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

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Modernism in the Animal Trap? Oxana Timofeeva Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences Criticism Volume 55 | Issue 2 Article 6 2013 Modernism in the Animal Trap? Oxana Timofeeva Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism 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 Subject: 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 autonomy 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 existence 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 being deprived of thought, language, consciousness or subjectivity, 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 natural science are mainly trying to various experiences 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 ethics, 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 experience 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, psychoanalysis, 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 human nature 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 universal 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 dialectic 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 beings 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 abjection 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 humanism will 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).
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