Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film

1. In “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991) Donna Haraway suggested that clear distinctions between humans and animals were no longer scientifically or publicly viable. Assuming for the moment this were true, scientific and popular perceptions of the permeable human/nonhuman boundary have not translated into changed relations between humans and animals in terms of shared spaces/habitats and ethical inclusion. Use of animals as/for food and in scientific research has steadily grown since 1990. A UK Home Office report (available on the Home Office Web site) confirms a rise of 14 percent in scientific procedures using animals between 2007 and 2008. Increases are set to intensify in the coming years.

3. A creaturely poetics partly operates as a “dehumanizing” perspective. This no more than translates Viktor Shklovsky’s famous notion of “defamiliarization”—art’s making the common uncommon by way of an estranged eye—into the terms of the discourse of species. See Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds., Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2d ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 15–22.

4. See for example, Mark S. Robert, The Mark of the Beast: Animality and Human Oppression (Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2008), which looks at the history of dehumanization and animalization of “inferiors,” including slaves, Jews, and also animals. See as well Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powerrs of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).

5. Philosophy and Animal Life includes essays by Cary Wolfe, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, and Ian Hacking.

6. The “bodiliness” of The Lives of Animals is doubled by the fact that Coetzee first performed it as the Tanner Lectures. Laura Wright has written about the importance of performance in Coetzee as a form of interspecies ethical displacement:

While Coetzee does not write drama, his writing does refuse a controlling narrative position and raises dialogic questions about embodiment as a kind of performance—acting as the other—that is potentially possible through imagined identification with the bodily suffering of the other. According to Coetzee, “in South Africa it is not possible to deny the authority of suffering and therefore the body” because “it is not that one grants the authority of the suffering body: the suffering body takes this authority: that is its power” (Doubling 248)…. The bodies with which Coetzee’s characters and audience are asked to engage in imagined physical dialogue not only consist of white women and racially designated others, but also of animals.

Laura Wright, Writing Out of All the Camps: J. M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement, p. 13 (New York: Routledge, 2006; my emphasis).

7. J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (hereafter TLOA) was published with commentaries by Amy Gutmann, Marjorie Garber, Peter Singer, Wendy Doniger, and Barbara Smuts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

9. I am thinking not just of Boethius’s classical text, but more recently of appeals to the so-called therapeutic uses of philosophy, for example, Alain de Botton’s best seller The Consolations of Philosophy (London: Pantheon, 2000).

10. On carnophallogocentrism see Derrida’s interview with Elisabeth Roudinesco, “Violence Against Animals,” in For What Tomorrow … A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). pp. 62–76. See also Calarco’s Zoographies (131–32).

11. The quote is taken from an expanded version of “The Love of God and Affliction” reprinted in Springsted, Simone Weil, pp. 41–70. Springsted prefaces Weil’s text by explaining that “this is one of the most important of all Weil’s essays. It was originally published in a shorter form. However, additional pages were later discovered, and are included here” (Simone Weil 41). Other quotations from “The Love of God and Affliction” are taken from the shorter version published in Waiting for God.

12. Badiou makes this argument strongly in Ethics. See also Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (London: Polity, 2004).

13. The quote is from Badiou’s text (Saint Paul 46), modified slightly from the authorized version of Corinthians.

14. It may be premature—or undesirable—to speak of a “theological turn” in the humanities, but there is no doubt that religious discourse is being revaluated in traditionally secular, leftist, and progressive debates. Besides Žižek, Badiou, and Agamben, philosophers like Leszek Kolakowski and John Gray have insisted on the significance of religion in a seemingly increasingly secular world. Terry Eagleton’s reengagement with Christianity in Reason, Faith, and Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), or On Evil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010) is also part of this shift.

1. Novick’s is one of several critiques of the contemporary appropriations of Holocaust memory. See for example Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (London: Verso, 2000); and Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). The filmwork of Eyal Sivan is devoted to a similar critique of the “instrumentalization of memory.” In films like Yizkor, Slaves of Memory (1990) and The Specialist (1999) Sivan is engaged instead in the creation of what he calls the “common archive,” a new paradigm for recording and conceptualizing histories of conflict transcending the sectarian division between victims and perpetrators.

2. For other references to the Muselmann, see also Levi, If This Is a Man, pp. 94–96, 131, 134.

3. Druker’s Primo Levi and Humanism After Auschwitz provides a nuanced reading of Levi’s memoirs as the site of a struggle to sustain his secular humanism in the face of Auschwitz. Druker proposes—unsatisfactorily in my view—a Lévinasian model as a viable post-Holocaust ethics and a “new humanism” (133). See also Zygmunt Bauman’s influential Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Robert Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, especially chapter 12: “The Postmodern, the Holocaust, and the Limits of the Human,” pp. 317–338 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Bernstein’s “Bare Life, Bearing Witness” is a highly critical response to Agamben.

4. Dalia Sachs explains that Levi’s title is not only grammatically but also temporally inconclusive: “there is no mention of a specific historical moment that led to Levi’s writing, nor does a second clause arrive with which we could situate the present tense use of the verb ‘to be,’ which instead remains unqualified and leaves the reader suspended in an inconclusive temporality, faced with an ambiguous challenge.” Dalia Sachs, “The Language of Judgment: Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo” MLN 110 (1995): 755–784, 758.

5. Céline’s Fable for Another Time (1952) opens with the following dedication: “For animals, for the sick, for prisoners.” Céline, Fable for Another Time, trans. Mary Hudson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).

6. See Wyatt Mason’s excellent “Uncovering Céline,” New York Review of Books, January 14–February 10, 2010, pp. 16–18, in which Mason dismisses sidestepping the antisemitic trilogy and excusing Céline as a wild satirist: “to understand Céline, we must be ready to, and permitted to, read all that he wrote. Only in this way can we begin to understand what we are saying when we might think to class him as—of all things—a humorist” (18). In “The Art of Evil,” Sylvere Lotringer writes of Artaud, Bataille, Céline, and Weil that “from the mid 1920s until well into the war their work seems to anticipate the Holocaust, responding to it from a distance, ‘like victims signaling through the flames’ (Artaud)”; FAT 1.1, http://www.thing.net/∼fat/vol1no1/sylvere.htm.

7. “No English word exactly conveys the meaning of the French malheur. Our word unhappiness is a negative term and far too weak. Affliction is the nearest equivalent but not quite satisfactory. Malheur has in it a sense of inevitability and doom.” Emma Craufurd in a translator’s note, “Love of God,” p. 67.

8. Several scholars link affliction to the Holocaust, but they do so only tentatively. Commentaries focus mainly on Weil’s difficult relationship to her own, repudiated Judaism. See, for example, Richard Bell, Simone Weil: The Way of Justice and Compassion (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), especially chapter 9: “Simone Weil, Post-Holocaust Judaism, and the Way of Compassion” (165–190). Bell places Lévinas and Weil at opposite ends (“Simone Weil you have never understood anything about the Torah!” [Lévinas qtd. in Bell 180]). Weil’s Letter to a Priest contains one of her most fervent attacks on Judaism. Idolatry is an invention of “the cult of Jehovah,” whose conception of God is inherently aggressive since it places power before goodness: “if some Hebrews of classical Jewry were to return to life and were to be provided with arms, they would exterminate the lot of us—men, women, and children, for the crime of idolatry. They would reproach us for worshipping Baal and Astarte, taking Christ for Baal and the Virgin for Astarte” (5). For Weil, Judaism itself is idolatrous because of the doctrine of chosenness: “the Hebrews took for their idol, not something made of metal or wood, but a race, a nation, something just as earthly. Their religion is essentially inseparable from such idolatry, because of the notion of the ‘chosen people’” (6). The letter dates September 1942. Patrick Drevet asks whether Weil was irrationally blind to the suffering of her own people. “Puisqu’aucune déduction rationnelle ne parvient a rendre compréhensible (et encore moins acceptable) cet aveuglement, il faut bien chercher autre chose” (“Since no logical inference could render comprehensible [even less so acceptable] this blindness, one needs to look for something else”; Drevet 210; my translation). Drevet believes Weil could not acknowledge the victimization of the Jews because she refused to regard herself as a victim, member of a particular persecuted group, or someone deserving protection: “Simone Weil détestait l’idée de se défendre pour elle-même, de s’ériger en victime; il lui était dés lors impossible de regarder le groupe auquel on la sommait d’appartenir comme une victime particulière à; plaindre ou à; protéger” (210). Moreover, the alleged denial of Jewish victimhood was part of Weil’s process of “decreation,” which refused to identify her dual embodiment (as a woman and a Jew). The question she thus faced was “comment effacer ce corps de Juive?”—How to erase this Jewish woman’s body? Drevet wants to distinguish between Weil’s theological objections to Judaism and her indifference to concrete Jewish suffering. As he puts it: “le problème ne tient pas dans son refus (tout à; fait discutable) de la spiritualité juive, de nature religieuse, mais dans la violence et la mauvaise foi des arguments de Simone Weil pour alimenter ce refus” (210). Not the religious rejection of Judaism, but the violence and bad faith that feed and fuel this refusal are the issue. I would question several of Drevet’s points, especially his turn to a psychopathological discourse to explain Weil’s difficult position. Much more can and needs to be said here, but this is a task for a separate study, devoted solely to the problem of Simone Weil’s anti-Judaism.

9. Alain Finkielkraut’s La mémoire vaine: Du crime contre l’humanité was first published by Gallimard in 1989. It appeared in English as Remembering in Vain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).

10. For background on the trial see Alice Y. Kaplan’s excellent introduction to the English edition of Remembering in Vain, “On Alain Finkielkraut’s Remembering in Vain: The Klaus Barbie Trial and Crimes Against Humanity.” The essay also appeared in Critical Inquiry 19 (1992): 70–86. My references in the chapter are to Critical Inquiry.

11. For the legal definition of war crimes and crimes against humanity see Remembering in Vain, pp. 76–77n6.

12. Finkielkraut believes that the case against Barbie (like that against Eichmann) was undermined by being handled locally, yet has little faith in the United Nations’ ability to justly assess Nazi crime. Would the International Criminal Court (ICC), set up in 2002, have provided a better framework for the justice Finkielkraut seeks? A number of Western and non-Western states (including the U.S. and Israel) have not ratified the ICC’s treaty, which significantly limits the court’s efficacy as a properly universal institution of justice.

13. While the origins of French universalism are elusive, this much is certain: at the beginning French universalism derives from its relationship to the Church; it is, as it were, borrowed from Catholicism (from the Greek Katholikos, “universal”). Referred to since the Middle Ages as “the elder daughter of the Church,” France drew from its privileged relationship to the Church its founding reputation and mission as a disseminator of a universalist creed. Indeed, in a paradoxical fashion, the very event of the French Revolution, which did so much to destroy the power of the Gallican Church, by the same gesture enabled French universalism to perpetuate and propagate itself. The French Revolution, in this view, did not mark a rupture between a pre-universalist and a post-universalist France but rather drew on and gave new impetus to France’s time honored civilizing mission.

14. On Schmitt and the vicissitudes of the state of exception as a contemporary judicial and political paradigm, see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

15. See the criticism of Father Joseph-Marie Perrin in the chapter “Syncretism and Catholicity,” in Perrin and Thibon, Simone Weil as We Knew Her, p. 53.

16. Passenger is split between past and present. Sequences set in the past were shot on location in Auschwitz, and the present was filmed on the luxury liner. But after Munk’s accidental death in 1961 the film’s future looked uncertain. Munk’s collaborators and friends completed Passenger two years later. Extra scenes were shot in Auschwitz. For the contemporary portions existing stills were used and a voiceover commentary (written by Wiktor Woroszylski) was added. The final film is an assemblage of Munk’s original footage, still photographs, and the voiceover commentary on both the plot and the complex process of the film’s completion. This disjointed and self-reflexive form says much about the challenges of representing the Holocaust and of the deeply interpersonal nature of this challenge. For more on the film, see Ewa Mazierska, “Double Memory: the Holocaust in Polish Film,” in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman, eds., Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television Since 1933 (London: Wallflower, 2005), pp. 225–235.

17. In “The Love of God and Affliction” Weil asserts that the mechanism of the world—gravity—applies similarly to the workings of nature and human psychology: “The mechanism of necessity can be transposed to any level while still remaining true to itself. It is the same in the world of pure matter, in the animal world, among nations, and in souls” (“Love of God” 76).

18. Höss was involved with nationalist paramilitary organizations after WWI. In 1923 he was charged with murder, committed with other members of an illegal Freikorps successor-organization in 1922. The group tortured and killed a schoolteacher named Kadow suspected (wrongly, as it happened) of being a communist infiltrator. Höss received a ten-year sentence but was released early in 1928. He joined the SS in 1934 and became commandant of Auschwitz in 1940. Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, pp. 43–45, 61, 64.

19. Singer himself had a complex relationship with Judaism. He called his position “private mysticism,” which, not unlike Weil’s, was based on the idea of God’s hiddenness or absence.

20. On the importance of Singer’s vegetarianism, see Qiao’s The Jewishness of Isaac Bashevis Singer: “Singer’s vegetarianism is crucial to his understanding of the evil deeply embedded in history and in nature itself” (17). Qiao also claims that vegetarianism is Singer’s only “-ism” (132), a basic moral code and part of his revision of Judaism.

1. In “New Models and Metaphors for the Neanderthal Debate” Paul Graves traces the shifts in archaeological and anthropological theories on the origins of “modern” Homo sapiens. Changes in scientific thinking were partly shaped by the wider cultural and political context of the time. “Paleontologists of the 19th and early 20th centuries tended to regard all fossil hominids as representatives of the ‘true’ human stock…. Moreover, this phylogenetic paradigm had, from its very beginnings, been extended to an essentially racist analysis of human types, representing non-Europeans (and sometimes women) as both separate and less evolved lineages.” But in the second half of the twentieth century these propositions were reversed: “indigenous development may be seen as the predominant metaphor for a world reacting against imperialism and the Nazi terror and living through the upheavals of colonial independence and the civil rights movement.” Graves sees Wells and Golding’s texts as examples of the “the role of the Neanderthal debate as a literary metaphor” (514).

2. Raine cites Kipling’s “The Knight of the Joyous Venture” as a specific precursor of The Inheritors. See “Belly Without Blemish.”

3. See Helen Tiffin and Graham Huggan’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (New York: Routledge, 2010).

4. See for example, Peter S. Alterman, “Aliens in Golding’s The Inheritors,” Science Fiction Studies 5.1 (1978): 3–10; and Jeanne Murray Walker, “Reciprocity and Exchange in William Golding’s The Inheritors,” Science Fiction Studies 8.3 (1981): 297–310. See also Kinkead-Weekes and Gregor’s seminal study William Golding (69). In “Utopias and Antiutopias,” Golding himself discusses the aptitude of science fiction for describing his work. William Golding. A Moving Target (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), pp. 171–184.

5. In the essay “In My Ark,” Golding reflects on humanity’s place in the world, its relation to nature and to other species. He professes an indifference to animals: “the positive love of animals has always amazed me” (103). The amazement is due to the fact that (the English) affection for animals is too often possessive: “I would preserve a dinosaur in my ark if I could, but not out of affection. Our manipulation of the world has grown explosive. Animals are capital, but they are not ours. I do not know whose they are, nor whose we are, except that we do not belong to ourselves. Once in a way, I smell purpose in the world and guess it may include not only Adam but also the delectable lamb and the loathsome spider” (103).

The mysteries of the world call for an attitude very different to the Victorian “lassoing phenomena with Latin names, listing, docketing and systematizing. Belsen and Hiroshima have gone some way towards teaching us humility” (105). At the end of the essay Golding sounds a little like Benjamin or W. G. Sebald when he says that “it is not the complete specimen for the collector’s cabinet that excites us. It is the fragment, the hint. For the universe has blown wide open, is a door from which man does not know whether blessing or menace will come” (105).

8. The “sadness of the creatures” is the second line of Auden’s “Our Hunting Fathers,” a poem that deals with the issue of human inheritance. For an interesting discussion of this poem in the wider context of Auden’s anti-Romantic appropriation of nature, see Rainer Emig, “Auden and Ecology,” in Stan Smith, ed., The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 212–225.

9. Other films in the series include I Dismember Mama (2000) and The Killer Inside Me (2000). Grandin’s status as a media darling was cemented by HBO’s 2010 biopic Temple Grandin, with Claire Danes in the title role.

10. Grandin is included (twice) in Susan J. Armstrong and Richard G. Botzler, eds., The Animal Ethics Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 184–186, 187–190. In “Deflections,” his essay in Philosophy and Animal Life, Ian Hacking writes: “laws have a moral stature not only because they create legal duties and obligations but also because they are benchmarks from which to move on. Grandin’s norm for abattoirs has the same virtue” (163–164). Besides the odd pairing of “abattoirs” and “virtue,” there is much else here one can find unnerving. Hacking writes that Grandin “changed the practices of most American abattoirs and in so doing has made the animals’ last walk down the alley of death less horrible” (149); on the face of it the welfarist call for improving conditions and reducing animal suffering. The serious difficulties inherent in animal welfare notwithstanding, large-scale industrial slaughter is surely a problem even for welfarists. Has Grandin become a sacred cow for a movement too anxious to avoid seeming “radical”? Are the majority of meat packing plants “less horrible” for the millions of animals who die there or for the mainly poor, mainly nonwhite people who labor in them? For a sober look at the state of modern U.S. abattoirs, see Gail A. Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse (New York: Prometheus, 1997). On the abolitionist position see Gary Francione, Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animals Rights Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), and Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

11. Toward the end of the book, Grandin says that she is often asked if she is a vegetarian. Grandin almost addresses but finally dismisses the issue and moves swiftly on. There are a number of missed opportunities in the book, but it is the deflection itself that is telling (Thinking 235).

12. Köhler’s The Mentality of Apes, published in 1925, dealt with the issue of “problem solving.” Köhler showed that chimpanzees possessed the capacity (or “insight”) to resolve practical problems and proceed to carry out solutions.

13. The discrete religiosity of mechanical food production is the subject of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s film Our Daily Bread, which I discuss in more detail in chapter 5.

14. In 1940 Benjamin declared that historical materialism alone has the potential to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (thesis 6, “Theses” 247). Benjamin’s insistence on the compatibility between materialism and mysticism (a peculiarity characteristic also of Weil) turns up in the “Theses” in the examination of historical materialism into which Benjamin slips the idea of “messianic time” as the moment that refuses the homogenization and emptying out of the timeline of narrative history and so introduces a new possibility into the world. Under the auspices of historical materialism, time does not unfold in installments along the triumphant axis of Progress, but as non-narrative and fragmentary. Opinions vary on Benjamin’s reconciliation between materialism and mysticism. Gershom Scholem believed that “the ‘Theses’ mark Benjamin’s decisive break with historical materialism and a return to the metaphysical-theological concerns of his early thought” (Beiner 423). For Beatrice Hanssen the combination failed to deliver a coherent politics (7), while in “Walter Benjamin, the Arcades Project,” J. M. Coetzee regards Benjamin as a reluctant materialist, seduced to Marxism by the love of a dangerous woman (Inner Workings 42).

16. See especially Crawford’s chapter “Literature of Atrocity” (50–80). Crawford also draws on Benjamin’s antiteleological view of history (25).

17. The Sportswriter is the first of the Frank Bascombe trilogy, followed by Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006).

1. Truie is French for sow. Although the compactness of the French pun Truismes does not quite survive the English translation, the play of words is maintained in the phonetic interchange of “tale” and “tail.” I shall be using the English title, except when quoting sources that stick with the original French. Darrieussecq’s use of truisme recalls Derrida’s play on bête and bêtise in “The Animal That Therefore I Am” (398).

2. “Piggle-squiggles” is the translation of écriture de cochon, literally “pig writing.” I will be using the French expression throughout.

3. Michel Lantelme, “Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales: Marianne’s Misfortunes at the Turn of the Millennium,” Romantic Review 90.4 (1990): 527–536.

4. In its nod toward autobiographical narrative, Pig Tales reflects some of Darrieussecq’s preoccupations in her 1997 PhD thesis “Moments critiques dans l’autobiographie contemporaine. Ironie, tragique et autofiction chez George Perec, Michel Leiris, Serge Doubrovsky et Hervé” (“Critical Moments in the Contemporary Autobiography. Tragic Irony and Auto-fiction in the works of George Perec, Michel Leiris, Serge Doubrovsky and Hervé Guibert”). In Pig Tales textual opacity is the measure of the heroine’s bodily transformation. In Darrieussecq’s subsequent novels, language remains turned to the material at the neurological and microbiological levels. Simon Kemp described Darrieussecq’s work from Naissance des fantômes onwards as “micro-narratives of the mind’s surface” (Kemp 429). I will return to Kemp’s arguments later in the chapter.

5. In “Dishing the Dirt,” Gaudet provides details of the novel’s popular success in France and beyond. Jean-Luc Godard bought the rights to the film version of the book, which (perhaps fortuitously) has not yet materialized.

6. Frédéric Badré, “Une nouvelle tendance en littérature” Le Monde, October 3, 1998. Although Houellebecq, not undeservedly, holds court here, the 1990s saw an energetic resurgence of writing by women. See Rye and Worton’s illuminating introduction to Women’s Writing in Contemporary France (1–26), Didier Jacob’s piece “Mesdames Sans Gêne” in Le Nouvel Observateur, special issue, 39 (1999); and William Cloonan, “Literary Scandal: Fin du siècle and the Novel in 1999,” French Review 74.1 (October 2000): 14–30. Despite the difference and variety amongst these writers (in addition to Houellebecq and Darrieussecq, a partial list includes Linda Lê, Annie Ernaux, Christine Angot, Nina Bouraoui, and Virginie Despentes, whose 1999 novel Baise-Moi was made into the controversial film in 2000, codirected by Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi), Jacob underscores the shared preoccupation with the body and with graphic violence and sex of these “nouvelles marquises de Sade.” Badré called the new tendency postnaturalist, which, posited against the avant-garde, returns the novel to the fabric of everyday experience. Although it is possible to link Darrieussecq to this (post)naturalist method, she owes at least as much to the antirealism of the nouveau roman.

“De toutes les questions possibles, sauf peut-être « comment ça va?”, c’est la question qu’on m’a le plus posée depuis la publication de Truismes en 1996.

Je n’ai pas vraiment de réponse, sauf statistique. On traite les femmes de truie plus souvent que de jument, de vache, de guenon, de vipère ou de tigresse; plus souvent encore que de girafe, de sangsue, de limace, de pieuvre ou de tarentule; et beaucoup plus souvent que de scolopendre, de rhinocéros femelle ou de koala.

C’est simple. Mais est-ce que ça répond à; la question? Posée si souvent, c’est qu’elle porte ailleurs, c’est qu’elle questionne quelqu’un d’autre, ou quelque chose d’autre. On toque au carreau. Mais y a-t-il quelqu’un, quand on écrit?

(Zoo 7–8)

8. Carol J. Adams has most consistently provided the linkage between the rhetoric of femininity and animality. See The Sexual Politics of Meat, The Pornography of Meat, and “Identity and Vegan Feminism in the Twenty-First Century,” an Interview with Tom Tyler in Parallax 12.1 (2006): 120–128.

9. Jordan is quoting from Lidia Curti, Female Stories, Female Bodies: Narrative, Identity, and Representation (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 107.

10. Michel Houellebecq’s Les particules élémentaires (Paris: Flammarion, 1998) was published in the UK as Atomised, trans. Frank Wynne (London: Heinemann, 2000). For a first-rate discussion of the indictments of liberalism in general and of sexual liberation in particular in contemporary French literature, see Abecassis’s “The Eclipse of Desire,” to which I return later in this chapter. Two other works, each differently pitted against French liberalist philosophy, are relevant in this context: Dominique Lecourt, The Mediocracy: French Philosophy Since the Mid-1970s, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2001), which includes a brief but incisive commentary on Houellebecq (66). See also Wolfe’s assault on Luc Ferry in “Old Orders for New: Ecology, Animal Rights, and the Poverty of Humanism” (Animal Rites 21–43).

11. In Atomised, humanity is ultimately transcended by a race of (sexless) posthuman cyborgs, while in Pig Tales it succumbs to human-animal hybridity. Darrieussecq and Houellebecq situate many of their literary experiments and social critiques in the convenient period of the near future, as, for example, in Darrieussecq’s White or Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island.

12. For critiques of classical anthropomorphism, see Tom Tyler, “If Horses Had Hands,” Society and Animals 11.3 (2003): 267–281. A useful discussion of anthropomorphism and its vicissitudes can be found in Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion, 2002). For challenges to commonly held ideas about the fallacies of anthropomorphism, see Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds., Thinking With Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). Marc Bekoff has continually written about animals’ emotional and moral sensibilities. See, for example, Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); or Marc Bekoff, Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See also Acampora’s Corporal Compassion (85–86) on the “rehabilitation” of anthropomorphism.

13. “All writing is piggery” (my translation). Artaud’s statement appeared in his early surrealist text Le Pèse-Nerfs.

14. For a survey of Deleuze’s various notions of “becoming,” see “Becoming” in Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 125–145.

15. Other examples of mirrors, reflections, and photographs include scenes in the apartment of her first lover Honoré (37, 44), a photo on the political campaign posters “for a healthier world” (55, 74), a passing reflection in a shop window (65), a hotel room mirror (76).

16. This point concerning naïveté carries over to the novel’s social/political dimension. As a parody of liberal humanism, the deadpan narration makes perfect sense. For Pig Tales’s is a world defined through rampant consumerism, violence, and sex, from which the traces of friendship and love have all but disappeared. If, however, this fictional world is really ours, then it is our own (biased) reading—with its emotional and moral preconceptions—that is outdated and out of touch. In an ironic reversal, it is no longer the protagonist who is dim, but the reader.

17. The face, as the saying goes, is the gateway to interiority; it is what most personalizes, as is evident from the artistic form consecrated to the revelation of personality: the portrait. The uncanny proximity between apes and humans lends itself particularly well to the portrait form. One example of the use of the portrait to convey individuality is the 2004 exhibition Face to Face by photographer James Mollison at London’s Museum of Natural History. The exhibition’s blurb read: “Extraordinary portraits of orphaned apes, highlighting the vitality and intelligence of these magnificent threatened animals—our closest biological relatives.” This approach to the subject of conservation and animal rights hinges on the invocation of kinship (intuitive and biological) between “us” and “them.” A revaluation of kinship is important for the understanding of a variety of interactions between kindred beings, including violence. This is one of the implicit concerns of this study, which moves beyond the question of animals as a matter of kinship versus otherness. One problem with rights discourse is that it does not problematize the space of kinship. Kinship is, in fact, a contradictory and difficult zone. It makes possible amity and moral inclusion, but also and perhaps just as significantly, aggression. An assumption common in human rights discourse is that systematic violence (like torture or genocide) requires the “dehumanization” of victims. But although violence entails a distancing between perpetrator and victim, neither is it thinkable in the purview of complete otherness. A (qualified) recognition kinship is thus present in the perpetrating of violence. One can wreak violence on she or he who—like me—is recognized as capable of suffering: my kin. Pig Tales’s interspecies economy crucially shifts the discussion away from the register of kinship (resemblance versus difference) to that of power. Michael Nichols and Jane Goodall’s book of photographs Brutal Kinship (New Jersey: Aperture, 1999) illustrates the contradictory status of kinship. Homi Bhabha has recently spoken about “neighbourliness” as a complex, paradoxical space of agency. “‘Also, I know that a man can become of an incredible wickedness very suddenly … ’: Time, Agency and the Banality of Evil”; CCSR Annual Lecture, June 10, 2009, University of East London. I thank Erika Rundle for the reference to Nichols’s book.

18. On Lévinas’s humanism see Derrida’s “The Animal that Therefore I Am” (381). Animal Rites devotes considerable space to critiquing Lévinasian humanism, while Calarco’s chapter on Lévinas in Zoographies explores the limitations and the potentialities in Lévinas for a nonanthropocentric philosophy.

19. “My novel is anything but psychological,” a statement made by Darrieussecq to Shirley Jordan in an unpublished interview (qtd. in Jordan 147).

20. Additionally, one can read bestiality in the novel following Derrida’s ironic lead in “The Animal That Therefore I Am,” which makes bestiality the only thing which is truly “proper to man,” since animals are by definition exempt from this transgression (409). For another literary take on bestiality, see Edward Albee’s play The Goat; or, Who Is Sylvia? (London: Methuen, 2003).

21. For a reading of the overlap between gender and species in Pig Tales, see Naama Harel, “Challenging the Species Barrier in Metamorphosis Literature: The Case of Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales” in Comparative Critical Studies 2.3 (2005): 397–409. Harel makes a similar point to the one made here, that whilst “interpretations of Pig Tales as a political or a feminist fable are well established, they all ignore the interspecies aspect of the story” (1). The novel’s feminist focus must not take precedence over its preoccupation with species.

22. I should note that hybridity or transhumanity need not be monstrous. Acampora’s Corporal Compassion includes quite a number of interbodily points of contact between humans and animals, with a distinctively “convivial” feel:

The convivial challenge for humans … is to interpret the skin-boundary not as an impermeable barrier encapsulating corporeality but as a surface of somatic contact. In Paul Shepard’s words, “the epidermis of the skin is … like a pond surface or forest soil, not a shell so much as a delicate interpenetration. It reveals the [human] self ennobled and extended … because the beauty and complexity of nature are continuous with ourselves”; as John Compton puts it, “what is characteristic of embodied, inter-subjective, world-related human life … is structurally analogous to what is found in other [living] regions of the natural world.”

(39–40)

23. Zoo uses a similar play between linguistic ability and animal needs. In “Connaissance des singes,” for example, a sullen talking chimpanzee called Marcel (his various hang-ups are indeed reminiscent of Proust) explains to the narrator (a woman writer with writers’ block) that eating reduces his capacity for speech. In Pig Tales the narrator discovers that reading books reduces hunger.

24. Nietzsche’s “transhumanism” is also important here. See Jami Weinstein, “Traces of the Beast: Becoming Neitzsche, Becoming Animal, and the Figure of the Transhuman,” which tracks Nietzsche’s impact on the rethinking of humanity and animality (A Nietzschean Bestiary 301–318).

25. See for example Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference [L’Écriture et la difference, 1967], trans. Alan Bass (New York: Routledge, 1981), which, incidentally, includes an essay on Artaud. Derrida’s central notion of writing cuts across all of his work. It reinstates writing as nonsecondary to speech (or the voice) and reveals language as a heterological system, internally other and “othered.” This includes recognizing the inhuman within human language, within literature. See also Barthes, Writing Degree Zero [Le Degré zéro de L’Ecriture, 1953].

26. More recently, Hamsun has begun to enjoy a critical revival. See, for example, Jeffrey Frank, “In from the Cold: The Return of Knut Hamsun,” New Yorker, December 26, 2005. http://www/newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/26/051226crat_atlarge.In 2009, the year that marked the 150th anniversary of Hamsun’s birth, the Norwegian government met with the (routine) Israeli remonstrations over the author’s commemoration. See Cnaan Liphshiz’s “Row Grows Over Norway Honor for Pro-Nazi Nobel Laureate,” Haaretz, June 21, 2009, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1094430.html.

1. I am grateful to Richard Kerridge for drawing my attention to zoos’ air of dreariness, not unlike the tedium of the inner city or suburban neglect. One film that illustrates this point clearly is Frederick Wiseman’s 1993 Zoo.

2. On the cultural, ideological, as well as commercial structures of (in particular) wildlife television, see Cynthia Chris’s Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

3. Acampora is explicit about the “pattern of pornography” that underlies zoos. See also Bob Mullan and Garry Marvin, Zoo Culture (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987); Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, DC: Island, 1996); and Randy Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

5. Baker’s discussion is partly a response to moral objections to postmodern animal art. The strongest objections Baker cites are by John Simons in Animal Rights and the Politics of Literary Representation (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); and Anthony Julius, Transgressions: The Offences of Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002).

6. Jonathan Burt explains that in postmodern art “ideas of pet-keeping, sentimentality, anthropomorphism, and a literal depiction of animal beauty are rejected in favour of bleak and figuratively transgressive versions of the animal” (Burt 26). Examples abound. Corinne Rusch’s 2009 installation piece Thinking Around—Metaphors in Nature, for example, uses the hides of taxidermied animals (a deer, a badger) to question the cultural “embalming” of feminine beauty. The animals are cut in half and mounted backward on the wall, so that their backsides face the viewer. The piece also includes photographs of women posing amongst an array of stuffed animals, mimicking still life paintings. The mounted rears are witty inversions of hunting trophies. But there is also confusion in this piece that simultaneously flaunts and disavows the animal. During a Q&A with the artist, Rusch was asked if she was vegetarian—a question that frequently acts as shorthand for raising the sort of ethical questions Baker examines. “No, not at all,” Rusch replied, “I love meat.” The reply illustrates just how taboo sentimentalism, nostalgia, and melancholy (in Benjamin’s sense) have become in contemporary art. “Repeating with a difference” is now the ultimate ethical gesture. But this can seem more deflecting than either sentimentality or nostalgia; reality is present as pure confrontation but emptied of its vulnerability for both artist and viewer. For an overview of recent animal art, see Massimiliano Gioni, “Where the Wild Things Are,” Tate Magazine 11 (Autumn 2007), http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue11/wildthings.htm.

7. See Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain Since 1800 (London: Reaktion, 1998).

8. In “… From Wild Technology to Electric Animal,” Lippit discusses Francis Bacon’s account of being “moved” by photographs of slaughterhouses. “Since the animal possesses no discernible subjectivity,” writes Lippit, “the human subject cannot rediscover itself in the place of this other. While a human being can project anthropomorphic characteristics onto the animal or experience emotions (such as pathos or sympathy) in response to its being, an impenetrable screen—language—divides the loci of animal and human being. If Bacon has indeed effected an identification with this image, then where does one locate the source of Bacon’s identification: in the animal or in the photograph?” (“… From Wild Technology” 120). The difference between Lippit’s project and mine lies in the way we treat the dominant history of thinking about animals. Lippit is acutely aware of the problems of Western metaphysics: what or who is “the animal” this tradition is referring to? In what “discernible” sense do animals lack subjectivity? And how can the assumption of the absence of language categorically distinguish between humans and animals? Lippit’s critical reflections result in the emergence of cinema as symptom: an apparatus symptomatic of the dominant tradition’s own aporias or lacks. My approach is less diagnostic. It attempts to find a position outside the dominant tradition that reads the animal as otherness and lack, in order to reframe the question of the animal. As is my method throughout the book, I am conducting my inquiry from the reverse perspective, one that rejects the accepted parameters (subjectivity, language, identification) of the human. I proceed from what is discernible in both humans and animals: their existence as embodied, finite beings.

9. Bazin describes the actors in Antonioni’s Cronaca di Amore as “caught in the maze of the plot like laboratory rats being sent through a labyrinth” (“De Sica” 66).

10. Bazin is sometimes called a “Catholic humanist”; see, for example, Colin MacCabe’s “Barthes and Bazin,” in Jean-Michel Rabaté, ed., Writing the Image After Roland Barthes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 75. Bazin’s roots in phenomenology and Personalism, his association with the journal Esprit, make the label perfectly acceptable. My point is certainly not to argue against a humanist reading of Bazin, only to follow through the (nonhumanist) implications of the realism he espoused.

11. Between 1940 and 1943 Simone Weil was in contact with the anti-Nazi publication Témoignage Chrétien. She helped distribute its first three issues (Three Women in Dark Times 157–158). In his foreword to the 2004 edition of What Is Cinema? vol. 1, Dudley Andrew writes that in 1943 Bazin was to publish the essay that would become “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” in a special issue of Confluences, printed at the same publishing house responsible for Témoignage Chrétien. Publication was delayed when the Gestapo raided the journal’s office (1:xiv). Incidental affinities continue via Roberto Rossellini’s 1952 film Europa ’51 (which Bazin wrote about in “In Defense of Roberto Rossellini”), whose main character (played by Ingrid Bergman) is based on Weil.

12. The revived interest in Bazin confirms his importance to contemporary film theory and (new) visual media. See, for example, Daniel Morgan’s “Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics,” which considers Bazin’s adaptability to “a rapidly changing media landscape” (443). Similar to my own rereading of realism, Jennifer Fay considers “the absence of man in Bazin’s formulation” (“Seeing/Loving Animals” 52) as the opening up of his aesthetics to posthuman ethics (43).

13. Tyulkin’s films were first shown to Western audiences as part of the Fallen Curtain screenings programmed by Marcel Schwierin at the 2005 Oberhausen International Short Film Festival. On the program, see George Clark, “Seeking the Other,” Vertigo 9.2 (Autumn/Winter 2005): 12–13.

14. See Ruslan Janumyan, “Kira Muratova,” Senses of Cinema 28 (2003), http://archive.senseofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/muratova.html. See also Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Kira Muratova’s Home Truths: The Asthenic Syndrome,” in Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), pp. 43–47.

15. “Play. A cat plays with a mouse before eating it. What is that play? It’s theatre. It’s an étude. When she’s eaten enough, a thousand mice, and begins to play with a piece of paper … that’s art in nature” (Muratova qtd. in Taubman 106). Taubman writes that “throughout the film she used domestic animals—dogs, cats, even canaries—to provide a mute protest. Muratova, like the post-conversion Tolstoy, is a vegetarian. She attributed the turn that led her to make Asthenic Syndrome to ‘the presence of Lev Tolstoy in my life, to his ideas and world-view … I so dislike the way nature and matter are arranged, how animals suffer, I don’t like the fact that some of them eat others’” (Taubman 48).

1. Franju is not the first to film animal slaughter, but he is the first to devote an entire film to it as a complex theme. An earlier film that uses documentary footage of animal slaughter in a similar way to Franju is Alberto Cavalcanti’s 1926 Rien que les heures. Cavalcanti’s is one of the so-called city films of the 1920s, along with Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927) or Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), which revel in cinema’s unique ability to probe urban space and time. Cavalcanti’s film includes an episode in which a typically bourgeois man is having his lunch. The camera focuses on his plate as he cuts his steak, then, in superimposition, framed by the plate, we see the origin of the meat in the slaughtering of an animal (a horse?). Violence fractures the civilized facade of middle-class existence. This works conventionally enough as an allegory and social critique of the brutal underbelly of modern urban life. But, as in Franju’s own city film, the slaughter sequence also carries an inalienable literal power.

2. The exhibition Undercover Surrealism at London’s Hayward Gallery (May-July 2006) examined the contribution of Documents and the Bataille milieu to a range of disciplines, from anthropology and ethnography to cinema. It featured Lotar’s photographs with the accompanying text from the journal. The images and text are reprinted in Encyclopaedia Acephalica (London: Atlas, 1996), pp. 72–74.

3. Sang des bêtes (1949), En passant par la Lorraine (1950), and Hôtel des invalides (1951) form a documentary triptych whose main theme can be defined as modernity’s slaughterhouse. The films deal with the abattoir, technology and factory work, and the ravages of war. Franju explores his theme across several contexts and species. Like Primate, Sang des bêtes belongs to a series whose subjects include both humans and animals.

4. Not everyone agrees that Franju’s cinema is explicitly political. For a counter-reading of Eyes Without a Face that rejects the predominance of historical allegory see Curtis Bowman, “A Film Without Politics,” Kinoeye 2.13 (2002), http://www.kinoeye.org/02/13/bowman13.php.

5. One example of this surrealist “lagging” is Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s famous Un Chien andalou (1928), in which the surgical eye slicing moment (in reality the eye of a calf) easily “outruns” the film’s other surrealist images. I recently watched again Hans Richter’s Dreams That Money Can Buy (1947) and was struck by a certain loss of pitch in some of the film’s more wondrous and “shocking” images. To an extent, canonical surrealism suffered the consequences of its own success, especially in terms of its influence in ubiquitous areas like advertising and television. And, although the movement was internally conflicted (Breton versus Bataille), it on the whole failed to realize a truly radical political program.

6. On the success of Dr. Von Hagens, see Virilio, “A Pitiless Art” (41). Cary Wolfe’s “From Dead Meat to Glow in the Dark Bunnies: Seeing ‘The Animal Question’ in Contemporary Art” addresses Eduardo Kac’s controversial transgenic animal art. “Animal Beings” special issue of Parallax 12.1 (2006): 95–109.

8. Liz Ellsworth’s Frederick Wiseman: A Guide to References and Sources (Boston: Hall, 1979), pp. 102–158, meticulously compiles statistical information on Wiseman’s films. Ellsworth’s statistics are repeated in several studies of Primate, for instance, in Thomas Benson’s “The Rhetorical Structure of Frederick Wiseman’s Primate.” Benson writes: “The film is 105 minutes long—feature length—and contains … 569 shots. That works out to an average of 11 seconds per shot for Primate, approximately half of the average shot length of 22 seconds in Wiseman’s High School” (Benson 193).

9. Like Sang des bêtes, Primate explores the vicissitudes of technological rationalism. Donna Haraway’s extensive Primate Visions discusses postwar primatology as “largely … a result of the extraordinary wartime mobilization of science” (120). The connections between rationalism, technology, and organized violence—and between Franju’s and Wiseman’s films—are thus traceable along multiple axes: militarily, scientifically, culturally, and aesthetically.

10. For a discussion of the ethics of vivisection, see Diamond, “Experimenting on Animals.” For a welfarist approach to animal experiments, see Jean Kazez’s Animalkind: What We Owe to Animals (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), especially chapter 8, “Science and Survival” (136–155). I have already briefly discussed the distinction between welfarism and abolitionism in chapter 2. Arguments for tighter regulation to reduce pain and increase animal welfare in research do nothing to challenge the rationale that legitimates the use of animals in the first place. From an abolitionist perspective, moreover, welfarism is ultimately counterproductive, since it reinforces rather than combats the rationale of domination. In food production, too, the move toward more “compassionate” forms of exploitation (bigger cages, free-range meat, etc.) avoids the fundamental ethical question: does it make sense to speak of a “compassionate killing” of animals? An abolitionist approach seeks to end all animal exploitation as morally unjustifiable, no matter how “humanely” exploitation may be carried out.

11. On the limitations of mainstream bioethics vis-à-vis some of the ideas I have been discussing throughout this study, see Cary Wolfe, “Bioethics and the Posthumanist Imperative,” in Eduardo Kac, ed., Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 95–114.

12. It is interesting to contrast Haraway’s reading of Primate’s scientific surrealism to Paul Virilio’s assessment of avant-garde science in books such as Art and Fear, The Information Bomb, or The Accident of Art. Virilio’s polemic against the nature and reach of contemporary biotechnology is politically and ethically alarmist, while Haraway celebrates the destabilizing effects surrealist science has on traditional humanist paradigms. Haraway’s analysis seems complicit in the discourses she critiques. She sees Primate as exploring the merging of human, animal, and machine. While wholly aware of the hierarchies of power that Yerkes exemplifies (in terms of species and of race), Haraway’s focus is on the fluidity of boundaries between species. Haraway’s work in this respect embodies some of the difficulties inherent in posthumanist theory that tends to separate the ethical from other aspects of its inquiry.

13. One essay that (lovingly) evokes the haunting visuality of the biotechnological workspace is Sarah Franklin’s “The Cyborg Embryo: Our Path to Transbiology,” Theory, Culture and Society 23 (December 2006): 167–187. Franklin describes in great detail the interiors and ecology of the embryology laboratory, from the “dirty room” (IVF surgery) to the “clean” derivation lab, and down to the individual tools used by embryologists in their work (“it is not uncommon for embryologists to make their own pipettes by hand … with a Bunsen burner” [174]). My thanks to Noreen Giffney and Michael O’Rourke for bringing this essay to my attention.

1. Alan Singer’s remark made at the Werner Herzog: Between the Visionary and the Documentary conference, September 16–18, 2005, at the Goethe Institute, London. My concern is with what Herzog’s “regard for nature”—be it great or small—might mean in the context of (his) cinema, the wildlife film, and in terms of Herzog’s treatment of the human figure.

2. Singer’s keynote “Through the Ruby Looking Glass: Transcending the Visionary,” at Werner Herzog: Between the Visionary and the Documentary.

3. In 2007 Herzog released Rescue Dawn, a fictional reworking of Little Dieter Needs to Fly. As the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in Herzog is tenuous at best, much of what I argue here via Herzog’s documentaries applies also to his fiction films, complete with their notoriously arduous shooting expeditions.

4. Errol Morris often uses a similar device of arrested looks (e.g. Stairway to Heaven, The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure). The device is interesting for the way it halts motion and suspends (rather than accentuates) the personal expression of the “framed” subject.

5. Throughout this study I try to disclose the stillness and inertness of human beings, a strategy that in my introduction I described as “contraction.” In her superb Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett performs the materialist gesture in the opposite direction, urging us to recognize the “thing-power” of inert stuff, investing matter itself with an “energetic vitality” (5). The two gestures complement one another, as Bennett explains: “the case for matter as active needs also to readjust the status of human actants: not by denying humanity’s awesome, awful powers, but by presenting these powers as evidence of our own constitution as vital materiality. In other words, human power is itself a kind of thing-power” (10).

6. Attentiveness implies a mode of seeing that, while remaining undisclosed to (and thus unreciprocated by) the object, does not emanate from a position of power. It eschews scopophilia by falling short of controlling the object as subservient or beautiful. This looking draws on Weil’s notion of attention as a kind of absent-minded thinking, an orientation with no specific object or idea. Attention might also invoke Lévinas’s notion of the other’s face seen in its nakedness. Lévinas gives the example of looking without being able to determine the color of the other’s eyes. Voyeurism, on the other hand, belongs to an economy of looking where the other appears as a definite object (of desire) with particular (fetishized) traits—that is, the object of voyeurism is, paradoxically, never naked. My point is that not all discrete looking falls into the theoretical domain of voyeurism.

7. In her chapter on Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo in Beasts of the Modern Imagination, Margot Norris uses this lack of reciprocity between subject and object to point out that Nietzsche’s (mock-) biography is oblivious to its imagined readers. Nietzsche does not seek to communicate, educate, or persuade. His self is asserted outside of the contractual exchange between author and reader. Thus Nietzsche seeks to free himself from the social as the foundation of individuality. His person is a natural fact, physiologically and metabolically self-generating. “Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo: Behold the Beast,” Beasts of the Modern Imagination, pp. 73–100.

8. Benjamin’s 1916 essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” introduces the notion of “nature’s mourning.” In Paul Celan’s short prose piece “Conversation in the Mountains,” human and nonhuman nature speak, and human language itself emanates from the impersonal expressiveness of nature. Paul Celan: Collected Prose, trans. Rosemarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986), pp. 17–22. See Hanssen’s discussion of Benjamin and Celan in Walter Benjamin’s Other History, pp. 155–160.

9. Weil is discussing the connections between necessity and beauty, between nature and art. In this and other passages, and despite her dislike of him, Weil is echoing Nietzsche’s assertion in The Birth of Tragedy that nature itself is inherently artistic, regardless of the human agency of the artist. Weil writes: “Matter is not beautiful when it obeys man, but only when it obeys God” (“Love of God” 77).

10. See, for example, the February 2006 issue of Sight and Sound, which includes Catherine Wheatley’s piece on Hidden, “Secrets, Lies and Videotape,” and Nick James’s “The Greatest Show on Earth” on Grizzly Man and Wild Blue Yonder.

11. David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1996) treads similar paranoid ground as Hidden and, like Hidden, refuses narrative resolution. Unlike Hidden, however, Lost Highway is genuinely frightening. Its lack of logical structure feeds spookily into the ambience of visceral terror. Few of Hidden’s eulogizers ponder the comparison with Lost Highway, yet even when Philip French cites Lynch as a precursor, he remains oblivious to the emptiness and sterility that cripple Haneke’s film. Philip French, “They’re all out to get him …” Observer, January 29, 2006. http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2006/jan/29/features.review77. Rather than calling attention to contemporary hollowness, Hidden exemplifies it. More successful in dealing with the sort of issues raised by Hidden and also invoking the animal as oblique symbol is Dominik Moll’s Lemming (2005).

12. There is nothing new in cinema’s fascination with the animal body as the pure moving image. Thomas Edison’s 1903 Electrocution of an Elephant is an early example of what Tom Gunning called the “cinema of attractions.” The “cinema of attractions” describes the non-narrative, attraction-based origins of film (from 1895 to about 1906). See Lisa Cartwright’s discussion of Electrocution of an Elephant in Screening the Body (13–16; 17–19). My point is that (as far as is legally possible), the animal continues to provide the ideal disposable body as a cinematic “attraction.”

14. In Animal Liberation Peter Singer famously proclaimed that neither he (nor his wife) loved animals. Despite being a critic of Singer’s utilitarianism, Cary Wolfe also distances himself from the idea of love as the foundation of justice for animals. He explains that “because the discourse of speciesism … can be used to mark any social other, we need to understand that the ethical and philosophical urgency of confronting the institution of speciesism and crafting a posthumanist theory of the subject has nothing to do with whether you like animals” (Animal Rites 7). But is not the very notion of a “philosophical urgency” understandable precisely as something other than reasoned calculation?

15. Children are often thought to have an intuitive connection with animals. Current attitudes to the young and to the “ontology of childhood” (from paeans to childhood innocence to moral panics about its violations and the pathologizing and criminalizing of youth by “experts”) are partly shaped by the demands of a neoliberal market ideology. Treadwell’s “refusal to grow up” challenges this ideology. His special relationship with animals is thus a main symptom of his alleged immaturity.

16. It is remarkable how, in a Western culture obsessed with child protection, the consumption of lamb or so-called veal is seldom thought of in terms of eating the flesh of child or infant animals. The inability to see childhood across the species barrier is not simply a failure of the imagination but an ethical failure as well: a misunderstanding of the extensive nature of attention. People may eat lamb while declaring lambs “cute.” This is the difference between “seeing” and “attending.”

17. See “Fact and Truth,” in Herzog on Herzog (Cronin 238–272). In his Minnesota Declaration, Herzog proclaimed “ecstatic” or poetic truth over factual or “accountants’” truth. More recently, Herzog announced on his Web site the launching of weekend seminars called the Rogue Film School. The school is “not for the faint-hearted; it is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum.” The school is not technical but “about a way of life” (http://www.roguefilmschool.com/default.asp).

19. In an evocative passage in §9, Nietzsche contrasts Greek and modern cheerfulness. The Greeks possessed an authentic capacity for joy because they also glimpsed “the terrible depths of nature” (BT 46). “Only in this sense can we imagine that we correctly understand the serious and meaningful concept of ‘Greek cheerfulness’—while today … we constantly encounter this concept of cheerfulness wrongly understood as a state of untroubled contentment” (46). The contention is central to Nietzsche’s critique of modernity and offers a powerful challenge to our own age in which happiness is mandatory and unhappiness pathologized and medicalized. Suffering itself is viewed as a strange aberration, an anomaly to be eliminated or cured.

20. It is tempting to take further the musical convergences between Nietzsche and Herzog, but this is perhaps the subject for a separate piece. I should point out, though, that Nietzsche’s discussion of the satyr as a Dionysian figure in §8 of The Birth of Tragedy calls to mind Herzog’s many versions of “natural man.” The satyr, writes Nietzsche, “is also the ‘simple man’ in contrast to the god: the image of nature and nature’s strongest impulses, the symbol of those impulses and also the herald of its wisdom and art—musician, poet, dancer and clairvoyant in a single person” (BT 44). Are not Herzog’s “simple men” and enfants sauvages versions of the Dionysian satyr? I am thinking, for instance, about the character of Stroszek, who, while an apparently naive and placid simpleton, is also a gifted musician, or of Kaspar Hauser (also played by Bruno S., himself the original foundling), who clumsily rejoins civilization from the wild. The wisdom of these figures (all “losers” in the societal sense) lies in their embodiment of worldly suffering and in their instinctive affinity with other sufferers (like the prostitute in Stroszek). A strong case can surely be made for Treadwell as a present-day satyr—a wandering goat-man who, having lost his tragic chorus, finds himself alone in a world without tragedy.

21. Herzog claims he came to music late and knew very little about it. Even if one treats such a statement with skepticism, it reveals something about Herzog’s antischolarly attitude to music. For Herzog the role of (preexisting) music does not appeal to a musically literate audience. Music functions in similar ways whether it is preexisting or especially composed.

22. For a reading that pins down Lessons of Darkness’s ecological, political, and cinematic overlaps, see Nadia Bozak’s excellent “Firepower: Herzog’s Pure Cinema as the Internal Combustion of War,” Cine Action 68 (2006): 18–25.

1. Quandt lists the many religious references and allusions in Balthazar. But he believes that “Bresson’s art never proceeds by strict or simple analogy … he is not an illustrator or allegorist—and his pessimism invalidates the affirmation this reading too readily reaches for” (Quandt 19). See also Tim Cawkwell’s thoughtful reading of Bresson in The Filmgoer’s Guide to God (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004).

2. The tension concerns the central theological problem of the nature of the relationship between God’s grace and free will. Leszek Kolakowski’s God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) is a brilliant account of the conflict between the Jansenists and the Jesuits. Bresson’s films clearly grapple with the issue of determinism and divine grace. They beautifully reflect Jansenism’s reactionary pessimism with regard to human freedom and salvation.