An Anguished Self-Subjection: Man and Animal in Werner Herzog's Grizzly

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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 combinations 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 meaning 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 girlfriend, 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 principle 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. He seems to intuit as much, at least for himself, when he admits to Herzog that Treadwell haunts him: he didn’t “feel dead.” Of course, Treadwell’s actions were harmful, most tragically for Amy Huguenard, who is a special kind of “nobody” in the story, as we appreci- ate by the fact of Queeney (meanly? modestly?) excluding her from the category of “cow.” Deliberately left off camera by Treadwell, who stylized himself a loner on his expeditions, we see her full face only once, in footage taken shortly before she dies. “Veiled, obscured, unknown,” as Herzog puts it, she functions as a representative of the “Thing” that orders the field of speech and action for homini sacri like Treadwell, but also for citizens like Queeney.

herzog assembled his documentary from a voluminous video archive Treadwell left behind on his death. He also thought of himself as a filmmaker, although right from the first sequence, in which we see him, backed by two idly grazing bears on an idyllic green meadow, speak to his camera

54 | Mattessich as if in his own documentary (or reality television show), Herzog underscores the tenuousness of this identity, like all others, for him. Failure, we sense, has indeed hit Treadwell hard enough to sever aim from object; even when the identity is that of actor, and the aim to be what he could not be in He is thus a l.a., the shock continues to insinuate tentativeness into his efforts, push- ing them more toward the private notations and experiments of a diary hero of the written by someone with a lot of time on his hands (or an unemployed actor). Failure also explains why he comes to Alaska, seeking, in the relief oxymoronic from social pressure that a natural world affords, both the consolation and opportunity that might set him right and make him “human” once type proper again. Oleg Gelikman, in a perceptive reading of Grizzly Man, recognizes a pastoral mode at work here: Treadwell’s return to nature takes up the old to that poetic project of reconciling the conflicts and divisions of the human world. He is thus a hero of the oxymoronic type proper to that poetic mode: typically mode. a “noble simpleton, mature child, [or] doglike human” who seeks “control over the universe via omnipotent modes of thought” (1147). Treadwell also comes to Alaska seeking a reflection of his dislodged status in the social world, his own in-humanity as someone not only deprived of a role and a place but coping with roles and places that are inherently in-human, reduced to a “bare life” for which the pastoral mode has indeed become central.1 Hence, in that first sequence of the documentary the bears in the background suggest a synecdoche for the camera; in their con- spicuous indifference, in fact, they seem very like the audience that is not listening or caring. They “frame” the framing activity in which Treadwell is engaged at a point in mental space (the Big Other) from which he is seen seeing himself or, rather, seeing this seeing of himself. In his analysis of this first sequence, Gelikman notes a compression of background and foreground in an “optical proximity” that is both spatial and symbolic (1151). Another detail (not mentioned by Gelikman) supports this reading: as Treadwell walks into the picture on activating the camera, he kneels down and starts to tell us about the bears behind him. In the process he obscures behind him one of the pair, so that, as he speaks in the plural, we see only one; or, if we imagine the second to be, in that “optical proximity,” absorbed in Treadwell’s body, what he says of them pertains as well to him, as the other bear in the scene. Let us listen, then, to what he says. I take the liberty of citing the monologue in its entirety, adding brief stage directions to indicate corresponding gestures and tonal shifts: 1 Gelikman stresses the entrenched ideological dimension of the pastoral mode in modern societies; in the narcissistic excesses of Treadwell’s ritual control over nature he “feeds off the energies of a pastoral machinery” (1155).

An Anguished Self-Subjection | 55 I’m out on the prime cut of the big green. Behind me is Ed and Rowdy, members of an up-and-coming sub-adult gang. They’re challenging everything, including me. Goes with the territory. If I show weakness … if I retreat, I may be hurt, I may be killed. I must hold my own if I’m to stay within this land. Because once there’s weakness, they will exploit it, they will take me out, they will decapitate me, they will chop me up into bits and pieces—I’m dead…. So far…. [He pauses, glances at them.]… I persevere … “persevere?” … [He starts again.] Most times I’m a kind warrior out here. Most times I am gentle, I am like a flower, I am like a fly on the wall, observing, noncommittal, non-invasive in any way. Occasionally I am challenged. In that case, the kind warrior must, must, must become a Samurai, must become … so formidable … so fearless of death … so strong … that … you will win … you will win … so that even the bears will believe … that you are more powerful. And in a sense you must be more powerful if you are to survive in this land, with the bear. No one knew that. No one ever friggin’ knew that there are times when my life is on the precipice of death, and that these bears can bite, they can kill. And if I am weak I go down. I love them with all my heart. I will protect them. I will die for them. But I will not die at their claws and paws. I will fight. I will be strong. I will be one of them. I will be … master … [Freezes, bows his head.] … but still a kind warrior … [Walking forward to the camera.] Love you Rowdy. [To the camera.] Give it to me baby … that’s what I’m talking about, that’s what I’m talking about, that’s what I’m talking about…. I can smell death all over my fingers.

Treadwell relates here a straightforward survival narrative for which the bears offer a tension, a danger, a possibility of death. But the relevance he seeks in his self-conscious fashion is not forthcoming because, in fact, those from whom he seeks it are absent. We understand this absence to be of other people when he refers to the “no one” who ever “knew” that he is now “on the precipice of death.” This anomalous temporal shift suggests past failures to attract attention or win recognition. Its unconsciousness for Treadwell is, again, duplicated in the bears behind him (particularly the bear occluded in him), who suggest that evaluative point from which Treadwell wrestles with the vexed question of his identity in that other l.a. world of ambition, competition, and zero-sum games. Nature, then, is social in Grizzly Man. Literally, this is the case for the animals we see—foxes as well as bears—that hang together in groups or

56 | Mattessich “gangs” and as such indicate an only limited fitness in their function as screens for the projection of an asocial human nature. Treadwell concedes this lack of fit himself when the “Samurai” he plays in his survival narrative shifts to a “kind warrior” and the attribute of “perseverance” in the face of death vacillates in his mind, leading him to attest other attributes of gentleness, care, and love as well as other values of safety and security. But that lack of fit is the same even when he projects a human sociality or familialism. When he also plays at parenting, the animals he nicknames, praises, minds, scolds, and instructs as if they were children remain as uncomprehending as ever (if, admittedly, not always quite as indifferent). We sense the character of the l.a. world to which Treadwell relates in the field of the animals with a second temporal shift in his monologue, from the conditional to the present tense, when he says, “I’m dead.” The effect is uncanny enough when we know he is dead—literally decapitated and chopped up. (Herzog gently pushes this effect by overlaying a caption, just as Treadwell begins the monologue, indicating the year of his death.) But it is more uncanny still when we understand him to mean not only that his self-narrating drive is killing him but also that it has already killed him. This latter inflection is brought out at a later point in the documentary, in a remark to Herzog by a former girlfriend, Jewel Palovak, who says of Treadwell and Amy Hueguenard, “They truly died doing what they lived for.” She qualifies what she means as the praise of people “living life to the fullest,” by which she implies following a dream, or something like a regulative ideal, that makes their lives matter, that gives them substance. The “truth” Treadwell and Huguenard lived is thus not simply established by their death; death is what they were always “doing,” the signifier of a relative or living death. Jewel Palovak is not far here from the “bare life” that obtains under what Agamben underscores as a sovereign power’s unconditional threat of death, which is felt as an immanent law binding the subject by way of an unconscious reproduction on corporeal levels of habit, disposition, and perceptual-cognitive schemes. To be included in as excluded from the space of political legibility entails, again, an internalization of sovereign power as the empty form of your own personal sovereignty, functioning as a fantasy to deflect the more profound facts of social antagonism. Treadwell hints at this empty form or fantasy in his sense of himself as that Samurai, both outcast and rebel. In a different monologue he says of himself, “I’m edgy,” and this phrase brings out another association: with the wilderness that literally provides an “edge” for the outcast he is. His edginess further discloses an uncertain corporeal identity in an admission

An Anguished Self-Subjection | 57 of prior problems with alcohol and drugs that his commitment to the bears over the years has helped him quite literally to survive. His mindset is that of someone going into rehabilitation or attending a gym—at still another point he mentions having lost twenty pounds over one summer’s expedition. This mindset is biopolitical in a slightly different sense than I have emphasized thus far—indeed, it points to tensions in the concept that might need more clarification here. Agamben has been criticized for adhering to a notion of sovereign power (cued to the state’s monopoly on violence) that weakens the inclu- sive exclusions or internal differences that control his account of political space as a state of exception.2 Foucault, by contrast, grounding this political space in a generalized market society, distinguishes sovereign power from a biopower that relies less on its “deductive” or “subtraction mechanism” than on a direct generative fostering of individual and col- lective life.3 Biopower, for Foucault, “exerts a positive influence on life [in] endeavor[ing] to administer, optimize, and multiply it” (History of Sexuality 144). As such it rests not upon a threat so much as a “disqualifi- cation of death” (141) that is equally evident, we see, in the irony of saying “I’m dead,” since it implies for Treadwell’s fantasy not only a living death but an immortality (he tries to survive his own death). Foucault further underscores for power, in the neoliberal paradigm of state disengagement, a shift of function from simply limiting (or restraining) the “social irra- tionality” of market society to finding what he calls its own limitation in it (Birth of Biopolitics 102). This suggests that the subject delimits power, becoming the field of its exercise and the justification for a new manage- rial prerogative over its habits, feelings, intuitions, beliefs, and values—its

2 For an overview of the differences and also overlaps between Agamben and Fou- cault on issues of biopolitics, power, law and norm, see Anke Snoek’s “Agamben’s Foucault” (44–67). 3 Instead of a repressive “law” holding over the subject a power of life and death, the internalized “norm,” and the normative space it governs, yields a “perspec- tive regularity” in the subject that renders the law’s empty form immanent to its spontaneous thought and action by synthetic rather than analytic means. If in practice biopolitics coexist with sovereign power, it is not, as Agamben maintains, because they are genetically linked at the origin of Western civilization’s project of self-governance, self-awareness, or autonomy; for Foucault, rather, the first relates to the second as a tactic and in “demonic combinations” (“Omnes et Singulatum” 311) that suggest uncertainty and instability more than the necessity of an actualized tendency. Agamben has dismissed this critique as “perfectly trivial” (Homo Sacer 87). It is not possible, he argues, to separate juridico-institutional state power from biopower (6).

58 | Mattessich “governmentality.” In this process, the subject identifies with a technocratic authority exactly as the technocratic authority identifies with it. If this process entails for the subject an internalization of the specialist’s evaluative “gaze” as well as its embrace of the self-monitoring “respon- sibility” it commands, Foucault locates it outside a “panoptic” discipline associated with a prior historical stage in which sovereign power still predominated; when the latter persists in a neoliberal context, it is in a “demonic combination” (“Omnes et Singulatim” 311) with biopower that is anachronistic (if hardly less effective or lethal) for the late modern state form. The subject of that evaluative gaze appears, we might say, in a kind of catachrestic split, seeing itself being seen as an administrative problem and a statistical entity (part of a “population”). As a consequence, we might still need, for a more precise registra- tion of the psychic reality at stake in this split, the sort of psychoanalytic rubric Lacan centres in the subject’s attempt to place the “I” where “it was,” in the “passion of” or “suffering from the signifier” that locates it in a symbolic order (The Ethics 143). Lacan formalizes this attempt nicely in a child’s locational confusion in the sentence: “I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest, and me” (Four Fundamental Concepts 20). The inability to grasp a difference between the I that counts and the I counted suggests a point of generation (in symbolic order) for an imaginary coherence or plenitude in the face of an accounting that leaves the subject as much out of the account as l.a. has Treadwell. Between this point, or its gaze, in mental space and the subject it constitutes, between the exclusion (or foreclo- sure) from and its inclusion in the account, Agamben sees a “dialectical oscillation” expressing a paradoxical (non)identity, (non)belonging, and symbolic (in)efficiency (Homo Sacer 177) that is not far from “demonic combination” in the subject or in political space. But unlike Foucault, he insists on the catechrestic split as an index of the decision (on the state of exception, also on the articulation of bios and zoe, man and animal) or “threat” that underscores in “bare life” a destitution that tends to drop out of the positivism in Foucault’s account (at least for some of his adherents). One register for a biopolitical condition in Grizzly Man appears in Treadwell’s frustrations with women and his wavering sense of sexual potency. These come through when, to rejoin the above cited monologue, he demands that the camera “Give it to me baby”—the “it” being not only the chance at sexual pleasure with others but sexual pleasure itself. The camera then becomes curiously bisexual: it is a woman who gives herself up to him, but it is also, as that agency which distributes sexual chances or gives “it” to him, a man who promises and withholds, who castrates or

An Anguished Self-Subjection | 59 feminizes in sticking “it” to him (or fucking him over). We are, of course, clearly on psychoanalytic terrain here—specifically where the gaze, its point in mental space, entails a question asked of the Big Other whose At stake is a desire is simultaneously an object and a cause of the subject’s desire. At stake is a constitutively impossible “satisfaction” that suggests, in its nor- constitutively malizing functions for the subject, two figures of authority (or primary object choice): the father, whose prohibitions hurt but also afford potential impossible recompense, situating the subject in a social and symbolic order, and also the mother, whose curtailments of the satisfaction she herself supplies “satisfaction” is experienced as particularly arbitrary and unfair. The second but prior maternal “no” generates, beyond or around the Big Other, a “Thing” that that suggests, in combines the later paternal “no” (in its formative effect) with the earlier pressure to do and not do. Both together produce in the subject an inter- its normalizing nalized authority that demands (on an “obscene” level) and punishes (on the level of public law and order) the transgression of official moral codes. functions for the In this sense, it forms what Lacan calls the “ferocious figure” (The Ethics 7) of a superego whose paradoxical injunction is to “Enjoy!”4 subject, two The latter accords well, of course, with the kind of authority claim made by technocratic experts in promising happiness and health. Foucault figures of identifies, at the origin of biopolitics, the figure of a shepherd who man- ages his flock in accordance with a pastoral power (“Omnes et Singulatim” authority (or 303). This power underlies, in a neoliberal “art of government,” the search for a “principle of … organization in the application to society of a schema primary object of rationality specific to nature” (Birth of Biopolitics 115).5 The kind of care or even love at stake in this schema, however, also suggests a locus choice). of maternal solicitude (for children qua infantilized citizens) that Lacan associates, again beyond or around that point in mental space of the Big

4 Lacanian critic Juliet Flower MacCannell gives a useful gloss of this double imperative in the sadistic superego, which tells you that the enjoyments you lack are nonetheless owed to you. It then challenges you to go ahead and take your portion—”Enjoy!” But (this is the sadistic part) you can do so only under conditions that would humiliate you in front of others. The obscene superego is what induces your enjoyment and punishes you for it at the same time. If its voice touches you in your heart, it also stains you on your surface. It is the postmodern form of guilt. (Hysteric’s Guide 9) 5 “The shepherd acts, he works, he puts himself out, for those he nourishes and who are asleep,” Foucault writes. “He watches over them. He pays attention to them all and scans each one of them. He’s got to know his flock as a whole, and in detail. Not only must he know where good pastures are, the season’s laws, and the order of things; he must also know each one’s particular needs” (“Omnes et Singulatim” 303).

60 | Mattessich Other, with a “Thing” animating not so much desire in its foreclosed but stabilizing satisfactions (or sublimations) as a “breakdown by means of which a certain psychic function, the superego, seems to find in itself its own exacerbation, as a result of a kind of malfunctioning of the brakes which should limit its proper authority” (The Ethics 143).6 Lacan traces the paradoxical functioning of this “broken machine” to its origin in the ethical and erotic “testing” (150) that qualifies the idealized “Woman” of courtly love poetry. In this “terrifying, inhuman” figure of judgment and jouissance, a “demand to be deprived of something real” appears in a “sig- nification of the gift of love” that is as overdetermined as the word for this woman in Provençal: Domna, Lady, corresponding to the verb domnoyer, in which Lacan hears the sense of “playing around” or “caressing” as well as the connection with domination. Just as significantly for Lacan, the first syllable is the same as the French don, “gift,” and suggests the action of the verb donner, “to give” (150). We can hardly maintain that Treadwell is thinking of this history in the “it” his sexualized camera (or “baby”) “gives” him. But he is caught in a certain “abandon” before an arbitrary law that binds the subject to its sadistic superego or, more specifically, to its obscene (or prelinguistic) “beyond” or “other” (Lacan speaks of an “Other of the Other” here [66]) in the will not to be anything more than a role. This, in turn, opens Treadwell to the drive in its homeostatic “isolation from reality” and its affirmation of a hallucinatory need or satisfaction that, for Lacan, is always met in the pressure or urgency of a “state of emergency in life”—also at a “mar- gin” or an edge (46). The law governing this state of emergency—again the prohibition against incest—controls the situation and conduct of the subject in socio-symbolic structures, and Treadwell would be as such only one instance of the typical case, turning himself into the sign or object of a regulated exchange on an unconscious level where desire and law are fused. Indeed, Treadwell as such also exemplifies the shift of these structures of exchange into a state of exception on, precisely, the biopolitical register of a “return to nature” (in, for Lacan as well, an “archaic form of the pastoral” [88–89]).7 6 The “moral conscience,” Lacan says, further specifying the malfunction here, “shows itself to be the more demanding the more refined it becomes, crueler and crueler even as we offend it less and less, more and more fastidious as we force it, by abstaining from acts, to go and seek us out at the most intimate levels of our impulses and desires” (89). The situation worsens, of course, when our “acts” involve giving in to impulses and desires rather than abstaining from them. 7 Treadwell stands for all of us as a kind of “everyman,” that is, insofar as we inhabit what Slavoj Žižek calls a shift in contemporary global society from desire to

An Anguished Self-Subjection | 61 Along parallel lines, Juliet Flower MacCannell identifies in the subject a “perverse reason” working on two levels: where it holds back from the field of a universal legibility (or “symbolic seeming”) in a “skepticism regard- ing the law, including the law of sexual difference,” and where it evinces a strong allegiance to the “absolute jouissance” of the mother” (18–19), expressing thereby a “Law more implacable than that of sexuation, the Law of Nature” (30). MacCannell’s primary focus in this account is the woman’s (hystericized) relation to this “Law” (instantiated not in either parent but in the figure of the male “pervert” qua eroticized type of the “total man” in a post–Oedipal society), where she finds a dynamic of “permanent deferral” from symbolic order. But insofar as this withdrawal or inhibition before the “Thing” is central to that symbolic order, she goes on to posit a gen- erally commodified “fantasy structure” in which both women (hysterics) and men (perverts) experience “permanent deferral” as the structure of identification itself, a condition of belonging in postmodern societies (9). Here we have the best register for Treadwell’s “kind warrior,” who is suspended not just between Samurai and parent, or between father and mother, but also between male and female—more than once Treadwell adverts to his sexually uncertain status, describing himself at one point as “passive” and a “patsy.” On all these registers, Treadwell’s perversity is grounded in the animals he fights and fights to protect, since they hold down that “Law of Nature” and, in it, the sadistic superego with which he is identified. This is obvious in the case of the bears, who aptly designate its internalized authority as the Big Other’s gaze (in the background—and in Treadwell—again as a kind of synecdoche for the camera). They are the ones who castrate, who “decapitate” and “chop me up into bits and pieces.” But the maternal side of this superego is also stressed in the documentary, notably in Treadwell’s relationship to his mother, relayed by Herzog in home movies of her and him as a child playing with pets. The connection is sustained again in an interview that shows the mother hugging a childhood teddy bear Treadwell routinely took with him on his expeditions to Alaska. Nothing in this relationship, or in the mother, suggests the sort of polysemy Lacan spots in the Lady of courtly love. But the affective bond does

drive, from “the lost object to the loss itself as an object” that, in its negative quantity, “gap,” or “distance,” is “directly enacted” in reality (Defense of Lost Causes 328). In her recent work, political theorist Jodi Dean has persuasively argued for this (im)material “Real” as the condition sine qua non of a commu- nicative capitalism characterized by compulsive and compulsory relations to digital media (like Treadwell’s camera). See, most recently, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive.

62 | Mattessich hint at the strong allegiance to a maternal jouissance that folds Treadwell into the biopolitical imperatives to care that govern his social world. Their regulative function for his drive appears obliquely in another scene, one not involving bears. In what begins as an idyllic moment at his campsite, two young foxes scamper around, playfully interacting in the spirit more of pets than wild animals. When one of them steals away with his hat and he chases after, however, Treadwell’s sweetness segues quickly into hectoring anger. Just as he warns the fox that it better not have taken the hat into its den, where we surmise it will disappear forever, he comes suddenly upon it, pointing his camera into its dark hole, which fills the screen with its suggestion of arbitrary “enjoyment.” This hole, this lack or gap, is central to what Herzog calls Treadwell’s “darkest human turmoil.” In its structuring relation to his “Thing,” it generates the cliché, the sentimentality, and the increasingly bizarre behaviour that attend Treadwell’s efforts to actualize the transcendence he wants in his life. Herzog also detects its influence in more unstudied moments of Treadwell’s footage, in the pauses and non sequiturs, in the sudden con- fessions of doubt and loneliness, and above all in the stretches between takes when the camera is inadvertently left to record things like the idle improvisations of animals or the breeze running through trees and brush. At these points of suspension in the relation to a sadistic superego, Herzog himself begins to feel how a “perverse reason” is more than just Treadwell’s problem, how its deferral structures the emptiness of all social roles, not just those he plays. This is why Herzog often lets the camera roll after the people he is interviewing about Treadwell finish speaking. Such awkward stretches, in the stylistic parallel they make with Treadwell’s own filmmak- ing, shift the locus of an animal nature once again into the human world. They suggest, in the loneliness of suburban parents, waitresses, coroners, or helicopter pilots, Treadwell’s same self-stylizing need to fill the voids that lie around and within such limiting social identities. In addition, Herzog implies Treadwell’s fantasy structure in their real- ism, especially when it converges with the abstraction Heidegger sussed out with his term Bestand: nature defined as an undifferentiated “standing reserve” of energy available to be exploited and consumed. When, for instance, Sam Egli, the helicopter pilot who transports the remains of Treadwell and his girlfriend back to civilization, asserts that Treadwell “got what he deserved” even if he meant well “helping with the resource of the bears,” his sympathy betrays its own falsity; the same goes for a biologist whose professed understanding of Treadwell’s desire to “become a bear” is accompanied by monotonously cited statistics about the health of the

An Anguished Self-Subjection | 63 “bear population” in Alaska. This rationalism characterizes what Herzog observes in the film is Treadwell’s “implacable enemy,” the “people’s world and the larger civilization” for which he has “only mockery and contempt.” But if Herzog reproves Treadwell for this “struggle,” he also leaves it tacitly for us to infer its autonomous drive in the rationalism it appears to contest. Its enemy, or backdrop, is, after all, just as implacable. Herzog calls it the “overwhelming indifference of nature” that is all he personally sees in the “blank stares” of the grizzly bears—the same internalized emptiness, void, hole, or lack that both constitutes and disrupts Treadwell’s identity. There is no “secret world” of the bears, Herzog avers, only a human nature that indexes the “common denominator of the universe,” which is not for him the “harmony” Treadwell presumed in it but only “chaos, hostility, and murder.”8 Oleg Gelikman argues that this aversion to nature—this “sentiment of indifference”—in Herzog commits him to that rationalism and precisely in its tacit need for a human “empathy.”9 But it is not clear that Herzog simply sides with the likes of Sam Egli or the biologist either. In the distance they put between themselves and Treadwell, they miss the image of human society that Herzog is also trying to depict.

herzog’s uncompromising—Gnostic or Manichean—view on nature and human nature brings us back to the question of care or, rather, to a question—who cares?—that points in the answer to a “nobody” that cannot separate caring from not caring (like Warren Queeney). It helps us, moreover, to remember that the internal split or difference in the concept of care is the same for the fantasist as for the realist, for homo sacer as for the expert or specialist (for the filmmaker or spectator as well), each under the sway of a “pastoral” return to nature, a perverse reason, and hallucinatory drive that reduces the sublimations (of desire’s lost object) to a self-destructive repetition (of loss as itself the object or “thing”). Is there a possibility in the order of biopolitics, the state of exception, for a different kind of care? In Grizzly Man, Herzog gives no answer, but he does hint at one in those unstudied moments of Treadwell’s footage, their inadvertency and indirection pointing to a “drift” in the drive that

8 This sentiment is of long standing for Herzog; see its fuller explication in an interview in Les Blank’s 1982 documentary on Herzog and the filming of Fitzcarraldo and also at various points in Herzog’s book The Conquest of the Useless. 9 In the terms of his argument, “The vehemence of Herzog’s rebuttal” of Treadwell, in the name of a more profoundly indifferent nature, betrays itself as “part of the pastoral scheme.” “The sentiment of indifference presupposes an irreducible demand for empathy” (1159).

64 | Mattessich precipitates its self-destructive character into a different relation to the world. Art is Herzog’s answer, in other words, even if it cannot, or at least any longer, claim the sort of sublimation that would redeem its drive from the destructive forces that determine it. Art is Herzog’s Let me come at this different relation from another register on which the question of care has been unfolded, that found in the work of Hei- answer, in other degger, which is also very much concerned with the articulation of man and animal in Agamben’s “anthropological machine.” Care is central, in words. Being and Time, to a finite and conditioned freedom that is experienced in either of two modes: as an inauthentic identification with the particular predicates and demands of a given situation (an “existentiell actuality”), and as an authentic acknowledgement of the fundamental contingency, or non-necessity, of one’s life (an “existential potentiality”). One relinquishes, that is, the idea that subjection to those demands can be transcended, or even rendered authentic, via those predicates, via actions and satisfactions that the will undertakes. One lets “be” the permanent state of subjection to “demand” itself as the disruption of identity, a non-self-identity felt as internal otherness or self-difference, in a relation to one’s own finality or death. In the structure of care that appears here, Heidegger derives a “voice of conscience” that, in the gloss given it by philosopher Stephen Mulhall, “is not so much concerned with the familiar phenomenon of an inner voice blaming or praising our specific deeds … as with what must be the case about us for that phenomenon to be possible” (Wounded Animal 103). Mulhall locates what I have called the sadistic superego in the inauthentic identification with a transcendence one actualizes through the death drive, expressed, again, in Treadwell’s “ ‘I’m dead.’ ” Genuine conscience or care, by contrast, “speaks against … our inveterate tendency to conflate our existential potential with our existentiell actuality; what it silently opens up is the human individual’s internal otherness, its relation to itself as other, as not self-identical but rather transitional or self-transcending” (103). Heidegger also links internal otherness to the animal, or to the animality in the human, which presents a resistance, withdrawal, and indifference that Mulhall sees as a “revealing refusal of the world as such to go along with the essentially situated and attuned comprehension of human beings” (107).10 The animal’s “blank stare” thus helps us to the care that disturbs our inauthentic acquiescence to mere brute necessity; it facilitates a break with that necessity rather than necessity itself. Indeed, when we confuse

10 Heidegger’s phrase in Fundamental Concepts is also translated as a “telling refusal” (139).

An Anguished Self-Subjection | 65 these things in the animal, or in our own animality, we resist the stimulus the animal gives us to a “discovery of beings in general as indifferent to us and hence of us as indifferent to them” (107). Heidegger calls the state so discovered “boredom,” and in its peculiar suspension of will, action, or comprehension he finds a uniquely human possibility. Paradoxically, this latter possibility consists of the resistance to the animal that takes place in the effort to relieve the boredom, to stage or narrate our lives. Thus, if Treadwell demonstrates this sort of resistance to the animal in the way he uses the animal as a pretext or springboard for transcendence, he also finds boredom in living or “being” with them. One can therefore say that at some level he (or his drive) is seeking a way, against himself and without knowing it, to accept the facticity of his existence, to make it the meaning he misses. In this regard his drive takes on a distinctly reiterative or performative dynamic that is also inherently con- flictual. Because resistance is always self-resistance, one does not suspend this drive so much as let it fail of its own accord or in its own drift, error, or mistake. As Judith Butler, one of the most persuasive contemporary theorists of this ethic, puts it, “The more I narrate, the less accountable I prove to be. The ‘I’ ruins its own story, contrary to its best intentions” (Giving an Account 67).11 The animal is central to this possibility precisely, for Heidegger, in being excluded from it. Lacking a “world” in its “environment,” it lives only with an instinctive “captivation” or “absorption” in itself that precludes “every apprehending of something as something” (Fundamental Concepts 247– 48). This withholding of a world does not mean the animal is “closed off” from it either, only “outside the possibility” of this “openness” altogether. It does, nonetheless, suggest a paradoxical kind of present inaccessibility and opacity that Agamben, reading these passages, calls an “openness in a non- relation” and links to an “essential disruption” (again from brute necessity).

11 Butler elsewhere indexes this drive to a desire for the law that founds the self- conscious subject on its own prohibition—“an odd form of preservation,” she writes, “eroticizing the law that would abolish eroticism” (Psychic Life 103). By adding this performative contradiction to a body conceptualized by Foucault as co-extensive with discourse and by Lacan as sacrificed to a symbolic law, she draws from its negativity the consequence of a repetitive (or reiterative) drive that, because it always fails, for the same reason leaves open the possibility of “inadvertently produced discursive complexity [that] undermines the teleologi- cal aims of normalization” (93). At stake in this “reiterability” for the subject is less an “unconscious outside of power,” Butler avers, than “the unconscious of power itself” as it paradoxically grounds identity in an always singular and open-ended contingency” (104).

66 | Mattessich If for Heidegger this (non)openness forms the background against which the human world stands out, it does so as well in an extreme proximity. Boredom and captivation “resonate.” They entail a similar “abandonment in emptiness” and a fascination with that which obstinately “refuses itself.” If they differ it is only insofar as the human being can apprehend the animal disruption as such. The human is “simply an animal that has learned to become bored,” writes Agamben. “It has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation” (The Open 70). As this awakening can never take a determinate form or mode except that of a self-resistant betrayal, Treadwell can only hint at its human possibility (even as he fails in the right kind of failure). But as exemplary also of the subject in a biopolitical order, he also tests the plausibility of the whole account, throwing Heidegger’s distinctions into disarray. For Agamben, indeed, they remain within the operative ambit of the anthropological machine; the human “grasping of the animal not-open” qua a not-grasping of the open, if it does not exactly synergize for Heidegger with the “animalization of the human” that qualifies homo sacer (or the taking up “as a task” by modern states of the very factical existence of peoples), does betray a continuing hope for the sort of sublimation that would redeem the drive in its indirection.12 Because nothing prevents the promise in boredom as a state or mood from functioning as an ethical ruse, a dissimulation of the “natural life” that now dominates the “people’s world,” authenticity can always become just another fantasy. For Agamben this indicates a need to think outside the anthropological machine altogether, to render it “inoperative.” He sketches such a possibility—or pure potentiality—by reference to Benjamin’s reworking of a Gnostic “separation” between nature and redemption (also revelation, apprehension) as a space of non-knowledge, non-being, and also forgiveness. “Etymologists have always been left perplexed,” Agamben writes, “when faced with the Latin verb ignoscere, which seems explicable as *in- gnosco, yet which does not mean ‘not to know’ [ignorare], but rather ‘to forgive.’ To articulate a zone of nonknowledge—or, better, of a-knowledge [ignoscenza]—means in this sense not simply to let something be, but to leave something outside of being, to render it unsavable” (The Open 91). This forgiveness without salvation Benjamin continues to think in terms of

12 Heidegger was “the last to believe (at least up to a certain point, and not without doubts and contradictions) that the anthropological machine, which each time decides upon and recomposes the conflict between man and animal, between the open and the not-open, could still produce history and destiny for a people” (75).

An Anguished Self-Subjection | 67 salvation: he finds the model for the form of thought at stake in its paradoxical space in works of art that disclose, in the “saved night” of nature, “ideas” that would not be structured by externalized differences between The death drive the human and the animal.13 These “ideas,” Agamben believes, “gather creatural life not in order to reveal it, nor to open it to human language, here comes but rather to give it back to a closedness and muteness” that sustain an “interval” or “reciprocal suspension” between the two terms and engender from the space something “neither animal nor man” (81). Agamben calls this something a “new in-humanity” (83) and underscores as its principal quality a “transient of aesthetic (and … rhythm of beatitude” (82). Herzog sees in images that, as he puts it in Grizzly Man, “take on a also ethical) life of their own” and assume “their own mysterious stardom” in inadvertency, something of the “in between” character that Agamben assigns to indeterminacy. the state of “separation.” He also acknowledges that Treadwell produced such images, even if he did not know it, even if he was caught fatally in the reflex of an anguished self-subjection that kept him from knowing it. But Herzog does not place as much hope in the “new in-humanity” that art—even his art—might hold out. His pessimism finds fresh proof in the fact that Treadwell inadvertently recorded the sounds of his and his girlfriend’s death, a camera having been in operation (with its lens cap still on) when the attack occurred. The death drive here comes from the space of aesthetic (and also ethical) indeterminacy, as a “Law” in nature that haunts, if it does not constitute, both the “glamour” of our images and our new in-humanity. For this reason Herzog, listening through headphones to their screams and moans in Jewel Palovak’s l.a. home, asks her to turn it off, declares emphatically that “she should never listen to this,” and rec- ommends that the tape be destroyed. In the limit it suggests both for and also of art itself, Herzog can only insist on a denial or disavowal without any redemption or “salvation” for or in the drive, Treadwell’s or anyone’s. He opts for a “separation” more typical of the Gnostic (or Manichean) aversion to a demiurgic nature. To his credit, Herzog lets the most troubling implications of this decision not only pull him into Treadwell’s self-destructive investments in arbitrary power but also pull those investments toward their most troubling contemporary edge. In one of the final sequences of the film, Herzog shows us this edge in an “incandescent” rage Treadwell directs at the park rangers and government officials who place limits on his “freedom” in the

13 Agamben quotes from Benjamin’s letter to Florens Christian Rang, 9 December 1923, reproduced in Selected Writings (389).

68 | Mattessich wilderness. Their regulations rouse him to libertarian rants on the evils of government that are infused with the same sexual frustrations and cas- tration anxieties we have seen already in the film. He turns his “struggle” or drama into a game he wins, repeatedly saying (and in repeated takes as well) to his camera, “I beat you, I beat you motherfuckers.” It is in this defiant spirit that he returns on his final expedition (after the altercation at the airport) to Kitmai National Park, thus setting up the conditions for the fatal attack. Amy Huguenard, meanwhile, increasingly trapped in his self-destructive drive, emerges, in her relation for him to its structural void or lack, as the true object as well as victim of his “motherfucking” rage. Treadwell reminds Herzog here of Klaus Kinski, whose titanic “strug- gles” on the sets of the movies they did together (like Fitzcarraldo and Agu- irre) are legendary; by extension, Herzog also associates Treadwell with the colonialism Kinski embodied so well, not to say that neocolonialism with the anti-statist right-wing populism that attends today’s autonomous cor- porato-financial power and generalized war. Herzog endorses none of this, but the distance between him and Treadwell/Kinski is nonetheless also a proximity. Again, Gelikman finds it in Herzog’s aversive relation to the animal’s “blank stare,” which engenders an identification with Treadwell that ironically commits him, not to the self-destruction he clearly observes and condemns but to the sentimentality he also dismisses in the name of that aversive relation (“Cold Pastoral” 1159). I am not sure how far to take this. Nature’s indifference is still a social indifference in Grizzly Man, and the sentimentalized violence Herzog might understand as natural still qualifies a civilizational project as perverse, indeed psychotic. However pessimistic he might be about any other than an inescapable complicity in this project, his accounting of it still preserves a distinction between brute necessity and the break with its inauthentic (existentiell) actuality. If he is not exactly thinking in nature’s “saved night,” where Benjamin finds “ideas” that fall outside Agamben’s anthropological machine, he is understanding art to entail concern for what “must be the case about us” (as Mulhall puts it) for the voice of conscience to take a sadistic form. Indeed, in attending to this concern, Herzog has few peers.

Works Cited

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An Anguished Self-Subjection | 69 ——— . Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford up, 1998. Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard up, 1996. Judith Butler. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford up, 1997. ———. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham up, 2005. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. Trans. G. Burchell. New York: Picador, 2004. ——— . History of Sexuality, vol.1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1978. ———. “Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason.” Power/Michel Foucault. Ed. James D. Faubion. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: New Press, 2000. 258–311. Gelikman, Oleg. “ ‘Cold Pastoral’: Werner Herzog’s Version of Empson.” mln 123.5 (December 2008): 1141–62 Grizzly Man. Dir. and written by Werner Herzog. Discovery Channel. 2005. Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Trans. J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Lacan, Jacques. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1998. ——— . The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Seminar vii. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1986. MacCannell, Juliet Flower. The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Sub- ject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Mulhall, Stephen. The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty of Reality in Literature and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton up, 2009. Snoek, Anke. “Agamben’s Foucault: An Overview.” Foucault Studies 10 (November 2010), 44–67. Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2009.

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