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An Anguished Self-Subjection: Man and Animal in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man Stefan Mattessich Santa Monica College Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who no longer have any essence or identity—who are delivered over, so to speak, to their inessentiality and their inactivity—and who grope everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a task, an inheritance as task? Giorgio Agamben The Open erner herzog’s interest in animals goes hand in hand with his Winterest in a Western civilizational project that entails crossing and dis- placing borders on every level, from the most geographic to the most corporeal and psychological. Some animals are merely present in a scene; early in Fitzcarraldo, for instance, its eponymous hero—a European in early-twentieth-century Peru—plays on a gramophone a recording of his beloved Enrico Caruso for an audience that includes a pig. Others insist in his films as metaphors: the monkeys on the raft as the frenetic materializa- tion of the conquistador Aguirre’s final insanity. Still others merge with characters: subtly in the German immigrant Stroszek, who kills himself on a Wisconsin ski lift because he cannot bear to be treated like an animal anymore or, literally in the case of the vampire Nosferatu, a kindred spirit ESC 39.1 (March 2013): 51–70 to bats and wolves. But, in every film, Herzog is centrally concerned with what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine” running at the heart of that civilizational project, which functions to decide on the difference between man and animal. Stefan Mattessich This decision entails separation but also proximity, hierarchy but also holds a ba in literature genetic homology, particularly in the context of a contemporary (social) from Yale and a Darwinian Weltanschauung and its correlative extension of technocratic doctorate in literature biopower into the whole of the animal (and natural) realm—a context from the University of in which, as Agamben succinctly puts it, “The total humanization of the California, Santa Cruz. animal coincides with a total animalization of the human” (The Open 77). In 2002 he published a In the space of this chiasmus, things in their closed forms reveal a non- monograph on Thomas self-identity or determinate negation that indexes the crisis of historical Pynchon, Lines of Flight reflection and purpose to which Agamben refers in the epigraph. He sug- (Post-Contemporary gests the depth of this crisis when he sees the locus of decision on this Interventions Series, chiasmic space as also in it—to shift into a political register, the decision Duke UP), which was presupposes the state of exception on which it also bears or which it also a finalist for the mla brings into existence. “Sovereign power” is expressed as a law that annuls First Book Award. Since itself in being reduced to a tactic (let us say, of a war on terror), but it also then he has published finds its legitimacy in the subject—homo sacer—to whom it is applied by numerous articles on not applying, by virtue of its suspension. “At the two extreme limits of the contemporary literature order” in question here, he writes, “the sovereign and homo sacer [bare and culture in such life] present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and venues as differences, are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are New Literary History, potentially homini sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom Modern Language Notes, all men act as sovereigns” (Homo Sacer 84). If the sovereign who takes the ELH, and Theory and law into his own hands is “correlative” with the subject on whom this law Event. He teaches English bears, it is only because the subject’s personal sovereignty—its essence at Santa Monica College or identity—has become an illusion. If homo sacer is foreclosed from and in Southern California. for the sake of the sovereign as its vanishing other, so too sovereignty is foreclosed to homini sacri, felt in a phantasmal law as at once a prohibition (a “ban”), a withdrawal of protection (an “abandoning”), and a giving over (in “abandon”) to its arbitrariness. Agamben writes, “Everywhere on earth men live today in the ban of a law and a tradition that are maintained solely as the ‘zero point’ of their own content, and that include men within them in the form of a pure relation of abandonment” (Homo Sacer 51). Agamben is not speaking here only of sovereign power at its “extreme limits.” This “pure relation” at the “zero point” of law and tradition in fact more persuasively describes the citizen in the extra-territoriality of its globalization, “everywhere on earth” caught in a dual process of homog- enization and polarization that alters the terms of identity on political, 52 | Mattessich economic, social, and psychic levels. A privileged cultural register for this experience is not by accident zombies or vampires, since in its combina- tions of motion and arrest, qualified and unqualified substance, bios and zoe, man and animal, the type of homo sacer becomes one who “can be killed but not sacrificed,” removed from the possibility not only of mean- ing but of apprehension (or revelation) as a “being” tout court. Again, this indiscernibility is not an exception but a rule, a way to understand those new terms on which identity is negotiated, and as such both normative and constitutive; at its heart we find an “anthropological machine” pro- ducing the human by “recognizing” it, Agamben says, in the “non-man” (The Open 26–27). Herzog offers a particularly striking example of this global man, or animal, in his aptly titled 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, which tells the story of Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor from Los Angeles who traveled every summer for thirteen years to Alaska’s Katmai National Park as a self-styled animals rights activist and environmentalist. Treadwell lacked, however, training and education for either role, and his motives turn out to have more troubled roots, namely in that “abandonment” by, to, and of his social world. As his motives develop into a more and more aberrant desire “to be a bear,” as Herzog laconically puts it, they also bring the operative principles of the anthropological machine to a breaking point. In the fall of 2003, after an altercation with an airline agent on his way back to Los Angeles, Treadwell returned against his own better judgment with his girl- friend, Amy Hueguenard, to the national park, where both were killed by one of the wilder bears he knew there. The wilful and senseless character of this event is jarring to say the least. One isn’t sure how to respond: with disbelief, sadness, and forgiveness or coldness and dismissal. In mixing up tragic and comic codes it passes finally into farce, suggesting once again the condensations of (non)meaning or (non)identity that Agamben sees as the product of that anthropological machine. As such, the event also stands as more than an exception or an aber- ration; it tells us something about a social logic with which we typically live. In what follows I link this logic to the drive that Lacan situated in a disjunction between object and aim, underscoring in it a “plastic” capacity to “find its aim elsewhere than in that which is its aim” and, in the “play of substitutions” this entails, to obtain satisfaction in deflection, deviation, or “drift” (he proposed the French dérive as a synonym for Freud’s Treib) (The Ethics 110). This indifferent “aim” indicates a strange kind of “object,” one caught up in a traumatic repetition oriented by an “absolute Other”— finally the mother prohibited by the incest taboo—that can “be found at An Anguished Self-Subjection | 53 the most as something missed” or in a state of “wishing” or “waiting” that conjures only “its pleasurable associations” (52). Behind or around this object, Lacan says, lies its inaccessible double, the “Thing,” as the prin- ciple of a “need” in the subject “to hallucinate his satisfaction” (138), to be “deprived of something real” (150). As I explore in more detail below, Treadwell’s relation to the roles he played—activist and environmentalist—hinges precisely on this sort of need. But he is not the only one in the documentary for whom this is true— a fact of which Herzog is well aware. We feel it, for instance, in a statement made by Warren Queeney, one of Treadwell’s friends (and another actor), whom Herzog interviews for the film. “There’s an old story on the farm,” he says, standing by palm trees near the Venice Beach boardwalk: “If it doesn’t scare the cows, then who cares? Well, Timmie wasn’t scaring the cows, so who cares?” This is meant as a defense of his friend, and the weight of repetition in those last two words pulls the answer—“nobody”—away from the judgment Queeney wants to contest. To care about Treadwell, he implies, is not to care about his actions insofar as they were harmless, the playing out of a fantasy, “no big deal.” But the polysemy of the word “care” also opens up two further readings: that (not) caring in this way meant nobody cared about Treadwell, not even Queeney, insofar as he was another nobody, and that Treadwell was a nobody too, caught in the same negative quantities and the same “play of substitutions” (or signifiers) as everybody else. His death, then, perhaps especially in its senselessness, highlights the drive-like dimension of the normal order in which Queeney lives.

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