NOTES

Introduction

1.  Catharine MacKinnon (2004) discusses the relation between loving and killing in terms of both women and animals.

2.  Derrida’s title, L’animal que donc je suis, can also mean “The Animal That I Follow.”

3.  In his eulogy for Emmanuel Levinas, Adieu (1997a), Derrida discusses the difficulty of “properly thanking” our teachers.

4.  Donna Haraway suggests (esp. 2004) some alternative ways of thinking about kinship that open kin beyond the human and beyond blood. Feminist anthropology and recent work on gay marriage also challenge traditional notions of kinship in interesting ways, some of which could be provocatively extended to animals. For example, see Collier and Yanagisako 1987 and Weston 1991. Beth Conklin’s work on cannibalism (2001) also challenges Western notions of kinship, particularly our relationships to animals and what we eat.

5.  For a criticism of the notion of fraternity, see Derrida 1997b.

6.  The survey was conducted by the American Kennel Club and reported in the March 28, 2008, issue of Mother Jones Magazine. The parrot and tiger examples come from this same article (Gettelman and Gilson 2008).

7.  See Gettelman and Gilson 2008. It is noteworthy that Deleuze and Guattari associate becoming-animal with becoming-woman (1987).

8.  In chapter 10, I discuss Agamben’s analysis of the nonhuman within the human in relation to animals.

9.  Deleuze and Guattari also focus on relationships. Their notion of becoming-animal in particular imagines differently the relation between man and animal. Although I mention Deleuze and Guattari in passing, I do not include a sustained analysis of their texts. My reasons are varied. Foremost among them are, first, in the Continental tradition their work has already been widely employed in discussions of animals and animality (e.g., see Baker 2002; Birke and Parisi 1999; Brown 2007; and Lorraine 1999). Second, their relational conception of becoming-animal is in some ways an exception to the historical trajectory I trace. Third, limitations of time and space prevent me from entering their texts in ways that I have not heretofore done in order to do justice to either the novelty or the limitations of their texts. Fourth, although I am sympathetic to their criticisms of “pets,” I do not agree that “anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 240). Finally, I am more interested in exploring relations in terms of responsivity rather than machine metaphors such as assemblage, geographical metaphors such as deterritorialization, geometric metaphors such as lines of flight, or biological metaphors such as rhizomes, all of which sound too deterministic for my tastes.

10.  Donna Haraway discusses (2003) some of the historical and social ways in which humans and animals developed together as what she calls “companion species.” Her work indicates that the symbiotic relation between animals and humans is not just conceptual. She also discusses (2004) animals in terms of kinship.

1. The Right to Remain Silent

1.  Some notable exceptions are Donna Haraway and philosophers working in the “Continental” tradition: Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, David Wood, Jacques Derrida, Len Lawlor, Cary Wolfe, and Matthew Calarco. Notable examples of those who engage in the “animal rights” or “animal welfare” debates in these, or similar, terms are Peter Singer, Tom Regan, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Richard Posner, Cora Diamond, and Martha Nussbaum (not coincidentally, all working in the “analytic” tradition). Daniel Dennett, among other philosophers of mind, regularly discusses the relation between animal intelligence and human intelligence.

2.  Matthew Calarco suggests that women’s rights and animal rights, among others, are related “if only for contingent historical reasons” (2008, 8). He identifies two problems with the current debates in animal rights philosophy: (1) adopting the language of identity politics pits animal rights against women’s rights and other rights; and (2) these discourses continue to “determine animality and animal identity according to anthropocentric norms and ideals” (2008, 8).

3.  For a discussion of some of the problems of drawing lines, particularly in terms of public policy, see Rachel 2004.

4.  Making fun of such list drawing, Daniel Dennett refers to them as “scorecards” and quotes Leiber:

Montaigne is ecumenical in this respect, claiming consciousness for spiders and ants, and even writing of our duties to trees and plants. Singer and Clarke agree in denying consciousness to sponges. Singer locates the distinction somewhere between the shrimp and the oyster. He, with rather considerable convenience for one who is thundering hard accusations at others, slides by the case of insects and spiders and bacteria; they, pace Montaigne, apparently and rather conveniently do not feel pain. The intrepid Midgley, on the other hand, seems willing to speculate about the subjective experience of tapeworms. . . . Nagel appears to draw the line at flounders and wasps, though more recently he speaks of the inner life of cockroaches. (Dennett 1998, 343)

5.  Discussing Confucianism, Henry Rosemont argues that a majority of the world live in cultures without notions of individuals as rights-bearing persons because they have no conception of rights (1991, 73).

6.  Hooks (2007) was echoing Sojourner Truth’s speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” at the Women’s Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio, May 29, 1851.

7.  Henry Rosemont argues that the majority of the world’s population live in cultures that do not have a concept of rights (1991).

8.  According to Brown,

Women’s struggle for rights occurs in the context of a specifically masculinist discourse of rights, a discourse that presumes an ontologically autonomous, self-sufficient, unencumbered subject . . . rights in liberalism also tend to depoliticize the conditions they articulate. . . . Thus rights for the systematically subordinated tend to rewrite injuries, inequalities, and impediments to freedom that are consequent to social stratification as matters of individual violations and rarely articulate or address the conditions producing or fomenting that violation. Yet the absence of rights in these domains leaves fully intact these same conditions. (2002, 432-33)

9.  In terms of women’s rights, Wendy Brown discusses some of the ways in which rights entail regulations and disciplinary techniques, particularly because they are rights of protection rather than positive rights, which currently are the only type of rights afforded to animals. For women, Brown argues,

To have a right as a woman is not to be free of being designated and subordinated by gender. Rather, though it may entail some protection from the most immobilizing features of that designation, it reinscribes the designation as it protects us, and thus enables further regulation through that designation. (2002, 422)

10.  Wendy Brown discusses (2002) the paradox of basing rights claims on identity politics.

11.  As we will see, the ability to “sign in one’s own name” comes under attack by Derrida, who argues that we cannot be so certain that humans can sign in their own names, which further complicates the issue of considering whether or not animals can do so.

12.  See O’Neill 2008, 24.

13.  Duncan Kennedy discusses the move from interests to rights as a rhetorical gesture that turns preferences into rules (2002, 188).

14.  Regan gives his famous lifeboat example (1983). Gary Francione and Alan Watson (2000) like the fire example. In response to the criticism that she is a killjoy because she doesn’t want people to enjoy their steaks, Brigid Brody argues that killing one of their joys is nothing compared with killing the animal and all its joy; she also says that in principle, she is not against eating animals (or humans) that died of natural causes if they could be made tender and hygienic, even though in practice she says she might choke on said casserole made of Great-Aunt Emily (Brody 1989). Peter Singer compares dogs to soy milk and his daughter to Kahlúa when discussing which one he would save in a fire (Singer 1999).

15.  Kennedy also argues,

Rights are a key element in the universalization projects of ideological intelligentsias of all stripes. A universalization project takes an interpretation of the interests of some group, less than the whole polity, and argues that it corresponds to the interests or ideals of the whole. Rights arguments do this: they restate the interests of the group as characteristic of all people. (2002, 188)

16.  Spain is on the verge of approving rights for great apes to comply with the Great Apes Project. Headlines in The Guardian and the Christian Science Monitor read, “Spanish Parliament Approves ‘Human Rights’ for Apes” and “Spain to Grant Some Human Rights to Apes” (Glendinning 2008 and O’Carroll 2008). Catharine MacKinnon argues, “Like women’s rights, animal rights are poised to develop first for a tiny elite, the direction in which the ‘like us’ analysis tends” (2004, 271).

17.  Derrida says,

On the one hand, casting doubt on responsibility, on decision, on one’s own being-ethical, seems to me to be—and is perhaps what should forever remain—the unrescindable essence of ethics: decision and responsibility. Every firm knowledge, certainty, and assurance on this subject would suffice, precisely, to confirm the very thing one wishes to disavow, namely the reactionality in the response. I indeed said “to disavow” [denier], and it is for that reason that I situate disavowal at the heart of all these discourses on the animal. (2003, 128)

I discuss this passage in chapters 4 and 5.

Literary theorist and philosopher Cary Wolfe develops a brilliant comparison between Derrida and Cora Diamond on the issue of rights versus justice. Wolfe says,

For both, the question of the animal requires an alternative conception of ethics to what we find in the liberal justice and rights tradition of analytical philosophy as it manifests itself in work such as Singer’s. For Singer, as we have seen, ethics means the application of what Derrida will elsewhere characterize as a “calculable process"—in Singer’s case, it is quite literally the utilitarian calculus that would tally up the “interests” of the particular beings in question in a given situation, regardless of their species, and would determine what counts as a just act by calculating which action maximizes the greatest good for the greatest number. In doing so, however, Singer would reduce ethics to the very antithesis of ethics in Diamond’s and Derrida’s terms because he would overleap what Derrida calls “the ordeal of the undecidable,” which “must be gone through by any decision worthy of the name.” For Derrida, “A decision that didn’t go through the ordeal of the undecidable would not be a free decision, it would be the programmable application or unfolding of a calculable process. It might be legal; it would not be just.” “Ordeal” is indeed the word we want here, which is one reason Diamond rivets our attention more than once on Elizabeth Coetzee’s [sic] “rawness” of nerves, her sufferance of a responsibility that is both undeniable and unappeasable. (Wolfe 2008, 19)

18.  For an insightful discussion of the connection between rights and private property (and Marx’s criticisms of private property in terms of rights) see legal theorist Duncan Kennedy’s “The Critique of Rights in Critical Legal Studies” (2002). He discusses Marx’s criticisms that voting rights and rights to free speech also guarantee rights to private property. For another discussion of the relationship between the Western notion of rights and capitalism, see Rosemont 1991, in which he concludes,

To be sure, that model [individuals as purely rational, self-seeking, autonomous individuals] especially as it has been taken to imply human rights—has advanced significantly the cause of human dignity, especially in the Western democracies, but it also has a strong self-fulfilling prophetic nature, which is strengthened further by the demands of capitalist economies; and I believe that model is now much more of a conceptual liability than an asset as we approach the twenty-first century, continuing our search for how to live, and how best to live together on this increasingly fragile planet. (1991, 89)

19.  Giorgio Agamben argues that we cannot separate human rights from the rights of citizens. Instead, the limit-case is the refugee, who should have human rights even without rights of citizenship, but who in practice does not. He maintains that the concept of citizen is outmoded for dealing with contemporary politics (see esp. Agamben 1996).

20.  For a fascinating history of relationships between humans and animals from predomesticity through present-day factory farming, see Bulliet 2005, in which he discusses the connection between the notion of private property and owning animals.

21.  Feminist theorist Catharine MacKinnon discusses (2004) the association between women and animals, particularly in terms of considering animal rights and the issue of names. See also Adams and Donovan 1990, 1995; and Dunayer 1995.

22.  For a sustained analysis of the interconnections between the exploitation of animals and of women, see Adams and Donovan 1990. In the introduction to his recent book on animals in Continental philosophy, Matthew Calarco describes the problem of treating animal rights as analogous to, but distinct from, other rights struggles: “Animal rights are seen as floating in an empty space distinct from political concerns about, for example, women’s rights, environmental justice, or worker’s rights (all of which are, on my understanding of the question of the animal, intimately related to animal rights, even if only for contingent historical reasons)” (Calarco 2008, 7—8). As he points out, this pits one group against another in the fight over whose rights are more important while ignoring the ways in which systems of oppression have historically been interconnected.

23.  See Diamond 2001 and 2008. Cary Wolfe makes a similar argument in his introduction to Philosophy and Animals (2008), in which he compares Diamond’s and Derrida’s views of animal suffering and the capacity to suffer or bodily vulnerability as what we share with animals. As Wolfe points out, Diamond’s rejection of animal rights is still based on taking the human as the standard, even of experiences that we do not properly “experience” such as death (2008, 21—22). Furthermore, whereas Diamond talks about suffering as a capacity, Derrida analyzes how it is a strange capacity in that it is an incapacity, an inability to avoid suffering (cf. Wolfe 2008, 25—26). In this regard, we could say that Diamond’s analysis still holds onto the sovereignty of the Cartesian subject.

24.  Philosopher Ann Murphy is developing an analysis of the concepts of violence and vulnerability in Continental philosophy.

25.  For a discussion of the use of the term vulnerability in the news media following the terrorist attacks, see Oliver 2007.

26.  Similarly, some philosophers, particularly feminists (including Iris Young, Gail Weiss, and Shannon Sullivan) have developed ethical theories using Merleau-Ponty’s notions of shared embodiment. For example, at a conference, I heard a young philosopher from France using Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of shared embodiment to develop an ethical theory. Like other recent attempts (including my own) to bring out the ethical implications of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, she argued that the structures of perception and behavior inherent in embodiment bring with them implicit obligations. Again, part of the argument is that our radical dependence on the world and others—what Merleau-Ponty calls the reversibility of the flesh—obligates us to them, that is, obligates us to that by virtue of which we exist at all. During the Q&A after her engaging presentation, given that animals have been on my mind recently, I asked the speaker about nonhuman creatures with whom we share embodiment; I asked whether her Merleau-Pontyan analysis applies to them as well. She seemed surprised, even shocked, by the question. She hadn’t considered that animals, too, have bodies.

27.  For a provocative application of Butler’s notion of vulnerability to animals, see Taylor 2008, in which she argues, “Butler’s account of an ethics of interdependence, embodiment, vulnerability, and mourning is a compelling incentive for thinking about the lives not only of humans, but of animals more generally, and that there is nothing about Butler’s ethics that would justify an exclusion of non-human animals” (2008, 61).

28.  For a discussion of the limits of politics of recognition, see Oliver 2001.

29.  I argue elsewhere that

philosophically, it is crucial to question the notion that vulnerability is constitutive of humanity, not just because we share vulnerability with all creatures but more particularly because it is not our vulnerability per se that distinguishes humans from other creatures; and most especially because the very notion of vulnerability is inherently linked to violence. The word vulnerable comes from the Latin word vulnerabilis which means wounding. The first definition of vulnerable in the Oxford English Dictionary is “Having power to wound; wounding"; the second is “That may be wounded; susceptible of receiving wounds or physical injury.” Vulnerable means both the power to wound or wounding and the capacity to receive wounds or wounded. (2007, 137)

That we are both violent and vulnerable may have particular significance in our relation to animals, particularly because our violence toward and domination over animals has helped secure our identity as properly human.

30.  For a defense of Butler’s ethics in relation to animals, see Taylor 2008.

31.  For a philosophy of dependence, see esp. Kittay 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999.

32.  Dennett argues that

snakes (or parts of snakes!) may feel pain—depending on how we choose to define that term—but the evidence mounts that snakes lack the sort of overarching, longterm organization that leaves room for significant suffering. That doesn’t mean that we ought to treat snakes the way we treat worn out tires, but just that concern for their suffering should be tempered by an appreciation of how modest their capacities for suffering are. (1998, 351)

He concludes that we cannot compare human and animal suffering.

33.  Daniel Dennett argues that animals (at least the lower ones) feel pain but that they do not suffer. Suffering, he maintains, is based on having a memory of experiences and a sense of the future, which he claims animals do not have. He does not, however, see this as a reason not to consider our ethical obligations to avoid causing animals pain (1998).

34.  For discussions of Derrida’s deconstruction of Bentham’s “Can they Suffer,” see Calarco 2008; Lawlor 2007; and Wolfe 2008.

35.  For a discussion of the reasons why I do not consider Deleuze and Guattari at greater length, see n. 9 of my introduction.

36.  Donna Haraway discusses “companion species” and details some of the ways in which dogs in particular have developed in symbiotic relation with humans (2003, 2004). Cora Diamond rejects animal rights discourse in favor of a notion of fellow creatures that would respect animals in their differences from man (1978, 2001, 2008). Cary Wolfe (2008) extends Diamond’s and Derrida’s discussion of fellow creatures. John Berger (1980) provocatively suggests that without animals, man would be lonely as a species.

37.  Kant imagines a “cosmopolitan constitution” of continents engaged in peaceful mutual relations that bring the entire human race under the same universal laws of hospitality. He contrasts this ideal with the “inhospitable conduct of the civilized states,” “especially the commercial states, the injustice of which they display in visiting foreign countries and peoples (which in their case is the same as conquering them) seems appallingly great” (1970, 106, italics added or in original). Kant’s 1795 description of European interests in the Caribbean is chilling in light of current U.S. interests in Iraq and our economic woes:

The worst (or from the point of view of moral judgments, the best) thing about all this is that the commercial states do not benefit by their violence, for all their trading companies are on the point of collapse. The Sugar Islands, that stronghold of the cruelest and most calculated slavery, do not yield any real profit; they serve only the indirect (and not entirely laudable) purpose of training sailors for warships, thereby aiding the prosecution of wars in Europe. And all this is the work of powers who make endless ado about their piety, and who wish to be considered as chosen believers while they live on the fruits of iniquity. (1970, 107, italics added)

2. You Are What You Eat

1.  The exact date of “On the Origin of Languages” is unknown; Catherine Kintzler (1993) puts it between 1756 and 1761. Thanks to Benigno Trigo and Kalpana Seshdri-Crooks (who also suggested the notion of animal pedagogy) for extremely helpful suggestions on this chapter.

3. Say the Human Responded

1.  Herder’s view of evolution is ambivalent. He frequently insists that man is radically distinct from animals and that his reason and language do not have animal origins. Yet, in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, he allows for a limited notion of evolution. While Kant agrees with Herder when he disclaims evolution, Kant’s criticisms of Herder stem from the places in which Herder imagines humans in proximity to animals (see Wilson 2006 and Zammito 2006).

2.  This remark is from the student minutes of Heidegger’s seminar on Herder. On the Essence of Language (1939) includes Heidegger’s lecture notes followed by seminar minutes taken by his students.

3.  In a discussion of Kant’s response to Herder, Catherine Wilson argues, “Herder said not only that culture was zoologically and geographically determined but that men had learned almost everything worth knowing from animals” (2006, 391). Kant, she claims, rejected this idea as monstrous as it would lead to “any sort of grotesquerie” (Wilson 2006, 392).

4.  Heidegger compares Herder’s view with that of biologist Uexküll, whose theories are central to Heidegger’s comparative analysis of humans and animals in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (see 1999, 137). See Chapter 8 for a discussion of Heidegger’s use of Uexküll.

4. “Hair of the Dog”

1.  For a discussion of Rousseau’s animal examples in relation to diet, see Yousef 2000.

2.  Rousseau uses the same word, goût, for taste in both the physical and the moral sense.

3.  For insightful readings of this text, see Calarco 2008; Lawlor 2007; Wolfe 2008.

4.  Derrida coins the term differánce, with á instead of e in order to highlight the double meaning of the Latin verb differre, which means both “to defer” and “to differ.” In Of Grammatology, he defines differánce as “An economic concept designating the production of differing /deferring” (1967, 23). In the essay “Differánce” in Margins of Philosophy (1968), he associates differánce with the play of signification and the dynamic relationship between words or concepts that constitutes both difference and identity.

5.  As we have seen, Rousseau is not consistent on the issue of whether man evolves slowly or erupts suddenly from Nature or animal existence. As we know, Derrida exploits this ambiguity in his reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology; while Paul de Man challenges Derrida’s interpretation of Rousseau, arguing that Derrida frames Rousseau by skewing textual evidence away from what de Man sees as Rousseau’s commitment to an evolutionary view. See de Man 1983 and Derrida 1967; also Rousseau 1966, 1984.

6.  Thanks to Kyoo Lee for pointing out the logical sense of the word follow.

7.  For provocative discussions of the ramifications of Derrida’s work for thinking about vegetarianism, see Calarco 2004a and Wood 1999.

8.  In the United States, we might ask whether a head of state could gain office without declaring himself a hunter, along with television ads featuring rifles and retrievers. Sara Guyer discusses the paradoxical position of what she identifies as Derrida’s cannibalism: “Calling the very possibility of the Good (du Bien) into questions, while at the same time insisting upon its necessity, an ethics of cannibalism recognizes the status of the other and then compels us to eat him” (1995, 63—80).

9.  Given that farmers regularly name their prized heifers and bulls and then send them to slaughter, and given that certain proper names incite us to kill (admittedly perhaps because they function as more than names)—Sadaam Hussein, Osama bin Laden—I am not entirely convinced that Lawlor’s recipe, as tempting as it may be, will lead to less violent ways of eating, although in time and numbers of names involved, it may put a dent in factory farming and slaughter. Lawlor’s recipe also supposes that we can draw a line between naming and counting so that a number cannot function as a proper name. Certainly, even factory-farmed animals are tagged, numbered, and accounted for on an invoice. Couldn’t any proper name degenerate into something like an ID tag? My point is that naming does not prevent counting, which may be why Derrida keeps asking whether animals (including humans) can “answer in their own names"—names that are not assigned to them by another, that is, an impossible name. At least all our names come from some sort of shared language, from something social that transcends any individual. Lawlor does observe that naming is necessary but not sufficient. Indeed, all the prescriptions he lists are necessary but not sufficient, thus the title of his book, This Is Not Sufficient. The kind of sublimation of our violent impulses into names and words that Lawlor’s theory implies does seem promising. Later I will return to Derrida’s repeated use of the phrase “worthy of its name” and Kristeva’s notion of abjection in relation to animals.

10.  Julie Klein puts it nicely:

In all of its implications, then, eating exhibits the intersection of natural necessity and human convention, or culture. This is perhaps the richest, and consequently most difficult to digest, food for thought in “Eating Well.". . . In this sense, while eating is necessary, there is not a single or intrinsic pattern of alimentation that obtains in all cases. Appetite appears in differing modalities and configurations, and satisfaction takes many forms. (2003, 198)

Klein concludes from this that Derrida’s analysis has the potential to open up material, historical, and political factors involved in taste. She argues, however, that Derrida stops short of embracing the possibility of infinite variations in taste, because to do so would be “abandoning a natural ground for ethics.” Unlike Klein, I read Derrida as ungrounding ethics in the name of ethics. His insistence on pure unconditional hospitality is intended to throw ethics into the aporia of adherence to its own most rigorous imperative of infinite undecidability that can never appeal to a “natural ground.”

11.  Matthew Calarco (2004a) brings this charge against David Wood.

12.  In Émile, Rousseau distinguishes the way that children learn by imitation from the way that monkeys imitate, insisting that humans don’t ape when they imitate. But he also insists that children must develop good habits through imitation and then go on to learn the lesson by heart, in the sense of feeling and understanding whether or not an action is good rather than just miming others (2003, 81). As we have seen, Derrida exploits this tension on the issue of mimesis in Rousseau’s work, whereas Paul de Man defends Rousseau against Derrida’s charge that despite his intentions, Rousseau makes imitation primary (see de Man 1983; Derrida 1967).

13.  In The Animal, Derrida maintains that we give ourselves the right to dominate the animals and argues that man’s sovereignty is self-sustaining and self-given because it has no foundation outside itself (see 2008, 89). In Rogues (2005), Derrida gives a more developed and sustained version of the same argument.

14.  One can own a house, but can one ever own a home? Space and the ethos connected with it are not within the control of anyone as absolute sovereign. David Carroll nicely described the problematic, which he associates with a kind of nomadic character in Derrida’s work:

What is original, what makes hospitality in its most radical, implacable sense, therefore, possible is not possession but a “radical dispossession.” In this sense no one is really ever originally or completely master of his/her house or truly at home in his/her home(land). The law of hospitality is rooted in this original displacement or deferment of the “natural right” to possess and along with it the right to sovereignty—over either oneself or others. (Carroll 2006, 822)

15.  Analyzing Derrida’s remarks on the impossibility of the gift, Maria Margaroni persuasively argues that “the theorist of differánce performs what I consider a strategic ‘forgetting’ of the differantial [sic] spacing entailed in the movement of giving, the spatio-temporal écart that defers the return of the gift, ensuring that on its return the given will be altered” (Margaroni 2004, 49).

16.  In his essay “Perpetual Peace,” in the section on universal hospitality, Kant says,

The stranger cannot claim the right of a guest to be entertained, for this would require a special friendly agreement whereby he might become a member of the native household for a certain time. He may only claim of right of resort, for all men are entitled to present themselves in the society of others by virtue of their right to communal possession of the earth’s surface. Since the earth is a globe, they cannot disperse over an infinite area, but must necessarily tolerate one another’s company. (1970, 106)

17.  For an interesting and instructive debate over the role of the impossibility of pure forgiveness in Derrida’s analysis, see Milbank (2001) and Dooley (2001). Milbank maintains that Derrida’s insistence on absolute or pure forgiveness undermines any possibility of an ethics of forgiveness and sacrifices the self to the other. Dooley argues that Milbank misreads Derrida’s use of the impossible in hyperbolic ethics:

The whole point of Derrida’s discourse is to suggest that “pure absolute self-sacrifice” is impossible, that no matter how hard I try I can never abandon my heritage, my language, or my tradition. But I can, by keeping the impossible dream alive, prevent this law from becoming an obstacle to those who do not come under its jurisdiction. (Dooley 2001, 145)

18.  In Rogues, Derrida describes the event as the arrival of the singular, other, or, we could say, new:

A calculable event, one that falls, like a case, like the object of some knowledge, under the generality of a law, norm, determinative judgment, or technoscience, and thus of a power-knowledge and a knowledge-power, is not at least in this measure, an event. Without the absolute singularity of the incalculable and the exceptional, no thing and no one, nothing other and thus nothing, arrive or happen. (2005, 148, italics in original).

19.  Elsewhere I question this strategy, if that is what it is, of using one discourse of purity against another. There I argue that hyperbolic ethics requires us to investigate our investment in even this “higher” or conceptual form of purity. See Oliver 2004, especially the last chapter and the conclusion, and also Oliver 2003.

20.  For a helpful discussion of Derrida on the impossibility of secrets, see Lawlor 2007, esp. 46—47.

21.  Derrida plays off the notion that only humans dream, by suggesting that his might be the dream of an animal, in the double sense in which an animal is the subject who is dreaming and an animal is the one dreamed about, only now an animal capable of speaking, or singing, in a new language (see 2008, 62—64).

22.  For a sustained analysis of the role of blood in Derrida’s “Circumfession,” see Oliver 1997, 53—68.

23.  Throughout The Animal, Derrida plays with the idiomatic use of the word animal in describing an individual as a political animal or a competitive animal. This use of animal connotes talent and passion as well as an instinct for politics of competition. Derrida turns the phrase into the “autobiographical animal” to indicate the animal, man, who has a taste or instinct for autobiography, for saying “I am” (see, e.g., 2002, 416). It is noteworthy that he begins Monolingualism of the Other with “I am some allegorical figure of this animal,” referring to a monolinguistic animal (1998, 1).

24.  Derrida seems to talk about philosophers in general and the entire history of philosophy in a sort of tongue-in-cheek gesture to highlight the ways that animals have been totalized into one group without distinctions. He often uses the term man in the same general way. In the end, he seems to imply that only by deconstructing the binary opposition man/animal can we recognize difference among not only animals but also humans.

25.  In The Animal, Derrida argues that only man can act beastly but that animals or beasts cannot behave beastly (see 2008, 64). He also plays with the word bête, which means “beast” or “stupid.”

26.  He also says:

It is not just a matter of asking whether one has the right to refuse the animal such and such a power. . . . It also means asking whether what calls itself human has the right rigorously to attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animals, and whether he can ever possess the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution. (2008, 135, italics in original; see also 2008, 72, where he challenges Descartes’ “thinking purity")

27.  Here I have a slightly different interpretation from Matthew Calarco (2008), who seems to suggest that Derrida wants to keep the human/animal binary and merely add to it.

28.  In his latest work on hospitality, forgiveness, and democracy, Derrida repeatedly uses this phrase, “worthy of its name” (digne de ce nom). I continue to analyze this phrase in the next chapter.

29.  In This Is Not Sufficient, Lawlor does not problematize Derrida’s discourse of purity; rather, throughout that text he suggests that Derrida gives us a discourse of contamination and not one of purity. But in the end, even Lawlor returns us to a discourse of purity when, with Cixous, he calls Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze part of a generation of incorruptibles. He concludes, “This generation will remain pure” (2007, 117).

30.  Derrida continues to discuss forgiveness and the gift:

Another example would be the unconditionality of the gift or of forgiveness. I have tried to show elsewhere exactly where the unconditionality required by the purity of such concepts leads us. A gift without calculable exchange, a gift worthy of its name, would not even appear as such to the donor or donee without the risk of reconstituting, through phenomenality and thus through its phenomenology, a circle of economic reappropriation that would just as soon annual its event. Similarly, forgiveness can be given to the other or come from the other only beyond calculation, beyond apologies, amnesia, or amnesty, beyond acquittal or prescription, even beyond any asking for forgiveness, and thus beyond any transformative repentance, which is most often the stipulated condition for forgiveness, at least in what is the most predominant in the tradition of the Abrahamic religions. (2005, 149, italics added).

31.  See Oliver 2001 and 2004.

32.  Leonard Lawlor mentions Derrida’s thickening of limits in several places in passing in This Is Not Sufficient (2007).

33.  In Of Grammatology, Derrida calls his project “radically empiricist” in that it looks to the material of language, in which “the very concept of empiricism destroys itself” (1974, 162). This passage appears in the same section as Derrida’s famous claim “There is nothing outside of the text” (158).

34.  Rousseau also distinguishes between eating plants and collecting plants for display, associating the latter with greed and the corruption of nature. Alexander Cook analyzes Rousseau’s criticisms of what Cook calls “exotic botany” in relation to his views of “nature versus property” (see Cook 2002). Jean Starobinski, in contrast, gives a more romantic account of Rousseau’s own interest in botany, associating plants with innocence: plants “bestow their innocence on the person contemplating them” (1988, 236).

35.  As we have seen in the conclusion of chapter 4, an alternative to contemporary ideas of “manly virtue” is the archaic notion of virtue as the healing power of certain plants and animals. This older sense of virtue suggests a beneficial nourishing relationship between humans and their environment and earthly companions. This form of virtue stands in contrast to manly virtues as conquering others in the same way that trophe differs from trophy. Trophe can humble us in the face of the earth and others upon whom we depend, while trophy fills us with pride over our conquest of them.

36.  In his recent book, Matthew Calarco argues that we need to get rid of the human/ animal distinction altogether (2008).

37.  Anne O’Byrne (2002) provocatively and productively reads Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity in relation to the maternal body’s acceptance of the DNA of the other body /fetus.

38.  For an excellent discussion of Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity in terms of suicidal tendencies in recent war and terrorism, see Lawlor 2007. We could apply Lawlor’s analysis to factory farming and recent moves to cloning that drastically deplete biodiversity and invite the possibility of deadly autoimmune responses in the form of viruses and bacteria that could wipe out entire species.

39.  I am echoing Leonard Lawlor (2007, 15) when he says that fundamentalist religions today are forms of autoimmunity that secrete their own poison.

40.  See Oliver 2004.

5. Sexual Difference, Animal Difference

1.  In her introduction to Glas, Peggy Kamuf summarizes Derrida’s strategy:

That is, displacing the familial moment, the point at which sexual difference is determined in oppositional terms and then reduced, negated, relieved (aufgehoben) to permit passage to the next moment, had to shake up the whole structure. In effect, by reading this moment as the strangle-point of the vast dialectical architecture, Derrida “sexualizes” that structure throughout. (Kamuf 1991, 317)

For an insightful analysis of Derrida’s reading of Hegel on the question of woman, see Rawlinson 1997, and for a provocative engagement with Derrida’s Glas, see Spivak 1977, 2005.

2.  For provocative discussions of Derrida’s criticisms of Heidegger and Levinas, see Chanter 1997 and Grosz 1997. See also Nancy Holland’s introduction to Feminist Interpretations of Derrida, 1997.

3.  Elizabeth Grosz describes the significance of Derrida’s thinking of difference beyond binary opposition:

In short, the debate on the status and nature of difference has tended to see it as a struggle of two entities, two terms, pairs; a struggle to equalize two terms in one case, and a struggle to render the two terms reciprocally in the second case. The concept of difference has been historically linked to the functioning of various dualisms. It is Derrida who demonstrated that difference exceeds opposition, dichotomy, or dualism and can never be adequately captured in any notion of identity or diversity (which is the proliferation of sameness or identity and by no means its overcoming or difference). Derrida understood that difference is not only at the heart of philosophy. . . but more significantly, for his work was never simply with texts, terms, or concepts alone, that difference is the methodology of life and, indeed, of the universe itself. (Grosz 2005, 90)

4.  In “Dreaming of the Innumerable,” John Caputo explores the connection between undecidablity and multiplicity in terms of justice and ethics. He argues that “for Derrida, dissemination and undecidability are the conditions, the ‘quasi-transcendental’ conditions, of justice—for women, for men (for animals, for everybody)—conditions of the dream of justice, which is also, when it comes to sexual difference, a dream of the innumerable” (Caputo 1997, 141).

5.  Elsewhere (1995), I discuss the ways that Derrida’s insistence that concepts of woman, the feminine, and femininity are undecidable and should not become objects of knowledge possibly undermine the project of feminism.

6.  For a helpful discussion of Derrida’s notion of the gift, see Cheah 2005.

7.  Elsewhere (2004, esp. chap. 4 and conclusion) I discuss several problems with this discourse of purity and contamination, particularly as Derrida uses it as an intervention into other discourses of purity and contamination, namely, the Holocaust and apartheid with their discourses of ethnic or racial purity and contamination.

8.  In this regard, the notion of purity and “worthy of its name” might conjure the concept of differánce from Derrida’s earlier work. If Derrida wishes to maintain with that notion both the sense of deferral and differing in the word difference, the qualification pure could perform the deferring function, while the idiom “worthy of its name” could perform the differing function. Now, however, both connote the realm of ethics, which the earlier term differánce did not. Given that Derrida is fond of multiplying the meaning of words, demonstrating their heterogeneous etymologies, and exploiting meanings that seem at odds with one another, this idiomatic expression—"worthy of its name"—casts a strange shadow on his hyperbolic ethics. The French digne means “worthy,” “proper,” “fitting,” so that Derrida’s phrase “worthy of its name” (digne de ce nom) implies an economy of property, since he is discussing what is proper to the concepts of gift, forgiveness, hospitality, and so forth.

9.  Derrida would probably reject my characterization of his position as “radical idealism.” In Of Grammatology, Derrida calls his project “radically empiricist” in that it looks to the material of language, in which “the very concept of empiricism destroys itself” (1974, 162). This passage appears in the same section as Derrida’s famous claim “There is nothing outside of the text” (158).

10.  Ellen Armour (1997) argues that Derrida provides a necessary supplement to Irigaray’s notion of the divine in relation to the feminine.

11.  Feminist philosopher Lisa Guenther is currently developing a notion of ethical indifference that might resonate with what I am calling unremarked difference. In her theory, the notion of indifference can prevent difference from becoming oppositional or hierarchical.

12.  For a more in-depth discussion of Derrida’s hyperbolic ethics, see Oliver 2004, chap. 4, in which I argue that even our ethical ideals must be subject to the vigilant self-interrogation of hyperbolic ethics.

13.  See Judith Butler’s pioneering work reconceptualizing gender in Gender Trouble (1990) and Undoing Gender (2004b). See also the work of Anne Fausto-Sterling (1979).

14.  Ellen Armour made this point in a presentation at Vanderbilt University in December 2006.

15.  For discussions of this passage in Derrida’s text, see Calarco 2008; Lawlor 2007; and Wolfe 2008. Lawlor creatively uses Derrida’s cat to point to what he calls, following Derrida, the “staggered analogy” between man and animals (2007, 77). In one of my favorite passages, Lawlor describes the analogy between Derrida and his cat:

In other words, we have a comparison between two things that are not completely visible, between two things that are concealed or covered up. So we have to say, then that Derrida resembles his cat less when he is uncovered and naked; he is most like a cat when he is fully clothed, when he is most uncatlike and most different from a cat. When Derrida is most human, most technological, most concealed, he is most indeterminate, and when he is most indeterminate, when he is only appresented, when he is imperceptible and clandestine, he most resembles a cat. In still other words, Derrida is most catlike when he is most human; when he is writing aporias, he most resembles a cat pacing back and forth before a door, waiting to be let out or to be let in. (2007, 78)

Calarco reads the cat example as showing the “singular event” of each particular animal subject (2008, 121—22). Wolfe discusses the cat example in terms of an exposure to the other that brings forth the ethical call (2008, 36—37). For a discussion of Derrida’s use of cats in his earlier work, see Wood 2004. It is striking that none of these accounts of Derrida’s cat discusses the sex of the cat, about which Derrida is adamant. He insists that it is a female cat looking at his sex, and sexual difference comes to play in his embarrassment. But none of these (male) theorists sees her sex. Perhaps ashamed of Derrida’s mention of the sex of his pussycat, they avert their eyes.

16.  For an excellent analysis of Derrida’s “answer” to the question of which comes first, sexual difference or difference in general, see Berger 2005.

17.  For a discussion of scientific evidence that by the end of the century half of all life on earth will be extinct, see Whitty 2007. It is telling that progressive discourses revolving around racial and ethnic diversity come at a time of drastically dwindling biodiversity, a coincidence worth further analysis.

6. The Beaver’s Struggle with Species-Being

1.  Jean-Paul Sartre’s nickname for Simone de Beauvoir, his lover, was El Castor, the Beaver. I would like to thank Gaile Poulhaus for suggesting that I write a chapter on de Beauvoir’s use of animals in The Second Sex.

2.  De Beauvoir uses the singular term woman throughout her text to designate the category assigned to women by patriarchal values. Her notion that women are born female but not born woman indicates the distinction between sex and gender that has been identified by feminist scholars as one of the fundamental lessons of The Second Sex. Her inclusion of female animals in her assessment of how patriarchal values debase females, however, challenges interpretations of The Second Sex as simply enforcing a distinction between sex and gender. My use of “woman” instead of “women” in this chapter is merely meant to mirror de Beauvoir rather than to endorse the use of the singular and universal category. For a different take on the complexities of de Beauvoir’s commitment to any sex/gender distinction, see Gatens 2003; and for insightful discussions of de Beauvoir’s sex/gender distinction, see Butler 1986a and b, 1989c; Kruks 1992; and Wittig 1992.

3.  For discussions of de Beauvoir’s ambivalence toward woman, feminine sexuality, and motherhood, see Allen 1995; Andrew 2003; Arp 1995; Bergoffen 1997, 2000; Brison 2003; Chaperon 1995; Deutscher 1997, 2003; Gatens 2003; Greene 1980; Seigfried 1985; Klaw 1995; Leighton 1975; Léon 1995; Simons 2006; Vintges 1996; and Ward 1995, among others.

4.  Ibid.

5.  Recent feminist commentaries on this section have come to mixed conclusions. For more critical accounts, see Moi 1986 and Seigfried 1985; and for a more sympathetic reading of this section, see Fallaize 2001; Bauer 2001; and Vintges 1996.

6.  For a revelatory study of the inaccuracies, deletions, and biases in zoologist Howard Parshley’s translation of The Second Sex, see Simons 1999 and 2006, esp. chap. 5. For a detailed account of the history of Parshley’s translation, see Patterson’1992; Bauer 2001; and esp. Moi 2004.

7.  Charlene Haddock Seigfried criticizes (1985) de Beauvoir for accepting the facts of biology as value free and not extending her criticisms of patriarchal myths far enough, arguing that there must be a more interactive relationship between facts and myths than de Beauvoir allows (1985, esp. 220—21 and 227). Elizabeth Fallaize contends (2001) that the main point of the first section of The Second Sex is to challenge the neutrality of all facts and to suggest that facts are always interpreted; that is, they always are imbued with myth.

8.  For a helpful discussion of de Beauvoir’s use of the word saraband to describe the imagery of zoology, see Fallaize 2001. In a footnote, Fallaize points out that the Robert French dictionary defines sarabande as a lively and lascivious Spanish dance and indicates an idiomatic use of saraband—danser, faire la sarabande, which means “to run amok.” The saraband of imagery in biology, then, could be interpreted as a lascivious dance between fact and myth, run amok.

9.  In a compelling essay, Donna Haraway argues, “Primatology is politics by other means” (1984, 489 and 515). Her detailed account of the field suggests that research on primates is fueled by desires to locate the origins of human behavior, particularly human sexuality. Her analysis suggests that de Beauvoir is not alone in using animal studies to draw conclusions about woman or gender. Indeed, her thesis is that primatology (and perhaps much of zoology) is about gender politics in one sense or another.

10.  Elizabeth Fallaize comments on de Beauvoir’s value-laden interpretations of the so-called biological facts: “Far from deconstructing images, Beauvoir is here building images of her own, and with gay abandon. However, the difference is that she does not imagine these images to be in danger of fanning the flames of male hostility against women” (2001, 78).

11.  Charlene Haddock Seigfried discusses the conclusions of primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy to show that the so-called biological facts can be interpreted in different ways. She argues that Hrdy’s studies suggest that females are dominant and sexually aggressive in order to ensure reproductive success. Seigfried concludes: “Beauvoir’s and Hrdy’s biological female are diametrically opposed. The weak, unstable, passive, female animal, overwhelmed by pregnancy has been replaced by the assertive, lusty, dominance-oriented female who revels in reproductive success” (1985, 226).

12.  In The Second Sex, she mentions the praying mantis several times (see 1949b, 18, 200, 254, 260, 467, 640, 716).

13.  For discussions of de Beauvoir’s views of motherhood and pregnancy, see Arp 2001; Bauer 2001; Bergoffen 1997; Fallaize 2001; Lázaro 1986; O’Brien 1981; Okely 1998; Patterson 1989; Pilardi 1991; Rich 1977; Simons 1999; Smith 1986; Ward 1995; and Zerilli 1992, among others. For a helpful criticism of de Beauvoir’s distinction between reproduction and production, see Jaggar and McBride 1985; and Vintges 1996.

14.  Ibid.

15.  For discussions of de Beauvoir’s relation to existentialism and particularly to Sartre’s philosophy, see Fullbrook and Fullbrook 1994, 1995; Greene 1980; Holveck 1995; Kruks 1995; O’Brien and Embree 2001; Simons 1995, 1999, 2001; Singer 1985; and Vintges 1995, among others.

16.  For a discussion of de Beauvoir’s use of anthropology in relation to contemporary studies, see Sanday and Goodenough 1990; also Lundgren-Gothlin 1996; Mahon 1997; and Vintges 1996.

17.  For discussions of de Beauvoir’s notion of freedom, especially in relation to Sartre’s, see Arp 2001; Bauer 2001; Bergoffen 1995; Kruks 1987, 1995; Linsenbard 1999; Marks 1987; Pilardi 1993; Simons 1995, 1999, 2006; Singer 1985; and Vintges 1996, among others.

18.  See n. 6.

19.  The Sriracha Tiger Zoo in Thailand reportedly regularly has tigers nursing piglets and sows nursing tiger cubs when necessary (Roberts 2005).

20.  Fredrika Scarth argues that de Beauvoir’s account suggests that pregnancy is a form of risk that enables Hegelian subject formation. She concludes: “Beauvoir isn’t valorizing a masculine model of subjectivity. Rather, in the process of shifting subjectivity from a masculine preserve to a human capacity she in fact alters the meaning of subjectivity and the project and the relationship of risking subjectivity” (2004, 155). According to Scarth, because it is the relation to otherness and even the other within that gives rise to subjectivity, pregnancy should be the ultimate risk of the other within.

21.  See Irigaray 1974, 1985, 1992, 1993.

22.  For fascinating recent discussion of the valuation of “life,” see Agamben 1996 and Lawlor 2007.

7. Answering the Call of Nature

1.  Henry Sullivan defends Lacan’s insistence on the uniqueness of human language in terms of desire, which is unique to humans: “Language and technology mark the point where material conditions cease to impinge on anatomy, and the homization of the planet begins” (1991, 46). As Lacan does, even while Sullivan criticizes evolutionary biology, he falls back on it in his conclusion about the evolutionary power of language (see Sullivan 1991).

2.  For a provocative argument in favor of animal responsiveness, see Marjolein Oele 2007. See also Ted Toadvine 2007a, who argues that phenomenology makes it possible to see that animals not only react but also respond.

8. The Abyss Between Humans and Animals

1.  For excellent exegetical essays on this text (which also offer critical remarks), see Calarco 2004b (this is the most critical of these five) and 2008; Franck 1991; Kuperus 2007; and McNeill 1999. For even more creative readings of this text and others on Heidegger’s animal, see Agamben 2004; Derrida 1987a and b, 1991b and c, 2006 (chap. 4); and Lacove-Labarthe and Nancy 1997. For another reading of this text in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s Nature lectures, see Thorens 2005. For a discussion of Heidegger’s views on animals in relation to Wittgenstein, see Glendinning 1996. For a fascinating critical extension of Heidegger’s views on animals and his philosophy of Being that makes them more useful for thinking about our ethical obligations to animals and the environment, see Llewelyn 1991, in which Llewelyn moves from the standard animal rights arguments that we have ethical obligations to animals because they are rational or suffer or have interests, to the argument that we have ethical obligations to all beings in need. Buchanan (2007) also critically extends Heidegger’s analysis of animals to make it more useful for thinking of reciprocity with animals.

2.  See, e.g., Heidegger 1983, 307. Heidegger variously uses the words Armut and Weltarm to refer to the animal’s poverty in the world, whereas McNeill translates Armut as “poverty” and Weltarm as “poor in world” (1999, 236).

3.  For a discussion of the strengths and weakness of Heidegger’s comparative approach, see Calarco 2004b, 2008; also Derrida 2006, chap. 4.

4.  Derrida discusses (2008) sovereignty and right in relation to the question of animals and the use of animals in the history of philosophy.

5.  For example, Matthew Calarco says,

Of greater importance to Heidegger than answering the skeptical question concerning circularity is to ensure that his thesis—"the animal is poor in world"—not be understood in terms of a hierarchical value judgment. He insists repeatedly throughout the lecture course that the thesis “the animal is poor in world” does not mean to say that the animal is “poor” in comparison with, and by the measure of, man who is “rich” in having world. (2004b, 21)

Later Calarco defends Heidegger against charges of humanism but levels his own charge of anthropocentrism (2004b, 29). In a more sympathetic reading (1999, 198) , McNeill argues that Heidegger is neither essentialist nor humanist in his analysis of animals. He maintains that Heidegger avoids hierarchical value judgments by consistently insisting that he is describing ontological rather than ontic differences. This reading allows that in terms of ontic differences between beings, some may perform certain tasks better than others, but in terms of ontological difference, there is no comparison and therefore no value judgment. Moreover, McNeill concludes that it is precisely the ontological difference between man and animals that opens up man to his infinite responsibility for other beings (cf. 1999, 246).

6.  See Calarco 2004b, 2008.

7.  Calarco nicely formulates the tension between citing animal experiments and Heidegger’s criticisms of technoscience:

It is highly revealing in the context that Heidegger has nothing to say about the domination of life in these experiments, particularly the experiment where a bee’s abdomen is cut away, and this despite his railings against the techno-scientific domination of nature which is prevalent throughout several of his texts. One perhaps wonders why the double sacrifice of this bee—sacrificed once (literally) in the name of scientific knowledge and a second time (symbolically) in the name of the ontological difference—even if it does not touch the bee at a cognitive level, does not “touch” thought more closely. (2004b, 25—26, italics in original).

Discussing Heidegger’s mutilated-bee example, David Morris argues that

we could say instead that a mutilated bee is a bee only for the experimenter who “prepares” it, that is it no longer really a bee, that is cannot behave toward the bowl in a bee-like manner because it has lost its belly. We might also say that the full belly of the (unmutilated) bee flying away from the scent of the bowl is an animal recognition of surplus honey. Instead of manifesting recognition in language or individual behaviour, this is a recognition of surplus in a kind of movement to be read against the overall movements of the hive. A mutilated bee cannot show this kind of recognition. But then again, a human who has lost the feeling of pain may lose the ability to show, in individual behavior, recognition of dangerous things in hand, yet recognition of danger can nonetheless be read in the individual’s behaviour in virtue of fellows alongside who help point out the danger. (2005, 59—60)

Morris criticizes Heidegger’s conclusions drawn from laboratory experiments instead of fieldwork, as well as conclusions drawn from observing individual or “lone” animals instead of groups.

8.  Derrida suggests that Heidegger’s analysis in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics risks biological determinism insofar as it seems to ground metaphysics in biology (cf. Derrida 2008, 144). He even says that this latent biologism signals a latent politics. Is Derrida suggesting that Heidegger’s latent biologism shares the same political impulses as eugenics?

9.  McNeill provides an insightful interpretation of Heidegger’s insistence on abyss, arguing that for Heidegger it is not the case that animals and humans are separated by an abyss and therefore we become linguistic beings or Dasein. Rather, our becoming Dasein opens the abyss. In other words, the abyss does not refer to the ontic level of beings but to the ontological level of being. Indeed, it is the ontological difference that opens the abyss, and not vice versa. McNeill asserts, “The Augenblick thus shows itself as the veritable abyss of world, an abyss that does not lie between different entities as beings present at hand, but that is the finite opening enabling and calling for attentiveness to Others—to all Others—in the context of their worldly presence” (1999, 246). The essential rupture between man and animals is what opens up the possibility of ethical responsibility and, more specifically, man’s responsibility toward other beings, including animals.

10.  Compare this passage from Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics:

It is precisely this inconspicuous and self-evident going alongside one another, as a particular way of being with one another and being transposed into one another, that creates the illusion that in this being alongside one another there is initially a gap that needs to be bridged, as though human beings were not transposed into one another at all here, as though one human being would first have to empathize their way into the other in order to reach them. For a long time now this illusion has also led philosophy astray and has done so to an extent one would hardly credit. Philosophy has reinforced this illusion even further by propounding the dogma that the individual human being exists for him- or herself as an individual and that it is the individual ego with its ego-sphere which is initially and primarily given to itself as what is most certain. This has merely given philosophical sanction to the view that some kind of being with one another must first be produced out of this solipsistic isolation. (1995, 206).

9. “Strange Kinship”

1.  Adèle Thorens argues that Merleau-Ponty’s alternative interpretation of Uexküll’s Umwelten allows us to answer Heidegger’s question of whether animals have world in the affirmative: “To the initial question posed by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty responds positively. Yes, animals, principally higher animals, have a world. Yes, there is in life an unbelievable potential of creation and from this [inépuissable emergent] dynamic entities [qui sont bein des mondes]” (2005, 239). Thorens also argues that one reason why Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s comparative analyses of animals and humans yield such different conclusions is that while the third term in Heidegger’s comparative analysis is inanimate objects such as stones, in Merleau-Ponty’s it is machines, particularly cybernetics. Merleau-Ponty finds more in common between man and animals by comparing them to machines: whereas machines function, both humans and animals live. Unlike Thoren, who attributes the differences between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on the question of animals to the difference between Heidegger’s Umring and Uexküll’s Umwelten, I believe that Merleau-Ponty goes beyond Uexküll and also that the difference in their answer to the question of having world comes back to the radical difference in their notions of behavior and instinct.

2.  Elizabeth Behnke argues that when he turns to science, Merleau-Ponty looks in the wrong place for the kinship between animals and humans. That is, by considering only animal experiments and overlooking our everyday relationships with animals, Merleau-Ponty takes a “frontal” view of animals and thereby treats them as mere objects. She concludes:

Similarly, the question of the human—animal “relation” is treated only ontologically, and there is only fleeting reference to human—animal sociality. More seriously, however, the unthematized relation between human beings and animals that undergrids many pages of this volume is a frontal relation of contemplation, objectification, intervention, and domination; the animals are not only observed from the outside and theorized about, but interfered with—removed from their native Umwelt, experimented upon, severed, grafted, dissected, etc. (1999, 99)

I agree with Behnke that this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s thought is in tension with his overall conclusions about behavior and the relational nature of human subjectivity. In addition, I agree that his conclusions about the “strange kinship” between humans and animals might have been different had he considered our animal companions.

Discussing Merleau-Ponty’s comparative analysis of monkeys and humans in The Structure of Behavior, David Morris (2005) criticizes him for drawing his conclusions from individual or “lone” animals rather than from groups of animals. His analysis of Merleau-Ponty on animals might have been different if he had considered Merleau-Ponty’s Nature lectures, in which his examination of animal behavior is significantly expanded and has evolved with the rest of his thought. For example, unlike Merleau-Ponty, Morris concludes that an individual animal is like one note in a melody, which should not be analyzed in isolation. Yet he seems unaware of both Uexküll’s use of the metaphor of melody to describe the animal’s relation to its environment and of Merleau-Ponty’s extension and development of that metaphor in relation to animal and human behavior.

3.  In the Nature lectures, Merleau-Ponty takes over the metaphor of melody from Uexküll. Ted Toadvine points out that in his earlier work, especially The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty takes musical metaphors from Bergson. Toadvine says that

Merleau-Ponty appropriates Bergson’s metaphor of musical structure to characterize the contrast between animal and human consciousness. Throughout Structure, Merleau-Ponty characterizes animal behavior as a “melodic unity” or a “kinetic melody,” but only at the symbolic level of behavior characteristic of humanity do we find an orientation toward the theme as such. (Toadvine 2007b, 20)

Toadvine’s essay presents a detailed analysis of the changing metaphors of melody and music in relation to the distinction between human and animal in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Toadvine traces the metaphor of melody from The Structure of Behavior through the Nature lectures and articulates the difference between the early and later work: “Whereas Merleau-Ponty’s earlier use of the musical metaphor had emphasized the fixity of the organism’s melody by the prior structures of vital need, here [Nature lectures] the accent is on the ecological relationships formed between organism, other creatures, and their milieu” (Toadvine 2007b, 27).

4.  For an excellent account of the development of Merleau-Ponty’s thought on animals and animality, see Toadvine 2007b. Unfortunately, this essay had not been published when I wrote this chapter, but fortunately I found it as I was revising the book. Robert Vallier (2001) gives a detailed account of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of animality in the Nature lectures and how it relates to his project as a whole.

5.  For an excellent analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Uexküll in the Nature lectures, see Vallier 2001. There, in a footnote, Vallier says that Merleau-Ponty’s use of Uexküll is similar to Heidegger’s, although he wasn’t aware of Heidegger’s writings when he gave his Nature lectures (Vallier 2001, 208). I disagree. As I argue in this chapter, Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Uexküll takes him in a very different direction than Heidegger’s.

6.  Renaud Barbaras makes a similar argument in his interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of nature (2001). Quoting Merleau-Ponty’s Nature lectures on the formless world already apparent in living bodies prior to consciousness, he argues that once Merleau-Ponty begins his analysis with Nature, the world is no longer constituted by consciousness but is instituted through embodiment: “Thus the Merleau-Pontian reduction, in its original form, is understood as reduction to the incarnate subject; by means of Gestalt psychology and physiology, the perceived world is then attained as world, no longer constituted by, but correlative of or inhabited by this incarnate subject” (2001, 25, cf. 29). Given that Heidegger, like Merleau-Ponty, rejects the Husserlian reduction that yields the disembodied transcendental ego and that he, too, formulates an ontology that is not subject centered, his version of world formation should not be seen as constituted by consciousness but perhaps as a correlate of or inhabited by it. In a later article, however, Barbaras criticizes Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of life because it is still grounded in consciousness (see Barbaras 2003).

7.  As Robert Vallier points out (2001, 198), already in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty maintains that signification in the sense of being oriented to gives us the category of life without relying on vitalism.

8.  Agamben quotes this passage from Linnaeus in chapter 7 of The Open, entitled “Taxonomies.” Agamben identifies Linnaeus with an “optical machine” for recognizing man mirrored in the ape (2004, 27). Linnaeus refuses to describe Homo but offers the philosophical adage “know thyself.” Agamben interprets this “know thyself” as an imperative for recognition that sets in motion the anthropological machine with which man identifies (produces) himself as human by distinguishing himself from animals:

Homo sapiens, then, is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing the recognition of the human. . . . It is an optical machine constructed of a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image always already deformed in the features of an ape. (Agamben 2004, 26—27)

It is noteworthy that Linnaeus put Homo in the general category of Anthropomorpha or “manlike” animals. Apes, lemurs, and bats also are part of this manlike category. Agamben suggests that identity as a struggle for recognition in some sense begins with this “know thyself.” However, the irony of Linnaeus’s “know thyself” is that his taxonomy would be read only by humans and that he need not describe them, since they were already well known to themselves.

9.  Ted Toadvine delineates the difference between human consciousness and human language and animal signification (2007b). Obviously, I take Merleau-Ponty’s analysis in a different direction, endorsing a type of continuity that allows for differences. For a discussion of why Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on language in the Nature lectures are not meant to suggest that animals have language, see Vallier 2001, esp. 210.

10.  For a discussion of what Merleau-Ponty means by lateral relation, see Vallier 2001.

11.  Discussing Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of science, Nancy Holland describes what she calls the emergence of consciousness from nature:

Consciousness “emerges” seamlessly from biological life, just as the biological emerges from the physico-chemical. The perceptual/behavioral nexus from which they both arise takes the form of fields that give us a world meaningfully organized in terms of biological salience and solicitations of action, as well as in terms of cultural significances and possibilities of behavior. (2002, 31)

I would diverge from Holland’s account in that the notion of lateral relationship implies that there is not an emergence or any kind of hierarchy but that life and consciousness arrive together. In this, I also diverge from Ted Toadvine’s conclusions about the Nature lectures and the emergence of human consciousness from animal life (see Toadvine 2007a, esp. 50; 2007b, esp. 29-30). Although Toadvine quotes Merleau-Ponty ("Animality and human being are given only together"), he concludes that human life emerges from animal life (Merleau-Ponty 2003, 217; Toadvine 2007b, 30). In addition, Toadvine interprets Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on the intertwining between animal and human as “entailing no fundamental ontological discontinuity” between them (2007a, 50), but I emphasize that strange kinship entails both continuity and discontinuity and that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intertwining as developed in his later work is intimately bound to his notion of chiasm, gap, or écart, which signals difference at the heart of this ontological continuity.

12.  Ted Toadvine comments (2007b) on this passage in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor of melody. He concludes his essay: “But perhaps an ontology of life cannot avoid listening more carefully to the upheavals and turbulence of Being, to the contrapuntal refrains that constitute each organism’s characteristic style of ‘singing the world’” (Toadvine 2007b, 30—31). I would add that perhaps an ontology of life should listen more carefully to the dissonances and contrapuntals that disrupt the harmony of the world.

13.  Robert Vallier describes the subtleties of Merleau-Ponty’s attempts to navigate between mechanism and vitalism in the Nature lectures in his excellent essay “The Indiscernible Joining” (2001).

14.  Mauro Carbone interprets Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor (following Uexküll) of a melody singing itself as a way of avoiding both mechanism and vitalism. Moreover, he says that this metaphor captures a relationship before the distinction between activity and passivity that inhabits the dualism of subject and object (2004, 30). Carbone concludes that Merleau-Ponty presents a notion of the “listening eye"—what he calls voyance—that rejects the separation between the activity of seeing and the passivity of listening (38). Many of the ways in which Merleau-Ponty mixes the senses and makes all sense perception dependent on relationships among the various senses and between organisms and their environments undermine the traditional oppositions between activity and passivity.

15.  Robert Vallier points out that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh (la chair) is a translation of Husserl’s Leib, or “life.” Vallier concludes that regarding Merleau-Ponty: “In that this ontology [of difference] would thus also be of the flesh, then the principle of difference on which it is grounded would also be a principle of life” (2001, 205, italics in original). Renaud Barbaras and Ted Toadvine also describe Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy as a philosophy of life (see Barbaras 2003; Toadvine 2007a).

16.  See n. 11.

17.  In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says, “Toute perception a lieu dans une atmosphère de généralité et se donne à nous comme anonyme” (1945, 249; 2002, 249—51).

18.  Donna Haraway criticizes (e.g., 2004) the bloody and violent nature of traditional notions of kinship and suggests the ways in which we must reconceive of kinship to include all sorts of families and critters. Deleuze and Guattari describe an alternative to Oedipal kinship relations using their concept “becoming-animal” (1987). Emphasizing becoming over being, they say that becoming-animal “is not an evolution, at least not an evolution by descent and filiation. Becoming produces nothing by filiation; all filiation is imaginary” (1987, 238). Although I do not engage in a sustained analysis of Haraway or of Deleuze and Guattari, I am sympathetic to their attempts to reconceive of kinship relations.

10. Stopping the Anthropological Machine

1.  Matthew Calarco makes a similar argument in relation to Agamben’s earlier work (Calarco 2000, 2008), and he also discusses (2008) the relation of The Open to Agamben’s earlier work.

2.  For a discussion of Agamben’s religious imagery in The Open, see Mendieta forthcoming.

3.  For example, Dinesh Wadiwel asks why Agamben does not consider the role of women in the anthropological machine, particularly in light of feminist criticism that demonstrates the “symbolic links between animality and femininity, either through an association of woman with nature, the body and the passions [e.g., Luce Irigaray and Genevive Lloyd] or a direct connection between violence against women and violence against animals [e.g., Carol Adams]” (Wadiwel 2004, par. 32).

4.  For a discussion of Agamben’s distinction between man and human, see Wadiwel 2004.

5.  See, e.g., J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), in which Elizabeth Costello, the main character, argues that slaughterhouses are a form of animal Holocaust that rivals the Nazis’ attempts to exterminate Jews. See also Charles Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka (2002), in which he says that in relation to animals, all of us are Nazis; see also Wadiwel’s commentary on Patterson (2004).

6.  Dinesh Wadiwel also worries that sometimes Agamben sounds as if he is arguing for a more absolute separation between man and animal (Wadiwel 2004). But he finds reassurance in Agamben’s concluding remarks on Titian’s lovers, which, he believes, indicates that Agamben is proposing a philosophy of love as a way out of biopower and a way to stop the anthropological machine (see Wadiwel 2004).

7.  Matthew Calarco gives an excellent analysis (2001) of Agamben’s earlier work, before The Open, in relation to Heidegger, particularly on the question of the animal. It is almost as if Agamben’s The Open is a response to Calarco’s earlier challenge. See also Calarco 2008.

8.  Following Derrida, we might also ask what kind of power the passive “letting be” is that is definitive of Dasein. Is it that animals cannot be passive enough? That they lack the “ability” or “power” of passivity, the ability or power to “let it be"? Derrida takes this tack in relation to the possibility of animal suffering. If humans are distinct from animals in their capacity to suffer pain—or, in Heidegger’s discourse, melancholy—then what kind of strange power is this power to suffer? (see Derrida 2008).

9.  Here I am applying Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks’s analysis (2000) of whiteness as a transcendental signifier to the notion of humanness.

10.  Wadiwel (2002) develops a persuasive account of how we might apply Agamben’s notion of bare life to animals and concludes that for Agamben it is not a matter of reinstituting a gap between humans and nonhuman animals but of eliminating the gap. Only by eliminating the gap will the zone of indetermination and the risks of the in-between category be eliminated. I am more sympathetic to Wadiwel’s interpretation of Agamben than to Agamben’s explicit discussions of animals and the risks of treating humans like them.

11.  The distinction between metaphysical separationism and biological continuism comes from Leonard Lawlor’s book on Derrida’s animals (2007).

12.  For a helpful discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology as a philosophy of life, see Vallier 2001, in which Vallier says that

the focus on behavior allows us to say that the motif in the name of which Merleau-Ponty engages this critique is that of life or the living; it is life that escapes from biological discourse when it views the organism as a collection of parts, and no catalogue of parts will disclose the life of the whole. (2001, 190, italics in original)

13.  I recently heard a report on National Public Radio that even plants recognize their kin. When neighboring plants are related to them, they are not as aggressive in taking water and nutrients from the soil as they are when their neighbors are not relatives. See “Researchers Find Discriminating Plants,” June 10, 2008.

11. Psychoanalysis as Animal By-product

1.  In an essay on Freud’s preference for single-celled organisms, Judith Roof claims that there are “sparse” references to animals in Freud’s work. I disagree. Animals are everywhere in Freud’s work, although they may not be the stuff of biological science preferred by Roof. Roof’s analysis of the role of single-celled organisms in what she calls Freud’s “Cellular Romance” is provocative and insightful:

Occupying a large share of Freud’s sparse references to animals, the single-celled organism both is and is not “human"; its difference from humanity both is and is not a positive feature. This ambivalent status makes the example of the protista valuable as a link between the human and the animal, as well as between the animate and the inanimate, the simple and the complex, the mortal and the immortal, its dual position guaranteeing the commonality of fundamental processes throughout a range of species. At the same time, the protist is the anthropomorphized subject of a psychoanalysis as Freud interprets its impulses, demonstrating how even the microbiological is ultimately a mirror for the human. (2003, 102)

2.  Although she did not have time to elaborate her claim in the context of her conference presentation at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in 2007, Elissa Marder argued, “As it happens, throughout Freud’s work, animals do the lion’s share of the theoretical work in the meta-psychology for the conceptual foundation of the idea of death, castration, and consequently the difference between the sexes” (see 2009b). Her formation of the role of animals in Freud’s work helped me clarify my thesis as I was revising this chapter. Marder draws these conclusions in the context of thinking about the relation between maternity and death in Freud’s writings.

3.  My thanks to Elaine Miller for articulating the problematic in these terms and for discussing this chapter with me. Her comments, along with those of a group of faculty and graduate students at Miami University of Ohio, were helpful in revising this chapter.

4.  For an interesting discussion of how Freud develops the theory of displacement in Totem and Taboo, see DiCenso 1999, esp. chap. 4.

5.  Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (2003) discusses the distinction between killing and murder instituted by the primal murder.

6.  Gary Genosko discusses the circular reasoning of Freud’s substitution of the animal for father, and vice versa (1993, esp. 627).

7.  Edwin Wallace (Wallace 1983), among others, has shown how Freud’s theories and the anthropological theories on which his theories are based have been discredited. See also Barnes 1959; DiCenso 1999; and Lewis 1988.

8.  For a discussion and criticism of the notion of contemporary ancestors, see Oliver 2001.

9.  Elissa Marder describes the circular reasoning of Freud’s theory of castration in relation to animals and animal phobia:

Sometimes he seems to prove the theory of castration anxiety based on his analysis of the clinical example, and sometimes he posits castration and then explains the phobia on the basis of the theory. . . . But the argument that the animal phobia is both a function of pre-historic knowledge of castration and a specific response to childhood events depends, once again, on the presumption of an ambiguous “special proximity” between boy children and large animals, and the specific psychic malleability of the figure of the animal itself. (2009a, forthcoming, italics in original)

10.  For general discussions of Freud’s theory of phobia, see Compton 1992; Lewis 1988 (she discusses the evolution of phobias and revises and updates Freud’s theories using current research in both psychology and anthropology); Snaith 1968 (he relates Freud’s theory to contemporary theories of phobia); and Spira 1991 (he traces the evolution of the concept of phobia in Freud’s work). For a discussion of anthropology since Freud, see Barnes 1959.

11.  Elissa Marder has written an extensive essay analyzing the role of animals and the animal in Freud’s presentation of the Wolf-Man case. She argues,

Animal figures operate at every level of the case and intervene in complicated ways in its conceptual framework. Indeed, I hope to demonstrate that animals occupy a critical, albeit somewhat obscure, role in many if not most of the major theoretical issues raised by the case. . . . I hope to argue that paradoxically, the animals in the text serve as strange indices to the very specificity of the human psyche. . . . Bizarrely, in what follows, it will emerge that one of the defining traits of being human is the incorporation of animal figures within the psyche; these internal animal figures are uncanny traces of our radical alterity and separation from animals. (Marder 2009a, forthcoming)

12.  For an insightful discussion of the psychoanalytic import of Freud’s comparison of animals and children, particularly in the case of the Wolf-Man, see Marder 2009a, in which she identifies a “failed recognition” of species difference in children and Freud’s savages that is a prerequisite for representation and thereby humanity: “In general, we do not suspect that wolves commonly dream of little boys even if little boys commonly dream of wolves” (Marder 2009a, forthcoming).

13.  In her essay “The Bestiary and the Primal Scene,” Elissa Marder develops a provocative and insightful interpretation of Freud’s concern with the reality status of the primal scene witnessed by the Wolf-Man. There, she discusses the substitutability of humans for animals necessary for the production of sexual difference as Freud describes it. She argues that “the observation of sexual difference in the primal scene is predicated upon” confusion between humans and animals and that “the only way human sexual difference can be perceived or represented in the scene is through the mediation and substitution of animal figures for human ones” (2009a, forthcoming).

In his essay “Freud’s Bestiary,” Gary Genosko also observes that Freud says that children are like animals in order to criticize Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that Freud does not consider “becoming animal” only a mere resemblance (1993, 605). Genosko also responds to Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of Freud’s replacement of the Wolf-Man’s wolves with domesticated dogs by claiming that they miss what is crucial through their insistence on the wolf as a pack animal, namely, the real wolves in the young Russian life (1993, 613).

14.  Elissa Marder (2009a) provides a stunning interpretation of the Wolf dream in relation to the role of animals as constitutive of humanity.

15.  Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks discusses the connection between food and sex in her reading of the Lacanian supplement to Freud’s

Lacan seems to suggest that the Freudian myth of the primal horde is also the myth of the constitution of the cannibal and the bestialist—the transgressors of the law before the law. This submerged matrix of prohibitions comes more sharply into view when we consider that one of the functions of the moral law is to establish a mutually exclusive opposition between those we use for food and those we use for sex (that is, we may not have sex with the food object or turn our sexual object into food). In The Savage Mind, Claude Lévi-Strauss, though not on the track of species difference, acknowledges the “profound analogy which people throughout the world seem to find between copulation and eating.” He provides several examples of languages, including French, which use the same word to denote both activities. . . . It is not so much that food prohibitions are prior in some way, but that the simultaneity of the prohibitions against anthropophagy and bestiality effectively disarticulates sex from food, leaving us with little but the meaty metaphor of ingestion and union. The extraordinary depth of the interrelation of these prohibitions is perhaps most evident in our relations with the family pet, which, like one’s kin, may not be regarded as food or sex object. (2003, 103—4)

16.  In the context of discussing the link between maternity and death in Freud’s writing, Elissa Marder made a similar point in her presentation at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy conference in Chicago, 2007:

As feminist readers of Totem and Taboo have long observed, in this story about the founding of religion and politics, women have no active role to play. . . . But my interest in this text is somewhat different. Moving all to quickly, I would like to suggest that the “erasure” of the maternal and the feminine with which Totem and Taboo famously ends is both derived from and challenged by the complicated inscription of animals, maternity, eating and death throughout its earlier sections. (2009b)

Marder also discusses (2009a) the link between the figure of mother in relation to the figure of animal, arguing that in Freud’s interpretation of the Wolf-Man’s encounter with the primal scene, that the woman is more of an animal than the man.

17.  Marsha Garrison points out that Hans is especially afraid of horses with carts, which both he and Freud associate with a “stork box” or his mother’s pregnant belly (see Garrison 1978, 526).

18.  Marsha Garrison reread Freud’s case of Little Hans and concluded that “Hans’s death wish against Hanna is, then, the most plausible roots of this fear [of horses]” (Garrison 1978, 531). As we will see in the next chapter, Julia Kristeva reinterprets Little Hans’s fear in relation to the maternal body which, like Freud’s interpretation, ignores the significant role of Hans’s sister.

19.  In terms of Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, which I will discuss in the next chapter, we could say that the Wolf-Man’s sister is his own abject self. See also Genosko’s discussion of the relation between wolves and sisters in the case of the Wolf-Man (1993, esp. 616).

20.  Freud takes this notion of the primal horde from Darwin. For a discussion of the tensions in Freud’s theories of sexuality and instinct that result from the influence of Darwin, see Ritvo 1990 and Roof 2003.

21.  For an insightful discussion of cannibalism and bestiality as the two prohibitions hidden behind the taboos against incest and murder instituted by the murder of the father, see Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks 2003.

12. Animal Abjects, Maternal Abjects

1.  Freud says:

The strangest fact seems to be that anyone who has transgressed one of these prohibitions himself acquires the characteristic of being prohibited—as though the whole of the dangerous had been transferred over to him. This power is attached to all special individuals, such as kings, priests or newborn babies, to all exceptional states, such as the physical states of menstruation, puberty or birth, and to all uncanny things, such as sickness and death and what is associated with them through their power of infection or contagion. (Freud 1913, 22)

It is noteworthy that Deleuze and Guattari also discuss sex and reproduction in terms of contagion (1987, 241).

2.  For introductions to Kristeva’s notion of abjection, see McAfee 2004 and Oliver 1993.

3.  For insightful and provocative discussions of Freud’s mythology, see Paul Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy (1970) and James DiCenso’s The Other Freud (1999).

4.  Kristeva uses the metaphor of the “stray” throughout Powers of Horror (1980) and Tales of Love (1987).

5.  Elissa Marder makes this argument in her analysis of Freud’s Wolf-Man case and concludes:

The child comes into contact with human sexuality and confronts sexual difference only when the humans involved do not appear to act like humans, but like animals. Once again, human sexuality becomes visible only when humans behave like animals. In the dream of wolves, therefore, the animal figures are distorted substitutes for human figures that are themselves imitating animal postures. (2009a, forthcoming)

Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that “becoming-animal” is neither mimesis nor imitation is relevant here (1987).

6.  For discussions of Kristeva’s reinterpretation of Freud’s case of Little Hans, see Beardsworth 2004, 84—90; and DiCenso 1999, 69—70.

Deleuze and Guattari also interpret Little Hans’s fear of horse as a network of affective relations. They say, “So just what is the becoming-horse of Little Hans? Hans is also taken up in an assemblage: his mother’s bed, the paternal element, the house, the café across the street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street” (1987, 257).

7.  For an insightful analysis of Kristeva’s reinterpretation of Freud’s theory of phobia, particularly in the case of Little Hans, see Beardsworth 2004, esp. 84—90. Beardsworth concludes: “Kristeva acknowledges Freud’s indications of the presence of the oedipal problematic in phobia, but equally shows the phobic object to be a hallucinatory metaphor tied to unsymbolized drives. She calls the hallucinatory metaphor a ‘proto-writing’, and little Hans—deprived of others—is stage director of his own drama” (2004, 90). Beardsworth takes up Kristeva’s analysis of the relation between writing and phobia.

8.  Marsha Garrison makes a similar argument in her reinterpretation of Little Hans’s phobia, maintaining that Hans is afraid of his mother, represented by the horse, and seeks protection from her from his father (1978, 525, 527).

9.  This maternal anguish is the infant’s relation to the not-yet or pre- or semi-objects of food, air, and movement that it needs. The infant experiences the deprivation of the breast, hunger, and other needs that are not satisfied “on time.” As a result, the anguish or fear it feels in connection with these bodily needs or wants are associated with the maternal body and, if we follow Freud and Lacan, eventually with the fear of castration (interpreted narrowly as the fear of losing the penis or broadly as the fear of losing the object—or agent—of satisfaction). Marsha Garrison reinterprets (1978) Little Hans’s phobia as a result of a fear of castration from his mother and not his father. Garrison argues that the case history demonstrates that the horse represents the maternal and not paternal threat. She concludes that ultimately Little Hans’s forbidden desire for the death of his sister prompts his fear of punishment from the horse/mother.

10.  For a discussion of the relation between Kristeva and Klein, see Doane and Hodges 1992.

11.  Kristeva challenges some of Lacan’s suggestions that language is always already there. She argues that this position discounts the drives and the primary processes that existed before the secondary processes (2000, 42—43). Her analysis of the unnamable and the presymbolic “symbol” of the phobic animal also imply her divergence from Lacan’s position on Freud’s discussion of totemism in which Lacan insists that the names of the father (and mother, etc.) must exist before the totemic substitution.

12.  Even while continually reminding us of the wanting or longing or negativity at the heart of language, Kristeva holds out hope that words can be connected to affects in ways that enable sublimation, love, and joy. She does point out, however, that the fetishism involved in language acquisition may be the only unanalyzable fetishism (1982, 37).

13.  Here she follows anthropologist Célestin Bouglé (see Kristeva 1982, 81).

14.  For a helpful discussion of Kristeva’s theory of religion and the sacred in relation to Freud’s, see Beardsworth 2004.

15.  Sara Beardsworth discusses Kristeva’s analysis of biblical abomination, saying that for Kristeva, “biblical abomination therefore iterates primal repression, carrying it into the very constitution of symbolic Law and, at the same time, revealing that the latter produces abjection, without end” (2004, 135).

16.  For discussions of Kristeva’s contributions to psychoanalysis pertaining to the role of the mother and the maternal function, see, e.g., Beardsworth 2004; McAfee 2004; Oliver 1993; Reineke 1997; Weir 1993; Wiseman 1993.

17.  For an extended examination of, and engagement with, Kristeva’s notion of creativity, genius, and revolt, see Oliver 2004.