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Certificate for Approving the Dissertation MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School Certificate for Approving the Dissertation We hereby approve the Dissertation of David Christopher Washington Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy ________________________________ Director (Dr. Laura Mandell) __________________________________ Reader (Dr. Tobias Menely) __________________________________ Reader (Dr. Mary Jean Corbett) __________________________________ Graduate School Representative (Dr. Jonathan Strauss) ABSTRACT FACING SYMPATHY: SPECIES FORM AND ENLIGHTENMENT INDIVIDUALISM by Chris Washington My dissertation identifies a significant aporia in Enlightenment thought concerning human and animal life. Eighteenth-century moral philosophy, I argue, predicates social relations on face-to-face identification. However, sympathetic identification limits itself to human form. Sympathy, like species form, promotes twin impulses: the formation of group identities and the exclusion of dissimilar others. Consequently, sympathy recognizes animals as other and excludes them from the social sphere. Eighteenth-century novels, for instance, struggle with the limitations of sympathy, brimming with human sensibility although equivocal about whether it can be directed toward animals. These concerns about the nature of sensibility and affect animate not only eighteenth-century sentimental novels but also surface as one of the central problems of Romanticism. Conventionally, the Romantic period has long been understood as a fulfillment of the Enlightenment promise that autonomous human subjects will govern the social and political imaginary. But this conventional narrative obscures how Romantic thought critiques this institutionalization of what are, in fact, biopolitical narratives that shape human-animal relationships. Romanticism demonstrates how the universalizing gestures of egalitarianism guarantee humans freedom only at the expense of the non-human. Moreover, such universalizing gestures legitimate competing exclusionary narratives that authorize prejudice, suppression, and subjugation of the other however that other is construed (in other words, humans conceived as non-human). As I argue, species form is the twilight of sympathy between not only humans and animals but between humans as well. Following prosopopoeia—the trope that links face and voice with personhood—I show how this trope undermines sympathy’s specular insistence on the human form and refutes species determinism as integral to maintaining sociopolitical systems. Prosopopoeia both limns and attenuates form, suggesting the fluidity of the human- animal divide. For the Romantic poets therefore, the problem of sympathy has biopolitical force that can only be countered by anti-institutional poetics that do not privilege human exceptionalism. Theoretically, the project allows new ways to read the long eighteenth century as a site of post-human richness, bridging Levinasian ethical concerns with the urgent problems raised by what Jacques Derrida calls “the living in general. FACING SYMPATHY: SPECIES FORM AND ENLIGHTENMENT INDIVIDUALISM A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English by David Christopher Washington Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2012 Dissertation Director: Laura Mandell Table of Contents Introduction: “Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast” 1-23 Chapter 1: An Inquiry into the Causes and Nature of the Zoopolitical Wealth of Nations 24-44 Chapter 2: Facing the Soul: Enlightenment Physiognomy in Laurence Sterne and Johann Lavater 45-75 Chapter 3: Jane Austen’s Frankenstein 76-98 Chapter 4: Lord Byron’s Chains: Species and Being in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage 99-123 Chapter 5: John Clare’s Autopoiesis 124-151 Works Cited 152-170 ii Introduction: I. “Man Differs more from Man, than Man from Beast” Recent trends in literary theory and criticism have prompted a reevaluation of human and non-human species relations.1 Since Linnaeus and Buffon in the eighteenth century, species has been defined as a classificatory system that groups members based upon empirically observed homogeneity in the physical traits of those members. Because of the emphasis on homogeneity, the formation of species distinctions as, broadly speaking, human and non-human life, has contributed to the institution of violence between human and non-human species that defines modernity. These species distinctions are a contemporary scientific mainstay, but they can also be linked to what Michel Foucault calls “biopolitics,” the management of the bodies of citizens who inhabit the State by means of institutionalized forms of power that mandate discriminatory practices, a process of control emerging, like taxonomic categories, in the eighteenth century. The formation of species, for Foucault, is linked to the emergence of racism, gender discrimination, and homophobia.2 Specifically, as Foucault shows, State powers in the emergent democratic system needed to conceptualize human beings as a species in order to organize and control them.3 Conceptualizing humans as one homogeneous group allows States to exclude those who do not fit certain schemas: healthy/unhealthy, 1 Jaques Derrida, The Animal that therefore I am, trans. Marie-Louis Mallet (New York: Fordham UP, 2008). Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2009). N. Katherine Hayles, How we Became Posthuman: Virtural Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999). Neil Badmington, Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within (New York: Routledge, 2004). Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (New York: Continuum, 2010). Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (New York: re:press, 2009). Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke UP, 2010). Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2009). 2 Michel Foucault, “Society must be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 247, hereafter SD. Foucault first discusses biopolitics in the final chapter of The History of Sexuality. The History of Sexuality, Vol I: An Introduction, trans. Richard Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 138. 3 “By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18th century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is what I have called biopower." Foucault, Security, Territory, and Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978 (New York: Vintage, 2009), 6. 1 normal/abnormal, human/non-human. Concurrently, these categorizations granted to the state radical new ways to measure, experiment on, classify, produce, discipline, understand, and manage human life at the bodily level, at the biological level of species.4 Given this epistemic shift, Foucault sets out “not to analyze power at the level of intentions or decisions” but to study “peripheral bodies” to show where power works “in real and effective practices… at the point where it relates directly and immediately to what we might, very provisionally, call its object, its target, its field of application, or, in other words, the places where it implants itself and produces it real effects.”5 However, despite his intention to study species formations and their biopolitical implications, Foucault does so only by analyzing “the peripheral bodies” of humans and thus overlooks the full field on which the management of bodies of all stripes are tilled: he does not consider non-human life. What is odd about Foucault’s singular focus on the human and the biopolitical arrangements of democracies is that the later period of the long eighteenth century also witnessed the nascent animal welfare, animal rights, and environmental movements, giving full scope to questions about how far egalitarianism extended in this new, democratic era.6 And yet, nevertheless, it is paradoxically true that the time period also saw the mainstreaming of Descartes’ ideas about natural philosophy: that humans are fully autonomous subjects whereas non-human life, animals for instance, are soulless machines, incapable of feeling pain.7 Moral-sense Enlightenment philosophy that helped shape democratic sovereignties inherits aspects of this Cartesian binary. Enlightenment theories of how people sympathize with each other, while expansive in their proposed scopes, run aground when it comes to the prospect of facing non-human life and thereby encourage the continued centralization of violence between humans and non-humans in 4 See also: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994); and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995). 5 SD 28. 6 Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992). Christine Kenyon-Jones, Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing (New York: Ashgate, 2001). Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). David Perkins, Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003). James McKusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: Palgrave, 2000). Timothy Morton, Ecology
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