Huntology: Ontological Pursuits and Still Lives
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Essay from diacritics journal by Antoine Traisnel...
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HUNTOLOGY ONTOLOGICAL PURSUITS AND STILL LIVES
Antoine trAisnel
Nw th huntr stps asid . . . and th naturalist cs rward. — Richard Rhds, John James Audubon At the beginning o the nineteenth century in Western Europe and North America, one hunt ended and another began. A orm o pursuit long associated with the acquisition o knowledge,1 hunting became all the more prevalent as a cultural and epistemological logic when technological advances secured the dominance o the human and made it no longer necessary to ensure the gain or deense o territory against animals. No longer a threat to humans, animals became objects o study and exhibition. While the analogy makes little sense today, in the mid-eighteenth century, hunting was oten described as a orm o war. Diderot’s Encyclopédie denes hunting as “all the sorts o wars that we wage against animals” (toutes les sortes de guerres que nous aisons aux animaux). J. M. Coetzee’s 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello urther explores this analogy. The title character describes a time when humans were still at war with the animals: “We had a war once against the animals, which we called hunting, though in act war and hunting are the same thing (Aristotle saw it clearly),” Costello explains. “That war went on or millions o years. We won it denitively only a ew hundred years ago, when we invented guns. It is only since victory became absolute that we have been able to aord to cultivate compassion.”2 The very possibility or humans and animals to be at war with each other implies a relative symmetry and supposes that they share a common political territory. Costello proposes a history in which they cease to cohabit by imagining the conditions under which the humans’ victory became “absolute.” She nevertheless states that some animals remain unaware that the war is over (rats, we are told, have not surrendered). The problem that Costello raises is not so much that the hunt is a war but that this war is thought to be over. And that we are at peace. The supposedly absolute victory o the hunt resulted in a “distribution o the sensible” that demands to be reassessed.3 What has this antasized victory eected in the West, both or (what we call) humans and (what we call) animals?4 The human’s exceptional status proves but a recent development and one that emerges out o a predatory relation to other animals. Costello provocatively suggests that the introduction o guns had a proound impact on how the human’s status as überpredator has been naturalized to the point o invisibility.5 How and when has it been it possible or some humans to envision their victory as “absolute”? With technological progress, the dominance o the human over (other) animals became more pronounced, almost sel-evident. Beore this apparent victory, the war o the species could be perceived as ongoing, and even interminable.6 This essay argues that this “event” took place at the turn o the nineteenth century, when the human-animal relation underwent a proound transormation in the West. The hunt oers a compelling paradigm or reading this transormation. A certain epistemophilia that emerged during this period—as evidenced by Buon’s colossal Histoire naturelle,7 Cuvier’s enterprise o systematic classication, and Darwin’s 1831 zoological expedition on the Beagle (named ater a hunting dog)8—can be seen as the continuation o the hunt by other means. The shiting valence o the hunt rom martial to episte-
DI ACR ITI CS Vlu 40.2 2012 4–25 ©2012 by Th Jhns Hpkins Univrsity Prss
Antin Traisnl is a PhD candidat in th Dpartnt Cparativ Litratur at Brwn Univrsity. H als hlds a dctrat in Arican Litratur r th Univrsité CharlsdGaull, Lill 3. H is currntly cplting a bk anuscript, Blasted Allegories: Après-coups critiques de Nathaniel Hawthorne, which addrsss th critical
dinsins allgry in Nathanil Hawthrn’s rancs rthcing r Aux orges de Vulcain, 2013.
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Figure 1.
Jhn Jas Audubn GoLDeN eAGLe ( Aquila chrysaetos ), 1833 Watrclr, pastl, graphit, and slctiv glazing, 38 x 25 1/2 in. Cllctin Th NwYrk Histrical Scity. Digital iag cratd by oppnhir editins.
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Figure 2.
Waltn Frd DeLIRIUm, 2004 Watrclr, guach, ink, and pncil n papr, 62 5/8 x 43 1/8 in. 159.1 x 109.5 c. Curtsy th artist and Paul Kasin Gallry
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mological nds a burgeoning archive in the emergence o natural history museums and science institutions, which depended on the products o the hunt or their specimen collections. No individual is more representative o this shit than John James Audubon. Audubon created scientic documents and works o art at a moment when the United States was eager to dene and promulgate its intellectual identity as an emergent nation.9 The amed naturalist and artist was above all a hunter: “Audubon engaged birds with the intensity (and sometimes the erocity) o a hunter because hunting was the cultural rame out o which his encounter with birds emerged,” writes Richard Rhodes. “In early nineteenth-century America, when wild game was still extensively harvested or ood, observation or hunting had not yet disconnected rom observation or scientic knowledge.”10 Hunting emerges as the “cultural rame” o Audubon’s artistic and scientic practice. It is in this rame that the gaze o the artist-scientist is shown to be inextricable rom that o the hunter. Contrary to Rhodes, I argue that observation or hunting and observation or knowledge did not then get “disconnected.” Instead, at the moment when science is said to have become “objective,” hunting recedes rom overt consciousness, only to inltrate urther what could be called the epistemological unconscious. It is this very moment when the labor o the hunter ostensibly gets detached rom epistemological pursuits that demands critical attention. How can we account or the convergence o the artistic and the scientic that Audubon’s practice represents as one o capture? What consequences, epistemological and ontological, do the predatory pursuits have, both or the hunted “object” and or the hunting “subject”? This essay elucidates the mechanism rom which the gure o “modern man” emerges in a dynamic relationship to the animal. I will call this dialectical mechanism o capture and exclusion huntology. >>
th excu f h subjc
. . . all huntrs lk alik. — Waltr Bnjain, The Arcades Project In the oreground, almost too large to be contained by the painting, the eagle soars into the air, threatening to exceed the limits o the canvas. In the background, almost imperceptible on the immaculate coat o snow, the hunter is dwared by the majesty o the surrounding massis. Audubon’s Golden Eagle (1833), rom the celebrated 1838 volume o etchings, The Birds o America, shows the imposing bird holding a dead or dying rabbit in its clenched talon (g. 1). The French-American naturalist’s painting is nearly identical to contemporary American artist Walton Ford’s Delirium (2004) (g. 2). The images, were they not separated by more than 170 years, might have ormed a d iptych. Audubon’s aim was to oer a aithul representation o the (then) exotic eathered auna o the New Continent. The depiction o the eagle is inormed by his careul scrutiny o the animal, and yet, despite its patent realism, the scene is imbued with an unnatural quality. The composition is elaborate. The impeccable whiteness o the prey
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reinorces the erceness o the eagle, the totemic animal par excellence. For Audubon, however, the Golden Eagle is not an allegory; he valued the bird or its ornithological singularity and uniqueness. And yet its allegorical dimension is undeniable. The eagle seems to have been recruited as a mascot or the American colonial project. In Audubon’s painting, the bird is soaring westward, charting the course o the American empire’s Maniest Destiny. As art historian Theodore Stebbins has noted, Golden Eagle appears to be modeled ater Jacques-Louis David’s painting, Bonaparte Crossing the Alps at Grand-Saint-Bernard (1800).11 I Walton Ford’s Delirium can be said to be a descendent o Audubon’s Golden Eagle, then David’s Bonaparte Crossing the Alps is its ancestor (see g. 3). Rhodes has noted the commonalities between the two, namely their mirroring color schemes, the pointing gesture o Bonaparte’s hand as reproduced in the eagle’s beak, and the upward trajectory o their nearly identical landscapes:
His triplpakd, snwcvrd untains ar brrwd r th distant ar right Bonaparte, vd rward and cntrd bhind his dark, rcky landscap t irrriag th clrs and rs th whit har and th dark agl. Light ding int bth picturs r th uppr lt illuinats th agl and its whit pry as it illuinats Napln and his whit hrs. Th drp bld swating r th har’s trn y duplicats a rd tu ch bridry at Napln’s waist. But th cnqurr and his raring whit hrs cbin in th agl int n agnicnt raptr, urging upward: th agl’s bating wings duplicat Napln’s gldn, windswirld cap, whil th agl’s pnbakd cry is th hrs’s pn uthd whinny and th agl’s glar danc is th hrs’s bulging wild y. 12 While the eagle gets confated with Napoleon (and his white horse), Audubon seems to position himsel as a simple soldier. Despite this seeming modesty, as Rhodes suggests, Audubon has already climbed the mountain, contrary to his heroic model, and is “shinnying down the chasm with his prize.”13 Moreover, i Napoleon is the eagle, then what are we to understand o the dead eagle on the hunter’s shoulder? This relation invites a closer look at the place o Audubon’s oeuvre in the representation and dissemination o the US imperial project.14 The predator literally replaces the imperial gure o Napoleon, and colonization thereby becomes naturalized through the moti o hunting. The lack o realism in Audubon’s painting is not only conveyed by the symbolic reading that it invites, but also by the rigid quality o the animals portrayed. The eagle and the rabbit appear as i they have just escaped rom a taxidermist’s workshop. Instead o
Figure 3.
JacqusLuis David BoNAPARTe FRANCHISSANT Le GRAND-SAINT-BeRNARD, 1800 oil n canvas, 259 × 221 c. Pht: Gérard Blt. Réunin ds musés Natinaux / Art Rsurc, NY. Châtaux d malaisn t BisPréau, Ruilmalaisn, Franc lt Audubn, GoLDeN eAGLe right
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the intended lielike impression o the bird o prey, Audubon presents us with something more closely resembling a nature morte, or still lie. And as it happens, it was a still lie, as Audubon’s process is brought to light by Ford’s painting. With its smoking beak, its claw caught in a leghold trap, and the small metal spear piercing its heart, Ford’s raptor appears at rst glance to have been taken rom a book o ables. In a way, Delirium is ar more historically accurate than Audubon’s original, rom which it draws its inspiration. Ford, who specializes in large-scale animal watercolors, exposes the abricatedness o Audubon’s hunting scene. Audubon had been asked by Columbian Museum (Boston) proprietor Ethan Allen Greenwood to identiy a live eagle that Greenwood had purchased rom a man who hunted ox with spring-traps in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. He explains in his 1835 Ornithological Biography that Greenwood agreed to sell him the coveted animal. Having brought it home, Audubon conesses a ascination with the bird:
I ust acknwldg that as I watchd his y, and bsrvd his lks prud disdain, I lt twards hi nt s gnrusly as I ught t hav dn. At tis I was hal inclind t rstr t hi his rd, that h ight rturn t his nativ untains; nay, I svral tis thught hw plasing it wuld b t s hi sprad ut his brad wings and sail away twards th rcks his wild haunts; but thn, radr, s n sd t whispr that I ught t tak th prtrait th agnicnt bird; and I abandnd th r gnrus dsign stting hi at librty, r th xprss purps shwing yu his sblanc. 15 The “little voice” that tells him to execute the animal might not be just that o his scientic instinct, but also Audubon’s uneasiness and ascination with the gaze o the animal, which seems to observe the naturalist in return (the execution acquires the quality o a sacrice). Audubon’s rendition o the eagle’s “ace,” compared to that o Ford, is distinctly anthropomorphic. Finding it too challenging to draw it alive, Audubon considered electrocuting the animal but decided to asphyxiate the bird by shutting it in a small room with a pot o burning charcoal. “I waited, expecting every moment to hear him all down rom his perch,” he writes, “but ater listening or hours, I opened the door, raised the blankets, and peeped under them amidst a mass o suocating umes. There stood the Eagle on his perch, with his bright unfinching eye turned towards me, and as lively and vigorous as ever!” Audubon repeated the operation several times but the animal reused to die:
There stood the Eagle on his perch, with his bright unfinching eye turned towards me, and as lively and vigorous as ever!
W wr narly drivn r ur h in a w hurs by th stiing vapurs, whil th nbl bird cntinud t stand rct, and t lk danc at us whnvr w apprachd his pst artyrd. His rc danur prcludd all intrnal applicatin, and at last I was c plld t rsrt t a thd always usd as th last xpdint, and a st ctual n. I thrust a lng pintd pic stl thrugh his hart, whn y prud prisnr instantly ll dad, withut vn ruing a athr.16
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It is this invisible violence that Ford exploits as he satirizes the arti ciality o Audubon’s composition by not only mirroring it but also distorting the mirrored image. Ford capitalizes on the irony that made Audubon kill the bird only to reintroduce it aterwards, pictorially, in its natural habitat. “It’s that backstory,” Greg Cook observes, “that tale o conquest and colonization and accumulated injuries against nature, that is at the heart o Walton Ford’s allegories.”17 Ford explains that he became interested in using watercolor because he wanted “things to look like Audubons.” He describes his paintings as “ake Audubons.” “I twisted the subject matter a bit and got inside [Audubon’s] head and tried to paint as i it was really his tortured soul portrayed,” Ford says, “as i his hand betrayed him and painted what he didn’t want to expose about himsel. And it was very important to me to make them look like . . . he painted them, but that they escaped out o him.”18 In Ford’s watercolor, the eagle is eastbound and very much alive, despite the shackles that mark its enslavement to representation. Ford’s eagle is represented with a tiny spear in its heart and thick plumes o smoke escaping its beak. In contrast, the gure o the hunter, who in Audubon’s painting carries a dead eagle on his back, is instead pictured lying in the snow as i dead. Cook suggests that, “like an avenging spirit, Ford imagines Audubon as a tiny hunter in the background, stricken, collapsed into the snow at the top o a wintry hill.”19 Ford’s elucidation o the circumstances surrounding the production o Audubon’s painting accounts or the model’s “fat” appearance, its pictorial rigor mortis (g. 4). The eagle appears conned within the canvas, as i its rame were a kind o trap and the naturalist-cum-artist regarded nature with the eyes o a hunter. In Audubon’s original, the arrogant raptor had indeed been captured by the painter, who had included his own image in the let-hand corner dressed in hunting gear. The eagle is a hunter, a erce predator that lives o the fesh o other animals. Audubon makes an appearance in the painting as the arch-predator, the hunter’s hunter. This mise en abyme is all the more intriguing because Audubon has not usually been regarded as a particularly sel-refexive artist. The naturalist’s sel-portrait appears comically small, almost irrelevant, and yet the whole scene is depicted rom his perspective. In the painting, however, the hunter’s gaze is not directed toward the bird but appears to be ocused on what is in ront o him. In Golden Eagle, Audubon’s hunter/beholder presents himsel as seeing the world rom below, whereas, as a painter, he adopts a God’s- or bird’s-eye view, typically associated with an all-encompassing perspective and betraying a antasy o omniscience. (Ironically, however, at the very moment that our hunter adopts a bird’s-
Figure 4.
Fil still r John James Audubon: Drawn rom Nature , 2007. Artist Waltn Frd dnstrats Audubn’s tchniqu “psing” th dad anial n a grid in rdr t draw it. Th cag lik grid will thn b blitratd by th landscap paintd vr it.
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Animal (Bird)
Human (Hunter) Pictorial Style
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eye view, his gaze is obstructed by a gigantic bird o his own making!) The painting literalizes the problem that representation poses to objective knowledge, which postulates an irreducible distance between the subject knowing and the object known. I the hunter depicted in the margin o Audubon’s painting is intended to represent the painter himsel, then the scene observed both rom above and below exposes the irreconcilable dualism o the observer. The purportedly realistic rendition is shown to be highly manuactured and hardly “natural,” i by natural one means something let untouched by the hand o man. Audubon represents two versions o the same eagle, which appears to be symbolically both captured (on the hunter’s shoulder) and ree (as a bird). The act that the eagle is at once dead and alive in the picture, not unlike JoHN JAmeS AUDUBoN WALToN FoRD Schrödinger’s cat in his box, establishes a Golden Eagle, 1833 Delirium, 2004 correlation between the killing o the emDpictd as living and r and Dpictd as dying but unttrd pirical animal and its transormation into as capturd and dad n th a representative specimen. Ford exposes huntr’s shuldr Audubon as having a split identity: he is both the naturalist ascinated with underLanding and acing astward Saring in th sky, wstward standing this living creature and the artist Aliv, straddling a tr alln vr Dad, lying n th grund, who must execute the object or the sake o a prcipic “attnd ut” his own artistic execution. Yoking the lie and death o the animal Ralistic but with at quality and Figural, r paintrly but r to that o the hunter/observer, Audubon’s slightly vrwrught livly and Ford’s tableaux de chasse make maniest the dialectical character o the hunter’s Painting titld atr th zlgical original titl indicating that perspective. The chart above summarizes catgry th anial rprsnt th painting ds nt hav any the important dierences between the two d, with Latin na in brackts bjctiv prtnsin paintings. Ford’s adaptation reveals the destinies o the hunter and the hunted to be deeply intertwined, suggesting that the hunter no longer has a raison d’être i the eagle breaks ree. One may go so ar as to perceive in Audubon’s painting the hunter’s unlikely “becoming bird” as he is himsel perched on a allen tree. The hunter is, urthermore, represented as under threat, balanced over a precipice, occupying a precarious position. The dynamic o the hunt is presented as not merely a question o the hunted but also, essentially, one o the hunter. Audubon’s painting indexes the problematic representation o the animal as inormed by a preconception o the human as a hunter. With huntology, I argue that our Western conception o the human is contingent upon such predatory representations o the animal.
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ogca Puu
Thn wuldn’t that an d this st purly wh apprachs ach thing as ar as pssibl with thught itsl, and wh nithr puts any sight int this thinking nr drags in any thr sns alng with his rasning; but instad, using unadultratd thught itsl all by itsl, h attpts t hunt dwn ach th bings thēreuein tōn ontōn that’s unadultratd and itsl all by itsl, and nc h’s rd hisl as ar as pssibl r ys and ars and, s t spak, r his whl bdy, bcaus it shaks th sul up and dsn’t lt hr attain truth and thughtulnss whn th bdy cuns with hr—isn’t this th an, Siias, i anyn, wh will hit upn what is? —Plat, Phaedo Michel Foucault’s study o Diego Velásquez’s 1656 painting, Las Meninas, opening The Order o Things, oers a reading o classical perspectivalism ounded on an irreducible invisibility. O the epistemic model presented by Velásquez, Foucault observes that “the proound invisibility o what one sees is inseparable rom the invisibility o the person seeing—despite all mirrors, refections, imitations, and portraits.” He argues that something (the author, the beholder, or the subject) is always let out o the rame: “the unction o that refection is to draw into the interior o the picture what is intimately oreign to it: the gaze which has organized it and the gaze or which it is displayed.”20 I the entire world were captured in the representation, it would not be a representation but the world itsel (or the world would be pure representation). This impossible coincidence between the subject and its representation heralds the emancipation o the human subject rom the world it represents. Velásquez insists on this representational divide, but, as Foucault suggests, the separation is also an elision o the subject, which he suggests will only be ully emancipated rom its object in the nineteenth century. The human subject, quite undamentally, creates itsel by extracting itsel rom the world that it seeks to describe. To paraphrase Cary Wole, the human gains knowledge o itsel as a knowing subject only to lose the world: by excepting himsel rom the picture, he has accidentally drawn the contours o its own image. Nature is thus born out o man’s dissociation rom it.21 Audubon’s animal representations are exemplary o the transition to the epistemological regime on which the modern ordering o things is grounded. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison situate Audubon in a time beore “mechanical objectivity” became the predominant epistemic virtue. O his depiction o the Crested Titmouse, they write: “Audubon’s bird drawings were printed on double elephant olio paper in order to approximate lie size as closely as possible. Yet Audubon’s insistence that birds be depicted in natural habitats and poses, observed rst-hand by the artistnaturalist, did not preclude mannered compositions . . . or anthropomorphic stances and descriptions.”22 They remind us o the extent to which Audubon’s paintings were
By excepting himsel rom the picture, he has accidentally drawn the contours o its own image. Nature is thus born out o man’s dissociation rom it.
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“criticized by some contemporary naturalists as alsications o nature” whereas similar artistic method had won English naturalist George Edwards the Royal Society o London’s Copley Medal in 1750.23 Ann Shelby Blum agrees that the “ethos o objectivity, expressed in the technical language o systematic description o generic and specic types, was deeply at odds with Audubon’s celebration o the observer as participant and his recording o singular events whose actors were individual creatures.”24 The ambition o the “truth-to-nature” regime in which Daston and Galison situate Audubon is to reveal “the one and only ur-orm o a plant, animal, or crystal,” while the mechanical objective paradigm wishes to remove entirely the knowing subject rom the known object.25 Audubon embodies the pivot between these epistemic regimes because, on the one hand, he highlights the labor (as an artist, hunter, and scientist) needed to produce his object, and, on the other hand, he hopes to render a lielike image o the bird as it really is. In the “mechanical objectivity” model, however, the sel qua sel is identied as the source o error and thus must be eliminated. This drive toward objectivity may explain why, when The Birds o America was published, the hunter had disappeared rom the background: “Whether on his own or on Audubon’s instruction, [the printer] Robert Havell removed the little woodsman rom the plate he made o the Golden Eagle, Plate 181 o The Birds o America, removing along with it a level o meaning that only the original watercolor has sustained.”26 It is this very eacement that gives birth to what Foucault has identied as modern man. The split described by Foucault between human observers and nonhuman others appears subconsciously literalized—and simultaneously obliterated—by Audubon’s rendition. However unrealistic, Audubon’s perspective is not shown as such. The painting purports to oer an unaltered image o what the wild animal really looks like. Contrary to the ingenious composition o Las Meninas that is always chasing its subject out o the rame, Audubon’s painting achieves a allacious reconciliation between the human observer and the observed nature. Whereas Velásquez and Foucault articulate the paradox o the spectator/subject, Audubon reconciles the observer and nature through their mere juxtaposition within the painting. The creative gap between the sel and the world is thereby negated, and the human born out o this elision is let to contemplate proudly its own image in the representation o the animal. Placed side by side with Ford’s adaptation, the human’s biurcated subjectivity is revealed to be produced by the eect o taking itsel “out o the picture” (in the published version o the painting). The split perspective at work in Audubon’s painting is emblematic o a predatory drive at the heart o some Western modern representations o the animal. As many have compellingly argued, these representations constitute a humanist archive that privileges logics o mastery and domestication and rests upon a strict, i ill- dened, demarcation between human and non-human animals. At issue in humanist representations o animals is more than “just” the way in which animals are treated but the very concept o humanity, and thereby o humanism.27 The political and ethical principles on which Giorgio Agamben’s work is ounded underline the inextricable anities binding the
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question o the animal to the practical issue o dening who gets to be called human and what, as a result o this partition, is excluded rom humanhood. In The Open, Agamben describes what he calls “the anthropological machine” as a simultaneously inclusionary and exclusionary apparatus:
Insar as th prductin an thrugh th ppsitin an/anial, huan/inhuan, is at stak hr, th achin ncssarily unctins by ans an xclusin which is als always alrady a capturing and an inclusin which is als always alrady an xclusin. Indd, pr cisly bcaus th huan is alrady prsuppsd vry ti, th achin actually prducs a kind stat xcptin, a zn indtrinacy in which th utsid is nthing but th xclusin an insid and th insid is in turn nly th inclusin an utsid. 28 It is interesting that Agamben would call upon the metaphor o the machine to account or the process o separation at work in our humanistic culture, doubtless to indicate in a Nietzschean gesture the ahuman oundations o that atereect that is the human. The human is no longer homo aber (the maker) but homo actum (the “sel” made man), or, rather, he is both. Playully evoking Descartes’s animal-machine, the image o the machine undermines the idea by which individual sovereignty and autonomous subjectivity constitute the logical premises o the human condition. Following Nietzsche, I would propose that the issue might not so much be, as Agamben suggests, to “stop” the anthropological machine,29 as to understand its modus operandi and recognize it as a machinic process over which “we humans” have little control. Instead o lamenting the violence committed against animals perceived as machines, Nietzsche recommends that we extend Descartes’s mechanical approach to the human being. One should “unlearn” to bind ethics and politics to questions o rational or divine agency: rom this perspective, rationality and spirituality are to be seen as nothing more than the undesirable byproducts o the anthropogenic machine.30 What is at issue in The Open is the exposure o the “irony” o the sel-perpetuating mechanisms that dene the ontological status o the human. The machine should not be thought o as a simple dragnet catching all that is not human, i only because “what is human” is always yet to be decided. The problem is not one o “classication” but o “relation.”31 In act, Agamben seems to say, it is the chase and not the arrest—the capturing and not the capture—o the animal that determines who deserves to be labeled human and what is let over. The Open insists on the interminability, indeed the openness, o the twoold movement o capture and exclusion at work in the making o the anthropos . Instead o running ater yet another singular eature that would be “proper” to human beings, rather than trying to establish another decisive specic barrier between the human and the nonhuman, Agamben o ers to examine the stalling logic o the “proper.”
The machine should not be thought o as a simple dragnet catching all that is not human, i only because “what is human” is always yet to be decided.
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The Open can be read as an attempt to re-dynamize an all-too-static anthropological ontology, which Derrida describes as “the fxism o the Cartesian cogito.”32 Near the conclusion o The Open, Agamben synthesizes his baroque overview o the human/animal dierentiation in Western philosophical discourses with a series o theses. In his second thesis, Agamben argues that ontology, the branch o metaphysics that concerns itsel with matters o essence and being, is sustained by a logic o the chase that works to exclude animals:
ontlgy, r rst philsphy, is nt an inncuus acadic disciplin, but in vry sns th undantal pratin in which anthrpgnsis, th bcing huan th living bing, is ralizd. Fr th bginning, taphysics is takn up in this stratgy: it cncrns prcisly that ta that cplts and prsrvs th vrcing anial physis in th dirctin huan histry.33 The overcoming o the human’s animal nature does not happen overnight; rather, it never happens inasmuch as it is ceaselessly happening even though the human is, in eect, always presupposed to be a meta-animal: rom the outset, “metaphysics is taken up” (or captured) in this ontological pursuit. The inclusionary/exclusionary logic at the heart o anthropological ontology is the result o huntology’s ongoing process o incorporation and expulsion. Oering a model or thinking the space maintained between man and animal, huntology queries the mode o apprehension o a philosophy that works to maintain the distance between the hunter and his prey, between the philosopher and his animal object. Huntology calls into question the deerral o knowing on which philosophical knowledge, in line with Descartes’s metaphysical school o thought, is based. This philosophy, Derrida hypothesizes, “governs, in the sense o being prevalent or hegemonic in, all domains that treat the question o the animal, indeed, where the animal itsel is treated: zoology, ethology, anthropology, but rst o all ontology, mastery by means o knowledge.”34 In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche delimits the ground o the “human soul” as a “hunting ground” or a “born psychologist and lover o the ‘big-game hunt.’”35 We might literalize Nietzsche’s analogy to suggest that the human subject is not merely studied but also constituted by his ontological p ursuits. As Heidegger has argued, tracking evidence o one’s humanity implies that one knows what one i s ater and thereore, that the human is both presupposed and deduced by such a metaphysical quest. 36 The validity o one’s hypothesis rests on evidence that, in turn, is sanctioned as such i and only i one already knows what one is looking or. Such vertigo-inducing recursivity turns The Fundamental Concepts o Metaphysics into a sort o thriller in which Heidegger investigates the appropriate method to “initially approach and subsequently pursue” his “subject matter,” namely, the animal, one that huntology aspires to render apparent and tactical.37 As in the case o Audubon’s Golden Eagle, the hunter who has “gone ater” the animal is motivated by a certain idea, sustained by a certain ideal that he pursues. The living animal in turn poses a resistance to, that is it opposes , the hunter, who, “or the express purpose o shewing his semblance” to the beholder has to execute it and paradoxically to
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lose his object.38 Audubon’s example is characteristic o the raptorial character o certain representations o animals and, subsequently, o the production o knowledge derived rom these representations. In the end, it is not the bird in its irreducible singularity that is described but the hunter’s antasized relationship to the bird as exemplary o its subspecies. The “capture” o the animal inorms us not so much about the animal as such but rather about our negative relationship to what we call “the animal,” and by extension, about the ormation o our ontological status as human beings. I the anthropological machine is relentless, this is because the hunt is not so much concerned with catching the prey but with the hunt itsel, or rather with the way it ensures the human dominion by catching and rejecting the animal in the same gesture. “I ear that this is the origin o hunting,” writes Michel Serres. “The only things hunted are those that have to be chased away.”39 It is revealing that the French word chasser contains within it two seemingly irreconcilable meanings. This double meaning expresses the apparent paradox at the heart o a concept that means simultaneously to hunt—that is, to go ater, to chase—and to repel—that is, to chase away rom onesel (or instance, chasser le naturel40 ). Whereas the English “to hunt” would seem to privilege the pursuit o the prey (indulging the antasy o ultimate capture), the polysemy o the French illuminates the complexity o the term that illustrates the production o knowledge about the animal. In Specters o Marx, Derrida plays on the double valence o the word to show that the hunt (here, the antagonistic ascination Karl Marx had or the German philosopher Max Stirner) is interminable and nds its object not in the prey it pursues but in itsel:
In the end, it is not the bird in its irreducible singularity that is described but the hunter ’s antasized relationship to the bird as exemplary o its subspecies.
I chas you. I pursu yu. I run atr yu t chas yu away r hr. . . . And th ghst ds nt lav its pry, naly, its huntr. It has undrstd instantly that n is hunting it just t hunt it, chasing it away nly s as t chas atr it. Spcular circl: n chass atr in rdr t chas away, n pursus, sts in pursuit sn t ak hi , but n aks hi , distancs hi, xpulss hi s as t g atr hi again and rain in pursuit. on chass sn away, kicks hi ut th dr, xcluds hi, r drivs hi away. But it is in rdr t chas atr hi, sduc hi, rach hi, and thus kp hi cls at hand. 41 Derrida exploits a similar semantic ambiguity in his posthumous The Animal That There ore I Am, in which he laments Western philosophy’s ailing o the animal. He challenges the ethics o a philosophy sustained by a logic o hunting that would strive to rame the animal in a tableau de chasse (“stilling the wildlie,” so to speak). From Descartes to Lacan, Derrida asserts, philosophers have labored to preserve the ontological dierence between man and animal by consistently depriving the animal o the capacity to respond. Derrida evokes the mythic gure o Bellerophon: “He deserves a ten-day conerence alone. He represents, as is well known, the gure o the hunter. He ollows. He is he who
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ollows. He ollows and persecutes the beast. He would say: I am (ollowing) ( je suis ), I pursue, I track, overcome, and tame the animal.”42 The title, L’animal que donc je suis, characteristically plays on the double meaning o the French “je suis” that can be translated as both “I am” and “I ollow,” which orces the translator to write each time “I am (ollowing).” Derrida tricks language into orcing the reader’s identication with the animal (“I am the animal”) and into recognizing the distance maintained by the one who goes ater the animal (“I am ollowing the animal”). This conceit enables him to apprehend the anthropological ontology as a relational economy rather than a predetermined state o things. I chase the animal ergo sum. This is huntology: the injection o a dynamism—oten unacknowledged, as Agamben makes clear—inside an overly static, lieless anthropological ontology. Not only does the term huntology intend to conjure up the repressed dynamic out o which the gure o the human emerges, not only does it demand, ollowing Derrida, that we develop an “alternative ontology o animal lie, an ontology in which the human-animal distinction i s called radically into question,”43 it also renders visible the violence done to the living beings (or example, women or oreigners along with beasts and vermin) that are chased away rom the category o the human. This exclusion recalls Derrida’s notion o carnophallogocentrism, denoting the traditionally masculinist dimension o the hunt, a critique o which remains to be developed in uture work. Questioning the premise o any unqualied distinction between human and nonhuman animals, huntology oers the opportunity to rethink what is usually excluded rom the realm o ontology. Hence the transparent echo with Derrida’s “hauntology,” a key principle o which is the welcoming in philosophy o what philosophy tends to discard, namely, specters, ghosts, and other ephemeral appearances that lack ontological substance. In Specters o Marx, Derrida himsel makes the relationship between hunting and haunting explicit:
This lgic and this tplgy th paradxical hunt whs gur, bginning br Plat, will hav travrsd th whl histry philsphy, r prcisly th ntlgical inqust r inquisitin shuld nt b tratd as a rhtrical rnant whn n rads The Maniesto o the Communist Party : its rst sntncs, as w saw, idiatly assciat th gur haunting with that hunting.44 Arming the possibility o accounting or that which is not recognized by ontology, Derrida deontologizes philosophy. This essay wishes to expand the scope o this gesture by opening ontology, with the concept o huntology, to animal li e. Huntology is both a critical paradigm or “tracking down” the anthropocentric prejudice undergirding a dominant Western philosophical discourse and a reparative theory that seeks to nuance the dogmatism o human/animal demarcations and to rethink, without necessarily doing away with, that which calls itsel human.
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Ccu: ergo sum
N cnsciusnss that w wuld rcgniz as cnsciusnss. N awarnss, as ar as w can ak ut, a sl with a histry. What I ind is what tnds t c nxt. Thy hav n cnsciusnss thereore. Thrr what? Thrr w ar r t us th r ur wn nds? Thrr w ar r t kill th? — J. m. Ctz, Elizabeth Costello So then, what, thereore? What comes ater the human, as the notion o posthumanism would seem to herald? To answer this question, Derrida proposes that we invent a dierent, “unheard-o grammar”45 to articulate dierently the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. The Animal That Thereore I Am is punctuated by a series o “thereores”—recalling Descartes’s cogito ergo sum. It adopts, as well as mocks, the predatory logic o this grammatical hinge that poses, really imposes , a methodical connection between a series o proposals or events. One recalls that Derrida amously opens his essay “Diérance” with a “thereore” that is not preceded by anything in order to show the potential violence made possible by this adverb. The “thereore” postulates a logical sequence, it presupposes a “beore” and an “ater” and determines a hierarchical order, as is shown by the Bellerophon passage. But it also implies a categorical statement. There is something authoritative and nal in the binding character o the thereore, something exclusive. “When we say ‘thereore,’ when we consider a proposition as concluded, we make it the object o an assertion,” writes Deleuze. “We set aside the premises and arm it or itsel, independently. We relate it to the state o aairs which it denotes, independently o the implications which constitute its signication.”46 The dismissal o the premises upon which the “thereore” depends echoes the way in which the human excepts himsel rom the picture he paints o the animal. Huntology exposes the temptation o a purely logical discourse that would enorce a rational order on the heterogeneity o animal lie. The point is neither to abolish all notions o order, nor is it to “stop” the anthropological machine, nor still to cease hunting. Rather, the imperative is to reassess what kind o relationship the human has to the animal. Right ater mentioning the logic that, according to him, guided the most “paradigmatic, dominant, and normative” gures o Western philosophy (namely, Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan), Derrida writes:
The point is neither to abolish all notions o order, nor is it to “stop” the anthropological machine, nor still to cease hunting.
Th stratgis this right or more to ollow [drit d suit] that I hav just vkd r sbl ths th hunt, whthr th anial thrby llws its dsir, what is dsirabl in its dsir r in its nd, as will b said by ths wh wish, ut dsir r nd, t bliv in an irnclad distinctin btwn th tw, dsir and nd, just as in th distinctin btwn an and anial, r whthr, whil llwing its driv, th anial nds itsl llwd, trackd by
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th driv th thr. And w shuld nt xclud th pssibility that th sa living cratur is at th sa ti llwr and llwd, huntr knwing itsl t b huntd, sducr and sducd, prscutr and ugitiv, and that th tw rcs th sa stratgy, indd th sa vnt, ar cnjugatd nt nly in th sa anial, th sa animot , but in th sa instant.47 The logic o ollowing presupposes the possibility o an a nity (o a relation as a relative) and yet, in the same gesture, contributes to producing the very dichotomy it promises to eradicate. In lieu o chasing the animal, the hunter chases it away. For Derrida, “hauntology” evokes and revokes in the same gesture the violence o ontology: it exceeds the connes o ontology, it is irreducible to it, but it is also what makes ontology possible, what justies it. Likewise, huntology a ccounts or the ormation o anthropological ontology and oers a poetic grammar or deconstructing the “ironclad” demarcation between the nonhuman and the human animal. Huntology should be understood as eluding the logic o philosophical language, dreaming instead o a non-hypotactic, illogical grammar that would upset certain preestablished associations concerning the animal and disturb the unyielding predation o grammatical predication. I huntology i s not ossied into an ontology, i it is not stabilized, i it remains cynegetic, i it opens itsel to other orms o existence, i it does not try to erase the traces o its own process, it might provide the grounds or an alternative, non-nihilistic posthumanist perspective.
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Notes Th ntanglnt hunting with th acquisi tin knwldg is nthing nw. Prhistric cav paintings, r xapl, dnstrat a lngstanding intrdpndnc btwn ritual, pistlgical, and prdatrial practics. 1
Ctz, Elizabeth Costello, 104. on th issu slavry in Politics 1–8., Aristtl argus that war r th purps acquisitin can b just, and th kind acquisitin h is thinking invlvs acquiring thr huans wh ar “intndd by natur t b gvrnd” i.., slavs. H thn likns this war t hunting th “acquiring” wild basts. Aristtl was prhaps inuncd by Xnphn’s Cynegeticus, or Treatise on Hunting, in which hunting is dscribd as “an xcllnt prparatin r th tils war” Xnphn, Minor Works, 368, r by Plat’s The Laws, whr th yuths ar advisd t hunt in rdr t b ailiar with thir cuntry in cas it ust b dndd against nis Plat, The Laws, 192. Fr Plat, th hunt cncrns anials and huans indirntly: “w als hav t tak int accunt th hunting n, nt rly by thir nis in war . . . but by thir lvrs, wh ‘pursu’ thir quarry r any dirnt rasns, s adirabl, s xcrabl” The Laws, 272. 2
As Jacqus Rancièr dns it, “th distributin th snsibl [is] th syst slvidnt acts sns prcptin that siultanusly disclss th x istnc sthing in cn and th dliitatins that dn th rspctiv parts and psitins within it” The Politics o Aesthetics , 12. This ssay prpss t undrstand th birth drn an, alngsid th narrativs clnizatin, industrializatin, and tchnlgical prgrss that cnsuatd th divrc btwn huans and anials, by rviving a rgttn r rprssd rivalry that cntributd t dtrin th drn partitin a shard spac. 3
Fr Drrida, th war cntinus t b wagd in arnas thr than hunting grunds, such as in lan guag. Whnvr “a philsphr, r anyn ls, says ‘Th Anial’ in th singular and withut urthr ad, claiing thus t dsignat vry living thing that is 4
hld nt t b huan,” Drrida afrs, “h dclars, just as a disas is dclard by ans a sypt, h rs up r diagnsis th statnt ‘I a uttr ing an asinanity [bêtis].’ And this ‘I a uttring an asinanity ’ shuld cnr nt nly th aniality that h is disavwing but his cplicit, cntinud, and r ganizd invlvnt in a vritabl war th spcis” Drrida, The Animal That Thereore I Am , 31. Th ar that tchnlgy wuld hav a ngativ inunc n th huan huntr is nt nw. In The Laws, Plat praiss hunting but ppss th captur birds and sh with nts and traps: “Frinds, w hp yu’ll nvr b sizd by a dsir r passin t sh in th sa r t angl r indd t hunt watr anials at all; and dn’t rsrt t crls, which a lazybns will lav t catch his pry whthr h’s aslp r awak. W hp yu nvr l any tptatin t captur n n th high sas and tak t piracy, which will ak yu int brutal huntrs and utlaws. . . . Nr shuld any yung an vr b sducd by a ancy t trap birds. . . . All n wh wish t cultivat th ‘divin’ curag hav nly n typ hunting lt, which is th bst: th captur urtd anials with th hlp dgs and hrss and by yur wn xrtins, whn yu hunt in prsn and subdu all yur pry by chasing and striking th and hurling wapns at th” Plat, The Laws, 273. 5
This accunts r hw th cnvrsatin culd b radically changd by Jry Bntha, r wh th qustin cncrning th anial was nt “can thy think” but, ausly, “can thy sur?” Sinc thn, th war was n lngr wagd vr th qustin rasn but, Drrida suggsts, “vr th attr pity.” Th last tw cnturis “hav bn ths a struggl, a war whs inquality culd n day b rvrsd bing wagd btwn, n th n hand, ths wh vilat nt nly anial li but vn and als this sn tint cpassin, and, n th thr hand, ths wh appal r an irrutabl tstiny t this pity” Drrida, The Animal That Thereore I Am , 28–29. 6
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Jacqus Rgr rinds us that th knwldg th anial displayd in Bun’s Histoire naturelle was that “ th huntsan” and that th philosophe Fridrich mlchir Gri “usd th articl ‘Hunt’ in th Encyclopédie t pps Bun’s psitin” Rgr, Buon, 89, 270n5.
as that a huntr in rdr t prit a spurius idnti catin with hi.
Darwin dscribs th auna th Galapags Archiplag as bing naturally “ta.” Th trrstrial birds ths islands “ar tn apprachd suf cintly nar t b killd with a switch, and stis, as I ysl trid, with a cap r hat. A gun is here almost superfuous; r with th uzzl I pushd a hawk th branch a tr.” Far an is an acquird instinct, Darwin cntinus: “It wuld appar that th birds this archiplag, nt having as yt larnt that an is a r dangrus anial than th trtis r th Ablyrhynchus, disrgard hi, in th sa an nr as in england shy birds, such as agpis, disrgard th cws and hrss grazing in ur lds” Darwin, The Voyage o the Beagle, 356; phasis in.
12
Rhds, John James Audubon, 376.
13
Ibid.
7
8
This sldnitin, as is wll knwn, rstd havily upn an iprialistic cncptin nt nly natur but als ths wh wr dsignatd as th “naturals.” “Audubn, th sltaught rntirsan risn t innc in eurp and at h ,” Blu xplains, “was th naturalist par excellence th Jacksnian ra, whil at th sa ti his idalizatin natur, and stablishnt a privilgd vantag pint r viwing it, appald t th Whig lit Nw england. Audubn’s cntprary culturhr cuntrparts pnd th orgn Trail and rad th bstslling ctin Jas Fnir Cpr. Th wildrnss clbratd in ths ythaking wrks and dds was abut t b subjctd t spculatin, igratin, and cultivatin. Audubn, lik Lathr stcking, syblizd th apprpriatin r th eur pan ppulatin th intiat knwldg natur assciatd with th Indian” Blu, Picturing Nature, 118. Cpr’s rprsntatin Lathrstcking can b sn as an xplary i prblatic cnatin th Arican iprial prjct with th “natural” and “ancstral” activity th hunt. A “whit an” raisd by th “rd n,” Lathrstcking a.k.a. Drslayr, La Lngu Carabin, Trappr, r Hawky is, as his aliass indicat, th übrhuntr. Hunting as a cultural idntity r Aricans ca abut whn it casd t b a practical, vryday activity, but als whn th iag th Arican Indian was bing rashind 9
10
Rhds, John James Audubon, 74–75.
Stbbins, “Audubn’s Drawings Arican Birds,” 20. 11
Th manist Dstiny that ths iags illustrat is als riniscnt eanul Lutz’s Westward the Course o Empire Takes Its Way 1862 r Jhn Gast’s American Progress 1872, in which a sris archtypal Arican gurs ar acing th wild and prising trritris th Wst. During th Arican Civil War, Lutz was cissind by th Cngrss t paint this ural in th Capitl clbrat ing manist Dstiny. Gast’s painting clbrats th prgrss civilizatin vr savagry pitizd by Nativ Aricans ing wstward and untad natur rprsntd by a hrd bisn huntd by n n hrss. 14
15
Audubn, Writings and Drawings, 355.
16
Ibid., 355–56.
17
Ck, “Waltn Frd,” par. 2.
18
Sllins, Art 21, 124.
19
Ck, “Waltn Frd,” par. 8.
20
Fucault, The Order o Things , 16, 15.
Wl suarizs brilliantly Stanly Cavll’s analysis th irrducibl gul sparating th knwing subjct and th phnnal wrld in Kant’s phils phy: “Cavll has plubd th cnsquncs what it ans t d philsphy in th wak what h calls th Kantian ‘sttlnt’ with skpticis. As h charactrizs it in In Quest o the Ordinary , ‘T sttl with skpticis . . . t assur us that w d knw th xistnc th wrld, r rathr, that what w undrstand as knwldg is o th wrld, th pric Kant asks us t pay is t cd any clai t knw th thing in itsl, t grant huan knwldg is nt things as thy ar in thslvs. . . . But i, n Cavll’s rading Kant, ‘rasn prvs its pwr t itsl, vr itsl’ by lgically driving th dirnc btwn th wrld r apparancs phnna that w 21
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can knw and th wrld th Ding an sich nu na, which ur knwldg nvr tuchs, thn w nd urslvs in a psitin that is nt just dd but in act prundly unsttling, r philsphy in a undantal sns thn ails prcisly insar as it succds. W gain knwldg, but nly t ls th wrld” Wl, Intrductin, 4–5. 22
Dastn and Galisn, Objectivity, 80.
Ibid., 79. Fr a dtaild accunt th skpti cis and criticiss with which Audubn’s paintings wr t by th naturalist cunity th ti, s Blu, Picturing Nature, 111–18. “Th iprving psitin th n arts and thir practitinrs in Arican scity and th incrasing ppularity landscap painting nhancd Audubn’s rputatin at h. At th sa ti, th grwing distinctin btwn naturalist and illustratr in scintic practic cratd th basis r cntrvrsy vr dning his tru calling. . . . In an iprtant sns, Audubn, an and wrk, pitizd th transratin th practic th naturalistillustratr int th ths th artist naturalist” 115. 23
24
Blu, Picturing Nature, 88.
25
Dastn and Galisn, Objectivity , 363.
26
Rhds, John James Audubon, 379.
I shuld ak it clar that th huanis at issu hr is n whs thrtical rts ar lcatd in th Wstrn taphysical traditin inuncd by Dscarts and r th st part by his llwrs. It is this ntthlgical taphysics that Drrida is atr in The Animal That Thereore I Am . on th sinal psitin ccupid by Dscarts in this philsphical traditin, s Fntnay, Le silence des bêtes , 275–88. 27
28
Agabn, The Open, 37.
29
Ibid., 38.
Nitzsch always dscribs an as anthr anial—that is, as an anial ang thrs, and nt as ssntially thr t anials. A larg sctin The Genealogy o Morals is dvtd t rhistriciz ing th sparatin btwn an and anial s r instanc 70; II.8, 85; II.16, 87; II.18, and 95; II.24. In The Anti-Christ , Nitzsch playully wishs t xtnd Dscarts’s cncpt th anialachin t th huan: “man is abslutly nt th crwn cratin: vry cratur stands bsid hi at th sa stag 30
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prctin. . . . And vn in assrting that w assrt t uch: an is, rlativly spaking, th st unsuc cssul anial, th sicklist, th n st dangrusly strayd r its instincts—with all that, t b sur, th st interesting!—As rgards th anials, Dscarts was th rst wh, with a bldnss wrthy rvr nc, vnturd t think th anial as a machine: ur whl scinc physilgy is dvtd t prving this prpsitin. Nr, lgically, d w xclud an, as vn Dscarts did: ur knwldg an tday is ral knwldg prcisly t th xtnt that it is knwl dg hi as a achin” The Anti-Christ, 136. on th ipssibility dtrining what is prpr t th huan and th plitical and scintic cnsquncs such a liitatin, s th last chaptr Sith, Scandalous Knowledge , “Anial Rlativs, Difcult Rlatins.” 31
32
Drrida, The Animal That Thereore I Am , 130.
33
Agabn, The Open, 79.
34
Drrida, The Animal That Thereore I Am , 89.
35
Nitzsch, Beyond Good and Evil , 74.
36
Hidggr, “Lttr n Huanis,” 225–26.
37 Hidggr, The Fundamental Concepts o Metaphysics, 201. Hidggr hisl cnts
n th circularity his philsphical inquiry at th bginning The Fundamental Concepts o Metaphysics, th 1929 sinar whr h ditats at lngth n th nn plac th anial ccupis in th wrld. Whil this rcursivity tstis t Hidggr’s attpt at cing t trs with th qustin th anial, his invstigatin is thrughly thtic in that it hlds unyildingly t th axi that th anial is “pr in wrld” weltarm whil an is “cnguratr wrld” weltbildend . Hidggr dscribs th anial ssnc as a r prannt “nubnss” r “captivatin” Benommenheit —n is tptd t say “captur.” It ss that th anial, as it is prsntd in Hid ggr’s sinar, plays th rl a tragic hr trappd int an inluctabl pattrn rptitin. I d nt hav th ti hr t labrat n this, but it wuld b in trsting t lk at th xapls th b cut in hal that cntinus t drink, unawar that it will nvr b satiatd gur Tantalus; th b unabl t rturn h gur Ulysss; th th whs wings ar burnt by th lap gur Icarus.
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Works Cited 38
Audubn, Writings and Drawings, 355.
39
Srrs, The Parasite, 77.
Signicantly, th scnd hal th prvrb is “t il rvint au galp,” which suggsts that i yu try t chas natur away, it nds a way t gt back at yu, acting as s srt revenant . It is wrth nting that natur cs back galloping, at th swit pac th urdsticatd anial. 40
Drrida, Specters o Marx , 175; phasis in riginal. 41
42
Drrida, The Animal That Thereore I Am , 66.
Calarc, Zoographies, 141. Calarc gs n t say that Drrida’s œuvr pavs th way r a “rla tinal and achinic ntlgy singularitis, n that is inrd as uch by Nitzschan and Dluzan atrialis as by Hidgrrian and Lvinasian ph nnlgy. This is prhaps th st radical strain Drrida’s thught n th qustin th anial, and it is th clsst t th argunt dvlpd in this bk—r this lin thught taks away th grund r aking any kind binary huananial distinctin. I what w call ‘anial li’ is cnstitutd by a ‘htrgnus ultiplicity’ ntitis and a ‘ultiplicity rganizatins rlatins’ btwn rganic and inrganic li rs, thn what sns can b ad an insuprabl divisin btwn huan and anial? D nt ‘huan bings’ blng t this ultiplicity bings and rlatins? Ar w t bliv that huan bings ar shw xpt r th play dirncs and rcs, bcings and rla tins?” ibid., 142. 43
44
Drrida, Specters o Marx , 175–76.
Drrida, The Animal That Thereore I Am, 64. Drrida’s dra can b rad as a rspns t Nitz sch’s ar in The Twilight o the Idols that w ar nt rid Gd bcaus w still bliv in graar. S Nitzsch, The Twilight o the Idols , 48. 45
46
Dluz, The Logic o Sense , 19–20.
47
Drrida, The Animal That Thereore I Am , 55.
Agabn, Girgi. The Open: Man and Animal. Translatd by Kvin Attll. Stanrd: Stanrd Univrsity Prss, 2002. Audubn, Jhn Jas. Writings and Drawings. Nw Yrk: Library Arica, 1999. Bnjain, Waltr. The Arcades Project . Translatd by Hward eiland and Kvin mcLaughlin. Cabridg: Harvard Univrsity Prss, 1999. Blu, Ann Shlby. Picturing Nature: American Nineteenth-Century Zoological Illustration. Princtn: Princtn Univrsity Prss, 1993. Calarc, matthw. Zoographies: The Question o the Animal rom Heidegger to Derrida . Nw Yrk: Clubia Univrsity Prss, 2008. Ctz, J. m. Elizabeth Costello. Nw Yrk: Viking, 2003. Ck, Grg. Rviw art xhibitin, Waltn Frd, “Tigrs Wrath,” Brklyn musu, Nvbr 3, 2006–January 28, 2007. The New England Journal o Aesthetic Research blg, January 27, 2007. http://asthtic.grgckland.c/2007/01/ waltnrd_116994251314210711.htl. Darwin, Charls. The Voyage o the Beagle: Journal o Researches into the Natural History and Geology o the Countries Visited During the Voyage o H. M. S. Bagl Round the World . Nw Yrk: mdrn
Library, 1991. Dastn, Lrrain, and Ptr Galisn. Objectivity . Nw Yrk: Zn Bks, 2007. Dluz, Gills. The Logic o Sense. Translatd by mark Lstr. Nw Yrk: Cntinuu, 2004. Drrida, Jacqus. The Animal That Thereore I Am . Translatd by David Wills. Nw Yrk: Frdha Univrsity Prss, 2008.
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———. Specters o Marx: The State o the Debt, the Work o Mourning and the New International . Trans latd by Pggy Kau. Nw Yrk: Rutldg, 1994.
Rgr, Jacqus. Buon: A Lie in Natural History. Translatd by Sarah Lucill Bnni. Ithaca: Cr nll Univrsity Prss, 1996.
Fntnay, elisabth d. Le silence des bêtes: La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité. Paris: Fayard, 1998
Srrs, michl. The Parasite. Translatd by Lawrnc Schhr. Baltir: Jhns Hpkins Univrsity Prss, 1982.
Fucault, michl. The Order o Things. An Archaeology o the Human Sciences . Nw Yrk: Rutldg, 2007.
Sith, Barbara Hrrnstin. Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth, and the Human . Durha: Duk Univrsity Prss, 2006.
Hidggr, martin. The Fundamental Concepts o Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Translatd by Willia mcNill and Nichlas Walkr. Bl ingtn: Indiana Univrsity Prss, 1995.
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