5

‘Unfamiliar Unconscious’: The performativity of Infinity Kisses

What is important to me is not the appearance, it is the passage. I like the word passage. Pas sage (ill-behaved, unwise). All the passwords all the passing and boarderpass words, the words which cross the eyelid on the interior of their own body, are my magic animots, my animal-words.

– Hélène Cixous¹

This chapter revisits the figure of the interspecies kiss in works by Donna Haraway, Hélène Cixous and Carolee Schneemann in light of the question of the animal posed by Jacques Derrida. The return named in this revisit is to work I first published in 2010, work arising from the dynamic force of what was then an essay rapidly gaining traction in animal studies: Derrida’s ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’.² At that time it had become clear that Derrida had so altered the intellectual frame as to make Schneemann’s series of works named Infinity Kisses something that could be affirmatively approached rather than avoided out of embarrassment and that the parallel projects of Donna Haraway and Cixous would further this approach.³ Indeed, the public consolidation of the work of Haraway’s 2003 Companion Species Manifesto in the extended form of When Species Meet in 2008 demanded engagement, and an important issue of the journal parallax in 2006 called ‘animal being’ – itself announcing the extensive development of work in animal studies now engaging continental and not predominantly analytic philosophy – included an intriguing essay by Cixous announcing ‘The Cat’s Arrival’.⁴ Extending my arguments from a decade prior in light of my own subsequent research, I hope to here provide still greater nuance to the complexity of the paths then sketched, ranging across a wider range of texts from Cixous and Haraway in particular.5 The transatlantic and interdisciplinary conversation that can now arise between these four figures slips further from the tendency to privilege one as the anchor of the others and more towards a shifting field of relations between humans and other animals that each one enables.

To position the interspecies kiss as performative and thus as a subset of the kiss in general, rather than an aberration, requires a curious kind of work in 2019. While ‘performativity’ has become part of the lexicon of Visual Culture, often appearing simply in adjectival form (and thus taken to be able to describe a particular form of writing rather than the condition of writing in general), it remains the case that its more complex articulation in the work of Derrida is often overlooked (outside of scholarship specifically engaging with deconstruction).⁶ Such is the chasm between what have become disciplinary norms, that the life of the ‘performative’ in this chapter may be illegible to those schooled in popular readings of Judith Butler or Peggy Phelan.⁷ Decades after the work of ‘Signature Event Context’, Derrida was to issue further caution with regard to the tendency for the performative to continue to foster the illusion of mastering – the illusion that we have the power to cause or to master an event when we are always and already vulnerable to the other.⁸ Elsewhere I have tried to show that even when one remains – more or less! – within the realm of what we call language that matters of force, repetition, irony or the countersignature of the other lead us perforce beyond intentionality and thoroughly trouble assumptions regarding the sovereignty of subjectivity up to and including the subject of confession.⁹ Writing then in light of both Paul de Man’s work on confession and Derrida’s critical relationship to it as well as Cornelia Vismann’s media theory (drawn upon in Chapter 6 of this book), I found leverage in Derrida’s term ‘machine-event’.¹⁰ Deriving from his extensive essay ‘Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink 2’ this awkward term did not sublate repetition with spontaneity or vice versa to forge a new concept but brought them into proximity with a hyphen. The mechanicity of repetition and the spontaneity of the event should be categorically distinct. If ‘one day’ they were able to be thought together as ‘one and the same concept’, Derrida tells us, this could not even be anticipated by the term ‘monster’.¹¹ It would be so new, he remarked, that it would be ‘the first possible event, because im-possible’. Given as a lecture only a couple of years after ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’, ‘Typewriter Ribbon’ too, then, works the ostensible separation between reaction (repetition) and response (spontaneous event) so intrinsic to that now celebrated essay, even as the animal asides of the latter were buried deep in its closing section.12 It was clear, however, that this contagion deeply implicated the performative: the impetus was ‘to think both the machine and the performative event together’ because they ‘remain … a monstrosity to come, an impossible event’.¹³ In retaining the name of my old friend, the ‘performative’, here I hope to make clear how embedded Derrida’s terms are in each other (rather than naming a discrete array of tools) and to welcome resonance in the thought of others – specifically, Haraway, Cixous, Schneemann. Performativity was already a part of Derrida’s subtle displacement of the signifier by means of the text and of the trace; it already impacted on what we thought was human property: rather than the performative providing the vehicle for meaning as that which resides within our organic, present possession, it becomes conditioned by a machinic, reactive repetition (convention rather than intention). The latter quality was, of course, that which Descartes attempted to section off as the impoverished domain of the animal. It is Descartes’ legacy that absurdly fenced off all those myriad non-humans on the side of the machine, dampening down any non-human responsivity.¹⁴

Insisting that organic and machinic are already within an enmeshed relation inevitably brings Haraway’s figure of the cyborg to mind, while the ‘doing’ over ‘being’ quality of the performative resonates with her emphasis on the relating of our encounters. While Haraway’s contemporary and colleague at the University of California, Karen Barad, published her own arguments for the ‘posthumanist’ nature of performativity in the same year that Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto caught academic attention, albeit drawn out of quantum physics, rather than the troping of biology, the core texts engaged here may be understood as anticipatory of what are now prominent debates on posthumanism.¹⁵ Nervous as Haraway has recently been about the term ‘posthumanism’ and her own habituation to it, I would suggest two things. Firstly, that her rightful hesitation might be directed more appropriately to the ‘post-human’ when construed to indicate a temporal break with ‘the human’ (and the concomitant assumption that we can accurately account for that proper name) and a brighter, even shinier and more cyborgian future that transcends the fallibilities of our assumed-to-be former state.16 This distinctly irony-free vision takes no account of the decentring of humanism that posthumanism and the ‘posthumanities’ might more hospitably be taken to solicit. Secondly, I want to resound our editorial comments on Haraway’s recent insistence on the earthiness of the compost. In her most recent books, Haraway writes: ‘We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities.’¹⁷ Pushing the continuities between companion species and compost in the introduction to The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, we wrote, ‘The humour, even nerdiness, of the figure is an only partly tongue-in-cheek affirmation of the compost with which, and in which, living things compose and decompose.’¹⁸ Moreover, ‘[g]iven Haraway’s insistence on the with-ness of the companion as com-panis, we might wilfully hear com and post as the spatial and temporal markers “with” and “after”.’¹⁹ As ever, this is no ‘return to nature’ but a move that attends to temporal and spatial discontinuities, as such her work proves hospitable to that of Derrida.

The closing sentence of ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’ reads ‘[b]ut as for me, who am I (following)?’²⁰ It is a citation, wrenched out of context as all citations are and set, unsettled, in another. It is unattributed. Those gathered to hear this essay in its initial form as a public address would doubtless have already heard the traces of Descartes given an afterlife from Derrida’s very title and passim. Among those gathered to speak at the 1997 colloquium at Cerisy-la-Salle, held in Derrida’s honour, under the title L’Animal Autobiographique, were Mireille Calle-Gruber, Akira Lippit, Laurent Milesi, Jean-Luc Nancy and Nicholas Royle. Often speaking in the second person, Derrida made quite sure that his address was to ‘you’, and to ‘your’ response. The subsequently and posthumously published book of the same title – The Animal That Therefore I Am – contained further material and its second chapter, bearing the name ‘[b]ut as for me, who am I (following)?’ immediately treated the citation for the suffering ‘suis’ that surfaced within Descartes’ Meditations in their French translation. The uncertainty that Descartes entertained arises in light of his own supposition of a ‘malicious deceiver’ out to trick him(self) – the infamous deceiver appears in the second clause of the sentence immediately following the citation.²¹ But Derrida opens the disorientation within the present tense itself; its very being is shaken. Throughout The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida plays on the first-person present tense of ‘to be’ – indistinguishable from ‘to follow’ in French, thereby making thought think again. A deceptively simple ‘Je suis’ performatively installs a non-priority and a non-presence in the heart of the thinking subject, the subject formerly known as ‘Cartesian’. This transformation is intensified through the substitution of ‘The Animal’ for ‘I think’: the anthropocentric quarantine of ‘I think therefore I am’ is brought up against its excluded other (excluded but homogenized, and controlled through the reach of the concept). Temporal trouble results from knocking the present tense of ‘my’ thought off-kilter through the implication that I am after something else – what? – the animal: it dispenses with linearity, distributes deferral and dislodges origin.22 If ‘Being’ is altered through the activity of following, the animal that therefore I am cannot be certain of its own terrain. Following as a hunter? A follower, not leader? One that is always following after the animal, without overtaking the animal, and without pause?

While they encounter each others’ work unevenly – one divergently traced by curiosity, science and who reads whom – there is a hospitality that emerges between the thinking of Haraway and Derrida independently of any deliberate mutual involvement. In contrast, the personal and the poetic friendship between Cixous and Derrida threads throughout their writing, explicitly and elliptically.²³ Surviving him in time (Derrida passed away in 2004), Cixous is frequently read in light of Derrida’s work. Yet, as this chapter finds, a feline Cixousian uncanny stalks The Animal That Therefore I Am, leaving tracks barely remarked.²⁴ Moreover, however much Derrida may have shifted relations between what we call philosophy and what we call literature (since what he has called ‘the law of genre’ affirms that they shall always be mixed²⁵), his work is perhaps more readily digested as ‘argument’. Cixous’s thought irreducibly turns on the poetic, and this has long involved animal figures – without subsuming animals under the decorative glaze of ‘mere’ figures. Observing ‘Animals are becoming more and more important in my books’ as early as 1996, Cixous invokes the animot as early as 1976.²⁶ The temporal quandary of who I am (following) is presaged in her work when she touches the touch of ‘the cat whose cat I am’.²⁷

It is unlikely that Schneemann is a reader of Derrida. However, she may well have encountered ‘French Philosophers’ as compulsory reading at some juncture in Anglo-American art cultures of the 1980s, following on from the lessons in ideology that she parodies with droll delight in her most well-known performance work Interior Scroll (1975). In that work, Schneemann famously pulled a scroll out of her vagina, unfurled it and read aloud a script addressing the distaste with which a ‘structuralist film-maker’ regards her work, detailing its ‘personal clutter’, ‘persistence of feelings’ and ‘hand-touch sensibility’ (a polemic that is actually very funny).28 The ‘structuralist film-maker’ stands for that assimilation of the unconscious to ideology prevalent in much theory of the 1970s.²⁹ That version of Freud and Marx promoted an obligatory critical distance in the arts – along with a widespread ban on the body – that was supposed to disarm the apparatus that would otherwise continue to dupe unwitting spectators into desiring against their own interests.³⁰ It also militated parricidically against any trace of authorship – or worse, autobiography – as another effect of ideology. Schneemann’s work does not enter this chapter as a combatant on behalf of the real lives imagined to be ignored as they wander ‘outside-of-the-text’ (conceived according to an absurdly literal architecture) nor as a sponsor of the conceit of authorship. Rather, in light of Derrida, Cixous and Haraway, her work indicates a revised sense of the autobiographical, of the touch of the hand, even of what we call experience linking with performativity beyond the speech act and the presumed ability to intend.³¹ These revised senses precisely impact on the powers assumed to be human.

The ‘autobiographical animals’ at play in Haraway, Cixous and Schneemann overlap through the kiss. In the opening paragraphs of The Companion Species Manifesto, Haraway writes of one of her dogs:

We have had forbidden conversation; we have had oral intercourse; we are bound in telling story upon story with nothing but the facts. We are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. We are, constitutively, companion species.³²

In an essay concerning the concept of the event, Cixous writes, ‘With a firm tread the cat climbs onto the woman’s lap, looks the woman in the eye with a clear and decided gaze and abruptly a kiss on the alarmed mouth.’³³ In the decades long before the vacant glaze of the smartphone ‘selfie’, to which we are now habituated, Schneemann, without consideration for finesse, frame or focus, made daily photographic portraits of her morning kiss with her cats, first Cluny and later Vesper, culminating in two large sequences: Infinity Kisses I (1981–1988) and Infinity Kisses II (1990–1998), later made into a short film Infinity Kisses – the Movie (2008). The kisses are not identical in all these instances, but they cannot be exhausted by a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ allegory in which the kiss reveals the beast to have been a man all along. Rather, the kiss solicits an undecidability into the divisions between subjects and species once thought to be decisive.

Kiss Me Honey Honey Kiss Me.34

Figure 5.1 Carolee Schneemann Infinity Kisses I, 1981–87. Courtesy of the Estate of Carolee Schneemann, Galerie Lelong & Co., Hales Gallery, and P•P•O•W, New York © Carolee Schneemann.

Figure 5.2 Carolee Schneemann Infinity Kisses I, detail.

The image that drew my attention to the Infinity Kisses is the one that was then shown out of sequence on Schneemann’s website from what is a substantial body of images.35 In contrast to the sexuality bypass affected by most critics of the Companion Species Manifesto, Schneemann’s image falls most easily, rapidly and ecstatically into one of a grand passion. The woman’s head is thrown backwards and reaches to one side in a gesture readily associated with female sexual pleasure (this is not an air kiss; this is not a peck on the cheek). She is in frame from the shoulders upwards, and since her shoulders are uncovered, her nakedness is metonymically implied. Though the cat is smaller, of course, this frame allows for equal space to be given to both beings. The cat at top right, the woman at bottom left. The cat, perched on a pile of boxes, reaches down to the woman. Their kiss is central: the even expanse of the woman’s upper chest and the glide of her neck swoop straight up to it. Breaking up the flow of the woman’s neck and the consistency of her skin, the black-and-white markings of the cat’s fur call a halt to the traversal of the gaze. Though the woman’s eyes are so turned towards the cat that they cannot be seen, we can see the face of the cat, and the cat’s eyes are shut. It would be recognizable as a portrait of a kiss even if the title did not name kisses as such. Familiar romantic conventions are out in force; all but one. And this exception, this unfamiliar ‘familiar’ is captivating.

Infinity Kisses is not a single image, nor a single idea work since the kiss constellates so very much. Rather it is the name of at least two extended series, sometimes rearranged into other patterns, and a movie. Infinity Kisses I consists of a photogrid of 140 small 35 mm Xerachrome photographs, each printed twice (right to left and left to right, exacerbating the mirror-image effect), taken from 1981 until 1987, massed together and mounted on linen. Infinity Kisses II comprises 24 self-shot 35 mm colour photographs printed as laser images, each 96 × 120 inches, taken between 1990 and 1998. There are strong formal and formalizing elements in the presentation of the work, though the images arise out of the highly informal filming environment of keeping a camera ready to hand in anticipation of the morning kiss that Schneemann habitually received, first from Cluny and later Vesper. Both sets ended arbitrarily, not through an aesthetic decision to render closure or because they work towards a known end but due to the death of the cat (the artist saw Vesper as the reincarnation of Cluny).36

Significant art-historical attention has been directed to Schneemann’s work and its engagements with space, body, process and ritual – albeit with the tendency to truncate more than forty years of varied practice to a kind of ‘greatest hits’ list consisting of the individual and group naked performance works, Meat Joy (1964), Up to and Including Her Limits (1973–76), Interior Scroll and Eye/Body (1963), as well as the erotic film Fuses (1965), for which the artist filmed herself having sex with her then partner James Tenney (in the company of her cat Kitsch, staging an intimate and proximate gaze).37 This hit list’s conversation with feminist theory and art history converges around the question of the body – especially the female body, and agency, sexuality, power and experience. The conversation turns into contestation around the same question. Feminist art-historical analysis of the 1970s and 1980s that was invested in Lacanian psychoanalysis, as exemplified by the earlier work of Griselda Pollock, found it difficult to see any female body step free of the pernicious ‘male gaze’ to the extent that only signs for the feminine became legitimate means by which to allude to the vexed field of sexual difference. Any female bodies, whether in performance, film or two-dimensional media, tended to be understood as the index of women who had given in to their own inevitable objectification, incapable of producing the requisite critical distance in the spectator. ‘Body art’ seemed particularly culpable. The feminist art history of the 1990s, exemplified by Amelia Jones’s book titled Body Art (1998), both challenged the ideological analysis of the problem of the ‘gaze’ and appropriate responses to it as well as opened performance work by both male and female artists (Schneemann included) to more nuanced analysis.³⁸

Much less has been written, however, about Schneemann’s works that foreground the feline (photographs, mixed media installations and films – arguably including Fuses), the relative silence around which (in terms of critical writing and exhibition profile) the artist is only too aware.³⁹ Breaking Borders and Remains to Be Seen, which comprised a large and intelligently curated retrospective of Schneemann’s work held in Toronto and Buffalo in 2007, marked a turning point in this absence by organizing her work not according to the deadweight of chronology but according to three themes: war, erotics and felines.⁴⁰ With work in animal studies now widespread, obituaries of Schneemann, who died on 6 March 2019, were no longer able to completely sideline this work.⁴¹

Rebecca Schneider is one of very few art historians to address the feline content of Schneemann’s practice, naming the subjects of bestiality, criminality and the everyday in relation to Infinity Kisses, the video installation Vesper’s Stampede to My Holy Mouth (1992) and Fuses. For Schneider these works point to the limits, even irrelevance, of gender in light of bestiality, the expected transgression of which is held in check by the quotidian tone of the work. Since Vesper’s gender is ‘neither apparent nor important’, Schneider sees sexuality fade gender from the frame, curiously allowing Schneemann to remain unmarked.42 Schneider links what she calls this ‘art-bestiality’ to a multiplication of sexualities commensurate with Derrida’s dream of future sexualities beyond negation and thus beyond opposition.⁴³ While this link is not unwarranted, it does run rough-shod over the range of conflicting work that the rather odd term ‘art-bestiality’ might be taken to incorporate, as well as – in composing a book about the ‘explicit female body’ in performance – effacing possible lines of enquiry opened by the question of the animal. In other words, it does not seriously consider the ‘questions of interspecies communication’ that Schneemann herself acknowledges.⁴⁴

In his prescient book on the representation of animals in contemporary art, The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker glossed Infinity Kisses. Reliant on Schneider, he framed the work as the collapse of art into documentary through the weight of the domestic mise en scène.⁴⁵ Baker’s work does imply, however, an interesting dilemma: realism, ostensibly for the sake of the animal, seems to descend into sentimentality, but unfeeling postmodernity only removes the animal by other means – through the sign without allegiance that is allegory. Schneemann’s work, I suggest, helps us understand that this division always breaches.

Now, does a kiss respond or react? ‘Does my cat really kiss me?’⁴⁶ Can we decide? In his recent investigation of the literary kiss, J. Hillis Miller swiftly asserts the metaphoric capacity of a kiss to substitute for speech (act).⁴⁷ I suggest that its metonymic function is equally important. If the lips are proximate to speech, then they serve, or at least attempt to serve, as the anchor tying the speech to its actor: these lips kissed you. But, in light of previous chapters, the metonymy that indicates the ‘touchiness’ of the kiss, that cannot dispel its equal proximity to ingestion.⁴⁸ Curiously, in light of Derrida’s extensive writings on the incalculable quality of the performative, Miller positions the kiss of which Derrida writes as one that does take effect, even when sent by the virtual means of telephone call, letter and email (by writing, in other words, by the dangerous supplements that expose the absence at the heart of any postal system), in contrast to Kafka’s mourning for written kisses, since these are inevitably destined to feed only ghosts and thus never to reach their ‘destinee’, so to speak.⁴⁹

If a kiss kisses, does it really do so because invisibly, airlessly it seals in the singular affect as the intention of the kisser? Does the mark, the ‘x’ really stand only for the particular kiss it bodies forth, without capacity for standing for anything else? Might the ‘x’ instead mark erasure? Nay-saying the singularity of each kiss seems a little churlish. No one but a Judas would tear a kiss into some other non-kissing context, surely, and his kiss was pretended anyway. In a debate with colleagues concerning the vicissitudes of the performative, one provided the example of ‘I love you’ and questioned who would ever say such a phrase and not mean it. Yet there seems to be no better example of this splintered category. Don’t we say, ‘I love you’ romantically and hope that we mean it, or that the saying of it will make it true? Don’t we say, ‘I love you’ spontaneously and wonder, belatedly, if we really meant it? Say it guiltily in response to the demand for reciprocity? Say it habitually, on automatic pilot? Use it accusingly: you said that you loved me! Repetition, the sense of convention invading intention, is once again at work, here dogging the human purchase on response. This repetition invites not just a roominess of meaning, a polysemia of the kiss, but an infinity kiss.50 In this sense it is the kiss that is modified by infinity, by an infinity of contexts: XOXO. Beyond comprehension, since infinity cannot be presented, the kiss becomes sublime. Kiss of infinity: kiss without end.

Miller also ventures the question of morality, hence the possible immorality of a kiss – although, interestingly, this question only emerges indirectly through a citation used to demonstrate the sheer uncertainty of what this non-universal practice might concern. Prior to asking what it means to kiss in general, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus asks whether it is right or wrong to kiss his mother.⁵¹ This morality, or even legality, is not first of all about consenting to kiss or be kissed but rather its confining its proper usage to the inside edge of a law-bound social world. But since kissing is of the edges – edges that lose track of themselves – this confinement is going to be uneasy. Kissing, Miller further notes, ‘by no means differentiates human beings from animals, as philosophers used to believe … Chimpanzees kiss, as do other animals’.⁵² Unsupported by any references, Miller assumes the empirical explanation that one can observe animals doing the same thing that humans do (kissing). He does not expand the sense of what might constitute this activity through recourse to the less empirically observable problem of the performativity of the kiss (his ostensible subject). Neither does he pursue the question, if kissing is common to at least some rather than just one animal, what happens in the inter-species kiss?

Changing the grounds of the ‘animal question’ is required if anything more or less than a reactive argument regarding the essential quality of the kiss is to be produced. Taking on the near, though not totally, unified front of philosophy that denies language, and hence the ability to respond, to the animal, with an opposing, defensive and reactive claim that ‘of course they have their own languages!’, like French or Mandarin, gets us nowhere.53 Derrida, Cixous, Haraway and Schneeemann turn the tables and question our certainty regarding our own clarity of communication; they transform the terms of the alleged privation of the animal with regard to language.

Art historical convention would concentrate upon marshalling adequate evidence for Schneemann’s aesthetic process, influence and development, culminating in the signature of the work. Schneemann is signatory; she takes credit for the work as artwork and she names – and defines – a body of photographs as Infinity Kisses. In this traditional view, every meaningful aspect of the work is decided in advance, and by the artist alone. But Schneemann opens herself to the risk of an other signatory, naming herself as a signed body, as recipient of the repeated actions of Cluny and Vesper: ‘he ritualistically, ardently kisses me on the mouth.’⁵⁴ She is impressed upon, marked, by those not of her kind. She has also referred to Kitsch as a camera, since her ‘steady focus enabled me to consider her regard as an aperture in motion’.⁵⁵ An important reversal of subject-centred maintenance of the signatory comes with deconstruction’s insistence on counter-signature, that it is the other that signs, the other that offsets the would-be decisiveness of my decision, my signature, my mark, my kiss. Prior to returning to Schneemann, Haraway and Cixous, the following sections elaborate the grounds by which it can also be argued that the cat signs, refining the question of what it is to be an ‘autobiographical animal’, what it is to kiss – and what it is to kithe.

Kithe and kin

Familiar in the albeit antiquated expression ‘kith and kin’ signifying ‘friends and family’, the Oxford English Dictionary also lists ‘kith’ as meaning ‘information’, specifically regarding rules of etiquette: rules concerning what is proper. Its strict separation from ‘kin’ is unclear. Kinship could also be seen as governing – at least attempting to govern – the proper. Kith is also linked to the verb ‘to kithe’. As a verb – a ‘doing’ word – to kithe is to proclaim, to show or to confess. How performative is that! Derrida’s cat does not kiss him; at least he does not tell us whether she does. He is at pains to keep the story of his cat on the most mundane level, in the effort to curb her figural conscription and to keep the discussion relatively directly focused on showing up the philosophical expectation that the animal can only react, rather than, as he finds to his ‘shame’, respond. The still burgeoning number of texts commenting on ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, as well as Derrida’s other key text from the Cerisy proceedings, ‘And Say the Animal Responded?’, have frequently fallen into one of two categories. They either applaud the work of the philosopher, relieved that his contribution clarifies both the extent and the stakes of anthropomorphism as well as its flipside of an absolute divide between the human and the animal (such as in the work of Carol Adams),56 or they backtrack these essays through the rest of Derrida’s work to remind us of his consistent investigation of the ‘animal question’ (such as in the work of Leonard Lawlor).⁵⁷ Haraway shares in the relief but supplements Derrida’s analyses with both alternative outcomes and a critical relation to what she takes to be the limits of his response to this cat, as well as its visual scenography.⁵⁸ On the other hand, since Haraway’s priority is to write from the point ‘where species meet’ as a place conflicted with natural, cultural, colonial, political narratives that incorporate the philosophical, rather than to start from a domain constitutively philosophical, she sometimes cuts short the range to which Derrida’s remarks might implicate. The ground may be muddied through following multiple tracks, but that range needs more detailed elaboration here.

A cluster of inabilities accrues to what is called, in a supremely performative gesture of naming, ‘the animal’. These inabilities collude in the expulsion of ‘the animal’ from the terrain that calls itself that of ‘Man’.⁵⁹ This name-calling procedure also invokes the communicative relation of call and response, and from here, the distinction, if there is one, between, response and reaction.⁶⁰ In the history of Western philosophy, it is rare for an inability to be reserved as proper to ‘Man’, yet when it is (in psychoanalysis), this inability or privation will operate as the initial spur that engineers the condition of his dominance. In Derrida’s two hands this last and exceptional inability will turn out to work quite differently, and this difference will mark a general condition.

The titular essay of The Animal That Therefore I Am names Descartes, Kant, Lacan and Levinas as key figures in upholding the once-and-forever line between the human and the animal. Dawne McCance makes plain that this theoretical genealogy also took root in the laboratory in which it was apparently possible for Descartes to oversee vivisection while simultaneously holding to the inability of the animal to suffer.61 The problem coalesces in particular, and in a particularly influential fashion, in the work of Martin Heidegger. For him ‘the animal’ has no hand, cannot name, cannot speak, has no relation to death, no relation to the ‘as such’ of the world – in fact is ‘poor in world’ – and hence has no relation to Dasein. Crucially this contrasts with ‘Man’s’ access to all of the above. In order to signal the animal’s substantial deprivation, the hand of ‘Man’ must be, or rather do, something special. It will become clear, however, that this doing, if it relates to the performative, does so in a far from empirical sense (underlining the misrecognition of performative for performance). Firstly, the hand must be given a clean slate, cut off in kind from what Heidegger refers to as the ‘grasping organs’ of beasts and divorced from the kinship among species named by evolution. It is not that Man’s hand does not grasp – the oddity, even monstrosity of its singular form was remarked by Derrida in his earlier essay on ‘Heidegger’s Hand’ – but that his grasp conveys a specialized range:

I use the word vocation to recall that [for Heidegger], in its destination (Bestimmung), the hand holds onto speaking. This vocation is double but gathered or crossed in the same hand: the vocation to show [montrer] or to sign (zeigen, Zeichen) and to give or give itself, in a word, the monstrosity [monstrosité] of the gift or of what gives itself.⁶²

Moreover, Heidegger joins the work of the hand (Handwerk) with what he calls ‘thinking’: ‘[e]very motion of the hand in every one of its work carries itself [träge sicht] through the element of thinking.’⁶³ The handiwork of thinking thus becomes a signature of the human: in having no hand, the animal does not think and cannot sign. Thinking of this handiwork as a signature gives a suggestion of the difference performed by the human hand: this hand may grasp, as does the paw, but what it does significantly is give. This hand does not simply, or empirically, give; rather and above all, it gives itself. Giving itself, giving the same, the hand auto-graphs. In so doing Heidegger’s hand transcends biology (flatly reduced) and accesses the ‘as such’ of things. The ‘as such’ of things grants their essence, which remains untouched by the paw or any other ‘prehensile organ’. Kithe me.

With so many definite articles invoked, following ‘the animal’ through the pages of The Animal That Therefore I Am is a readerly exercise worth taking literally (along with tracking use of the conditional).64 Follow ‘the animal’ and you will follow our bitter conceptual inheritance. Consider the rare use of the indefinite article as a step towards opening the ‘corral’ of this inheritance.⁶⁵ In the more improvisational style of the second essay in The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida muses at length on his dream of animals dreaming and adjusts his own phrasing and framing. He shifts from condemning the foreclosure in the question ‘Does the animal dream?’ – foreclosed by the opposition the animal versus the human, reaction versus response – to imagining, as if he ‘were dreaming … in all innocence, of an animal that doesn’t intend harm to the animal’.⁶⁶ In innocence – that is to say, without the ‘anthropo-theomorphic’ fall from grace into a state of sin organized by absolute division.

Thus, rather than simply reacting to Heidegger’s division of labour by elevating the grasping paw, Derrida switches attention to the assumed qualitative separation of giving and taking: this is an element of what cannot be vouchsafed in the doings of any hand. Likewise, the difference between the sign-making capacities of the animal and the linguistic abilities of Man – especially the ability to name, rather than be named – is raised to a higher plane through Heidegger’s assumption that the animal has no access to phenomenality as such and thus ‘does not unveil the being of being’ through naming.⁶⁷ Again, for Derrida, rather than reacting and claiming equal footing with regard to being for the animal, what must be questioned is the alleged phenomenal presence in the name of that which is named through showing up its distance as a consequence of the gesture of pointing. Kithe me. Rather than performing a kind of direct capture, pointing is a spacing that disseminates; it is a gesture that cannot gather the ‘as such’ of that which is pointed out. This privation holds true for the gesture when performed by the hand, even – perhaps crucially – in a relation of auto-affection. The culmination of the animal’s privation of hand, language, naming and access to the ‘as such’ of being is Heidegger’s well-known determination that the ‘animal is poor in world’. This is in contrast both to the stone, which is ‘worldless’, and of course ‘Man’, who is ‘world-forming’.68 In spite of any apparent comparison, Lawlor points out that this insistence on poverty of world should not be read as placing the animal and human on a sliding scale of relation to world. Rather, this is a difference ‘not of degree but of essence’.⁶⁹ The ‘world-forming’ capacity of Man again assumes access to the ‘as such’ of beings. With such an access comes the capacity to question being as such. This ability to question one’s own being echoes the gesture of pointing involved in naming, here directed, directly, auto-affectively, to oneself. Never pointing at themselves, never referring to their own being, animals do not die for Heidegger; they merely ‘perish’.⁷⁰ But, now that the difference between giving and taking, the ability of pointing to gather the world and the presence of being as such in the name are all uncertain, the implication is that Man too does not have access to death as such. If the gesture misleads and Man cannot access, cannot catch up with what – should he do so – would vanquish all possibility (death), then Man too suffers a privation similar to that of the animal. Consequently that common privation muddies the grounds of their ostensible difference. Following this, and since for Heidegger ‘the possibility of death defines what most belongs to Dasein’, Derrida’s assertion that these questions shake the foundations of Heidegger’s entire ontology does not seem so dramatic.⁷¹

These unsettling manoeuvres characteristic of deconstruction dismantle the anthropomorphic traps that both identity politics and the logic of ‘animal rights’ fall into – that is, into defending animals on the basis of the privileges (whether laws or rights or concepts of identity) formerly accorded solely to ‘Man’.⁷² This is not dissimilar to the shortfall of a feminism of equality – a feminism that assumes that our task is solely to extend the existing range of rights formerly co-opted by men to newly enfranchised women, rather than the ambitions of a feminism of difference that would also examine the conditions and stakes of these rights together with the concept of subjectivity that they assume. Like the latter, deconstruction insists on changing the terms of the argument, such that the grounds of comparison themselves qualitatively change. Neither conceding to the tendency to police an absolute divide of difference between animal and human nor collapsing all distinctions, all signatures, into absolute continuity or identity, Derrida rather refigures the relation between animals and humans as one of ‘staggered analogy’.⁷³ With the stagger comes a spacing: ground not covered by the equivalence marshalled when this is corralled into being like that. Derrida loosens the assumed anchorage of one side of an analogy. Lawlor presents the staggered analogy as the notion of faults, or differences, without a fall – that is without a Fall from grace, from an original, sinless, perfect, condition of presence. Rather, the staggered analogy opens spacing on all sides, or better, on every shore: for every corps.

Im/modest witnesses

Noting that Heidegger does not cite any source to uphold his doxa regarding ‘the animal’, Derrida pinpoints the discursive pattern to the two major missed encounters in representations of animals: that of the philosopher or the scientific observer of animals, who nevertheless does not see animals as beings who look back, and that of the poets or prophets, ‘who admit taking upon themselves the address of an animal that addresses them’, but claim to have found ‘no statutory representative’ who acknowledges the address of an animal in a theoretical, philosophical, juridical or civic mode (other than himself, faced by his cat).74 Yet, what if not all ‘Western human workers with animals’ have refused or ignored the respective gazes of animals, as Haraway demonstrates.⁷⁵ Turning to (and therefore impacting on) a different archive than that of Derrida, Haraway calls on a range of less discursively regimented work from the sciences that adapt or abandon the flawed concept of the neutral observer (or modest witness). Bioanthropologist Barbara Smuts, for example, finds that her observation of a baboon colony can only proceed when she gives up the attempt to be invisible – better put as hostile – and learns to adjust her behaviours to those of the baboons who certainly are taking note of her.⁷⁶

While Haraway appreciates the mundane quality of Derrida’s encounter with his cat, his vigorous efforts to maintain the daily particularity of this cat and to hold at bay the allegorical lure that would dissolve her catness, as well as his recognition that the cat was responding and not only reacting to him, she yet finds a failure of curiosity in his encounter. For Haraway, so much effort goes into addressing the pitfalls that philosophy has entrenched in the discourse of species that when it comes to this cat, if Derrida is curious about what her response might entail, he can find no way to write about it, and she vanishes from his text as surely as if she were a Cheshire Cat. This is one reason I turn to the heightened terrain of the interspecies kiss. The site of curiosity, and the way in which it affects the subject in its grip, is pressing, not least because Haraway has found herself, trained biologist and interdisciplinary critic of technoscience, in the thick of what might be construed as fascist aesthetics: the terrain of ‘pure-bred’ dogs. Those scare quotes are Haraway’s. The second paragraph of The Companion Species Manifesto immediately calls up the violent fictions of racial purity that the idea of the breed covets saying, ‘One of us, product of a vast genetic mixture, is called “pure bred.” One of us, equally product of a vast mixture is called “white”.’77 She has learnt to love playing a sport with – rather than simply maintaining the breed history (herding livestock) of – Australian Shepherds. However, loving Cayenne as a companion animal and as an Australian Shepherd leads Haraway not simply to the closed book of an aesthetics and hierarchy of the type but to another involvement with gene politics. The macro-level leads her to the amateur practices of activist dog-breeders to quash in-breeding (since not everyone follows popular ‘sires’ for their looks alone, regardless of genetic proximity to their mate) and work towards eliminating genetic disorders through open registries recording pedigree details in full. The micro-level generates the interspecies kiss.

Alternating between poetically attuned diaristic extracts from what she names as ‘Notes of a Sportswriter’s Daughter’ and a comparatively more straightforward theoretical address, Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto begins somewhat provocatively. The very first line tells us that ‘Ms Cayenne Pepper continues to colonize all [Haraway’s] cells – a sure case of what the biologist Lynn Margulis calls symbiogenesis’.⁷⁸ (Symbiogenesis refers to new ways of thinking about genetic transfers that do not necessarily involve linear sexual reproduction but rather notice the various exchanges, mergers and recombinations of genetic material perpetrated by bacteria.) Starting off on the other foot, it is Donna Haraway that is ‘colonized’ by Cayenne Pepper, by the saliva from her ‘darter-tongue kisses’.⁷⁹ It is the tongue of the other that signs, delivering the saliva that troubles the species of all kisses.⁸⁰ This figure is biological in a dynamic sense. It is not merely a ‘trope’. Indeed Thyrza Nichols Goodeve has recently given precise attention to this rich term both literary and biological: ‘a tropism is an obligatory movement made by an organism in response directly proportional to a physical stimulus.’81 It displaces earlier feminist fears that biology would only ever cut destiny to the whim of those in power. Indeed, the whole of Haraway’s work may be understood as a demonstration that, while the biological may be a field riven by power, this field is not therefore forever anterior to culture or otherwise inaccessible, immovable or timeless. Her still paradigmatic early essay ‘“Gender” for a Marxist Dictionary’ historicizes the political urgency of the relatively recent term ‘gender’ to compensate for the ‘deficiencies’ blamed on the immutable ‘sex differences’ of girls, while opening second-wave feminism’s foundational ‘sex/gender’ divide to other differences masked by the genre of gender, as well as, crucially, refusing to give up theoretically on ‘sex’ or ‘nature’.⁸²

‘Ms Cayenne Pepper’ presents a flash of the irony familiar from the first lines of ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’. That marital blank ‘Ms’, rather than the anachronistic ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs’, might initiate the scent of the spectral terror of monstrous lesbian reproducibility. And if there is terror, it may only be compounded by the line-by-line realization that Cayenne is canine, and she is not transformed into a man by the humanizing virtue of the kiss. They have had ‘forbidden conversation’; they have had ‘oral intercourse’.⁸³ The wet medium of Cayenne’s rich saliva produces a figure of co-constitution and of reproduction, exceeding both species as transfections pass – or communicate – through viral vectors. In so figuring unlicensed reproducibility and in so figuring co-constituting contact as unplanned occurrence rather than appointed moment within the dialectical narrative foretold about the human subject, Haraway bypasses the necessity to surmount any dead fathers in the telos of the law. This is not the de-humanization of a sadistic pornographic standard (bestiality) but the de-humanism of life.

Such a de-humanism could have taken hold after the three wounds inflicted on the ‘fantasy of human exceptionalism’ named as such by Freud – namely, the Copernican wound that decentred the Earth and fundamentally opened the door to ‘a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces’; the Darwinian wound that earthed ‘Man’ as one amongst other animals rather than their anointed ruler or final outcome; and the Freudian wound itself, wielding the concept of the unconscious to dislodge reason from within.⁸⁴ To these Haraway adds a fourth wound, the ‘cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that Great Divide as well’.⁸⁵ These dissolves, however, do not amount to a newfound pool of sameness but a series of differences unanchored by origin or end in sets of shifting relations. These shifting relations need to be re-emphasized in light of Haraway’s cited 60 per cent of Americans currently doubting or outright rejecting that humans are descended from other animals.

Play, and all the incalculable risks it entails, surfaces theoretically when Haraway changes the register of the question Derrida uses to reset our relation to them, and to discontinue any further variation on the rhetorical theme of ‘can they do what we (think we can) do?’ – the line that Heidegger’s work entrenched. Citing utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Derrida asks, ‘can they suffer?’ while Haraway finds more ‘promise’ in the question ‘can they play?’86 Yet ‘can they suffer?’ does not simply replace something like ‘can they speak? (No? Oh well, let’s kill them)’. Rather, ‘[o]nce its protocol is established’, Derrida tells us, implying a direction other than that already established by Bentham, only then will ‘the form of this question change[s] everything’.⁸⁷ If the question ‘can they suffer?’ is to exceed a calculus of suffering, it is by virtue of exposure to Derrida’s reversal of the philosophical refrain of a privation or lack of an ability as that which is assumed to contrast the proper possession of that ability as mark of the human. This ‘animal question’ works the ground between privation and ability. This can only spell trouble for the sovereignty of power as pouvoir (ability) – they can suffer; they are able to suffer: ‘[t]he question is disturbed by a certain passivity.’⁸⁸ This certain kind of passivity is a common ground, a common vulnerability. Thus the grounds of Derrida and Haraway do not quite square, but they should be read together, staggering, supplementing each other’s work, especially since play too might also trouble the sovereignty of power. If ‘[p]lay makes an opening’, as Haraway suggests, it cannot square the outcome.⁸⁹

While Haraway’s ‘play’ arises in the contexts of her agility work with dogs, in which species must derive a means of communication in order to work together, and of the non-reproductive sexual play observed between dogs in what is the closing sequence of the Companion Species Manifesto, ‘play’ in its more Derridean sense of supplementarity joins the scene at the point where Haraway’s interspecies contact zones are also figured as kin-making.⁹⁰ With a less melancholic air than ‘suffering’, those contact zones become labile. I fancy that what we might call a state of ‘lability’ training would appeal to her sense of what happens When Species Meet.

Pet subjects

Haraway’s wider argument in The Companion Species Manifesto was at pains to extend ‘companion species’ beyond the ‘companion animals’ that we think we know under the name of ‘pets’ (a name that arguably Oedipalizes the animals in its grasp).91 That wider field should constantly hover even as those domesticated animals with whom we may more easily recognize our intimacy are foregrounded here. Even as the Manifesto was nourished by loving Cayenne, Haraway rudely pointed out that her ‘red merle Australian Shepherd’s quick and lithe tongue has swabbed the tissues of [her] tonsils, with all their eager immune system receptors’, thereby conjuring the work between bacterial intimates and mammalian hosts.⁹² With her early prompt in mind, we can understand the showy opening kiss of the Manifesto to kithe unseen companions. It is crucial, however, for Haraway that companion animals such as dogs are not apprehended as ‘furry children … They are not a projection, nor the realization of an intention, nor the telos of anything’.⁹³ She thus refuses both broader sedimented narratives of the domestication of animals as the one-way traffic in their technological appropriation by Man and domestic practices that may well name the dog or the cat as the ‘family pet’ or as a ‘family member’ (as kin in Shell’s terms) but in so doing disregard and disrespect the non-human needs of those animals. Of course, we might also wonder about how it is that we raise humans in our cultures, and what needs we foster, inculcate or render abject, particularly within the Oedipalizing cultures of the West.

Inevitably the (frequently hostile) discourse on pets has informed this research – a hostility also, and typically, levered towards the women in proximity to those pets in their metonymy of domesticity (something Schneeman’s art work fought against). Marc Shell’s important essay on ‘The Family Pet’ deserves attention here because it attends to the way in which animals become figured as kin to those not their kind, enabled by the legacy of structuralism and the assumption of a universal incest taboo. Published in 1986, the essay was written without any engagement from available animal studies resources (which could have been drawn out of ecofeminism or rights-based utilitarian thought at that time) and without the questions directed to the embedding of heterosexuality in and as the law that queer theory was soon to muster.⁹⁴ That said, Shell did have the insight to question the way that Freudian psychoanalysis failed to notice ‘the institution of pethood’, even as it entertained animal phobias (discussed in Chapter 1 of this book).⁹⁵ Those who defend ‘pet-love’ in his archive do so for the kinds of sentimental reasons for which Haraway is rightly critical: they are construed to be for us and like us – our Family is The Family (this analogy cannot afford to stagger).⁹⁶ For Shell, pet-lovers who name their love as one which encompasses all animals fall into a universalism coincident with a Christian ideology of one family, in which ‘all men are my brothers’.⁹⁷ While this may not immediately sound problematic, it ultimately totalizes that Family. As such, the One Family produces totalitarianism since all occupy the same position; thus, if we are all brothers under God and show kindness to our brothers, those who are not cast as a brother may fear for their lives. Indeed, Shell suggests that this Pauline universalism may turn out to mean ‘Only my brothers are human, all others are animals’.⁹⁸ In this instance animals are wholly outside the covenant of the law, along with those called animals (Shell’s caution here bears comparison with that of Derrida in the ‘Eating Well’ interview discussed in Chapter 2 of this book). Sometimes universalism – as with St. Francis, and as in pet love, Shell implies – incorporates animals as my brothers, my kind. The structural conundrum this now produces is a newfound equivalence between incest and bestiality. Consequently Shell suggests that the logical outcome is ‘either universal celibacy and starvation [because all are kin, taboos on sex are absolute and likewise nothing can be eaten] or bestiality/incest and cannibalism [all foundations of law fail]’.⁹⁹

While Judaic particularism fares better, in that it does not imagine ‘all men’ as brothers, thus allowing for some non-brothers to nevertheless be human (and thus does not open a road to the totalitarian) and also renders differences between animals through the laws on Kashrut (thus allowing for food), Shell nevertheless finds it difficult to envision any new kin relation between those we call human and those we call animals. Indeed with the law regarding animals given in Kashrut, he does not pursue why these animals and not others should be eaten. Persuasive as his classical argumentation is, Shell’s implicit habituation to the grid-locked relations of structuralist anthropology means that he does not pause to consider if there is any performative contingency involved in the functioning of ‘family’. Synchronic slices of current sets of relations (structuralism’s remit) just cannot imagine what they (claim only to) describe unfolding in any other direction. Here we should remember the deconstruction of the distinction between description and prescription that goes hand in hand with that between constative and performative.100 For Shell, the addition of animals makes no operative difference for existing kinship structures: along with a universal incest taboo, there is also an implicit bestiality taboo. No supplement, animals merely compound existing problems.

What we might call Haraway’s post-structuralism of kinship assumes otherwise: if humans and other animals are drawn into making new kinds of kin relation, this does not necessarily revert to an Oedipal contract. Looking at the trajectory of her work over several decades shows Haraway’s commitment to shattering ‘the family’ – whether the heteronormative Oedipal nuclear family, the place where eugenics shades sexual hygiene into its poisonous sibling, racial ‘purity’ in the Family of Man, or in the conscription of companion animals to pethood conceived as being the same as the rest of the family (as in Shell’s universalism). In 1997, in the closing pages of Modest_Witness, Haraway’s heartfelt polemic declared that she was, rightly,

sick to death of bonding through kinship and ‘the family, and [she] longs for models of solidarity and human unity and difference rooted in friendship, work, partially shared purposes, intractable collective pain, inescapable mortality and persistent hope. It is time to theorize an ‘unfamiliar’ unconscious, a different primal scene, where everything does not stem from the dramas of identity and reproduction. Ties through blood – including blood recast in the coin of genes and information – have been bloody enough already.¹⁰¹

While the texts of psychoanalysis are rare in her work, this ‘unfamiliar’ unconscious knowingly calls out to that which is not of ‘the family’, even as the logic of the uncanny yokes the familiar and unfamiliar together. Haraway refuses a kin relation that authorizes the pet as (like) a child, since she does not want to infantilize dogs and also because neither ‘children’ nor brothers exhaust the term ‘kin’.¹⁰² Echoing his earlier work on the non-admission of ‘sisters’ to the category of ‘friendship’, philosophically conceived, Derrida asks, ‘what happens to the fraternity of brothers when an animal enters the scene’.¹⁰³ ‘[T]rying to live different tropes’ in Haraway does not retreat into her own personal whims or freshly cleared ground to defend, but it does assume that if there are kinship structures, they neither exist in an everlasting present nor repeat with the exactitude of an idealized machine, nor obey an inexorable law of necessary patriarchal form.104 Staying with the Trouble – Haraway’s most recent book at the time this chapter was revised – re-addressed matters with a new forceful and succinct slogan:

the stretch and recomposition of kin are allowed by the fact that all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time). Kin is an assembling sort of word…

So, make kin, not babies!¹⁰⁵

The impetus here draws its full strength from the question trembling at the edge of the climate crisis in which we are now indisputably immersed, namely population: ‘babies’ is the metonymy of 11 billion people on this Earth by 2100.¹⁰⁶ ‘Kin’ becomes a wider, creative force for new alliances and nourishing those repressed of our unfamiliar unconscious that we have previously abjected rather than acknowledged. Self-consciously avoiding or directly countering all the hallmarks of eugenics (as the ‘top-down’ biopolitical discourse of the right mobilized to encourage the ‘right’ people to breed and prevent the ‘wrong’ people from doing so), Haraway’s book closes with an SF narrative imagining a future in which shifting assemblages of kinds flourish without that flourishing necessarily repeating the God-given mandate of ‘Go forth and multiply’.¹⁰⁷ She pinpoints the ethical urgency of modes of attention that can welcome ‘kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time)’. This can bridge the symbiogenesis evoked by the kiss of Cayenne Pepper, to the symbionts of ‘The Camille Stories’. These stories, which form the last chapter of Staying with the Trouble, derive from another colloquium at Cerisy-la-Salle (this time in honour of feminist philosopher of science, Isabelle Stengers in 2013, under the title of ‘Gestes Speculatifs’). In the 400 years or so into the future imagined therein, ‘The Children of Compost came to see their shared kind as humus, rather than as human or nonhuman’.¹⁰⁸ In so doing the human population alters dramatically, choosing not necessarily to reproduce and where it does so to often ‘come into being as symbionts with critters of actively threatened species’.¹⁰⁹ Earlier in this chapter I suggested a kind ‘lability training’ as a practice that would speak both to Haraway’s affective affirmation of play and the ‘nonpower at the heart of power’ of Derrida.¹¹⁰ Let the reader also keep in mind the summons from Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, first published in 1985, ‘for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction’. This is not abjection.

Shell ends ‘The Family Pet’ with the confirmation that pets occupy a structural function, a typically anthropomorphic one: ‘If there were no such beings as pets, we would breed them’, he says, since pets tell us who we are.111 Yet there is an odd loophole which may well prove to be more than an exception: ‘sometimes we really cannot tell whether a being is essentially human or animal – say when we were children or when we shall become extraterrestrial explorers.’¹¹² Science fiction is not necessarily off-world; it is here and now.

Catoptrics: The mirror of autobiography

Along with the disappearance of Derrida’s cat from ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’ – a disappearance hovering between a failure of curiosity and an ethical refusal – Haraway also finds the repetition of a philosophical trope trapping Derrida in a scene dominated by its visuality and punctuated by his naked body.¹¹³ He is naked before his cat. Naked and ashamed. Yet with Haraway’s acknowledged Catholicism and the emphasis of Judaeo-Christian thought on the sins of the flesh as original sin, following Derrida’s visual emphasis, she loses track of its equivocality in his text, disappointed that this biblical affect stands before philosophy.¹¹⁴ On the one hand, she’s right – this is about Jacques and not his cat, about whom we learn very little – but the way it is about Jacques makes a difference. His nudity is not of the common garden variety. His shame does not appear as a symptom or as the only due response to the ever-increasing litany of violence against animals perpetrated by humans. Derrida’s phrasing is purposefully odd. He writes, ‘I often ask myself, just to see, who I am – and who I am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example the eyes of a cat.’¹¹⁵

Prompted by the eyes of a cat, this gaze is like a kiss, if a kiss is as open as this chapter suggests. This ‘just to see’ may seek but cannot seize. Its curiosity is not calculative. Just a few lines later Derrida repeats the phrase, repeats it twice more, and in those instances, it turns back towards him, mirroring the first time, now identified with the cat looking at him ‘just to see’.¹¹⁶ Later in the essay it is echoed in the scene of biblical naming. There God lets man (without woman) name ‘in order to see’ what happens. This God has both an ‘infinite right of inspection’ and also the ‘finitude of a god who doesn’t know what is going to happen to him with language’.117 Derrida too does not know what is going to happen when he looks ‘just to see’ into the eyes of this cat, and in so doing asks after himself. Derrida’s human being is troubled, not confirmed, by this other. He says as much. He has ‘trouble repressing a reflex of shame’.¹¹⁸ The intensity of this reflex engulfs and can pre-empt the reader from following the cautionary tale in which it figures. This tale is a reflection, is on reflection. At its ‘optical center’ ‘appears’ ‘nudity’. His follow-up demands additional emphasis: ‘about which [nudity] it is believed that it is proper to man, that is to say, foreign to animals, naked as they are, or so it is thought, without the slightest consciousness of being so’.¹¹⁹

Who am I? Such an autobiographical question would point the self out, point for point ‘in the present … and in his totally naked truth’.¹²⁰ This indexical emphasis makes a metonymy for the hand, and the hand recalls its signature place in Heidegger (this is the hand – the hand that can). Yet for Derrida the incapacity for the human to point to being as such speaks to the vicissitudes of writing, to the indecidability between giving and taking. The autobiographical animal would point out the naked truth, would do so, ‘if it were possible’. Jacques Derrida, in the very first line of The Animal That Therefore I Am, at the commencement of his address and ‘In the beginning’, ‘would like to entrust [him]self to words that, were it possible, would be naked’.¹²¹ The reader must actively seek out, must follow, the conditional tense that so marks this text – indeed it is often our surest [!] guide to the departures that Derrida solicits, departures that lead away from both common sense and the conceptual apparatus of metaphysics.¹²² Everywhere you look, there is a conditional ‘would’. They gather around ideas that one would otherwise think to be sound. Ill at ease with the conceptual inheritance visited upon his flesh in this encounter both banal and singular, Derrida cautions us, ‘Man would be the only one to have invented a garment to cover his sex. He would be a man only to the extent that he was able to be naked.’¹²³ This invention then would mean that we ‘would therefore have to think shame and technicity together, as the same “subject”.’¹²⁴ This would be the case if truth were given by Judeo-Christian ontotheology. The implication, then, is that full disclosure, of the nude, of naked words, of the truth as that which bares all has never been within our grasp and never will be so.

Derrida’s opening desire to trust himself to ‘naked words’ – were it possible – might also be read ironically in light of Haraway’s own exposure of the illusion of the unmarked subject served by the ‘experimental life’ of the eighteenth century (an illusion served to the history of scientific practice in the West). Drawing on Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s book Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Haraway recounts that the ideal witness to this life was a modest one, yet one whose modesty must be visible while the witness himself should be invisible: ‘[t]his self-invisibility is the specifically modern, European, masculine, scientific form of the virtue of modesty.’125 This manner of invisibility counted on the witness ‘adding nothing from his mere opinions, from his biasing embodiment’.¹²⁶ While the witnessing (most famously, of an experiment on a bird in an air pump) should take place in public, and taking into account the vexatious determination of just which context and by virtue of what audience would constitute a ‘public’ event, perhaps we could think of Cerisy-la-Salle as such a forum and Derrida’s ‘experiment’ his reflection on the animal. Moreover, the bad feeling – the shame – that afflicts Derrida and draws attention to his body, naked before his cat, thoroughly troubles the invisibility of his witness. Rather than completely dismiss the figure of the ‘modest witness’, Haraway seeks to ‘queer the elaborately constructed and defended confidence of this civic man of reason in order to enable a more corporeal, inflected and optically dense … kind of modest witness to matters of fact to emerge’.¹²⁷ Might the embarrassment of the philosopher drawing attention to himself and his body in this way in fact speak to the corporeal inflection that Haraway entertains as she puts pressure on the necessarily modest quality of witnessing as partial or even ‘situated’?¹²⁸

Moreover Shapin and Schaffer described Robert Boyle as himself professing a ‘naked way of writing’:

He would eschew a ‘florid’ style; his object was to write ‘rather in a philosophical than a rhetorical strain.’ This plain, ascetic, unadorned (yet convoluted) style was identified as functional … Moreover, the ‘florid’ style to be avoided was a hindrance to the clear provision of virtual witness.¹²⁹

The same can hardly be said of Derrida. While not necessarily ‘florid’, Derrida’s style could hardly be described as ‘plain’ or ‘unadorned’. Naked before his cat – ‘stark naked’ as the translation has it – Derrida is ‘á poil’: he is down to his ‘animal’ hairs, in common with mammalian animality.130 Immodest, marked, partial, situated: the philosopher’s body responded. That this response speaks also to the beat of the heart will be taken up in my closing chapter.

Derrida does not look in order to annihilate the difference of the other by seeing only his own re-confirmed reflection (‘pointing’ straight back to him). Rather, the other can always surprise. For where autobiography habitually imports a mirror to figure its reflective function and to lead back automatically, autoaffectively, to the signing self, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (following)’ sees itself in the eyes of a cat. The mirror of autobiography that would see all is not a ‘miroir’ but a ‘psyché’ in Derrida’s text: a full-length mirror that can be angled to reflect what one desires.¹³¹ Habitually, in post-Lacanian thought, it is by means of the reflected other that the subject is staged for itself as such: misrecognition of that subject’s capacities is part of the allure. Yet what if the other is wholly other, and not a brother in advance? What if this other happens to arrive in the form of a cat? The autobiographical mirror is like one found in a bedroom, the place in which one undresses. But in this context, it also conjures up the invention of the other – the subtitle of an essay and two collections of Derrida’s essays: ‘Psyché: the invention of the other’.¹³² Jacques Lacan once opened limited access to the mirror for the animal as a rudimentary visual reflection functionally tied to sexual maturation, but without speculative insight, without the dialectical spur that would technically supersede privation (that privation being the alleged singularity of human infantile immaturity in this case).¹³³ There the recognition of the animal’s own image did not forecast the ability to say ‘I’ as it did for the human infant.¹³⁴ Neither could animals take each other’s images for their own. But seeing himself in the eyes of a cat, signed by this other, one morning in the bathroom by chance, Jacques Derrida becomes an autobiographical animal, and he is not alone.

Supplementing the gaze of the non-human other, it is the interruption in and of the kiss that is underlined in Cixous. She does not see it coming, even though her eyes are open and the cat’s determination is flagged by its ‘clear and decided gaze’.¹³⁵ For that matter she does not see the cat coming, either: ‘in the meantime the cat arrived.’136 Pure event, and as such, astonishing. Not ‘in the beginning’ – Derrida’s opening clause that announces not his own obeisance to Judaeo-Christian onto-theo-chronology but his shame before the violence of that tradition – but rather, ‘in the meantime the cat arrived’. Cixous is struck by unforeseen hospitality in the meantime. Arriving without an article, as the chapter of her novel Messie (1996), ‘Arrivée du chat’ stresses arrival even over the cat, in a sense that slightly dissipates in its 2006 English translation as a discrete essay called ‘The Cat’s Arrival’. Even so, published in a special issue of the journal parallax on ‘animal beings’, this essay has been interjected into a field rippling with the after-effects of Derrida’s work on the animal question, but which still struggles to keep pace with that of Cixous. At least two volumes now invite her work to be read in this light: Marta Segarra’s edited and annotated collection of her writings The Portable Cixous, published in 2010, explicitly names ‘The Animal’ as a core theme for Cixous (and one not limited to cats or domesticated animals).¹³⁷ My edited collection, The Animal Question in Deconstruction, published in 2013, expanded the practice of deconstruction beyond the proper name of Jacques Derrida and opened with Cixous’s essay ‘A Refugee’ as well as including essays that foregrounded this practice as one of poetics as much as a politics.¹³⁸ But Cixous’s ceaseless breaching of genre disorients the difference between autobiography (that should only ever point back to the self) and magical realism (that should always escape the perceived realism of the self). Thus the challenge of her prose and her preference for embedding ‘argument’ within poetic phrasing and neologism may continue to fox those readers hoping to find a programme or a method that they can grasp: as Cixous herself writes, ‘I do not command. I do not concept.’¹³⁹ Of course, these cannot be found in Derrida either!

Cixous’s cat does not make an appearance only to subsequently fade from view, or atrophy in allegory. But the stress is on the surprise of the encounter: she writes, ‘I’d also never have imagined … That the Event would be a cat.’¹⁴⁰ Her surprise at this unforeseen, and thus eventful, remarkable encounter foreshadows that of Derrida: both of them rendered not at home in their own homes, both caught on the unhomely, uncanny, backfoot.¹⁴¹ Perhaps this was ‘the first possible event, because im-possible’.¹⁴² In Cixous, since arrival is a feminine noun in French, this force of arrival is stressed as feminine, while the cat of the title is in the generic that is masculine form until the first line of the essay, when ‘la chatte’ is specified (had the French used ‘arriver’ as a verb – Le chat est arrivé or La chatte est arrivée – it would have both emphasized the cat and obliged agreement of the choice of gender across noun and verb).

A similar sense of arrival arriving prior to any assignation surfaces in Derrida in his ambiguously wrought term l’arrivant – forgetting, he tells us in a footnote, that Cixous had made use of ‘arrivant’ in her novel La (1976) and the next year produced a play based on that book called L’Arrivante.143 On the one hand, this footnote frustratingly contributes to the play of precedence between Derrida and Cixous, whose works echo each other so much anyway, not least in the context of deconstruction’s troubling of precedence itself – who am I following?¹⁴⁴ The door and the shore (‘la rive’ conjuring ‘l’arrive’) marking the arrival of the arrivant – repeating throughout Cixous’s text – redouble this problem, as Derrida remarks: ‘this border will always keep one from discriminating among the figures of the arrivant, the dead, and the revenant (the ghost, he, she, or that which returns).’¹⁴⁵ At the core of deconstruction then, this corps never fully manifests, is never caught, remains unsure. The one who arrives should be unmarked because unforeseen, a neutral if not neuter arrival. On the other hand, this is also fraught in the general context of work by women, so rarely cast as eventfully paradigmatic rather than machinically derivative – and, in dating from the mid-1970s, L’Arrivante, like La Jeune Née, marks a time when it was most pressing to challenge alleged sexual neutrality (La Jeune Née is translated as The Newly Born Woman though only the feminine not the species is strictly specified).¹⁴⁶

Cixous’s writing encompasses the literary liberty of free indirect style, enabling rapid shifts between first- and third-person voices, dissolving easy identification or solidity of ‘character’, and frequently provoking the question ‘who speaks?’ Thus in her text, both ‘she’ and ‘I’ are caught off guard by the arrival of the cat. The question is intensified, given the shift in context, the grafting of ‘Arrivée du chat’ from an ambiguously fictional and ambiguously autobiographical book into a journal context in which we expect the first-person singular to be the vehicle for the author’s own voice, to sign for the author and for no other. Provoking ‘who speaks?’ or ‘who signs?’ usually skews the machinations required for rendering and retaining the human subject as central. Here it enables Cixous to pose and repose all the clichés of anthropomorphism without simply falling into thoughtlessly enunciating them herself. She lets fly the distance of the literary while at the same time appropriating autobiographical authority, saying that she had never thought that a cat would show up, not ‘in one of my stories’.147 Remarked in this way, Cixous’s ‘stories’ become her autobiographical animal, and events exceed her control. Not simply a personal quandary, events exceed human control as they let both animals and machines rush in.¹⁴⁸

In Cixous this cat that arrives can speak – but in order to demonstrate projection, to reveal error. In the middle of the essay, the narrator elects to bathe the cat installed in the narrator’s heart and house despite protestations.¹⁴⁹ This bath, however, is imagined as a denuding disaster in which her fur dissolves away completely, necessitating that the narrator cover her with a towel. Amid the echo of shame as their bodies are made if not identical then similarly in need of the modesty of clothing, Thea reproaches the narrator for ‘passing the limit’ and names her transgression as the ‘exaggera[tion of] love’.¹⁵⁰ In Cixous the ruse that the cat is really and merely an allegory of the displaced human partner is voiced to try and ward off the animal’s difference and the possibility that the cat is a rival (as Anglophone readers will hear). When comings and goings have already circumvented his post, that displaced partner – his improper name a literary quotation (Aeschylus) – is reduced to attempting to reinstall proper boundaries. He grasps pointlessly at the functioning of doors, hence laws, and who should remain before them, as a limitless amount of women and fantastic beasts traverse this open house, a hippopotamus highlighting the hyperbole.¹⁵¹ Meanwhile the woman comes to offer unconditional hospitality to the others to whom she is hostage, in spite of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the animal has no face and hence no relation to the ethical.¹⁵²

Attempting to refuse to accommodate a foundling cat for any second longer than necessary, the narrator takes this cat – who will become Thea – to her cousins’ house and leaves her there. But the cat, with a newly torn ear, returns and not only returns but ‘came to thank the hostess for saving her from the hell into which she herself had thrown her’.¹⁵³ ‘You’re thanking me!!?’ the woman asks, on the cat’s return.¹⁵⁴ Startled by her affirmative kiss, given in disregard of the woman’s initial inhospitable shock at their proximity, the woman ‘asked herself who could have taught the animal this way of thinking’.¹⁵⁵ So close together in the text, alliteration pulling them together, ‘thanking’ can easily be taken for ‘thinking’. As Cary Wolfe notes, thinking and thanking are etymologically entwined.156 Thea thinks and thanks, and these things redouble the surprise that she be there at all, challenging anthropocentrism not simply by refusing to project human qualities upon non-human species but questioning whether we can properly identify the anthropos as such.¹⁵⁷ No gratuitous slippage, the move implicates Cixous in the same critical relation to Heidegger’s ‘Handwerk’ that Derrida more explicitly poses. The gift, for which one gives thanks, was supposed to sign for the human. It was not supposed to be performatively available beyond the human, not supposed to be so radically open to citation.

A mirror crops up in ‘Arrivée du chat’, again as the device that points back to the signing subject. Pre-figuring Derrida’s nude scene, it is an uncomfortable return: it is host to a supplement of shame. The mirror moreover is personified – or ‘animalified’: the mirror ‘squawks’ like a parrot, it is ‘perched’ on her shoulder, it will not shut up and it is repetitious: ‘Naked naked naked see you see you see you’, exacerbated in the phonetically close French: ‘Nus nus nus vus vus vus’.¹⁵⁸ Cixous is naked before a Cartesian-Lacanian animal-machine – the psyché that parrots the Judaeo-Christian history of technology inscribing nudity as shame. This parroting mirror that shows will always show you up, land upon the fault. A moment later the mirror derides her in terms that redress her nakedness as a type of clothing, ‘a get-up’: ‘look at that get-up it isn’t pretty.’¹⁵⁹ Pointed out, ‘in her totally naked truth?’ The mirror affronts her. The mirror shames, barring her from the invisible role of modest witness. Its plural derision is also addressed to the cat (‘vous êtes nus’), but sits on the shoulder of the woman recalling her to its specular economy that always sees the same thing. No insult from the woman’s exasperated human family quite manages this. ‘Arrivée du chat’ specifically links the inculcation of shame with the technology of the mirror. The mirror is charged with splitting the pair of them into the self-conscious one that knows and must overcome her shameful nakedness – or proximity to animality – and the one that does not. The story of shame is thus embedded within the original sin of speculative dialectics that spurs the human to produce both clothing and the veil of consciousness as a technology that sublates the animal. What if dialectics offers a history of technology both incomplete and idealized, polished up to cover the faultlines? This is the charge that both Cixous and Derrida level at the mirror, the psyché.

Animotion

For Schneemann, every morning the awkward analogue camera was there ‘just to see’, without determination over the image (and without the now-habitual glazed gaze of a selfie captured with the high resolution of the now-ubiquitous camera phone). She had it there, ready to hand, by the bed, ready to turn towards her cats as well as towards herself. Schneemann is in the photographs, she signs: quickly read, and without the insight of the theoretical work drawn upon in this essay, Infinity Kisses would be legible as autobiographical work as it is traditionally and simply identified – as an index of that which is ‘my own’, and legible within an artist’s work known for its investment in the personal, in experience, in a ‘hand-touch sensibility’. But does that hand point back to the signing subject, and point her out, point for point in her naked truth? ‘Nudity perhaps remains untenable’, remarks Derrida, his own desire for naked words, for ‘words from the heart’ having been revealed to have been a dressage of sorts.160 Nudity cannot be held in the hand, gathered in a moment of presence. Schneemann’s nudity precedes her: ‘nudity’ clothes the performance works more readily associated with her name as a form of signature. She is always partly concealed, as are her cats, and this is not a violence that could be avoided according to a more ethical representational strategy that would complete the picture without exclusion. Despite Derrida’s caution, he warns readers that we not be able to decide for certain whether his story was true or fictional, since the telling and the reading of that story will always redraw its contours. Texts of whatever context cannot police their own borders.

If the mirroring function within Schneemann’s works was perhaps less clear in the first version of Infinity Kisses, where the smaller images were abutted against each other and mounted as one totemic grid, in the subsequent versions of much larger prints, the effect is magnified. Glazed, they reflect viewers as well as other prints. In Schneemann, the trope of the mirror is no trap of the same. The eye of the camera is a frequent trope for the ‘I’ of a directing subject (as Schneemann well knows, given her derailment of this authority in her Eye/ work). Here each blink of the shutter releases an other image – image after image of – what? As Cixous writes, ‘Woman with cat? Or Woman belonging to cat? Or Cats? Or Woman? Or Women? Or the foreigner?’¹⁶¹ Who mirrors whom? Infinity Kisses is not reducible to the too-available and pitying cliché of older women clinging to the company of cats as poor substitute for the men they can no longer attract. We must take account of a mirror of technical reproducibility, a mirror that iterates – a point reiterated by the various articulations of these photographs, re-cited in different contexts when Schneemann uses her own work as a found object. In so doing she emphasizes their range beyond realism. Their eyes are shut in most images. Even when they are open, the inability to predict frame or point of focus renders the visual field contingent. Schneemann’s experiments in framing – horizontally or vertically, and variations on printing the images in pairs as loose similarities or as precise doubles – makes use of photography’s propensity towards infinite reversals between positives and negatives and allows no gaze to resolve a hierarchy ordering who follows whom. Infinity Kisses names the work, emphasizing the performative kisses without consolidating their content or contracting their context. The kiss brings to attention the entanglement of response and reaction without dissolving those who kiss into a pool of sameness: kissing is of the edges, of continguity, not continuity. Performativity is neither a power nor the proper of the human. Kithe me.

Figure 5.3 Carolee Schneemann Infinity Kisses II, 1990–98, 2004 print edition as shown in Remains to Be Seen, CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY, 2007. Courtesy Galerie Lallouz

 

‘Unfamiliar Unconscious’ is Donna Haraway’s term. See Donna J. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ Oncomouse™ (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 265.