AFTER the ANIMAL Predatory Pursuits in Antebellum America By

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AFTER THE ANIMAL

Predatory Pursuits in Antebellum America

By Antoine Traisnel

B.A., Université Lille 3, 2000

M.A., Université Lille 3, 2005

Ph.D. Université Lille 3, 2009

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University.

Providence, Rhode Island

2014

This dissertation by Antoine Traisnel is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date Kevin McLaughlin, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date Timothy Bewes, Reader

Date Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Reader

Date Marc Redfield, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School

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VITA

Antoine Traisnel (born 1979, Lille, France) received his B.A. (licence) in Foreign Language, Literature and Civilizations (Langues, Literatures, Civilizations Etrangères) in 2000, an M.A. in American Literature and Cinema in 2005, and a Ph.D. in American Literature in 2009 from Université Lille 3.

He has published on topics in the fields of American, French and German literature and philosophy, critical theory, cultural studies, and animal studies in such forums as Diacritics, Humanimalia, Presses Universitaires de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, Sites, Théorie Littérature Epistémologie, Sillages Critiques, The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, and Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines. His book, Blasted Allegories: Après-Coups Critiques de Nathaniel Hawthorne, is forthcoming from the French press Aux Forges de Vulcain.

Starting in July 2013, he is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory in the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University.

for anna

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I believe that we never think or write alone, and this is certainly true for this dissertation, for which I have had the chance to be in conversation with many exceptionally generous interlocutors.

I am grateful to Kevin McLaughlin for his invaluable mentorship over the past three years. I am doubly thankful to him for previously being on my French dissertation committee as well as supporting my transition from Brown Fulbright scholar to graduate student. I cannot thank Barbara Herrnstein Smith enough for her warmth and rigorous criticality. Her contagious enthusiasm for Nietzsche, brilliant asides and generous sense of humor will influence my scholarship for years to come. I am indebted to Marc Redfield for his careful reading of my work and his precious insights and suggestions. To him I also owe the immense pleasure of discovering Tristram Shandy. Thank you to Tim Bewes, for his expertise on Deleuze, his ability to read what is not yet written (and to spot what has not yet been read) and for his friendship. I also thank my committee for their steadfast support for me over the past year.

Thank you to my other cherished mentors and advisors: Mathieu Duplay, Yves Abrioux and especially Karen Newman, for her unflagging support (and for helping me brush up on my Shakespeare).

For additional support in and out of the department, I am grateful to Susan Bernstein, Réda Bensmaïa, Bill Keach, Zach Sng, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Arnold Weinstein, and Gerhard Richter. A warm thank you to Carol Wilson-Allen and Charles Auger for their kindness and patience with my special brand of administrative incompetence.

I thank my stimulating colleagues and interlocutors in animal studies: Susan McHugh, Matthew Calarco, Nigel Rothfels, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, and Alain Romestaing. For reading drafts of chapters at different stages of completion, I want to thank Silvia Cernea Clark, Ingrid Diran, Mauro Resmini, Stéphane Vanderhaeghe (always!), and especially Kenneth Haynes for their humbling erudition and their generous contentions.

The debt this dissertation owes to my conversations and collaborations with Thangam Ravindranathan cannot adequately be expressed here. I remain thankful for her inexhaustible generosity and her idiosyncratic brilliance.

I am most fortunate to have already felt the warm welcome of my new colleagues at Cornell. Thank you to Natalie Melas, Jonathan Culler, Cathy Caruth, and Tracy McNulty for their warmth and professionalism. A special thanks to Tim Murray for giving me the opportunity to benefit from the intellectual community of the Society for the Humanities this past year and to the editors of Diacritics, Laurent Dubreuil and Diane Brown, for publishing a version of my second chapter.

I am grateful for the treasured friendships I have made in Ithaca and thank in particular those who have encouraged and supported me this past year: Annie McClanahan, Amanda Jo Goldstein, Tom McEnaney, Alex Livingston, Merike Andre-Barrett, Emily Nacol and Patty Keller. I must also acknowledge the friendship and big-heartedness of Jonathan Mullins.

Love and thanks to my family and friends in France and in the U.S., especially to my parents, Christian and Catherine and my brother Etienne. A special thank you to my sister Florence for our inspiring intellectual dialogue.

Thank you to my favorite false feline, Bogey.

Finally, I want to thank my best and dearest reader, Anna. Thank you for never tiring of my water buffaloes, golden eagles and ourang-outangs. Your warm encouragements and countless brilliant insights have inspired me and this project in ways words could never begin to capture.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD 2 Afterlives: Life and Death in Captivation 2 Hereafter 2 INTRODUCTION 13 The Ends of Hunting and the Lures of Capture in Nineteenth-Century America 13 From Hunt to Capture 13 Easy Targets 16 The Rule of Capture 20 A Better Mousetrap 23 Capture as a Representational Mode 28 Accounting the Whale 30 Intolerable Allegories (Or, the Whale) 36 CHAPTER ONE 44 Entrapments: Chasing the Open in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie 44 Land Speculations: (Pur)chasing The Open 44 Persistence of Vision 50 The Dis-Appearance of Animals 57 The Trapper 65 Conclusion: The Ends of Hunting 78 CHAPTER TWO 81 Huntology: Ontological Pursuits in the Still Lives of John James Audubon 81 War of the Species 81 The Execution of the Subject 86 Ontological Pursuits 96 Conclusion: Ergo Sum 107 CHAPTER THREE 111 Cryptoanimality: The Illegible Animal in Edgar Allan Poe’s Urban Fiction 111 Cityscapes 111 The Urban Wanderer 113 Off the Map 117 Zoon Ex Machina 120 The Morgue 128 Cryptozoon 131 So That No Eye Could Detect Any Thing Suspicious 137 Anaseme (Tieret) 144 OuRang-OuTang 152 Conclusion: Ecce Animot 156 AFTERWORD 161 Case In Point: Cuvier, Hawthorne, Darwin 161 On Point 161 Of Sirens and Men 164 Lusus Naturae 167 Pointillism 172

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LIST OF FIGURES

INTRODUCTION

Fig. 1. Patent for an improved animal trap. April 1870. 24 Fig. 2. The Photographic Amateur, 2nd Edition, J. Traill Taylor, Scovill Mfg. Co. pub. (New York, NY), 1883, 2nd Ed. about 1885, p. 22 28

CHAPTER ONE

Fig. 1. Map of the territories purchased from France in 1803. 46 Fig. 2. Thaumatropes c. 1825 63 Fig. 3. Thomas Cole, illustration of The Prairie 70 Fig. 4. Tonnelle: entry for “perdrix,” Chomel’s dictionnaire économique, 1732. Mille plateaux (528) 74 Fig. 5. Hunting and capture regimes chart. 77

CHAPTER TWO

Fig. 1. “Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos)” by John James Audubon, Watercolor, pastel, graphite and selective glazing, 38 x 25 1/2 inches; Collection of the New-York Historical Society, 183 87 Fig. 2. “Delirium” by Walton Ford, Watercolor, gouache, pencil and ink on paper, 151.4 x 101.9 cm (59 5/8 x 40 1/8 in.), 2004. 88 Figs. 3 & 4. “Bonaparte franchissant le Grand-Saint-Bernard” by Jacques-Louis David, Oil on canvas, 259 × 221 cm (102 × 87 in), 1800 beside “Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos)” by John James Audubon. 90 Fig. 5. Still from documentary John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature (2007). Artist Walton Ford demonstrates Audubon’s technique of “posing” the dead animal on a grid in order to draw it. The cage-like grid will then be obliterated by the landscape painted over it. 94 Fig. 6. Audubon vs. Ford paintings comparison table. 95

CHAPTER THREE

Fig. 1. Orion, attributed to Reverend Richard Rouse Bloxam. 156 Part a set of the constellation cards Urania’s Mirror, published in London c. 1825 156

AFTERWORD

Fig. 1. Sirenis Lacertinae. From Cuvier’s 1807 “Recherche anatomique sur les reptiles regardés encore comme douteux par les naturalistes.” 169 Fig. 2. “Human Ear. Modeled and drawn by Thomas Woolner. a. The projecting point.” 172 Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (2004 32). 172 Fig. 3. “Foetus of an Orang. Exact copy of a photograph, showing the form of the ear at this early age.” Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (2004 33). 172

As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all other hunted whales, his is an unwritten life.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale (1992 147)

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Foreword

AFTERLIVES LIFE AND DEATH IN CAPTIVATION

The hunter has been turned into a butterfly.

Franz Kafka, “Hunter Gracchus” (1974 131)

When. . .a vanessa or sphinx moth (which I should have been able to overtake easily) made a fool of me through its hesitations, vacillations, and delays, I would gladly have been dissolved into light and air, merely in order to approach my prey unnoticed and be able to subdue it. And so close to fulfillment was this desire of mine, that every quiver or palpitation of the wings I burned for grazed me with its puff or ripple. Between us, now, the old law of the hunt took hold: the more I strove to conform, in all the fibers of my being, to the animal – the more butterfly-like I became in my heart and soul – the more this butterfly itself, in everything it did, took on the color of human volition; and in the end, it was as if its capture was the price I had to pay to regain my human existence [endlich war es, als ob sein Fang der Preis sei, um den einzig ich meines Menschendaseins wieder habhaft werden könne].

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (2006 51)

HEREAFTER The Hunter Gracchus is the undying. One day, while hunting in the Black Forest, he fell from a precipice and bled to death. But the boatman who was supposed to ferry him to the hereafter lost his way, and Gracchus found himself drifting interminably between life and death. Ever since, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, Gracchus has wandered with no other aim than to recount his story: “I am for ever. . .on the great stair that leads up to

[the other world]. On that infinitely wide and spacious stair I clamber about, sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, always in motion,” he laments. Then, speaking of himself as if a spectator of his own metamorphosis, he remarks: “The hunter has been turned into a butterfly” (1974 129-131).

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Suspended thus between life and death, Kafka’s hunter shares the lot not just of the metaphorical butterfly but also of “the animal,” which, presumably deprived of logos, history and consciousness, has been cast as “undying” in predominant strands of

Western philosophy and science. Akira Mizuta Lippit identifies thinkers as diverse as

Descartes, Leibniz, Freud and Bataille as part of this tradition, though it is perhaps in

Heidegger’s philosophy that the exclusion of the animal from the experience of death is most explicit. “Is the death of the animal a dying [ein Sterben] or a way of coming to an end

[ein Verenden]?” he asks in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. “Because captivation

[Benommenheit] belongs to the essence of the animal, the animal cannot die in the sense in which dying is ascribed to human beings but can only come to an end” (1995 267).

Tellingly, it is not its end, but an end, which cannot be its own. The animal’s “poverty-in- world” is the result of this essential Benommenheit, this passive “being seized” with no seizing agent, informing the animal’s experience of a world to which access is denied.1

At the antipodes of Heidegger, Deleuze insists that it is beasts who “know how to die,” and that when humans die, they “die like beasts.”2 Heidegger and Deleuze’s apparent diametrical opposition might in fact be two sides of the same coin, as the philosophers’ conceptions of the animal are both deeply influenced by the work of biologist Jakob von

11 See The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995 236-282). “Captivation,” which for Heidegger constitutes the essence of animality, is the term used by the philosopher to describe the particular relationship (or lack thereof) that the animal entertains with its environment (which can never be a world because the animal does not have the capacity to conceive beings “as such” but only insofar as they trigger the “disinhibiting ring” of which they are “held captive [this is how the translator chose to render ‘Hingenommensein an den Enthemmungsring’]” [269]). Benommenheit translates as being “anesthetized,” “disturbed,” “dizzy” or “benumbed,’ but literally means being “grasped” or “seized.” For an elucidation of Heidegger’s use of Benommenheit in Being and Time and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, see David Farrell Krell’s Daimon Life (1992 9-11). For an analysis of Heidegger’s treatment of the animal, see Derrida’s Of Spirit, Matthew Calarco’s Zoographies and Akira Lippit’s Electric Animal. 2 This statement, which echoes what Deleuze says about the animal that suffers in Logic of Sensation, can be found in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet’s Abécédaire, in the segment entitled “A for Animal” (my translation).

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Uexküll. By invoking Uexküll’s biosemiotic approach, Heidegger and Deleuze seek to

“free” the animal, so to speak, from mechanistic interpretations of life, restoring the animals’ “manners of being in the world” in relation and contrast to those of the human.3

This “freeing,” however, has nothing to do with a simple “animal liberation,” as neither philosopher questions the premises of Uexküll’s theory that casts animals as captive of their Umwelt. Osmotically connected to the limited number of “carriers of significance

[Bedeutungsträger]” susceptible to affect them, animals appear confined within an environment that Uexküll compares to a “soap bubble [Seifenblase],” a sort of “sensorial monad closed upon itself.”4 “[N]o imperfection was apparent even in the simplest animal,” writes Uexküll:

As far as I could judge, the material available for construction was always used in the best possible way. . .The characteristics of the animal and those of its fellow players harmonized everywhere with assurance, like the points and counterpoints of a many-voiced chorus. It was as if the same masterful hand were gliding the keys of life since time immemorial (1934 195).

If both philosophers take their cue from Uexküll, Deleuze, in contrast to Heidegger, does not understand this unmediatedness as an essential limitation depriving the animal of an access to a rich and complex world. In What Is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari take up Uexküll’s musical imagery to portray the animal as forming a melodic

3 Heidegger in particular insists on the limitations of biology, which he sees constrained to defining life according to chemical or physical parameters and thus unable to “grasp” what life is “in and of itself” (1995 188-190). “Our guiding thesis with reference to the animal claims that the animal is poor in world,” explains Heidegger. “The animal is the object of investigation in zoology. Is then our proposition borrowed from zoology? For zoology is surely a suitable kind of investigation, oriented as it is to all those facts circumscribed by the term ‘animal.’. . .However, we see at once that in fact our thesis does not tell us something merely about insects or merely about mammals, since it also includes, for example, non-articulated creatures, unicellular animals like amoebae, infusoria, sea urchins and the like – all animals, every animal. Expressed in a rather extrinsic way we could say that our thesis is more universal than these other propositions. Yet why is it more universal, and in what respect? Because this thesis is meant to say something about animality as such, something about the essence of the animal: it is a statement of essence” (186). Deleuze and Guattari (and Merleau-Ponty) borrow from Uexküll to describe animals as imbedded in their Umwelt, with which they are contrapuntally connected. On these philosophers’ animal ontologies, see Brett Buchanan’s Onto-Ethologies. 4 Dominique Lestel, in the French introduction to Uexküll’s Milieu animal et milieu humain (2010 19). Brett Buchanan also alludes to the possible influence of Leibniz’s Monadology on Uexküll’s image of the Umwelt as a spherical “soap bubble” (2008 23).

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composition with its environment: “The spider’s web contains ‘a very subtle portrait of the fly,’ which serves as its counterpoint,” Deleuze and Guattari explain. “This is not a teleological conception but a melodic one in which we no longer know what is art and what nature (‘natural technique’). There is counterpoint whenever a melody arises as a

‘motif’ within another melody, as in the marriage of bumblebee and snapdragon”

(1991 185).

Envisioned in “perfect communion” with its environment, the animal appears confined in an unmotivated chain of causality (as in “the butterfly effect”). This explains the sense of claustrophobia for which Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming-animal” has often been criticized whereas they had intended this concept to figure a euphoric (and euphonic) metamorphosis. If the animal only reacts to a limited number of signals or “carriers of significance,” Deleuze and Guattari insist, the combination of signals is immanently orchestrated on an infinite “symphonic plane of composition,” leaving room for the irruption of unforeseen assemblages and becomings.5 For Deleuze and Guattari, the lexeme “animal” has little to do with the “real animal,” which “is trapped in its molar form and subjectivity” (2003 275, emphasis mine). Hyphenated to a dynamic process of becoming, their “animal” signals the possibility, not of “liberty,” but of an “escape” (e.g.

Gregor turning into a beetle while locked in his bedroom or Red Peter imitating his human captors in “A Report to an Academy”).

While the term capture often registers a violent and “reactive” form of appropriation in

5 Brett Buchanan argues that this is the point where Deleuze and Guattari deviate from Uexküll: “Uexküll’s own example [of the flower and the bee] does not evoke anything near the dynamism that Deleuze and Guattari read into the relation [of the wasp and the orchid]; with Uexküll, the orchid and wasp would still be caught within their own bubbles, albeit in a manner in which each is significant for the other. With Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, the bubbles have burst due to the lines of flight that carry each term off in new directions. The orchid and wasp become nearly synonymous with the ontological break effected by this line of thinking” (2008 180).

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Deleuze and Guattari’s lexicon (especially when they describe the capitalist “apparatuses of capture” in A Thousand Plateaus), it also holds the promise of becoming: “The act of becoming is a capturing [une capture], a possession, a plus-value, but never a reproduction or an imitation” (2003 13). Viewed as an active process, capture dissolves or at least destabilizes the traditional lines of demarcation between the animal and the human. On the other hand, taken to be the permanent condition of the animal (as in Heidegger’s sequestered animal), capture consolidates the boundaries between the human and the animal.

Both Heidegger and Deleuze locate the line of demarcation between humans and animals in their respective relationship (or lack thereof) to death. What defines the human

(i.e. what delineates its frontiers, what sets it apart from other animals) is a unique attitude toward finitude or the possibility of ending. For Deleuze this uniqueness dissolves at the moment of death, whereas for Heidegger “death” is the very point against which

Dasein affirms its uniqueness (1995 294). Because Heidegger envisions the animal thoroughly captivated by its Umwelt, loss of life does not count as death but is merely a

“coming to an end.” In “The Thing,” Heidegger writes: “The mortals are human beings.

They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies. The animal perishes. It has death neither ahead of itself nor behind it” (qtd. in Lippit, 2000 58). Deprived of an end that would be its own, the

“dying” animal simply undergoes what we would be tempted to call, after Leibniz, a metamorphosis. But contrary to Deleuze and Guattari’s Dionysian metamorphosis, this transformation hardly qualifies as a becoming, barely even a passing. “Animals, like souls, are those creatures thus destined to survive, or at least to remain,” observes Lippit apropos the philosophical tradition in which he situates Heidegger. “Their apparent lack of language commits them to a perpetual and protean evolution toward eternity”

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(2000 36).6

Animal unendedness is precisely the lot of the Hunter Gracchus. In his reading of

Kafka’s parable, Guy Davenport reminds us that “psyche” is the Greek word for both butterfly and soul. Davenport goes on to compare Gracchus – whose name encrypts both the author and the animal, Gracchus meaning grackle or blackbird in Czech (kavka) – to a caterpillar: “A caterpillar does not die; it becomes a wholly different being” (1996 17).

“Free from death,”7 as if contaminated by the very animal he pursues, the Hunter

6 For a brilliant survey of the treatment of animals as undying in Western philosophy, see Akira Lippit’s chapter “Philosophy and the Animal World” in Electric Animal. The idea here expressed comes not from Descartes, as one might have expected, but from Leibniz. Though he challenges the Cartesian idea that animals are mere automata, Leibniz reinscribes a strict distinction between humans and animals. Whereas humans as rational creatures are conscious of their finitude, animals are non-reflexive monads and therefore, like souls, are immortal. Leibniz writes: “Thus, not only souls, but also animals cannot be generated and cannot perish. They are only unfolded, enfolded, reclothed, unclothed, and transformed; souls never entirely leave their body, and do not pass from one body into another that is entirely new to them. There is therefore no metempsychosis, but there is metamorphosis. Animals change, but they acquire and leave behind only parts. In nutrition this happens a little at a time and by small insensible particles, though continually, but it happens suddenly, visibly, but rarely, in conception or in death, which causes animals to acquire or lose a great deal all at once” (qtd. by Lippit, 2000 34). On the complicity between this philosophy and the modern capitalist treatment of animals, see the introduction to Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital. Shukin criticizes of Lippit, who, she claims “ends up buying the idea of the undead animal that he surveys and rearticulating it to an aesthetic theory of cinema” (2009 41). She exploits the different valences of the word “rendering” – both the “mimetic act of making a copy” and “the industrial boiling down and recycling of animal remains” (20) – to expose the overlooked complicity between late capitalism and “poststructuralist” philosophies that, she argues, equate the animal with “pure potential” (Deleuze and Guattari) or spectralize it (Derrida): “To suggest that specters perturb hegemonic structures of power assumes that they appear out of some ghostly volition from within immanent fissures in architectures of presence. The rubric of rendering suggests, by contrast, that capitalism is biopolitically invested in producing animal life as a spectral body” (38). Shukin compellingly argues in favor of a materialist zoopolitics, in opposition to an idealistic biopolitics that tends to neglect the body of nonhuman others, contending that discourses and technologies of biopower “hinge on the species difference as a strategically ambivalent rather than absolute line, allowing for the contradictory power to both dissolve and reinscribe borders between humans and animals” (11). Though provocative, her readings of Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida as “ideologists of late capital” unconvincingly turn them into idealist thinkers (that Derrida’s specters would be animated by a “volition,” for instance, seems unlikely). For a more extended commentary of Shukin and Lippit, see the chapter I devote to Edgar Allan Poe’s urban fiction. 7 This is how Rilke describes the creature of the eighth Duino elegy: “With all its eyes, the creature-world beholds / the open. But our eyes, as though reversed, / encircle it on every side, like traps [als Fallen] / set round its unobstructed path to freedom. / What is outside, we know from the brute’s face / alone; for while a child’s quite small we take it / and turn it round and force it to look backwards / at conformation, not that openness / so deep within the brute’s face.

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Gracchus finds himself trapped between life and death. The tragic irony of Gracchus’ metamorphosis is that he must “come to an end” in order to realize that he cannot die, or to say it with Blanchot, that “there is no end.” To be and not to be is the hunter’s fated condition, one he shares with the undying animal. According to Maurice Blanchot,

Kafka’s story recounts modern man’s refusal to live in “the here and now”: “[S]uch is the truth that Western man has made a symbol of felicity, and has tried to make bearable by focusing on its positive side, that of immortality, of an afterlife that would compensate for life. But this afterlife is our actual life” (1995 8). The Hunter Gracchus appears unable to account for his essential and endless afterness.

In all the readings of Kafka’s parable, little has been made of the fact that Gracchus is a hunter. “The question of who is to blame for [Gracchus’s] undoubtedly great misfortune remains unresolved,” writes W. G. Sebald in Vertigo, “as indeed does the matter of what his guilt, the cause of his misfortune, consists in” (2000 165). Thus reads the conversation between the Hunter Gracchus and the burgomaster of Riva:

“I had been happy to be alive and was happy to be dead. Before I came on board, I gladly threw away my rag-tag collection of guns and bags, even the hunting rifle which I had always carried so proudly, and slipped into the shroud like a young girl into her wedding dress. There I lay down and waited. Then the accident happened.” “A nasty fate,” said the burgomaster, raising his hand in a gesture of depreciation, “and you are not to blame for it in any way?” “No,” said the hunter. “I was a hunter” (1974 131-133).

While he holds the boatman accountable, Gracchus poses the possibility (which he rejects in the same breath) that his plight might be retribution for his being a hunter: “I

Free from death” (1963 67). The poem establishes a direct correlation between the creature’s unobstructed connection with the open (hyperbolized by the adverb “all”) and the fact that it is does not perceive death because it is too close to it. While Rilke and Heidegger are “fundamentally opposed” on the question of who or what has access to the open, as Jean- Christophe Bailly has noted (2007 40), they both agree in portraying the animal as ensnared within their ecosystem. At the end of the elegy, Rilke writes: “Oh bliss of tiny creatures that remain / for ever in the womb that brought them forth! / Joy of the gnat, that can still leap within, / even on its wedding-day: for womb is all” (1963 69-71). Heidegger devotes the last section of Parmenides to differentiating his view of the animal from Rilke’s.

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was a hunter; is there any sin in that? [Ich war Jäger, ist das etwa eine Schuld?]” (133). Should he, by any stretch of the imagination (etwa), feel any guilt or debt (Schuld) and, if so, for what? To whom? The answer, I suggest, might be found in the very question posed by the Hunter Gracchus.

The hunter entertains an agonistic relationship to the hunted being that comes to be identified as animal. The hunted animal, writes Georges Bataille in his study of the

Lascaux paintings, is essentially “at the level of death [à hauteur de mort]” for it “is the being that the hunter sees only to kill it” (1979 370). Far from a simple hostility, this antagonism exposes the complex tangle binding hunter and hunted that has evolved over time. The evolution of this antagonism, I contend, is crucial to interpreting Kafka’s story.8 In the Paleolithic scene that Bataille surveys, the life of the hunter was most likely predicated on the death of his prey. Put simply, the hunter owed his life to the death of the animal. The memory of this essential debt – central in sacrificial rituals – is disowned in Gracchus’ rhetorical question: Ich war Jäger, ist das etwa eine Schuld? What if the hunter’s

“sin,” ironically, lay in his very disavowal, in the non-recognition of his sin or debt

(Schuld) toward the hunted animal?9

Bataille speculates that, for the hunters of Lascaux, the animal was thought to be necessarily complicit of its own murder (1979 76). What he alludes to is the “ideology” of the “grateful prey” prevailing in hunting societies, according to which the animal is thought to offer itself to the hunter, who would return empty-handed without the

8 Davenport proposes to see Gracchus as representative of the modern hunter and his prehistoric avatar: “Gracchus is both prehistoric man, a hunter and gatherer, and man at his most civilized,” notes Davenport. “Walter Benjamin, Kafka’s first interpreter, said that a song prehistoric wind blowing across Kafka from the past” (1996 12-13). 9 Samuel Weber describes a similar irony in Benjamin’s use of Schuld, which consists in “the denial of indebtedness to an alterity without which nothing could be identified, no aim taken, no target hit” (2005 105).

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consent and sacrifice of the hunted animal.10 Bataille contrasts a time when the animal was envisioned of as giving itself to the hunter – and was therefore endowed with the capacity of giving – with the supposedly more advanced agricultural civilizations, in which the animal is increasingly considered as a given. The hunter no longer goes after the animal; the animal comes to him. In other words, the animal does not give itself to, but is taken by, the human. This shift from active to passive changes everything, as instead of being indebted to the animal, the human simply takes his due.11 The relative symmetry between the animal and the human is thereby negated, and the animal no longer appears

“at the level of death” for the human. Death is henceforth secured as a uniquely human prerogative or property.

My second epigraph, excerpted from Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, singularly echoes

Kafka’s parable. The young butterfly-hunter threatens to turn into the animal he chases, and can only resume his “human existence” by capturing the animal:

Between us, now, the old law of the hunt took hold: the more I strove to conform, in all the fibers of my being, to the animal – the more butterfly- like I became in my heart and soul – the more this butterfly itself, in everything it did, took on the color of human volition; and in the end, it was as if its capture was the price I had to pay to regain my human existence (2006 51).

Once the butterfly is securely pinned down in the “specimen box,” continues Benjamin, the hunter’s “lust for blood had diminished, his confidence was grown all the greater”

10 From this perspective, writes anthropologist Robert Brightman, predator and prey are “successively subject and object in an endless cycle of reciprocities” (2002 187-188). 11 Bataille invokes the theory of the “grateful prey” with a grain of salt. He quotes Eveline Lot- Falck’s Rites de chasse before comparing the hunter-hunted to the seducer-seduced relation: “‘L’ours n’est une victime que de son plein gré et il présente lui-même le bon endroit pour recevoir le coup mortel.’ Ainsi les relations du chasseur et de la proie sont-elles en un sens semblables à celles du séducteur et de la femme désirée. Les unes et les autres sont d’une égale hypocrisie (de même si les unes aident à comprendre les autres, la réciproque est vraie…). Mais nous sommes loin du sentiment de supériorité qui ne s’affirme pas encore essentiellement dans le monde des éleveurs et des animaux qu’ils asservissent : il est surtout le fait d’une civilisation plus avancée, où l’éleveur est lui-même un inférieur, où le bétail n’est guère, à la cantonade, que la chose la plus basse, ou la plus neutre” (1979 76). It should be noted that Bataille does not “buy” the ideology of the grateful prey without reserves and calls attention to the relative “hypocrisy” with which the human hunter exculpates himself by presenting himself as the recipient of a gift.

Foreword | 10

(52). In Benjamin’s vignette, human existence is not an enviable position but the hiatus in a metamorphic process, the suspension of an ecstatic becoming-animal. This seemingly innocent episode illustrates how capture marks the end of the “old law of the hunt.” Yet

Benjamin also suggests that this end is not final, and there is still a “price to pay” in capture. “In the end,” the debt is not expunged, only disavowed and turned into guilt, which Samuel Weber (nodding to Benjamin’s definition of capitalism as system with “no way out”) defines as “denial of indebtedness” (2005 105). This is the history of this disavowal that I seek to uncover in this dissertation. It is the history of this disavowal that I seek to uncover in this dissertation. The logic of the hunt does not entirely disappear in the modern regime of capture; what disappears is only the sense of indebtedness to the animal we remain after.

Foreword | 11

And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale (1992 212)

Introduction | 12

Introduction

THE ENDS OF HUNTING AND THE LURES OF CAPTURE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

I am willing to admit that we began with hunting, but this first stage, like the first seconds of the universe, was so short, so limited, that it is not worth the trouble of talking about it. From the dawn of time, there are no more prey.

Michel Serres, The Parasite (1982 10)

I hear and smell it: their hour came for the hunt and the procession, not for a wild hunt, to be sure, but for a tame, lame, snooping, up-buttering prayer muttering hunt – – for a hunt for soulful mousy yes-men; all the heart’s mousetraps have now been set again!

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1969 144)

FROM HUNT TO CAPTURE This dissertation locates a shift in the representation of animals when hunting fell out of common practice in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. From James

Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking Tales to Louis Agassiz’s Natural History of the United

States, John James Audubon’s Birds of America to Eadweard Muybridge’s Animals in Motion, the century witnessed a shift in literary, scientific, and artistic treatments of “the animal.”

In this brave new age of mechanical objectivity, the animal progressively came to be seen not merely through apparatuses of capture (i.e. the lens of the camera or the eye of the microscope) but as essentially captured – effectively naturalizing their mechanized decontextualization from nature.

This captured animal would find potent expression in Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of

Umwelt, thereby gaining acceptance within various twentieth and twenty-first-century

Introduction | 13

philosophies. Such works include those of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and

Guattari, and Agamben, which along with those of Benjamin and Derrida, make up the philosophical archive of this project. The ambition of this dissertation is to examine how this conception of the animal as essentially captured came to be so widely accepted and relayed in American literary and artistic representational practice. Tracking a cultural and epistemological turn from a logic of the hunt to one of capture, I recover hunting as the repressed substrate of the modern regime of capture that would emphasize procedure over process, apprehension over pursuit.

Spurred by the accelerating expansionism and industrialism of the nineteenth century, humanly embodied practices of hunting were gradually rendered obsolete by more efficient means of procuring animals, as witnessed by technological developments in the production of traps and guns, the introduction of factory farming and the industrialization of slaughter, and the taming of the nation’s wild territories. During the period, the ideology sustaining the purchase of land shifted from one of conquest to control, as the nation grew less concerned with the acquisition of new territories than with the securing of the land. An evolving signifier for America’s changing cultural identity, hunting was gradually recast as an archaic recreational activity, even as it was increasingly valorized as a nostalgic pursuit associated with the intrepid early years of the young nation. It is precisely when hunting receded as a quotidian reality and material practice that it was internalized by the modern nation to fashion its identity as that which distinguished it from Europe.12

12 The dissertation is not nostalgic of a time when hunting was still a subsistence activity. First, I am not suggesting that prior to the industrial revolution and the closing of the frontiers, America entertained more harmonious or fair relationships to animals, if only because I do not think that the hunt is over. Secondly, though I recognize that hunting supposes a relative symmetry between the hunter and the hunted, I remain suspicious of the moralization of hunting as establishing an equitable relation between the human and the animal (on the ethics of hunting as a “cultural pursuit,” see Garry Marvin’s “Wild Killing: Contesting the Animal in Hunting” in

Introduction | 14

Hunting, I argue, offers a critical paradigm for apprehending America’s self-identification through its relationship to animals and animality during the antebellum years. The dissertation asks how the perceived “disappearance” of the animal, which has mostly been read through the rubrics of colonization (as extinction) and industrialization (as mass slaughter), is a philosophical problematic that makes important demands on

American Literature. Over the course of the century, predation was refashioned as

Manifest Destiny’s tacit logic, and this sublimation of the hunt rendered invisible the violence to both animals and animalized human subjects while contributing to the taming of wildlife and the near eradication of Native Americans.13 Fraught with the tensions of territorial expansion, nineteenth-century American Literature, I argue, offers privileged

Killing Animals [2006 10-29]). Admittedly, hunters do not work toward the eradication of their object, as is made clear as early as in Xenophon’s Cynegeticus. While they pursue and kill individual animals, they ought to be careful to “preserve” the species (by being familiar with reproduction cycles, migratory habits, and so on). Moreover, the hunted animal must remain “wild” (shooting a cow or a chicken does not count as hunting). It is not fortuitous, therefore, if hunters have historically been associated with the preservation of wildlife. But, as the quasi-oxymoronic concept of “wildlife preservation” indicates, what is preserved is often the animal as game. On the prominent and problematic role played by hunters in preservation, see Mark Cioc The Game of Conservation, Harriet Ritvo, “Destroyers and Preservers,” and John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature. The dissertation will elaborate on the seeming paradox between preservation and hunting and on the complex temporality of hunting, which simultaneously requires premeditation and unpredictability. 13 The ambition of the dissertation is to attend to this sublimation and its consequences for the modern conception of the animal and the human. In chemistry, sublimation is the evaporation of a substance directly from solid to gas without passing through the liquid phase. By analogy, in Freudian psychoanalysis, it describes the elevation of instinctual animal impulses (including sexual attraction for animals) into more socially acceptable occupations, especially artistic pursuits (see Freud’s “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex”). Often credited for being the first to introduce the concept of Sublimierung in psychological language, Nietzsche also defines sublimation as the “evaporation” of animal drives but, contrary to Freud, he does not valorize sublimation but treats it instead as a form of inhibition and repression, the very symptom of modern falsification. Calling the bluff on the supposed “purification” of modern civilization, Nietzsche strives to revert the process of sublimation in order to retrieve the obliterated animal instincts still active under the polished carapace of modern civilization. On the difference between the Nietzschean and Freudian conceptions of sublimation, see Paul-Laurent Assoun, Freud and Nietzsche (2000 157-171). On the role played by sublimation in the erasure of violence in modern social institutions, see Richard Schacht’s “Nietzsche and Philosophical Anthropology,” in A Companion to Nietzsche (2006 115-132). On the increased violence of sublimated instincts, see Robert Guay’s “The Philosophical Function of Genealogy,” in A Companion to Nietzsche (2006 359).

Introduction | 15

ground for understanding how the modern nation was predicated on the literal and figurative chasing away of animals.

EASY TARGETS Over all the animals that man keeps captive hangs his death sentence. It is, it is true, suspended, and often for a long time, but it is never remitted. . .The span of life he allows them is as set as his own. . .as herdsman, he has more power than any hunter. His animals are all in one place and do not flee from him. The duration of their lives is in his hands. He does not have to kill them when and where he finds them. The force of the hunter has become the power of the herdsman.

Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power (1978:199).

It is hardly by accident that the quintessential American novel, Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale, is named “after an animal.” The story of Moby-Dick is well-known: the novel follows

Captain Ahab and his motley crew’s Homeric quest to hunt down the monstrous sperm- whale that deprived the captain of his leg. Melville’s epic chase embraces and extends the tradition of the hunting narrative in the American literary canon – from Cooper’s

Leatherstocking saga to Faulkner’s Big Woods, from Francis Parkman’s buffalo hunts in The

Oregon Trail to Richard Brautigan’s whimsical Trout Fishing in America, from Theodore

Roosevelt’s hunting memoirs to Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” to

Ernest Hemingway’s hunting chronicles. While not a singularly American phenomenon, these hunting narratives have little in common with, say, Flaubert’s mystical “Legend of

St Julien l’Hospitalier,” Turgenev’s evocative vignettes in A Sportsman’s Sketches, the fabulous pursuits of Buzzati’s The Colomber, or Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark.”

Taken as a specifically American subgenre, hunting narratives have tended to combine allegorical abstraction with an acute attention to the hunt as an empirical activity with explicit rules and tacit codes, which invite symbolic interpretation without fully giving

Introduction | 16

way to it.14

Published in 1851, the year of the death of James Fenimore Cooper and John James

Audubon, two foremost proponents of the “American frontier,” Moby-Dick sounds the death knell of hunting in America. The unprecedented levels reached by human predation at the time deeply modified the American landscape, signaling the emergence of a more insidious and systematic regime of predation. The sophistication of guns and other apparatuses of capture made it impossible for game animals to “reproduce” fast enough, even as animals were increasingly “mass produced” for the purpose of being slaughtered. Derrida recalls that the problematic of species extinction is coterminous – and doubtless correlated – with contemporary issues of mass slaughter and animal manipulation:

[T]he annihilation of certain species is indeed in process, but it is occurring through the organization and exploitation of an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of a life proper to animals that are thus exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation (2008 28, emphasis mine).

With the advent of the “mechanical reproducibility” of animal life in the modern era, standardized mass slaughter replaced hunting as the seemingly inexhaustible pool of undying livestock (interminably surviving their programmed death) supplanted the elusiveness of the prey.15 With the systematized procurement and production of animals,

14 The closest equivalent may be, in the French context, what has been termed the “rustic novel” (roman rustique), a subgenre gathering writers such as Jean Giono (himself translator of Moby-Dick), Maurice Genevoix, Henri Bosco, Louis Pergaud and Jean Proal. These authors chronicle the life in the French countryside or mountains with similar phenomenological attentiveness to the life of animals and the interactions between animals and humans as their American counterparts. They can hardly, however, boast to the popularity of Cooper, Melville, Faulkner or Hemingway. Memorable hunting scenes can also be found in Hugo or Tolstoy, for instance, but they do not constitute or motivate the entire narrative as in Moby-Dick or “The Bear.” 15 Nicole Shukin recovers the forgotten history of Ford’s assembly lines, “so often taken as paradigmatic of capitalist modernity,” as “mimetically premised on the ulterior logistics of animal disassembly” (2009 87). This amnesia is not fortuitous, she claims, and it shows the degree to

Introduction | 17

the modern period rechanneled the logic of hunting into that of capture. This shift occurred when capture was no longer merely a singular “moment” in hunting practice – the climax of the chase or the point when the animal is ultimately caught or killed – but made the enduring condition of the animal. Capture, in this sense, does not so much abolish hunting as it secures its “end” (its finality and its cessation), making the logic of hunting sustainable while ostensibly rendering its practice irrelevant. This transition has significant consequences not only for the animal but also for the self-conception of the human.16

which animal killing and rendering have become transparent in our culture. A more “hygienic” and less contingent way of procuring meat, explains Paula Young Lee, slaughterhouses were gradually rendered less noticeable in the nineteenth century, built in such a manner that they would “deflect visual attention” (“Siting the Slaughterhouse” in Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse, 2008 51). 16 Hunting is not merely one of the oldest recognized forms of interaction with animals, but it supposedly played a determining role in the hominization of the human. A number of influential anthropological narratives known as “the hunting hypothesis,” “the killer ape” or “man the hunter” theory conjectured that “man” dissociated himself from other apes through predation. Predominant in the 1950s and 1960s, these pessimistic accounts of the human’s origins were challenged on several fronts, mainly for their remarkable lack of scientific evidence, but also for their patent misanthropy and shameless androcentrism. Less flattering theories portraying man as a scavenger emerged in the 1970s but, though better-evidenced, the “man the hunter” paradigm remain predominant (for a detailed summary and critique of the evolution of this notion, see Cartmill (1993 1-27) and Nerissa Russel (2012 144-173). Though these debates mainly concern paleoanthropologists, they help us understand the role played by the hunt in our anthropogenetic narratives. In The Parasite, Michel Serres goes to great lengths to debunk the mythology that places the human at the top of the hunting ladder, substituting this hierarchizing model for a more dynamic and messy ecology of parasitical relations. In Serres’ counter-model, hunting is anything but an equitable practice: “I fear that this is the origin of hunting. The only things hunted are those that have to be chased away,” he argues. “In the end, there are two kinds of animals: those that are invited and those that are hunted. Guests and quarry. Tame and wild. . . There are animals whom we parasite and those who might supplant us and whom we chase away, hunt, and eventually eliminate” (1982 77-78). What gets hunted, in Serres’ scenario, is that which refuses to be domesticated or cannot be assimilated in the system (rival predators, vermin, microbes, and so on). But the animal is not just the name of what must be chased away, but also of that upon which our lives depend (for food, clothing, scientific experiments, raw material, sport). It is not fortuitous, Serres suggests, if the complex ecology within which we find ourselves entangled has often taken the shape of an animal: “We live in that black box called the collective; we live by it, on it, and in it. It so happens that this collective was given the form of an animal: Leviathan. We are certainly within something bestial; in more distinguished terms, we are speaking of an organic model for the members of a society. Our host? I don’t know. But I do know that we are within. And that it is dark in there” (10). If the animal must be chased (away), therefore, it is not merely because it threatens to “supplant us” and take our place (everything for Serres is a matter of territory). It is also because we seek to disavow the extent to which we depend on it, and how cramped we find ourselves in the belly of the beast. By hunting animals, Serres suggests, the human entertains the hope of finding the way out of the black box of the

Introduction | 18

Samuel Weber has argued that the desire to overcome the indeterminacy of human life and knowledge can be palliated by the “adjustment” of death to a target. Naturalizing the power to take life into a right of taking life, the one taking aim (or “targeter”) is able to transcend, “temporarily at least,” his own finitude. Weber’s main example is the recent popularization of the military phrase “target of opportunity,” whereby the contingency inherent in the concept of opportunity gets preempted by targeting protocols that, in turn, endow the targeter with a sense of mastery upon what he cannot control. The phrase, he suggests, describes the effort of a system to “integrate or appropriate the singularity of the event through an equally exceptional response” (2005 5). Commenting on a passage from Derrida’s Aporias, Weber suggests that the targeting of the other, retroactively alleviates our existential anxieties by offering a form of “adjustment” to our own end and to death in general:

The word Derrida uses to designate the impossibility of attributing a referent to the word death is, in French, ajuster. In addition to its English cognate, “adjust,” in the sense of “modifying so as to bring into accord,” this word can also mean “to take aim,” in the sense of viser. A dictionary example is ajuster une cible, un animal – to aim at a target, an animal. The linking of the two, target and animal, in the dictionary example – and examples, even and especially in dictionaries, are rarely insignificant – raises the question: What if the impossibility of ever “adjusting” a referent to the word death and its extremely disturbing consequences could be palliated, temporarily at least, by turning the tables and ‘adjusting’ death so that it seems to become a function of “targeting”? What if such targeting could adjust the absolute indeterminacy of “death” – the word and the thing – by linking it, on the one hand, to the target, and, on the other, to the targeter, who would in the process demonstrate the power, and perhaps the right, to take life if not to give it? (2005 24)

Even though Weber is mainly concerned with the lot of human (or at least male) lives, he hints in passing that the prime “targets” have historically been animals. What happens,

collective, of excepting himself from an intricate network of interdependency by chasing the animal at a safe distance.

Introduction | 19

then, when the animal is no longer sufficiently “other” to be construed as a target? When the targeted “other” has become for the most part an “easy target”?

The generalization of “targets of opportunity” and its attendant logic must be understood as an “effort” toward systematicity. However accurate the weapon or quick the decision to pull the trigger, targeting always allows for an element of play or undecidability. Likewise, if capture has become the condition of the animal, the animal always retains a certain degree of “wildness.” Just like targeting, capture is not an exact science but a continually perfectible and perfected model. Subsumed as it may be under stable cognitive structures, strict regulations and mechanized material procedures, the animal is never perfectly seized (and perhaps, perversely enough, deliberately so17). The hunting of the animal, therefore, does not end with capture, hence the importance of attending to the logic of the hunt as the substrate of the regime of capture. In this introduction, I will examine three paradigmatic instantiations criss-crossing the legal, commercial, and cultural domains that I argue evidence the transition from a logic of the hunt to one of capture in the nineteenth century: 1. the legal hegemony of “the rule of capture,” 2. the entrepreneurial fetishization of the trap-as-apparatus, and 3. the conceptual refashioning of representation as capture.

The Rule of Capture

17 The shift from hunt to capture should be read in relation to the development of biopolitics, identified by Foucault as the set of discourses and procedures by which lines are drawn between lives that count as bios and those that count as zoe (whose killing does not constitute murder). Whereas studies in biopolitics have overwhelmingly focused on human lives, scholars like Cary Wolfe, Nicole Shukin, Colleen Boggs and others have recently argued that the animal has always been integral to the biopolitical equation, asking for it to be complemented by a “zoopolitics” that would take into account not only matters of race, class and gender, but also the question of species difference. Shukin, for instance, invokes Derrida to show that “discourses and technologies of biopower hinge on the species divide.” But, she insists, this divide must be recognized as a complex construct, a “zoo-ontological production of species difference as a strategically ambivalent rather than absolute line, allowing for the contradictory power to both dissolve and reinscribe borders between humans and animals” (2009 11, emphasis mine).

Introduction | 20

The first chapter of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, set at the end of the eighteenth century, opens on to a dispute between Natty Bumppo and Judge Temple over whether the buck slain on Temple’s land belongs to the hunter or the judge.

Grounding the novel, this opening scene evidences the extent to which issues of private property inform the romance. “The basic conflict is between two guardians of the land,”

Kay Seymour House explains, “and the basic realignment of forces comes when young

Oliver Effingham abandons Natty’s idea of land use (hunt it as the Indians did) and joins

Judge Temple in cultivating it” (1965 265). As I’ll argue in my first chapter, The

Leatherstocking Tales chronicles the rapid striation of the American land over the course of the nineteenth century, when the question of territorial expansion shifted from issues of acquisition to matters of private property and land exploitation.

The best example of this transformation is the significant cultural and legal consequence of the “rule of capture” to the early American context. This common-law rule stipulates that the first person “to capture” a natural resource becomes its legal owner. The law concerns specifically oil, gas, and water sources, as well as game animals. Though not only an American phenomenon, the principle of the rule of capture “assumed particular importance in the United States,” according to legal scholar Terence Daintith, “where the process of westward expansion constantly opened up new resources that might be available for appropriation by the prompt and energetic” (2010 4). He explains:

As individual ownership by European settlers replaced the communal enjoyment of resources practiced by earlier inhabitants, scope for the operation of the rule was steadily reduced, but it continued to be important in relation to resources to which it was difficult for individuals to assert a permanent and effective claim in the absence of actual physical possession. Wildlife, fisheries, and flows of water [as well as fossil fuels] offer familiar examples (4-5).

Since its implementation, conservation acts have frequently superseded the rule in order to prevent resources from excessive depletion. In spite of consistent criticism of its

Introduction | 21

effects, it has remained the default rule for private land in the United States (whereas other countries with the law have since modified their legislations to limit the waste of natural resources).18 What is remarkable is not just that the United States has entertained an abiding relationship to the rule of capture but that game animals gradually disappeared from legal debates about capture at the end of the nineteenth century.

For obvious economic reasons, historians of the law have focused mainly on its applications and consequences for gas and oil but only very rarely for game animals. The common point between these different “natural resources” is that they are in essence elusive (hence the need to capture them). In the case Westmoreland & C. Natural Gas

Co. v. De Witt, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania stipulated that “Water and oil, and still more strongly gas, may be classed by themselves, if the analogy is not too fanciful, as minerals ferae naturae, [because] in common with animals, and unlike other minerals, they have the power and the tendency to escape without the volition of the owner” (qtd. in

Daintith, 2010 22). In this 1889 arbitration, the wild animals (ferae) are figured only through analogy and a rather “fanciful” one, at that.

Tellingly, after 1892, there was no record of any mention of the capture of wild animals in litigation between neighbors. Daintith suggests that “the right to drill on, and take oil from, one’s own land was apparently too obvious to require bolstering by learned allusions to qualified property rights” (36). The fact that the reference to the capture of

18 “In the United States, where commercial oil production began in 1859, it has been judicially recognized since 1886 and is still in force there today, despite attracting such epithets as ‘theft,’ ‘law of the jungle,’ and ‘absurd, almost idiotic’ during its long and unloved life,” explains Daintith. “Its critics have had no difficulty in demonstrating that the rule has induced behaviour which has led to an extraordinary waste of oil and gas resources in the United States, notably – though not exclusively – in the period from the first beginnings of the industry in the 1860s through the widespread application of limits on oil and gas production from the late 1920s onwards” (in “The Rule of Capture,” 2010 140-141). The complex history of the rule of capture, which I simplified for the purpose of my argument, continues to have a strong impact on U.S. environmental policies today, as for instance in the case of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking).

Introduction | 22

wild animals had become too “fanciful” or too excessively “learned” tells us something about the status of animals in private property. It is tempting to speculate that wild animals recede from legal debates because, contrary to oil, gas and water, they are no longer considered sufficiently “volatile” (and even less so “non-renewable” resource).

This does not mean that hunting is less regulated, quite the contrary. Only, the debate shifts mainly to issues of species protection. As a consequence, wild animals evolve from a fugacious or volatile resource to endangered beings in need of preservation. If they become irrelevant to the rule of capture at the end of the nineteenth century, it does not mean that animals are no longer captured but rather that they are conceived as always- already captured.

A Better Mousetrap The legal definition of capture is inseparable from issues of private and intellectual property. It is telling, in this context, that the expression that best sums up the innovative zeitgeist of the second half of the nineteenth century is the catchphrase “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door,” often misattributed to Thoreau or Emerson. The phrase assumes a market economy based on fair competition, the use of the comparative “better” leaving room for countless ameliorations. The equation is simple: the better the quality of the product, the more customers will frequent a business.

Introduction | 23

Fig. 1. Patent for an improved animal trap. April 1870.

Despite the less-than-flattering analogy of the customer as a mouse about to be trapped, the expression proved so compelling that it has frequently been taken literally, to the point of making mousetraps (at least according to Wikipedia) “the ‘most frequently invented device in U.S. history.’”19 It is symptomatic that this phrase, intended as a metaphor for innovation within reach for the “everyman inventor” (Lienhard, 2003 205), came to be understood literally at a moment when animals were systematically exterminated from urban spaces.20 More symptomatic even is the idea that a mousetrap – by all accounts an unassuming device – could prove powerful enough a contraption21 to

19 In 1996, writes John H. Lienhard, “the U.S. Patent Office had issued over 4,400 mousetrap patents, and some four hundred people per year were continuing to seek them” (2003 204). For a brief but illuminating explanation of the phrase in relation to the history of patents in the United States, see John H. Lienhard’s Inventing Modern (2003 203-209). 20 We should not rule out the possibility that devising mousetraps provided a socially acceptable outlet for people to exercise their sadistic fantasies on creatures that ended up crushed, glued, drowned, maimed, starved, electrocuted, etc. 21 The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of the term “contraption” to the beginning of the nineteenth century (c. 1825). “Contraption: A popular formation, apparently < contrive (or

Introduction | 24

bring “the world” to one’s door. The reason the mousetrap was so emblematic of the period might indeed have to do with it being not merely a tool but an apparatus of capture.

The modern entrepreneur no longer dreamed of conquering the world. He lies in wait for the world to come to him.

Another exemplary invention of the period, photography is one such apparatus of capture (and it integrates the logic of “capture” and “release” in its very idiom). The development and sophistication of what would become the modern camera – along with the telescope, the microscope, the daguerreotype, and a number of mimetic technologies

– were the conditions of emergence for what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have described as the epistemic regime of “mechanical objectivity” (2010 125-137), an emergence I discuss in my second chapter in relation to the representation of animals in the aquarelles of naturalist-artist John James Audubon. This turn to mechanization favored a static and objective epistemic model that cast human intervention as a source of error and yet articulated knowledge as a form of prehension (as that which is to be grasped).

The capturing process at work in photography is a complex one. Tellingly, the history and rhetoric of this practice are deeply intertwined with those of hunting. “Shooting” is not a gratuitous figure of speech to describe the activity of the photographer. Rather, it expresses the very singular attitude of the photographer toward his object. The notion of photography as a continuation of hunting has been well documented. Be it in terms of the specific gestures of the photographer,22 in the technology itself,23 or in the taming of

its variant contreve): compare conceive, conception; some vague association with trap may have entered in.” 22 “The photographer takes a hunter’s pride in capturing the spontaneity of life without leaving traces of his presence,” writes Rudolf Arnheim (1986 105). Vilém Flusser describes the photographer as a predator of sorts: “If one observes the movements of a human being in

Introduction | 25

the land,24 photography appears, in the words of Susan Sontag, as a form of “sublimated hunt”25:

Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it has always been – what people needed protection from. Now nature – tamed, endangered, mortal – needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid, we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures (2011 64).

The entanglement of photography and hunting expose the desire to capture what is by definition elusive or ungraspable. In that sense, photography can be envisaged as an ars ferae naturae. Vilém Flusser has shown that the predatory dimension of photography was inherent in the very concept of apparatus of capture. Apparatus, he elucidates, comes from the Latin apparare, to lurk or lie in wait: “The photographic apparatus lies in wait for photography: it sharpens its teeth in readiness” (2000 21).26

It is little wonder, then, that animals quickly became photography’s object of predilection.

The end of the nineteenth century witnessed an ironic chiasmus between the historical

possession of a camera (or of a camera in possession of a human being), the impression given is of someone lying in wait. This is the ancient act of stalking which goes back to the paleolithic hunter in the tundra” (2000 33). 23 Think for instance of Étienne-Jules Marey’s “chronophotographic gun” and its numerous replications. 24 On the collusion between hunting, photographing and colonization, see for instance Henry Bryden’s Gun and Camera, John MacKenzie’s The Empire of Nature, Finis Dunaway’s “Hunting with the Camera,” or James R. Ryan’s Picturing Empire. 25 “Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture,” writes Sontag. “Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder – a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time” (2011 14-15) 26 This is an interesting addition to Agamben’s dizzying definition of the apparatus (the English translation of dispositif) as “anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings.” By way of Uexküll and Heidegger, Agamben suggests that “apparatuses are not a mere accident in which humans are caught by chance, but rather are rooted in the very process of ‘humanization’ that made ‘humans’ out of the animals we classify under the rubric Homo sapiens. In fact, the event that has produced the human constitutes, for the living being, something like a division. . .This division separates the living being from itself and from its immediate relationship with its environment – that is, with what Jakob von Uexküll and then Heidegger name the circle of receptors-disinhibitors. The break or interruption of this relationship produces in living beings both boredom – that is, the capacity to suspend this immediate relationship with their disinhibitors – and the Open, which is the possibility of knowing being as such, by constructing a world.” (2009 16)

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disappearance of animals and their reappearance in modern representations, notably in the stop-action photographs of California photographer Muybridge’s Animals in Motion

(1872).27 Famously analyzed by John Berger, and later elaborated by Akira Lippit, Steve

Baker and Rebecca Solnit, among others,28 this transfer into the realm of representation does not simply index the vanishing of empirical animals but signals an alteration in the animal’s very “nature.” Whether apparatuses of capture relied on the animal’s animacy as a substitute for or supplement to their mechanical inelasticity (Shukin), or whether modern technology served as a mausoleum for mourning creatures threatened with extinction (Lippit), the animal that is “preserved” in modernity has little to do with the hunted one. In order to understand this transformation, we must examine capture as a representational mode.

27 “By capturing and recording the animals’ every gesture, pose, muscular disturbance, and anatomical shift with such urgency,” Lippit suggests, “Muybridge seemed to be racing against the imminent disappearance of animals from the new urban environment” (2000 185). 28 See Akira Lippit’s Electric Animal, Steve Baker’s The Postmodern Animal, Nichole Shukin’s Animal Capital and Rebecca Solnit’s River of Shadows. Solnit takes Eadweard Muybridge, one of the “fathers” of motion picture and inventor of the zoopraxiscope, as exemplary of the transformations brought by industrialization and technological innovations in nineteenth-century America: “The late eighteenth through nineteenth centuries were the golden age for landscape representation, for a passion for nature represented as places beautiful to the eyes. This was also the era of rapacious exploitation, though to recite its particulars is to invoke an almost alchemical transformation from wildness to citified commodities. The beaver of the North American West went first, those dammers of rivers turned into felt top hats for city gentlemen. . .The whaling industry turned those titans of the seas into lamp oil for parlors and whalebone for corsets and brought them close to extinction, at least until 1870, when Rockefeller founded Standard Oil and began to pump out the black residue of the Jurassic past in unprecedented quantities. The forests of the nation were being pitched into the boilers of locomotives and smelters of ore, were becoming churches and rocking chairs and crates, and the buffalo were becoming factory belts. Organic material is usually harvested so that it renews itself year after year; but in the nineteenth century the industrialized world began mining this material – passenger pigeons, bison, beaver, whales, forests – into extinction or near-extinction. What was vanishing as ecology was reappearing as imagery” (2003 65-66).

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Fig. 2. The Photographic Amateur, 2nd Edition, J. Traill Taylor, Scovill Mfg. Co. pub. (New York, NY), 1883, 2nd Ed. about 1885, p. 22

Capture as a Representational Mode According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb “to capture” was first used as a synonym for “to represent” in 1901. From capere, meaning to seize with one’s hands (the suffix -ure denoting the result of a process), the term had previously appeared mainly in hunting and military contexts (e.g. the catching of prey, seizing of land, taking of prisoners), as in to “catch by force, surprise, or stratagem.” Capture’s semantic repurposing has been traced to George Bernard Shaw, who was among the first to use the term to express, in an artistic context, the action to “catch, or record (something

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elusive, as a quality) in speech, writing, etc.” This redefinition has since come into common usage in our contemporary aesthetic, technological and critical idioms to the point of being transparent. That the point of transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would witness the verb’s lexical leap from the literal to the metaphoric is symptomatic of a crucial transformation in human-animal relationships over the course of the nineteenth century that continues to have repercussions today.

It is perhaps Walter Benjamin’s reflections on “The Work of Art in the Age of its

Mechanical Reproducibility” that best account for the modern acceptation of the verb

“capture” as an aesthetic category. Rather than conceiving of capture as the containment of something whose nature or essence exceeds or precedes, in principle, the event of its capture, Benjamin suggests that it is through the very act of capture that something comes into being. Far from being a neutral aesthetic or epistemological gesture (if there is such a thing), capture appears as an action or event with remarkable ontological and political effects. 29 Benjamin’s analysis is inextricable from the advent of the technological revolution characteristic of the modern period, and especially from the increasing sophistication and proliferation of mechanized apparatuses of capture. Writes Chow:

Benjamin has in effect inaugurated a reconfiguration of the conventional logic of capture: rather than reality being caught in the sense of being contained, detained, or retained in the copy-image (understood as a repository), it is now the machinic act or event of capture, with its capacity for further partitioning (that is, for generating additional copies and images ad infinitum), that sets reality in motion, that invents or makes reality, as it were (2012 4).

29 Rey Chow shows how the emergence of capture as a dominant representational logic works hand in glove with the work done by Foucault on the coerciveness of visibility in disciplinary societies (where surveillance systems rested heavily on the perfecting of “capturing” apparatuses). But she insists by way of Deleuze that visibility is not as readily assimilable with surveillance, as most readings of Foucault suggest. In effect, visibility is predicated upon and produced by a subtle (and often overlooked) interplay with invisibility. Despite all appearances, to quote Deleuze, “nothing in Foucault is really closed” (qtd. in Chow, 158).

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Capture, as Chow understands it, destabilizes the conventional temporality of representation as coming after the fact because, in this new representational model, the act of capture is indivisible from the fact represented. In Benjaminian terminology, the object represented no longer conveys the sense of having been dislodged from an original, authentic, or natural place: it has lost its aura. Or, rather, its aura has become quasi-irrelevant (the virtually limitless copy supersedes an original that Chow describes as

“trapped in its own aura, imprisoned in the specificity of its ‘natural’ time and place” [3]).

The aura has not fully evaporated, however, if only because the verb “capture” requires

(grammatically at least) an object in its own right, however trivial. This object recedes in the background but nonetheless remains active (alive, but as dead – undying).

What the representational sense of “capture” borrows from hunting practices is the sense of apprehending something elusive. Capture is not a mere “grasping” because what is captured must be opposing a certain resistance, however infinitesimal, to the captor. If not fully alive, the object must nevertheless be dynamic, mobile, or, better, “elusive.” As an epistemocritical category, capture betrays the dual drive to frame and to keep alive, to arrest a movement while maintaining it. Here resurfaces the venatic origin of the term, an origin that, I contend, continues to animate the modern conception of the animal.

ACCOUNTING THE WHALE Hunting is above all a cynegetic art – an art of leading the dogs. . .Does the lord of the manor hunt? I no longer am sure. I don’t know what hunting is. Who blows and makes noise in the loud din of the hunt? The horns. Who gallops? The horse. Who traps and bites? The pack of dogs. Who organizes the battue? The squires. The hunter does everything while doing nothing.

Michel Serres, The Parasite (1982 81-82).

In principle, hunting is premised on the paradoxical condition that the prey is both

“killable” and undying. The antagonism at work in the hunt must be conceived as

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fundamentally iterative and (somewhat counterintuitively) sustainable. The kill may be the end of the hunt but not of hunting.30 This conception requires that the animal be accounted as both – but not simultaneously – a representative of its species and as an individual being. In the hunt, therefore, the hunted animal can acquire a proper name, as it does with Moby Dick (or for instance with “Old Ben” in Faulkner’s “The Bear”). In the chapter entitled “The Affidavit,” the narrator explains that some sperm-whales have been so ferocious or invincible that they have gained “ocean-wide renown.” Not only does “each of those famous whales enjoy great individual celebrity. . ., not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name” (223). With a proper name, what the animal acquires – or, better, what the animal is granted – is not so much immortality but, in effect, mortality (an end of one’s own). Here I will read Moby-Dick as the story of the systematic anonymizing of the whale that is a direct consequence of the paradigm shift from hunt to capture. Moby-Dick registers this as the transition between two complementary (rather than contradictory) logics for “accounting” the animal. The novel appears at the moment when the logic of capture is being honed as an apparatus of early capitalism.

30 Matt Cartmill explains: “Hunting is an end in itself for the hunter, and he wants the beasts he kills to be endlessly replaced so that his sportive battled with the wilderness can go indefinitely. . .Throughout European history, hunters have tended to see themselves as enemies of the individual animals but friends of the animal kinds. . .Hunters, then, are not simply fighters on the side of humanity against the wilderness. Their loyalties are divided. Because hunting takes place at the boundary between the human domain and the wilderness, the hunter stands with one foot on each side of the boundary, and swears no perpetual allegiance to either side” (1993 31). The dual allegiance of the hunter accounts for the topos of hunting narratives, predominant in American literature, where the man gone after the animal identifies with his victim and undergoes a kind of “becoming-animal.” It is not by accident if Moby-Dick is one of Deleuze and Guattari’s choice examples for their concept of “becoming-animal.” In the final confrontation between the captain and the whale, for instance, Ahab’s becoming-whale is inscribed in his very “rolling” toward the whale (in the “Etymology” section that opens the novel, we learn that the “animal is named for roundness or rolling; for in Dan[ish] hvalt is arched or vaulted”). The passage is quoted below.

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Moby-Dick is no ordinary revenge story, if only because the subject (object?) of Ahab’s retaliation is an animal. “Vengeance on a dumb brute!” exclaims his chief-mate Starbuck, challenging his authority (and questioning his sanity). “Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous!” (178). What is more, Ahab’s arrogant animosity (that animating force that propels his relation to the whale) predates his mutilation. The hubristic hunter is the vessel of a more primal, almost “transcendent” detestation for which the white whale appears, above all, a surrogate victim, “the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them” (200). A scapegoat for an ageless hostility, the albino whale serves as the blank canvas onto which Ahab projects his fantasy of revenge: “That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down” (200).

Little wonder, then, that the hunt would continue even after the final chapter closes upon Ahab’s awful death. Caught around the neck by the line of his own harpoon, Ahab meets his end tethered to the beast he chases, inadvertently rendering himself forever captive to his own pursuit: “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale. . .Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!” (623). Ahab’s obsession knows no limit, not even that of his own life. “Thus” this watershed scene in American literature, I contend, consolidates the historical paradigm shift when the hunt outlives the hunter and is transformed, in capture, to an interminable and self-perpetuating mechanism of modernity (one that depends on the whale’s interminable survival).

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The only conceivable end for his “fiery hunt,” the narrator insinuates, might be the eradication of “all sperm whales”:

Though, consumed with the hot fire of his purpose, Ahab in all his thoughts and actions ever had in view the ultimate capture of Moby Dick. . .nevertheless it may have been that he was by nature and long habituation far too wedded to a fiery whaleman’s ways, altogether to abandon the collateral prosecution of the voyage. . .It would be refining too much, perhaps, even considering his monomania, to hint that his vindictiveness towards the White Whale might have possibly extended itself in some degree to all sperm whales, and that the more monsters he slew by so much the more he multiplied the chances that each subsequently encountered whale would prove to be the hated one he hunted (1992 230, emphasis mine).

This alternative end raises the specter of the extinction of the whale, a growing concern at this point in the century,31 and one that Melville broaches frontally in the chapter

“Does the Whale’s Magnitude Diminish? Will He Perish?” “Melville himself was conscious of the fact that the relentless pursuit of other animals was becoming less and less a heroic endeavor,” explains Mark Payne. “In the first chapter of The Confidence-Man, he anticipates the killing of America’s last wolves, and in Moby-Dick, he entertains the idea that sperm whales may be wiped out by human beings, only to conclude, ironically enough, that they will likely escape total annihilation by shifting their habitat to the polar ice caps” (2010 105). Strangely, whereas the narrator acknowledges the consequences of overhunting on the Continent, he dismisses this possibility for the whale:

Comparing the humped herds of whales with the humped herds of buffalo, which, not forty years ago, overspread by tens of thousands the prairies of Illinois and Missouri. . .where now the polite broker sells you land at a dollar an inch; in such a comparison an irresistible argument would seem furnished, to show that the hunted whale cannot now escape speedy extinction. . .But you must look at this matter in every light. Though so short a period ago – not a good lifetime – the census of the buffalo in Illinois exceeded the census of men now in London, and though at the present day not one horn or hoof of them remains in all that region; and though the cause of this wondrous extermination was the spear of man; yet the far different nature of the whale-hunt peremptorily forbids so inglorious an end to the Leviathan (501-502).

31 On debates about the issue of extinction in nineteenth-century North America, see Paul Semonin’s American Monster.

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As if to reassure itself, the chapter marshals statistical data and summons mythical references to deflect the fatalist predictions of “some philosophers of the forecastle” about the diminishing number of sperm-whales. Near the chapter’s end, the voice of the narrator assumes a prophetic tone as he declares the whale inextinguishable: “Wherefore, for all these things, we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality. . .In Noah’s flood he despised Noah’s Ark; and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive” (503-504, emphasis mine). The interminableness of the hunt, in this case, is neither the effect of some logistic limitation on the part of the human hunters, nor the consequence of some adaptation skills on the part of the hunted animals. Rather, it is the result of a way of “accounting” – conceiving, narrating, counting – the animal.

Critics have mostly focused on the confrontation between two guiding principles or forces at work in the book, namely Ahab’s consuming passion and Ishmael’s encyclopedic curiosity (the former is on a crusade, while the latter on a cruise). But there is another set of actors in the tale who, although not on board the Pequod, are present throughout the whalemen’s journey: the ship’s proprietors. They are also hunters but ones who no longer hunt. Remaining on shore, they are insatiable entrepreneurs who demand that the whalemen “harvest” as many whales as possible. (Melville’s appropriation of the agricultural term, not incidentally, bespeaks the nascent specter of the mass production of the hunt – and thereby the defanging of the animal – during the period.32) Where they are fixated on the anonymized animal mass, Ahab, “intent on an

32 In From Animal to Edible, Noëlie Vialles interprets the euphemistic replacement of killing by abattage (felling) as a “vegetabilization” of animal life. She explains that the “restraining pens” where large animals (bovine, horses) are held tightly “for their own safety (on which worker safety depends)” are referred to as “traps” by French slaughtermen. The animals are led to a “cul- de-sac” where they can easily be stunned and bled. Vialles details the role played by this trap in the symbolic hierachization of men and animals necessary to justify these practices. The main

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audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge” (202), campaigns against the individual specimen of Moby Dick. By showing how the Pequod’s proprietors channel

Ahab’s predatory “drive” for their own benefit, Moby-Dick makes manifest how the more capacious logic of capture incorporates and reframes the less systematic logic of the hunt.33

The proprietors, two retired captains named Peleg and Bildad, own the Pequod along with a number of anonymous shareholders (or “annuitants”). Ironically enough, these

“hunters who no longer hunt” are introduced as peaceful Quakers, if “Quakers with a vengeance,. . .the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters” (82, emphasis mine).

Supposedly harmless and comical, Bildad and Peleg are rapacious merchants, though they claim to despise the “marchant service.” (Michel Serres derides the hypocrisy of the modern hunter, who is above all a parasite: “He chases and hunts with traps” [1982 82].)

Such parasites are Peleg and Bildad, who no longer go after the animal but hunt by proxy. They are perhaps the deliberately ignorant “landsmen” decried by the narrator, who are prone to turn whales into “intolerable allegories.” While the capitalist logic described by Melville is not new, its accelerating force and influence in the nineteenth century threatens to transform the nature of the hunt. Binding the issue of extinction to

difference between the hunted animal and the slaughtered animal is that the slaughterman establishes a relationship to the animal as species whereas the hunter establishes a relationship, however short-lived, to the prey as individual (1994 116-117). On the “neutralization of killing” and the detachment imposed by the pace of mechanized slaughter, see Charles Patterson’s Eternal Treblinka (2002 71-74). 33 Even though Ahab is said to have lost his mind after losing his leg to Moby-Dick, the proprietors of the Pequod still trust that he will be fit for the job. In fact, they need Ahab for the very rage he harbors: “far from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales” (202). Ironically, however, if Bildad and Peleg seek to use the captain for their own gain, he also uses them and his crew to reach his own target. Ahab is well aware of the necessity to lure his crew into thinking that they will enrich themselves, seeing plainly “that he must still in a good degree continue true to the natural, nominal purpose of the Pequod’s voyage” (232).

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Peleg and Bildad’s “accounting logic,” Moby-Dick, I contend, chronicles the last American hunt.

INTOLERABLE ALLEGORIES (OR, THE WHALE) A hunt. The last great hunt. For what? For Moby Dick, the huge white sperm whale: who is old, hoary, monstrous, and swims alone; who is unspeakably terrible in his wrath, having so often been attacked; and snow-white. Of course he is a symbol. Of what?

D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (2003 133)

This does not, however, mean that the hunt is over. Even as a lucrative business, Bildad and Peleg’s line of work is still described as a form of “vengeance.” Only, contrary to

Ahab’s monomania (his obsession with the one animal), the merchants are driven by a profit in theory without limit (Melville repeatedly mentions that the whalemen do not have a fixed wage but that their salary is indexed to the number of whales they kill). With

Ahab’s death, it is not hunting, but the hunt as a heroic enterprise, that disappears, only to be converted into the more systematic form of capture.

The hunt constitutes one variation on the well-trodden theme of the confrontation between man (overwhelmingly represented in the position of the colonizer) and the untamed wilderness. This constitutive agonism (“man” vs. “nature”) is a familiar topos of nineteenth-century literature and philosophy (from Crèvecoeur to Emerson, Thoreau to

London) inherited from both New England Puritanism’s long-standing ambivalence toward the Wilderness and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century captivity narratives (e.g. those of Mary Rowlandson, Hannah Duston, Mercy Harbison, and so on). 34 The

American geographic imaginary has thus been largely defined by a conception of nature

34 On the significance of the Wilderness as a real and conceptual space in the construction of America’s national identity, see for instance John Canup’s Out of the Wilderness.

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as frontier: a blank page or tabula rasa awaiting inscription. And yet, the uncharted landscape has also represented a transformative potentiality, a phantasmatic horizon line holding out the promise of radical alterity. In the expansive library of American hunting narratives, Leslie Fiedler locates an oscillation between the impulse to conquer and the temptation to get lost (or, as he writes, “to box the compass”). It is these dueling tendencies – consolidated in the contrapuntal coupling of Ahab and Ishmael or, as I’ll argue in Chapter One, the character of Natty Bumppo – that would inspire Deleuze and

Guattari’s concepts of becoming and territorialization and deterritorialization central to their approach of American literature and to my analysis.35

What critics have rarely explored in their discussions of these major American hunting narratives, however, is how they stage encounters not merely with an abstracted and idealized notion of “nature,” but with animals, and in the case of Moby-Dick, with one

35 I will mainly focus on A Thousand Plateaus in the dissertation, but Fiedler’s influence on Deleuze also manifests in Essays Critical and Clinical, as well as in his Dialogues with Claire Parnet and the Abécédaire. Deleuze’s theorization of territorialization and deterritorialization (and his fondness for the word “outlandish”) may also have been influenced by Philippe Jaworski’s study of Melville, Le Désert et l’Empire (Deleuze was on Jaworski’s dissertation committee). Indeed, Jaworski identifies two perceptual modes, two “regimes of desire,” governing Melville’s approach in Moby-Dick: “The Desert expresses the desire to go on, the open space, a possible interminable journey in the phenomenal world, in truth and sense endlessly recommenced. Here I speak of reading: creation, questioning, promise. / The desire for Systems organizes space in territory, territory in Empire. A center of authority determines the functions, defines attributions. Power, fixity: supremacy of interpretation [Le Désert dit le désir de continuer, l’espace, un cheminement peut-être interminable dans les phénomènes, la vérité et le sens toujours recommencés. Je parle ici de lecture : création, questionnement, promesse. / Le désir de Système organise l’espace en territoire, le territoire en Empire. Un centre d’autorité détermine les fonctions, définit les partages. Pouvoir, fixité : règne de l’interprétation]” (1986 17, my translation). The Melvillian desert for Jaworski (and by extension Deleuze and Guattari) is not merely the smooth space in wait of striation, but also the effect of a flight, of a desertion from organized bodies (both real and symbolic). For a splendid meditation on the baroque phenomenology of Moby-Dick’s elusive bodies – of the animal, of the leviathan of the nation, of the mutilated hunter, of the Babelic community of the Pequod, and so on – see Agnès Derail- Imbert’s Allures du corps. It is worth noting that Deleuze and Guattari speculate that Kafka’s “becoming-animals” are limited to short stories, as if the animal was still too close, too individualized or territorialized to provide the substance of a full-length novel. They identify in passing one novel-long becoming-animal, the only one sufficiently intense to blow up the confines of the short story: that of Captain Ahab’s becoming-whale (see the section “The Components of Expression” in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature).

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particular animal.36 The novel explicitly raises the question of representing the animal, asking what it means to attend to both “the whale” in its generality and Moby Dick in his particularity. “The question of the animal,” a refrain animal studies scholars have borrowed from Derrida, indexes the field’s critical discontent with philosophy’s propensity to “allegorize” the animal, that is to “confine” the multiplicity of the heterotrophic living into the singular general category of “the Animal.”37 This frustration has been otherwise articulated by Deleuze and Guattari, who railed against those who would seek to domesticate complex animal assemblages (e.g. swarms, schools and packs) as Oedipal totems (e.g. Freud’s “Wolfman”).

That Melville’s title (Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale) is typically abbreviated as Moby-Dick is symptomatic of such a reductionist tendency. The fact that the title is routinely amputated from its other half, maimed like Ahab’s leg, exemplifies the difficulty of keeping the irreducibilities introduced by the novel in play. What precisely is the novel

(named) after? Is it trying to get at the individual animal called Moby Dick38 or is it more interested in grasping “the Whale” as concept (the common taxon encompassing every

“spouting fish with a horizontal tail” [148])? Melville’s novel, I argue, countenances two incompatible possibilities, holding them together rather than choosing between them; it

36 On the rarity of studies examining the treatment of animals in American literature, see Colleen Glenney Boggs’s Animalia Americana (2013 19-33). “American literary studies has until recently fallen into a trap that Walter Benjamin noted in his essay on the tenth anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death,” notes Boggs, “the trap that ‘it is possible to read Kafka’s animal stories for quite a while without realizing that they are not about human beings at all’” (29). 37 The passage in which Derrida laments philosophy’s failing of the animal has often been quoted, but I want to underline that he presents this commonplace “pseudo-concept” – the Animal – as a homogenizing confinement imposed on animal life: “Confined within this catch-all concept, within this vast encampment of the animal, in this general singular, within the strict enclosure of this definite article (‘‘the Animal’’ and not ‘‘animals’’), as in a virgin forest, a zoo, a hunting or fishing ground, a paddock or an abattoir, a space of domestication, are all the living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers” (2008 34, emphases mine). 38 A matter further complicated by the fact that, conventionally, “Moby Dick” is hyphenated when it stands for the title of the book but not when it designates the white whale.

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puts in the same boat the monomaniac Ahab and the encyclopedic Ishmael.39

The title anticipates the novel’s impossible epistemic undertaking, which is further evidenced by the narrator’s deployment of a spectacular battery of biblical, zoological, culinary, fabulous, economic, statistical and literary references (from Job to Hobbes to

Cook to Hawthorne to Darwin) all in an attempt to pin down the animal. Whether exclusive or inclusive, the copula “or” that yokes “Moby-Dick” with “the Whale” indexes either a mere tautology (that Moby-Dick is but another name for the whale) or an irreducible inadequacy (that the proper name fails to capture the general reality it is after). The title stumbles on this innocuous-seeming “or,” this hinge that articulates the animal to its name.40

Melville warns against the temptation to subsume the animal under the apparent stability of its name (proper or generic). In a chapter he describes “as important a one as will be

39 In Prophéties du texte – Léviathan, Peter Szendy explains the distribution of these knowledgeable endeavors as the tasks of the archivist (Ishmael) and the anarchivist (Ahab). For Andrew Delbanco, the novel is shaped around the “encounter between these two principles – the widening embrace of Ishmael and the ‘monomania’ of Ahab.” Yet, he continues, “the book never becomes merely a contest between them, because Melville himself incorporates both, and he feels their claims with equal fervor” (xix). 40 The title’s stutter is repeated in the chapter entitled “Cetology,” which attempts to classify different families of whales according to their magnitude. About the “Right Whale,” the narrator confesses to be at a loss: “In one respect this is the most venerable of the leviathans, being the one first regularly hunted by man. It yields the article commonly known as whalebone or baleen; and the oil specially known as ‘whale oil,’ an inferior article in commerce. Among the fishermen, he is indiscriminately designated by all the following titles: The Whale; the Greenland Whale; the Black Whale; the Great Whale; the True Whale; the Right Whale. There is a deal of obscurity concerning the identity of the species thus multitudinously baptized. What then is the whale, which I include in the second species of my Folios? It is the Great Mysticetus of the English naturalists; the Greenland Whale of the English whalemen; the Baleine Ordinaire of the French whalemen; the Growlands Walfish of the Swedes. It is the whale which for more than two centuries past has been hunted by the Dutch and English in the Arctic seas; it is the whale which the American fishermen have long pursued in the Indian ocean, on the Brazil Banks, on the Nor’ West Coast, and various other parts of the world, designated by them Right Whale Cruising Grounds” (150).

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found in this volume,” he identifies this temptation as allegorical:41

So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory (223).

The problem of allegory for the animal, I want to suggest here, is precisely this problem of the “or” and its tendency to collapse the two realities it articulates (the literal and the figural, the sensible and the suprasensible). The novel refuses to equate “Moby-Dick” with “the Whale,” with the “or” simultaneously enabling this equation and marking its impossibility. What is “intolerable” is that the whale would be subsumed, indeed captured, by its very naming (and vice versa, Moby Dick by his special categorization).

The novel both refuses and exposes allegory as a linguistic apparatus of capture which works toward the erasure of the process and temporality required to go after the animal, thereby fantasmatically luring the captor in the comforting sense of being after the animal

(in the sense of being beyond it, or having overcome his own animality).

The narrator’s plea to resist allegorizing the whale recalls Derrida’s insistence at the beginning of The Animal That Therefore I Am that his cat, who is watching him as he stands naked, is not an allegory: “I must immediately make it clear, the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse our myths and religions, literature and fables” (2008 6, emphases mine). Ironically, the urgency of Derrida’s plea betrays the “natural tendency” to read (the animal) allegorically,

41 Though I do not have the space to develop this point here, I want to flag that the history of allegory is a complex one. I do not use allegory in the Benjaminian or de Manian sense, but more in the sense prevalent in the nineteenth-century American literary scene considerably influenced by the romantic theories of Goethe and Coleridge (i.e. as a rigid hermeneutic establishing one-to- one correspondences between signifier and signified). This mechanistic view of allegory was the paradigm against which Melville protests as it threatens to reduce the hunted animal to an abstract cipher, a transparent signifier that would not hold within itself its raison d’être.

Introduction | 40

to turn the animal into a fabulous cipher bearing “a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for and in man” (37). The problem of the animal in literature and philosophy is inseparable from a problem of naming, or rather, of calling:

To follow and to be after will not only be the question, and the question of what we call the animal. We shall discover in the follow-through the question of the question, that which begins by wondering what to respond means and whether an animal (but which one?) ever replies in its own name. And by wondering whether one can answer for what “I am (following)” [je suis] means when that seems to necessitate an “I am inasmuch as I am after [après] the animal” or “I am inasmuch as I am alongside [auprès] the animal” (10).

From the outset of the novel, the question posed by Moby-Dick is one of naming (we will recall the famous opening line: “Call me Ishmael.”) and one of reading the name (is

Ishmael the narrator’s name, or are we just calling him Ishmael?). The novel stages the interminability of the hunt, even as hunting appears to be stalled by capture, even as the animal endlessly disappears behind its representation.

My project begins at the very moment the hunt is said to have ended. Chapter One asks why Natty Bumppo, the hunter-hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Leatherstocking

Tales, must die. I argue that the hunter, once seen as indispensible to “taming” the wilderness, must disappear for the colonial project to be complete. I look at The Prairie as a “captivity narrative” of sorts where the American open, the space of animals par excellence, gets striated and captured with the aid of the hunter, with the hunter working toward his own obsolescence to become a trapper, and eventually the trap or contraption itself. Chapter Two examines the watercolors of naturalist John James Audubon, whose work exemplified the conflation of art, science, and hunting in the Jacksonian era. The chapter introduces huntology as a reparative theory for retrieving and attending to the predatory logic that continues to entrap the animal. Here I draw upon the ambivalence of the French verb chasser, which means at the same time to hunt (to go after) and to

Introduction | 41

repel (to chase away from oneself): when we expose the hunt as a dialectic of catch and release, we bring back into the picture the human subject previously obscured by his own epistemological pursuit. Just at the point at which Audubon’s paintings willfully erase the figure of the hunter, I turn to Poe’s urban fiction to contend that the hunt is hardly over, merely repressed. Chapter Three shows how Poe resuscitates the figure of the hunter in the character of Detective Dupin, who alone is capable of tracking down the animal- murderer lost in the labyrinth of the modern city. I find in Poe’s fiction a new theory of reading, or decrypting, allowing us to detect the traces of the captured animal. The afterword examines how Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, exactly contemporaneous with

Darwin’s The Origin of Species, stages the tension between taxonomic knowledge and the poetic work of fiction.

Introduction | 42

Whether owing to the almost omniscient look-outs at the mast-heads of the whale-ships, now penetrating even through Behring’s straits, and into the remotest secret drawers and lockers of the world; and the thousand harpoons and lances darted along all continental coasts; the moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale (1992 501-502)

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Chapter One

ENTRAPMENTS CHASING THE OPEN IN JAMES FENIMORE COOPER’S THE PRAIRIE

Everything else which belongs to the Western scene has long since been assimilated: the prairies subdivided and landscaped; the mountains staked off as hunting preserves and national parks; fabulous beasts, like the grizzlies and the buffalo, killed or fenced in as tourist attractions; even the mythological season of the West, that nonexistent interval between summer and fall called “Indian summer,” become just another part of the White year. Only the Indian survives, however ghettoized, debased and debauched, to remind us with his alien stare of the new kind of space in which the baffled refugees from Europe first found him (an unhumanized vastness).

Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (1968 23-24)

[M]ost of those who witnessed the purchase of the empty empire, have lived to see already a populous and sovereign state, parcelled from its inhabitants, and received into the bosom of the national Union, on terms of political equality. The incidents and scenes which are connected with this legend, occurred in the earliest periods of the enterprises which have led to so great and so speedy a result.

James Fenimore Cooper, The Prairie (1987 11)

LAND SPECULATIONS: (PUR)CHASING THE OPEN Whereas the titles of James Fenimore Cooper’s four other installments of The

Leatherstocking Tales are based on characters, The Prairie (1827) singularly addresses the environment in which its action takes place. Set in 1805, just two years after the

Louisiana Purchase, The Prairie foregrounds the question of territory at a time when it remained to be seen how the young nation, having just doubled in size (fig. 1), would be changed by the acquisition of the vast expanse of unspoiled land west of the Mississippi

River.

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Cooper presents the prairie both as an apocalyptic wasteland and the prelapsarian “pure space” that Rainer Maria Rilke would call “the open” – the “unsupervised [Unüberwacthe]” area that constitutes the milieu of the animal (1963 67). In striking contrast to the dense woodlands of upstate New York (in which the first two installments, The Pioneers [1823] and The Last of the Mohicans [1826], are set), the arid swathes of the prairie are likened to a moderately agitated ocean wherein “the eye [is] fatigued with the sameness and chilling dreariness of the landscape” (13). The last retreat for “the barbarous and savage occupants of the country” and a provisional refuge for those who wish to escape the law, the prairie is unintelligible to this disembodied and singular “eye.”42 Only a “practiced reader,” the narrator observes, will not be deceived by the seeming interminableness and sterility of the landscape (14). At first glance, Cooper’s wearied “eye” has then little to do with Emerson’s transparent eyeball. It does not dissolve pantheistically in nature but, in the “absence of foreign objects” (13), is disoriented, unable to find its bearings. The novel thus compels the question of orientation, translated here as a faculty for reading or deciphering what appears at first glance illegible. How does one navigate the asemiotic

“no man’s land” that is the prairie?

I will argue in this chapter that the novel’s geographical concerns are inseparable from aesthetic and political questions: How does the land both resist and lend itself to

42 I am tempted here to oppose this cyclopic gaze – which might or might not be the gaze of the narrator – to that of Rilke’s animal looking at the open “with all its eyes [mit allen Augen].” On the one hand, in Cooper, we have a monocular point of view that strives to make sense of a seemingly uniform landscape by parceling it out, while on the other hand, in Rilke, we have a multifarious and heterogeneous site of perception. Not only does the adjective “all” leave room for animals that have more or less than two eyes (caterpillars, spiders, water fleas, etc.), but also, read as a hyperbole, it implies that the limitless “open” always exceeds the visual capacities of the animal, which it never “beholds [erblicken],” as Heidegger suggests (1998 159). Rilke’s creature, Heidegger lamented, is too much of a Nietzschean animal. For Nietzsche, “objective truth” – a concept he does not do away with – proceeds from an irreducible multiplicity of points of view: “The more feelings about a matter which we allow to come to expression, the more eyes, different eyes through which we are able to view the same matter, the more complete our ‘conception’ of it, our ‘objectivity,’ will be” (On the Genealogy of Morals, quoted by Tyler, 2012 168).

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representation? How does one read and write – “decode” and “overcode” to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari – the blank page of the Louisiana territory? At issue in the romance is the capture of what seems a priori uncapturable: a wilderness that eludes clear vision, evades representation and defies occupation (ob capere). The prairie is foremost an exemplary site of land speculation at the heart of the project of early American frontierism, which is the subject of Cooper’s meditation on the role of vision (specere) in the mercantile and libidinal investments of the expansionist doctrine that later came to be known as Manifest Destiny.

Fig. 1. Map of the territories purchased from France in 1803.

In the preface to his 1832 edition of The Prairie, Cooper presents the as-yet undomesticated tract of land as a natural frontier to the young nation’s Western expansion. But the frontier is never simply a demarcation line separating the wild from the civilized in the American imaginary. It is also the mythical soil in which the American

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dream is rooted, the phantasmatic “elsewhere” that serves as the breeding ground for the creature whom Leslie Fiedler dubs the “New Man, the American tertium quid” (1968 25).43

Insofar as it traces the perimeter beyond which myth and imagination come to supplant and supplement knowledge, the frontier constitutes at one and the same time a threat and a promise for the emerging nation and for the poet-historian.44 Captivating precisely because it simultaneously resists and invites capture, the terra nullius of the prairie encapsulates the ambivalence most Americans entertained in the first half of the nineteenth century toward Manifest Destiny.

As the novel opens, Cooper announces that the challenge for the now-doubled nation will be to domesticate the inhospitable territories and assimilate the nomadic (and animalized) “swarms of. . .restless people. . .hovering on the skirts of American society”

(9). What the narrator euphemistically calls the “empty empire” of Louisiana was, of course, anything but – designating the lands of indigenous peoples as well as an untold number of plants and animals. This paronomastic turn-of-phrase ventriloquizes the discourse of the colonizer whose “eye,” as Mary Louise Pratt has observed, “produces subsistence habitats as ‘empty’ landscapes, meaningful only in terms of a capitalist future”

43 For Fiedler, Cooper’s uncouth hunter-hero Natty Bumppo, “that first not-quite-White man of our literature” (25), is the paragon of a new species able to “orient” themselves in the West without turning it into the East, and thereby to forgo the colonial violence recalled by the appellation “Indians” for the Native Americans. In Fiedler’s view, the Westerner is not the emissary of Western culture but the White man remade in the Indian’s image (1968 49). The confusion comes from the fact that, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “directions in America are different: the search for arborescence and the return to the Old World occur in the East. But there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever-receding limit, its shifting and displaced frontiers. There is a whole American ‘map’ in the West, where even the trees form rhizomes. America reversed the directions: it put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came full circle; its West is the edge of the East. (India is not the intermediary between the Occident and the Orient, as Haudricourt believed: America is the pivot point and mechanism of reversal.)” (2003 19) 44 If The Leatherstocking Tales is “a decrescendo of reality, and a crescendo of beauty,” in the words of D.H. Lawrence (2003 55), The Prairie is the least plot-driven narrative of Cooper’s pentalogy and, arguably, the author’s most conscious effort at painting a landscape tantamount to the sublime.

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(2003 61).45 Simultaneously, the bleak look of the prairie anticipates what Deleuze and

Guattari will call the “smooth ground,” a heterogeneous, open milieu on the point of being closed, measured, overcoded, striated – “captured.”

Perceiving in the “empty empire” of the prairie a blank page awaiting inscription, Cooper foregrounds in the novel two dominant (and seemingly conflicting) strategies of territorial expansion: hunting and capture. Both approaches are already encrypted in the term used to designate the transaction, purchase, which, as indicated in the Oxford English

Dictionary, expresses the acquisition of real estate by means other than inheritance, while hinting at the labor or effort – the chase – necessary to secure the possession.

PURCHASE (from Middle French, pourchasser): † The action or process of obtaining or gaining something for oneself in any way. † The action of seizing or taking something forcibly; pillage, plunder. Also (chiefly Sc.): the action of hunting or seizing prey. † The action of attempting to bring about or cause something; endeavour; contrivance; machination. † U.S. An area of land purchased by a colony, government, individual, etc., esp. from North American Indians.

Bearing in mind the different valences of the word “purchase,” I examine the epistemologies and ideologies of entrapment presented in Cooper’s novel as they came to define the ethos of the emergent nation at the turn of the nineteenth-century. It is at the moment when hunting disappears as a material practice, I argue, that predation is

45 The passive voice of The Prairie’s first paragraph presents this as a self-evident truth: “Much was said and written, at the time, concerning the policy of adding the vast regions of Louisiana, to the already immense and but half-tenanted territories of the United States. As the warmth of controversy however subsided, and party considerations gave place to more liberal views, the wisdom of the measure began to be generally conceded. It soon became apparent to the meanest capacity, that, while nature had placed a barrier of desert to the extension of our population in the west, the measure had made us the masters of a belt of fertile country, which, in the revolutions of the day, might have become the property of a rival nation. It gave us the sole command of the great thoroughfare of the interior, and placed the countless tribes of savages, who lay along our borders, entirely within our control; it reconciled conflicting rights, and quieted national distrusts; it opened a thousand avenues to the inland trade, and to the waters of the Pacific; and, if ever time or necessity shall require a peaceful division of this vast empire, it assures us of a neighbour that will possess our language, our religion, our institutions, and it is also to be hoped, our sense of political justice” (emphasis mine, 9).

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internalized as Manifest Destiny’s logic (if obscured by its proclaimed self-evidence, its supposed manifestness) contributing to the extinction of wildlife and the near- eradication of Native Americans.46 I hope to make manifest – i.e. to call attention to the self-erasing mark of the hand (manus-festus) – the violence done to both animals and animalized human subjects by exposing the mechanism behind the sublimation of the hunt as a logic of capture.

This chapter proposes that the problem of vision, by which I mean both the perceptual faculty of seeing something and the conceptual ability to forge a mental image, is intimately tied to the violence of capture.47 Reading Cooper’s romance through the

46 Tellingly, in The Pioneers – which takes place in 1793, ten years before the events of The Prairie – Natty Bumppo describes the death of his friend Chingachgook as “natur’ giving out in a chase that’s run too long” (1985:425). The life of the Mohican is entirely subsumed under the motif of the hunt. The end of the chase for the Native American metonymically marks a historical transition over the rights and modes of occupation of the land. The figure of the Native American, whom the author sees fade before his eyes, is emblematic of the precarious openness of the land: “The Great Prairies appear to be the final gathering place of the red men. The remnants of the Mohicans, and the Delawares, of the Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees, are destined to fulfil their time on these vast plains. The entire number of the Indians, within the Union, is differently computed, at between one and three hundred thousand souls. Most of them inhabit the country west of the Mississippi. At the period of the tale, they dwelt in open hostility; national feuds passing from generation to generation. The power of the republic has done much to restore peace to these wild scenes, and it is now possible to travel in security, where civilised man did not dare to pass unprotected five-and-twenty years ago” (1832 preface, 1985 884-885). The unwitting irony that binds together the Union’s peace-making to the ineluctable extinction of the previous occupants of the land lays bare the imperial logic underwriting this paragraph. At the moment Cooper wrote this preface, in the midst of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, the land of the Great Plains had been for the most part “secured” and peace, thereby, had been “restored.” In a recognizably Hobbesian gesture, the author equates pacification with the process of civilizing the ageless and natural belligerence of the “savages.” Yet, in the same breath, the idea of “restoration,” as opposed to “instauration,” of peace implies that the pacification of the land is in effect a return to normal. Such logical inconsistency naturalizes the extermination of the Native Americans and works toward the exculpation of the republic’s assimilationist politics, which is presented as following a preordained agenda. As a consequence, nothing remains of the West, Fiedler writes in 1968, except for the “alien stare” of the Vanishing American that reminds us of the “unhumanized vastness” and “historyless antiquity” of the pre-colonial Americas (an anachronic stare that recalls the irreducible asymmetry of Derrida’s “visor effect”). 47 The opposition that Elisa New discerns in nineteenth-century American literature between the visionary rhetoric of empire and the more pragmatic “literature of experience” is useful: “Where the visionary finds only Israel or Babylon, Promised Land, Manifest Destiny, or a receding Frontier (plantations or power abounding, but no place and no satisfactory calling), a discerning and prudent orthodoxy on the lookout for Revelation finds birds, pasturage, and work among

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philosophical treatments of capture that informed and transformed the modern conception of animality in the West, from Merleau-Ponty to Deleuze and Guattari to

Heidegger,48 I argue that the question of the animal is inseparable from the traps of vision. Attending to the manifold manifestations of animality in The Prairie requires us to address the issue of the environment or milieu in which the animal is seen appearing and disappearing, as well as that of the kind of observer who does the seeing. Questions of appearance, visibility and representation thus undergird this chapter: How can we understand the discursive violence to the animal that persists in the recourse to “capture” in the logics and idioms of representation? To what extent does hunting constitute a prehistory to the naturalization of discourses of capture today?

PERSISTENCE OF VISION When I say that every visible is invisible, that perception is imperception, that consciousness has a “punctum caecum,” that to see is always to see more than one sees – this must not be understood in the sense of a contradiction – it must not be imagined that I add to the visible. . .a nonvisible. . . – One has to understand that it is visibility itself that involves a nonvisibility. What [consciousness] does not see it does not see for reasons of principle; it is because it is consciousness that it does not see. What it does not see is what in it prepares the vision of the rest (as the retina is blind at the point where the fibers that will permit the vision spread out into it).

them. Cultivating surprise, side-stepping ‘entelechy’ as an almost too-obvious snare to the self’s excesses, the poetic reorientation of American sight will . . . disclose a different set of Protestant provenances than those customarily invoked in studies of American vision” (1998:9-10). Cooper is an interesting case for New insofar as The Leatherstocking Tales register how “unsettled American ranges become bourgeois homes-as-found” while never being unambiguously critical of the century’s expansionist vision. It is precisely that the notion of vision is highly problematic, and problematized by Cooper who, New reminds us, devotes “uncommon concentration to verbal transpositions of retinal impressions and much space – proportionally – to lamenting the failures of sight” (44). Vision as I understand it is akin to what Nicholas Mirzoeff, drawing on Foucault and Rancière, has called a “complex of visuality,” which he defines as a combination of specific modes of classifying, separating and aestheticizing that work together toward presenting “authority as self-evident” (and therefore attempt to erase the labor required to legitimate the authorities) (2011 3-4). 48 I choose to focus on these philosophers because their views of animality (and arguably their philosophies as a whole) were profoundly influenced by the works of Jakob von Uexküll, the father of ethology, whose claustral concept of the Umwelt I discuss in the introduction. For an extended survey of the way Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze’s ontologies of living beings engage Uexküll’s work, see Brett Buchanan’s Onto-Ethologies.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (1968 247-248)

In The Prairie, the aging Natty Bumppo, once a mighty frontiersman and hunter and now but a “miserable trapper” (115), threatens to be supplanted as the protagonist of the romance by his naturalist foil, Dr. Obed Bat. It is in the semidarkness of early dawn that we first encounter Dr. Bat (or Battius, as he prefers to be called) returning from one of his scientific expeditions. Bat is a cartoonish, easily spooked wildlife expert, a poor man’s

John James Audubon, with something of a habit of improvising the genus and species of the flora and fauna he encounters. Driven by what we’re told is his “thirst for natural history,” Dr. Bat has attached himself to the caravan of the Bush family, a nomadic tribe of lawless squatters with whom he is roaming the “virgin territory” of Louisiana in search of untapped natural treasures from the New Continent.

Losing his path back to camp one day, Bat accidentally “discovers” a new species. Later, recalling the encounter, he boasts of having risked his life “in behalf of mankind” in the hopes of documenting his find. In striking contrast to Natty Bumppo – who on the other hand is nicknamed “la longue carabine” [the long rifle], with all its attendant sexual innuendoes –, Bat ultimately confesses that his pistol was of too small a caliber to shoot the specimen. Facing down the terrible beast, the man of science trades the gun for a pen and fumbles for his tablet.49 “I did better than to attempt waging a war, in which I could not be the victor,” he later says, “I recorded the event” (emphasis mine, 70). His entry, a delectable pastiche of Linnaean taxonomy, reads:

49 The apparent naiveté and ostensible ludicrousness of the scientist can be misleading. In Imperial Eyes, Pratt has shown that the naturalist often presents himself as a de-eroticized “insect hunter,” a “self-effacing” anti-hero: “Unlike such antecedents as the conquistador and the hunter, the figure of the naturalist-hero often has a certain impotence or androgyny about him . . . The naturalist-heroes are not, however, women – no world is more androcentric than that of natural history) . . . In the literature of the imperial frontier, the conspicuous innocence of the naturalist acquires meaning in relation to an assumed guilt of conquest, a guilt the naturalist figure eternally tries to escape, and eternally invokes, if only to distance himself from it once again” (2003 56-57).

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Oct. 6, 1805 . . . Quadruped; seen by star-light, and by the aid of a pocket lamp, in the Prairies of North America. . .Genus, unknown, therefore named after the Discoverer, and from the happy coincidence of having been seen in the evening – Vespertilio; Horribilis, Americanus. Dimensions (by estimation). Greatest length eleven feet, height, six feet. Head, erect, nostrils, expansive, eyes, expressive and fierce, teeth, serrated and abundant. Tail, horizontal, waving and slightly feline. Feet, large and hairy. Talons, long, arquated, dangerous. Ears, inconspicuous. Horns, elongated, diverging and formidable. Colour, plumbeous-ashy, with fiery spots. Voice, sonorous, martial and appalling. Habits, gregarious, carnivorous, fierce and fearless. There,” exclaimed Obed, when he had ended his sententious but comprehensive description, “there is an animal, which will be likely to dispute with the Lion, his title to be called the King of the Beasts!” (71)

Shortly after, rereading his description aloud, Bat is suddenly terrified at the sight of a dark form running toward him once more, convinced that he is again confronted with his newly discovered specimen, only to realize that the form is in fact his faithful donkey,

Asinus.

As it becomes undeniable that it was his own ass that the naturalist was contemplating all along, he blames his mistake on an optical illusion known as persistence of vision, a perceptual phenomenon in which an image endures after the object seen is no longer present. “The image of the Vespertilio was on the retina,” he explains, “and I was silly enough to mistake my own faithful beast for the monster” (73). The doctor prides himself on seeing not “with the organs of sight” but with what he claims (with questionable logic) are “much more infallible instruments of vision: the conclusion of reason, and the deductions of scientific premises” (105).50 As a consequence, he does not see but oversees the animal, and thus overlooks his animal (just as Benjamin has argued that the language of man has “overnamed” nature and thereby reduced it to silence

50 In privileging of the mind over the eye, Battius is unquestionably Cartesian. In her analysis of Descartes’ fifth Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and Meteorology, Sarah Kofman explains that because “images on the retina are perspectivist, Descartes concludes that there is no resemblance between object and image. It is the mind that sees, and not the eye, and the mind is consciousness without point of view” (1998 51).

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[2004 73]). As his surname teases, the good doctor’s vision is impaired, as he is ultimately shown to be blind as a bat.

Refusing anatomical coherence, Bat’s improbable assemblage of mismatched attributes proves a chimera, a figment of his own positivist imagination. In the Discourse on the

Method, Descartes warns us against the misleading power of imagination:

[W]hether we are awake or asleep, we ought never to let ourselves be convinced except on the evidence of our reason. And it is to be noted that I say ‘our reason,’ and not ‘our imagination’ or ‘our senses.’ For although we see the sun very clearly, we should not on that account judge that it is only as large as we see it; and we can well imagine the head of a lion grafted onto the body of a goat, without having necessarily to conclude form this that a chimera exists in the world; for reason does not dictate to us that what we see or imagine in this way is true [nous pouvons bien imaginer distinctement une tête de lion entée sur le corps d’une chèvre, sans qu’il faille conclure pour cela qu’il y ait au monde une chimère : car la raison ne nous dicte point que ce que nous voyons ou imaginons ainsi soit véritable] (2008 34).

If Bat creates a monster, however, it is not because he relies too much on his senses or imagination as Descartes warns but, ironically, because he proves to be overly methodical.

Part-feline, part-bovine, part-avian, his animal does not elude taxonomy but on the contrary lends itself too easily to the procedures of classification: it is not ungraspable but all-too-graspable, excessively prone to being itemized and captured.

It is by writing it that Bat turns the shapeless apparition into an animal. His capture is made possible by and through writing. In his commentary on Rousseau, Derrida goes further and suggests that writing is not just what enables capture but, originally, is capture:

If we suppose that writing had a primitive and pictorial stage, it would emphasize this absence, this evil, or this resource which forever shapes and undermines the truth of the phenomenon; produces it and of course substitutes it. . . . Writing carries death. One could play on this: writing as zoography as that painting of the living which stabilizes animality is, according to Rousseau, the writing of savages. Who are also, as we know, only hunters: men of the zoogreia, of the capture of the living. Writing

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would indeed be the pictorial representation of the hunted beast: magical capture and murder [à supposer qu’elle ait un stade primitif et pictural, l’écriture accuse cette absence, ce mal ou cette ressource qui depuis toujours travaille la vérité du phénomène : la produit et bien sûr la supplée. . . . L’écriture porte la mort. On pourrait jouer : l’écriture comme peinture du vivant, fixant l’animalité, la zoographie, est selon Rousseau l’écriture des sauvages. Qui ne sont aussi, nous le savons, que chasseurs : hommes de la zoogreia, de la capture du vivant. L’écriture serait bien représentation picturale de la bête chassée : capture et meurtre magiques] (1997 292).

By playfully ascribing pictorial and cynegetic origins to writing, Derrida suggests that, since its inception (depuis toujours), Western representation has been inherently hostile to the living, and especially to the living animal; yet he also leaves open the possibility to historicize this violence by underlining the factitiousness of Rousseau’s partition between, on the one hand, pictographic proto-writing and, on the other, analytical phonography, or, in other words, between the “writing of savages” (who, as we well know, are “only hunters”) and the “writing of the civilized,” a form of writing capable of slipping through the coarse mimetic net of zoography. 51 This non-pictorial, more abstract mode of representation which, supposedly, is no longer predicated on the pursuit of the hunted beast is not just one that ceases to “stabilize” animality, as Spivak’s translation suggests, but also one that averts its gaze and no longer looks fixedly at animality (“fixant l’animalité”

– we could translate: fixating (on) animality, to combine the idea of directing one’s eye toward something in a fixed manner and the obsessive attachment at work in this fixation). Writing as zoography “carries” death like one carries a child: it is what kills and, simultaneously, what shapes the living, engendering and endangering it in the same gesture.

Capturing the beast in words, Dr. Bat contains its potential threat, gives it contours and makes it come into being. By striving desperately to make the “phenomenal” apparition – let us remember here that phenomenon comes from the Greek phainesthai, “to appear” –

51 Derrida’s syntax complicates Rousseau’s picture and invites us to read “the writing of savages” not only as the writing done by these so-called savages, but also to them: the civilized thereby appear as savage hunters in their own right.

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coincide with a set of preestablished noumenal criteria, indeed by having a preconceived idea of “the animal,” Dr. Bat is guilty of what Derrida called a bêtise, a term that David

Wills aptly translates in the English as an asinanity (2008 31). 52 In this scene, the naturalist’s retina is a trap, in which the animal – before it even exists – is already caught, recalling the famous line from Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy: “Our eyes encircle the creature from every side like traps” (1963 67).

Retina comes from the Latin rete, meaning “net,” a reference to the retina’s “fibrillar” or fibrous texture as resembling a net (we can think of the German Netzhaut for retina, or the French rets designating a hunting net used to capture birds or, figuratively, an ambush). But as the Vespertilio anecdote suggests, this net does not just capture the animal as it is, if there is such a thing, but operates as a grid through which the animal becomes legible. Here the fact that the retina is defined by its texture resonates with the correlation Derrida outlines between writing and the capture of the living animal: to a large extent, the encounter between the man of science and the animal was pre-scripted.

Cooper scholar William Kelly has observed that, “Blinded by hubris, [Bat] extends the ideals of the Enlightenment to a ludicrous extreme,” attempting to “impose absolute

52 Bat’s quixotic character is underlined by his being inseparable from his stubborn companion throughout the novel (at one point he is even tied up to Asinus by the Sioux who capture him: “the legs of the Naturalist were attached to the beast in such a manner that the two animals might be said to be incorporated and to form a new order” [304]). But Asinus is not just the objective marker of the scientist’s ludicrousness. As the ur-domesticated animal, the donkey is also recruited to underline the contrast between the trapper’s pragmatic view and the scientist’s sentimental idealism. Twice, Bat and Bumppo argue over the lot of Asinus, whom for reasons of safety the trapper wishes to put to death. The compassionate naturalist ends up saving in extremis the life of his companion, who then proves crucial in helping the two men out of perilous situation. Thus the course of action vindicates Battius and seems to justify his (selective) compassion. It should also be noted that, though recurringly ridiculed by the trapper, the naturalist is never fully defeated in their debates, and at times the author himself explicitly sides with the man of science (see for instance Cooper’s footnote p. 100). For a discussion of the thorny issue of compassion and animals, see Olivia Rosenthal’s Que font les rennes après Noël?, Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, and my “Zarathustra’s Philosafari.”

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order on nature through scientific classification” (105). Entrapped in his own system of representation, Dr. Bat is unable to see the animal for what it appears to be, lured instead by what he wants to see (hence the self-referential name, vespertilio being the Latin for

“bat”). But there is another logic at work: Bat’s stated desire to encounter a beast that might prove a match for the Lion is a reference to the historical contest between the Old and the New World at the time. The rivalry was initiated by the French naturalist

Georges Buffon, who charged that the supposed absence of large animals on the New

Continent stood as evidence of the young nation’s immaturity and degeneracy.53 At the time when Cooper situates The Prairie, this “arms race” raged on, with Jefferson still holding out hope, when he appointed Lewis and Clark for their 1803 expedition, that the explorers might find a living mammoth that could compete with the African elephant.

53 In his Histoire Naturelle, Buffon explains that the humid climate of the New World generated second-rate life-forms: “La Nature vivante y est donc beaucoup moins agissante, beaucoup moins variée, et nous pouvons même dire beaucoup moins forte ; car nous verrons, par l’énumération des animaux de l’Amérique, que non seulement les espèces en sont en petit nombre, mais qu’en général tous les animaux y sont incomparablement plus petits que ceux de l’ancien continent [note the irony: animals are incomparably smaller, and thus the difference between the continents is incommensurable], et qu’il n’y en a aucun en Amérique qu’on puisse comparer à l’éléphant, au rhinocéros, à l’hippopotame, au dromadaire, à la girafe, au buffle, au lion, au tigre, etc. Le plus gros de tous les animaux de l’Amérique méridionale est le tapir . . . cet animal, le plus grand de tous, cet éléphant du nouveau monde, est de la grosseur d’un veau de six mois ou d’une très petite mule” (emphasis mine). For a detailed description of the polemic, see Antonello Gerbi’s The Dispute of the New World and Paul Semonin’s American Monster. There are multiple indirect references to this quarrel in Battius’ discourse (69-70, 106), but also in Natty’s attempt to refute the scientist’s meliorist vision and his celebration of the Old Continent: “‘Old World!’ retorted the trapper, ‘that is the miserable cry of all the half-starved miscreants that have come into this blessed land since the days of my boyhood! They tell you of the old world, as if the Lord had not the power and the will to create the universe in a day! or as if he had not bestowed his gifts with an equal hand, though, not with an equal mind, or equal wisdom, have they been received and used! were they to say a worn out, and an abused, and a sacrilegious, world, they might not be so far from the truth!’” (237) To which Bat responds that the trapper takes this issue of old and new too “literally”: if the New Continent is of the same geological age, it is “morally” less mature. I want to flag that Bat is not entirely consistent in his allegiances, sometimes attacking Buffon and promoting the grandeur of the New Continent, and at other times defending the view according to which this hemisphere was morally, if not physically, “unripe.” For a more extended account on this issue, see Matthew Sivils’ compelling reading of The Prairie as Cooper’s rebuttal of Buffon’s theories.

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Cooper’s antihero embodies the paradox of the New World, whose novelty remains defined and conditioned by the Old World. He personifies the expansionist logic that enlisted natural history in the American imperialist project and, in the process, took animals hostage in a coercive system of classification. But at stake in Cooper’s portrayal of Bat is neither merely the Oedipal drama unfolding between the Old and New Worlds, nor still the complicity between natural history and empire apparent in the doctor’s martial rhetoric. Bat’s libido sciendi is also symptomatic and emblematic of a transition from the epistemological and cultural model of the hunt to that of capture. In this regard, bringing into focus the differences and similarities in the ways Bumppo and Battius approach animality can help us give another account for the precipitous “disappearance of animals” which, as John Berger has observed, has characterized the last two centuries.

THE DIS-APPEARANCE OF ANIMALS (Thus knowledge gives life laws that separate it from what it can do, that keep it from acting, that forbid it to act, maintaining it in the narrow framework of scientifically observable reaction: almost like an animal in a zoo.)

Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (2006 93)

The postulate of classical logic is that given the observer as fallible subjectivity, there can be appearance, but this de facto appearance is reducible de jure by a better knowledge of the apparatus and of our sensorial imperfections. The idea of “objective truth” is not beyond reach.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature (2003 93)

“Everywhere animals disappear,” writes John Berger in the classic About Looking: “In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance” (1980 24). Akira

Lippit elaborates: “It is a cliché of modernity: human advancement always coincides with a recession of nature and its figures. . .Modernity sustains. . .the disappearance of animals as a constant state. That is,. . . animals never entirely vanish. Rather, they exist in a state of perpetual vanishing” (2000 1). It is in that sense that they can disappear “everywhere.” This state of permanent disappearance explains why Berger takes the zoo as the paradigmatic

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space for understanding our relation to animals in modernity (in the same way perhaps the camp is the “nomos” of modern politics for Agamben54): a major emblem of modern colonial power, the public zoo bears witness to the modern impossibility of

“encountering” animals (32).55

But if animals “disappear” in modernity, it is not merely because they are increasingly domesticated, enclosed in “natural” reserves, massively slaughtered and banished from urban environments, or because, as Lippit and others have argued, technology provided

“virtual shelters for displaced animals” in the age of photography and later cinema

(2000 187) – in other words, not that they can no longer be “seen.” Rather, it is because they have fewer possibilities to “appear,” in the sense of coming into view or emerging out of invisibility on their own terms (if such thing is ever possible). Berger’s is not just a nostalgic meditation on extinction, exploitation and industrialization in the nineteenth century but also, more literally, on the disappearance of animals as their receding from view, their becoming “out of focus” (21) while paradoxically being, in principle and in fact, entirely on display within the limits of their cages.56

54 As Nigel Rothfels reminds us, nineteenth century zoos are different from earlier collections of animals insofar as they are no longer mainly designed for the entertainment of visitors but have gradually become sanctuaries devoted to the conservation of endangered species (2002 38). One cannot help but draw a parallel with the attribution of parcels of land as “Indian preservations” in the middle of the nineteenth century in the US. 55 Berger notes that visitors are often disappointed by the animals that do behave the way they imagined and fail to return their gazes (we remember the tired eyes of Rilke’s panther). About the continual disappointment experienced by zoogoers, Rothfels writes: “regardless of how much we may desire the animals in our collections to return our look, regardless of how much we are disappointed when they try to escape our attention, it is precisely when they do look back that the edifice undergirding the zoological garden begins to collapse” (2002 12). 56 “The disappearance of animals takes several forms,” explains Anat Pick, “some of them paradoxically those of enhanced visibility. Animals appear as pets, as endeared subjects of live action or animated film, as stuffed toys, and, most significantly for Berger, in the zoo” (2011 103). She adds: “the disappearance of animals from daily life that renders them utterly visible – that represents them – as objects of mastery and knowledge has only intensified under the conditions of endangerment. With a hint of titillation, endangerment lends new legitimacy to zoos as engines of species ‘conservation’” (104).

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Here I draw on the reflections of French poet and philosopher Jean-Christophe Bailly on a series of paintings by Gilles Aillaud (to whom Berger’s essay is dedicated) depicting animals in zoos. Taking as his point of departure Heraclitus’ aphorism, “nature loves to hide [phusis kruptesthai philei],” Bailly suggests that, in captivity, animals are submitted to a regime of absolute and inescapable visibility. It is worth noting that Bailly defines visibility as a form of réseau, or net [2009:14], which resonates with Maurice Merleau-

Ponty’s visible as a connective tissue binding the seer and the seen. Captive animals are deprived of a territory, which for Bailly is primarily constituted by hiding places where animals keep out of sight (primarily to hunt or to avoid predators). In captivity, animals cannot hide, but also, as a paradoxical consequence, no longer have the possibility to crop up unexpectedly.57

The example of Bat’s confrontation with the Vespertilio is telling in this respect. The apparition of the animal – as a dark form emerging from an open field – is immediately caught and replaced with a preposterous taxonomic profile. There is no “encounter” to speak of, let alone a “meeting” in the sense Donna Haraway lends to this verb, since the sudden emergence of the beast is immediately sifted through the grid of taxonomy.

When Merleau-Ponty encounters animal life, it is as a “power to invent the visible”

(2003 190), a disorderly “impression” that unexpectedly surges and wrinkles the smooth veil of invisibility in which it was hiding:

57 Thoreau uses a similar analogy in his opposition between the zoological knowledges of the hunter and of the scientist, poet, or philosopher, the former proceeding from nature’s less timid, quasi-voluntary self-exhibition: “Fishermen, hunters, woodchoppers, and others, spending their lives in the fields and woods, in a peculiar sense a part of Nature themselves, are often in a more favorable mood for observing her, in the intervals of their pursuits, than philosophers or poets even, who approach her with expectation. She is not afraid to exhibit herself to them. The traveller on the prairie is naturally a hunter, on the headwaters of the Missouri and Columbia a trapper, and at the Falls of St. Mary a fisherman. He who is only a traveller learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience” (1989 491).

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[W]e see the protoplasm move, a living matter that moves; to the right is the head of the animal, the left its tail. From this moment on, the future comes before the present. A field of space-time has been opened: there is the beast there [Un champ d’espace temps a été ouvert: il y a là une bête]. The perceived crawling is, in sum, the total meaning of the partial movements figured in the three phases, which make action as words make a sentence. There is a perception of continuity between cause and effect. Michotte questions those who doubt this causality: they have what Nietzsche calls “scientific myopia” (154-155).

Animal life is not graspable and isolatable as such but should be approached as “a fold, the reality of a process, as Whitehead would say, unobservable up close” (157). Merleau-

Ponty refers to an experiment conducted by Albert Michotte in La perception de la causalité

(1954), a “duck test” of sorts in which moving traits projected on a screen give “the characteristic impression of life, whatever the familiarity of the spectator with animals.”

Merleau-Ponty specifies that the subjects of the experience do not say that the schema makes them think of an animal but that they “perceive a living thing” (2003 154). The partial movements of the animal – in the case of Michotte’s experiment, of the animate –

“make action” just like “words make a sentence.” The impression of unbroken causality, which in a recognizably Nietzschean gesture Merleau-Ponty compares to the sense of continuity conveyed by grammatical predication, is the condition of possibility for the

“appearance” of the animal, which becomes “visible only globally and escap[es] from attentive perception” (155).

Causality, thus, is not an a priori principle that organizes life but the name of the global

“perception of continuity” whereby meaning is given to and by the sudden appearance of animal life.58 Hence, from Merleau-Ponty’s point of view, “scientific myopia” comes from the mistrust of one’s impressions and not from a defective vision that demands to be

58 Animal behavior is not “meaningful” solely from an external, objective human point of view capable of reconstructing a significant sequence of events out of the animal’s instinctive and sometimes apparently objectless gesticulations. Rather than explaining animal behaviors in terms of objects and ends, Merleau-Ponty characterizes them as “styles,” thereby giving rhetoric precedence over logic, interpretation over experimentation (2003 192). For more on this question, see Elizabeth de Fontenay (1998 654-655).

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enhanced. For Dr. Battius, on the other hand, the phenomenal “il y a là” of animality, the

“ecce” that constitutes its condition of visibility, is immediately suppressed and contained by a caption: “there. . .there is an animal, which will be likely to dispute with the Lion, his title to be called the King of the Beasts!” (71). There are two “theres,” there. It is tempting to hear the doctor’s stuttering as a suturing, as if the second “there” signaled the reassertion of control and mastery over the first “there,” which on the other hand would be a marker of surprise, a pointer yet unattached to an intelligible object.59

Battius admits that he made a mistake in taking his donkey for a new species, but in his own defense, he claims entrapment: the fault is not his, it is his eye that induced him to commit the crime. That Bat would invoke persistence of vision as an alibi for his mistake is revealing. The problem lies in a flaw intrinsic to the human eye, which proves insufficiently competent to capture the animal and thus requires the assistance of a mechanized apparatus.60 Arguably, Bat can be seen as a harbinger of the new age of

59 The deictic distance imposed by the scientist’s “there” is strikingly (though doubtfully intentionally so) at variance with Bumppo’s enigmatic last word before dying: “Here!” (385). This adverb seem to freeze Bumppo in an immobility and a presentism at odds with the West- and future-oriented ethos that drives the rest of the nation, and in conflict with the progressive principles to which the scientist obeys. At the end of the penultimate chapter, indeed, Bumppo turns down Battius’ invitation to “return to [his] countrymen to deliver up some of those stores of experimental knowledge, that [he has] doubtless obtained by so long a sojourn in the wilds”: “the Lord has made me a doer and not a talker” (371). A lot has been written on this mysterious monosyllable. See for instance House (1965 303-304) and John Engell’s “Reading and Hearing Natty Bumppo’s Last Word in The Prairie,” in which the word is “experienced as an aural event” referring indistinguishingly to “the deictic adverb ‘here’ and the transitive verb ‘hear’ uttered in the imperative.” Incidentally, in About Looking, the modern relation to animals is characterized by a crisis between the hereness and thereness of the animal that, Berger argues, appear incompatible: “Animals came from over the horizon. They belonged there and here. Likewise, they were mortal and immortal. . . . This – maybe the first existential dualism – was reflected in the treatments of animals. They were subjected and worshipped, bred and sacrificed. Today, vestiges of this dualism remain among those who live intimately with, and depend upon, animals. A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away his pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an and and not a but” (1980 3). For Colleen Glenney Boggs, this seeming paradox does not vanish with the removal of animals from our daily lives but “persists at the core of subject formation” in our biopolitical age (2013 23). 60 To be more precise, there is an intriguing transference at work in the case of Battius, who does not merely want to capture the animal as it is by means of a mechanized apparatus but instead

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mechanical objectivity, which Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have defined as the

“attempt to capture nature with as little human intervention as possible” (2007 20). In objectivity, scientific representation becomes an idealized form of capture.

We see the entanglement of representation and capture in the thaumatrope, a device that

I take to be paradigmatic of the logic of capture that came to define the modern period.

First popularized by Dr. John Paris in 1825, thaumatropes are optical devices made up of a small disc with an image on each side. When the disc is twirled, the two sides appear superimposed, giving the impression of forming a single, composite image. Early prototypes of the “philosophical toy,” as Jonathan Crary reminds us it was called at the time (1990 106), commonly depicted a bird and a cage. When in motion, the bird appeared trapped, its capture effected through an appearance of stillness caused by a movement too rapid to be registered by the human eye. While the thaumatrope has been significant to debates about the phenomenology and temporality of vision in modernity, little attention has been paid to the images themselves, and particularly to the persistence with which animals are represented.

dreams of mechanizing the animal (in which he prophetically anticipates the intensive modification and commodification of animals brought by the rapid development of factory farming): “Is the power to give life to inanimate matter the gift of man? I would it were! You should speedily see a Historia Naturalis, Americana, that would put the sneering imitators of the Frenchman, De Buffon, to shame! A great improvement might be made in the formation of all quadrupeds; especially those in which velocity is a virtue. Two of the inferior limbs should be on the principle of the lever; wheels, perhaps, as they are now formed; though I have not yet determined whether the improvement might be better applied to the anterior or posterior members, inasmuch as I am yet to learn whether dragging or shoving requires the greatest muscular exertion. A natural exudation of the animal might assist in overcoming the friction, and a powerful momentum be obtained. But all this is hopeless – at least for the present!” (70-71).

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Fig. 2. Thaumatropes c. 1825

According to Dr. Paris, the aim of the toy was to generate “young Cartesians” by

“driving a wedge between what we know and what we see” and valuing the former over the latter, as film theorist Tom Gunning has recently argued (2011 33). If the Cartesian discourse surrounding the thaumatrope reveals a “prejudice towards perception as a static process” (34), it also implies that stillness was thought to be the condition for reliable knowledge. Ironically, the thaumatrope taught this lesson by demonstrating that stillness can be manufactured by motion or animation.

The problem is not that knowledge about the animal is produced by apparatuses of capture but that we tend to conflate, as Rey Chow has observed, “the prey’s experience

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of being captured” with “the intent or intelligence of the trap’s design” (and designer). She argues that “the trap tends to be treated as a unified discursive plane. . .oriented toward the interest of the hunter – that is to say, the winner – when, ontologically and epistemically speaking, no such unity exists” (2012 46). In other words, the logics and temporalities of the prey may be hinged to these of the hunter by the trap, but it does not entail that they are commensurable. (“The fox condemns the trap,” noted William Blake in Proverbs of Hell, “not himself.”) Because the trap does not require any direct intervention on his part, the hunter – or rather, the trapper – can “appear” as a Godlike figure presiding over the preordained fate of the entrapped animal. In a footnote, Chow mentions a passage from an essay by cultural anthropologist Alfred Gell in which the animal is compared to a tragic hero:

Each [trap] is not only a model of its creator, a subsidiary self in the form of an automaton, but each is also a model of its victim. . . . Traps are lethal parodies of the animal’s Umwelt. . . . The trap is therefore both a model of its creator, the hunter, and a model of its victim, the prey animal. But more than this, the trap embodies a scenario, which is the dramatic nexus that binds these two protagonists together, and which aligns them in time and space. . .The fact that animals who fall victim to traps have always brought about their downfall by their own actions, their own complacent self-confidence, ensures that trapping is a far more poetic and tragic form of hunting than the simple chase. The latter kind of hunting equalizes hunters and victims, united in spontaneous action and reaction, whereas trapping decisively hierarchises hunter and victim. The trapper is God, or the fates, the trapped animal is man in his tragic incarnation (1996 27).

One should be careful not to romanticize hunting, as Gell tends to do. The chase remains a hierarchizing activity, and it “equalizes hunters and victims” only insofar as it is not fully predetermined. Conversely, the “decisive hierarchy” instituted by the trap is not unproblematic: if the trap is at once “a model” of its creator and of its victim – in the same way Uexküll writes that the spiderweb draws a “very subtle portrait of the fly” (qtd. in Deleuze and Guattari, 1994 185) – then the trapper is de facto no less trapped (or modeled or drawn) than his prey. As a consequence, trapping can be seen as more

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“equalizing” than hunting, on condition that the differences between the trapper and the trapped remain incommensurable instead of being used to institute a hierarchy (which supposes, in principle, a certain degree of commensurability).

Chow insists on the necessity to refrain from collapsing the (supposedly reactive and active) temporalities of the trapped and the trapper: if they are “situationally entwined,” it is crucial to understand them as “phenomenologically disjointed” (46), i.e. to envision capture not as the thoroughly premeditated and continuous operation it purports to be but rather as a process of entanglement that brings together multiple temporalities without homogenizing them61 (that Achilles eventually catches the tortoise does not mean that they belong in the same temporal frame). The mistake, so to speak, comes when one forgets that it is through capture that the animal has come into being and assumes, tautologically, that it has been caught because it had such or such defining property (it has been trapped therefore it is animal). When the trapper fails to recognize his own portrait in the trap, when the hands that hold and operate the thaumatrope are no longer seen, when the human takes himself out of the picture that he contributed to creating, the animal is perceived and conceived as always-already captured.

THE TRAPPER [I] sold my gun before I went to the woods. . . . During the last years that I carried a gun my excuse was that I was studying ornithology, and sought only new or rare birds. But I confess that I am now inclined to think that there is a finer way of studying ornithology than this. . . . There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are the “best men,” as the Algonquins called them. We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a

61 In the introduction to Entanglements, Chow explains that her title was inspired by quantum physics, “in which the term ‘entanglement’ designates mysterious connections between particles, which are said to be entangled due to simultaneous reactions they produce, reactions that are not the results of proximity” as well as by Uexküllian biosemiotics, “the behavior of animals and organisms which coevolve by mysterious patterns of symmetry, down to the precise details of their bodily formations” (2012 2). Her express wish is to find the adequate idiom for talking about encounters that are not defined by proximity, affinity or equivalence.

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gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected. This was my answer with respect to those youths who were bent on this pursuit, trusting that they would soon outgrow it. No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1989 492)

The onto-epistemological transition I am interested in, therefore, takes place when, the human hands disappear or, more precisely, when by a sleight of hands they recede from view. This does not mean that the hand no longer constitutes the distinguishing mark of humanity,62 only that the labor of prehension/predation is obliterated or sublimated (here

I think of the “invisible hand” ideally presiding over free-market economy, of photography as an art without artist 63 ). Arguably, this erasure heralds the age of mechanical objectivity, described by Daston and Galison as a form of “hands-off” epistemology (2007 130) in which the scientist’s hands and eyes are assisted and supplemented by an increasing number of contraptions and apparatuses.64 In the imperial logic of early nineteenth century America, it is the moment when the hunter is replaced by the trapper. In a meaningful footnote, Cooper feels compelled to explain: “It is scarcely necessary to say, that this American word means one who takes his game in a trap. It is of general use on the frontiers.”

It is no accident if, in The Prairie, Natty Bumppo is but a shadow of his former self. The protagonist’s name is not mentioned once throughout the novel, and the unsophisticated woodsman would remain anonymous if not for his chronic tendency to reminisce about

62 I think notably of how Heidegger makes the hand the unique apparatus by which Being can emerge: “Beings, as beings, are taken in hand and there preserved as something present and ready to use,” writes Tom Tyler apropos Heidegger’s “What is Called Thinking?” “This means, of course, that animals do not have word or hand. This is where the abyss opens up, separating the essence of the human hand from what are merely ‘grasping organs’ in animals, such as paws, claws and fangs” (2012 16). 63 See François Brunet’s essay in La Fabrique du sauvage dans la culture nord-américaine. 64 In the epistemic regime of objectivity, the mechanized apparatus is mainly thought of as a “prolongation of our senses,” as Merleau-Ponty’s epigraph suggests. This is no longer true with quantum physics (2003:93), or with what Daston and Galison call “trained judgment.”

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his former exploits. The great hunter of The Last of the Mohicans is steeped in his own past.

Hence his insistence on being called a trapper (61), for he no longer feels worthy of his famous aliases, Hawkeye and La Longue Carabine, which index his once great hunting skills. Tellingly, the word “trapper” is never used in Last of the Mohicans, nor even in The

Pioneers, in which Bumppo is already seventy years old. And when he is resuscitated as a twenty one-year-old huntsman in The Deerslayer (1841), the young Bumppo exclaims: “I am no trapper. . . . I live by the rifle, a we’pon at which I will not turn my back on any man of my years, atween the Hudson and the St. Lawrence. I never offer a skin that has not a hole in its head besides them which natur’ made to see with, or to breathe through”

(1985 500). In The Prairie, the 82-year-old frontiersman has become too old to catch anything except through the trickery of traps. His decline does not prevent him from playing a critical role in the domestication of the hostile landscape of the prairie. Though at this point, too weak to go after the animal, he lets the animal come to him.

Let us look briefly at another scene that displays an interesting symmetry with Bat’s animal encounter (or lack thereof). 65 Shortly after rescuing Inez de Certavallos, kidnapped and used as a “decoy” by the Bush family (92), Bumppo and his friends are threatened by the sudden irruption of a wild flock of bison running in their direction.

While the naturalist is unable to anticipate the danger because of his myopia, the hunter is able to read the land: “yonder is a sign that a hunter never fails to know” (196). He

65 Bumppo’s metamorphosis from hunter to trapper cannot simply be attributed to the character’s senescence. For most critics, the trapper’s lost youth “sounds an elegiac note not only for a way of life and a wilderness that is vanishing beneath the settlers’ axes but for the passing of the frontiersman as a type” (Nevius, xxiv). But the hunter’s decline and death also herald a transformation in the way the animal came to be perceived and conceived in modernity. This theory is corroborated by the troubling similarities between the trapper and his foil: “[I]t is no cause of wonder,” Bumppo exclaims, “that a man whose strength and eyes have failed him as a hunter, should be seen nigh the haunts of the beaver, using a trap instead of a rifle” (117). In effect, the naturalist is the ultimate trapper, and we need to take him seriously when he claims that Bumppo and himself are “lovers of the same pursuits” (98), though it is important to recognize how very different their take on animals is.

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says to Battius: “I conclude that a hunter is a better judge of a beast and of its name . . . than any man who has turned over the leaves of a book.” While on the verge of being trampled by a mass of wild animals, in the typical Cooperian fashion that infuriated Mark

Twain, the two men engage in a debate over the Biblical account of Adam naming the animals and the sacrilegious hubris of scientific classification. After an unrealistic amount of time, their debate is interrupted by the “sudden exhibition of animal life which changed the scene, as it were by magic”:

A few enormous Bison bulls were first observed scouring along the most distant roll of the prairie, and then succeeded long files of single beasts, which in their turns were followed by a dark mass of bodies . . . The herd, as the column spread and thickened, was like the endless flock of the smaller birds, whose extended flanks are so often seen to heave up out of the abyss of the heavens, until they appear as countless and as interminable as the leaves in those forests over which they wing their endless flight (198).

Endless, interminable, countless: the herd of bison is reminiscent of the army of demons portrayed in Paradise Lost (which Milton compares not to a flock of birds but to a swarm of bees). And the scene goes on:

Clouds of dust shot up in little columns from the centre of the mass, as some animal more furious than the rest ploughed the plain with his horns and from time to time a deep hollow bellowing was borne along on the wind, as if a thousand throats vented their plaints in a discordant murmuring (198).

The group is utterly paralyzed at the sight of this terrible manifestation, until the silence of the bewildered spectators is broken by the trapper, who, “having been long accustomed to similar sights felt less of its influence, or rather felt it in a less thrilling and absorbing manner.” Less captivated by the aura of the spectacle, Bumppo throws down his rifle and “advance[s] from the cover with naked hands, directly toward the rushing columns of the beasts.”

“The figure of a man,” we are told, “when sustained by the firmness and steadiness that intellect can only impart, rarely fails of commanding respect from all inferior animals of

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the creation” (200). Like Moses parting the Red Sea, Bumppo splits in two the torrent of life rushing toward them: “The head of the column . . . divided, the immovable form of the trapper cutting it, as it were, into two gliding streams of life” (201). Cooper describes how the trapper divides the flow of wild animals in terms strikingly close to those used by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Not quite the unmoved prime mover,

Bumppo is presented as the “immovable form” that interrupts, parcels out and organizes life, the arithmetic force that breaks the one into two. If he is no longer a hunter – a fact made explicit by his throwing down his rifle – Bumppo is not really a trapper either so much as the trap itself. Placing himself between the stampede and his friends, he uses his body in order to impede the progress of the buffaloes. He is not merely instrumental in saving his friends: he literally becomes the instrument of their salvation.

Bumppo’s selflessness is in keeping with the character as he is presented in the rest of the novel and in the other volumes of the pentalogy. Structurally, in the economy of The

Leatherstocking Tales, the “saint with a gun,” as D.H. Lawrence called Bumppo (2003 54), unfailingly occupies a sacrificial position, something that is made clear in the etching by

Thomas Cole depicting the trapper’s first appearance in The Prairie as a colossal silhouette on top of a hill (fig. 3). Bumppo shows the way to the settlers while simultaneously straddling the horizon and threatening to be dissolved in the setting sun.66

66 Significantly, it is as though no time has passed between The Pioneers and The Prairie (respectively set in 1793 and 1805), at the beginning of which we seem to find Bumppo exactly where we had left him. Indeed, the last sentence of The Pioneers shows the old hunter walking “far towards the setting sun, – the foremost in that band of Pioneers, who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent” (1985 465). And Bumppo is introduced with these words at the beginning of The Prairie: “The sun had fallen below the crest of the nearest wave of the prairie, leaving the usual rich and glowing train on its track. In the centre of this flood of fiery light, a human form appeared, drawn against the gilded background, as distinctly, and seemingly as palpable, as though it would come within the grasp of any extended hand. The figure was colossal; the attitude musing and melancholy, and the situation directly in the route of the travellers. But imbedded, as it was, in its setting of garish light, it was impossible to distinguish its just proportions or true character” (14-15). Though he is presented as “a kind of guardian spirit of the wilderness,” as Marius Bewley has observed, Bumppo’s “aura of almost supernatural

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Fig. 3. Thomas Cole, illustration of The Prairie

Not unlike Poe’s Chevalier Dupin, Bumppo materializes as if by magic when he is needed (i.e. when a group of white people is in danger) and vanishes as soon as his work is done. The old hunter is both necessary for the advance of the nation and altogether expendable. He is necessary insofar as he is the only character who speaks English and the dialects of the Pawnees and the Sioux; nevertheless, if he “moves among the four inimical groups on the prairie [the two Indian tribes, the Bush family and the “good” settlers] with the free ease of a specter gliding through the insubstantial shades of another world,” Kay House has argued, “it is largely because he is already a member of the living dead” (1965 305).67 Caught in a struggle between two camps – to put it schematically, between the wild and the civilized – the hunter is presented as an

powers” is clearly not sufficient to “stop the westward march of civilization or, rather, the evils of civilization” (Överland, 1973 151). Leslie Fiedler notes the paradoxical nature of Bumppo, who, though he incarnates the true spirit of America, must make way, along with the Indian, for the civilized man: “Cooper disconcertingly condemned his own kind of fiction to extinction by predicting the disappearance of the ‘New Man’ – that backwoods American neither Red nor White represented by Natty Bumppo – along with that of the Indian himself” (1968 121). 67 On the hunter as a liminal figure sharing the lot of the “undying animal,” see the foreword and Lippit’s Electric Animal.

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endangered species. Having completed the task of paving the way for civilization, he no longer has a raison d’être.68 Too liminal, too literal, too animal, the hunter must disappear.69

Yet his disappearance does not signal the interruption of hunting – quite the contrary.

Unfolding at the moment when hunting, no longer a subsistence activity, was falling out of common practice, the novel participates in the mythification of the figure of the hunter, which was to become an indispensible topos in the U.S. imperial narrative.70 The hunter’s ostensible metamorphosis into the trapper – or, better even, into the trap, as in the buffalo stampede scene – signals a stricter distribution of the sensible between man and “the inferior animals of the creation,” and concomitantly between the people who have outgrown their drive to hunt and those who have not (i.e. the Native Americans).71

68 The figure of the frontiersman is a tragic one, as Lukács has shown, comparing Bumppo to the “middle-of-the-road” heroes of Walter Scott’s novels. In Bumppo’s fate, we recognize the well- known story of Daniel Boone, whose maverick undertakings (known as “long hunts”) were retrospectively assimilated by the teleology of Manifest Destiny. 69 “Hunters. . .are not simply fighters on the side of humanity against the wilderness,” explains Matt Cartmill. “Their loyalties are divided. Because hunting takes place at the boundary between the human domain and the wilderness, the hunter stands with one foot on each side of the boundary, and swears no perpetual allegiance to either side” (1993 31). Leatherstocking is exemplary in this regard. Cooper’s hunter is never just the one who tames the wild, but also the one who has an intimate knowledge of nature and hunts only what is necessary to his own subsistence. Cartmill shows that both images of hunters as destroyers and preservers date back to antiquity, one view prevailing over the other at different historical moments. Tellingly, Cartmill alludes to Cooper’s hero to illustrate the transition that took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century from the hunter as “a friend of nature” to the stereotype of “the Great White Hunter”: “For the Romantic hunter, the Man in the Buckskin Suit, the hunt is an act of loving communion with nature. For the imperial and Darwinian hunter, the Man in the Pit Helmet, it is an assertion of his competitive superiority over the natives and other local faunas” (1993 137). 70 On the real and symbolic collusions between hunting and imperialism, see Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate and “Destroyers and Preservers: Big Game in the Victorian Empire,” Greg Gillespie’s Hunting for Empire, James R. Ryan’s Picturing Empire (especially pp. 99-139), John MacKenzie’s The Empire of Nature and Matt Cartmill’s A View to a Death in the Morning. 71 Hunting as a cultural identity for Americans came about when it ceased to be an everyday activity, but also when the image of the American Indian was being refashioned as that of a hunter in order to permit a spurious identification with him (see for instance the paintings of Karl Bodmer, Charles Bird King, George Catlin, and later the photographs of Frederic Remington). On Natty Bumppo as a national icon and surrogate Indian, see Marius Bewley’s The Eccentric Design.

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As the epigraph excerpted from Walden helps us understand, in the same way humanity is commonly thought to have “evolved” from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies, hunting was often perceived in the young American republic as an expedient supposed to yield way to a more civilized and “humane” set of practices. As a matter of fact, Thoreau often calls into question the seemingly straightforward homology between hunting and a lower degree of humanity/humaneness.72 And yet, it is difficult not to hear in his relegation of hunting to the adolescence of the race an echo to the promotion of the agrarian model defended by Jefferson, which culminated with the purchase of the

Louisiana territories.73 Exit hunter. Enter trapper.

What I want to suggest is that this transition from hunt to capture is not a rupture but a form of sublimation. For Deleuze and Guattari, the other of the hunter is not the trapper, but the warrior. Borrowing from Paul Virilio, they recall that the hunter’s aim is to

“arrest the movement of wild animality” (396). The difference between hunt and war is

72 See for instance J. Edward Chamberlin, “Hunting, Tracking and Reading,” pp. 68-69 (notwithstanding his callow “reading” of Foucault and moralistic tone of his argument). Instead of reducing Thoreau to mouthpiece of the progressive Zeitgeist of the period, I want to put pressure on the intricate knot that this excerpt ties between hunting, scientific knowledge, preservation, humanity and humaneness. In this chapter of Walden, Thoreau is explicitly concerned about the disappearance of animals. In the previous paragraph, he writes: “But already a change is taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity, but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society” (1989 491). I will come back to this tangle in the chapter devoted to Audubon. 73 Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) is a good illustration of the way in which Jeffersonian agrarianism coupled hunting and savagery on the one hand and husbandry and culture on the other. In the last letter, “Distresses of a Frontiersman,” Crèvecoeur’s narrator declares himself happy to live among the “savages” as long as he is allowed to preserve a safe distance from their manners by labouring his fields: “My youngest children shall learn to swim, and to shoot with the bow, that they may acquire such talents as will necessarily raise them into some degree of esteem among the Indian lads of their own age; the rest of us must hunt with the hunters. I have been for several years an expert marksman; but I dread lest the imperceptible charm of Indian education, may seize my younger children, and give them such a propensity to that mode of life, as may preclude their returning to the manners and customs of their parents. I have but one remedy to prevent this great evil; and that is, to employ them in the labour of the fields, as much as I can. As long as we keep ourselves busy in tilling the earth, there is no fear of any of us becoming wild; it is the chase and the food it procures that have this strange effect” (1981 219-220). Children’s books constitute one of the richest sources for popularizing animal welfare at the turn of the nineteenth century (see for instance The Hare; Or, Hunting Incompatible with Humanity: Written as a Stimulus to Youth Towards a Proper Treatment of Animals, 1802).

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not simply a difference between who or what is killed or captured (animal or human) but rather a question of speed and becoming: “War in no way appears when man applies to man the relation of the hunter to the animal, but on the contrary when he captures [capte] the force of the hunted animal and enters an entirely new relation to man (enemy, no longer prey)” (396). In the war machine, it is not the animal that is “captured” but its kinetic power, which the warrior does not seek to arrest but rather integrate and absorb

(hence his becoming-animal).74 Whereas the hunter is motivated by the prey (from the

Latin praehendere, to seize), the warrior “borrows from the animal the idea of the motor.”

The war machine is the invention of the nomadic tribes who operate on “smooth spaces,” while the hunt machine organizes spaces by parcelling and striating them (here, the hunt is seen as driven, in its very principle, by and toward capture, and conceived as a precursor to agriculture75).

74 Massumi’s translation of capter by “capture” is somewhat misleading here, since Deleuze and Guattari try to distinguish between State apparatus (which captures while simultaneously constituting a “right to capture” [2003 448]) from other regimes of occupation and apprehension. For a discussion of the artistic and economic valences of the French word captation, as opposed to captivation and capture, see Chow (2012:47). 75 The distinction Deleuze and Guattari make between the hunt and the war machine is complicated by the fact that the nomos, from which the term “nomad” is derived, comes from the Greek nemein meaning to capture, take or allot (for more on the etymology, see Carl Schmitt’s The Nomos of the Earth). This etymological complication precludes deriving a simple dichotomy between the animals raised by nomads and those raised by farmers: “In striated space, one closes off a surface and ‘allocates’ it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth, one ‘distributes’ oneself in an open space, according to frequencies and in the course of one’s crossings (logos and nomos). As simple as this opposition is, it is not easy to place it. We cannot content ourselves with establishing an immediate opposition between the smooth ground of the nomadic animal raiser and the striated land of the sedentary cultivator. It is evident that the peasant, even the sedentary peasant, participates fully in the space of the wind, the space of tactile and sonorous qualities. When the ancient Greeks speak of the open space of the nomos – nondelimited, unpartitioned; the pre-urban countryside; mountainside, plateau, steppe – they oppose it not to cultivation, which may actually be part of it, but to the polis, the city, the town. When Ibn Khaldun speaks oibadiya, bedouinism, the term covers cultivators as well as nomadic animal raisers: he contrasts it to hadara, or ‘city life.’ This clarification is certainly important, but it does not change much. For from the most ancient of times, from Neolithic and even Paleolithic times, it is the town that invents agriculture: it is through the actions of the town that the farmers and their striated space are superposed upon the cultivators operating in a still smooth space (the transhumant cultivator, half-sedentary or already completely sedentary). So on this level we reencounter the simple opposition we began by challenging, between farmers and nomads, striated land and smooth ground: but only after a detour through the town as a force of striation” (2003 481). In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari make the liminality of the hunter even more explicit, arguing that the space of the hunter’s encampment is always “adjacent” to that of the

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For the frontispiece of their chapter on the “apparatus of capture,” Deleuze and Guattari borrow the image of a bird trap (fig. 4) from French agronomist Noël Chomel’s 1732

Dictionnaire Œconomique. According to David Gissen, “such traps illustrated a larger

‘apparatus of capture’ that . . . took the form of stockpiling nature to impose economic control over the productivity of the earth and convert open territories into saleable land”

(182-183).

Fig. 4. Tonnelle: entry for “perdrix,” Chomel’s dictionnaire économique, 1732. Mille plateaux (528)

Since there is no mention of it in the chapter, we are left to wonder why Deleuze and

Guattari chose this illustration. In Chomel’s encyclopedia, the drawing is accompanied by very detailed instructions on how to capture the partridge: after carefully spanning the net, the trapper is to hide behind a cow disguise in order to lure the birds, who have learned to be afraid of the figure of man but not of a placid bovine. Once the partridge are sufficiently close to the entrance of the circular net (tonnelle), the trapper can spring from behind his Trojan cow to collect the prey.

wild forest. However temporary, the hunter’s encampment relies on processes of “inscribing and allocating” that have to do with capitalist coding of flows (2000 148).

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Everything is meticulously represented in the picture except for the human trapper, as though the trap was capable of working of its own accord. Even more intriguing is the background of the picture: the parallel lines of the furrows denote the isomorphic force imposed by the State apparatus on the land as well as on the birds, who are forced into the tonnelle, itself parallel to the furrows. Chomel’s drawing suggests that the discontinuity between hunting and capture (or in this case agriculture), if there is any, revolves around issues of presence and absence, or more precisely, visibility and invisibility (in this case, the dual invisibility of the trapper hidden behind the luring cow and absent from the picture). Accordingly, if we follow Deleuze and Guattari’s intuition, agriculture as capture is not so much the end of hunting (in the sense of its interruption) but instead its disappearance (its falling out of visibility).

The modern regime of capture, understood as a politico-economic model and as a cultural and epistemological logic, is determined by the acceleration of the process of predation to the point of invisibility. This regime does not just witness and contribute to the material

“disappearance” of animals – evidenced by the most patent issues of extinction and industrialized slaughter76 – but their dis-appearance, i.e. the transition in the conception of the animal from a living being endowed with the capacity to appear or emerge to one perceived as always-already entrapped. I have summarized the main differences between the hunting regime and the capture regime in a series of axioms in order to outline the consequences this shift had on the way the animal is apprehended and envisioned in modernity.

76 It is at the turn of the nineteenth century that discourses on extinction emerged in the wake of epic enterprises of comparative taxonomy and classification, which, ironically, are the condition of possibility for the very idea of extinction (Semonin, 2000 5). On the industrialization of slaughter and rendering and the withdrawal of slaughterhouses from urban environments in Europe and North America in the twentieth century, see Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital.

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Hunting Regime Axiom 1: The animal appears on its own terms (to a significant extent).

The animal encounter cannot be fully anticipated or planned.

The animal, in the hunt model, is essentially something that emerges or appears in a fugitive manner – it can be stopped and killed, but only once it has made its appearance on its own terms.

Axiom 2: Because the animal cannot be taken for granted, the hunt is ongoing but each time unique.

Hunting is an atelic process.

The human-animal antagonism at work in hunting must be conceived as fundamentally iterative and endless.77

Axiom 3: The animal can escape, or it can die.

The animal for the hunter is essentially “at the level of death [à hauteur de mort],” explains Bataille, for it “is the being that the hunter sees only to kill it” (1979 370).

77 This is one of the reasons why Benjamin sees in the hunter the prototype of the flâneur: “the hunt is, as work, very primitive. The experiences [Erfahrungen] of one who attends to a trace [Spur] result only very remotely from any work activity, or are cut off from such a procedure altogether. (Not for nothing do we speak of ‘fortune hunting.’) They have no sequence and no system. They are a product of chance, and have about them the essential interminability that distinguishes the preferred obligations of the idler” (1999 m 2.1).

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Capture Regime Axiom 1: The animal is in principle already at hand.

The animal can no longer be ‘encountered.’

In the capture model, the animal no longer is this fugitive appearance because it is always-already there, at the human’s disposal. This is what happens in the shift from hunting to agrarian and then agro-industrial societies, where animals go from prey to cattle to livestock or pure meat. If the animal is “at the level of death,” it is merely on the humans’ terms.

Axiom 2: The animal is taken for granted. Capture is iterative but always the same.

Capturing is a telic process.

Transition from ritualized hunting practices to mechanized slaughter – in Benjaminian terms, when the killing (and the reproduction) is mechanized, the animal loses its aura.

Axiom 3: The animal cannot escape, and it cannot die.

Because presumably deprived of logos, history or consciousness the animal, has been cast as “undying” by a predominant trend in Western philosophy, as I mention in my introduction.78

Fig. 5. Hunting and capture regimes chart.

78 As Carol J. Adams and Nicole Shukin have noted, conceiving animals as undying (and thereby unmurderable) has played a crucial part in justifying the capitalistic exploitation of animal life, but also in lending philosophical grounds for advocating the uniqueness of the human animal as a finite being.

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CONCLUSION: THE ENDS OF HUNTING

The name of the bow (biós) is life (bíos), but its work is death.

Heraclitus

If capture is indeed the end of hunting, it is crucial to understand “end” as both the skopos and the telos of hunting. Capture is both hunting’s interruption and its finality.

Jean-Luc Nancy helps us disentangle the two valences of the word “end”:

There are two concepts of the end – or rather, doubtless the end itself does not cease dividing itself in accordance with two concepts: skopos and telos . . . Skopos is the target [la cible] that one has in one’s sights and at which one takes aim; it is the goal presently and clearly offered to an intention [une visée]. Telos, by contrast, is the fulfillment of an action or a process, its development up to its end (e.g., the fruit is not the target of the tree, any more than the target is the fruit of the archer) . . . Skopos is the draw of the bow, telos life and death (“Dies Irae,” qtd in Weber 2005 7).

The skopos of hunting is the capture of the animal (dead or alive): i.e. the hunt is over when the animal is captured (both “hunt” and “chase” etymologically refer to the catch79). What I have suggested is that it might also be its telos. It is along those lines that

Samuel Weber characterizes the contemporary “militarization of thinking”: “Nancy emphasizes that the telos entails the relation of ‘life and death’ as well as the existential

‘development’ of something to its utmost limit, ‘beyond which there is no longer anything that this thing could still become.’” Weber continues: “But what if the banal tir

à l’arc and the activity it permits, in short what if skopos itself was experienced as just such a limit experience? What if the enabling limits associated with the telos were themselves made dependent upon the power to treat the other as skopos? What sort of ‘self’ would be implied by such a bifurcation, and what sort of ‘ends’ would it entail?” (2005:8).

79 Chase: “Middle English < Old French chacie-r , later chascie-r , chasse-r . in 11th cent. cacer (Old Northern French cacher , Provençal cassar , Spanish cazar , Portuguese caçar , Italian cacciare ) < late Latin *captiāre , used instead of captāre (frequentative of capĕre to take) to seize, catch.” – Hunt: “The ablaut-stem *hent-, *hant-, *hunt- is identical in sense, and in origin evidently closely akin to henþ-, hanþ-, hunþ-, in Gothic hinþan to seize, capture, fra-hunþans captive, hunþs captivity, and Old High German hunda, Old English húð booty” (OED).

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To use Nancy’s terms, the target might in effect also have become “the fruit of the archer,” and hunting came to “fruition,” so to speak, when animals – I should say “the animal” – came to be conceived as essentially captured. In the second chapter, I argue that the modern categories of the animal and the human can be understood as co- constituted by the asymmetrical relationality imposed by the hunt in a dialectic of exclusion and capture. My argument is not that the genus homo sapiens distinguished itself from other primates by hunting, as it has been suggested, but rather, following Derrida and Agamben, that the hunt furnishes a compelling paradigm for understanding Western anthropogenesis.

In this chapter, I have suggested that the predatory dynamic that drives anthropogenesis goes on but is repressed and sublimated in the modern period, when one no longer needs to go after the animal but where it is, in fact and in principle, always-already captured. The problem is when skopos and telos are so entwined, when they become so indistinguishable, when they are so tele-scoped, that the interruption of the hunt seems permanent and the hands that control the mechanism are no longer visible. From this perspective, modernity can be understood as the conflation of the skopos and the telos of hunting, whereby capture has become the condition of the animal.

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Any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which must remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale (1992 289)

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Chapter Two

HUNTOLOGY ONTOLOGICAL PURSUITS IN THE STILL LIVES OF JOHN JAMES AUDUBON

[T]he draftsman would be given over to this other invisibility, given over to it in the same way that a hunter, himself in relentless pursuit, becomes a fascinating lure for the tracked animal that watches him. In order to be absolutely foreign to the visible and even to the potentially visible, to the possibility of the visible, this invisibility would still inhabit the visible, or rather, it would come to haunt it to the point of being confused with it, in order to assure, from the specter of this very impossibility, its most proper resource. The visible as such would be invisible, not as visibility, the phenomenality or essence of the visible, but as the singular body of the visible itself, right on the visible – so that, by emanation, and as if it were secreting its own medium, the visible would produce blindness.

Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind (1993 51)

To capture, is that not to be captivated by it?. . .He wants to classify [classer], he can only chase [chasser].

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (2006 165-176)

WAR OF THE SPECIES At the beginning of the nineteenth century in Europe and North America, one hunt ended and another began. A form of pursuit long associated with the acquisition of knowledge,80 hunting became all the more prevalent as a cultural and epistemological logic when technological advances secured the dominance of the human and made it no longer necessary to ensure the gain or defense of territory against animals. No longer a threat to humans, animals became objects of study and exhibition.

80 The entanglement of hunting with the acquisition of knowledge is nothing new. Prehistoric cave paintings, for example, demonstrate a longstanding interdependence between ritual, epistemological, and predatory practices.

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Whereas such an analogy makes little sense today, in the mid-eighteenth century, hunting was described as a form of war. Diderot’s Encyclopédie defines hunting as “all the sorts of wars that we wage against animals [toutes les sortes de guerres que nous faisons aux animaux].” J.

M. Coetzee’s 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello further 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 fact war and hunting are the same thing (Aristotle saw it clearly),” Costello explains. “That war went on for millions of years. We won it definitely only a few hundred years ago, when we invented guns. It is only since victory has become absolute that we have been able to afford to cultivate compassion” (2003 104)81.

The very possibility for humans and animals to be at war with one another 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 of the hunt resulted in a “distribution of the sensible” that demands to be reassessed.82

81 On the issue of slavery in Politics (1-8.), Aristotle argues that war for the purpose of acquisition can be just, and the kind of acquisition he is thinking of involves acquiring other humans who are “intended by nature to be governed” (i.e., slaves). He then likens this war to hunting (the “acquiring” of wild beasts). Aristotle was perhaps influenced by Xenophon’s Cynegeticus, or Treatise on Hunting, in which hunting is described as “an excellent preparation for the toils of war” (1857 368), or by Plato’s The Laws, where the youths are advise to go in for hunting in order to be familiar with their country in case it must be defended against enemies (2004 192). For Plato, the hunt concerns animals and humans indifferently: “we also have to take into account the hunting of men, not merely by their enemies in war. . .but by their lovers, who ‘pursue’ their quarry for many different reasons, some admirable, some execrable” (272). 82 As Jacques Rancière defines it, “the distribution of the sensible [is] the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it” (2006 12). This

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What has this fantasized victory effected, both for (what we call) humans and (what we call) animals?83 The exceptional status of the human proves but a recent development and one that emerges out of a predatory relation to the animal. Costello provocatively suggests that the introduction of guns had a profound impact on how the human’s status as überpredator has been naturalized to the point of invisibility.84 How and when did technology make it possible for the human to envision its victory as “absolute”? Prior to industrialization, hunting was not consciously concerned with the achievement of the human’s supremacy; rather, this supposed supremacy must be understood as an effect of this development. With technological progress, the dominance of the human became more decided over (other) animals. Before this apparent victory, the war of the species was perceived as ongoing, and even interminable.85

essay proposes to understand the birth of modern man, alongside the narratives of colonization, industrialization, and technological progress that consummated the divorce between humans and animals, by reviving a forgotten or repressed rivalry that contributed to determine the modern partition of a shared space. 83 For Derrida, the war continues to be waged in arenas other than hunting grounds, such as in language. Whenever “a philosopher, or anyone else, says ‘The Animal’ in the singular and without further ado, claiming thus to designate every living thing that is held not to be human,” Derrida affirms, “he declares, just as a disease is declared by means of a symptom, he offers up for diagnosis the statement ‘I am uttering an asinanity [bêtise].’ And this ‘I am uttering an asinanity’ should confirm not only the animality that he is disavowing but his complicit, continued, and organized involvement in a veritable war of the species” (2008 31). On the war on animals, see also Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. 84 The fear that technology would have a negative influence on the human hunter is not new. In The Laws, Plato praises hunting but opposes the capture of birds and fish with nets and traps: “Friends, we hope you’ll never be seized by a desire or passion to fish in the sea or to angle or indeed to hunt water animals at all; and don’t resort to creels, which a lazybones will leave to catch his prey whether he’s asleep or awake. We hope you never feel any temptation to capture men on the high seas and take to piracy, which will make you into brutal hunters and outlaws...Nor should any young man ever be seduced by a fancy to trap birds...All men who wish to cultivate the ‘divine’ courage have only one type of hunting left, which is the best: the capture of four-footed animals with the help of dogs and horses and by your own exertions, when you hunt in person and subdue all your preys by chasing and striking them and hurling weapons at them” (Plato 2004 273). 85 This accounts for how the conversation could be radically changed by Jeremy Bentham, for whom the question concerning the animal was not “can they think” but, famously, “can they suffer?” Since then, the war was no longer waged over the question of reason but, Derrida suggests, “over the matter of pity.” The last two centuries “have been those of a struggle, a war (whose inequality could one day be reversed) being waged between, on the one hand, those who violate not only animal life but even and also this sentiment of compassion, and, on the other hand, those who appeal for an irrefutable testimony to this pity” (2008 28–29).

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This chapter argues that this “event” took place at the turn of the nineteenth century, during which the human-animal relation in the West underwent a profound transformation. The hunt offers an outstanding paradigm for reading this transformation.

A certain epistemophilia that emerged during this period – as evidenced by Buffon’s colossal Histoire naturelle,86 Cuvier’s enterprise of systematic classification, and Darwin’s

1831 zoological expedition on the Beagle (named after a hunting dog) 87 – is the continuation of the hunt by other means. This shifting valence of the hunt from martial to epistemological finds a burgeoning archive in the emergence of natural history museums and science institutions, which depended on the products of the hunt for collecting their specimens. No individual is more representative of this historical shift than John James

Audubon.

Audubon created scientific documents and works of art at a moment when the United

States was eager to define and promulgate its intellectual identity as an emergent nation.88

86 In Buffon: A Life in Natural History, Jacques Roger reminds us that the knowledge of the animal displayed by Buffon’s Histoire naturelle was that “of the huntsman” (Roger 2006, 89) and that the philosopher Friedrich Grimm “used the article ‘Hunt’ in the Encyclopédie to oppose Buffon’s position” (270). 87 Darwin concludes his description of the fauna of the Galapagos Archipelago as being naturally “tame.” The terrestrial birds of these islands “are often approached sufficiently near to be killed with a switch, and sometimes, as I myself tried, with a cap or hat. A gun is here almost superfluous; for with the muzzle I pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree” (emphasis mine). Fear of man is an acquired instinct, Darwin continues: “It would appear that the birds of this archipelago, not having as yet learnt that man is a more dangerous animal than the tortoise or the Amblyrhynchus, disregard him, in the same manner as in England shy birds, such as magpies, disregard the cows and horses grazing in our fields” (Darwin 1991, 356). 88 This self-definition, as is well known, rested heavily upon an imperialistic conception not only of nature but also of those who were designated as the “naturals.” For Blum, “Audubon, the self- taught frontiersman risen to eminence in Europe and at home, was the naturalist par excellence of the Jacksonian era, while at the same time his idealization of nature, and establishment of a privileged vantage point for viewing it, appealed to the Whig elite of New England. Audubon’s contemporary culture-hero counterparts opened the Oregon Trail and roamed the best-selling fiction of James Fenimore Cooper. The wilderness celebrated in these mythmaking works and deeds was about to be subjected to speculation, migration and cultivation. Audubon, like Leatherstocking, symbolized the appropriation for the European population of the intimate knowledge of nature associated with the Indian” (1993 118). Cooper’s representation of Leatherstocking can be seen as an exemplary if problematic conflation of the American imperial project with the “natural” and “ancestral” activity of the hunt. A “white man” raised by the “red

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The famed naturalist and artist was above all a hunter: “Audubon engaged birds with the intensity (and sometimes the ferocity) of a hunter because hunting was the cultural frame out of which his encounter with birds emerged,” writes Richard Rhodes. “In early nineteenth century America, when wild game was still extensively harvested for food, observation for hunting had not yet disconnected from observation for scientific knowledge” (2004 74-75). Hunting emerges as the “cultural frame” of Audubon’s artistic and scientific practice. It is in this frame that the gaze of the artist-scientist is shown to be inextricable from that of the hunter.

How can we account for the convergence of the artistic and the scientific that

Audubon’s practice represents in the field of vision as one of capture? What consequences, epistemological and ontological, do the predatory pursuits have, both for the hunted

“object” and for the hunting “subject”? This essay elucidates the mechanism from which the figure of “modern man” emerges in a dynamic relationship to the animal. I will call this dialectical mechanism huntology.89

men,” Leatherstocking (aka Deerslayer, La Longue Carabine, the trapper, or Hawkeye) is, as his aliases indicate, the überhunter. 89 (Now, of course, “huntology” may just be a bad play on words. It is not without some shame that I propose this term. While it is not the focus of this essay, I want to say a few words about the special relationship that shame has to the question of the animal. My intuition is that talking about animals – indeed taking the question of the animal seriously – is never devoid of a certain amount of shame, is never safe from a certain disciplinary scorn for an emergent object of study. I cannot help but wonder if this shame is not unrelated to another kind of shame, the under- recognized shame for what is done to the animal in the name of its non-humanity. Of Kafka’s animal stories, Benjamin writes in parentheses, as if in passing: “(Being an animal presumably meant to [Kafka] to have given up human form and human wisdom from a kind of shame – as shame may keep a gentleman who finds himself in a disreputable tavern from wiping his glass clean)” (1968 144). We may remember here that it is embarrassment or malaise (malséance, animalséance) produced by the gaze of a cat on his naked body that prompts the philosopher’s reflection on the animal. Perhaps shame is the proper mode for an encounter with the animal, the proper mode of “the impropriety that comes of finding oneself. . .stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just to see” (Derrida 2008:4). Here I am faced with the shame of using the neologism “huntology,” a term that would be inextricably related to a certain amount of shame or honte. Huntology as hontologie. But also, huntology should be understood as pursuing another logic, one that would escape the logic of philosophical language, adopting instead a logic of the pun, of the non sequitur – of not following.)

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THE EXECUTION OF THE SUBJECT Now the hunter steps aside…and the naturalist comes forward.

Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon (2004 75)

In the foreground, almost too large to be contained by the painting, the eagle soars into the air, threatening to exceed the limits of the canvas. In the background, almost imperceptible on the immaculate coat of snow, the hunter is dwarfed by the majesty of the surrounding massifs. Most famous for his celebrated 1838 volume of etchings The

Birds of America, Audubon’s “Golden Eagle” (1833) shows the imposing bird holding a dead or dying rabbit in its clenched talon (Fig. 1). The French-American naturalist’s painting is nearly identical to U.S. contemporary artist Walton Ford’s “Delirium” (2004)

(Fig. 2). The images, were they not separated by more than 170 years, might have formed a diptych.

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Fig. 1. “Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos)” by John James Audubon, Watercolor, pastel, graphite and selective glazing, 38 x 25 1/2 inches; Collection of the New-York Historical Society, 1833.

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Fig. 2. “Delirium” by Walton Ford, Watercolor, gouache, pencil and ink on paper, 151.4 x 101.9 cm (59 5/8 x 40 1/8 in.), 2004.

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The eagle is a hunter, a fierce predator that lives off of the flesh of other animals.

Audubon’s aim was to offer a faithful representation of the (then) exotic feathered fauna of the New Continent. The depiction of the eagle is informed by his careful scrutiny of the animal, and yet, despite its patent realism, the scene is imbued with an unnatural quality. The composition is elaborate. The impeccable whiteness of the prey reinforces the fierceness of the eagle, the totemic animal par excellence. For Audubon, however, the

Golden Eagle is not an allegory; on the contrary, the naturalist valued the bird for its ornithological singularity and uniqueness.

And yet its allegorical dimension is undeniable. The eagle has been recruited as a mascot for the American colonial project. In Audubon’s painting, the bird is soaring westward, charting the course of the American empire’s Manifest Destiny. As the art historian

Theodore Stebbins has noted, the “Golden Eagle” appears to be modeled after Jacques

Louis David’s painting “Bonaparte Crossing the Saint Bernard” (1800) (Figs. 3 & 4). If

Ford’s “Delirium” can be said to be a descendent of Audubon’s “Golden Eagle,” then

David’s “Bonaparte Crossing” is its ancestor. Richard Rhodes has noted the commonalities between the two, namely their mirroring color schemes, the pointing gesture of Bonaparte’s hand as reproduced in the eagle’s beak, and the upward trajectory of their nearly identical landscapes. 90 This relation invites a closer reading of the

90 Rhodes writes: “His triple-peaked, snow-covered mountains are borrowed from the distant far right of Bonaparte, moved forward and centered behind his dark rocky landscape to mirror-image the colors and forms of the white hare and the dark eagle. Light flooding into both pictures from the upper left illuminates the eagle and its white prey as it illuminates Napoleon and his white horse. The drop of blood sweating from the hare’s torn eye duplicates a red touch of embroidery at Napoleon’s waist. But the conqueror and his rearing white horse combine in the eagle into one magnificent raptor, urging upward: the eagle’s beating wings duplicate Napoleon’s golden, wind- swirled cape, while the eagle’s open-beaked cry is the horse’s openmouthed whinny and the eagle’s glare of defiance is the horse’s bulging wild eye” (2004 376). While the eagle gets conflated with Napoleon (and his white horse), Audubon seems to position himself as simple soldier. Despite this seeming modesty, as Rhode suggests, Audubon has already climbed the mountain, contrary to his heroic model, and is “shinnying down the chasm with his prize.” Moreover, if

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imperialism of the naturalist-artist.91 The predator literally replaces the imperial figure of

Napoleon, and colonization thereby becomes naturalized through the motif of hunting.

Figs. 3 & 4. “Bonaparte franchissant le Grand-Saint-Bernard” by Jacques-Louis David, Oil on canvas, 259 × 221 cm (102 × 87 in), 1800 beside “Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos)” by John James Audubon.

The lack of realism of Audubon’s painting is not only conveyed by the symbolic reading that can be made of it but also by the rigid quality of the animals portrayed. The eagle and the rabbit appear as if they have just escaped from a taxidermist’s workshop. Instead of the intended lifelike impression of the bird of prey, Audubon presents us with something more closely resembling a nature morte or still life.

And as it happens, it was a still life, 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

Napoleon is the eagle, then what are we to understand of the dead eagle on the hunter’s shoulder? 91 The Manifest Destiny that these images illustrate are also reminiscent of Emanuel Leutze’s “Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way” (1861) or John Gast’s “American Progress” (1872), in which a series of archetypal American figures are facing the wild and promising territories of the West. Leutze was commissioned by the Congress to paint this mural celebrating the United States’ Manifest Destiny in the Capitol during the American Civil War. Gast’s painting celebrates the progress of civilization over savagery epitomized by a tribe of Indians fleeing Westward and untamed nature represented by a herd of bison hunted down by cowboys.

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spear piercing its heart, Ford’s raptor appears at first glance to have been extracted from a book of fables. In a way, “Delirium” is far more historically accurate than Audubon’s original, from which it draws its inspiration. Ford, who specializes in large-scale animal watercolors, exposes the fabricatedness of Audubon’s hunting scene.

Audubon had been asked by Columbian Museum proprietor Ethan Allen Greenwood to

“identify a live eagle he’d purchased from a man who hunted fox with spring-traps in

New Hampshire’s White Mountains” (1999 355). He explains in his 1835 Ornithological

Biography that he had convinced Greenwood to sell him the coveted animal. Bringing the wild bird into his home, Audubon confesses his fascination with the bird:

I must acknowledge that as I watched his eye, and observed his looks of proud disdain, I felt towards him not so generously as I ought to have done. At times I was half inclined to restore to him his freedom, that he might return to his native mountains; nay, I several times thought how pleasing it would be to see him spread out his broad wings and sail away towards the rocks of his wild haunts; but then, reader, some one seemed to whisper that I ought to take the portrait of the magnificent bird; and I abandoned the more generous design of setting him at liberty, for the express purpose of shewing you his semblance (355).

The “little voice” that tells him to execute the animal might not be that of his scientific instinct, but rather Audubon’s uneasiness with regard to the gaze of the animal, that seems to observe the naturalist in return. Audubon’s rendition of the eagle’s “face,” compared to that of Ford, is distinctly anthropomorphic.92 Finding it too challenging to

92 The issue of anthropomorphism is often raised to cut short any discussion of the animal under the pretense that placing humans and animals “on the same explanatory plane” inevitably does violence to the animal (de Waal, 2006 66). Wielding the threat of anthropomorphism, however, can result in a no less dogmatic position that Frans de Waal has called “anthropodenial.” With huntology, I propose to see the human as constituted in dynamic relationship to the animal: hence neither the animal can ever be thought as a given. Interestingly, when Stephen Budiansky argues that anthropomorphism is an outcome of natural selection (we anthropomorphize because it is in the interest of the species), he invokes the hunt: “Our tendency to anthropomorphize the animals we hunt may have given us a huge advantage in anticipating their habits and their evasions” (2009 xviii). For Tom Tyler, Budiansky gets himself into a pickle because on the one hand suggests that anthropomorphism is “hardwired” (genetically determined), but on the other hand that one should try “to transcend this decidedly unscientific inclination” (2012 57). Anthropomorphism (in this case, the tendency to predict what the beast is

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draw it alive, Audubon attempts to electrocute the animal but, for lack of a powerful enough battery, decides to asphyxiate the bird by shutting it in a small room with a pot of burning charcoal (356). “I waited, expecting every moment to hear him fall down from his perch,” he writes, “but after listening for hours I opened the door, raised the blankets, and peeped under them amidst a mass of suffocating fumes. . .There stood the Eagle on his perch, with his bright unflinching eye turned towards me, and as lively and vigorous as ever!” Audubon repeated the operation several times but the animal refused to die:

We were nearly driven from our home in a few hours by the stifling vapours while the noble bird continued to stand erect, and to look defiance at us whenever we approached his position of martyrdom. His fierce demeanour precluded all internal inspection, and at last I was compelled to resort to a method always used as the last expedient, a most effectual one. I thrust a long pointed piece of steel through his heart, when my proud prisoner instantly fell dead, without even ruffling a feather (356).

It is this invisible violence done to the represented animal that Ford exploits as he satirizes the artificiality of 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 afterwards, pictorially, in its natural habitat. Of Ford’s painting,

Greg Cook writes: “It’s that backstory, that tale of conquest and colonization and accumulated injuries against nature, that is at the heart of Walton Ford’s allegories”

(2007). Ford explains that he became interested in using watercolor because he wanted

“things to look like Audubons.” He describes his paintings as “fake Audubons.” “I twisted the subject matter a bit and got inside [Audubon’s] head and tried to paint as if it was really his tortured soul portrayed,” Ford says, “as if his hand betrayed him and

in order to “outsmart” it) would be the reason the human is such a good hunter. But how, then, can one suggest in the same breath that this results from the very activity that would engender it? How can anthropomorphism be both the result of the hunt (we act as humans because we hunt well) and its consequence (we are good hunters because we act as humans)? I believe that the hunt does play a preponderant role in the constitution of the human, but it makes little sense to speak of anthropomorphism in an evolutionary perspective that, in principle, refuses any transcendental myth of origins.

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painted what he didn’t want to expose about himself. And it was very important to make them look like. . .he painted them, but that they escaped out of him” (2003 124).

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 of smoke escape its beak. In contrast, the figure of the hunter, who in Audubon’s painting carries a dead eagle on his back, is instead pictured lying on the snow as if dead. Cook writes: “Like an avenging spirit, Ford imagines

Audubon as a tiny hunter in the background, stricken, collapsed into the snow at the top of a wintry hill.” Ford’s elucidation of the circumstances surrounding the production of

Audubon’s painting accounts for the model’s “flat” appearance, its pictorial rigor mortis

(Fig. 5). The eagle appears confined within the canvas, as if its frame were a kind of trap and the naturalist-cum-artist regarded nature with the eyes of a hunter.

In Audubon’s original, the arrogant raptor had indeed been captured by the painter, who had included his own image in the left hand corner dressed in hunting gear. 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 self-reflexive artist. The naturalist’s self-portrait appears comically small, almost irrelevant, and yet the whole scene is depicted from his perspective. In the painting, however, the hunter’s gaze is not directed toward the bird but appears to be focused on what is in front of him. In the “Golden Eagle,” Audubon’s hunter/beholder presents himself as seeing the world from 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 fantasy of omniscience. (At the very moment that our hunter adopts a bird’s- eye-view, his gaze is obstructed by a gigantic bird of his own making!)

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The painting literalizes the problem that representation poses to objective knowledge, which postulates an irreducible distance between the subject knowing and the object known. The “tragedy” of objective representation is that it demands the execution of its subject.

Fig. 5. Still from documentary John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature (2007). Artist Walton Ford demonstrates Audubon’s technique of “posing” the dead animal on a grid in order to draw it. The cage-like grid will then be obliterated by the landscape painted over it.

If the hunter depicted in the margin of Audubon’s painting is intended to represent the painter himself, then the scene observed both from above and below exposes the irreconcilable dualism of the observer. The purportedly realistic rendition is shown to be highly manufactured and hardly “natural,” if by natural one means something left untouched by the hand of man. Audubon represents two versions of the same eagle, which appears to be symbolically both captured (on the hunter’s shoulder) and free (as a bird). The fact that the eagle is at once dead and alive in the picture, not unlike

Schrödinger’s cat in his box, establishes a correlation between the killing of the empirical animal and its transformation into a representative specimen. Ford exposes Audubon as

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having a split identity. He is both the naturalist fascinated with understanding this living creature and the artist who must execute the object for the sake of his own artistic execution.

What has been erased in the still life is the temporality of the crime scene. Or, rather, the iconographic grammar (before, the eagle was alive in the foreground – after, it is dead and on the hunter’s shoulder) erects the movement of the hunt in a structure (in a process that can be called allegorization).

Yoking the life and death of the animal to that of the hunter/observer, Audubon and

Ford’s tableaux de chasse make the dialectical character of the hunter’s perspective manifest.

The chart below summarizes the important differences between the two paintings.

Ford’s adaptation suggests that the destinies of the hunter and the hunted are deeply intertwined, suggesting that the hunter no longer has a raison d’être if the eagle breaks free.

One may go so far as to perceive in Audubon’s painting the hunter’s unlikely “becoming bird” as he is himself perched on a fallen tree. The hunter is, furthermore, represented as under threat, balanced over a precipice, occupying a precarious position.

Fig. 1. John James Audubon, Fig. 2. Walton Ford, “The Golden Eagle,” 1833 “Delirium,” 2004 Animal • Depicted as living and free and as • Depicted as dying but unfettered (Bird) captured and dead on the hunter’s • Landing and facing eastward shoulder • Soaring in the sky, westward Human • Alive, straddling a tree fallen over a • Dead, lying on the ground, “flattened (Hunter) precipice out” Pictorial • Realistic but with flat quality and • Figural, more painterly but more Style slightly overwrought lively • Painting titled after the zoological • Original title indicating that the category of the animal represented, painting does not have any objective with Latin name in brackets pretension

Fig. 6. Audubon vs. Ford paintings comparison table.

The dynamic of the hunt is presented as not merely a question of the hunted but also, essentially, one of the hunter. Audubon’s painting indexes the problematic representation of the animal as informed by a preconception of the human as a hunter. With huntology,

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I argue that our conception of the human is contingent upon such predatory representations of the animal.

ONTOLOGICAL PURSUITS Then wouldn’t that man do this most purely who approaches each thing as far as possible with thought itself, and who neither puts any sight into this thinking nor drags in any other sense along with his reasoning; but instead, using unadulterated thought itself all by itself, he attempts to hunt down each of the beings [thēreuein tōn ontōn] that’s unadulterated and itself all by itself, and once he’s freed himself as far as possible from eyes and ears and, so to speak, from his whole body, because it shakes the soul up and doesn’t let her attain truth and thoughtfulness when the body communes with her – isn’t this the man, Simmias, if anyone, who will hit upon what is?

Plato, Phaedo (66a)93

Michel Foucault’s study of Diego Velásquez’s 1656 painting “Las Meninas,” opening The

Order of Things, offers a reading of classical perspectivalism founded on an irreducible invisibility. Of the epistemic model presented by Velásquez, Foucault observes that “the profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility of the person seeing – despite all mirrors, reflections, imitations, and portraits” (1994 17). He argues that something (the author, the beholder, or the subject) is always left out of the frame: “the function of that reflection is to draw into the interior of the picture what is intimately foreign to it: the gaze which has organized it and the gaze for which it is displayed” (17).

93 Apropos the use of the word “thēreuein,” John Burnet says that it is Socrates’ “favorite metaphor” (in Plato 1998, 35). Plato uses it again in 66c when he explains how the body hinders the philosopher in his purely rational “hunt for what is” (tou ontos thēran). Surely, this is but a “metaphor” used to describe the philosophical pursuit of truth. Yet it is important to flag that the animal (thér, related to the German Tier, the hunted animal) is there, already lodged within the verb thēreuein, which introduces the task of the philosopher as taming nature’s inconstancy and driving away the body’s deceiving senses in order to contemplate directly the true essence of things. Burnet adds that tōn ontōn means “things” in 66a, but in other passages, the same word is translated as “realities” or even “the truth.” In her little book entitled Platon et la “Chasse de l’Être”, Geneviève Rodis-Lewis draws our attention to the fact that, according to Plato, the vocation of the philosopher is literally to “hunt down being” (singular).

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If the entire world were captured in the representation, it would not be a representation but the world itself (or the world would be pure representation). This impossible coincidence between the subject and its representation heralds the emancipation of the human subject from the world it represents. Velásquez insists on this representational divide, but, as Foucault suggests, the separation is also an elision of the subject (which will only be fully emancipated from its object in the nineteenth century). The (human) subject, quite fundamentally, creates itself by extracting itself from the world that it seeks to describe. In other words, to paraphrase Cary Wolfe, the human gains knowledge of itself as a knowing subject only to lose the world. By extracting itself from the picture, as

Foucault suggests, the human has accidentally drawn the contours of its own image.

Nature is thus born out of man’s dissociation from it.

Audubon’s animal representations are exemplary of the new epistemological regime on which the modern ordering of things is grounded. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and

Peter Galison situate Audubon in a time before “mechanical objectivity” became the predominant epistemic virtue. Of his depiction of the “Crested Titmouse,” they write:

“Audubon’s bird drawings were printed on double elephant folio paper in order to approximate life size as closely as possible. Yet Audubon’s insistence that birds be depicted in natural habitats and poses, observed first-hand by the artist-naturalist, did not preclude mannered compositions […] or anthropomorphic stances and descriptions”

(2010 81). They remind us of the extent to which Audubon’s paintings were “criticized by some contemporary naturalists as falsifications of nature” whereas similar artistic method had won English naturalist George Edwards the Royal Society of London’s

Copley Medal in 1750 (79).94 In Picturing Nature, Ann Shelby Blum writes that the “ethos

94 For a detailed account of the skepticism and criticisms with which Audubon’s paintings were met by the naturalist community of the time, see Blum, Picturing Nature (1993 111-18). “The

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of objectivity, expressed in the technical language of systematic description of generic and specific types, was deeply at odds with Audubon’s celebration of the observer as participant and his recording of singular events whose actors were individual creatures”

(1993 88).

The ambition of the “truth-to-nature” regime in which Daston and Galison situate

Audubon is to “reveal the one and only ur-form of a plant, animal or crystal” (2010 363), while the mechanical objective paradigm wishes to remove entirely the knowing subject from the known object. 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 lifelike image of the bird as it really is. In the “mechanical objectivity” model, however, the self qua self is identified as the source of error and thus must be eliminated. This drive toward objectivity may explain why, when The Birds of America was published, the hunter had disappeared from the background: “Whether on his own or on Audubon’s instruction,

[the printer] Robert Havell removed the little huntsman from the plate he made of the

Golden Eagle, Plate 181 of The Birds of America, removing along with it a level of meaning that only the original watercolor has sustained” (Rhodes, 2004 379).

It is this very effacement that gives birth to what Foucault has identified 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 improving position of the fine arts and of their practitioners in American society and the increasing popularity of landscape painting enhanced Audubon’s reputation at home. At the same time, the growing distinction between naturalist and illustrator in scientific practice created the basis for controversy over defining his true calling . . . In an important sense, Audubon, man and work, epitomized the transformation of the practice of the naturalist-illustrator into the ethos of the artist-naturalist” (115).

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to offer an unaltered image of what the wild animal really looks like. Contrary to the ingenious composition of “Las Meninas” that is always chasing its subject out of the frame, Audubon’s painting achieves a fallacious reconciliation between the human observer and the observed nature. Whereas Velasquez and Foucault articulate the paradox of the spectator/subject, Audubon reconciles the observer and nature through their mere juxtaposition within the painting. The creative gap between the self and the world is thereby negated, and the human born out of this elision is left to contemplate proudly its own image in the representation of the animal. Placed side by side with Ford’s adaptation, the human’s bifurcated subjectivity is revealed as produced by the effect of taking itself “out of the picture” (in the published version of the painting).

The split perspective at work in Audubon’s painting is emblematic of a predatory drive at the heart of Western modern representations of the animal. As many have compellingly argued, these representations constitute a humanist archive that privileges logics of mastery and domestication and rests upon a strict, if ill-defined, demarcation between human and non-human animals. At issue in humanist representations of animals is more than “just” the way in which animals are treated but the very concept of humanity, and thereby of humanism.95 The political and ethical principles on which Giorgio Agamben’s work is founded underline the inextricable affinities binding the question of the animal to the practical issue of defining who gets to be called human and what, as a result of this partition, is excluded from humanhood. In The Open, Agamben describes what he calls

“the anthropological machine” as a simultaneously inclusionary and exclusionary apparatus:

95 I should make it clear that the humanism at issue here is one whose theoretical roots are located in the Western metaphysical tradition influenced by Descartes and (for the most part) by his followers. It is this ontotheological metaphysics that Derrida is after in The Animal That Therefore I Am. On the seminal position occupied by Descartes in this philosophical tradition, see Elizabeth de Fontenay’s Le Silence des Bêtes (1998 275-288).

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Insofar as the production of man through the opposition man/animal, human/inhuman, is at stake here, the machine necessarily functions by means of an exclusion (which is always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always already an exclusion). Indeed, precisely because the human is already presupposed every time, the machine actually produces a kind of state of exception, a zone of indeterminacy in which the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an inside and the inside is in turn only the inclusion of an outside (2003 37).

It is interesting that Agamben would call upon the metaphor of the machine to account for the process of separation at work in our humanistic culture, doubtless to indicate in a

Nietzschean gesture the ahuman foundations of that aftereffect that is the human.

The human is no longer homo faber (the maker) but homo factum (the “self” made man), or, rather, he is both. Playfully evoking Descartes’s animal-machine, Agamben’s image of the machine undermines the idea by which individual sovereignty and autonomous subjectivity constitute the logical premises of the human condition. Following Nietzsche,

I would propose that the issue might not so much be, as Agamben suggests, to “stop the anthropological machine” (38), as to understand its modus operandi and recognize it as a machinic process over which “we humans” have little control. Instead of lamenting the violence committed against animals perceived as machines, Nietzsche recommends that we extend Descartes’ mechanical approach to the human being. One should “unlearn” to bind ethics and politics to questions of rational or divine agency: from this perspective, rationality and spirituality are to be seen as nothing more than the undesirable byproducts of the anthropogenetic machine.96

96 Nietzsche always describes man as another animal – that is, as an animal among others, and not as essentially other to animals. A large section of The Genealogy of Morals is devoted to rehistoricizing the separation between man and animal (see for instance Genealogy, II. 8, 16, 18 and 24). In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche playfully wishes to extend Descartes’ concept of the animal-machine to the human: “Man is absolutely not the crown of creation: every creature stands beside him at the same stage of perfection...And even in asserting that we assert too much: man is, relatively speaking, the most unsuccessful animal, the sickliest, the one most dangerously strayed from its instincts – with all that, to be sure, the most interesting! – As regards the animals, Descartes was the first who, with a boldness worthy of reverence, ventured to think of the animals as a machine: our whole science of physiology is devoted to proving this proposition. Nor,

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What is at issue in The Open is the exposure of the “irony” of the self-perpetuating mechanisms that define the ontological status of the human. The machine should not be thought of as a simple dragnet catching all that is not human, if only because “what is human” is always yet to be decided. The problem is not one of taxonomy but of kinship, not one of “classification” but of “relation.”97 In fact, Agamben seems to say, it is the chase and not the arrest – the capturing and not the capture – of the animal that determines who deserves to be labeled human and what is left over. The Open insists on the interminability, indeed the openness, of the twofold movement of capture and exclusion at work in the making of the anthropos. Instead of running after yet another singular feature that would be “proper” to human beings, rather than trying to establish another decisive specific barrier between the human and the nonhuman,98 Agamben offers to examine the stalling logic of the “proper.” The Open can be read as an attempt to re-dynamize an all- too-static anthropological ontology, that Derrida describes as “the fixism of the Cartesian cogito” (2008 130).

Near the conclusion of The Open, Agamben synthesizes his baroque overview of the human/animal differentiation in Western philosophical discourses with a series of theses.

In his second thesis, Agamben argues that ontology, the branch of metaphysics that concerns itself with matters of essence and being, is sustained by a logic of the chase that works to exclude animals:

logically, do we exclude man, as even Descartes did: our knowledge of man today is real knowledge precisely to the extent that it is knowledge of him as a machine” (1990 136-137). 97 On the impossibility to determine what is proper to the human and the political and scientific consequences of such a limitation, see the last chapter of Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s Scandalous Knowledge, “Animal Relatives, Difficult Relations.” 98 This is a move that Agamben sees Heidegger reperforming in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, in spite of his forceful criticism of the complicity holding together humanism and metaphysics (we think, for instance, of “The Letter on Humanism”).

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Ontology, or first philosophy, is not an innocuous academic discipline, but in every sense the fundamental operation in which anthropogenesis, the becoming human of the living being, is realized. From the beginning, metaphysics is taken up in this strategy: it concerns precisely that meta that completes and preserves the overcoming of animal physis in the direction of human history (2003 79).

The overcoming of 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 effect, always presupposed to be a meta-animal: from the outset, “metaphysics is taken up” (or captured) in this ontological pursuit. The inclusionary/exclusionary logic at the heart of anthropological ontology is the result of huntology’s ongoing process of incorporation and expulsion.

Offering a model for thinking the space maintained between man and animal, huntology queries the mode of apprehension of 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 deferral of knowing on which philosophical knowledge, in line with Descartes’s metaphysical school of thought, is based. This philosophy,

Derrida hypothesizes, “governs, in the sense of being prevalent or hegemonic in, all domains that treat the question of the animal, indeed, where the animal itself is treated: zoology, ethology, anthropology, but first of all, ontology, mastery by means of knowledge…” (2008 89).

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche delimits the ground of the “Human soul” as a “big- game hunt” for a “born psychologist” (1990 74). We might literalize Nietzsche’s analogy to suggest that the human subject is not merely studied but also constituted by his ontological pursuits. As Heidegger has argued, tracking evidence of one’s humanity implies that one knows what one is after and therefore, that the human is both

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presupposed and deduced by such metaphysical quest (2008 225-226). The validity of one’s hypothesis rests on evidence that, in turn, is sanctioned as such if and only if one already knows what one is looking for. Such vertigo-inducing recursivity turns The

Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysic into a sort of thriller in which Heidegger investigates the appropriate method to “initially approach and subsequently pursue” his “subject matter,” namely, the animal (1995 201),99 one that the concept of huntology aspires to render apparent and tactical.

As in the case of Audubon’s “Golden Eagle,” the hunter that has “gone after” 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 opposes, the hunter, who, “for the express purpose of shewing his semblance” to the beholder has to execute it and paradoxically to lose his object. Audubon’s example is characteristic of the raptorial character of certain representations of animals and, subsequently, of the production of knowledge derived from these representations. In the end, it is not the bird in its irreducible singularity that is described but the hunter’s fantasized relationship to the bird as exemplary of its subspecies. The “capture” of the animal informs 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 formation of our ontological status as human beings.

99 Heidegger himself comments on the circularity of his philosophical inquiry at the beginning of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, the 1929 seminar where he meditates at length on the (non)place the animal occupies in the world. While this recursivity testifies to Heidegger’s attempt at coming to terms with the question of the animal, his investigation is thoroughly thetic in that it holds unyieldingly to the axiom that the animal is “poor in world” (weltarm) while man is “configurator of world” (weltbildend). Heidegger describes the animal essence as a form of permanent “numbness” or “captivation” (Benommenheit) – one is tempted to say of “capture.” It seems that the animal, as it is presented in Heidegger’s seminar, plays the role of a tragic hero trapped into an ineluctable pattern of repetition. I do not have the time to elaborate on this, but it would be interesting to look at the examples of the bee cut in half that continues to drink, unaware that it will never be satiated (figure of the Danaids); the bee unable to return home (figure of Ulysses); the moth whose wings are burnt by the lamp (figure of Icarus).

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If the anthropological machine is relentless, this is because the hunt is not so much concerned with catching the prey but with the hunt itself, or rather with the way it ensures the human dominion by catching and rejecting the animal in the same gesture. “I fear that this is the origin of hunting,” writes Michel Serres. “The only things hunted are those that have to be chased away” (1982 77). 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 of a concept that means simultaneously to hunt, that is to go after, to chase, and to repel, that is to chase away from oneself (for instance, “chasser le naturel”100). Whereas the English “to hunt” would seem to privilege the pursuit of the prey (indulging the fantasy of ultimate capture), the polysemy of the

French illuminates the complexity of the term that illustrates the production of knowledge about the animal.

In Specters of Marx, Derrida plays on the double valence of the word to show that the hunt (here, the antagonistic fascination Karl Marx had for the German philosopher Max

Stirner) is interminable and finds its object not in the prey it pursues but in itself:

I chase you. I pursue you. I run after you to chase you away from here . . . And the ghost does not leave its prey, namely, its hunter. It has understood instantly that one is hunting it just to hunt it, chasing it away only so as to chase after it. Specular circle: one chases after in order to chase away, one pursues, sets off in pursuit of someone to make him flee, but one makes him flee, distances him, expulses him so as to go after him again and remain in pursuit. One chases someone away, kicks him out the door, excludes him, or drives him away. But it is in order to chase after him, seduce him, reach him, and thus keep him close at hand (2006 175).

Derrida exploits a similar semantic ambiguity in his posthumous The Animal That Therefore

I Am, in which he laments philosophy’s failing of the animal. He challenges the ethics of

100 Significantly, the second half of the proverb is “et il revient au galop,” which suggests that if you try to chase nature away, it finds a way to get back at you, acting as some sort of revenant. It is worth noting that nature comes back galloping, at the swift pace of the urdomesticated animal.

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a philosophy sustained by a logic of hunting that would strive to frame the animal in a tableau de chasse (“stilling the wildlife,” so to speak). From Descartes to Lacan, Derrida asserts, philosophers have labored to preserve the ontological difference between man and animal by consistently depriving the animal of the capacity to respond. Derrida evokes the mythic figure of Bellerophon: “He deserves a ten-day conference alone. He represents, as is well known, the figure of the hunter. He follows. He is he who follows.

He follows and persecutes the beast. He would say: I am (following) [je suis], I pursue, I track, overcome and tame the animal” (2008 66).

Derrida’s title L’animal que donc je suis characteristically plays on the double meaning of the

French “je suis” that can be translated as both “I am” and “I follow,” which forces the translator to write each time “I am (following).” Derrida tricks language into forcing the reader’s identification with the animal (“I am the animal”) and into recognizing the distance maintained by the one who goes after the animal (“I am following the animal”).

This conceit enables him to approach the anthropological ontology as a relational economy rather than a predetermined state of things. I chase the animal ergo sum. This, precisely, is huntology: the injection of a dynamism – often unacknowledged, as

Agamben makes clear – inside an overly static, lifeless anthropological ontology. Not only does the term huntology intend to conjure up the repressed dynamic out of which the figure of the human emerges, not only does it demand, following Derrida, that we develop an “alternative ontology of animal life, an ontology in which the human/animal distinction is called radically into question” (Calarco, 2008 141),101 but it also renders

101 Calarco goes on to say that Derrida’s œuvre paves the way for a “relational and machinic ontology of singularities, one that is informed as much by Nietzschean and Deleuzean materialism as by Heidegerrian and Levinasian phenomenology. This is perhaps the most radical strain of Derrida’s thought on the question of the animal, and it is the closest to the argument developed in this book – for this line of thought takes away the ground for making any kind of binary human-animal distinction. If what we call ‘animal life’ is constituted by a ‘heterogeneous multiplicity’ of entities and a ‘multiplicity of organizations of relations’ between organic and

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visible the violence done to the living beings that are chased away from the category of the human. This exclusion recalls Derrida’s notion of carnophallogocentrism, denoting the traditionally masculinist dimension of the hunt, a critique of which remains to be developed in future work.

Questioning the premise of any unqualified distinction between human and nonhuman animals, huntology offers the opportunity to rethink what is usually excluded from the realm of ontology. Hence the transparent echo with Derrida’s “hauntology,” a key principle of which – following Max Stirner against and alongside Marx – is the welcoming in philosophy of what philosophy tends to discard, namely, specters, ghosts and other ephemeral appearances that lack ontological substance. In Specters of Marx,

Derrida himself makes the relationship between hunting and haunting explicit:

This logic and this topology of the paradoxical hunt (whose figure, beginning before Plato, will have traversed the whole history of philosophy, more precisely of the ontological inquest or inquisition) should not be treated as a rhetorical ornament when one reads The Manifesto of the Communist Party: its first sentences, as we saw, immediately associate the figure of haunting with that of hunting (2006 174-176).

Affirming the possibility of accounting for that which is not recognized by ontology,

Derrida deontologizes philosophy. This essay represents a petition to expand the scope of this gesture by opening ontology, with the concept of huntology, to animal life.

Huntology is both a critical paradigm for “tracking down” the anthropocentric prejudice undergirding a dominant Western philosophical discourse and a reparative theory that seeks to nuance the dogmatism of human/animal demarcations and to rethink, without necessarily doing away with, that which calls itself “human.”

inorganic life forms, then what sense can be made of an insuperable division between human and animal? Do not ‘human beings’ belong to this multiplicity of beings and relations? Are we to believe that human beings are somehow exempt from the play of differences and forces, of becoming and relations?” (2008 142)

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CONCLUSION: ERGO SUM No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. No awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends? Therefore we are free to kill them?

Elizabeth Costello (2003 90)

So then, what, therefore? What comes after the human, as the notion of posthumanism would seem to herald? To answer this question, Derrida proposes that we invent a different, “unheard-of grammar”102 to articulate differently the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. The Animal That Therefore I Am is punctuated by a series of

“therefores”– recalling Descartes’s cogito ergo sum. It adopts, as well as mocks, the predatory logic of this grammatical hinge that poses, really imposes, a methodical connection between a series of proposals or events. One recalls that Derrida famously opens his essay “Différance” with a “therefore” that is not preceded by anything in order to show the potential violence made possible by this adverb. The “therefore” postulates a logical sequence, it presupposes a “before” and an “after” and determines a hierarchical order, as is shown by the Bellerophon passage: “[The hunter] follows. He is he who follows. He follows and persecutes the beast.”

But it also implies a categorical statement. There is something authoritative and final in the binding character of the therefore, something exclusive. “When we say ‘therefore,’ when we consider a proposition as concluded, we make it the object of an assertion,” writes Deleuze. “We set aside the premises and affirm it for itself, independently. We relate it to the state of affairs which it denotes, independently of the implications which constitute its signification” (2004 19). Huntology relinquishes the temptation of a purely

102 Derrida’s dream can be read as a response to Nietzsche’s fear in Twilights of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer that we are not rid of God because we still believe in grammar (“Ich fürchte, wir werden Gott nicht los, weil wir noch an die Grammatik glauben”).

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logical discourse that would enforce a rational order on the heterogeneity of animal life.

The aim is neither to abolish all notions of order, nor is it to “stop” the anthropological machine, nor still to cease hunting. Rather, the imperative is to reassess what kind of relationship the human has to the animal. Right after mentioning the logic that, according to him, guided the most “paradigmatic, dominant and normative” figures of

Western philosophy (namely, Kant, Heidegger, Levinas and Lacan), Derrida writes:

The strategies of this right (for more) to follow [droit de suite] that I have just evoked resemble those of the hunt, whether the animal thereby follows its desire, what is desirable in its desire (or in its need, as will be said by those who wish, out of desire or need, to believe in an ironclad distinction between the two, desire and need, just as in the distinction between man and animal), or whether, while following its drive, the animal finds itself followed, tracked by the drive of the other. And we should not exclude the possibility that the same living creature is at the same time follower and followed, hunter knowing itself to be hunted, seducer and seduced, persecutor and fugitive, and that the two forces of the same strategy, indeed, of the same movement, are conjugated not only in the same animal, the same animot, but in the same instant (Derrida, 2008 55).

The logic of following presupposes the possibility of an affinity (of a relation as a relative) and yet, in the same gesture, contributes to producing the very dichotomy it promises to eradicate. In lieu of chasing the animal, the hunter chases it away. For

Derrida, “hauntology” evokes and revokes in the same gesture the violence of ontology: it exceeds the confines of ontology, it is irreducible to it, but it is also what makes ontology possible, what justifies it.

Likewise, huntology accounts for the formation of anthropological ontology and offers a poetic grammar for deconstructing the “ironclad” demarcation between the nonhuman and the human animal. Huntology should be understood as eluding the logic of philosophical language, dreaming instead of a non-hypotactic, illogical grammar that would upset certain preestablished associations concerning the animal and disturb the unyielding predation of grammatical predication. If huntology is not ossified into an

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ontology, if it is not stabilized, if it remains cynegetic, if it opens itself to other forms of existence, if it does not try to erase the traces of its own process, it might provide the grounds for an alternative, non-nihilistic posthumanist perspective.

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It is not down in any map; true places never are.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale (1992 61)

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Chapter Three

CRYPTOANIMALITY THE ILLEGIBLE ANIMAL IN EDGAR ALLAN POE’S URBAN FICTION

Man has been a hunter for thousands of years. In the course of countless chases he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks on the ground, broken branches, excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors. He learned to sniff out, record, interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces…He learned how to execute complex mental operations with lightning speed, in the depth of a forest or in a prairie with its hidden dangers…

The hunter would have been the first “to tell a story” because he alone was able to read, in the silent, nearly imperceptible tracks left by his prey, a coherent sequence of events. “To decipher” or “to read” animal tracks are metaphors. We have tried, however, to take them literally, as the verbal condensation of a historical process which brought us, perhaps, over a long span of time, to the invention of writing…

Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues,” Myths, Emblems, Clues (1990)

CITYSCAPES In the decades before the Civil War, a growing number of American authors began to explore the landscapes of urban modernity, electing the city as the fertile ground for their fiction. The cultural center of gravity was gradually moving outwards from New England to new localities, such as New York City and Philadelphia. In this chapter, I propose to leave the deep oceans and the arcane forests that Melville, Cooper, and Audubon both celebrated and mourned in their epic works to step into the labyrinthine city imagined in the short fictions of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the first American writers to lay his tales in the modern urban environment. Mainly set in the European capitals of Paris and

London, Poe’s urban fiction raises the question of what constitutes its American idiosyncrasy. Inspired by Dickens and inspiring Baudelaire, Poe’s fiction epitomizes the complex geography of influence between the continents in the mid-nineteenth century.

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Indeed, the bustling ecology of the metropolis offered new imaginative grounds for affirming the emergent nation’s cultural identity as it was being modeled by and against that of the Old World. This complex process of identification and disidentification with

Europe was further triangulated by the nation’s own changing cultural and socio- geographical landscape by the end of the Jacksonian era, as writers sought to represent the shifting focus in the American imaginary from the wilderness to the city. Shuttling between the wilds of the New World and the cities of the Old, John James Audubon is both a symptomatic figure and documentarian of this historical shift. He played both sides of the continents’ Oedipal negotiation, displacing “the birds of America” from their native habitats to the great drawing rooms of Paris with his elephant folio.103 Many writers of the time, Poe among them, sought to measure up not only to their European counterparts but also to the romantic pastoralism then dominant in American literature.104 As the untamed American landscape began to recede from view (Audubon’s paintings willfully erasing the figure of the hunter), the animal, however, seemed to disappear. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd,” “The Murders in the Rue

Morgue,” and “The Black Cat,” among other short fictions, reveal that the hunt is hardly over, merely repressed.

The perceived disappearance of the animal in the nineteenth century is inseparable, I will argue, from the city dweller’s inability to track it. As it becomes ever more ubiquitous in

103 Richard Rhodes’ biography observes that the French-American naturalist mainly sought recognition in Europe for his work on the American fauna (2004 209-226, 249-339). 104 In The Raven and the Whale, Perry Miller makes this argument about cosmopolitan writers and journalists as exemplified by the conservative magazine The Knickerbocker and the more liberal Democratic Review. He observes that they sought to free themselves from writers like Cooper who were mythifying the nature of the American landscape. “[In] their heart of hearts, they [the Knickerbockers] were not worshipers of rural landscapes,” writes Miller, “they did not want to range the wilderness with Natty Bumppo, they were not savages. . .they did not really believe that familiarity degraded these urban localities and that New York needed to be fumigated by the roseate air of romance” (1997 28-29).

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the booming arenas of science and art (from the zoo to the museum), the animal is ever more lost. This transition is one that I’ll characterize as the move from a huntological to a cryptological relation to the animal following Walter Benjamin’s crucial insight in The

Arcades Project that the figure of the detective is the modern hunter. “Owing to the influence of [James Fenimore] Cooper,” he observes, “it becomes possible for the novelist in an urban setting to give scope to the experience of the hunter. This has a bearing on the rise of the detective story” (M11a6).

Poe resuscitates the figure of the hunter in the character of Detective Dupin, who alone is capable of tracking down the animal-murderer by decrypting signs that come across as meaningless to everyone else (i.e. by reading what does not permit itself to be read or what was never written). The problem of the urban animal – which allegedly cannot write, and thus cannot be read by the police – poses the question of reading as one of decryption. Decrypting, I will show, is not only the act of reading tracks (and not writing), but also seeing writing as tracks. Reading, in short, not what was written but what was once writing.

THE URBAN WANDERER Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs.

Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood (2006 53)

In his well-known tirade against James Fenimore Cooper’s “literary offenses,” Mark

Twain drolly proposes that the Leatherstocking saga should be renamed The Broken Twig

Series. “Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig,” writes Twain (1994 380). Calling out the perceived paucity of Cooper’s literary bag of tricks (or “little box of stage-properties” as

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he calls it), Twain’s charge also points to The Leatherstocking Tales’ persistently clumsy privileging of senses other than sight. When sight is privileged, however, it is not used for reading (as we know, Bumppo is illiterate). Or to quote Hofmannsthal, it is used for

“reading what was never written”105: the tracks of an animal, the changing position of the sun, the direction of the wind, and so on. Even as Twain pokes fun at him, he nevertheless draws attention to the fact that Cooper gives us access to another mode of reading, where different senses and faculties are used. The semiotics of Cooper’s stage- properties, however ridiculous for Twain, evidences the novel’s insistent somatic lexicon

– that is, how the imprints made down the path or the mark left by the snapped twig enable a different kind of reading and writing.

How does one hunt in an urban space? Overwritten by the flow of scriptural bodies and signs, the city privileges a semantic acumen to the detriment of a somatic one – forgetting that the former likely derives from the latter, as Carlo Ginzburg speculates.106 Benjamin argues that the modern hunter is the flâneur or the detective. Debunking the common perception of antebellum literature as provincial, Dana Brand cites the introduction of the flâneur, often thought to be a continental phenomenon, into the American context in the works of Poe (1991 9). The urban wanderer does not read street names, as Benjamin tells us, so much as he lends his ear to them in the manner of an attuned hunter, detecting

(relever) signs and sounds that city life ostensibly renders irrelevant – one cannot see the stars in the city, and animal odors are methodically eliminated to avoid offending the

105 “Was nie geschrieben wurde, lesen.” Walter Benjamin was fond of this sentence by Hofmannsthal, which he quotes in the “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’” and “On the Mimetic Faculty.” On the significance of this sentence in Benjamin’s philosophy, see Peter Szendy’s “Loose Words, or Arche-Reading” in the collection of essays devoted to Samuel Weber co-edited by Peter Fenves, Kevin McLaughlin and Marc Redfield (forthcoming). 106 A connection that is already suggested by Socrates in Cratylus, in which the philosopher argues that the body (soma) is “that by which the soul signifies.”

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nostril of urban consumers.107 What is lost in the dulling of the city dweller’s sensorial faculties then is not just the capacity to lose one’s way, as Benjamin observes but also to decrypt the unwritten traces of the animal whose appearance goes undetected.

Let us call this reading unattached to writing, this decoding that supposes no prior encoding, decryption. This anti-hermeneutic is the task that Benjamin ascribes to the flâneur, who, in learning how to read the unwritten, has mastered the art of losing himself in an urban setting. It is precisely because the modern city is overcoded with textuality that, caught in the net of its hyperstriation, it is easy not to find one’s way and yet almost impossible to lose it. This distinction, put otherwise, is one of not finding something on a map versus throwing away the map from the beginning. Not to find one’s way is the suspension, or rather the indefinite protraction of a telic movement and envisions an endpoint toward which one is progressing. Losing one’s way, on the other hand, is an end in itself (albeit an endless end). For Benjamin, losing one’s way is no accident but an art form that is hard to master.

In the vignette he devotes to “Tiergarten”108 (meaning “Animal Park”) in Berlin Childhood,

107 Nicole Shukin describes in detail the modern strategies of olfactory containment: “From the nineteenth century to the present, the rendering industry has innovated many material technologies for scrubbing itself clean of the acrid, malodorous signs of its carnal commerce. Retreating out of an urban field of vision was just one step in the reorganization of slaughter and rendering; doing everything possible to prevent the sensory revolt triggered by smell has arguably been even more critical to the affective management of animal capital. . .The containment of smell has been integral to the inconspicuous ‘no-place’ of public secrecy within which modern rendering has achieved invisibility. Recalling the importance placed on smell by both Benjamin and Adorno and Horkheimer as a sensory trigger of mimetic identification, the control of smell is suggestive, moreover, of the containment and management of affect aroused by a potential identification with animal others subject to sacrifice. Smell’s management enabled public culture in ‘knowing what not to know’ about the ‘anonymous flesh’ on their dinner table. The rendering industry has striven to spirit away all sensible traces of the historical – that is, dying – animal, preventing the smell of animal remains from reaching the nostrils of consumer culture by promptly converting perishable nature into perennial capital” (2009 63-64). On the erasure of animal traces in urban locales, see also Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse. 108 The oldest public park in Berlin, Tiergarten owes its name to being a hunting reserve for the king and electors of Brandenburg up until the middle of the 18th century.

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Benjamin confesses that he “acquired this art late in life,” thereby fulfilling a dream that he traces back to the labyrinths he used to draw as a child on the blotting papers of his school notebooks. At the time, allured by the appeal of his beloved “Ariadne,”109 he admits to having been too intent on escaping the maze,110 too fixated on finding a way out, to appreciate fully the treasures harbored by the park: “How rarely I distinguished the fish in its pond,” he laments. “How much was promised by the name ‘Court

Hunters’ Lane,’ and how little it held” (2006 55). The hybrid nature of the Minotaur locked in the labyrinth, alluded to by Benjamin, will prove significant to my reading of

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

The urban wanderer must willfully lose himself by giving himself over to the labyrinth of the city. This immersion requires a different kind of attention, or rather of distraction,111 than the one at work in Rousseau’s pastoral reveries: “The case in which the flâneur completely distances himself from the type of the philosophical promenader, and takes on the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness, was fixed for the first time and forever afterward by Poe in his story ‘The Man of the Crowd,’” writes

Benjamin in The Arcades Project (1999 418).

It is important to note that the historical context in which Poe sets his story is that of the intensifying striation, indeed “griddification,” of the modern city in the mid-nineteenth

109 “Whatever he may tell us,” Nietzsche warns us, “a labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but always, only, his Ariadne.” There are two Ariadnes for Nietzsche. On the one hand, she is the (res)sentimental figure who gives the thread to Theseus so he can kill the man-bull and exit the labyrinth (for Deleuze, this labyrinth is the temple of transcendental knowledge and morality). On the other hand, she learns to love Dionysus the bull, renouncing the chance to escape the labyrinth (which is no longer architectural but musical, modeled after the round ear of Dionysus, the God of the eternal return). On the figure of Ariadne in Nietzsche, see Deleuze’s “The Mystery of Ariadne According to Nietzsche” in Essays Critical and Clinical (1998 99-106) 110 On the labyrinth as a figure used to describe the experience of the modern city, and nineteenth century in particular, see Samuel Weber’s Benjamin’s –abilities, p. 236-237. 111 On the importance of distraction and attention in Poe and Benjamin, see Kevin McLaughlin’s “Distraction in America: Paper, Money, Poe, in Paperwork, pp. 29-49.

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century. In “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Benjamin explains that since the Revolution, and especially since the urban standardization inaugurated under

Napoleon Bonaparte’s administration, Paris was increasingly submitted to “a multifarious web of registrations – a means of compensating for the elimination of traces that takes place when people disappear into the masses of the big cities” (2006 78).112 This process was aided by a vast number of technical apparatuses, first and foremost photography which equipped the police and criminologists with a more accurate and objective method of identification. Later amplified by the Haussmannization of Paris, the rapid proliferation of disciplinary strategies and surveillance apparatuses in the first half of the century laid the foundations for the rise of the detective story, which “came into being when this most decisive of all the conquests of a person’s incognito had been accomplished.” “Since that time,” Benjamin argues, “there has been no end to the efforts to capture [dingfest machen] a man in his speech and actions” (79).113

OFF THE MAP I am of the school of Walking Philosophers. I believe that more knowledge of human nature is attainable by an hour’s conversation with an oyster-catcher, than in the same space devoted to the pages of Locke and Bacon. . .Let me

112 In Animal Capital, Nicole Shukin reminds us that “Napoleon’s project of modernization involved, crucially, the ‘exile’ of the sensoriums of slaughtering and rendering to outlying precincts far from the eyes and noses of an urban polity.” She continues: “In the nineteenth century public culture began to be sanitized and sensitized through myriad practices, disciplines, and reforms best discerned, perhaps, by Foucault. According to [Noëlie] Vialles, the institutionalization of enclosed, monitored facilities devoted solely to animal slaughter in compliance with new regulations and sensibilities around ‘suffering, violence, waste and disease, ‘miasmas,’ and finally animals themselves,’ helped to materially and ideologically prepare conditions for the massification of slaughter” (2009 62). On the hygiene standards and the subsequent insulation of slaughterhouses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and North America, see Paula Young Lee’s Meat, Modernity and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse. 113 Let us note that the city, in Benjamin’s account, compensates for the “elimination of traces” of its inhabitants. In cities, people, not just animals, disappear as animals. “A multifarious web of registrations” (traps?) substitutes for their bodies. The street name, then, would no longer be a physical place, but a corner of the web, a referential node. And the “conquest of incognito” would thus not make someone “cognito” again in the sense of hunted down. Rather, it would “capture” the incognito as such. (Following the logic of trapping, which need not track because it is unmoving, rather than the logic of hunting.)

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use a book as a seaman his chart – a guide, – safe only so long as he plies to the deep sea-lead, and makes the necessary calculations.

J.W.B., “The Leisure Hunter,” The Knickerbocker (1835 497)114

In “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), Poe’s narrator, who prides himself on being able to

“read” the history of each anonymous passer-by, describes the movements of the

London mob:

The wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces; and although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted before the window prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years (392).

His scanning gaze is suddenly “arrested and absorbed” by an old man’s countenance “on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression”: “How wild a history,” the narrator says to himself, “is written within that bosom!” (392) He proceeds to shadow the stranger through the crowd but finally gives up after a frenzied day spent following the old man, recognizing that he will not permit himself to be read: “He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the ‘Hortulus Animae,’ and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that ‘er lasst [sic] sich nicht lesen [he will not let himself be read]’” (396).115 Anticipating Melville’s Bartleby, the old man’s absolutely idiosyncrasy, the absolute secrecy or privacy (idios) of his nature, forces the narrator-cum-reader to relinquish his pursuit. Poe draws the portrait of the urban wanderer as an escape artist,

114 Published in the New York magazine The Knickerbocker, Vol. 5, 1835. On this story as a probable inspiration for Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” and the importance of this magazine for the promotion of “urban” culture and literature, see Brand (1991 70-71). 115 Poe (mis)uses this German phrase twice, at the opening and at the end of the short story. In the first instance, er lässt sich nicht lesen refers to “a certain German book” (388) and not to the titular man of the crowd. To be grammatically correct, the sentence should read es lässt sich nicht lesen, as Stephen Rachman has noted (in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, 1995 73). Poe plays on the objectification and fictionalization of his human character and, in the same gesture, on the humanization of the book. According to Rachman, whatever Poe’s level in German was, the mistake is too obvious to be one, and the sentence itself performs the resistance to being read that it enunciates.

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an elusive creature persistently evading the perspicacity of the narrator. Susan Bernstein attributes this illegibility to the fact that he “is the man with no interior, the man who never goes home – therefore is literally unheimlich or unhomely” (2008 63). To say it with

Benjamin, he “is at home neither in his class nor in his homeland, but only in the crowd”

(1999 895).116

Not in but wholly of the crowd, the old man pulsates in time with the movements of the city. And yet, in his automatized circuitry, he hardly seems human. Unable to return the gaze of the narrator that would reassure him of his humanity, the old man raises the specter of Descartes’ automaton, as Kevin McLaughlin has observed.117 But, recalling that the Cartesian animal is but a machine, and heeding the clues disseminated in Poe’s text (i.e. the emphasis placed on the character’s “wildness,” the uncanny “shriek” he emits, his “stalk[ing] backward and forward, without apparent object,” and so on) we might begin to wonder if the man of the crowd is not, after all, something of an animal,118 an indeterminate “werewolf”-like figure that threatens modern classification.

In “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” Benjamin goes on to say that “The

Man of the Crowd” (1840) is a detective fiction avant la lettre: “Poe’s famous tale ‘The

Man of the Crowd’ is something like an X-ray of a detective story. It does away with all the drapery that a crime represents. Only the armature remains: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man who manages to walk through London in such a way that he

116 Benjamin claims that Baudelaire found inspiration for his flâneur in his own roaming the streets of Paris in order to avoid returning home where his creditors would be able to find him. 117 Finding in Poe’s description of the crowd an echo to a passage from Descartes’s Metaphysical Meditations, Kevin McLaughlin has argued that the man of the crowd appears illegible to the narrator because he is “more like a machine than a man” (2005 31). On the relationship between Poe and Descartes, see Stanley Cavell’s essay “Being Odd, Getting Even (Descartes, Emerson, Poe)” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (1995 3-36). 118 Stephen Rachman alludes in passing to the prey-like character of the man of the crowd, comparing him to a “quarry” that the narrator is pursuing (1996 56-70).

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always remains in the middle of the crowd.” All the ingredients are gathered: the busy metropolis, the eerie throng, a breathless pursuit. The only thing missing is a crime (although the narrator catches a glimpse of what he believes is a dagger). In Poe’s subsequent short story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), often credited with inaugurating the genre of detective fiction, Poe will remedy this absence telling the story of the mysterious murders of Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye.

ZOON EX MACHINA Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville Change plus vite, hélas ! que le cœur d’un mortel) ; . . . Là s’étalait jadis une ménagerie ; Là je vis, un matin, à l’heure où sous les cieux Froids et clairs le Travail s’éveille, où la voirie Pousse un sombre ouragan dans l’air silencieux, Un cygne qui s’était évadé de sa cage.

Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne,” Les Fleurs du mal (1868)119

In his well-known story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe’s unnamed narrator and his friend C. Auguste Dupin roam the streets of Paris when they are suddenly gripped by the headline “Extraordinary Murders” in the Gazette des Tribunaux. The newspaper relays that a dozen neighbors and two policemen, alarmed by a succession of “terrific shrieks” issuing from the fourth story of a house in the rue Morgue, break open the doors of the house to discover Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye’s apartment “in the wildest disorder.” The police find the body of Mademoiselle L’Espanaye forced up the narrow aperture of the chimney, with bruises around her throat, indicating that she had been throttled to death. The body of her mother is discovered lying in a small yard in the rear of the building with her head entirely cut off by a razor found in the apartment. While

119 “Old Paris is no more (the form of a city / Changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart); / Once a menagerie was set up there; / There, one morning, at the hour when Labor awakens, / Beneath the clear, cold sky when the dismal hubbub / Of street-cleaners and scavengers breaks the silence, / I saw a swan that had escaped from his cage.” Translated by William Aggeler.

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the belongings of the wealthy widow are scattered across the floor, nothing is taken. The investigation will later cite this: “if we are to suppose gold the motive of this outrage, we must also imagine the perpetrator so vacillating an idiot as to have abandoned his gold and his motive together” (422, emphasis mine). To be sure, financial gain hardly seems a plausible motive for such gruesome deeds.

The neighbors report having heard two voices: one gruff and one shrill. The gruff voice is described without hesitation as that of a Frenchman, while the source of the shrill voice stubbornly evades consensus among the witnesses. (The Dutchman supposes it the voice of a Frenchman, the Frenchman that of a Spaniard, the Spaniard that of an

Englishman, and so on.) What is more, the door of the apartment is locked from the inside with no other possible points of exit, the two windows appearing to be securely fastened by a stout nail (clou). “To this horrible mystery,” the Gazette reads, “there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew” (405-406).

Drawing on a seemingly incoherent tangle of evidence, Dupin, an amateur sleuth who takes it upon himself to solve the case, proceeds to investigate the mysterious killings through a process of elimination (or deductive reasoning based on negation). First, he reminds the narrator that the voice of the perpetrator remained positively unassignable despite a gaggle of witnesses representing nationalities from across Europe.120 Second, assuming that “Madame and Mademoiselle L’Espanaye were not destroyed by spirits”

(417), he speculates on the near- praeternatural agility of the perpetrator. He asserts that one of the two windows must have served as the means of egress, proceeding thereafter to deconstruct the mechanism by which the windows “have the powers of fastening

120 With decidedly loose (and somewhat xenophobic) logic, Dupin rules out the possibility that the voice may be that of a non-European under the pretense that “[n]either Asiatics nor Africans abound in Paris” (416) or of a madman because even madmen “are of some nation” (423).

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themselves.” “There was no escape from this conclusion,” he exclaims (418).121 After a lengthy and meandering explanation, he concludes that there “must be something wrong…about the nail.” And as if his words possessed incantatory powers, the nail reveals itself to be fractured (although “the fissure was invisible”). Describing the process by which he makes the discovery, Dupin remarks: “I touched it; and the head, with about a quarter of an inch of the shank, came off in my fingers” (419).

All of these “clews” (the archaic spelling Poe uses for clues) suggest the work of a nonhuman actor. Furthermore, the nature of the crime is “altogether irreconcilable with our common notions of human action” (422), and the fingerprints left behind bear “the mark of no human hand” (424). After reading a passage from Le règne animal in which

Cuvier profiles the animal, Dupin ultimately identifies the perpetrator as an Ourang-

Outang (Poe’s spelling) recently escaped from the guardianship of a French sailor who brought the animal back from his journey to Borneo, thus at last rendering it legible.122

Poe’s tale of “ratiocination” – the author’s own term for a form of imaginative reasoning

– raises the question whether the Ourang-Outang qualifies as a juridical actor subject to the law and thus a potential “murderer.” Colleen Glenney Boggs observes that the

121 Poe’s story does not merely raise the specter of animal encroachment on human territory but also plays on the modern phobia of nonhuman agency by hinting at the threat of an entirely automatized and autonomous technological world. See for instance Poe’s essay “Maelzel’s Chess Player” (1836), whose automated chess player inspired Benjamin’s first Thesis “On the Philosophy of History.” On the fear elicited by the possibility of simian agency, see Bruno Monfort’s “Sans les mains : vérité achéiropoiète chez Poe.” 122 In this reference lies another instance of “reading what was never written,” for Cuvier’s orangutan has little to do with Poe’s Ourang-Outang. Whereas Cuvier attempts to demystify the exaggerated humanlikeness of the ape – “L’Orang-Outang. . .passe pour être de tous les animaux celui qui ressemble le plus à l’homme . . . mais les expressions exagérées de quelques auteurs sur cette ressemblance, tiennent en partie à ce que l’on n’en avait vu que de jeunes individus. . .c’est un animal assez doux, qui s’apprivoise et s’attache aisément, qui, par sa conformation, parvient à imiter un grand nombre de nos actions, mais dont l'intelligence ne paraît pas s’élever autant qu’on l’a dit” (52-53) –, Poe deliberately exploits the popular misperceptions of the animal: “The gigantic stature, the prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities of these mammalia are sufficiently well known to all. I understood the full horrors of the murder at once” (424).

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“definition of a murder calls for a specific capacity: not only the capacity for thought, but also the capacity for a temporally forward-looking (afore) thought that carries a moral component (malice). Moreover for homicide to be ‘criminal’ implies that a legal subject carries it out” (2013 112). Misled by the title of the short story into expecting a murderer, and thus a human actor, the reader is prone to mirror the misreading of police, whose perceptions, as Dupin teases, are no less “hermetically sealed” than the crime scene

(423).123

Ultimately, Dupin alone is able to “[read] the entire riddle” (414) that the police could not in spite of their methodical examination of the premises. It is, in fact, because of their very meticulousness that they are unable to fathom what happened. Dupin derides their efforts as excessively profound, asserting that truth is “invariably superficial” and never

“where we seek her.”

The depth lies in the valleys where we seek [truth], and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found. The modes and sources of this kind of error are well typified in the contemplation of the heavenly bodies. To look at a star by glances – to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star distinctly – is to have the best appreciation of its lustre – a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it. A greater number of rays actually fall upon the eye in the latter case, but, in the former, there is the more refined capacity for comprehension. By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct (412).

The lie of truth, the detective observes, is the belief that in-depth vision – indeed close and extended looking – grants one access to it. It will be this same brand of reasoning

(and a pair of green spectacles) that will allow Dupin, a recurring character in Poe’s

123 Poe also destabilizes the distribution of conscious and unconscious affects among men and animals by insinuating that the ape’s initially “pacific purposes” of shaving Madame L’Espanaye turned into “wrath,” “anger” and “frenzy” when she started screaming and then became a kind of shame or guilt: “Conscious of having deserved punishment, it seemed desirous of concealing its bloody deeds, and skipped about the chamber in an agony of nervous agitation” (429).

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detective tales, to recover the missing missive in “The Purloined Letter” while the microscopes of the police prove utterly ineffective (685-686). Truth, he pontificates, comes to the one who is able to look sideways, indeed to divert one’s attention from its object in order to get a better look at it. (Venus herself – the brightest celestial body after the sun and the moon and, incidentally, the Goddess of Beauty – would vanish if one’s eyes were fixated upon it.) In his criticism of the police’s shortsightedness, the detective pays tribute to the nebulousness indispensible to understanding phenomena as complex and dynamic, an idea Poe will go on to develop extensively in Eureka [1848], where he discusses at great length the “nebular theory” of Laplace and its refutation by Dr.

Nichol.124

The amateur detective, from his marginal position, does not just look directly at the case but apprehends it through the skewed lens of police reports and newspaper accounts. He reads between the lines, focusing not on what is seen, but what is overlooked:

124 In this vitalist prose-poem, Poe laments the fallacious sense that nebulae are nothing but a cluster of individual stars derived from the recent improvement of modern telescopes: “A most unfounded opinion has been latterly current and even in scientific circles,” writes Poe, “the opinion that the so-called Nebular Cosmogony has been overthrown. This fancy has arisen from the report of late observations made, among what hitherto have been termed the ‘nebulae,’ through the large telescope of Cincinnati, and the world-renowned instrument of Lord Rosse. Certain spots in the firmament which presented, even to the most powerful of the old telescopes, the appearance of nebulosity, or haze, had been regarded for a long time as confirming the theory of Laplace. They were looked upon as stars in that very process of condensation which I have been attempting to describe. Thus it was supposed that we ‘had ocular evidence’ – an evidence, by the way, which has always been found very questionable – of the truth of the hypothesis; and, although certain telescopic improvements, every now and then, enabled us to perceive that a spot, here and there, which we had been classing among the nebulae, was, in fact, but a cluster of stars deriving its nebular character only from its immensity of distance – still it was thought that no doubt could exist as to the actual nebulosity of numerous other masses, the strong-holds of the nebulists, bidding defiance to every effort at segregation. Of these latter the most interesting was the great ‘nebulae’ in the constellation Orion: – but this, with innumerable other miscalled ‘nebulae,’ when viewed through the magnificent modern telescopes, has become resolved into a simple collection of stars. Now this fact has been very generally understood as conclusive against the Nebular Hypothesis of Laplace; and, on announcement of the discoveries in question, the most enthusiastic defender and most eloquent popularizer of the theory, Dr. Nichol, went so far as to ‘admit the necessity of abandoning’ an idea which had formed the material of his most praiseworthy book” (1319, emphasis mine).

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The wild disorder of the room; the corpse thrust, with the head downward, up the chimney; the frightful mutilation of the body of the old lady; these considerations with those just mentioned, and others which I need not mention, have sufficed to paralyze the powers, by putting completely at fault the boasted acumen, of the government agents. They have fallen into the gross but common error of confounding the unusual with the abstruse. But it is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels its way, if at all, in its search for the true. . .In fact, the facility with which I shall arrive, or have arrived, at the solution of this mystery, is in the direct ratio of its apparent insolubility in the eyes of the police (414, emphases mine).

Ironically, the police are at a loss to find the murderer precisely because they are desperately looking for one. The first hint at the possibility that the crime might be of “another nature” is given by the Gazette des Tribunaux125:

A murder so mysterious, and so perplexing in all its particulars, was never before committed in Paris – if indeed a murder has been committed at all. The police are entirely at fault – an unusual occurrence in affairs of this nature. There is not, however, the shadow of a clew apparent (411, emphasis mine).

The epanorthosis of this paragraph mimics a corrective re-reading at work in Dupin’s investigation: the solving of the murder requires that its very “premises” be called into question.126 In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the murderer (l’auteur du crime, as the

French say) does not premeditate, indeed does not even precede, the murder but is

125 In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault uses the Gazette to explain the role the fait divers played in the imposition of the sense that delinquents were “everywhere to be feared” while the detective novel, born around the same time and often printed in the same reviews, play an apparently opposite but in effect complementary role by suggesting that “that the delinquent belonged to an entirely different world, unrelated to familiar, everyday life.” Writes Foucault: “The combination of the fait divers and the detective novel has produced for the last hundred years or more an enormous mass of ‘crime stories’ in which delinquency appears both as very close and quite alien, a perpetual threat to everyday life, but extremely distant in its origin and motives, both everyday and exotic in the milieu in which it takes place” (1995 286). What could be closer and yet more exotic than the animal that, in Poe’s tale, committed the first murder of the modern crime story? Poe’s story can also be read as a reflection on the animalization of criminals and the decriminalization of animals, as I suggest in the afterword. 126 In “Afterthoughts on the Animal World,” Akira Mizuta Lippit shows that the crime itself disappears as the case unfolds: “the criminal trespass dissolves into a series of accidental encounters between two women and an ape – an arbitrary slaying of two human beings by an animal. . .there are, in the end, no monsters, only animals” (1994 787). Alternatively, perhaps, animals have become monsters, in the sense Foucault gives to this word in Discipline and Punish (after all, the ape does end up behind bars at the Jardin des Plantes).

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retrospectively postulated as its a priori condition.127 By calling attention to the limitations of the deductive model upon which the police’s methods are predicated, the story highlights that decoding does not so much require, as it presupposes, a code. “The

Murders in the Rue Morgue” can thus be approached as an allegory of reading.128 Instead of being “confounded by the seeming absence of motive,” Dupin is able to read in this absence the very signature (though a signature is perhaps never read but only authenticated) of the animal whose “killing style” is farcically described as “excessively outré”

(422).

It is precisely the gridded space of the city that makes it possible for the animal to “get away with murder.” Because its presence has become unthinkable in this anthropocentered environment, the beast evades the purview of the police entirely.129

127 In fact, the police do arrest a suspect, Adolphe Le Bon, even though “nothing appeared to incriminate him” (411) apart from a plausible motive. As his name subtly indicates, Le Bon is innocent and serves as a fall guy for the well-oiled but myopic machine that is the Parisian police (412). Ironically, it is the police’s very blindness (and deafness) that provides Dupin’s insights into what happened. 128 In this story, Poe restores the archaic sense of reading as guessing or interpreting a dream or riddle (“read” is etymologically related to “riddle”). Reading thus has little to do with the logocentric “binding together” praised by Heidegger in his essay “Was Heißt Lesen?” After a somewhat laborious preface praising the powers and pleasures of the “analytical ability,” the narrator of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” offers the extraordinary homicide of the L’Espanayes as a case in point to illustrate the superiority of analysis over mere calculation, too prone to “oversight” and overly “by the book” (398). This superiority, however, cannot be demonstrated, only monstrated (just like Ginzburg’s hypothesis about the venatic origins of narration is “obviously undemonstrable” [1990 103]). From the outset, we are told that the logical continuity between the theoretical preface and the expository narrative may in effect be misleading: “The narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of a commentary upon the proposition just advanced” (400, emphases mine). The narrator’s precautions warn the reader against the lure of logical sequences that might ultimately prove nothing but rhetorical effects. The very first sentence of the tale says nothing else: “The mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible to analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects” (397). Thus the continuity between the two “halves” of the narrative – the moral and the story, the head (or tail) and the body – might rest on an optical illusion, just like the apparent robustness of the nail, whose decapitation parodically duplicates Mme L’Espanaye’s. So to read “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” just like Dupin reads the murders in the rue Morgue, one must adopt a very different frame, i.e. try to get “out” of the traditional frame of reference. For a brilliant analysis of the particular act of reading that detective fiction engages and elicits, see Ted Martin’s “The Long Wait.” 129 For Aristotle, the city (polis) is not just created around, for and by humans but is a “natural” consequence of what it means to be human (zoon politikon) (in Politics, Book I.2.1252b27-30). “He

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The ape is untraceable because it is unlooked-for; it cannot be tracked because it cannot be fathomed in the first place.130 The animal in Poe literally emerges out of nowhere because it is in essence, as Susan Bernstein said of “the man of the crowd,” an unheimlich creature – literally, a creature that does not belong in a home.131 Its appearance is an apparition.132

who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself,” writes Aristotle, “must either be a beast or a god: he is no part of state.” To which Nietzsche responds a few millenaries later in “Arrows and Epigrams”: “To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. But he left out the third case: you can be both – a philosopher” (2005 156). In his reading of Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” Serres defines the role of the police as one of chasing the unwanted parasite out of the city: “The ant is at home, is rational and works. It works by chasing out [chasser] disorder. It constituted order, classifying its seeds, flies, worms; chasing away the singers and dancers; building the collective city through its collections: well-run large cities, perfectly controlled. What is also noticeable is the equivalence of work to the police” (2007 91). On police work as manhunt, see Chamayou. 130 This has become a topos of sorts for detective fiction. See for instance Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane (where a man is killed by a lion’s mane jellyfish) or The Hound of the Baskervilles. The plot of Peter Høeg’s 1996 The Woman and the Ape revolves around the same idea. The novel opens on an attempt to smuggle an endangered specimen into London. But, just like “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” things go awry and the ape escapes, vanishing into the streets of the city. Madelene, the female protagonist, explains that the ape manages to escape the vigilance of the police even though it is fully visible because they “did not expect to see [it]” (2007 157). When the animal reappears, it is through a telescope mounted onto a hunting rifle. In Høeg’s modern fable, however, zoologists and zoo directors have replaced hunters as the animal’s archenemies and the ape appears above all a victim. This is where the resemblance with Poe’s story ends: the animal is no longer the perpetrator but the object of a potential murder. Indeed, the hunter, in whose heart still burns “the old love of the chase,” does not dare to pull the trigger because of the “overpowering feeling that were he to shoot this animal he would be committing a murder” (2007 12). 131 This cannot but recall The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics where Heidegger writes that domestic animals live with us and yet do not live with us because, simply, they do not “live.” Animals and humans might share the same space, but the way they occupy this space is so radically different that they belong in incommensurable universes: “Let us consider the case of domestic animals as a striking example. We do not describe them as such [Haustiere] simply because they turn up in the house but because they belong to the house, i.e. they serve the house in a certain sense. Yet they do not belong to the house in the way in which the roof belongs to the house as protection against storms. We keep domestic pets in the house with us, they ‘live’ with us. But we do not live with them if living means: being in an animal kind of way. Yet we are with them nonetheless. But this being-with is not an existing-with, because a dog does not exist but merely lives. Through this being with animals we enable them to move within our world. We say that the dog is lying underneath the table or is running up the stairs and so on. Yet when we consider the dog itself – does it comport itself toward the table as table, toward the stairs as stairs? All the same, it does go up the stairs with us. It feeds with us – and yet, we do not really ‘feed.’ It eats with us – and yet, it does not really ‘eat.’ Nevertheless it is with us! A going along with. . ., a transposedness, and yet not” (1995 210). The “and yet” that punctuates Heidegger’s paragraph, in which Derrida saw the symptom of a certain “denial” (2008 157-160), resonates with the epanorthic structure of Poe’s story (the animal cannot be there, and yet…). 132 See “The Black Cat,” p. 600. In Poe’s fantastic texts, animals are often equated with spectral presences threatening the peace of the domestic space (think of the raven tapping on the poet’s window [81-85] or the sphinx beetle ominously crawling on a spider thread along the window- sash of a country house in Hudson valley [843-847]). A great asymmetry is revealed by these

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Though he will reveal that the supposed hermeticism of the apartment is but a trompe l’oeil,

Dupin still looks like a magician pulling an Ourang-Outang out of his sleeve.133

THE MORGUE Morgue \ˈmo(ə)rg\ The sense development in French proceeds from the sense ‘place in a prison where the guards examine new prisoners before locking them up’ (probably with reference to the haughty [morgue] expression of the jailers). † a. Originally: a building in Paris in which the bodies of people found dead were kept until identified. b. Any repository of unwanted, forgotten, or discarded things. † In a newspaper office: a collection of miscellaneous material relating to people still living, assembled for use in future obituaries.

Oxford English Dictionary (2012)

The unidentified body in Poe’s “Morgue” is not that of the victim but that of the perpetrator. The missing murder announces, for Dupin, the need for a hunt (i.e. for a body) while the crime scene, for the police, turns out to be a trap (for which what is missing is the hunt). Poe’s tale, observes Akira Mizuta Lippit, “brings to the surface a characteristically modern catastrophe.” “[The] domicile of mankind has been assailed

uncanny creatures whose appearance in human habitats have grown to exceed the bounds of plausibility. Regardless, animals doggedly return to haunt the humans as if they have not been properly killed, as if they have not been banished but simply encrypted, buried alive like the black cat in the eponymous story (see infra). The animal in Poe is shown to occupy a möbian topology, being simultaneously inside and outside (the space of) the human. On the uncanny fold in which Poe’s ourang-outang abide, see Thangam Ravindranathan’s “The Changed Meter: Animals Passing in La Fontaine, Poe and Chevillard” (forthcoming in Differences): “if in imitating the human it is inside it, in exceeding it (‘excessively outré’) [the ape] is continually outside it. It should not come as a surprise, given the insistence of such a chiasmus, that the shadow scene in which the crime is committed is both a time lag in which the rules of accountability (economics, or the theory of the subject) are faced with (and must fail before) their own struck-through prehistory (for the criminal is a pre-economic, not to say an-economic, even anti-economic being, its ‘value,’ as yet unestimated, is none or infinite – unequal), and a space that folds in/out to connect both the inside to an outside (revealing suddenly a channel opening the Paris apartment out onto the forests of Borneo) and, conversely, an outside to an inside (revealing, as if within the human, the ‘recesses of thought altogether inaccessible,’ where an altogether unaccountable ‘Ourang-Outang’ – in Malay, the word for ‘man of the forest’ – persists in its ‘wild ferocity’).” 133 Though “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is not a gothic tale per se, it explicitly borrows elements from the gothic, alluding repeatedly to the “praeternatural” character of the events. In Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler suggests that the detective story is but an extension of the gothic, the difference being that the supernatural is quickly explained away by the detective (2003 497).

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from the outside, indeed by the outside” (1994 786). In modernity, he contends, the animal is not merely cast out of human environments but is thought to live in a “world apart” (for Heidegger, a crossed out world, a world literally put behind bars). In this respect, the big metropolis is the paradigmatic locus of the modern (non)relationship to the animal.134

“[T]he city is the striated space par excellence,” write Deleuze and Guattari. It is a “force of striation that re-imparts smooth space, puts it back into operation everywhere, on earth and in the other elements, outside but also inside itself” (2003 481). It is necessary to understand the city not just as a specific location but first and foremost as a “force” or principle that allocates surfaces according to determinate intervals. Hence, Michel de

Certeau allegorizes this panoptic space as a “Concept-city” (1988 95).135 But even “the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces,” insist Deleuze and Guattari (2003 500).

“It is possible to live striated on the deserts, steppes, or seas” in the same way as “it is possible to live smooth even in the cities, to be an urban nomad” (482). “Urban nomads” do not attempt to turn the tangled network of the city into a perfectly mappable totality by surveying (and perhaps overlooking) it; this, writes de Certeau, is the response of the

“voyeur” who dreams of catching a God’s-eye-view of the city, an “Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far

134 Høeg’s The Woman and the Ape suggests not merely that the animal has no place in the city, but that it has no place tout court because the modern city is now, in principle, everywhere: “What mattered was not the city itself, since that too was only one small dot on the face of the earth. What mattered was the principle of the city – modern civilization per se. Madelene [the titular woman] saw that there was no longer any end to that; it had totally enmeshed the globe. There was no longer any outside for the ape at her elbow. Any zoo, any game reserve, any safari park, whatever was now contained within the bounds of civilization” (2007 82). If indeed the city is everywhere, then the animal is nowhere, or, more precisely, nowhere to be found. 135 Let us recall that in Discipline and Punish, Foucault imagined Bentham’s Panopticon to be inspired by Le Vaux’s menagerie at Versailles: “The Panopticon is a royal menagerie; the animal is replaced by man, individual distribution by specific grouping and the king by the machinery of a furtive power. With this exception, the Panopticon also does the work of a naturalist” (1995 203).

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below” (1988 92). On the contrary, the bodies of these urban wanderers “follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen” (93). Like the “man of the crowd” they are at one with the vibrato of the city.

Dupin appears as one such urban nomad who has mastered the art of navigating the maze of the city and detected the scent of the animal on the loose. It takes the skills of a hunter, Poe suggests, to negotiate the “holey” topology of the modern city and to ferret the animal out of its crypt. The hunter-detective is introduced as a model reader, one who makes use of what “cannot be seen,” and whose “reason feels its way. . .in its search of the true.” Just before he discovers the clou, Dupin boasts of his analytical “method”:

To use a sporting phrase, I had not been once ‘at fault.’ The scent had never for an instant been lost. There was no flaw in any link of the chain. I had traced the secret to its ultimate result, – and that result was the nail. It had, I say, in every respect, the appearance of its fellow in the other window; but this fact was an absolute nullity (conclusive as it might seem to be) when compared with the consideration that here, at this point, terminated the clew (419, emphasis mine).

“At fault,” here emphasized by being put in quotes, does not imply that Dupin never committed a logical error, as Baudelaire’s translation of the tale suggests, but that the detective was never thrown off the animal’s scent. The “sporting phrase” in question stems from the French en défaut,136 which in the elaborate scenography of medieval hunts designated the process by which auxiliaries, often dogs or birds of prey, were misled by the quarry to pursue another animal in its stead.137 Like that of Nietzsche, Dupin’s genius

136 I am grateful to Thangam Ravindranathan for this insight. 137 The detective is no less ambivalent a figure than the hunter who inhabits the threshold between wilderness and civilization in Cooper’s narratives. Even though he exposes the blind spots in the police’s investigation, he also holds the promise (and raises the specter) of absolute surveillance (see Rosenheim, The Cryptographic Imagination, 70). As D. A. Miller puts it, “Detective fiction is. . .always implicitly punning on the detective’s brilliant super-vision and the police supervision that it embodies. His intervention marks an explicit bringing-under-surveillance of the entire world of the narrative. As such, it can be alarming.” One of Miller’s examples is the

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is in his nostrils. Priding himself with never losing the scent of the animal, the detective decrypts the signs (signes) of the animal (singe or cygne) escaped from its cage.

Where, Poe’s story asks, is the animal in the modern urban environment (supposing that it is still here)? How can it be found? What are the conditions of its manifestation?

Asking not what but where the animal is requires that we investigate the scene that serves as a setting for its (dis)appearance.138 If it is not here, in the city, then is it not logical to suppose that the animal is there, in the wild? Poe’s story offers an alternative reading of this apparent absence. If the animal is not to be found here, among us, it might be that it has slipped out of our purview, not because it is hiding but because the modern urbanite has grown unaccustomed to registering its appearance and accustomed to its disappearance. No longer a Heraclitean creature concealing itself of its own accord – spontaneously encrypting itself (PHUSIS KRUPTESTHAI PHILEI) – the animal is nowhere to be found, neither here nor there but trapped in an altogether unfamiliar place, an atopic topos. It has been encrypted.

CRYPTOZOON When the word-thing tieret is buried (in the unconscious, in fact, as the cryptic Unconscious’s Thing), it is “interred with the fallacious fiction that it is no longer alive.” The inhabitant of a crypt is always a living dead, a dead entity we are perfectly willing to keep alive, but as dead, one we are willing to keep, as long as we keep it, within us, intact in any way save as living.

Jacques Derrida, “Fors” (1986 xxi)

famous scene where Dupin reads the narrator’s mind at the beginning of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1988 35-36), to which I will come back at the end of the chapter. 138 I write “scene” and not ecosystem, biotope, or milieu in order to highlight the artificiality of the background – what the Foucault of The Order of Things called the “mute ground” – out of or against which the animal becomes legible.

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Encryption, for Lippit, is the lot of the animal in modernity, this “crucial moment in the consolidation of metaphysics during which the superiority of humanity is achieved from the lowest ranks of being.”139 He writes:

According to the dialectic of humanism, an a priori animality (thesis) is subsumed by a competing humanity (antithesis): as a result, animality ceases to occupy a proper space apart from the humanity that succeeds, appropriates, and enframes it. The animal, according to that historical rendering, no longer remains in the realm of ontology; it has been effaced. . .In this manner, the animal becomes an active phantom in what might be termed the crypt of modernity (2000 53-54).

Lippit’s claim rests on the uncanny ontology of the animal in modern thought.

Conceived as undying, the animal has a troubling tendency to endure without ever being fully present. A double consequence of the empirical extinction of animals and of the ensuing melancholy as the result of “missing” these very animals, modern humanity schizophrenically mourns the “loss of its former self” (18). The disappearance of the animal from the phenomenal world, Lippit argues, has disrupted the subtle balance that constituted the very humanness of the human. The modern human, as a result, is

“dehumanized.” This, however, does not mean that the modern world is posthuman:

139 Just as for Agamben, Lippit’s “modernity” appears less a determined historical period than a distinct critical gesture by which what is excluded (in this case, the animal) surreptitiously returns as constitutive of humanity. In The Open, Agamben argues that the modern anthropological machine “functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human: Homo alalus, or the ape- man” whereas in the ancient machine “the non-man is produced by the humanization of an animal: the man-ape, the enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also and above all the slave, the barbarian and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form” (2003 37). It is crucial to note that these two machines are not mutually exclusive and are both still at work in our culture, though the modern one has become predominant today. Lippit’s account of the modern separation between animals and humans is not incompatible with Agamben’s, only it insists on the role played by the empirical disappearance of animals in the urbanized West: “Despite the constancy with which animals have hovered at the fringes of humanity, principally as sacrifices to maintain its limit, the notion of animal being changed dramatically during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is perhaps especially true of the modern period, which can be said to begin with late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century technological advances and conclude in the devastation of World War II. Modernity can be defined by the disappearance of wildlife from humanity’s habitat and by the reappearance of the same in humanity’s reflections on itself: in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and technological media such as the telephone, film, and radio” (2000 2-3).

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Dehumanized beings, human beings that have broken their primordial link to nature, are an ironic legacy of humanism. As for the animals, their disappearance does not release them from their bond with human beings in a human world. Even as absent beings, animals accompany the crisis in human ontology. Even in a dehumanized world, animals survive – although in a manner altogether different from that of human beings (20).

If it disappears, the animal does not go away, if only because in this scenario, the animal mainly disappears from the point of view of the human being. Denied the faculty to apprehend its own death, the animal disappears from and for the human. Perversely, it remains nonetheless a compelling element in the discursive structure of modernity, as

Lippit shows that the disappearing animal was not only thematized by modern machines

(think of the thaumatrope), but was also exploited for its symbolic and actual vitality (24).

Modern technology, in particular photography and film, operates for Lippit as a colossal apparatus that simultaneously remembers and mourns the animal that cannot fully be disposed of, let alone sublated or assimilated. Nicole Shukin accuses Lippit of valorizing the cinematic apparatus as “salvaging” the animal from its material disappearance even though he shows modern mourning to be an impossible task – simply because the animal is not dead.140 In her own chilling account of the “capitalization of nature,” animals appear entirely assimilable within the Leviathan of modern capitalism, whereas for Lippit, if the

140 Shukin makes a fascinating addendum to Lippit’s argument: the rise of cinematic culture is inextricably linked to the disappearance of animals by showing that early cinema materially relied on the product of large-scale animal killing (she recalls for instance that the mass production of photographic gelatin depends upon mass-slaughter). However, she misreads Lippit when she argues that he valorizes “cinema as a salvaging apparatus that shelters or encrypts vanishing ‘animal traits’” (2009 104). Lippit’s use of “shelter” and “crypt” as quasi-synonyms is somewhat confusing, but he certainly does not romanticize cinema as a means of salvation for animals. The crypt is not a sanctuary or an asylum. By providing a crypt for the animal, cinema testifies to the resistance to the modern wet dream of having done away with (its) animality and other nonhuman agencies (Latour, 1993 100). The resistance Lippit talks about should be understood less in a political sense – it is not a power granted to the animal – than in an electrical sense, as the degree to which a body opposes the passage of electricity. In other words, the resistance of the animal is the symptom of something that remains and returns in cinema and in technology, something that exhausts and drains the logic of modernity. One passage in which Shukin’s reading of Lippit is unambiguously contrived is when she affirms that he subscribes to the idea of the undying animal (2009 135) by extracting one sentence from a paragraph where Lippit cautiously frames this idea as expressed by Bataille and Thomas Sebeok (2000 187).

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modern Jonah has finally swallowed the whale, he suffers from indigestion.141 As a consequence, the animal remains a foreign body lodged in the very foundations of modernity: “Because modern philosophy fails to eliminate entirely the residues of the animal, its texts continue to inscribe the secret history of the animal as phantom,” Lippit contends. “In the philosophical world the figure of the animal moves undying from one corpus to another, one text to another, leaving distinct though faintly perceptible tracks, signs of its migration across the field” (54).

In other words, the animal poses an insoluble problem to modern thought because, in

Lippit’s dialectical rendering, it must be sublated for human subjectivity to be complete but in effect resists this sublation.142 It is not surprising that Lippit engages Hegel to elucidate the configuration of animality in modern Western thought. Derrida has shown in Glas (which he claims to have written “in the depths of an absolute crypt” [1986 107]) that the Hegelian hermeneutic system works very much like a digestive tract, aspiring to

141 In spite of what Shukin claims (2009 16), there is little, if any, occasion for resistance in her account of animal capital – and if there is to be any glitch in the system, it does not come from the animal but from a sort of autoimmune reaction inherent to the rendering processes governing the capitalistic management of animal life. Taking up in her postscript the example of the mad cow disease as an ostensible moment of crisis for what she calls animal capital, Shukin ends up borrowing the idiom of digestion to argue that “Rather than reading in the monstrous character of prions an indigestible kernel of animal alterity, it is crucial to read them as immanent products of animal capital. If there are forms of alterity haunting cultures of capital, they demand to be understood less as a primal surplus of animal life that evades cooking than as a species of stomach trouble symptomatic of the churning insides of biopolitical culture” (229). What she tends to forget or minimize is that the very process of rendering, assimilating, integrating and recycling animal products, engenders (and in fact presupposes) a prior alterity which also serves as its regulating horizon. It might not be from the animal as such that resistance comes, therefore, but this resistance nevertheless has to do with the supposed alterity of animals and animality. 142 In Theory of Religion, Georges Bataille invokes Hegel to explain how in eating animals the human affirms its humanity by turning the animal into an object (and thereby affirms itself as subject). As Cary Wolfe reminds us, Bataille is not a dupe of this reification of animals and suggests that we cook them in order to reassure ourselves retroactively on the fact that animals are, and have never been anything, but things, and thereby can be put to death without this killing falling within the ambit of the law (2003 113-114).

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transubstantiate foreign phenomena into the wholeness of the Spirit.143 In an interview with Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson, Derrida explains:

The concept of “Erinnerung,” which means both memory and interiorization, plays a key role in Hegel’s philosophy. Spirit incorporates history by assimilating, by remembering its own past. This assimilation acts as a kind of sublimated eating – spirit eats everything that is external and foreign, and thereby transforms it into something internal, something that is its own. Everything shall be incorporated into the great digestive system – nothing is inedible in Hegel’s infinite metabolism.

Or almost nothing. In his Lectures on History, Hegel notes that zoolatry, while it may at the time have seemed repulsive and archaic, is predicated upon the belief that the animal is, and has always been, “truly Incomprehensible”:

[I]n the brute world the Egyptians contemplate a hidden and incomprehensible principle. We also, when we contemplate the life and action of brutes, are astonished at their instinct – the adaptation of their movements to the object intended – their restlessness, excitability, and liveliness; for they are exceedingly quick and discerning in pursuing the ends of their existence, while they are at the same time silent and shut up within themselves. We cannot make out what it is that “possesses” these creatures, and cannot rely on them. A black tom-cat, with its glowing eyes and its now gliding, now quick and darting movement, has been deemed the presence of a malignant being – a mysterious reserved specter; the dog, the canary-bird, on the contrary, appear friendly and sympathizing. The lower animals are the truly Incomprehensible [Die Tiere sind in der Tat das Unbegreifliche]. A man cannot by imagination or conception enter into the nature of a dog, whatever resemblance

143 Derrida explains that the demarcation between the human and the animal is predicated upon a process of interiorization which he describes as a form of sublimated eating. Even with thinkers like Heidegger and Lévinas who deconstruct the premises of what constitutes human subjectivity, the difference between humans and animals remains essential because they maintain this assimilative gesture as constitutive of genuine comprehension. For Heidegger, Derrida suggests, the assimilation of the animal is no longer a form of ingesting but rather a handling or a capturing: “as far as Heidegger’s qualified humanism is concerned, which transfers the specifically human from man’s interior to his hand, the boundary between human and animal still remains something which is impossible to call into question. It is not a traditional humanism, but a determination of the location – the place (Dasein) where meaning can be received. The location is not explicitly determined as Man, but Heidegger nonetheless provides a description of this place that excludes animals. Only man has hands, says Heidegger, and, through the hand, he has access to a world of meaningful action. The ape, however, possesses only “Greifsorgane” (organs for grasping) and is therefore excluded from the realm of the human. This distinction between hand and organ for grasping is not something Heidegger arrived at by studying apes in the Black Forest, but rather has a purely stipulative character. Here, as always, humanism rests on the sacrifice of the animal, on the implicit swallowing up of the animal” (Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson, “An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion,” http://www.e- flux.com/journal/an-interview-with-jacques-derrida-on-the-limits-of-digestion/).

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he himself might have to it; it remains something altogether alien to him [sie bleibt ihm ein schlechthin Fremdartiges] (1900 211).

Hegel goes on to remark that one also encounters this incomprehensibility in Spirit, but

Spirit has the ability to comprehend itself, whereas the animal appears to remain utterly unsublatable. The only way to “comprehend” – or better, to “apprehend” – the animal is to name it: “According to Hegel,” Lippit explains, “the act of naming transforms animals from independent beings into idealized beings: language, in essence, nullifies animal life.

In disappearing, the animal leaves only its cry” (2000 42).144

It is precisely this contrived sublation – this sublimation – which is at work in modernity, a discursive economy that encysts and encrypts that which it cannot process.145 The problem is thus not that the animal cannot speak but rather that it won’t be heard, that its shrill cry will be deemed inarticulate and, as a result, inaudible. Instrumentalized as handy philosophical concept and yet resistant to conceptualization, the animal occupies an untenable position: simultaneously close at hand and at a safe distance. Within a Hegelian frame, any attempt at imagining or conceiving the nature of animals is discarded as fallacious sympathizing or naïve anthropomorphism.146 In order to prevent the animal from interfering with our human affairs, it will have to be “framed” or allegorized as the

144 As if in response to Hegel’s reading of Genesis, Benjamin interprets Adam’s naming of the animals as the “rendering mute” of nature by the very process of it being given a name by man (“On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”). See Derrida’s reading of this passage in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008 19). 145 The combined metaphors of crypts and digestive tracts bring to mind images of the Chicago meat lockers – the animal “morgue” of the city – described in in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906): “this slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory” (1981 35). 146 At the beginning of the twentieth century, Uexküll’s biosemiotic “wandering into the worlds of animals and humans [Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen]” will make this theoretical frame vacillate, though without entirely doing away with it. On a possible Hegelian reading of Uexküll’s theory of the Umwelt, see Brett Buchanan (2008 30) and Geoffrey Winthrop- Young’s afterword to A Foray (2010 231). On the evolution of the charge of anthropomorphism in 20th century science, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Scandalous Knowledge (2005 159-160), Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers (2005 59-68), and Thinking with Aninmals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, edited by Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman. On the anthropocentrism of anthropocentrism, see Tom Tyler, CIFERAE (2012 63-64).

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“truly Incomprehensible,” locked up in an artificial niche, and buried alive in a crypt.

Derrida writes in Glas: “What speculative dialectics means (to say) is that the crypt can still be incorporated to the system. The transcendental or the repressed, the unthought or the excluded must be assimilated by the corpus, interiorized as moments, idealized in the very negativity of their labor” (1986 166).

To account for the unaccountable incarceration of the animal in modernity, Lippit argues, it has been necessary to devise new structures that could accommodate the undying animal, which he finds mainly in the Freudian theory of the unconscious,147 but also in the cinematic apparatus and modern genetics. In these unlocalizable recesses of modernity the animal is kept, to quote Derrida, “alive, but as dead” (the self-corrective structure of this sentence performing the illogical topology of the crypt). The edifice of modern thought thus depends upon the adverb “as,” acting here as an “as if” that enforces the belief in a hermetic partition between the human and the non-human

(among other binaries). In order for the animal to disappear entirely, the crypt cannot be just another place but must be a nonplace. Hence the surprise when animals resurface in a supposedly “safe” place and the impression that one has been attacked not from but by the outside.

SO THAT NO EYE COULD DETECT ANY THING SUSPICIOUS All cats are false. The feline is the false.

147 The crypt conjures up the topography of the unconscious but cannot be reduced to it. As we will see later in the chapter, Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham come up with the notion of the crypt precisely because they believe that Freud’s theory is unable to account for the Wolf Man’s “infantile neurosis.” In his foreword to The Wolf Man’s Magic Words, Derrida describes the crypt as a place (un lieu) lodged inside and yet completely isolated from another place. It is a nonplace that “no longer rallies the easy metaphors of the Unconscious (hidden, secret, underground, latent, other, etc.), of the prime object, in sum, of any psychoanalysis. Instead, using that first object as a background, it is a kind of ‘false unconscious,’ an ‘artificial’ unconscious lodged like a prosthesis, a graft in the heart of an organ, within the divided self. A very specific and peculiar place, highly circumscribed, to which access can nevertheless only be gained by following the routes of a different topography” (1986 xiii).

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Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (1998 29)

In Hegel’s skittish black tomcat, we can recognize not only the prototype of Heidegger’s captive animal but also the protagonist of Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843). In this “most wild, yet most homely narrative” (597), the narrator, formerly a pet-lover, recounts from behind the bars of a prison cell how he repeatedly dreamt of killing, before actually killing, his black cat Pluto (the god of the underworld). After returning home one night, the intoxicated narrator gouges one of the cat’s eyes out of its socket with a penknife before hanging the animal in his garden. Shortly after this macabre event, his house inexplicably burns to the ground, except for one wall on which appears, “as if graven in bas relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat” (600). The narrator immediately rationalizes this “apparition,” forgetting Pluto and his guilt, until one night he chances upon another black cat, who is in all respects similar to his old pet except for an indefinite white splotch on its chest. The animal follows the narrator to his new house and “domesticate[s] itself at once” (601).

Soon, the narrator finds himself resenting his new pet. A “certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of [his] former deed of cruelty,” prevent him from abusing it, until one day the cat makes him stumble on his way to the cellar. Losing his temper, the narrator attempts to kill it but instead accidentally buries the axe intended for the cat in his wife’s brain. In order to conceal his deed, he immures the body of his deceased wife in his cellar:

Upon the fourth day of the assassination, a party of the police came, very unexpectedly, into the house, and proceeded again to make rigorous investigation of the premises. Secure, however, in the inscrutability of my place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment whatever. The officers bade me accompany them in their search. They left no nook or corner unexplored (605).

Just as the police are about to leave the cellar, leaving the corpse undetected and the deed

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unpunished, a strange noise is heard: “I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!” exclaims the narrator, “by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman – a howl – a wailing shriek. . .I had walled up the monster up within the tomb!” (606)

The story invites an economic reading, not only because of how the narrator’s fortune is intimately bound to the cat’s (or perhaps cats’?) pathetic lot, but also in terms of who or what is welcome to circulate in and out of the house (oikos). Just as in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” female characters are not safe in domestic spaces, and animals are nowhere to be found. Whereas the ape is never “present” (though it lurks in every aperture), the cat ultimately betrays where it has been hidden/hiding. It was held captive neither in nor out but at the threshold, incorporated in the house’s very walls. Perhaps

Poe had Hoffmann’s Kater Murr [mur] in mind? If “no eyes could detect anything suspicious,” walls in Poe stories have ears (and a mouth), and the animal returns with a vengeance: “Upon [the head of my wife’s corpse], with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman” (606).

Poe’s story seems to lend itself to a univocal reading: that of the undying creature as the objective correlative of the murderer’s unsuccessfully repressed guilt. Might we, however, imagine instead that the cat not merely stands in as a cipher for human emotion (telling us something about us, as animals often do in parables) but also stands for itself, representing equally as animal? And, furthermore, as a specific animal in its unsubstitutable idiosyncrasy: a black cat, the black cat? Is that even possible, given that the story houses not one but two almost identical cats, whereas there is only room for

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one in the title? Is the reader not tricked into once again following the tale’s heading too blindly, into reading the title too literally? Can one call un chat un chat, in other words, without in the same gesture overnaming and overlooking the animal encrypted in its name?

Poe’s stories have proven hospitable to symbolic interpretation – psychoanalytic hermeneutics in particular 148 – that, under the pretense of illuminating the truth underlying the story, have buried certain details under an ingenious if smothering critical apparatus. The best example of this may be Marie Bonaparte’s identification of the black cat with Poe’s mother: “Though a tom and named Pluto, we should not be misled, for the Black Cat, as it were, is a totem of Poe’s mother, conjured up by [Poe’s cat]

Catterina’s presence round the house and bed of his consumptive mother-figure, Virginia”

(1933 465).149 One of the problems raised by this reading is its outright conflation of the empirical figure of the author with the fictional narrator (Bonaparte’s thesis being that

Poe’s entire oeuvre becomes intelligible when viewed through the prism of infantile trauma caused by the death of the author’s mother).150 The animal in Bonaparte’s interpretation is itself readily purloined, put at a safe distance (pur-loign) to facilitate the

148 Shawn Rosenheim explains that “Because Poe is compulsively interested both in crypts (‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ‘The Black Cat,’ ‘The Premature Burial’) and in cryptograms, it is no surprise that pyschoanalytic critics have often concentrated on his work. Poe’s writing coalesces around secrets and obscurity, almost forcing readers to imagine the text as a crypt with a hidden key” (1997 41). On the notorious susceptibility (and resistance) of Poe’s detective fiction to psychoanalytical interpretation, see Rosenheim (71). 149 To be fair, the cat is not the only transparent signifier in Bonaparte’s exegetic toolbox. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,”Poe’s mother is alternately the L’Espanayes and the room itself, while the ourang-outang holding the razor is the figure of the father slaying the mother during coitus (a crime that is not one, a crime in the mind of little Edgar). Poe himself is in turn Dupin, the narrator, and the sailor, which is surprising since in the tale the ourang-outang wants to shave in imitation of the seaman he had observed through the keyhole of the closet where it was held captive (429). 150 On Bonaparte’s reading of Poe, see Ian Walker’s article in Eric Carlson’s Companion to Poe Studies (1996 38) and Shoshana Felman, “On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytical Approaches,” in The Purloined Poe (1988 133-156). On the intricate history of Poe and psychoanalytical interpretation, refer to The Purloined Poe, and especially Lacan’s seminar on “The Purloined Letter,” Derrida’s “The Purveyor of Truth,” and Barbara Johnson’s “The Frame of Reference.”

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transposition of signs into symptoms. Even when Bonaparte underlines the affection of

Poe for his pet cat, the animal is promptly turned into a mere “cipher,”151 disregarding that Catterina’s very name encrypts the animal, disavowing the sensorial agency that owes the cat its name (from cattare, to see152). The cat loses one eye in Poe’s story and two in

Bonaparte’s interpretation, where they are reduced to symbols for the author’s soon-to- be-castrated penis.

How can we see the animal (and let it see)? How can we hear it instead of silencing it?153

Can the animal signify without being transfigured into an empty signifier? An earlier story by Poe, “Instinct vs Reason: A Black Cat” (1840), attests to the fact that these

151 In CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers, Tom Tyler remarks that philosophy and psychoanalysis have often used animals as ciphers or gratuitous placeholders. Attending to Carol J. Adams’s important notion of the animal as “absent referent” for the meat we eat (2010 64-133) and Derrida’s concern (itself prompted by the gaze of his little cat) that the general singular syntagm “the Animal” compresses the wild multiplicity of the heterotrophic living into a handy philosophical category – “the Animal” in the general singular, this “catch-all concept” (2008 31) – Tyler proposes to kill this chimeric Animal with the aid of a “small army of assassins” (2012 42). Here the hybrid Animal is not a limit-case, a liminal creature undermining the stability of human epistemologies but on the contrary the very foundations of (self-)knowledge – and just like Poe’s cat, the foundations, if we are willing to lend an ear, might talk back. Professing to consider the specific case of animals summoned in philosophical texts in their idiosyncrasy, Tyler follows Wittgenstein’s aspiration of dismissing generalization as a way to “shew the fly away out of the fly-bottle” (Philosophical Investigations, qtd. by Tyler, 1). To avoid the pitfalls of exemplification – taking the individual as representative not just of the species but an entire kingdom –, Tyler suggests to proliferate the points of view. Each animal is “a particular, tangible individual in his or her own right, not an instance of animality or of the Animal. These animal companions are FERAE, wild and unruly enough to escape cipherous substitution by means of their spirited heterogeneity” (44). Unable to do justice to the inexhaustible diversity of animals, Tyler settles for 101 – CI in roman numerals – distinct animals that must not be tamed into mere ciphers: “CI FERAE, not CIFERAE.” In bringing the chimera Animal to death, Tyler invokes the mythical figure of Bellerophon, thereby turning himself into a hunter of sorts, on the lookout for the animals that reside in philosophical texts. His bestiary is not a nostalgic turn to some premodern ordering of things where the human was not (yet) the measure of all things – though Tyler’s periodization is left vague, probably deliberately so, but leaving a sense that the critical same gesture, in the same conditions and with the same results, has been enacted since the beginning of philosophy –, but an attempt to question the anthropocentrism that continues to dominate philosophical discourses. Moreover, Tyler does not fetishize the animal as such but claims to look at them as clues, pointers, or indexes – i.e. as creatures to follow (que donc je suis) (30). 152 This etymology is suggested by Sarah Kofman in Autobiogriffures (1976 40). 153 In the first pages of his short monograph on “The Philosophy of Animal Magnetism,” Poe laments the “inconsistencies of our modern philosophers” who refuse to “stop to inquire – to investigate – not even to hear” the “facts” of animal magnetism (upon which mesmerism was founded).

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issues preoccupied the author. In this essay-like tale, yet another story about an animal escaping a space designed by and for humans, the narrator gives a detailed account of the stratagems used by his pet to open the kitchen door:

She first springs from the ground to the guard of the latch (which resembles the guard over a gun-trigger,) and through this she thrusts her left arm to hold on with. She now, with her right hand, presses the thumb-latch until it yields, and here several attempts are frequently requisite. Having forced it down, however, she seems to be aware that her task is but half accomplished, since, if the door is not pushed open before she lets go, the latch will again fall into its socket. She, therefore, screws her body round so as to bring her hind feet immediately beneath the latch, while she leaps with all her strength from the door – the impetus of the spring forcing it open, and her hind feet sustaining the latch until this impetus is fairly given (371, emphasis mine).

This careful phenomenological account muddies the “line which demarcates the instinct of the brute creation from the boasted reason of man – a boundary line far more difficult to settle than even the North-Eastern or the Oregon” (371). The animal appears as an untraceable frontier. While this tale is a plausible blueprint for “The Black Cat,” the minute description of the door’s complex mechanism also anticipates the intricate technical explanations of the self-fastening window that Detective Dupin will elaborate in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

Such phenomenological attention is one possible path taken by Poe to consider the animal as animal – one that echoes Montaigne’s playful interaction with his cat and anticipates Derrida’s insistence that the cat seeing him naked in his bathroom is a “real cat. . .[not] the figure of a cat” (2009 11). But “A Black Cat” does not become “The Black

Cat” until Poe incorporates it in a full-fledged fiction. There would be another path then to the animal, one that, following Poe’s and Benjamin’s cues, I am calling decryption.

One does not de-crypt an animal sign like one decrypts a cipher. A master of cryptography, Poe explains in “A Few Words on Secret Writing” (1841) that while few

“persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of

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secret writing which shall baffle investigation,” however, “it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve”

(1984 1286). As Bruno Monfort has argued, the “tragedy” of cryptography is that its secret meaning is “merely human” and thus it is just a matter of time or ingenuity before a human code is cracked (2011 47). Decryption thus has little to do with “cryptography,” if only because cryptography remains at bottom a form of writing (graphein) and can always, at least in principle, be decoded. Once the message has been extracted from the cipher, there remains nothing more to be said.154

In theory, cryptography ensures covert communication between two or more human agents who possess the key to the cryptogram. But the Poe of “The Gold Bug” reminds us that cryptography is never so clean and scientific a process that the Poe of “A Few

Words on Secret Writing” would have us believe.155 “The Gold Bug” can indeed be regarded as a narrative about the contingencies inherent to cryptography. Animals are

“present” at every step of the hermeneutic quest initiated by William Legrand – whose

“chief amusements,” we are told, are “gunning and fishing, or sauntering along the beach and through the myrtles, in quest of shells or entomological specimens” (561) – to recover the treasure that captain Kidd has “secreted” (like a spider secretes its web): as material support for the invisible ink (the vellum or parchment), as pointers (the scarab, the “bee-line”), as serendipitous sidekick (Wolf, the Newfoundland), as symbolic signifiers (the drawing of the goat or kid serving as Captain Kidd’s “hieroglyphical signature”). What is at stake in Poe’s animal signs is another kind of marking: an

154 Tom Tyler reminds us that the term cipher comes from sunya, the Sanskrit word for “empty, desert, naught.” The very principle of the cipher is to exhaust itself in the delivery of the information it carries. 155 On the idealistic dimension of cryptography, “the utopian inverse of cryptonymy,” see Rosenheim (1991 157).

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encryption that exceeds “human ingenuity” and “baffles” investigations by a secret form of inscription.

At first glance, the crime scene in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” makes no sense since nothing has been consciously pro-grammed. Because of this, Dupin is able to deduce what species of “murderer” he is up against. From this perspective, the ape’s attempts at signifying are but a vain and grotesque pantomime, an “empty gesture.” The ape means nothing, signifies nothing, as Monfort contends. The razor with which it slits

Madame L’Espanaye’s throat is a hollow semiophore because it is not wielded by a human hand – that is, for Monfort, by no hand at all (the title of his essay is “Sans les mains,” meaning “hands-free” or “without hands”). But Poe’s ape does have hands, only not “human hands.” Pace Monfort, I do not see the Ourang-Outang as a senseless, “pure mimetic force” (46), but as a rebellious animal sign unwilling to resign itself, save for re- signing itself as singe. In effect, Poe’s animal tales are always concerned with debunking the supposed alienating impact of modern technologies and the fantasmatic hermeticism of human spaces and scripts. These stories evidence, invite and perform different modes of writing and reading sustained by a different kind of logic.

ANASEME (TIERET) Freud himself revealed his interest in the adventures of Sherlock Holmes to a patient, the “wolf-man.”. . .In each case, infinitesimal traces permit the comprehension of a deeper, otherwise unattainable reality: traces – more precisely, symptoms (in the case of Freud), clues (in the case of Sherlock Holmes).

Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues,” Myths, Emblems, Clues (1990 101)

In The Wolf Man’s Verbarium: A Cryptonymy, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok decide to reopen the “case” that Freud had too soon closed. After four years of analysis, Freud declared his young patient Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff, better known as the Wolf

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Man, cured and wrote “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The Wolf Man)”

(1918), an essay that played a significant role in establishing psychoanalysis as a therapeutic science. But Pankejeff was not cured, and his treatment, write Deleuze and

Guattari, “would continue for all eternity under Brunswick, Lacan, Leclaire” (2003 26).156

Pankejeff owes his nickname to a childhood dream where he saw six or seven white wolves perched on a big walnut tree in front of his bedroom window, which he describes as opening suddenly, “of its own accord” (1995 404). Terrified at the idea of being eaten alive, he woke screaming, before going back to sleep after being reassured that it was all just a dream.

The case of the Wolf Man interests me not merely for its obvious resemblance to “The

Murders in the Rue Morgue” – the anxiety over animal intrusion, innuendoes of bestiality, self-activated window, the hybrid figure (here a Wolf Man, there an Ourang-Outang or

“Wild Man”: the confusing polyglossia behind which the animal hides). It interests me because, like Poe’s tale, it has generated innumerable diagnoses and misreadings. In a gesture that infuriated Deleuze and Guattari, Freud reduced the pack of wolves to one single wolf and then to a domesticated sheepdog and finally to the figure of the patient’s

Father. Symptomatically, for them, Freudian psychoanalysis operates as an enormous

156 The list continues, though at the end of the twentieth century the emphasis shifted from the relevance of Freud’s diagnostic model to narratological issues: “Peter Brooks states at the beginning of his essay, ‘The Fictions of the Wolf-Man’: ‘The case history of the Wolf-Man’s story. . .suggests a paradigm for the status of modern [narrative] explanation’. . .Both Brooks and Jonathan Culler, the latter in an essay entitled ‘Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative’ (The Pursuit of Signs) take their cue from two additions made by Freud to the case history of the Wolf Man concerning his ‘intention of pursuing the discussion of the reality of ‘primal scenes.’’ Juxtaposing the initial summaries of the problem by Culler and Brooks, the issue seems to be whether the Wolf Man’s main nightmare and his subsequent neurosis produced their own fictitious origin, or whether the nightmare and the neurosis indeed resulted from a prior and real event” (translator’s introduction to Cryptonymy, [1986 liv-lv]).

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Oedipal apparatus,157 turning the multiple into the individual and the animal into the human:

We are criticizing psychoanalysis for having used Oedipal enunciation to make patients believe they would produce individual, personal statements, and would finally speak in their own name. The trap was set from the start: never will the Wolf Man speak. Talk as he might about wolves, howl as he might like a wolf, Freud does not even listen; he glances at his dog and answers, “It’s daddy” (2003 38).

“The transformation from wolf to dog demonstrates that it does not really matter which animal operates as father surrogate,” Tom Tyler explains. “In his bid to decipher the dream, Freud fails to de-cipher the wolves.” But Freud’s obedient pet dog (whose name was Wolf) was probably a little too quiet to be honest, Tyler suggests: “Like the faithful hound in the Sherlock Holmes mystery ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze,’ by submitting to their master, by failing to give voice in loud and distinctively doglike tones, they denounce him. Their submissive, cipherous silence speaks volumes” (2012 40).

The domesticated muteness of Freud’s animals points a finger at the analyst more than at the dreamer. Deleuze and Guattari accuse Freud of overlooking his patient’s desire of becoming-animal, of becoming-pack. Freud’s only good deed was to rename him, giving him a proper name “linked to the becomings, infinitives, and intensities of a multiplied and depersonalized individual.” What psychoanalysis lacks, assert Deleuze and Guattari,

“is a truly zoological vision” (2003 38). If psychoanalytical semiotics does share affinities with the methods of the detective, and if both derive their “evidential paradigm” from ancestral hunting techniques, as Carlo Ginzburg has claimed, then Freud seems more

157 Thank you to Kevin McLaughlin who reminded me that Oedipus – who put the Sphinx, the anthropophagous winged monster with a woman’s bust and a lion’s body, to death – is introduced as a hunter in Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. He vows to “hunt down” the person responsible for killing his father, only to realize that he is chasing his own tail.

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interested in the hunter than in the hunted, and effectively overlooks the becoming- animal at work in the hunt.158

For Torok and Abraham, on the other hand, Freud was not able to cure the Wolf Man because he failed to understand that his patient’s dreams were not typical narratives with a finite series of one-to-one (or several-to-one) correspondences. Their theory is that the

Wolf Man had secreted his own idiom within the very substance of language (to be precise, of a patchwork of languages composed of Russian, German and English) in order to conceal an unspeakable childhood trauma. Since no language can be absolutely idiosyncratic, the Wolf Man had to carve out a linguistic crypt in order to keep his secret illegible.159 To account for what he could not say, what he had to incorporate because, unable to assimilate it, one needs a new “theory of readability,”160 a translation business inscribed in a new “type of economy that. . .is neither purely idiomatic (the absolutely undecipherable) nor simply commonplace (conventional and transparent)” (1986 xlvii).

Writes Derrida:

158 Poe also repeatedly gestures toward affinities between Cuvier’s paleontological method and Dupin’s detection techniques, Cuvier being renown for his extraordinary abilities to “reconstruct” an entire animal from a small fragment of bone. The scientist reportedly said: “‘Today, anyone who sees only the print of a cloven hoof might conclude that the animal that had left it behind was a ruminator, and this conclusion is as certain as any in physics and in ethics. This footprint alone, then, provides the observer with information about the teeth, the jawbone, the vertebrae, each leg bone, the thighs, shoulders and pelvis of the animal which had just passed: it is a more certain proof than all Zadig's tracks” (qtd. in Ginzburg, 1990 116-117). I will return to Cuvier’s influence on 19th century American zoology and fiction in the conclusion. 159 In Freud’s reconstructed scenario, Sergei’s secret is the repressed desire for his father’s sexual attentions initiated by a double memory. On the one hand, his being the spectator of the “primal scene” of his parents’ coitus a tergo (doggy-style). On the other hand, his witnessing his six-year- old sister abused by his father. These two scenes are encrypted in Sergei’s memory of chasing a butterfly (a swallow-tail) whose wings looked like “a woman opening her legs, and then the legs made the shape of a Roman V, which, as we know,” writes Freud, “was the hour at which, in his boyhood, and even up to the time of the treatment, he used to fall into a depressed state of mind.” As long as the butterfly flees, Sergei is happy to chase it, but when it settles on a flower, the child starts screaming. His depressive state, Torok and Abraham claim, comes from the fact that he had to swallow his scream: “Cry out? No! I must swallow it. This anxiety explains the choice of a swallow-tail in addition to the visual image of the wings in V: The swallow-tailed butterfly = I swallow the tale (of the tail), it is better to lie. What is tragic in this tale is that my desire must be eradicated within myself” (1986 44-45). 160 See Nicholas Rand’s introduction to Cryptonymy (1986 li-lii).

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In unfolding the “drama” of the Wolf Man, in deciphering the monumental record of his history, in reconstituting the hieroglyphic code (which he had to invent in order to say without saying the interdict) (they allude at one point to Champollion and the Rosetta stone), the two analysts constructed: the analysis of a crypt, of course, of a cryptography, with its language and its method; but also, inseparably, the crypt of an analysis, its “decrypted” (deciphered) crypt, its crypt in the act of decrypting, the commemorative monument of what must be kept alive and seminally active (xxiv).

There is undeniably a methodical deciphering at work in Torok and Abraham’s reading practice, but it is necessarily coupled with a process of encrypting. Simultaneously desperate for and hostile to readability, the Wolf Man is twice “trapped,” in the analyst’s interpretation and in his own secret.161 In order to unravel this tangle of irreconcilable impulses, the “cryptonymic translation” (undecidably encryption and decryption) must at once lure and lose its reader. At this point in his explanation of Torok and Abraham’s method, Derrida appears to nod in the direction of Poe (whose work he explicitly mentions in the middle of his essay). The erratic “ratiocination” of the Wolf Man conjures up the elusive ramble of “The Man of the Crowd” (who, we’ll recall, Benjamin compared to a werewolf):

It is as though the cryptonymic translation, playing with the allosemes and their synonyms (always more numerous in their open series than is indicated by a dictionary), swerves off at an angle in order to throw the reader off the track [dérouter] and make its itinerary unreadable. An art of chicanery: judicial pettifogging or sophistic ratiocination [l’âpreté ratiocinante], but also [chicane = maze] a topographical stratagem multiplying simulated barriers, hidden doors, obligatory detours, abrupt

161 Two forms of trapping must be distinguished here. The interpretive trapping of the analyst is non-zoological (non-somatic) because always already semiotic, whereas the secretive trapping of the Wolfman is a somatic expression, an animal track. In her article on Derrida’s “A Silkworm’s of one’s own,” Ginette Michaud recalls that there was no good distinction between introjection and incorporation (or between repression and suppression) before Abraham and Torok: “Between repression [Verdrängung: in French, refoulement] and suppression [Unterdrückung: in French, répression], there is a major shift in topos in which, similarly to what happens between introjection and incorporation, the passage to another scale, from one system to the other, takes place. The secret of the silkworm is derived from this double logic: its secret is certainly not more readable once it is exposed; it could even be said that it is its very visibility that renders it invisible. The secret, or rather the secrets of the silkworm – concerning creation, coupling, death and rebirth – are no longer a matter of something hidden or forbidden (the secret is not related to unattainable information, nor to some lure or bait – although a worm might well suggest this!), any more than they lead to revelation or unveiling” (2011 62).

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changes of direction [sens], all the trials and errors of a game of solitaire meant both to seduce and to discourage, to fascinate, and fatigue (xlii).

Underlying the Wolf Man’s “cryptonymic translation,” Derrida exhumes a logic directly concerned with the animal. Originally, dérouter (to sidetrack or distract) refers to the hunted animal capable of shaking off the dogs pursuing it. The lexicon of the hunt resolutely insinuates itself in Derrida’s foreword. The unsayable “thing” that the Wolf

Man strives to repress obeys the paradoxical logic of the chase that I outlined in the preceding chapter. This “word-thing” that cannot and yet must be said, that he simultaneously pursues and chases away, has a name (one given by the analysts): tieret, from the Russian to “rub” or “wound.” This “anasemic word” singlehandedly captures the Wolf Man’s phobia and desire by combining the fear of the wolf with the idea of sexual pleasure (18-19). “The ‘word’ tieret,” writes Derrida, “subjected to a ‘true repression’ that banishes it into the Unconscious [qui le chasse dans l’Inconscient], can thus only have the status of a word-thing” (xlii).

The animal is everywhere and nowhere in the case of the Wolf Man. Not just in the pet name he is given by Freud or in his dreams (crowded by wolves, caterpillars, sheepdogs, foxes, a butterfly, and so on) but also in the very idiom that he invents for himself.

Torok and Abraham claim that the Wolf Man conceals his “story” in a multilingual warren composed of seemingly “defunct” words, a knotty network of inarticulable names.

Inert repositories of meaning that only he could reanimate, these “magic words” are cryptically connected less by their semantic value (or one that has dulled over time, as in the “archeonyms”) than by their form and sound (Torok and Abraham speak of “rhymes”

[82-83].) These ciphers await not a conventional decipherment enjoining these “mute words” to speak in their own name, but rather a poetic decryption capable of hearing and

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seeing, touching and smelling, them.162 The Wolf Man’s Magic Word shows “into what labyrinth, what multiplicity of heterogeneous places, one must enter in order to track down the cryptic motivation,” Derrida explains, “for example in the case of [the sequence of letters] TR, when it is marked by a proper-name effect (here, tieret), and when, consequently, it no longer belongs simply to the internal system of language”

(xlvii).

Is it by chance that Nicolas Abraham chose The Raven (1845) as exemplary of the logic of incorporation? Poe’s ungainly poem, “forever deadly and forever vivifying” (1995 130), stages, both thematically and prosodically, the insistent resurgence of what is thought dead

(to be never-more). The iterative pattern of the poem resists immediate legibility and forces the reader to hear (as opposed to listen to) the sounds of The Raven.163 The task of the interpreter is thus to detect the disagreements between metrics and semantics, as Richard

Godden has argued. Of Torok and Abraham’s cryptonymic method, Godden focuses on the “word-thing” in the Wolf Man’s “verbarium”: the one word that absolutely does not speak, except (for) itself:

[T]ieret (Russian, to rub) is taken to crystallize a four-year-old boy’s trauma over witnessing his father fondling or rubbing his six-year-old sister. At sixteen the sister commits suicide by swallowing mercury (Russian rtut). Abraham and Torok, noting two shared consonants (“r” and “t”) and “the glottal pronunciation t.r.t.,” hear rtut as an oblique enunciation of tieret. The girl swallows the word, objectified as mercury, and the boy disguises the word tieret in a visual image of a nursemaid scrubbing a floor (natieret, to rub down, to scrub, wax, to scrape, wound oneself). The word, with its freight of occluded events, silent within the image of domestic rubbing, causes the boy to achieve orgasm “in his father’s place, as it were.” Whether or not one is persuaded by the ingenuity of Abraham and Torok’s reading is not finally the point: the

162 In “Being Odd, Getting Even,” Stanley Cavell insists that his readings of Poe “have generally to do with the sound of Poe’s prose, with what Emerson and Nietzsche would call its air or its smell” (1995 18-19). 163 Following the principles laid out by Abrahama and Torok’s Cryptonymy, Richard Godden claims that the poem “would be eminently readable, were it not that its remorseless trochaic rhythm, extended through one hundred and eight predominantly eight-foot lines, displaces attention from meaning” (2000 997).

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example is intended to illustrate how absolutely the event – the early scene of child abuse – has taken on phonic and graphic substance. Tieret and rtut are both “defunct” semantically, at least in terms of the scene they finally address, and yet because of that occluded site elements of each term remain semantically over-charged – theirs is, we might say, a forceful opacity (2000 994).

Having collected a number of defunct signs that nonetheless continue to signify, Godden proposes we read the poem as an allegory for the Southern slave trade by replacing the dead mistress (Lenore) with a dead slave (le noir) (1007). For the slave owner, the slave was mere chattel, conceived of as socially dead by the master. But, as he argues by way of

Hegel, in so doing the master “threatened his own life” (1006). The only way of overcoming this aporia is to keep the slave “alive, but as dead”: “Alive, the slave exposes to the master that his mastery is a form of dependence. Dead, the slave cancels the master’s means to mastery. Buried alive, the slave ratifies the master’s mastery

(underpinning the substance of the lord), without troubling his master’s independent consciousness” (1006). “Almost readable,” the black slave makes its presence felt without appearing explicitly, but instead literally (hidden, as it were, in plain sight).

But what about the raven as raven?164 Is not the raven, the animal and its name, a tieret of sorts in the economy of Poe’s poem? However plainly it may speak, does it not remain inaudible? “Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, / Though its answer little meaning – little relevancy bore” (83). In their transparent omnipresence,

Poe’s animals “manifest” themselves as symptoms. But because they do not “possess language,” they can only return from their repression not with but within language.

Scholars have failed to take note of the fact that, encrypted in the Wolf Man’s anasemic

164 On Poe’s animals as placeholders for Black slavery in Poe, see Christopher Peterson’s “The Aping Apes of Poe and Wright: Race, Animality and Mimicry in ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and Native Son.”

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word – tieret – lay the German word for animal, Tier. (Furthermore, Tier is etymologically related to the Greek ther, the hunted animal.)

OURANG-OUTANG Student and hunter. The text is a forest in which the reader is hunter. Rustling in the underbrush – the idea, skittish prey, the citation – another piece “in the bag” [ein Stück aus dem tableau]. (Not every reader encounters the idea.)

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (1999 802)

Let us pick up the trail where it had gone cold for the Parisian police to follow Dupin one last time in his tracking of the Ourang-Outang. As I have suggested, Poe’s tale can be approached as an allegory of reading. Many of the clues scattered throughout the story are explicitly intended for the reader and bear little diegetic significance. When the detective insists on the necessity of lending a hunter’s ear and nose to decrypt the maze of the modern city, he underlines that the police do not have even “the slightest clew”

(406).

Sound and spelling matter: first, in this clew, one hears the French for nail (le clou) whose invisible fracture Dupin discovers, finding the key to the locked-room mystery. This translinguistic pun betrays another line of fracture in the clew/clou, a metaleptic transgression where the clou phonetically encroaches upon the clue given to the reader.

Secondly, the use of the archaic variant of “clue” conjures the tale’s indebtedness to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Thus spelled, “clew” evokes the ball of thread given by Ariadne to Theseus to mark his way out of the Cretan labyrinth.165 This visual clue is another hint at the resolution of the story (the final encounter with a semi-human,

165 For an analysis of the mythical subtext crypted in the clue/clew/clou homonymy and archeonymy, see John T. Irwin’s “A Clue to a Clue” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (1995 139-152).

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homicidal creature).166 This attention to the letter, with its phonetic and archeonymic entanglements with the semantic and semiotic levels of the text, makes this “reading” possible. The clue is literally in the clew (and playfully leads to the clou du spectacle).

As I have noted, the story provides not one but two investigations to illustrate the extraordinary powers of the analytic mind. Almost as well known as the solving of the murders, the first scene where Dupin showcases his analytic faculties offers suggestive clues about the way animal signs may be decrypted in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”

Introducing the detective as a great analytical mind from whom few men could keep secrets, the narrator provides an anecdote as a “case in point” of what Dupin means when he boasts that “most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms”

(401). Let us note the similarity he thus bears both with the narrator of “The Man of the

Crowd” and with the Ourang-Outang entering the apartment through the window.

In this exemplary anecdote, Dupin and the narrator are silently strolling down a Parisian street when suddenly the detective breaks the silence to confirm the narrator’s thoughts about the mediocre performance of Chantilly, a cobbler recently converted to acting who he deems unqualified for playing the role of Xerxes in Crébillon’s eponymous tragedy.

The narrator is quite “a-mazed,” for nothing had been said that could lead the detective to guess what the narrator was thinking about. Dupin retraces for him the steps of his reasoning: “The larger links of the chain run thus – Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichol,

166 Where John T. Irwin claims that Dupin is Theseus (1995 151), however, I would like to suggest that he might as well be Ariadne. As Irwin himself notes, Dupin never goes after the animal but only helps find it in the labyrinth of the city. And indeed, his rival is less the animal murderer than the prefect of police, whom he delights having “defeated in his own castle” (431). Moreover, in the myth, Ariadne will quickly pass from Theseus to Dionysus, as Deleuze reminds us, that is from the man who subdues Pasiphaë’s monstrous progeny (and also, not incidentally, the founder of the city of Athens) to the animal deity: “abandoned by Theseus, whom she had nonetheless guided through the labyrinth, [Ariadne] is carried off by Dionysus, and discovers another labyrinth” (1998 99). In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze dreams of an art that would be a labyrinth without a thread and where “Ariadne has hung herself” to return as Arachne (1994 56).

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Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer” (403). These “running links” provide Dupin a theory of reading of sorts.

As they were crossing the street, Dupin reminds his friend that a fruiterer with a large basket of apples had thrust the narrator upon a pile of paving stones. This stumble,

Dupin infers, caused the narrator to reflect on “stereotomy,” the method by which the street is paved. This in turn led him “to think of atomies, and thus of the theories of

Epicurus.” Dupin having recently mentioned to the narrator that “the vague guesses of that noble Greek had met with confirmation in the late nebular cosmogony” (of Dr.

Nichol, though this link is missing in Dupin’s reconstruction). Upon this, the narrator could not avoid casting his “eyes upward to the great nebula in Orion,” a gesture that corroborated Dupin’s speculations. Finally, the thought of Orion triggered the memory of the line about Chantilly (himself a star of sorts) in the journal the day before: “Perdidit antiquum litera prima sonum.” Dupin explains this rather cryptic mot d’esprit:

I had told you that this was in reference to Orion, formerly written Urion; and, from certain pungencies connected with this explanation, I was aware that you could not have forgotten it. It was clear, therefore, that you would not fail to combine the two ideas of Orion and Chantilly. That you did combine them I saw by the character of the smile which passed over your lips. You thought of the poor cobbler’s immolation. So far, you had been stooping in your gait; but now I saw you draw yourself up to your full height. I was then sure that you reflected upon the diminutive figure of Chantilly (404, emphasis mine).

Crucially, every step of the deductive chain is produced or confirmed by the narrator’s body language (stumbling, stooping, smiling, etc.). This episode facetiously illustrates

Dupin’s contention about stars being viewed more distinctly when contemplated “in a side-long way”: the narrator looks up at the constellation while Dupin is observing him.

In this allusion to the nebula lies another clue, whose full luster appears if we look at it sideways. First, Orion in Greek mythology is the great hunter, at times assimilated to the

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giant Nimrod,167 “the great Hunter before God” who originated the project of the Tower of Babel. Orion is not a fortuitous link in Dupin’s chain but a surrogate for the detective- hunter. In certain versions of the myth, Orion is blinded by Artemis, the Goddess of the hunt, because he threatens to surpass her. He then needs to resort to other senses (and to the help of Cedalion) before Helios restores his sight. In Hesiod’s version, Orion is killed by a scorpion sent by Gaia because he vows to kill every beast on earth. He is then transformed into a constellation, stuck between the constellation of the scorpion (the predator) and that of the Taurus (the prey), condemned to be the pursuer and the pursued for all eternity.

Orion is thus the one who does not see, or rather who sees with new eyes.168 He is the arch-hunter who is never at fault, who never loses the scent of animals and would kill them all if he could. But ironically, Dupin hints that the scent originally emanates from the hunter himself, who would himself then be able to be hunted. Indeed, the celebrated giant owes his original name, Urion, to being born out of the urine of Jupiter, Neptune and Mercury.169 Over time, Dupin recalls, his name was corrupted (perdidit) and the

“pungencies” associated with it were concealed (hiding his ignoble origins behind a new name just as the cobbler Chantilly sought to climb the social ladder by playing the role of a king). An alternative version of the Babelic corruption of language, Dupin’s allusion exhumes the stench from the supposed cleanliness of the letter. Urion is made Orion. And the

167 See Algernon Herbert’s Nimrod: A Discourse on Certain Passages of History and Fable, Volume 1 (1828) – let us note that Nimrod is represented with a bull’s head on the cover of the Harvard edition – on Orion and Nimrod being the same mythical figure, p. 3, on the connection with the myth of Babel, p. 7. On the Giant Nimrod and his “hunt for language,” see Agamben’s The End of the Poem (1999 124-125). 168 On Orion’s sightless vision, see Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind (1993 102-103). 169 Begotten by these three illustrious fathers, he is also sometimes taken as an allegory for philosophy, derived from different sources of knowledge. Wikipedia mentions another possible origin where Zeus, Hermes and Poseidon come to visit Hyrieus of Tanagra, who roasts a whole bull in their honor. When they offer him a favor in return for his hospitality, he asks for the birth of a son. The gods take the bull’s hide and urinate into it, bury it in the earth, and tell him to dig it up ten months later.

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prefix Ur- (denoting origin) becomes the conjunction Or (indicating divergence). This sanitization figures the shift from soma to semiosis, from hunt to capture.

Fig. 1. Orion, attributed to Reverend Richard Rouse Bloxam. Part a set of the constellation cards Urania’s Mirror, published in London c. 1825

CONCLUSION: ECCE ANIMOT Every word was once an animal.

Ben Marcus, epigraph to The Age of Wire and String, falsely attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1995 1)

By misquoting Emerson, who in fact wrote “Every word was once a poem,”170 Ben

Marcus cryptically speculates that the animal may be the lost origin of language. Rather than a mere appropriation of the vitality of animality, his is an appeal to resurrect the animals encrypted in everyday language:

170 Emerson’s “original” sentence was published in his essay “The Poet.”

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What would be base, or even obscene, to the obscene, becomes illustrious, spoken in a new connection of thought. . .The meaner the type by which a law is expressed, the more pungent it is, and the more lasting in the memories of men. . .It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word (1981 250).

The transformation of Orion’s name is thereby exemplary of a forgotten relation. Ovid writes: “Perdidit antiquum litera prima sonum,” meaning “The first letter has lost its original sound.” Quoting the Latin poet in a “dead language” to lament the counterintuitive degeneracy of language (wherein decay gives way to purification, as the obscene letter no longer smells), Dupin further encrypts the reference with another turn of the screw (or nail in the coffin). The allusion to Epicurus presents us with an atomized universe that has lost its primal unity – hence, the invisible fracture in the nail that is supposed to secure the room. Through the reference to the professor of astrology Dr. Nichol, Dupin acknowledges his attachment to Laplace. Just like Epicurus’ “vague guesses” later got confirmed by Laplace, the latter’s nebular theory will be confirmed by Nichol (who will soon refute them, much to the chagrin of Poe), though he cannot entirely prove his theories as he progresses “blindfolded, through a labyrinth of Error, into one of the most luminous and stupendous temples of Truth” (Eureka, 1322).171 Dupin offers a theory of language as animated, as animal. Not only does he track the scent of the animal encrypted in the letter, but he also shows that it takes an animal to smell it out (Orion is both the hunter and the hunted).

171 Eureka’s “ruling idea” – “not the theorem which [the author] hope[s] to demonstrate – for, whatever the mathematicians may assert, there is, in this world, no such thing as demonstration” (1261) – is that the Universe is in essence a nebular cosmogony prompted by a centripetal force that Poe calls “tendency to One” (concentrism, monism, vitalism are the three main engines of the universe). Eureka has often been derided for its idealism because most critics have regarded this work as a philosophical treatise, where Poe himself – or E.A.P., as he signs it – insists on presenting it as a “prose poem” (1259). At stake are not merely the astrological theories discussed by Poe but a certain relationship to language. Underlying is the assumption that the best approximation of the movement of the world must be poetic. This implies to take into account the process by which letters lose touch with their corporeality, their scent and their sound.

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“[Feeling] his way. . .in search of the true,” Dupin is Nietzschean avant la lettre: “It is my fate,” writes Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, “that I have to be the first decent human being;. . .I was first to experience lies as lies – smelling them out. – My genius is in my nostrils”

(1989 159). And as we know, truth for Nietzsche is a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms and anthropormorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations” whose metaphoricity is “worn out and without sensuous power” (1976 46-47). This loss of sensuous power is a paradoxical decay, a peculiar form of entropy whereby the original scent is masked by the acquisition of lettres de noblesse.

In the beginning was the word Urine (with which animals mark their territories), but this pungent origin soon covered its own tracks: phusis has a tendency to encrypt (itself). Thus

Ur becomes Or. Combined, these two fragments spell out the first syllable of Ourang-

Outang. This may be the reason for Poe’s strange spelling. Or perhaps Ourang-Outang is spelled this way because, contrary to the more traditional variants, there is but one single letter setting apart the two words articulated by a hyphen: OuRang-OuTang. In Le Règne animal, Cuvier notes that Ourang, meaning reasonable in Malay, applies to the human as well as to the ourang-outang and the elephant.172 The only “thing” preventing the senseless repetition of the same and standing between human reason (ourang) and animal instinct (outang) is a single letter. As in the case of the Wolf Man, the balance between reason and unreason, between the body and the mind (or head), between human and animal, rests upon the (dis)articulation of two letters – T. R.

172 “Orang est un mot malais, signifiant être raisonnable, et qui s’applique à l’homme, à l’orang-outang et à l’éléphant. Outang veut dire sauvage ou des bois” (1836 87).

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A mirage of letters: the animal dis-appears when one gets too close, and letters appear made of animals. The letters become sigils of their animal descent. Specular chase: Edgar

Allan Poe, whose imprimatur for Eureka is EAP, there encrypts his own signature: APE.

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‘Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters.’ ‘Impenetrable veil covering our knowledge of the cetacea.’ ‘A field strewn with thorns.’ ‘All these incomplete indications but serve to torture us naturalists.’

Thus speak of the whale, the great Cuvier, and John Hunter, and Lesson, those lights of zoology and anatomy.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale (1992 145)

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Afterword

CASE IN POINT CUVIER, HAWTHORNE, DARWIN

My desire today revolves around a point [porte sur un point]. This object without objective truth, and yet the most fracturing I can imagine [le plus brisant toutefois que j’imagine], I assimilate it to the smile, to the limpidity of the beloved. No embrace can attain this transparency (it’s precisely what flees at the instant of possession [elle est ce qui précisément se dérobe au moment de la possession]). It is lacerated by desire that I have seen beyond the desired presence of this point whose sweetness is given in despair.

Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche (2004 53, modified translation)

The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod, – or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly, – thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (2006 4)

ON POINT In The Marble Faun, Hawthorne introduces a faun-like creature into the setting of then- present-day Rome. The character of young Donatello is thought by his friends to bear a striking resemblance to sculptor Praxiteles’ marble faun, a sculpture described as imaging a hybrid being, “neither man nor animal” (10). Whether Donatello is or is not a faun is never made explicit. The intrusion of this “doubtful specimen” in what is otherwise a realist setting betrays the epistemological nebulousness that permeates the book. The story ends with a character politely refusing to offer a definitive answer to the question of Donatello’s possible animality. When asked if Donatello’s ears are as pointy as those of the book’s title character, the sculptor Kenyon smiles inscrutably and responds: “I know but may not tell. . .On that point, at all events, there shall be not one word of explanation” (emphasis mine).

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On that “point” – that of Donatello’s ears – Kenyon, and indeed the “Author” himself, remain obstinately tight-lipped, and leave the reader disappointed. It is as if the disclosure of a small anatomical detail that would index Donatello’s animality threatened to puncture the edifice not so much of Hawthorne’s romance but of fiction writ large. At issue here would seem to be the way in which the pursuit of knowledge – a certain type of anatomical knowledge – comes into tension with the work of fiction. In his stubborn refusal to conclude his romance, I’ll suggest that Hawthorne might offer a different kind of path for approaching the question of the animal.

According to the OED, the sayings “making a point” and “coming to a point” originate in 18th century hunting practices. The “point” is the “spot to which a straight run is made,” the shortest distance between the hunter and the hunted. Moreover, hounds that assume a rigid attitude when they sense game (their gaze directing itself toward their prey) have been called pointers. The point further describes the number of antler tips on the hunted animal (in hunting parlance, a “nine point buck” is better than an “eight point buck”). To “make a point” when we talk about the animal, would mean to go directly at it, with no deviations, diversions, or digressions.

Must I get to the point here? That is must I, by way of conclusion, find the most explicit or economic way to approach the animal? Is the shortest distance between oneself and one’s object the most desirable? In this dissertation, I have suggested that animal studies demands a methodological revaluation of its own philosophical foundations,173 given that it has largely borrowed a scientific approach that defines knowledgeable practices in terms of proximity: the closer one is to one’s object, the better the object is thought to

173 Highlighting the importance of hunting in Socrates’ description of the pursuit of logos, John Burnet evokes the venatic origin of the word “method” – literally “‘to go after,’ ‘to follow up,’ especially in pursuit of game” (1963 79).

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be understood (épistémé, the Greek term for knowledge, means to stand [stem] near [epi]).

It is the fundamental entanglement of comprehension and apprehension that I have been interested in here. I have argued that in responding to the imperative to make a point, we as critics have perhaps unwittingly made ourselves proponents of a predatory epistemological model.

In the preface to Targets of Opportunity, Samuel Weber notes that thinking “is often construed on the model of the archer hitting – or missing, voluntarily or not – the mark.

Thinking is hitting the mark, making the point: targeting” (2005 viii, emphasis mine).

Though this tradition has a long history, Weber observes an inflation of the idiom of targeting in recent years (as the use of the phrase “target of opportunity” in academic contexts testifies). This inflation betrays a contemporary tendency that Weber calls the

“militarization of thinking.” He recognizes that targeting is not something that we can entirely do away with for it is construed as the very condition of possibility for knowledge (understood as cognition). Nevertheless, by way of Benjamin and Hölderlin, he gestures in the direction of poetry as an alternative knowledge practice, hoping to move away from the vocabulary and logic of targets and networks toward “a different kind of netting, and ultimately not to a figure in the carpet but rather to a figure of carpets, upon which footsteps leave traces” (x). What he indicates is not a way out of capture but the possibility to navigate the net endlessly, or rather inconclusively. Weber recognizes limits and ends, but these are never present “as a conclusive conclusion or as the bottom line of a balance sheet, but, rather, only as another singular interruption in an ongoing scansion” (133).

In this afterword, I propose to read Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun – his last romance, and a work obsessed by the question of the end – as a meditation on the potentialities of an

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inexhaustible form of pointlessness, a non-targeting poetic knowledge. Hawthorne refuses to fix or fixate the animal but instead beholds it from a compassionate distance, or to say it with Dupin, “with a side-long glance.”

OF SIRENS AND MEN What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.

Sir Thomas Browne, Hydriotaphia (qtd. in Poe, 1996 397)

Thus reads the epigraph of the “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which introduces

Dupin as a modern-day Ulysses and hints at the successful resolution of a seemingly intractable puzzle.174 The reference to the sirens also anticipates the threat raised by the

Ourang-Outang (itself, as we saw, a modern avatar of the Minotaur) to the sanitized and fantasized hermeticism of species difference. Whether depicted as winged creatures or mythical beings with the trunk of a woman and the tail of a fish, sirens are hybrid creatures, part-human, part-animal.175 Their captivating melodies allure sailors onto rocky shores where they perish in shipwrecks or, in some versions, are ultimately eaten alive by the sirens. The challenge raised by Poe’s epigraph thus lies less in hearing their song than surviving their encounter.176 In the Homeric account of the myth, Ulysses must chain himself to the mast of his ship and order his crew to put wax in their ears and ignore his supplications to set him free. Ironically, although Ulysses probably hears the sirens sing –

174 Poe borrowed his epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne’s 1658 Hydriotaphia, a melancholy investigation into funerary rituals initiated by the discovery of a Roman burial site in Norfolk, U.K. It is not by accident that a text dealing with morgues and crypts would refer to a text that, according to Emerson, “smells in every word of the sepulchre” (Journals, Dec. 29 1830). 175 On the normative function of hybrids in Antiquity, see Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. “The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece,” comments Haraway, “established the limits of the centred polls of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary, pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman” (1990 180). 176 The Odyssey is, after all, examining the possibility to return home unchanged, to resume one’s life as if nothing had changed, to be recognized by one’s dog.

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a probability challenged by Kafka in his rewriting of this episode of The Odyssey177 –, his knowledge nonetheless appears as a form of bondage. Self-alienation is the price that

Ulysses must pay to avoid losing himself.

In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the hunter-detective must undergo a certain degree of animalization and lose himself in the labyrinth of the city in order to “scent the traces” of the lost animal. And yet, even animalized, Dupin ultimately proves a relatively safe figure, most concerned with closing the case and restoring order in the city.178 Both

Ulysses and Dupin manage to hear or smell the animal without succumbing to its siren song. Despite these similarities, however, Poe’s story is not a simple reiteration of the myth of Ulysses’ “encounter” with the not-fully-human. Rather, it displays a perfect symmetry in the way the human and the nonhuman “miss” each other – the mirroring of interfacing “non-encounters.” On the one hand, in The Odyssey, Ulysses must chain himself to avoid falling for the sirens’ alluring animality (presuming that sirens are animals). On the other, in Poe’s tale, it is the humanlike animal that ends up being captured.

Unless perhaps it is the captured one that winds up “animalized.” To a certain degree,

Poe’s story anticipates late nineteenth-century criminological speculations inspired by

Darwin’s theory of evolution. Cesare Lombroso’s L’Uomo Delinquente (Criminal Man,

1878), for instance, argued “that most criminal behavior is atavistic, a reversion to evolutionary primitive actions” (Sims, 2003 87). A few years later, Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and the father of eugenics, notoriously used “composite

177 For an analysis of this epigraph in relation to the question of the animal by way of Kafka and Blanchot, see Ravindranathan, “The Changed Meter.” 178 This is a moot point, as these are not, however, Dupin’s principal motivations. He appears much more interested in the confrontation with the prefect than in Le Bon’s innocence or the ape’s guilt.

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photography” to capture the ideal-type of the criminal and devised the method for classifying fingerprints that we still use today.179 Galton took as his point of departure the discovery of the British officer Sir William Herschel who used fingerprinting to manage and control the Bengali population under his supervision. “As Galton observed retrospectively,” notes Carlo Ginzburg, “there was a real need for an efficient method of identification in the British colonies, and not in India alone: natives were illiterate, quarrelsome, cunning, deceitful, and, in the eyes of a European, indistinguishable”

(1992 122).180 Galton later “attempted to distinguish racial peculiarities in the fingertips, but without success; he declared, however, that he would pursue the research on Indian tribes in the hope of discovering there ‘a more monkey-like pattern’” (123). In a fascinating chiasmus, the racialist and racist logics behind the animalization of criminals appear, not merely to prolong, but indeed to supplant the special and specieist logics that undergird the decriminalization of animals. This decriminalization is by no means an exculpation of the animal, let alone a form of liberation. Quite the contrary, there is no longer any need to criminalize the animal because capture became its existential condition (we think here of Nabokov’s ape at the end of Lolita, who has internalized his own guilt and can only draw the bars of his cage).

By inverting the terms of Ulysses’ “captivity narrative” (his tactical self-entrapment in order to resist the Sirens’ captivating melodies), Poe’s story anticipates the shift from the ancient to the modern anthropological machine. In the ancient variant, Agamben argues,

“the non-man is produced by the humanization of an animal: the man-ape, the enfant sauvage or Homo ferus, but also and above all the slave, the barbarian and the foreigner, as figures of an animal in human form.” In other words, the contours of the human are

179 On the influence of Darwin’s theses on Galton, see for instance Neil Davie’s article “Une des défigurations les plus tristes de la civilisation moderne.” 180 See Chandak Sengoopta’s The Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting Was Born in Colonial India.

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drawn by the exertion of nonhuman forces that threaten him from the outside. The modern anthropological machine, on the other hand, “functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human: Homo alalus, or the ape-man” (2003 37). This machine obeys a subtractive process, excavating the figure of the human from out of itself (hence the modern relevance of biopower, defined as the attempt to isolate and control animal life in man). In this variant of the machine, the animal threatens man from the inside. For

Agamben, it is Darwin’s theory of evolution that marks the moment when the shift from the ancient to the modern anthropological machine occurs. It is at this critical juncture that I propose to situate this afterword.

We’ll recall that it is Cuvier’s taxonomic profile of the Ourang-Outang that enables the narrator to comprehend the mystery “at once” and allows the police to close the case of the “Murders.” Once identified as an animal and locked up in the Jardin des Plantes

(Cuvier’s favorite haunt and workplace), the killer no longer constitutes a threat to the human community. Is there a way to avoid this tidy closure? At what cost might the case be left open? These are questions that Nathaniel Hawthorne, nearly two decades after the publication of Poe’s story, poses in his last published romance, The Marble Faun.

Published in 1860, only a few months after Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, it puts pressure on the prevalence of a certain classificatory gaze on the animal at the time.

LUSUS NATURAE To reconstruct a megatherium or a mastodon from a tiny bone was Cuvier’s special gift, but it may also happen that from a piece of mouse’s tail one might reconstruct a sea serpent.

Antonio Gramsci, Letters from Prison (2011 302)

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When readers wrote to express their frustration with the enigmatic treatment of the character of Donatello (and the many gray areas left by The Marble Faun), Hawthorne consented to add an explanatory postscript in the new edition of the book. His postscript only proves more vexing, as the author instead chastises his readers for wanting to know too much. In it, Hawthorne, still further infuriates his readers by writing of the Author in the third person, relinquishing the omniscient voice used for most of the romance:

The idea of the modern Faun loses all the poetry and beauty which the Author fancied in it, and becomes nothing better than a grotesque absurdity, if we bring it into the actual light of day. He had hoped to mystify this anomalous creature between the Real and the Fantastic, in such a manner that the reader’s sympathies might be excited to a certain pleasurable degree, without impelling him to ask how Cuvier would have classified poor Donatello, or to insist upon being told, in so many words, whether he had furry ears or no. As respects all who ask such questions, the book is, to that extent, a failure (463-464, emphasis mine).

How are we to understand this “Author’s” appeal to ignorance? What role does the animal play in this scenario? These questions, I contend, are inextricable: it is no accident that the animal frames emerging debates about knowledge at this particular point in the

19th century. Hawthorne responds to a call for classification by citing “Cuvier,” whose name appears as the signature of the taxonomic worldview that reigned during the early part of the century.

In a 1807 text entitled “Anatomical Research on Reptiles Still Regarded as Doubtful by

Naturalists,” Cuvier examines the case of three aquatic creatures that had until then defied classification. Each of the reptiles possessed both gills and lungs and, because of their large size, it was uncertain whether they were larvae or adult specimens. Up to that moment, the only known amphibian animals had been tadpoles whose gills shriveled and disappeared as their lungs developed. The first reptile Cuvier studied bore the name of

“siren” (sirène), named after the mythical creature for its two front legs and a long tail.

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Sent from the Americas to Linnaeus in 1765, the creature was classified as an amphibian.

In 1785, Camper, a Dutch zoologist, dissected a specimen of the siren owned by the

British Museum of London and, discerning no lungs, classified the creature as a fish. In order to settle the dispute between his predecessors, Cuvier ordered a fresh siren from the New Continent. The autopsy confirmed that the animal possessed both gills and lungs, and that its lateral appendages were legs and not fins. After a minute description of the animal’s bone structure, Cuvier concluded that it was an adult specimen. In order to remove any doubt, the naturalist created a new order, the pérennibranches (a name that indicates that the batrachians’ gills, or branchia, are perennial). This is how Cuvier operates: in order to remove any doubt and classify the unclassifiable, he adds a column to his taxonomic inventory. Thus the siren leaves the mythic waters of the Strait of

Messina to enter the classificatory tables of modern science.

Fig. 1. Sirenis Lacertinae. From Cuvier’s 1807 “Recherche anatomique sur les reptiles regardés encore comme douteux par les naturalistes.”

Cuvier’s classifying fervor breaks with the globalizing perspective of the “pioneers” of

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natural history. In The Open, Giorgio Agamben reminds us that sirens were catalogued alongside with seals and sea lions in Peter Artedi’s 1735 zoological treatise. They were then cautiously added to the second edition of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae (1740), in the section entitled “Animalia Paradoxa.” In The Platypus and the Mermaid, Harriet Ritvo mentions cases of mermaid spotting as late as 1822 in England. Claims to have sighted these fabulous animals were systematically disproved by anatomists (1997 178-186).

Ritvo relates for instance the case of Captain Eades who brought back a specimen of mermaid (or merman) from his journey to the Fiji islands. After inspection, William Clift, the curator of the Hunterian collection at the Royal College of Surgeons, proved that the mermaid was inauthentic, a “fraud, constructed of the cobbled remains of an orangutan, a baboon, and a salmon” (179). After that, mermaids could only find shelter in volumes of “cryptozoology,” a pseudoscience involved in the search for animals whose existence or survival remains unfounded (the Loch Ness monster being the archetypal cryptids).

Cuvier’s classificatory method will be questioned some fifty years later by Darwin’s work, which revives, though without fully endorsing it, Buffon’s continuist and Lamarck’s transformist perspectives. Contrary to Cuvier, Darwin identifies numerous borderline cases where it is difficult to distinguish between species and variety. Foucault explains:

Darwin admits that all the taxonomic definitions which had been proposed for the classification of plants and animals were, up to a certain point [jusqu’à un certain point], abstract categories. For him there was therefore one reality, which was that of the individual, and another, which was the ‘variability’ of the individual – its capacity to vary. All other categories (species, genus, order, etc.) were kinds of constructions built on the basis of the only reality: the individual. In this respect we can say then that Darwin’s position is directly opposed to Cuvier’s (1979 125).

In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin tackles a subject that he had not dared to address a decade earlier in On the Origin of Species: i.e. the applicability of his theory of evolution to humans. In the first pages of the book, Darwin remarks that a significant percentage of

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human ears present a congenital condition that manifests as a protuberance at the junction of the upper and middle thirds (see fig. 2). Commonly known as “Darwin’s point” (or “Darwin’s tubercle”) this condition serves as the point of departure for the scientist’s exploration of atavistic features in humans that indicate common ancestry with other primates. This small mutation was mentioned to Darwin by Thomas Woolner, a

British sculptor whose attention “was first called to the subject whilst at work on his figure of Puck, to which he had given pointed ears” and was “thus led to examine the ears of various monkeys, and subsequently more carefully those of man” (2004 15).

Observes Michael Sims,

It was not difficult to find evidence of this peculiarity among apes and even among the more distantly related monkeys. . .Diligently quoting the objection of a colleague that these results were ‘mere variability,’ Darwin nonetheless maintained his own view that ‘the points are vestiges of the tips of formerly erected and pointed ears (2003 87).

Thus blurring the species lines, Darwin’s theory radically questions the place of the human among other animals. This revolution, however, in no way “stops” the endless labors of anthropogenesis, but, as Agamben suggests, it provokes the inversion of its mechanism. Instead of an exclusive inclusion, it performs an inclusive exclusion. In other words, since the animal can no longer be confined in hermetic taxonomic “cases,” it will be expelled from inside the human. Quite symptomatically, only five years after the publication of The Descent of Man, Darwin’s evolutionary theory was appropriated by

Cesare Lombroso, who observes in L’Uomo Delinquente that ears are exemplary sites for identifying the criminal body. Sims writes that Lombroso played “into the fear of our animal nature exemplified throughout mythology, in which one of the bestial attributes of satyrs is their pointed ears” (2003 87).

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Fig. 2. “Human Ear. Modeled and drawn by Thomas Woolner. a. The projecting point.” Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (2004 32).181

Fig. 3. “Foetus of an Orang. Exact copy of a photograph, showing the form of the ear at this early age.” Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man (2004 33).

In The Gay Science, Nietzsche warned us against the temptation of a teleological interpretation of The Descent of Man, a title that may lead us to believe that evolutionism stages the emergence of humanity as the ultimate chapter in the history of the world

(2003 109-110). This teleologization is precisely what happens in Lombroso’s targeting of the supposedly less evolved, more animal specimens of the human race: he attempts to make the means justify the end. Retrieving the animal in the human, therefore, is not enough to sabotage the anthropological machine.

POINTILLISM – and it really WAS a kitten, after all.

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass (1936 268)

Is it fortuitous, if a sculptor’s attentiveness spotted Darwin’s point, where most anatomists dismissed this point of detail as an accidental mutation? Is it irrelevant, if

181 Darwin specifies that these “points not only project inwards towards the center of the ear, but often a little outwards from its plane, so as to be visible when the ear is viewed from directly in front or behind” (2004 31).

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Darwin appeals to the expertise of an artist to aid him in his enterprise? Privileging a regime of uncertainty and ignorance at the precise historical moment when Darwin inflicts on the human a major narcissistic wound by depriving him of any “proper” position in the great ladder of beings, The Marble Faun challenges the epistemophilia of

Cuvier’s scientific thrall to classification. The romance is the theatre of a conflict between, on the one hand, a logic of positive knowledge and, on the other, a poetics of opacity.

Though The Marble Faun was Hawthorne’s most popular romance, critics have often considered it to be a relative failure. In this, they follow Henry James, for whom the

Italian romance was “of slighter value than its [American] companions” (1997 131) because it lacks their completeness and mastery. For French critic Pierre-Yves Pétillon,

The Marble Faun is “above all a ‘blurry’ novel [un roman flou], in the photographic sense of the term” (1996 65). These criticisms must be nuanced if we envisage that The Marble

Faun’s fragmentariness is not so much the symptom of the writer’s fatigue but rather the sign of an aesthetic choice. The blurring effect generated by the romance, I contend, results from a careful work on the point of view, which Hawthorne leaves deliberately vague.

After toying with the idea of using Donatello as a model for a painting, Miriam gives in:

“If I can catch you on my canvas, it will be a glorious picture; only I am afraid you will dance out of it, by the very truth of the representation, just when I shall have given it the last touch.” Henry James comments on this scene:

[E]very one will remember the figure of the simple, joyous, sensuous young Italian, who is not so much a man as a child, and not so much a child as a charming, innocent animal, and how he is brought to self-knowledge and to a miserable conscious manhood, by the commission of a crime. Donatello is rather vague and impalpable; he says too little in the book, shows himself too little, and falls short, I think, of being a creation (1997 132, emphases mine).

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Ridden with semi-negations, James’ criticism suggests that Donatello’s portrait is vague because the creature is essentially elusive, and therefore literally ungraspable. Just like

Praxiteles’ sculpture, he is “neither man nor animal” (10). The only details that betray the animality of Donatello’s marble counterpart are its pointy ears: “The pointed and furry ears. . .are the sole indications of his wild, forest nature” (10). To verify that their friend shares all of the faun’s characteristics, his friends ask him to move aside his brown curls in order to ascertain to what species he belongs. Donatello asks his companions not to examine him too closely: “‘I entreat you to take the tip of my ears for granted’. . .‘I shall be like a wolf of the Apennines. . .if you touch my ears ever so softly. None of my race could endure it. It has always been a tender point with my forefathers and me’” (12).

The play on the “sensitivity” of the subject of his ears underscores the erotic subtext of the book, made manifest by the allusion to Titania’s unnatural love for Bottom’s furry ears in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (4.1). Without lingering too long on the phallic dimension of Donatello’s pointed ears, we will recall that the term “point” comes from the Latin pungere, to pierce or prick. In response to his shyness, Miriam teases Donatello:

“‘your tender point – your two tender points, if you have them – shall be safe, so far as I am concerned’” (12-13). This rejoinder can be understood, either as a refusal of his attempt to seduce her, or, more generously, as the acceptance of Donatello’s generic

“gender” ambiguity (in the sense that we do not know from what genus his gender emerges). Miriam continues:

“But how strange this likeness is, after all! – and how delightful, if it really includes the pointed ears! Oh, it is impossible of course. . .with a real and common-place young man like Donatello; but you see how this peculiarity defines the position of the Faun, and, while putting him where he cannot exactly assert his brotherhood, still disposes us kindly towards the kindred creature. He is not supernatural, but just on the verge of Nature, and yet within it. What is the nameless charm of this idea, Hilda? You can feel it more delicately than I.” (13, emphases mine)

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The point on which the friends’ understanding of Donatello’s species stumbles is but a detail, but it is precisely details that motivate and authorize anatomical knowledge and species determination. Comparative anatomy is a matter of detailing (from the French tailler, to cut), of cutting (from the Latin, ana-tomia, cutting up), of dissecting and, according to Foucault, of “dividing [bodies] into distinct portions” in order to disclose

“the great resemblances that would otherwise have remained invisible” (2007 293).

The point of detail discussed in this passage figures the extremity from which the body of a being is measurable and thereby apprehensible in its entirety in the sense that the

OED defines the point as a “quality or feature in the appearance of an animal (esp. a horse) by which it may be assessed.” But the point is also the limit of such a systematic endeavor. The point is this unlocalizable locus, this infinitesimal site that proves irreducible to measurement. It is a punctum, a “partial object” that grounds and simultaneously undermines the epistemological stability of the studium. While it determines the limits of a body, the point itself escapes the logic of determination. The play on the pointed ears is thus less innocent that it seems at first sight. Donatello is essentially marginal; he is the limit case: “Not supernatural, but just on the verge of Nature, and yet within it.” At the end of the scene, the point is no longer how one should classify Donatello, but rather what one’s point of view on the matter is. The term point, here, should convey the ambivalence of the French adverb of negation point. Point de vue: the object eludes taxonomic capture and resists the logic of the species (from specere, to look). It is not knowledge per se that is considered problematic in Hawthorne’s romance but a certain kind of positivistic, classificatory episteme that Cuvier epitomizes.

While Cuvier turns the “siren” into a “mere animal,” Hawthorne reenchants animal creatures by reintroducing the element of uncertainty that had been lost. For Cuvier, the

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point of knowledge is the vanishing of uncertainty whereas for Hawthorne, positive knowledge is the vanishing point of fiction. The reader is invited to get lost momentarily, as Kenyon does at the end of the romance, in the chaos of a carnival that looks like the messianic banquet described by Agamben at the end of The Open: “Hereupon, a whole host of absurd figures surrounded [Kenyon], pretending to sympathize in his mishap.

Clowns and particoloured harlequins; orang-outangs; bear-headed, bull-headed, and dog- headed individuals” (446). Ultimately Kenyon and Hilda leave an impure Italy and return to America, while Miriam consents to the monstrous community offered by Donatello.

But things soon go awry. Everything has an end, in The Marble Faun, and the lovers passed the point of no return. Donatello ends up captive in a jail of the Vatican and

Miriam’s ultimate appearance shows her to be mute:

[W]hen the kneeling figure beneath the open Eye of the Pantheon arose, she looked towards [Hilda and Kenyon] and extended her hands with a gesture of benediction. Then they knew that it was Miriam. They suffered her to glide out of the portal, however, without a greeting; for those extended hands, even while they blessed, seemed to repel, as if Miriam stood on the other side of a fathomless abyss, and warned them from its verge (461).

Her intimacy with Donatello has banished her from the community of the humans.

While The Marble Faun opens up the possibility of hybridization, imagining “a being in whom both races meet on friendly ground,” it also, crucially, raises the specter of a dystopic immersion in the unknown. “To-day Donatello was the sylvan Faun; to-day

Miriam was his fit companion, a Nymph of grove or fountain; to-morrow – a remorseful man and woman, linked by a marriage bond of crime – they would set forth towards an inevitable goal” (435, emphasis mine). Miriam falls silent, contaminated by the “mute mystery” that characterizes the animal in whose name it is impossible to speak, if improperly. Does, in the end, Hawthorne’s romance announce Cuvier’s victory? Perhaps.

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If there is one thing that we are taught by the irony of the postscript, however, it is that no end is definitive, and something always returns, “after all.” Pondering Miriam and

Donatello’s guilty miscegenation, Kenyon tells Hilda: “‘you do not know. . .what a mixture of good there may be in things evil; and how the greatest criminal, if you look at his conduct from his own point of view, or from any side point, may seem not so unquestionably guilty, after all. So with Miriam; so with Donatello” (emphasis mine). “And, after all,” the narrator tells us, “the idea may have been no dream, but rather a poet’s reminiscence of a period when man’s affinity with Nature was more strict, and his fellowship with every living more intimate and dear” (10-11, my emphasis). What remains, after all, then, of the story of Donatello that may have been but a dream, after all? Perhaps the undecidable status of the scene itself within the structure of the romance betrays the “Author’s” own ambivalence toward positive knowledge and toward his own humanity, which is secured by the certitude of what the animal is.

The romance points toward a post-historical time, which for Agamben might be the time of reconciliation between man and animal. Rereading Foucault’s famous prophecy at the end of The Order of Things, Agamben sees the disappearance of the human as a happy event, a hybridization to come that would not represent “a new declension of the man- animal relation so much as a figure of the ‘great ignorance’” (2003 92). This ignorance, which signals the suspension of the tireless partitioning of what Agamben calls “the anthropological machine,” demands the formation of a “zone of nonknowledge – or better, of aknowledge” (91), a point beyond or below objective knowledge, to recall

Kenyon’s Cheshire cat smile and The Marble Faun’s last words: “I know, but may not tell.

On that point, at all events, there shall be not one word of explanation.”

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‘Great God! but for one single instant show thyself,’ cried Starbuck; ‘never, never wilt thou capture him, old man – In Jesus’ name no more of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone – all good angels mobbing thee with warnings: – what more wouldst thou have? – Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh, – Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!’

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, the Whale (1992 611)

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