Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal

1. Noel Annan, “Science, Religion, and the Critical Mind: Introduction,” in 1859: Entering an Age of Crisis, ed. Philip Appleman, William A. Madden, and Michael Wolff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), 35.

2. Howard Mumford Jones, “1859 and the Idea of Crisis: General Introduction,” in 1859: Entering an Age of Crisis, ed. Philip Appleman, William A. Madden, and Michael Wolff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), 17.

3. Peter J. Bowler, Charles Darwin: The Man and His Influence (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 177.

4. Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 21.

5. Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (New York: Gramercy, 1979), 107.

6. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London: Penguin, 2004), 105.

7. Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 40.

8. Quoted in Lucille B. Ritvo, Darwin’s Influence on Freud: A Tale of Two Sciences (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 76.

9. Emanuel Garcia, “Reflections on Death, Phylogeny, and the Mind-Body Problem in Freud’s Life and Work,” in Understanding Freud the Man and His Ideas, ed. Emanuel Garcia (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 151.

10. Cynthia Marshall, “Psychoanalyzing the Prepsychoanalytic Subject.” PMLA 117, no. 5 (2002): 1211.

11. Thomas Docherty, Alterities: Criticism, History, Representation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 26.

12. Akira Mizuta Lippit outlines theories of animality in Western philosophy near the beginning of Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife. His analysis includes such major figures as Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger. Heidegger’s problematic treatment of animal being is treated with particular rigor by Derrida, especially in Of Spirit.

13. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 207.

14. Bernhard Waldenfels, “Levinas and the Face of the Other,” in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63.

15. John Llewelyn, “Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal),” in Re-reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 241.

16. Richard Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political (New York: Routledge, 1996).

17. Cary Wolfe, Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside,” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 43.

18. Marjorie Perloff, “Modernist Studies,” in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (New York: MLA, 1992), 166.

19. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 3.

20. Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or The Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 98.

21. Derrida notes that the same sacrificial operation occurs for the subject in a symbolic relation to other humans.

22. Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol, (London: Routledge, 1991), 2.

23. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 38.

24. Robert McKay, “‘Identifying with the Animals’: Language, Subjectivity, and the Animal Politics of Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing,” in Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, ed. Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 211.

25. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 50.

26. Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer, “Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs,” Boundary 2 22, no. 3 (1995): 145.

27. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 22.

28. Deleuze and Guattari discuss the habit of making a pet part of the family in A Thousand Plateaus where they explain, “individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals each with its own petty history, ‘my’ cat, ‘my’ dog. These animals invite us to regress, draw us into a narcissistic contemplation” (240). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

29. I should emphasize that this does not imply that animals do not engage in linguistic modes at all. Rather, I am noting their inability to participate fully in human languages, an inability that emphasizes their otherness for us.

30. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 28.

31. It is instructive to remember here that what seems a progressive posthuman opening toward otherness in Lyotard’s work has been shown to redouble itself finally into a familiar humanism that excludes animals’ ethical consideration. See Cary Wolfe in Animal Rites, where he discusses how Lyotard’s concept of the “inhuman” is not extended to animal others. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

32. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 417.

33. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 33.

34. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” Cardozo Law Review 11, no. 919 (1990): 953.

35. Cary Wolfe, “Faux Post-Humanism, or, Animal Rights, Neocolonialism, and Michael Crichton’s Congo,” Arizona Quarterly 55, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 118.

36. As I explain in chapter 3, I refer via Žižek to the “official” image of the Enlightenment, to the strain of rationalism most prominent in Kant and Descartes. Not all thinkers in this period subscribed to such an extreme view of the human subject. Nonetheless, this position was very powerful and influential.

37. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 142.

38. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1944), xi.

1. Marjorie Spiegel, The Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery (New York: Mirror Books, 1996), 21.

2. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Brantlinger contextualizes his discussion of the “Imperial Gothic” Victorian text by describing racial theories that were used to justify domination.

3. Robert M. DeGraaff, “The Evolution of Sweeney in the poetry of T. S. Eliot,” in Critical Essays on T. S. Eliot: The Sweeney Motif,” ed. Kinley E. Roby (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 222.

4. T. S. Eliot, “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 49.

5. John Ower, “Pattern and Value in ‘Sweeney Among the Nightingales,’” in Critical Essays on T. S. Eliot: The Sweeney Motif,” ed. Kinley E. Roby (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 73.

6. Stephen Clark, “Testing the Razor: T. S. Eliot’s Poems 1920,” Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989),1 67–89.

7. Kinley E. Roby, ed., “Introduction,” in Critical Essays on T. S. Eliot: The Sweeney Motif (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 10.

8. Nancy Hargrove, “The Symbolism of Sweeney in the Works of T. S. Eliot,” in Critical Essays on T. S. Eliot: The Sweeney Motif,” ed. Kinley E. Roby (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 151.

9. In the tradition of Ovid, Philomela, who was raped by her brother-in-law, was changed into a nightingale. For further discussion of Eliot’s use of Greek mythology in this poem, see Ower, “Pattern and Value.”

10. Bryan Cheyette, “Neither Excuse nor Accuse: T. S. Eliot’s Semitic Discourse,” Modernism / Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 431–37.

11. I refer to the discovery of Eliot’s correspondence with Horace M. Kallen that Ronald Schuchard elucidates in his apologetic essay on Eliot and critical charges of anti-Semitism. See Modernism / Modernity 10, no. 1 (2003) for Shuchard’s discussion and the six scholarly responses to his essay. See also the debate’s continuation, especially by Freedman and Cheyette, in Modernism / Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003).

12. Jonathan Freedman, “Lessons Out of School: T. S. Eliot’s Jewish Problem and the Making of Modernism,” Modernism / Modernity 10, no. 3 (2003): 421.

13. Anthony Julius cites this anti-Semitic stereotype. See Anthony Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27.

14. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Circumscriptions: Assimilating T. S. Eliot’s Sweeneys,” in People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity, ed. Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 141.

15. See Hargrove, “The Symbolism of Sweeney,” 151.

16. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 29.

17. Anne McClintock’s study Imperial Leather contains illustrations of this type that show profiles of the head through evolutionary progression. McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 38–39.

18. Stephen Clark discusses Sweeney Todd as a possible source for Eliot’s Sweeney. See also Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s consideration of the ethnic references in the name Sweeney in “Circumscriptions: Assimilating T. S. Eliot’s Sweeneys.”

19. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 12–16, on performativity as citationality.

20. T. S. Eliot, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 33.

21. T. S. Eliot, “Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama,” Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 119–20.

22. Richard Sheppard, “The Crisis of Language,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (London: Penguin, 1976), 323.

23. Frederick R. Karl, “Introduction to the Danse Macabre: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” in Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 134.

24. C. T. Watts, “Heart of Darkness: The Covert Murder Plot and the Darwinian Theme,” Conradiana VII (1975): 139.

25. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1988), 9.

26. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 42.

27. Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” The Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 782–94. Rpt. in Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd edition (New York; Norton, 1988), 257.

28. As I discuss in chapter 1, Emmanuel Levinas in Totality and Infinity privileges the human face as the impetus for ethical relations: “the Other faces me and puts me in question and obliges me by his essence qua infinity” (207).

29. Hugh Mercer Curtler, “Achebe on Conrad: Racism and Greatness in Heart of Darkness,” Conradiana 29, no.1 (1997): 33.

30. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 14.

31. Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell Publishing, 1964), 6.

32. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995), 24.

33. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 39–40.

34. Bette London, “Reading Race and Gender in Conrad’s Dark Continent,” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 31, no. 3 (1989): 249.

35. Johanna M. Smith, “‘Too Beautiful Altogether’: Patriarchal Ideology in Heart of Darkness,” in Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 184.

36. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 7–8.

37. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 59.

38. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom (New York; Routledge, 1992), 181.

39. Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer. “Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs,” Boundary 2 22, no. 3 (1995): 156–57.

40. Carole Stone and Fawzia Afzal-Khan, “Gender, Race and Narrative Structure: A Reappraisal of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Conradiana 29, no. 3 (1997): 229.

41. Carol Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990), 40.

42. Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or The Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 112.

43. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 25.

44. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 58–59.

45. L. D. Clark, Dark Night of the Body: D. H. Lawrence’s “The Plumed Serpent” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 52.

46. D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (Quetzalcoatl), ed. L. D. Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 16.

47. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

48. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 238.

49. D. H. Lawrence, “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,” Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 358.

50. Thomas McCarthy, “Introduction,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), viii.

51. Thomas Lyon, “Introduction” in D. H. Lawrence: Future Primitive, Dolores La Chapelle (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1996), xvi.

52. Dolores La Chapelle, D. H. Lawrence: Future Primitive (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1996), 32.

53. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1944), xi.

54. John Humma, “The Imagery of The Plumed Serpent: The Going-under of Organicism,” The D. H. Lawrence Review 15, no. 3 (1982): 201.

1. Wells’s relationship to science and to Darwinism in particular has been examined by a number of scholars in light of his tutelage under T. H. Huxley. R. D. Haynes has written that “Evolutionary theory then seemed to Wells, and may 3. facing the animal still be regarded as, the nearest approach to a unifying factor in contemporary thought.” See Haynes, H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future (New York: New York University Press, 1980), 16.

2. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 136, 181.

3. H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau (New York: Bantam, 1994), 2.

4. Cyndy Hendershot, “The Animal Without: Masculinity and Imperialism in The Island of Dr. Moreau and ‘The Adventures of the Speckled Band,’” Nineteenth Century Studies 10 (1996): 7.

5. Cary Wolfe and Jonathan Elmer, “Subject to Sacrifice: Ideology, Psychoanalysis, and the Discourse of Species in Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs,” Boundary 2 22, no. 3 (1995): 156.

6. Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Dell Publishing, 1964), 57.

7. Anne Simpson, “The ‘Tangible Antagonist’: H. G. Wells and the Discourse of Otherness,” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 31, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 135.

8. In fact, in Totem and Taboo, Freud notes, “Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals. Uninhibited as they are in the avowal of their bodily needs, they no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders, who may well be a puzzle to them.” Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York: Norton, 1950), 157.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 85.

10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1944), 6.

11. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 107.

12. Cyndy Hendershot discusses the Victorian equation of feminine sexuality and the animal. See note 4.

13. Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 396.

14. Jill Milling, “The Ambiguous Animal: Evolution of the Beast-Man in Scientific Creation Myths,” in The Shape of the Fantastic (New York: Greenwood, 1990), 108.

15. H. G. Wells, The Croquet Player (New York: Viking, 1937), 9.

16. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 587.

17. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 16.

18. Stephen Kern, Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 38.

19. See William Scheick, “Exorcising the Ghost Story: Wells’s The Croquet Player and The Camford Visitations,” Cahiers: Victoriens et Edouardiens 17 (April 1983): 53–62. Scheick agues that Frobisher’s ineffective will functions as the central horror of the novel and that the reader is invited to “participate in the collective ‘mind of Man’” (59). I suggest that this very participation is unveiled as an impossibility in Wells’s text.

20. Sandra M. Gilbert, Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 142.

21. D. H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1995), 127.

22. Christopher Pollnitz, “‘I Didn’t Know His God’”: The Epistemology of ‘Fish,’” The D. H. Lawrence Review 15, no. 1–2 (1982): 1–50.

23. D. H. Lawrence, Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1995), 105.

24. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 17.

25. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 19.

26. Deborah Slicer, “Your Daughter or Your Dog? A Feminist Assessment of the Animal Research Issue,” Hypatia 6, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 112.

1. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 9.

2. Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7.

3. George J. Zytaruk discusses Lawrence’s belief in the need for spontaneity for the development of individuality in his essay “The Doctrine of Individuality: D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Metaphysic,’” in D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration, ed. Peter Balbert and Phillip Marcus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 237–53.

4. 4. Diane S. Bonds, Language and the Self in D. H. Lawrence (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1987), 21.

5. 5. Michael Bell, “Lawrence and Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, ed. Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 184.

6. See David Parker, “Into the Ideological Unknown: Women in Love,” The Rain bow and Women in Love: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Gary Day and Libby Di Niro (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).

7. Carola M. Kaplan, “Totem, Taboo, and Blutbrüderschaft in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love,” in Seeing Double: Revisioning Edwardian and Modernist Literature, ed. C. M. Kaplan and Anne B. Simpson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 115.

8. Barbara Ann Schapiro, D. H. Lawrence and the Paradoxes of Psychic Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 9.

9. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1944), 20.

10. Kenneth Inniss, D. H. Lawrence’s Bestiary: A Study of His Use of Animal Trope and Symbol (Paris: Mouton, 1971), 24.

11. As is so often the case with symbolic uses of animality, it is important to note here Lawrence’s easy and oversimplified association between animality and detachment.

12. Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 100.

13. D. H. Lawrence, St. Mawr (New York: Vintage, 1960), 6.

14. Carol Siegel, “St. Mawr: Lawrence’s Journey Toward Cultural Feminism,” D. H. Lawrence Review 26, no. 1–3 (1995–96): 279.

15. Marjorie Garber, “Heavy Petting,” in Human, All Too Human, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1996), 32.

16. In Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name Hearne argues that we have a duty to train animals such as horses and dogs because they are “so generous” in answering our call. Hearne suggests that humans call creatures into a more noble context by facilitating their partial participation in human symbolic systems. She insists that such animals have a right to “freedom of speech” and, at the same time, believes that humans have something to learn from animals’ nonhuman phenomenological modes. See Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name (New York: Knopf, 1986), 265.

17. John Haegert, “Lawrence’s St. Mawr and the De-Creation of America,” Criticism 34, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 75.

1. Bonnie Kime Scott, “Barnes Being ‘Beast Familiar’: Representation on the Margins of Modernism,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 3 (Fall 1993), 41.

2. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1937), 3.

3. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 48.

4. I am leaving aside the larger question of the text’s treatment of Jewishness as such. It seems possible that despite the text’s privileging of abjected positions and discourses (such as animality and sexual deviation) Jewishness remains marginalized to a greater extent than these.

5. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom (New York: Routledge, 1992), 48.

6. For another discussion of Felix’s embodiment of racial “purity” tainted by false claims to ancestry see Jane Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Woman’s Circus Epic,” in Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991).

7. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 102.

8. Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 225.

9. For an introduction to some of the primary critical issues at stake in the disagreements between Derrida and Lacan, see Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference.”

10. See, for instance, Jane Gallop’s Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), especially 133–46.

11. Judith Lee, “Nightwood: ‘The Sweetest Lie,’” Silence and Power: A Reevaluation of Djuna Barnes, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press 1991), 216.

12. Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well,’ or The Calculation of the Subject: Interview with Jacques Derrida,” interview by Jean-Luc Nancy, in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 113.

13. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 53.

14. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 30.

15. Karen Kaivola, “The ‘Beast Turning Human’: Constructions of the Primitive in Nightwood,” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 13, no. 3 (Fall 1993), 175.

16. Dianne Chisholm, “Obscene Modernism: Eros Noir and the Profane Illumination of Djuna Barnes,” American Literature 69, no. 1 (March 1997), 181.

17. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 280–81.

18. Freud figures our transition from animal to human as an organic repression and a developing shift from the olfactory to the specular; see Civilization and Its Discontents, 29–30.

19. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4.

20. Sigmund Freud, “Lecture II Parapraxes,” in volume 15 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953–74), 209.

21. Donald Philip Verene, Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), quoted in Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 50.

22. It is important to note that Deleuze and Guattari err in characterizing animal consciousness as nondifferentiated because, in fact, we know that animals have complex experiences of self and other that cannot be so simplistically categorized; see, for example, Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project: Equality beyond Humanity (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993); and Donald R. Griffin, Animal Minds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

23. Given my reliance on Žižek in this essay, it is necessary to note that Butler, and for that matter Kristeva, finally disagree with Žižek’s privileging of the real, which they and other feminists interpret as a potential reification of castration and the Oedipal scenario. In Bodies That Matter, Butler raises the possibility that Žižek understands these classic psychoanalytic mechanisms as existing outside cultural and political contingencies, and she suggests that Žižek’s work therefore valorizes the real as “a token of a phallus” (197), as a doctrine closed to interrogation that secures the correlative links between man-phallus and woman-lack. See also Žižek’s rejoinder to Butler’s critique in the appendix to his Metastases of Enjoyment where he reiterates the Lacanian insistence that the phallic signifier is defined by difference and lack.

24. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Lion S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.

25. Andrea L. Harris, “The Third Sex: Figures of Inversion in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood,” in Eroticism and Containment: Notes from the Flood Plain, ed. Carol Siegel and Ann Kibbey (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 233–59.

26. John Forrester, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 235.

27. My understanding of Robin’s “redemption” from the human differs significantly from readings that interpret her assumption of nonhuman identity as pathological or regressive. Dana Seitler’s classification of Nightwood as a “degeneration narrative,” for instance, frames the novel in such a register, though Seitler’s reading understands this kind of narrative through a complex analysis of scientific culture. See Dana Seitler, “Down on All Fours: Atavistic Perversions and the Science of Desire from Frank Norris to Djuna Barnes,” American Literature 73, no. 3 (2001): 525–62.

1. Margot Norris, “The Human Animal in Fiction,” Parallax 12, no. 1 (2006): 9.

2. Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 193.

3. Elizabeth Grosz, “The Creative Impulse,” interview by Julie Copeland, Sunday Morning Radio National, August 14, 2005, 2, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/sunmorn/stories/s1435592.htm.