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Volume 55 | Issue 2 Article 6

2013 in the Animal Trap? Oxana Timofeeva Institute of of Russian Academy of Sciences

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Recommended Citation Timofeeva, Oxana (2013) "Modernism in the Animal Trap?," Criticism: Vol. 55: Iss. 2, Article 6. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol55/iss2/6 Modernism in It’s interesting to observe how ani- mal studies, or, to be more precise, the Animal critical animal studies, occupies a Trap? more and more significant place Oxana Timofeeva among what is broadly called human sciences. This is a part of a Stalking the : Modernism massive twentieth-century tectonic and the Animal by Carrie Rohman. shift, where the very core of human New York: Columbia University sciences, i.e., the human itself, meets Press, 2009. Pp 208. $90.00 cloth, its limit. The human subject bids $29.50 paper. farewell to its dream of and attempts to define itself from without, through various figures of the nonhuman, the latter thought of in terms of radical alterity. This move tries to embrace the unstable domain beyond the border of hu- manity and, among nonhuman others, the animal is the most insis- tent and striking. The animal ac- companied humanity, as its mirror twin, from its very birth in Paleo- lithic caves, and the animal is still here, still promising to reveal some- thing that humans cannot grasp about themselves. Long after the Cartesian for- mula, linking the subject and the thought, the philosophy of animal- ity turns to the question of how to think about this mode of that supposedly does not think it- self. As opposed to the classical philosophical tradition character- ized by an almost general disre- gard towards animals as a deprived of thought, language, or , con- temporary thinkers working at the crossroads of animal studies, critical philosophy, and human and

Criticism Spring 2013, Vol. 55, No. 2, pp. 331–337. ISSN 0011-1589. 331 © 2013 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309 332 OXANA timofeeva are mainly trying to various of sexuality, think about animality as another violence, poetry, etc. kind of subjectivity either by prag- Rohman emphasizes that her matically locating this question work is mostly inspired by Gary in the domain of , politics, Wolf’s philozoophy, but work by Ju- and science or along the lines of a dith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Gilles De- theoretical and critical deconstruc- leuze, George Bataille, and Jacques tion of classical philosophy and the Derrida—authors who deal with metaphysical tradition. The animal the human rather than with the an- turn in human sciences, most gen- imal, properly speaking—are other erally inspired, perhaps, by Peter primary references. If Gary Wolf Singer’s practical ethics and ani- is searching for a “proper” nonhu- mal liberation movement, but also man animal, Rohman addresses in- by the theoretical interventions of stead the of the human Deleuze and European post-Hei- animal, exploring the thresholds deggerianism, shapes a peculiar and the borders, the places whereof crossing point between philosophy, the human and animal encounter politics, , literature, each other within the world of the and other arts. human rather than in the realm of Carrie Rohman’s Stalking the the supposed animality per se. The Subject is a good example of inter- question here, then, is not about disciplinary academic research in what constitutes the animal, but this field. It applies posthumanist how the animal makes humans theory to literary studies—namely, think about themselves. Literature to studies in British modernist liter- is taken as a place of such encoun- ature. Rohman thus does not speak ters because as the world of words, about modernism in general, or the the domain of an extremely culti- subject in general, or the animal in vated language, it tends to meet its general; her work consists of criti- opposite, the nonspeaking animal, cal analysis of works by T. S. Eliot, as its very ontological limit. Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Modernist literature gives es- H. G. Wells, and Djuna Barnes that pecially wide room for rethinking focus on the figure of the animal or subjectivity through its relation animality. Such a clear framework, to the animal. As compared to a however, allows the author to make classical canon, in which animals rather deep observations about so- generally serve as representations called as it is repre- of human merits and defeats, mod- sented in this specific historical and ernism takes animals seriously. cultural context, and to interrogate Doing so creates another form of the most questions about cultural sensibility and new modes the limits of humanity as tested by of expression, different from those on stalking the subject 333 found in classical humanist univer- The discourse of species in sality. Modernism establishes a kind modernism is specifically of imaginary space, inhabited by framed by this and crossed by transitional, mon- between Darwinism and strous figures, in which human be- Freudianism, which further ings hardly recognize themselves. explains the centrality of the These are figures of the retreat of human/animal dichotomy the human, of the failure of the in literature of the period. humanist project, or the end of the Indeed, the development of anthropic perspective. Modernist psychoanalysis in the early desire is constituted around the sys- twentieth century should tem of distorting mirrors in which be contextualized as a logi- faces are altered. From such mir- cal response to the humanist rors, various nonhuman “others” crisis set in motion by evolu- are staring back at “us,” incessantly tionary theory. (22) bothering, troubling, and bringing into question our properties and Starting from this point, human- identities. kind step by step loses its privilege Together with the other major over the rest of the animal king- representative of the nonhuman, dom and has to recognize that it the machine, the animal is the main bears in itself all the indelible traces object (or subject?) of modern- of its animal past. ist fears and phobias (like all those As Rohman emphasizes, Dar- famous animal phobias in Freud), win revealed that human but also the main subject of desires, were not God’s creatures, onto- hopes, and expectations. Thus, the logically different from all other (chrono)logical order of Rohman’s species, but just a certain—albeit a narration about modernist subjec- highest—level of a general evolu- tivity, always obsessed or haunted tionary chain. Freud, for his part, by the ghost of animality, develops showed that “traces of human- in an explicit move from phobia to ity’s own origins were still em- desire, from to fascina- bedded in the individual’s mental tion, from rejection to dissolution. and physical structures” (6). In Rohman’s own understanding both cases, man turns out to be of modernism, first of all, refers “the animal among others” (and back to the discoveries of Freud this is the title of the chapter in and Darwin. She identifies a cru- which Rohman defines her theo- cial point in the history of culture retical and methodological appara- when the arrogance of Western hu- tuses). Traditional manist subject faces the fact of its try to save face when confronted animal ancestry: with these discoveries, to keep the 334 OXANA timofeeva privilege of men, and if in Darwin because this border exists and pro- there is still a certain species hier- duces itself, so that the domain of archy, which gives a rule for social the human shapes itself through the Darwinians to esteem one race or function of exclusion. According another according to its higher or to Rohman, “displacing animality lower degree of “humanity” or onto marginalized groups, whether “animality,” then in Freud there is they be Jews, blacks, women, or the an obligation to transcend animal poor, is a common feature of mod- nature in the course of individual ernist literature” (29). Thus, T. S. human development. However, Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Night- these two paradigmatic shifts—the ingales” (1920) inscribes animality one of the evolution of species and into a framework of the “lowness” the other of the unconscious—al- of human impulses, and the racial ready trigger a double anxiety pro- other, in particular the Jew, and the duced by the idea of the existence of sexual other, the woman, clearly the animal other either as a neighbor rise behind the poet’s species imagi- from the outside, with whom we nary. Sweeney as a figure of confu- nevertheless share a single species sion can never fully erase his own universe, or as a very nonhuman in- unclean animal nature and thus side of the human subject itself. generalizes the poet’s heteropho- Chapter 2, “Imperialism and bia and misogyny. Conrad’s Heart Disavowal,” starts with a critique of of Darkness (1899), in turn, draws a the limits of a postcolonial approach, figure of “Africanized animality”: which “has privileged the catego- men’s animal nature “is textually ries or race and gender in an effort embodied by Africa and Africans” to rearticulate our understanding (46), and the process of civiliza- of modernism’s imperialists bina- tion echoes the process of evolu- ries” but “has failed to examine the tion as a means of “transcending” fact that these discourses sought this “dark” nature. Finally, “D. H. justification through the discourse Lawrence must also be numbered of species” (29). Rohman empha- among the modernist writers who sizes this underestimation of the deploy the discourses of species and species question in gender and of races to explore the contours of queer studies, as well, reminding the human” (52). Lawrence’s at- us again and again that repres- titude is clearly idealistic and nos- sions and oppressions within the talgic “for the preindustrial and human world actually derive from precivilized man” (53) when, for our primal repression and rejec- example, in his The Plumed Ser- tion of animality. Certain humans pent (1926) the writer pictures the sometimes find themselves beyond ambiguity of the relationships be- the border of humanity precisely tween Americans and Mexicans. on stalking the subject 335

All three cases demonstrate both animal nature. His poem “Fish” an insistence on animal ancestry as (1923) is especially remarkable on a background of the so-called civi- this point, since here the fish serves lized society and the racial drama as an example of a being living in already paradoxically inscribed in a its own element or environment. kind of posthuman perspective. Silent fish in water appear as the If the texts analyzed in chapter very image of immanence, of ani- 2 generally “project animality away mal’s conformity to its natural es- from the Western subject,” then sence: in this analysis, Rohman the characters depicted in chapter refers to Heidegger’s and Bataille’s 3, “Facing the Animal,” reveal “the speculations on the immanence of inevitable return of animality for animal nature, best of all symbol- the European” (64). The most strik- ized and expressed by “fishness.” In ing example here is H. G. Wells’s his poetic fascination, Lawrence is The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), trapped by this kind of metaphysi- which exposes “the repression in- cal projection. The radical alter- herent in an Enlightenment project ity of the fish, as celebrated by the of transcendence that attempted to author, reflects a sort of passeist deanimalize the human subject” utopia, which, being pushed to the (64). This text, Rohman claims, extreme, in Lawrence’s poem ends “bears witness to the inherent vio- up suggesting both the vitalist con- lence of the humanizing process ception of the unknowable and ir- which creates ’s split reducible animal world, as well as subject” (72). The voice of the ani- the Christian symbolism of the fish. mal (the puma’s scream at the hor- Since Lawrence “is perhaps the rifying Moreau’s factory), which British modernist most engaged suffers enormously in order to be with the species problem through- transformed into a rational being, out his work,” which “signals a expresses this rupture, dramatically deepening disgust with humanism inscribed into human culture as its in its rational mode” (100), chap- constitutive moment of pain. In his ter 4, “Recuperating the Animal,” later novella, The Croquet Player concentrates on his novels Women (1937), Wells “narrativizes the dia- in Love (1920) and St. Mawr (1925). lectic between evolution and psy- According to Rohman, “[T]he ani- choanalysis” (64); animal ancestry mal possesses the kind of being that appears as a kind of ghost from the Lawrence wants to recuperate in past, the basis of an indi- humans, a being that rejects mech- vidual’s deep neurotic structure. anistic forms of self-consciousness The last part of this chapter and embraces radical mystery” returns to Lawrence’s idealistic (101). She emphasizes the ideologi- appeals to the infinite wisdom of cal gesture of privileging 336 OXANA timofeeva over , characteristic of refining the human, by means of a both Lawrence and Heidegger, but sexual transgression. draws our attention to the fact that It seems that if for classical liter- whereas in Heidegger the animal is ature and literary studies an animal “poor in world,” in Lawrence’s nos- stands as a metaphor for a human, talgic antihumanism animals rather then in Carrie Rohman’s book it enjoy a more pure mode of being, stands for a metaphor for a non- “unspoiled by cultural reification human, but a nonhuman always and intellectual posturing” (111), already related to a certain kind of which can reveal itself, in par- human. A human and a nonhuman ticular, through human sexuality. here are produced by each other, Consequently, Rohman’s final and Rohman’s book interprets dif- chapter, “Revising the Human,” ferent kinds of human subjectivity represents an attempt to pave the as produced by and rising from the way to a literary becoming-ani- metaphorical encounter with the mal through sexual peripeties in animal. Similarly to the protago- Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). nist of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, Its main character, Robin Vote, who cannot find her way among “figures nonidentity as a form of repressive human identities, albeit subjectivity . . . where the nonlin- woman or lesbian, since they are guistic, the undecidable, and the all insufficient in comparison to her animal serve to revise what counts radical gesture of becoming-ani- as human” (133). Yet, this version mal, the author theoretically goes of utopia is organized around the further than postcolonial, gender, spoilt ­upper-class subject’s desire and other identity studies, by trying to return to nature (embodied in to examine the very limits of these the rather idealistic figure of Robin identities posed by animality. But is as a wild woman, who, with her this ultimate shift to animality ever “openness towards alterity,” fi- really possible? It seems that the nally escapes the human realm), at stake demonstrate, the modernist desire to transgress in various ways, the impossibility the limits of human with all the either of an ultimate detachment restrictions of its language, society, from what is called “the animal etc., the utopia of a nonrepressed nature” or of an ultimate attach- sexuality as an ultimate liberating ment to it, marked by the desire to practice. However, sexuality is mis- become-animal. Perhaps literature leading. It will never bring us to the itself, and modernist literature in animal; even in imitating animality particular, are the symptom of this it goes in the opposite direction— very impossibility. The question not towards a final “revising” of that should be raised here is how to the human, but towards further escape the new opposition between on stalking the subject 337 the “bad” human and the “good” generalized animal other of moder- animal, which would be a reversal nity is like a good psychoanalyst: it of the classical binary based on the causes the human to speak out his affirmation of exclusively human or her fears and radical doubts, to merits (thought, awareness of confess, to verbalize various “sins” death, language, etc.)? How to the human is made of. escape the trap of the vitalist be- lief—deeply inscribed in modern- Oxana Timofeeva is a Senior Research Fel- ist culture itself—in a form of life low at the Institute of Philosophy of Russian as a “natural” or bodily force of resis- Academy of Sciences and is the editor of tance against repressive human in- the “Theory” rubric at the New Literary Observer magazine (Moscow). She is part of stitutions without thinking through the working group “Chto Delat?” (“What is the complex ambiguity of the rela- to be done?”). She is the author of the books tions of the two? But even if this History of Animas: An Essay on Negativ­ trap is unavoidable, the injection ity, Immanence and Freedom (Jan van Eyck Academy, 2012) and Introduction to of animality into critical discourse the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille remains extremely useful. The (New Literary Observer, 2009).