INTRODUCTION

 

On April 14, 2009, President Barack Obama made good on a campaign promise: his daughters Malia and Sasha got a dog, as he had said they would if he won the election. After months of public speculation,¹ revolving mainly around the kind of dog the Obamas would get to accommodate their daughters’ allergies and around the manner in which they would acquire that dog, the first family introduced Bo, a purebred Portuguese waterdog and present from Senator Ted Kennedy, to the White House press corps.² Reporting for the Washington Times, Christina Bellantoni captured the occasion in footage now available on YouTube: “The White House Press Corps got a rare glimpse of the first family as they got to know the first dog of the United States…. We were herded out to the White House South Lawn, where we usually watch Marine One take off and land. They had wranglers there to make sure we didn’t get out of hand.”³ Billing the occasion as private and intimate, the narration also captures its public and political dimensions: although the “glimpse” of the “family” is “rare,” they are the “first” family, and they walk their dog—the “first dog of the United States”—on the White House South Lawn. As Bellantoni emphasized, that lawn is usually the staging ground for the president’s role as commander in chief in that it is the landing place for his military helicopter, Marine One. Although the “first dog’s” introduction to the American public on the ground where the president most commonly makes visible U.S. global military power may seem coincidental, this apparently frivolous occasion reveals a key mechanism of biopolitics (a term I will define presently) by which forms of power as seemingly disparate as state authority and familial intimacy get conjoined and worked out via animal representations.

But which animals are we talking about when the press corps is “herded” onto the lawn and disciplined by (presumably cattle) “wranglers” so as to behave appropriately? The literal animal, Bo, here receives company from figurative animals, the bovine White House Press Corps. The lines between the figurative and the literal as well as between different species blur in the course of the report. If the press corps becomes animalized, the “first dog” becomes humanized: one reporter asks, as one would of a new child’s arrival in a family, “Is it a boy or a girl?” The dog’s sex matters and is definitively identified by the president, who proclaims: “A boy.” Although the answer to that question is straightforward, it seems more difficult to discern whether the boy is a dog: a discussion ensues of the dog’s seemingly natural (or at least of his breed’s cultivated) characteristics. Sasha informs the reporters that her Portuguese waterdog can’t swim, and the president explains that, although the breed has webbed feet, these dogs have to be taught to swim. The fact that the dog is in need of pedagogy to perform his own doghood appropriately and is subject to discipline is brought home by the reporters’ asking whether he has had an “accident” yet, and by the president didactically informing them that everyone in the family will have to take turns walking the dog: “We want to make sure that we’re responsible dog owners, and we hope everyone is, too.” Here, again, a shift occurs, by which it is not only the dog who must be taught to perform his species correctly, but also his human caregivers who have to be taught their responsibilities. In the location where military force usually gets staged, we see a different social ordering take place. What both of these scenes share, I argue, is that they reveal animal representations to be a complex site where the construction of subjectivity occurs by affective means and pedagogical methods that hinge on the literal relationship to animals and on their figurative representation. The president’s concluding comment in the video sums up these affective dimensions and the way they complicate our understanding of relationships and subjectivities: invoking President Harry Truman’s lament that the only way one can have a friend in Washington is to get a dog, President Obama says that he finally got a friend. Bo is no longer the child one would associate with the question about the new arrival’s sex; Bo is now both utterly canine—inhabiting the role of “man’s best friend”—and superhuman—being the president’s only friend where all interhuman relationships fail. How do we begin to sort out these different roles, relationships, and meanings, and what significance do we want to attach to the relationship between the seemingly important (the White House, the president, U.S. military power) and the seemingly trivial (the family pooch)? What is the cultural and political work of animal representations? To address these questions, and to recognize their significance, we need to bring American studies in dialogue with critical animal studies.

“The Question of the Animal”: Animal Rights, Animal Studies, and Posthumanism

Our tools for theorizing and historicizing the relationship between animal representations and subject formation have recently multiplied.⁴ Animals are everywhere these days. Legal scholars, political theorists, cultural critics, historians, anthropologists, religion scholars, sociologists, and literary critics have undertaken a rigorous examination of “the question of the animal” in its relation to their respective fields.⁵ Their efforts press beyond disciplinary boundaries in the sense that a field conceptualized as “animal studies” is in the process of articulating its rationale. At its core, animal studies asks what happens when we include other species in our understanding of subjectivity. Different answers to this question have led to the development of two divergent and seemingly incompatible strands of animal studies: the branch grounded in the social sciences that emerged out of the animal rights movement and the branch that developed in the humanities out of post-structuralist theory, especially in response to the work Jacques Derrida published shortly before his death in 2004.⁶ Whereas the animal rights movement argues that our understanding of subjectivity needs to include animals, post-structuralist analysis uses animals to deconstruct our notions of subjectivity. One strand of animal studies has a firm investment in the subject, whereas the other has an equally firm investment in erasing the subject.⁷ This book places the two approaches in dialogue with each other and argues that the way we read subjectivity depends on the way we represent the relationship between human beings and animals.

The current concern with animal rights emerged in the 1970s out of a reconsideration of liberal subjectivity. Modeling itself on nineteenth- century utilitarian philosophy and twentieth-century movements for racial and gender equality, animal rights advocacy grew out of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, published in the late 1970s.⁸ In Singer’s account, animals are part of liberalism’s progressive telos: they are the last step in a history that has increasingly abolished discrimination based on physical differences. Arguing that “speciesism” (that is, a bias in favor of one’s own species and against members of other species) parallels racism and sexism in making the body a site of discrimination, Singer insisted that the time had come to recognize animals as liberal subjects.⁹ Reviving Jeremy Bentham’s argument that animals are sentient beings whose suffering matters, he grounded their claim to ethical consideration in the body: pointing out that bodily difference had long been the grounds for discriminating against animals, he argued that they had a similar capacity to suffer pain and that therefore they needed to be included in a utilitarian model of society premised on minimizing suffering.¹⁰ Although Singer’s book did not itself advocate for animal rights and in many ways is incompatible with the rights model subsequently developed by Tom Regan and others, it was nevertheless received as a call for increased legal representation for animals and sparked a debate over subjectivity that continues today.¹¹

As the position statements compiled in the recent volume Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions make clear,¹² this inclusion of animals in liberal subjectivity has ignited a fierce discussion over the relationship between representation and embodiment, and has raised the question whether species is a marker of alterity akin to or different from race and sexuality. In arguing that rights are exclusively reserved for human beings, scholars opposed to the inclusion of animals in legal models of subjectivity, such as Richard Posner and Richard Epstein, have deliberately embraced the speciesism of which their opponents, such as Steven Wise and Peter Singer, accuse them. Espousing a Darwinian position that differentiates human beings from all other animals, Richard Epstein writes: “We have to separate ourselves from (the rest of) nature from which we evolved.”¹³ Claiming that “membership in the human species is not a morally irrelevant fact, as the race and gender of human beings have come to seem,” Richard Posner insists that animals are not to be classified as subjects, but as property.¹⁴ Animals, says Epstein, should “be treated as objects of human ownership,” not as “bearers of independent rights.”¹⁵ For Epstein and Posner, the conditions of embodiment are not conterminous with the conditions of representation; on the contrary, by their account, being fully embodied means being barred from the abstractions on which legal representation depends.

Different as the advocates and opponents of animal rights seem from one another, they ultimately share in the same logic of binary thinking. Both sides of the debate pragmatically take for granted that “the law divides the physical universe into persons and things,”¹⁶ though they disagree whether the binary division between subjects and objects should correspond to the division between human beings and animals. Each side of the rights debate is invested in the liberal subject, either by guarding against the notion that animals can participate in a model of subjectivity based on reason and the proprietorship of one’s own person or by arguing for the inclusion of animals in the liberal subject’s rights, thereby reinstating the fundamental underpinning of the liberal subject—namely, its claim to universality—by expanding its reach; their disagreement over the parameters of that subject does not challenge but on the contrary reaffirms the liberal subject’s importance. What is missing on both sides is an understanding of the ways in which the liberal subject already depends at its core—as I argue—on a relationship with animals that undercuts this binary and that reveals “the animal” as well as “the human” to be “a linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical construct of comparatively recent date.”¹⁷ We need to understand the history of that construct because we cannot otherwise account for the structural position that animals have in opposition to humans or for the way that relationship straddles the subject/object divide and functions as a mechanism of violence on the one hand and a means of alterity on the other.

Post-structuralism enables us to read animals as an immanent other that founds and confounds the liberal subject. Animals represent an alterity that underwrites the formation of the subject as its disavowed point of origin and unassimilable trace. Post-structuralist animal studies challenge the “schema of the knowing subject and its anthropocentric underpinnings.”¹⁸ This shift away from the “knowing” or reasoning subject puts post-structuralism in unexpected alliance with the animal rights movement in its emphasis on feeling.¹⁹ The validity of this claim—that post-structuralism theorizes feeling—is not self-evident. Post-structuralism’s relationship to feeling was largely ignored or dismissed before Rei Terada’s landmark 2001 publication Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the “Death of the Subject.” Terada does not merely argue that post-structuralism opens up a space for considerations of feeling. She also demonstrates that post-structuralism has a notion of affect at its core, and that it develops a theory of subjectivity via an understanding of what it means to feel for others. Taking issue with the ideological gesture that “casts emotion as proof of the human subject,” post-structuralist critics—as Terada has demonstrated—map affect as the “common ground of the physiological and the psychological,” where “emotions emerge only through acts of interpretation and identification by means of which we feel for others.”²⁰ As Jacques Derrida’s last works powerfully demonstrated, those “others” need not always already be human. By examining specific representations of animals, abjected as beasts and sentimentalized as pets, my work tests the boundaries of who or what can count as an “other” that we feel “for” and what forms such “feeling” takes in the context of a particular history of subject formation. As I argue, the subject is not self-sufficient but relies on affective relationships that cross the species line.

Feeling is a particularly ambivalent site for the engagement with animals.²¹ One recurring and dominant strand of argumentation about the relationship between human beings and animals points to the “emotional contradictions” by which “pets and wildlife evoke deep positive feelings, but domestic animals feeding the consumer market are a morally troubling reality.”²² Gary Francione has argued that “when it comes to non-humans, we exhibit what can best be described as moral schizophrenia. We say one thing about how non-humans should be treated, and do quite another.”²³ Such statements suggest there are two poles to our affective engagement with animals: that of “positive feelings” and that of violence; by transmuting those structures of feeling into political terms, we might begin to map them onto the division between bios and zoē as well as between affirmative and thanatological biopolitics, terms that I take up later. These seemingly contradictory attitudes toward animals serve an important function. They make affect the mechanism for claims to ontological difference. Human and nonhuman are themselves mutable categories whose definitions are worked out in these affective relationships.

Charting the “emergence of the ‘animal question’” through these different schools of thought, Kari Weil has suggested that we need to focus “on three trends or moments in literary and critical theory for which the animal becomes a test or limit case: the linguistic turn, a counterlinguistic or affective turn, and the ethical turn.”²⁴ My book sets those three strands in dialogue with one another: locating animals at the core of language inevitably means confronting its limit, its outside, its enabling and negating conditions. That confrontation is one where language and reason emerge but also unravel. I do not see this attention to language necessitating a counterlinguistic turn, nor would I equate the counterlinguistic with the affective; instead, I locate the linguistic and the affective in dialogue with one another as the terrain on which subjectivity gets worked out via intertwined symbolizations and embodiments. One of the relationships that I constantly trace is the relationship between language and affect, a relationship that does not presume a binarization between the human and the animal. The attempts to intervene in and control those shifts in various ways are what I understand as constituting the “ethical turn.” Weil helpfully defines the relationship of animals studies to the ethical turn, which she defines as “a concern with and for alterity, especially insofar as alterity brings us to the limits of our own self-certainty and certainty about the world.”²⁵ But what kind of alterity we encounter in animals is already determined by a complex set of expectations about that encounter: Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman caution that “before either animal individuality or subjectivity can be imagined, an animal must be singled out as a promising prospect for anthropomorphism.”²⁶ I want to shift the terms here and suggest that “an animal must be singled out as a promising prospect” for a relationship. That relationship can certainly be anthropomorphic, but it can also function, in Weil’s formulation, as an affect-based “‘critical anthropomorphism’ in the sense that we open ourselves to touch and be touched by others as fellow subjects and may imagine their pain, pleasure, and need in anthropomorphic terms but must stop short of believing that we can know their experience.”²⁷

But if human and animal themselves emerge as relational and shifting categories, what justifies describing the field that engages with them as “‘animal’ studies,” and what are the methodological implications and limitations of that approach? The bifurcation in animal studies between the rights approach and the post-structuralist approach has recently occasioned the question how the emerging field might otherwise be described and whether animal studies is an adequate term. Cary Wolfe cautions against the use of the terms animal studies and human–animal studies because they allow for the continuity of anthropocentrism: “Indeed, one of the hallmarks of humanism—and even more specifically that kind of humanism called liberalism—is its penchant for that kind of pluralism, in which the sphere of attention and consideration (intellectual or ethical) is broadened and extended to previously marginalized groups, but without in the least destabilizing or throwing into radical question the schema of the human who undertakes such pluralization. In that event, pluralism becomes incorporation, and the projects of humanism (intellectually) and liberalism (politically) are extended, and indeed extended in a rather classic sort of way.”²⁸ Michael Lundblad has suggested that we replace the term animal studies with animality studies to embark on scholarly inquiries that explore “how constructions of the animal have shifted historically in relation to the human and how discourses of human and nonhuman animality have produced various identity categories within the human.”²⁹ Although I find the term animality useful in a number of ways that will become evident, I am wary of letting go entirely of the term animal. The importance of retaining the latter stems from three factors. First, “animality” is not a single construct but operates on a spectrum where “the animal” is one position. Second, the term animality risks foreclosing difference by turning back to “categories within the human” (a critique I also extend to the terms creature and creaturely when I discuss them in chapter 5); I want to make sure to hold on to a notion of animal alterity and, for that matter, to see such alterity’s importance for rethinking subject formation.³⁰ And third, “animality” is a useful theoretical concept but not a term that we should anachronistically impose on the historical materials I examine.

The approach that has emerged with the greatest force as an alternative to “animal studies” is posthumanism, which sees itself as a critique not just of liberalism and the kinds of humanist scholarship it enables, but of the very premises about species distinctions that underlie them.³¹ Popularized by N. Katherine Hayles’s 1999 book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, the term challenged Enlightenment models of subjectivity by reflecting on modern technologies’ ability to mimic core traits of the human.³² Posthumanism grew out of an interest in the role that technology plays for unsettling our understandings of such binaries as culture and nature, biology and technology. What I draw from posthumanism is a commitment to seeing the connections between seemingly disparate entities and an attentiveness to embodiment.

The cultural importance of embodiment and the relationship between the body and discourse has been long and well established by scholars engaging with Michel Foucault’s work, and has not been limited to posthumanism. To cite but one example, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White write: “The body cannot be thought separately from the social formation, the symbolic topography, and the constitution of the subject. The body is neither a purely natural given nor is it merely a textual metaphor, it is a privileged operator for the transcoding of these other areas.”³³ This passage crucially makes the body a nodal point for subject formation and provocatively unsettles the binaries that had separated the natural from the textual and privileged the latter. Important as this attention to the body has been for critiquing models of subjectivity based on reason and universality by drawing attention to embodiment and particularity, what is striking about this passage and paradigmatic of many discussions of “the body” is its implicit definition of “the body” as the human body. How might other bodies unsettle that association? What happens to this critical approach when “the body” becomes “bodies” in the plural?

Posthumanism offers answers to these questions and critiques scholars’ ongoing equation of “the body” with the human. For instance, in her discussion of the Turing test (which assesses a machine’s ability to show intelligent behavior), Hayles argues: “What embodiment secures is not the distinction between male and female or between humans who can think and machines which cannot. Rather, embodiment makes clear that thought is a much broader cognitive function depending for its specificities on the embodied form enacting it. This realization, with all its exfoliating implications, is so broad in its effects and so deep in its consequences that it is transforming the liberal subject, regarded as the model of the human since the Enlightenment, into the posthuman.”³⁴

Useful as I find this approach, I ultimately depart from posthumanism in three crucial and connected ways: whereas posthumanism is interested in the challenges technology poses for our definitions of its constituent term human, I am interested in the challenges that cross-species relationships pose for that term.³⁵ This interest shifts my attention from notions of a “post” to the concept of “inter,” as in “intersubjective,” “interrelated,” “interactive,” “interspecies,” and even “intercourse.”³⁶ It also positions me differently in relation to the liberal subject: instead of critiquing liberalism from the outside by imagining posthumanism as an alternative, I want to read at least a certain kind of posthumanism as being intrinsic to a certain logic of liberalism. To that end, I read animals as integral to liberalism, as a structuring force that destabilizes the liberal subject at its core. This emphasis on the liberal subject also redirects my attention from such macroconcerns as computing technology (Hayles) and systems theory (Wolfe) to the microlevel of relationships and the ways in which political structures get enacted and resisted on the level of interactions in such seemingly mundane acts as petting a dog.

The Absent Animal: Theorizing Biopolitics and Biopower in Relation to Species

Within the field of posthumanist inquiry, a dichotomy has arisen (which in certain ways replicates the bifurcation in animal studies) between an approach based on embodiment and one concerned primarily with semiotics or, more broadly speaking, information technologies.³⁷ In thinking about subjectivity as a discourse formation along Foucauldian lines—that is, as something that occupies a shifting nexus of power—I bring these symbolic dimensions and bodily registers into contact with each other. But the terrain of inquiry then necessitates another set of considerations: Anat Pick has recently mapped a move in the work of Cora Diamond and Jacques Derrida “from rights to lives.”³⁸ The shift in terminology suggests that we need to bring animal studies and posthumanism in conversation with inquiries into the way biopolitics operates in that biopolitics at its core aggregates to itself the power to define whose “lives” matter.

Michel Foucault coined the terms biopolitics and biopower but never fully elaborated on them in his work. As Michael Donnelly has observed, Foucault “wrote comparatively little” about “such regulatory controls,” especially when we consider that “it is the population or species-body, emerging as a field of intervention and then as the ultimate end of government, which leads Foucault to conceptualize that new cluster of power relations, beyond the juridical framework of sovereignty, which he describes as the ‘governmentalisation of the State.’”³⁹ Foucault identified two vectors of biopower: one, the “anatomo-politics of the human body,” which were “ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines”; and two, “a biopolitics of the population.”⁴⁰ These two aspects of biopower position it between disciplinarity and governmentality. They reconcile the central tension in political philosophy between the individual (Locke) and the collective (Hobbes) model of subject formation in the modern state.⁴¹ In Foucault’s theorization, the collective and the individual produce each other: in order for the body to be marked as human, an understanding of population as species must be in place.

But this tautology by which human and population (as well as population and human) define one another as the proper terrain of the political is itself a conceit of biopower’s operation and comes at the deliberate exclusion of the nonhuman from the realm of political representation. Animals are integral in two ways to a full understanding of biopolitics. First, the “anatomo-politics” of the modern state does not limit its reach to human bodies but also exercises power over animal bodies; and second, the differentiation between human beings and animals is the fundamental mechanism by which biopolitics exerts power. This fluidity by which affect determines ontology is not a failure of biopolitics, but its operative core: as Nicole Shukin has argued, biopower hinges on the “production of species difference as a strategically ambivalent rather than absolute line, allowing for the contradictory power to both dissolve and reinscribe borders between humans and animals.”⁴² Affect is historically produced and regulated, and this affective ambivalence is central to the process by which subject formation occurs in the biopolitical state.⁴³

Biopolitical theory and animal studies have markedly different critical genealogies and have, to date, had little to say to each other. As Cary Wolfe has recently pointed out, animal studies has largely ignored the political frame that biopolitics offers, and biopolitical theorists have largely ignored the question of how animals might figure into theorizations of sovereign power (with the result that these theorists themselves run the risk of replicating the model of sovereign politics they set out to analyze and critique).⁴⁴ Both fields have had virtually no engagement with gender and sexuality.⁴⁵ This book fills that gap and advances our understanding of the crucial role animals play for the psychosexual formation of biopolitical subjectivity.⁴⁶

Whereas animal studies has largely been an American phenomenon (and that is not to dismiss the vibrant interest currently under way in Australia, Germany, and elsewhere), biopolitical theory has been developed primarily in Europe, especially in French and Italian philosophy. But biopolitical theory has recently entered the American academy with a vengeance.⁴⁷ The sudden but massive scrutiny that biopolitical theory, especially the work of Giorgio Agamben, has received in the past decade can be explained by American academics’ renewed interest in understanding the exercises of sovereign power. Two particular focal points have been, one, the use of the rule of exception to expand presidential executive power and, two, the rhetoric of American exceptionalism, both driven by the American response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. At its inception, American studies focused on exceptionalism. Although that focus initially took a celebratory form in the symbol–myth–image school’s readings of American culture as a coherent enterprise of encountering new intellectual and geographic territories, that reading and its concomitant assumptions about subjectivity came under scrutiny in the late 1970s, when exceptionalism itself became an object of criticism rather than a field-defining paradigm.⁴⁸ The work especially of Giorgio Agamben on the use of exception in relation to sovereignty has thus fallen on fertile ground. But a larger dialogue among American studies, biopolitical theory, and animal studies has yet to emerge, and this book maps some of the ways in which we might imagine that conversation unfolding.

In response to Foucault’s theory of biopower, two major schools of thought have developed: one, represented chiefly by Giorgio Agamben, sees biopower as a negative force tied to death, whereas the other, as represented by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito, emphasizes an affirmative version of biopower. What emerges from this discussion, as I argue, is a larger issue by which the question of what counts as life and who exerts power over life hinges on a complex system of representations. It is in the struggle over defining biopower that the figurative and the literal, the political and the scientific, encounter each other at the intersection that modernity tries to negate (more on that later). Even when animals function figuratively, those figurations are often more messy than we might suspect. Susan McHugh argues that

the ideals of intersubjective relations … effectively unsettle habits of mind that otherwise render intimacies within and across other species insignificant, and along the way model approaches to gaining and sustaining more meaningful engagements. Together they begin to explain why, in lieu of definitively identifying individual agents as subjects, questions about the narrative functions of animals and animality lead directly to concerns about populations, that is, the possibilities for nonsubjective agency forms required of whole ways of life, and so lead to open-ended engagements with the biopolitics of life itself…. [F]amiliar household pets like cats and dogs serve on the front lines of people’s everyday attempts to work out these problems.⁴⁹

Animal representations form the nexus where biopolitical relationships get worked out. My book argues that we need to focus specifically on American literature as a key site for that negotiation. To develop an understanding of the important functions animal representations take on in the struggle over biopower, I draw on two key scholarly interventions into theorizations of biopower and animal studies—one by Andrew Benjamin in his analysis of Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy and the other by Alice Kuzniar, who works out a theory of productive abjection in her work on animal representations.

According to Giorgio Agamben, the power to differentiate between life forms is key to the exercise of sovereign power in the modern state. Revitalizing categories first introduced by Aristotle, Agamben argues that life is divided between bios, which refers to life in its political forms, and zoē, a physiological life that is excluded from but foundational to the political order. Foucault was the first to remark on how the sign of the animal emerged, in Shukin’s description, as the “threshold of biological modernity, marking a shift to ‘untamed ontology’ or ‘life itself’ as the new object of power.”⁵⁰ For Agamben, sovereignty is the exercise of determining which life forms count as bios. To make that determination, the sovereign must remove himself from bios: he inhabits an exceptional position that mirrors the homo sacer (sacred man) of Roman law and the wolf-man of Germanic law—that is, the form of life that is placed outside of the law.

It is important to note three problems with Agamben’s model: his absent treatment of gender, his monolithic account of history, and his Eurocentric views of race. First, Agamben reads Aristotle selectively in that he sets aside Aristotle’s examination—in his writings on natural history as well as in his writings on politics—of sexual difference. Agamben thereby arrives at a theory of biopower that ignores gender as a category of analysis (thus going against the Foucauldian grain) and that is implicitly masculine. Second, Agamben privileges his version of Aristotelian philosophy as the dominant and only model for understanding political power and Western attitudes to life. Writing about the moral status of animals, Gary Steiner proposes that a flexibility of categories marks “Homeric and pre-Socratic thought.” That flexibility, says Steiner, is not simply replaced by Aristotelian determinations but presents an ongoing challenge to them that makes Western philosophy’s relationship to animals far more complicated and less monolithic than many scholars have suggested: “Some aspects of that early openness persist in Western thought and conflict with the dominant line of thought.”⁵¹ Agamben posits the Aristotelian model of power as a transhistoric monolith for organizing biopower. Dominick LaCapra has taken Agamben to task for “an insufficiently situated version of transhistorical, structural, or existential trauma that, in Agamben’s account, may well induce an evasion or misconstruction of specific historical, social and political problems, including the status and use of the animal in society.”⁵² And third, Agamben’s model remains Eurocentric by not taking into account the global and imperial mappings on which biopower depends. The mirroring of the sovereign and the wolf-man is refracted: explaining how the exclusion from bios is racialized and territorialized, Achille Mbembe argues that we must understand biopolitics as a fundamental mechanism of colonialism, founded in slavery and operational today in an array of global conflicts.⁵³ In the colonial context, biopolitics operates by producing race as a category of alterity. Barred from political life, these racialized, nonwhite “others” experience biopolitics as “necropolitics”—that is, as an exercise of power that hinges on what has been problematized as a social death. Necropolitics is a condition for “the deathly logic of citizenship that sentenced women and slaves to excessive and lethal embodiment” in order to “reanimate the lifeless citizen, hinting that his abstract identity and legal authority always rests on memories, corporeal residues, and other material contexts, no matter how completely disavowed or forgotten they seem.”⁵⁴ As Ann Laura Stoler writes, “Domains of the intimate … are strategic for exploring two related but often discretely understood sources of colonial control: one that works through the requisition of bodies—those of both colonials and colonized—and a second that molds new ‘structures of feeling’—new habits of heart and mind that enable those categories of difference and subject formation.”⁵⁵ Biopolitics, states Anthony Bogues, has to “trap both the imagination and desire” in its quest to “shape, control, and make human life in its own image.”⁵⁶ That task makes literature both central to and excluded from its operations, as I argue at greater length in subsequent chapters. The reliance on imagination and desire places representation and affect at the core of biopower’s operation. Biopower depends on regulating representation and affect precisely because imagination and desire make it possible to oppose the “death drive of imperial power” and its totalizing aspirations.⁵⁷ But what form can that opposition take?⁵⁸

The question is complicated by the collusion between death and desire that developed in the nineteenth century, as Philippe Ariès has documented.⁵⁹ This dimension of desire is all but absent from current accounts of biopower’s operation. I make it key to my analysis: I examine different practices and representations of animal love to understand how the affective engagement with animals functions as a site of biopolitical regulation as well as resistance. I read two moments in the seventeenth century as being central to the emergence of a specifically American biopolitics: the criminalization of bestiality at Plymouth Plantation and the related development—in the wake of John Locke’s Thoughts on Education (1693)—of animal pedagogy, a term Kelly Oliver defines as “discourses” that use animals to “teach us to be human.”⁶⁰ Instead of charting a telos by which the disciplining of bodies gives way to other forms of governmentality, I read these two strands of animal love as being “organized around a radical and irreducible incoherence,” as Eve Sedgwick puts it, and as generating what she calls “overlapping, contradictory, and conflictual definitional forces” that create a “performative space of contradiction.”⁶¹ This book examines how the double legacy of animal love (that is, bestiality and “puppy love” as conjoined discourses) gets worked out in American literature’s engagement with animals in order to explicate an iconography that haunts our current understandings of subjectivity and that links colonialism with neoliberalism, particularly in its strategies of infantilization and its depictions of children and animals as subjects in the making.

Whereas Agamben’s work focuses mainly on the thanatological drift in biopolitics, Roberto Esposito has tried to counter that focus with a model of affirmative biopolitics, which he arrives at via a reworking of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s model of the multitude that resists empire. In an interview conducted by Timothy Campbell, Esposito usefully sums up the differences between these models and the importance of his intervention:

Where Agamben accentuates the negative, even tragic tonality of the biopolitical phenomenon in a strongly dehistoricizing modality—one that pays tribute to Heidegger, Schmitt, and Benjamin—Negri, on the contrary, insists on the productive, expansive, or more precisely vital element of the biopolitical dynamic…. Indeed, Negri imagines that biopolitics can contribute to the reconstruction of a revolutionary horizon in the heart of empire, and in so doing, he absolutely accentuates the moment of resistance to power, in opposition to the letter of the Foucauldian text. For my own part, I don’t radicalize one of the two semantic polarities of biopolitics to the detriment of the other. Instead I have tried to move the terms of the debate by providing a different interpretive key that is capable of reading them together, while accounting for the antinomical relation between them. All done without renouncing the historical dimension, as Agamben does, and without immediately collapsing the philosophical prospective into a political one, as Negri does.⁶²

For Esposito, there is no zoē separate from bios. Perceiving resistance against the death drive as located in positions that are not exterior to power, he sees power in conflict with forces that are not always already abjected and that are more closely aligned with Foucault’s original view of biopower as productive. The model that emerges in Esposito is far messier than the one we get in Agamben. Instead of seeing biopolitics in relation to a symmetry between sovereignty and homo sacer, Esposito locates biopolitics in bodies, forces, technologies, disciplines, and institutions that are constitutive of biopolitics but that also map a terrain of power relations that is much more complicated than a model premised on state sovereignty. Arguing that the modalities of bios cannot be inscribed in the borders of the conscious subject and therefore cannot be limited to persons, Esposito’s work opens up a larger terrain of thinking about power. Although Agamben’s contribution lies in showing how the anthropological apparatus needs a remainder (one he variously frames as the homo sacer or the animal or the wolf-man) that needs to be excluded from the operations of power that depend on it, thinking about the affirmative dimensions of biopower opens up the possibility of seeing animals in a position that need not always be abjected. There are two interconnected ways of examining that double operation: one in relation to affect—for instance, in the model Alice Kuzniar works out (via the theorizations of Julia Kristeva) in arguing for melancholia as a site where abjection becomes productive of new representational possibilities—and a second in relation to language, as we see in the work of Andrew Benjamin, to whom I now turn.

Animal representations provide a way of rethinking the equation of biopolitics with thanatopolitics. In his work on Maurice Blanchot, Andrew Benjamin gives an account of how such a rethinking might be possible and of the crucial role that literature plays in the process. Taking as his point of departure the “question of human being” and challenging “an eventual equation of that question with death,” Benjamin affords a central role to animals in thinking biopolitics beyond thanatopolitics. The challenge for this undertaking lies in the fact that, seemingly, “the propriety of human being demands either the exclusion or the death of the animal.” But death itself takes on complicated and multiple meanings in this context. Pointing out that “it is vital to note that the place of the animal within much philosophical and literary writing is positioned by a death that is no mere death,” Benjamin confronts the difficulty of accounting philosophically “for a radically different situation—one in which the particularity of human being was not dependent on forms of privation and sacrifice.” For Benjamin, that situation raises fundamental questions: “What would be the effect on being human—and thus the thinking of that being philosophically—if the maintained animal were allowed? If, that is, the ‘without relation’ gave way to a fundamentally different form of relationality?” For Benjamin, that “different form of relationality” emerges through animals’ ability to figure a “distance that both joins and separates,” a distance that “cannot be thought outside its founding relation to death,” but that functions as a “between” and as such “identifies a form of commonality, the common as the co-presence of ethos and place in addition to death, brings community to the fore. More importantly, it positions the question of community such that it eschews a relation given by sameness and allows for the introduction of a sense of alterity. Rather than merely being the other to the same, alterity in this context is defined in terms of founding ‘irreciprocity.’”⁶³ This figuration fundamentally unsettles a dichotomy between the human and the animal and enables us to think beyond the structures of the dyad sovereign/homo sacer. The multiplication of death that takes place via the animal’s sacrificial position as a structuring device of human being also introduces a fundamental plurality to the very notion of subjectivity, a plurality that cannot be thought of separately from its relation to animals. Allowing for the “maintained animal” to have an ongoing relevance multiplies its presence. Thinking about “real” animals and “real” human beings also requires taking into account figurative animals and figurative human beings—and vice versa. Instead of functioning as a delimitation that consolidates ontological differences and circumscribes the realm of the properly symbolic, “the maintained animal” opens them up.

In that proliferation, a collapse of these categories themselves takes place, as Benjamin explains:

For Blanchot, the point at which literary language and thus writing takes place, is encapsulated in the moment when it becomes possible to say (more accurately, to write, and thus never to say!), “When I speak death speaks in me” (Quand je parle la mort parle en moi). “When” here is both a singular utterance and announces an action, thus indicating the moment that should have been absorbed into the “I” who speaks while yielding that “I,” for there cannot be pure particularity here. This impossibility is not due to the presence of an original plurality, but to the fact that the death in question, the one that “speaks in me,” is already doubled. The “I” in whom death speaks is there, and only there, as the result of a death that makes that “I” possible. There is therefore what can be described as a “death of possibility”—namely, the unannounced sacrificial death within death’s now doubled presence. The animal dies in order that there be alterity. In more general terms, the force of the questions “who and what dies?” springs from their necessary relation to both literature and writing…. It is clear that the relationship constructed by death’s emphatic presence—the presence in which the dying of the other always occurs—defines particularity and intimacy.⁶⁴

Emily Dickinson captures this complicated philosophical statement in one line (as I explain in chapter 4): “there was a fly buzzed when I died.” In Benjamin’s view, the fundamental relation between the “I” and an alterity that is not simply another “I” but a structuring and interconnected part of that “I” connects “death and the logic of sacrifice—death’s double presence—as that which founds community.” This reading of death as enabling an affirmative biopolitics is a fundamental departure from Agamben: for Agamben, the operative logic of thanatopolitics is its destruction of both subjectivity and community. In Benjamin’s reading of Blanchot, the opposite holds true: that it is the proliferation of death and the structure of animal death that “founds community.” But the difficulty then becomes how to think of that community in relation to animals: if “community occurs with the sacrifice of the animal,” then how would it be possible to inscribe animals within that community in any meaningful way? “The reiteration of the logic of sacrifice,” after all, “continues to position the animal’s inclusion as predicated upon the necessary and productive nature of its death.” For Benjamin, the answer lies with language or, more specifically, with an “Adamic naming in relation to the animal,” where naming “affirms relation.”⁶⁵ Such naming “preserves the animal” “within a space that will always be contested, and where the endlessness of the naming has as its correlate the inevitable endlessness of the ‘nameless unspoken language’” that I associate especially with voice in the chapters to come. Writing, says Benjamin, then becomes the way in which we can imagine an alternative biopolitics that does justice to animals: “Both the endless naming and the nameless unspoken language operate within domains and relations in which one neither exhausts nor masters the other. Both continue within their difference. The animal will have been maintained. Writing will continue. There is another relation to the other.”⁶⁶ My book explores what that other relation might look like and how American literature negotiates its relationship to biopolitics and subjectivity via animal representations.

American (Animal) Literature and the Politics of Countermodernity

I am interested in tracing the cultural work that animal representations do, first, as the other in a set of binaries that are constitutive of the subject and, second, as the middle ground that enables and unsettles that binarization. On the one hand, animals function as the absolute other of the human subject; they are the negatively defined nonhuman. On the other hand, animals serve as mediators between the subject and its others. A problematic double articulation emerges of what we mean by “animal”: (“the”) animal is the binary opposite of (“the”) human. But animals, especially when figured as pets, also function as a middle ground between sets of binaries that oppose the subject and the object, the human and the nonhuman, the psychological and the physiological, the real and the symbolic. In that sense, animal representations are mediators; they perform what Jacques Rancière calls a “process of subjectivization that bridges the interval between two forms” of existence.⁶⁷ Animal representations mark the limit of the subject and reveal the mechanisms of its functioning. But even beyond that, “representations” mark a paradox: whereas in political contexts representation suggests the ability to be recognized by a subject in the political system and to participate in it, in the context of literature representation is a more generic term for depiction. In speaking about “animal representations,” I am gesturing toward a set of tensions: in political contexts, animals cannot have representation; in literary contexts, they can be represented, though it is questionable even there whether they can participate in any meaningful way in that representation. And yet I want to suggest that it is on the grounds of such representations that the terms of animals’ exclusion become legible—that animals achieve a representation of their exclusion from representation and that here at minimum a critique of and at best an alternative to this exclusion becomes possible.

This approach presents a challenge to the way animal studies has been configured as a field: as Christine Kenyon-Jones points out, a “literary approach” has until recently been “at odds with many other cultural studies of animals, which have deliberately excluded art and literature from their discussions.”⁶⁸ This reluctance has been based on a suspicion that “canonical art and literature … has little connection with real creatures,” according to Harriet Ritvo.⁶⁹ I explore and question that assumption by asking how literature grapples with the meaning of “real” animals and the possibilities as well as limitations for their depiction. Instead of seeing representation as a hindrance to an engagement with animals, as Erica Fudge worried it might be for historians,⁷⁰ I suggest that animal representations on the contrary provide an important opportunity to inquire into the bigger mystery: not why we have constructions of animality, but the fact that the construct animal gets to inhabit a position of the ontologically real.

I selected the case studies that form the focus of my analysis on the basis that they are ones in which the writers imagine their texts as spaces of engagement, where language is not a medium for representing animals, but a grounds for encountering them. That makes literature the site where the relationship with animals is worked out—where it is not an already formed subject that enters into the articulation of its intimate connections, but where the expression of relationships fundamentally confront us with questions of subjectivity. Literature is not a point of separation or distinction, but a means of encounter, and it is in literature that we confront the irreducible alterity of animals that is the basis for a relationship beyond anthropomorphism. As Laura Brown has argued, “Neither alterity nor anthropomorphism, in itself, can account for the versatility and complex nature of the imaginary animal.” Whereas the “opposing claims that see the animal either through the lens of anthropomorphism or [through the lens] of alterity have largely shaped the critical understanding of animal-kind,” it is possible to move beyond that duality: “literature provides an alternative model.”⁷¹ My aim is to understand what that model has to offer us for the American context and vice versa.

Taking up the question of “the animal” in relationship to literature might be seen as replicating a central problem: that animals are being represented in language and that language is always already a human construct. I find Susan McHugh’s reflections particularly helpful in addressing this issue: arguing that “the problems of metaphor especially point to the danger of arriving at the same old conclusions, namely that animals are only literary as human subjects,” she suggests that “putting the relationship between these forms of literary criticism and historical methodologies under scrutiny disturbs the sedimentation of these patterns of reading literary animals in western humanist traditions, and the interdisciplinary methods of animal studies prove particularly useful in launching this critique” because such “readings of animal representations inform and are informed by axiological and other ‘unnatural’ histories.”⁷² McHugh, then, presents use with two challenges that I take up: one, seeing animal representations as a way of producing alternative “histories” and, two, thinking about what animal representations have to offer us for our readings of American literature.

Countermodernity

Animals are a recent invention. In his landmark two-volume publication Man and the Natural World, Keith Thomas traced changing attitudes toward animals.⁷³ Initially an undifferentiated part of nature that was subject to conquest and exploitation, animals only gradually gained recognition as distinct from a broader natural landscape. By about 1800, animals had attained a special status (one unevenly distributed among different animals) as being able to enter into fellowship with human beings. Thomas links these changes to empirical methods of science and pays particular attention to new descriptions of the natural world that no longer relied primarily on analogies with human beings and on symbolic meanings.⁷⁴ He pays particular attention to the work of Comte de Buffon and Carolus Linnaeus for developing biological taxonomies that established a physical likeness between human beings and animals.⁷⁵ However, Thomas not only examines philosophical changes but also thinks about changing social parameters and in particular links changes in attitudes toward animals to urbanization, which he associates with the reduction of human beings’ exposure to animals and with the simultaneous rise of pet keeping.⁷⁶ The meaning of the term pet changed in the process: initially referring to lambs—that is, to domesticated farm animals—it came to mean any animal kept for enjoyment as opposed to utility. In the American context, farm animals are largely a neglected category, with the scholarly focus being on “wild animals” or on “pets” in the term’s later meaning.

Mary Allen’s 1983 publication Animals in American Literature, is among the first—and up until recently, among the only—books to examine the presence of “literal animals” in American literature. Allen argues that “it was during the Darwinian awakening that the first great blossoming of American literature took place,” and she connects the two. For Allen, the focus in American literature is on “wild animals.”⁷⁷ By contrast, Jennifer Mason’s Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900, published twenty-two years later, explores the role of urbanization and pets in (roughly) the same time period. The difference between Allen’s and Mason’s books is instructive for the way literary analyses of animals have developed over the past twenty years: whereas Allen sees animals as “realistic” in that they are “wild, terrestrial beings,” Mason wants to locate the realism of animals in urban setting and creatures, where a melding between nature and culture has already taken place, and argues that we need to read animals beyond “America’s affair with the frontier.”⁷⁸ What both Allen and Mason share and what I in turn share with them is a resistance against claims such as Steve Baker’s that “the animal is the first thing to be ruled out of modernism’s bounds.”⁷⁹ On the contrary, to understand modernism requires understanding the emergence of biopower in relation to animals. Whereas Mason speaks of the “domesticated/wild animal divide,”⁸⁰ I question the notion of a divide and think about the way in which these concepts both crucially enable one another and remain highly volatile categories. That volatility becomes evident, for instance, in the intrusion of Edgar Allen Poe’s orangutan into the inner sanctum of the domestic, the room with no exit, where domesticity is the ultimate confine that nevertheless is penetrated by the orangutan, that oxymoronic creature, the soldier’s wild pet.

In “Looking at Animals,” John Berger argues that for the medieval peasant it was possible to love and kill the animals he raised. As Berger puts it, “Animals came from over the horizon. They belonged there and here. Likewise, they were mortal and immortal…. This—maybe the first existential dualism—was reflected in the treatment of animals. They were subjected and worshipped, bred and sacrificed. Today the vestiges of this dualism remain among those who live intimately with, and depend upon, animals. A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not by a but.”⁸¹ Whereas for Berger this “and” disappears with the removal of animals from our daily lives and their replacement by the attenuated creatures that are pets, I trace how it persists at the core of subject formation and especially in relation to affect. Philip Armstrong argues that “first—like the conceptualization of humanity, inhumanity, rationality and other terms fundamental to Enlightenment modernity—the culture of sensibility cannot be understood without reference to human–animal interactions…. Second, early eighteenth-century manifestations of sympathetic engagement between humans and other animals proved to be remarkably varied.”⁸² Jonathan Lamb has identified a spectrum of sympathetic relationships between human beings and animals that emerged in the eighteenth century. Troping on William Hogarth’s image sequence “Four Stages of Cruelty” (1751), which depicts scenes of animal abuse, Lamb traces “four stages of likeness” that provide a “schematic account of sympathy.” First, “physiological similarities” provide the basis for recognizing “the symptoms of our own emotions in others.” Second, those commonalities “raise questions of the rights belonging to those with whom we sympathise”; and third, a “more oblique degree of resemblance” arises “by means of imagination or figurative expressions.” Finally, sympathy erases all differences and “proclaims the identity of the subject and object.”⁸³ Lamb charts how these stages get worked out in Gulliver’s Travels and thereby links animal representations to the biopolitics of the early modern colonial enterprise.

My selection of case studies follows a cultural logic that Laura Brown usefully explains:

The experience of nonhuman animals was dramatically reshaped by two major and related historical phenomena that coincided in this period [the seventeenth century]: … [T]he globalizing context of mercantile capitalism, through travel, trade, and exploration … gave rise to an explosion of popular and scientific speculation about the relationship between humans and nonhuman animals that threw European thought into “turmoil,” … [raising] problems of ontology and [disrupting] accepted ideas of human identity or genealogy. At the same time, the cultural practice of pet keeping arose in the commercial, bourgeois society of eighteenth-century England, creating the companion animal as an antidote to the alienation and commodification of modern urban life…. Together these two historical innovations in human–animal contact generated a vital imaginative power that fundamentally shaped the idea and the roles of nonhuman animals as they are represented in the literature of the modern period.⁸⁴

Animals are not only a recent invention; they are an invention that goes hand in hand with the emergence of colonial modernity. Brown’s work participates—as does my own—in current investigations into the way in which animals are the grounds on which colonial and domestic power relations get negotiated. This enterprise goes back to Harriet Ritvo and Donna Haraway’s work from the 1980s.⁸⁵ And yet such “zoocriticism, understood here in the context of intersections between animal studies and postcolonialism, is still in its infancy.”⁸⁶ As Carrie Rohman has argued, we need to analyze the “animalizing of disenfranchised groups and the concomitant humanizing of imperialist power.” Useful as I find Rohman’s analysis, I disagree with her when she says that animality is “displac[ed] onto marginalized groups” via a mechanism of “scapegoating.” She argues that “the vigorous reentrenchment of Western sovereignty through the primarily racialized displacement of animality away from the European subject … reveals how deeply the animal threatened a destabilization of that subject.”⁸⁷ Of course, a passage like this needs to be read against the larger work of her book, which carefully reflects on what we might mean by “the subject” and locates animals and animality as integral to the subject’s fragmentations. Yet at moments like this Rohman’s writing risks suggesting that there is such as thing as “the” subject, that such a subject is stable, and that animals threaten its stability. What interests me is an instability that lies at the core of subjectivity and that strategically gets worked out by biopower. In my account, there is no subject that predates the relationship with animals—subjectivity emerges in and remains unhinged by cross-species encounters.

Central to my work, then, is the claim that “the human” and “the animal” are shifting and acquired constructs, and my chapters uncover a variety of ways in which this acquisition operates. Since the founding of the Great Ape Project in 1993, much work has been done to “prove that a variety of animal species possess the basic capabilities deemed necessary for subjectivity: self-consciousness, rational agency, the capacity to learn and transmit language.”⁸⁸ My focus is not on understanding animals’ shared humanity or uncovering “how animals made us human,” to invoke Paul Shepard’s title, which Temple Grandin repeats almost verbatim in her most recent work,⁸⁹ because I have no interest in an evolutionary account of human–animal relations or in tracing biological points of overlap via affective neuroscience. Although there are a few moments when I reference evolution—for instance, in my engagement with Donna Haraway’s work on “companion species” that have coevolved—I am tracing a different set of embodied relations and relational paradigms than the ones suggested by evolutionary theory.⁹⁰

Instead of mapping a history of human–animal ontology, I produce a genealogy of human–animal sexuality—a topic that remains taboo even in recent criticism. In tracing that genealogy, I am trying to retell the story of modern subject formation. The usual narrative goes like this (as Harriet Ritvo sums it up): “The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 is usually considered to mark the beginning of a new era in the study of life…. [C]ertainly for those who were persuaded by it, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection … eliminated the unbridgeable gulf that divided reasoning human being from irrational brute” and “dethroned humankind almost implicitly.”⁹¹ According to such accounts, the year 1859 marks a caesura by which the understanding of animals shifted from one of categorical difference to one of gradated kinship. But as Ritvo has shown in her own correction of the narrative she is summarizing, the history of human–animal relations is messier than this neat taxonomy would suggest, especially because of the ongoing relevance of the early modern period.

Scholars of the early modern period have documented what René Girard refers to as a “crisis of distinctions” in regard to human–animal relations,⁹² where, according to Fudge, the human as a “category begins to collapse into absurdity.”⁹³ One account of modernity insists, as Eileen Crist explains, that Cartesian philosophy resolved these ambiguities and that they did not resurface until the emergence of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.⁹⁴ With the notable exception of Philip Armstrong’s work, the field of animal studies itself has by and large replicated that periodization.⁹⁵ A strange bifurcation has emerged in how we define modernity, one that focuses on either the twentieth century (Eric Santner and Beatrice Hanssen, who study German texts) or the early modern period (Bruce Boehrer, Erica Fudge, and Laurie Shannon, who focus on British literature) but does not create a dialogue between these models of modernity and largely elides the American nineteenth century.⁹⁶ For that matter, some accounts of the field of animal studies explicitly perform that elision: in her introduction to Renaissance Beasts, Erica Fudge sides with Peter Harrison when she writes that “the seventeenth century is linked to the twentieth by the sheer volume of discussion in both about the place of animals. The early modern and the modern share a fixation on them that marks both periods as crucial to developments in the understanding of human relationships with animals and also marks animals as vital figures that historians of all kinds must take notice of if we are to offer a full assessment of that past and if we are to fully understand our own interests in the present.”⁹⁷ I find the idea of using modernism to link the early modern period with twentieth-century modernity compelling and have framed my book accordingly, but the bulk of my work focuses on the nineteenth century elided by these accounts of modernity and considers this century the crucial ground on which notions of biopolitics and liberal subjectivity get worked out via animal representations.

Bruno Latour has questioned our current taxonomizing of modernity by demonstrating modernity’s own crises of taxonomizing. He has described a disavowed conjunction between the representation of things and the representation of subjects.⁹⁸ I locate that conjunction in a range of animal representations in popular, canonical, mainstream, and obscure works. Those works tell a different tale of human–animal relations than the one that has emerged from the history of philosophy and history of science perspectives. Armstrong has developed this view for the context of an imperial modernity that grew out of Britain’s empire. Arguing that a “reconceptualization of agency” can “facilitate a mode of analysis that does not reduce the animal to a blank screen for the projection of human meaning, and might offer productive new ways of accounting for the material influence of the non-human animal upon humans, and vice versa,” he insists that a feature of “Enlightenment modernity” is “the formative role played by human–animal relations. Whether as a concept (animality) or as a brute reality (actual animals), non-humans play a constitutive role in the preoccupation of the modern enterprise: its relentless mobility (spatial, social, economic and epistemological), its development of commodity culture, its promotion of new scientific paradigms and its determination to reconceptualize the human.” Tracing that history back to British writers’ engagement with Descartes, whose work first appeared in a popular translation in 1694, Armstrong argues that English writers “scrutinized it sceptically and, more often than not, rejected it.” He sees eighteenth-century English literature as deconstructing “man” as well as the “crucial companion term, ‘animal.’” Central for that undertaking is John Locke, who “reverses Descartes’ method—the separation of rationality from the body, the abandonment of the latter to the realm of animality and the location of humanity in the former—by welding body and mind back together” so that “the development and testing of novel ways to manage the relationship between human and non-human life became the defining labour of modernity.” Armstrong argues that out of this engagement emerged “two competing structures of feeling at work in the eighteenth century, namely the intellectual detachment of projectors (both scientific and capitalist) … and the exorbitant sympathetic identification embodied by Gulliver, who experiences being treated as an animal and eventually aligns himself so completely with the virtues of an equine species that he can no longer bear the company of humans.”⁹⁹ The forms of writing on which I focus are ones in which questions of who and what counts as a subject takes center stage as the object of inquiry: slave narratives, lyric poetry, animal autobiography, and confessional writing (a category into which both William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” fit in different ways). Like Latour, Armstrong, and McHugh, I believe that it is important to get “out from under the master narratives of evolution, ecology, and more pervasively of disciplines,” as McHugh puts it, and that doing so “requires this understanding that stories can (and indeed always) do more than represent selves at the expense of others.”¹⁰⁰

But how do we engage with “others” responsibly? Instead of asking how, whether, and when animals should be included in existing models of subjectivity, I argue that they already underlie the core of that subjectivity—that definitions of self-consciousness, rational agency, the capacity to use language are foundationally underwritten by an understanding of “the human” as emerging in relation to “the animal” and that we need to go the other direction and envision viable forms of alterity that are neither appropriative nor oppressive. The danger in this approach lies in using animals for purposes that remain anthropocentric. Keenly aware of that problem, I believe that my work on the contrary unsettles anthropocentrism at its core by demonstrating that there can be no centering of the human because the human is a relational category that cannot be separated from the animal. This view does not, however, negate a power differential that lies in that core, and I remain attentive throughout to the question how that power gets played out and played against. The case studies that I chose concern writers who recognize the dual cooptation of a power structure that uses not only violence (a model I develop via Agamben) but also affect (which I historicize via Locke and theorize through Foucault’s legacy in the works of Rei Terada and others) to structure “the human” in its relation to “the animal.” What interests me is not the distinction between human beings and animals, but their complex and shifting relationship to one another. That relationship has the human and the animal as constantly changing coordinates. Tracing those shifts and their implications for the limitations and possibilities of complex subjectivities lies at the center of this project. I focus on the terrain where questions of species—human, animal—get worked out at the intersections with race and gender.

The “animal turn” may raise a concern about the reinscription of “the human” as an operative concept that gender studies, critical race theory, and post-structuralism have critiqued in their different ways. Whereas the larger field of animal studies works on the level of philosophical abstraction, weighing “the human” in relation to “the animal,” I agree with Donna Landry’s trenchant assessment of these debates when she writes that “cultural specificity is more compelling than … philosophical concern with ‘the animal’” and that “we need to interrogate the significance of the various ‘social, cultural, economic, political and environmental contexts’ that gave shape to particular relationships between humans and animals, and to particular representations of animals, in specific times and places.”¹⁰¹ Animals are often referenced as a universal category, but this book develops an understanding of the specific cultural work that animals and animality (terms that call for repeated definitions and reconsiderations) do in the context of American literature.

American (Animal) Literature

Scholarship that emerged in the 1990s demonstrated that nationalism depends on affective structures that make up a “love of country,” whether that is “an eroticized nationalism” or the “commerce between eros and nation” runs “in the other direction,” for instance by producing homophobia.¹⁰² Borrowing from Anne McClintock’s claim about gender, this book argues that “theories of nationalism have tended to ignore species as a category constitutive of nationalism itself” and that “nationalism is constituted from the very beginning as [an animal] discourse, and cannot be understood without a theory of [species] power.”¹⁰³ In this quote, I replaced the word gender with the words animal and species, but that rewriting on my part itself will need to come under scrutiny for raising the question whether species erases gender and under what circumstances one can serve as a substitute for the other. For now, I turn my attention to another matter: What is the relation between species and nation, and how might an understanding of American literature shed light on that question?

American literary studies has until recently fallen into a trap that Walter Benjamin noted in his essay on the tenth anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death: the trap that “it is possible to read Kafka’s animal stories for quite a while without realising that they are not about human beings at all.”¹⁰⁴ I do not want to follow Benjamin and say that American animal stories are not about human beings “at all” but rather to suggest two things: one, that animals are animals in American literature and that we have not adequately accounted for them as such; and two, that accounting for them as such will change how we read that literature. Carrie Rohman worries that “historicist readings have proven inadequate to the task of illuminating the complexities of the subject’s relation to animality within and beyond symbolic codes.”¹⁰⁵ Cary Wolfe similarly has recently taken to task “current U.S. literary and cultural studies and their ruling disciplinary norms, which are, at the current moment historicist,” and has objected that this approach “takes for granted and reproduces a specific picture of the knowing subject that undercuts the putative historicist commitment to the materiality, heterogeneity, and externality of historical forces: a subject that is clearly … an ideological expression of liberalism.”¹⁰⁶ I take up these provocations to ask what a historicist approach might look like that does not take for granted that it knows the knowing subject and that tries to understand the complexities of liberalism’s ideological constructions.

Anyone writing on animals in nineteenth-century American literature owes a debt to Jennifer Mason, and this book certainly participates in her query into “the dynamic relationship between people’s lived relations with animals and the multiple, species-specific and often markedly affective discourses relating to these animals” as “essential for understanding the contest for power in the human social order” as it is “played out in literary texts.” Mason focuses on a distinct period, from 1850 to 1900, which she identifies as one in which Americans reflected on “their affinities with animals” in relation to “the built environment,” especially with respect to increasing urbanization. Mason’s periodization (like Mary Allen’s, which traces its account from the 1850s forward) coincides with the way American literature was initially canonized—that is, with F. O. Matthiessen’s argument that a distinctly American literature emerged in the 1850s. This focus leads Mason to conclude that “we are the inheritors of beliefs about the importance of emotional connection to animals generated in the nineteenth century” but also of “repressions sustaining current narratives about animal politics and animals’ significance to American literary and cultural history.”¹⁰⁷ I find Mason’s work tremendously compelling and engage with her specific contributions throughout my own work. But my work challenges hers in two important ways: by insisting that we need to look at a much longer genealogy (as I explained earlier) and by resisting the repressive hypothesis that Mason develops and looking at the tremendous proliferation of discourses that the affective relationship with animals has generated.

For the discussion of American literature’s relationship to animals, Mary Allen’s inaugural work precluded a discussion of sexuality, which the field has by and large continued to follow—although recent interest in the connections between Darwinian and Freudian theory seems to be pointing to a change.¹⁰⁸ Allen wrote that “in American literature animals offer a type of purity that rarely conflicts with violence but does require chastity. Their most peculiar characteristic is the avoidance of sexual activity—even the absence of desire. Virility is assumed in most cases, but mating is as much to be avoided by the animal as by the human character…. Animals are generally beyond sexual activity…. With animals, the American writer might have released Puritan inhibition and shown lust without guilt. But that did not happen.”¹⁰⁹

I question these assumptions and locate animals and sexuality at the very core of an investigation that goes back to some of the earliest records of human–animal interaction in New England: bestiality trials. This book traces a history of human–animal sexuality through the connected permutations of bestiality and puppy love to understand how subjectivity depends on sexualized animal bodies and affective pet relations. The scholarly literature on such relations uses the larger rubric of zoophilia to capture various permutations ranging from the violent (zoosadism) to the nonviolent.¹¹⁰ The term zoophilia was coined by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in 1894 and has encompassed a range of practices; for instance, “sometimes a general love of animals without any sexual interest has been called zoophilia.”¹¹¹ Although the term bestiality has long been a catch-all for cross-species affective relations, a more differentiated discussion has emerged recently among social scientists (psychologists, anthropologists, criminologists) whose data “support the existence of another phenomenon closely related to bestiality—zoophilia—where the key feature, in addition to sexual interactions, is a strong emotional involvement with the animal.”¹¹² Although I tie much of that discussion to my analysis of bestiality, I do not see the term bestiality as functioning as a “singular and reductive signifier”¹¹³ for a variety of affective relations between human and nonhuman animals. Instead, I see bestiality as pointing to a spectrum of affective relationships that are subject to different forms of scrutiny and control and that are, most important, at the very core of the way subjectivity emerges in pedagogical and cultural contexts.

Even among scholars invested in examining affective relationships with animals, the subject of bestiality remains taboo. Alice Kuzniar has critiqued the work of Kathleen Kete, Harriet Ritvo, John Berger, Marc Shell, Yi-fu Tuan, and even Marjorie Garber for distancing itself “from the seriousness of pet love.” Kuzniar’s work goes a long way toward impressing on us that seriousness and working out a complex model of alternative intimacy. But for all her own complicated and compelling insights into the topic, she persists in defining “pet love” as everything except bestiality: the term bestiality is not listed in the index to her book, and, by my count, she mentions it only three times (on pages 10, 109 and 130). There might of course be a very good reason for this—namely, a principled definition of bestiality as a violently unequal relationship that cannot encompass a viable notion of “love.” But even and especially if that is the case, we need to examine the complex cultural negotiations by which differentiations between bestiality and “pet love” operate so that we can consider what they reveal about biopower. We may still, then, pause and puzzle over a moment in Kuzniar that seems out of keeping with her careful analysis of shame and abjection and that turns her focus away from melancholia to dog love as a form of jouissance: “Those who have an ardor for dogs know that such passion is unavailable and inaccessible elsewhere: it opens up the subject in unique ways that, precisely because independent of gender and sexuality, are liberating.”¹¹⁴ There are many things in this statement with which I agree: the idea of dog love as pointing to an affect “unavailable and inaccessible elsewhere” resonates with arguments I develop here, as does the emphasis on the way this affect opens up our understandings of subjectivity. But my focus on animal love as a site where raced sexuality gets negotiated takes issue with the idea that dog love is “independent of gender and sexuality” and that this independence would necessarily be “liberating.” As I demonstrate, the affective relationship to animals is a site where gender and sexuality get worked out and worked through. Because that negotiation depends on mechanisms of racialization and othering, the “liberating” qualities we might see here are ones we want to qualify carefully.

Such caution applies particularly to the context of animal love as a queer relation, which several writers are currently celebrating. Again, Alice Kuzniar’s work provides an important reference point. She writes that “one of the major repercussions of pet love is that it reorients companionship and kinship away from the normative strictures of heterosexual coupling and the traditional family.”¹¹⁵ For Kuzniar, that reorientation has the potential of continuing and furthering the work of queer studies that interrogates the binaries that arise from inflexible gender and sexual identity categories: “Our affective life with its fluctuating sensual needs, devotions and obsessions can be complex and inconsistent in ways that call into question self-definitions based primarily on sexual preference. Object choice as in the case of the pet can complicate, as does the fetish, a simplistic adherence to male–female or hetero–homosexual binaries when defining one’s intimate self. In other words, to admit that one’s object choice might not always be restricted to one’s own species means to loosen the power granted sexual identity categories to socially regulate the individual.”¹¹⁶ For reasons that become obvious in my book’s frame (its first and final chapters), I particularly like Kuzniar’s claim that dog love is “queer beyond queer!” and her justification of that claim via a reading of animal affect as a triangulated relationship.¹¹⁷ Although I certainly explore the liberating potential she and others ascribe to cross-species affection, I am wary of embracing too readily any celebratory optimism. For one thing, the larger history that I chart demonstrates how animal love is not simply a move “away from the normative strictures of heterosexual coupling and the traditional family” but also deeply inscribed at their core, as becomes evident in the fact that the first family must show its normalcy and normativity by being dog lovers. Moreover, the ability to celebrate dog love as liberating strangely depends on the object choice’s not being flexible in the sense that the object is defined as a dog and that this definition is given fixed ontological meaning. But if we grapple with the way biopower constructs and unsettles the human/animal binary and think about overlapping territories, one thing that opens up and requires careful consideration is a domain of animality whose complicated sociocultural history is deeply rooted in colonialism, slavery, and sexism. It seems to me, then, that for the American context, we need to understand that history and the instrumentalization of animals and animality that produced that history before we can decide on the mechanisms and conditions that would turn animal love into an alternative to the very system it has helped put in place.

Here, then, is also a point where I want to be very cautious of the current embrace—my own included—of posthumanist theories that see species boundary crossing as part of a liberating narrative, whether sexual or otherwise. There is a history by which species blurring and boundary crossing has been at the very heart of race- and gender-based violence, and it seems vitally important to me to parce out that history if we are to pursue this line of inquiry. My turn to literature is meant to provide a model for a particularly important methodology for such engagement. Because literary representations of animals always implicitly if not explicitly raise the question of whether the animal is to be taken literally or figuratively (with the Puritans intriguingly collapsing the two, as I discuss in chapter 1), animal representations crucially confront readers with the complex terrain of epistemology and ontology, of representation and symbolization.

Chapter Summaries

As I explain in chapter 1, bestiality and its criminalization offer one model for the emergence of subjectivity under biopolitics that continues to haunt us, as the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib made clear. Bestiality is a site for the development of what Foucault calls homo juridicus—that is, the legal subject that hinges on its relation to animals. The criminalization of bestiality provides a specific instance in which the law emerges via the regulation of physical bodies, where representation is worked out via embodiment, and where animals are a fundamental relay between the two. The criminalization of bestiality is a hallmark of modernity: according to Richard Bulliet, the sexual interaction with animals is a staple of normal development for adolescent men in “domestic” society; its criminalization marks the entry into a “postdomestic” society in which the spatial and epistemological separation between human beings and animals takes place. An upsurge in the legal prosecution of bestiality occurred in the 1640s and led to some of the earliest legal regulations in Plymouth Plantation. Drawing from the punishment for bestiality outlined in Leviticus, the colonists made bestiality a capital crime for which both the human perpetrator and his animal victims were put to death. In criminalizing bestiality, the law drew a line between human beings and animals by prohibiting sexual intercourse between them. Sexual practices defined and divided species. The law established a distinction between human beings and animals. But cases of bestiality also revealed that distinction to be fungible: the existence of the law testified to its transgression.¹¹⁸

In cases of bestiality, colonial law did not merely separate bios from zoē; because animals themselves became subject to the law that put them to death, they participated in bios. Conversely, the accused was recognized as bios before the law, but his crime relegated him to the category of zoē in that he was stripped of his legal rights and put to death. Because human beings and animals suffered the same fate in convictions of bestiality, their affective engagement proved to be ontologically transformative; the very categories that the law meant to establish as absolute turned out to depend on a mobile system of representation. In discussions of bestiality, a strange category emerged, of the beastly as an excessive form of animal being. Bestiality extended beyond human interaction with the animal body; it also produced an animalization of human bodies. Bestiality, then, was not only a literal, physiological act but also a symbolic, representational register that informed the exercise of biopower. The animalization of human bodies hinged on representational practices that mapped species onto a grid.¹¹⁹ That grid served two purposes: it enabled connections between species while also positing binary oppositions, and it created a structural position of bestial abjection but also used animals to elicit and mediate affect. That mediation underwrote the second aspect of biopolitical subject formation—the pedagogical discourse that made kindness to animals crucial for the formation of the liberal subject. Tracing this strand of biopolitics to John Locke’s educational writings, I understand the “liberal” subject as a subset of the “biopolitical” subject—that is, as one way in which subjectivity gets figured and functions in the biopolitical state. The use of animals for didactic purposes reaches back to antiquity and Aesop’s animal fables. Whereas the fable tradition used animals as stand-ins for human beings, it was not interested in animals as such. Locke’s widely read Thoughts on Education (1693) made animals themselves central to children’s education and enabled them to have both a symbolic and literal presence in literature. Locke suggested that we gain our humanity by performing acts of kindness to animals and located subject formation in the relationship among different species. He asked that “children should from the beginning be bred up in Abhorrence of killing, or tormenting any living creature…. And indeed, I think People should be accustomed, from their Cradles, to be tender to all sensible creatures.”¹²⁰ Emotional and physical feelings are coupled in Locke’s prohibition against torment and his call for tenderness. Animals function as the “other” and as the ground from which liberal subject formation becomes possible.

My reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s crime fiction brings the legal and pedagogical formations I have been outlining in dialogue with each other and locates the subject’s fissures in the fraught relationship to animal representation. In referring to representation, my primary aim is not to reanimate the philosophical discussion of (anti)representationalism,¹²¹ but to engage Latour’s observation that from the development of modernity in the seventeenth century forward, “the representation of things through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissociated from the representation of citizens through the intermediary of the social contract” and that this separation hinders us from establishing any “direct relations between the representation of nonhumans and the representation of humans, between the artificiality of facts and the artificiality of the Body Politic.” According to Latour, “the word ‘representation’ is the same,” but the conditions of modernity render “any likeness between the two senses of the word unthinkable.”¹²² As shown in chapter 3, Poe’s work is an exercise in the unthinkable; his animal representations locate us in the terrain where American literature negotiates between the two uses of representation and shows that their function as synonyms and opposites is key to the way biopolitics operates. Exploring the tension between alterity and identity, Poe’s fiction develops a hermeneutics that reads the “symbolic order” in relation to the bodily, the abject, and the animalized. By affording that bodily register its own legibility, Poe develops grounds for understanding the mechanisms by which subjectivity produces itself via an engagement with the beastly and provides a means for engaging critically with that production. Examining animals’ extralegal position, these texts demonstrate that animals generate and confound the relation between the literal and the figurative. They occupy a position in which abjection becomes a site for subject formation. Although animals function within texts to provide a sense of the real that the text can reference and distinguish itself from, they in fact point to the traces of the real that remain embedded in the representational. Conversely, animals themselves are already highly mediated. They generate a process of destabilization: the figurative points to the real, and the real asserts itself as figurative. So animals are always both: they are the embodied core of literature, and literature is the symbolic core of embodiment.

In the context of American literary studies, the theoretical discourse of biopolitics has a particular provenance in the issue of slavery. In chapter 2 on Frederick Douglass’s work, I examine how the animal(ized) other can respond to these structures of abjection despite his and her exclusion from the symbolic order. By casting the abuse that Aunt Hester endures as a scene fraught with animal imagery, Douglass shows how race and gender are contingent on species and how that contingency reveals them to be social constructs rather than ontological realities. Douglass reads the category of the beastly along the lines that I propose in chapter 1, as the failed attempt to polarize human bios and animal zoē. But his method for doing so shifts our understanding of the beastly. Instead of establishing the differentiation between the sovereign and the wolf-man, the beastly functions in Douglass’s reading as the site of an emergent liberal subject formation that reveals the animal origins of biopolitics. Douglass’s work rejects the mechanization of animals and instead emphasizes animals’ and human beings’ shared sensibility; put in theoretical terms, Douglass’s writing challenges Agamben’s reading of biopower as an effect of sovereignty by advancing a Foucauldian model of subjectivity. Douglass initially portrays Hester as inhabiting the position that Agamben calls “bare life.” Yet Douglass accomplishes a rereading of Hester’s expendable, consumable flesh as itself the locus of an alternative gender and discourse formation. Understanding pain as a discursive register, Douglass suggests that the beastly not only founds the juridical subject homo juridicus but also produces the interest-bearing subject that Michel Foucault calls homo oeconomicus. Foucault initially develops his notion of homo oeconomicus through a reading of David Hume that makes the desire to avoid pain the irreducible measure of self-interest. This emphasis on pain establishes the individual and collective body as the locus of meaning: although the avoidance of pain marks the individual’s irreducible self-interest, that avoidance also functions as the base line for an interest that all members of society share. Douglass examines such interest as a basis for extralegal subjectivity: removed from the discursive register of the law and situated in the bodily register of sentiment, this interest enables a redescription of subjectivity that hinges on embodiment.

In chapters 4 and 5, I examine how the scene of bestiality gets rewritten as one of “puppy love” with the rise of sentimentalism in the nineteenth century and its permutations in the twentieth century. Framing my discussion of Emily Dickinson in relation to affect theory, I demonstrate how Dickinson might advance our understanding of liberal subjectivity beyond its current parameters. Because affect studies produces “a new ontology of the human or, rather, an ontology of the human that is constantly open and renewed,” it generates a space for inquiry that presses us beyond the explicitly humanist framework of liberal subject formation.¹²³ What particularly interests me is Dickinson’s use of that framework to radically rethink the parameters and representational modes of subject formation: engaging with the pedagogical and literary models that became a staple of childhood education in the nineteenth century, Dickinson stretches our understanding of literary representation beyond symbolization by rethinking orthography as a confrontation with literal animals. Deliberately invoking Lockean pedagogy, Dickinson adopts the persona of a child. That persona enables her to reject the telos of Lockean pedagogy—namely, the separation of the human being from the animal. Placing herself in a position of ambiguity, where the human and the animal are conjoined and not yet separated, Dickinson engages the parameters of liberal subject formation to envision an alternative. Affect theory and liberalism open a space for radical alterity, but they too easily foreclose that space by reinscribing affect in an ontologically defined frame that distinguishes human beings from animals. At stake in that foreclosure is the production of a particular notion of subjectivity as one marked by an individuality independent of others and clearly demarcated by the separation of reasoning from embodiment. Looking at animals gives us a different account of the subject as relational and contingent on an alterity that cannot easily be reinscribed in the registers of either abstract rationality or embodied affectivity. Through the literal and figurative presence of animals, we see new possibilities for subjectivity and poetry emerge in Dickinson’s work.

Chapter 5 allows me to return to the questions I was asking about “Bo Obama” and presidential pets. In my opening comments, I largely focused on Barack Obama and set aside the role that his daughters play in the staging and framing of affective biopower. This chapter takes up the conflation of pets with children by examining the genre of animal autobiography—that is, of autobiographies written from the perspective of an animal. Concluding that animal representations locate a queerness at the very heart of liberal subject formation, I take up the case study of Millie’s Book, as Dictated to Barbara Bush to argue that animal autobiographies participate in and unsettle the heterosexual matrix (that is, in Judith Butler’s definition, the link between sexual norms and power) they are meant to affirm. As “things” with which we engage affectively, pets suffer from a double animation—as commodities and as creatures—that situates them at the core of modern biopolitics. In fact, they become exemplary “things” in the sense that they realize the central fantasy of commodity culture, the fantasy that things have a life of their own beyond their relationship with the desiring subject. I examine the genre of “animal autobiography” to understand how our affective engagement with pets gives rise to an embodied intersubjectivity that emerges between the subject and the object. I look at objectification as a mechanism of biopower, but also at another genealogy by which animals can be more or other than a commodity and can reshape the subject via object relations. If object relations structure our sense of subjectivity, then the pet—as a creature and as a commodity—occupies a physical and figurative position beyond and at the very core of our subjectivity; it both exemplifies and unsettles liberal subject formation.

This book argues that animals are central to the way in which we are taught to perform our humanity and that species is crucial to the regulation of subjects in the biopolitical state. Biopolitics thrives on the mutability of the line between human beings and animals. The constant renegotiation of the species line via means of representation produces an excess that is never fully regulated. Animals are embedded as and at the core of subjectivity. Figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional of and exemplary for the biopolitical subject. Animal representations reveal the structuring force of a species imagination through which our culture’s deepest investments are made available and distorted.¹²⁴ Examining the figurative treatment of animal(ized) others reveals the mechanisms of ambivalence that establish and undercut the stabilization of the symbolic economy. Animals produce a hyperrepresentation that lacks the stability it is meant to produce. The liberal subject at its core, then, hinges on its relationship to real and imagined animals that obscure and create the distinction between the real and the representational. Animal representations locate us between the symbolic and the real; they function as one pole of a binary and as the relay between the representational (bios) and the physical (zoē) that the modern state creates.