books, 2002), 31.
18. Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers, 46.
20. See Rebecca Cassidy, “Introduction,” in Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin, eds., Where the Wild Things Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered (Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 2007), 7.
21. Donna Haraway writes that “co-constitutive companion species and co-evolution are the rule, not the exception.” Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 220. See her various references to Lynn Margulis’s theory of “symbiogenesis” and to coevolution in this same work (31–33).
22. On domestication from anthropological perspectives, see Cassidy and Mullin, eds., Where the Wild Things Are Now.
23. Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 65.
24. Gala Argent, “Do Clothes Make the Horse? Relationality, Roles, and Statuses in Iron Age Inner Asia,” World Archeology 42, no. 2 (2010), 162.
25. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (New York: Penguin, 1983), chap. 3.
26. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” in Ways of Reading, 5th ed., ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky (New York: Bedford and St. Martin’s, 1999), 519.
27. Haraway, When Species Meet, 220.
28. Cassidy, “Introduction,” 12.
29. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 241.
30. Burt, Animals in Film, 32.
31. Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Akadine Press, 2000), chap. 3 and p. 132.
32. See Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); and Armstrong, What Animals Mean.
33. On animals under industrial capitalism, see Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” and Armstrong, What Animals Mean. On the postdomestic, see Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers. On epistemological shifts with regard to animals, see Keith Tester, Animals and Society: The Humanity of Animal Rights (London: Routledge, 1991).
34. Adrian Franklin, Animals and Modern Cultures (London: Sage, 1999), 24.
4. Gendered Subjects/Abject Objects
1. Alice Kuzniar, Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 68.
3. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 10.
4. Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 282.
5. Thomas Mann, “Tobias Mindernickel,” in Death in Venice and Other Stories, trans. Jefferson S. Chase (New York: Penguin, 1999), 1; subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.
6. Paul Bishop, “The Intellectual World of Thomas Mann,” in Ritchie Robertson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 22.
7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevich (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 53.
8. Insofar as suffering appears to be the intended rather than unavoidable result of Tobias’s actions, he offers a perverse example of Donna Haraway’s notion of “shared suffering,” whereby lab technicians and others might attempt to feel the pain they inflict as a result of remaining “at risk and in solidarity in instrumental relationships that one does not disavow.” Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 70.
9. Compare Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 43, and Susan McHugh, “Marrying My Bitch: J. R. Ackerly’s Pack Sexualities,” Critical Inquiry 27 (Autumn 2000), 21–22.
10. See Rabbi Judah Elijah Schochet, Animal Life in Jewish Tradition (Jersey City: KTAV, 1984). In Deuteronomy 23:19, for example, dogs are identified with male prostitutes—an association worth mentioning with potential relevance to Mann’s story.
11. Wesley Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin (London: Quartet Books, 1996, 208). See also Michael Wood’s discussion of the horse episode in his book Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 6.
12. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Jessie Coulson (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1975), 50.
13. Readers may also be reminded of Freud’s 1919 essay on sexual fantasy and perversion in which he examines a similar shifting identification between beater and beaten. See Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 2d ed., 17:179–204 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).
15. Robert Alter, trans. and commentary, Genesis (New York: Norton, 1996), 129 n. 31.
16. Hannelore Mundt, Understanding Thomas Mann (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 26.
18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Vintage, 1968), 199.
19. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 117; see also Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 35.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin, 1954), 572–573.
21. Pity and empathy are not necessarily the same emotion, but Nietzsche’s use of pity has much in common with the kind of empathy that Tobias displays.
22. On empathy in history, see Carolyn Dean, The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); Dominick LaCapra, Experience, Identity, and Critical Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Samuel Moyn, “Empathy in History, Empathizing with Humanity,” History and Theory 45 (October 2006): 397–415. On empathy in animal studies, see Lori Gruen, “Empathy and Vegetarian Commitments,” in Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, eds., The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, 333–343 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Primatologist Frans de Waal’s recent book The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (New York: Harmony Book, 2009) suggests that empathy is both the new theme for our times and a talent that has evolved from our animal origins.
23. Moyn, “Empathy in History,” 400.
24. See, for instance, Lori Gruen on what she calls “engaged empathy” in “Attending to Nature: Empathetic Engagement with the More Than Human World,” Ethics and Environment 14, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 23–38.
25. Kenneth Shapiro, “Understanding Dogs Through Kinesthetic Empathy, Social Construction, and History,” Anthrozoos 3 (1990): 184–195; Ralph Acampora, “Bodily Being and Animal World: Toward a Somatology of Cross-Species Community,” in H. Peter Steeves, ed., Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 119.
26. Edgar Allen Poe, “The Black Cat,” in The Portable Edgar Allen Poe, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy (New York: Penguin, 2006), 192.
27. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 144.
29. Guy de Maupassant, “Fou?” in Contes et nouvelles, vol. 1, ed. Louis Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 525, my translation.
31. Cary Wolfe discusses the “logic of the pet” and the status of “humanized animals,” which constitute an exception to the sacrificial structure described by Derrida. See Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites, American Culture: The Discourse of Species and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 100–101, 104.
32. Carrie Rohman, Stalking the Subject (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 15.
33. Thomas Mann, Man and Dog: An Idyll, in Death in Venice and Other Stories, 219–302; subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.
34. According to Michael Fischer, “Cavell suggests that happiness, maybe even sanity, depends on being touched by Othello’s problems but not done in by them”; see Michael Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 87.
35. See, for instance, Hannelore Mundt, Understanding Thomas Mann (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), 10.
36. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).
37. “It has its point of view regarding me,” writes Derrida of his cat. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 11.
38. Baushan thus resists the growing institutional understanding of dogs according to categories of breed rather than according to the individual. See, for instance, the chapter “Prize Pets,” in Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, 82–124 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
39. Freedom, Rousseau writes in The Social Contract, is “obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. G. D. H. Cole, book 1, chap. 8, available at http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon_01.htm#008.
40. Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Akadine Press, 2000), 66.
41. For an elaboration of this sense of abjection, see Kristeva, Powers of Horror.
42. As Arnold Arluke and Clinton Saunders discuss in a chapter on animals in Nazi Germany, the wild predator became a model for German Nazi youth, whose task it was to reverse the weakness wrought by domestication. “I want violent, imperious, fearless, cruel young people,” wrote Hitler. “The free, magnificent beast of prey must once again flash from their eyes…. I shall blot out thousands of years of human domestication. I shall have the pure, noble stuff of nature.” Quoted in Arnold Arluke and Clinton Saunders, Regarding Animals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 139, 140.
43. Diana Donald discusses the conflicting emotions of the “sporting instinct” and the “blood lust” that “[coexist] with love and veneration for the hunted animal.” Diana Donald, “Pangs Watched in Perpetuity,” in Animal Studies Group, ed., Killing Animals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 50.
44. Quoted in Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 10. The first chapter of Lemm’s book discusses the importance of this antagonism in relation to Nietzsche’s sense of “human animal life”: “What defines culture is freedom from moralization, from the ‘willed and forced animal taming’ of civilization, and from its intolerance toward ‘free spirits.’ When culture rules over civilization, what rules is the freedom of the animal and of the spirit” (12).
46. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 5.
49. On “true” history for Nietzsche or what Lemm calls “artistic historiography,” see Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy, 99–102.
50. See Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History, 5. On the silence of Nietzsche’s animals, see Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy, 114–115.
51. “To breed an animal with the right to make promises—is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is it not the real problem regarding man?” Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), 57.
5. Dog Love/W(o)olf Love
1. Marjorie Garber, Dog Love (New York: Touchstone, 1997).
2. Quoted in Anna Snaith, “Of Fanciers, Footnotes, and Fascism: Virginia Woolf’s Flush,” Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 8 (Fall 2002), 618. As her title indicates, Snaith also connects the writing of Flush to political issues raised in Three Guineas.
3. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace and World: 1966), 134, 142.
4. As Craig Smith and others have indicated, the initial reception of Flush criticized its anthropomorphism as a form of “sentimentalism.” See Craig Smith, “Across the Widest Gulf: Nonhuman Subjectivity in Virginia Woolf’s Flush,” Twentieth Century Literature 48, no. 3 (Autumn 2002), 351.
5. Kate Flint, “Introduction,” in Virginia Woolf, Flush (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2009), xiii.
6. Naomi Schor, “This Essentialism Which Is Not One,” differences 1, no. 2 (1988), 45–46.
7. Frans de Waal, “Appendix A: Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial,” in Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, 59–68 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
8. On the various animal and creaturely expressions Woolf used to address her friends and family, see Flint, “Introduction,” xii.
9. Elizabeth de Fontenay, Sans offenser le genre humain (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008), 119, my translation.
10. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981), 99.
11. Woolf, Flush, 31; subsequent citations to this work are given parenthetically in the text; ellipses in quotes are mine unless otherwise noted.
12. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 104.
14. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1956), 13.
15. Marc Shell, “The Family Pet,” Representations 15 (Summer 1986): 121–153. Shell is less concerned with the individual pet owner than with understanding how Western familial and national structures affect the institution of pethood—its sexual, familial, and sociopolitical role. As a chaste, safe, and voluntary transgression of kinship boundaries, Woolf’s pet love contrasts with the incest she experienced.
16. “Originally the word [anthropomorphism] referred to the attribution of human form to gods, forbidden by several religions as blasphemous.” Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, “Introduction: The How and Why of Thinking with Animals,” in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 2.
17. Jacques Lacan, “God and the Jouissance of the Woman,” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982), 138.
18. Kari Weil, Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), esp. 2–11.
19. “Man is an animal, but a speaking one, and he is less a beast of prey than a beast that is prey to language.” Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 120–121.
20. Susan Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985). Squier devotes a whole chapter to Flush.
21. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 680.
22. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), 21:89.
24. Quoted in Paul Guyer, Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 152.
25. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 21:11.
26. Finding an alternative to this either/or condition of submission to a dominant authority or the unleashing of so-called animal instincts had clear, political urgency in Europe in 1933, as it already had for Thomas Mann some years earlier.
27. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 21:110.
28. Wolfgang M. Schleidt and Michael D. Shalter, “Co-Evolution of Humans and Canids: An Alternative View of Dog Domestication: Homo Homini Lupus?” Evolution and Cognition 9, no. 1 (2003), 60.
30. Squier, Virginia Woolf and London, 128.
31. Anna Snaith argues that Flush needs to be understood within the politics of the 1930s and contemporary fears about the growth of fascism. Anna Snaith, “Of Fanciers, Footnotes, and Fascism: Virginia Woolf’s Flush,” Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 3 (2002): 614–636.
32. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 21:103. In this respect, Woolf understands dog obedience differently than Vicki Hearne, who argues that dogs work less for love than for “coherent authority.” See Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Akadine Press, 2000), specifically “How to Say, ‘Fetch!’” 42–76.
33. Woolf, Three Guineas, 109.
34. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 21:99–100 n. 1.
35. Quoted in Todd Dufresne, Killing Freud: Twentieth-Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis (New York: Continuum, 2003), 146.
36. Alice Kuzniar, Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 72.
37. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Estella Barnes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 302.
38. Dufresne, Killing Freud, 147.
39. Ibid.; see also Garber, Dog Love, 249.
40. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 84.
6. A Proper Death
1. Richard Klein, “The Power of Pets,” The New Republic, July 10, 1995, 23.
2. Virginia Woolf, Flush: A Biography (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2009), 105–106.
3. Leo Tolstoy, “Strider: The Story of a Horse,” in Steven D. Price, ed., Classic Horse Stories (Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2002), 274.
4. Quoted in Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 35.
5. Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation,” in Kelly Oliver, ed., French Feminism Reader (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 284.
6. For a provocative discussion of dog death in Victorian literature, see Ivan Kreilkamp, “Dying Like a Dog in Great Expectations,” in Deborah Morse and Martin Danahay, eds., Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture, 81–94 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007).
7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 142.
8. Tolstoy, “Strider,” 272.
9. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 330.
10. Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Conner (San Francisco: City Lights, 2001), 52.
12. Georges Bataille, “Animality,” in Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, eds., Animal Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2004), 34.
13. Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 45.
15. Steve Baker, “Animal Death in Contemporary Art,” in Animal Studies Group, ed., Killing Animals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 83. See also Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaction Books, 2000).
16. Baker, The Postmodern Animal, 8.
17. Taylor-Wood’s “little death” is itself an aporia between life and death and between animal and human death as defined by Heidegger. Heidegger says that animals perish and thus come to an end, but he reserves for man a death that, as Derrida explains, is “without end.” “Even if it dies (stirbt) and even if it ends (endet), it never ‘kicks the bucket’ (verendet nie)” (Derrida, Aporias, 40). This “little death” appears to be without end, but it also appears to be animal.
18. As an effect of a body’s dissolution, the liveness of Taylor-Wood’s hare is thus different from the “enlivening effect of bodily presence” that Baker describes in reference to a display of taxidermic polar bears and that, he argues, contributes to a new, physical history of the animal. See Steve Baker, “What Can Dead Bodies Do?” in Bryndis Snaebjornsdottir and Mark Wilson, eds., Nanoq: Flat Out and Bluesome: A Cultural Life of Polar Bears (London: Black Dog, 2006), 152.
19. Baker, “Animal Death,” 74.
20. Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 7.
22. Of course, even before Woolf’s biography, Flush lived on in the poems written about him by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As for Tolstoy, he is estimated to have spent seven years of his life in the saddle, and the impact of horses generally on his life is summed up by an anecdote Turgenev told of overhearing him talking to a horse along the road. “I could not refrain from remarking,” Turgenev later wrote, “beyond any doubt you must have been a horse once yourself.” Quoted in Price, “Introduction,” in Price, ed., Classic Horse Stories, 5.
23. Taylor-Wood thus reverses the sublimity of death and “livingness” discussed by Edmund Burke in his essay on the sublime, where, as Jonathan Burt writes, the “striking” quality of death allows us to overlook or “take for granted” the “state of livingness.” In Taylor-Wood’s video, on the contrary, livingness is striking and mesmerizing also because of its duration. See Jonathan Burt, “Derrida, Bergson, Deleuze, and Animal Film Imagery,” Configurations 14, nos. 1–2 (Winter–Spring 2006), 167.
24. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 14:239–260 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961).
25. Baker suggests that the attitudes and practices he discusses might provisionally be said to tend toward either the melancholic or the mournful. But I disagree with his characterization of melancholia as conservative because it “clings to certainties” (Baker, Postmodern Animal, 164). I would say rather that melancholia’s potential conservatism comes from its clinging to ambivalence for its own sake.
26. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “Becoming Animal,” in Atterton and Calarco, eds., Animal Philosophy, 87–100.
27. Quoted in Steve Baker, “What Does Becoming-Animal Look Like?” in Nigel Rothfels, ed., Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 67.
28. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 22.
29. Hélène Cixous, “Shared at Dawn,” in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), 177.
30. Gilles Deleuze [and Félix Guattari], “Becoming Animal,” in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 122.
31. Derrida, Aporias, 34.
32. Cixous, “Shared at Dawn,” 176.
34. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 14:245.
35. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 63. See also Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender—Refused Identification,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues 5, no. 2 (1995): 165–180.
36. Cixous, “Shared at Dawn,” 176.
37. Another avenue for pursuing this connection is through Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection as a disavowal of our primary dependence on and connection to our mother as to other animals. Abjection is similar to melancholia in that it is a state that holds onto even as it attempts to separate from an “object” that is not yet an object because it is unrepresented. As Kelly Oliver writes, “Abjection is the constant attempt and constant failure, to separate from the primary ‘object,’ which is the (or an) animal on the level of society and the (or a) mother on the level of personal archaeology.” Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 282.
38. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 68.
39. Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation,” 288, emphasis in original.
40. Butler, Gender Trouble, 68.
41. Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation,” 288.
42. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 27, 28.
43. “Introduction,” in Animal Studies Group, ed., Killing Animals, 3, my ellipses in brackets.
44. Butler, Precarious Life, xviii–xix.
46. Chloe Taylor, “The Precarious Lives of Animals,” Philosophy Today 52, no. 1 (2008), 3.
48. Charles Patterson notes this exemption in Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New York: Lantern Books, 2002), 71, cited in LaCapra, History and Its Limits, 179.
49. Butler, Precarious Life, 36. The state of the semiliving or undead brings to mind the laboratory tick discussed by the biologist Jakob von Uexküll; the tick was artificially isolated from its environment and kept “in a sleep-like state” and withheld nourishment for eighteen years. It was an object of fascination for Giorgio Agamben, as it was perhaps for von Uexküll, but neither considers the ethics of such treatment. Who cares about a tick?
50. Marjorie Garber, “Reflections,” in J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals, 73–84 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).
51. Butler, Precarious Life, 22.
52. LaCapra, History and Its Limits, 186 n. 49. LaCapra criticizes Cary Wolfe and to a certain extent Derrida for overvaluing passivity and disempowerment.
53. Well, we all have to eat, Derrida might remind us.
54. Butler, Precarious Life, 23.
7. Thinking and Unthinking Animal Death
1. On this distinction, see Beatrice Hanssen, “Ethics of the Other,” in Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., The Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2000), 134–135.
2. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 79–80.
3. Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Elizabeth Weber, ed., Points … Interviews 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others, 255–287 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995).
4. Haraway, When Species Meet, 81.
5. Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’” 273.
6. Both Derrida and Haraway build on even while deconstructing or transgressing the distinction that Lacan makes between an animal’s instinctive or mechanical “reaction” and a human’s ability to “respond.” To respond, in other words, is to act out of the freedom to choose and with understanding of the repercussions of various choices. We humans cannot always be sure when our so-called responses are merely reactions.
7. Cora Diamond, “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” in Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Ian Hacking, and Carey Wolfe, Philosophy and & Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 74, 45–46.
8. Temple Grandin, Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 159. In his Second Discourse, Rousseau makes a similar comment regarding thinking in pictures or “imaging” as a limited form of thought that can take hold only of the particular rather than of the general or abstract. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 148.
9. See also Cary Wolfe’s discussion of the way Grandin turns her disability into a special ability in “Learning from Temple Grandin,” in What Is Posthumanism? 127–142 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
10. Temple Grandin, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (New York: Scribner, 2005), 65.
11. On this point, see also Cary Wolfe, “Exposures,” the introduction to Cavell et al., Philosophy & Animal Life, 8.
12. Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy,” in Duino Elegies, trans. J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York: Norton, 1963), 67.
13. J. M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), 23.
15. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed., Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 121.
17. Quoted in Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 35.
18. Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy,” 69.
19. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals,” in About Looking, 3–28 (New York: Vintage, 1992).
20. Indeed, misguided nostalgia for this look has sent celebrity chefs in search of “looking dinner in the eye.” See Julia Moskin, “Chefs New Goal: Looking Dinner in the Eye,” New York Times, January 16, 2008.
21. “Conclusion: A Conversation,” in Animal Studies Group, ed., Killing Animals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 209.
22. Grandin, Thinking in Pictures, 41–42.
23. Wolfe makes similar remarks about this passage and suggests other potential readings in “Learning from Temple Grandin.”
24. Grandin, Thinking in Pictures, 205.
25. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999), 12; subsequent citations to this work are given parenthetically in the text.
26. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004).
28. Derrida, The Animal, 121.
29. This is the last line of Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which describes how in the absence of a head “there is no place that does not see you, / You must change your life.” In Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1982), 61.
30. Emmanuel Levinas is equivocal at best about an animal’s ability to call a human to his or her ethical responsibility. See, for instance, Emmanuel Levinas, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” in Peter Atterton and Matthew Calarco, eds., Animal Philosophy, 47–51 (London: Continuum, 2004).
31. Grandin, Thinking in Pictures, 206.
32. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 210.
8. Animal Liberation or Shameless Freedom
1. “Conclusion: A Conversation,” in Animal Studies Group, ed., Killing Animals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 203, 207.
3. Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002).
5. Gary Francione, whom I discuss later in this chapter, is the major representative of the “abolitionist approach,” whose mission statement can be read at http://www.abolitionistapproach.com.
6. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 11. Gala Argent makes similar arguments about human–horse relations. See Gala Argent, “Do Clothes Make the Horse? Relationality, Roles, and Statuses in Asia,” World Archeology 42, no. 2 (2010): 157–174.
7. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 25.
8. Ibid., 159. The closest English equivalent for the term bêtise, meaning simply “stupid” but derived from the word for “beast” or “animal,” may be asinine because it contains the bestial or animal reference. Derrida’s text focuses attention on the gendering of le souverain versus la bête in ways that recall his discussion of “carnivorous virility” and the gendering of power in “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Elizabeth Weber, ed., Points … Interviews 1974–1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf and others (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 280.
9. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 151, quoted in Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 156.
10. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 161.
11. Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in Collected Stories, ed. Gabriel Josipovici (New York: Knopf, 1993), 198.
12. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 157.
13. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999), 215, 220; subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text.
14. Ian Hacking, “Our Fellow Animals,” New York Review of Books, June 29, 2000.
15. Josephine Donovan, “‘Miracles of Creation’: Animals in J. M. Coetzee’s Work,” Michigan Quarterly Review 43, no. 1 (Winter 2004), 79 n. 16.
16. David Attridge, “Age of Bronze, State of Grace: Music and Dogs in Coetzee’s Disgrace,” Novel 34 (2000), 115.
17. Louis Tremaine, “The Embodied Soul: Animal Being in the Work of J. M. Coetzee,” Contemporary Literature 44, no. 4 (2003), 603.
18. Gary Francione, “Animal Welfare and the Moral Value of Nonhuman Animals,” paper presented for the monthly meeting of the Animal Ethics Group, Yale University Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, New Haven, Conn., December 4, 2008, 1. Francione’ s major discussion of the abolitionist position can be found in his book Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).
19. Francione, “Animal Welfare,” 21.
20. Kari Weil, “Killing Them Softly: Animal Death, Linguistic Disability, and the Struggle for Ethics,” Configurations 14, no. 1 (2006): 87–96.
21. Although I agree with Donovan’s reading in terms of a conversion because I still see that conversion in terms of ideas, my reading is closest to Attridge’s and to a lesser extent to Tremaine’s, the latter suggesting that Lurie’s coming to terms with death and suffering is not primarily intersubjective; rather, “it is one for the self in itself” (Tremaine, “The Embodied Soul,” 609). In other words, the particular relationship that exists between Lurie and the dog is irrelevant to his transformation.
22. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 61, emphasis in original.
23. This scenario might be a third to add to the two Heideggerean scenarios of the end of history that Giorgio Agamben describes in The Open. In the first scenario, animality is offered up to be governed “by means of technology”; in the second, animality is regarded not as something to be governed or mastered or as something hidden, but rather is “thought as such, as pure abandonment” (Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004], 80). In this third, animality is destroyed with the extinction of animals.
24. On recent views regarding the history of domestication, see Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin, eds., Where the Wild Things Are: Domestication Reconsidered (Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 2007).
25. On Margulis and the implications of her work on symbiogenesis, see Haraway, When Species Meet, 30–33.
27. Stacy Alaimo, “Transcorporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature,” in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 251. On this point, see also Lynda Birke and Luciana Parisi, “Animals Becoming,” in H. Peter Steeves, ed., Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology, and Animal Life, 55–73 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
28. I use the term abjection in the sense of casting off or attempting to separate oneself from those natural elements of feces or blood or milk that are seen to defile the self and that are associated with the maternal–feminine. For an elaboration of this meaning of abjection, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), esp. chap. 3.
29. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).
30. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, “Introduction: Emerging Models of Materiality in Feminist Theory,” in Alaimo and Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms, 7.
31. Tremaine foregrounds such a kinship of shameful bodies but without really questioning the meaning or status of shame. See Tremaine, “The Embodied Soul.”
32. Alice Kuzniar, Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 179.
33. Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams, “Introduction,” in Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams, eds., The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 15.
34. Lori Gruen, for instance, writes of the importance of the empathic person as having a “distinct self … so when she is imaginatively engaging with the other, she doesn’t believe herself to be in the other’s situation.” Lori Gruen, “Empathy and Vegetarian Commitments,” in Donovan and Adams, eds., The Feminist Care Tradition, 337.
35. See Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of Social Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: McKay, 1977).
36. Kuzniar, Melancholia’s Dog, 117.
37. Donovan and Adams, “Introduction,” 14. In chapter 13 of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), Charles Darwin focuses on the act of “blushing,” “the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions,” which is caused by shame (309).
38. Quoted in Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 172.
39. Haraway, When Species Meet, 73.
40. It should be stressed that this view can be especially risky for those who are already marginalized.
41. Vicki Hearne, “Job’s Animals,” in Animal Happiness: A Moving Exploration of Animals and Their Emotions (New York: Skyhorse, 1994), 237, 229.
42. Haraway, When Species Meet, 36.
43. Hearne, “Job’s Animals,” 238.
44. In Derrida’s essay The Animal That Therefore I Am, uprightness concerns not only the human stance, but also, through its association with erection, the sign of masculine power and authority. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
45. Quoted in Hearne, “Job’s Animals,” 237.
46. Like Haraway, Hearne thinks of relationships with animals in terms of work, not of use.
47. Attridge says something similar when he writes that Lurie dedicates himself to “the singularity of every living and dead being.” Attridge, “Age of Bronze,” 117.
48. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 20.
“And Toto Too”
1. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 7.
2. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxv.
3. Emilie Hache and Bruno Latour, “Morality or Moralism? An Exercise in Sensitization,” trans. Patrick Camilier, Common Knowledge 16, no. 2 (Spring 2010), 2.
5. Such a view is at the core of Bruno Latour’s earlier work We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
6. Priscilla Patton, “Theory: Gone to the Dogs,” JAC 30, nos. 3–4 (2010), 574, emphasis in original.
7. Elizabeth de Fontenay, Sans offenser le genre humain (Paris: Albin Michel, 2008), 119, my translation.
8. Elizabeth de Fontenay, Le silence des bêtes (Paris: Fayard, 2006), 703, my translation.