Displacements of Sacrifice and the Turn to Insect Life A

THE TEEMING AND THE RARE: DISPLACEMENTS OF SACRIFICE AND THE TURN TO INSECT LIFE A dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Adeline Patten Rother August 2012 © 2012 Adeline Patten Rother THE TEEMING AND THE RARE: DISPLACEMENTS OF SACRIFICE AND THE TURN TO INSECT LIFE Adeline Patten Rother, Ph.D. Cornell University, 2012 iii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION This is a dissertation on how the differences between human beings and animals have been represented through frameworks of sacrifice and sexuality. Through readings of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Jacques Derrida’s “Rams,” my first chapter explores the inadequacy of “sacrifice” as a violent action that may be problematically legitimating. This concept of sacrifice is placed in tension with a different vision, that of an “ethics of response,” which, far from negating sacrifice, sustains it as a figuration of the necessity and destructive potential of the encounter with the other. I next trace a movement away from rapports of domination with animals in a “turn” to insect life. Although insects have been objects of a phobic orientation, I show that a non-phobic insect emerges in nineteenth and early-twentieth century works by Jules Michelet, Maurice Maeterlinck, Jean-Henri Fabre, André Gide, and Eugène Marais. Viewed as a thing of intricate beauty, the insect becomes the paradigm of our dissemination into a fabric of infinitesimal differences. Derrida returns to these currents in his writings on sexual difference with their unexpected entomological metaphors. The cuts of the “in-sect” contest the fascination with redemptive violence, including sacrifice, in works by Michelet or Derrida. My third chapter explores a “zoö-curious gender discourse” that produces two imaginary shifts. On one hand, a recognition that differences, including sexual differences, cannot be regarded as the property of humans alone, as has been assumed by critics who valorize human differences while relegating animality to a zone of iv repetition without change. Secondly, the eroticized insect imaginary I describe reorganizes binary sexual difference into an operation that produces differences, including the multiple forms of homosexuality opened up in Gide’s Corydon. Finally, I argue that theoretical concepts of Difference depend upon a notion of “the same,” for example, in theories that link humankind to an inexorable differentiation while failing to explore evidence of authentic differences among animals. I study the ivory-billed woodpecker, an extinct bird whose tragic rarity has elicited the exuberance and the contradictions that, I believe, characterize our investment in exaggerated Differences and in the sacrifices that give them flight. v BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH A native of North Central Florida, fascinated from the beginning by the area’s dense tableau of plants and animals, Adeline Rother began a new life in the habitats of Oregon at eleven years of age. Troubled by human relations, preferring to stare out the window, Adeline came late to academic interests but became enamored with French before she went to college. At Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, she majored in French Studies and Religious Studies (writing a thesis on logics of sacrifice in the writings of Paul the Apostle), and went on to Cornell, Paris-VIII, and the École normale supérieure de Lyon, where her zoö-curious dissertation finally took shape, attempting (not unlike a biography of the author) to reflect upon human stories and subjectivities through relationships with nature and the animal. vi To Alice, born in this project’s final push. vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In gratitude to the members of my academic committee, Anne E. Berger, Dominick LaCapra, Tracy McNulty, and Jonathan Culler. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Sacrifice, Sexuality, and The Imagination of Animal Difference . .1 CHAPTER 1 Say the Ram Survived: Altering the Binding of Isaac in Jacques Derrida’s “Rams” and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace . 17 CHAPTER 2 The Matter of Difference: Michelet's Literary Entomology and the Poetics of The Cut . .53 CHAPTER 3 Becoming Zoö-Curious: Reading Sexual Differences in the Field of Animal Life . 111 CHAPTER 4 Enchanted Endangerment: Sacrificial Affects in The Case of The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker . .159 CONCLUSION Lines of Force and Fascination: Tracing Sacrifice’s Imaginary Power . .192 ix INTRODUCTION Sacrifice, Sexuality, and The Imagination of Animal Difference This is a dissertation about differences and about the ways in which they tend to take on meaning, texture, significance and form. Beginning with a curiosity for the concept of “the cut,” this work progresses through readings in French-language literature and literary theory; through a Derridian thinking of “sexual difference” as a logic of rupture and reparation; and through a textual memory of Biblical narrative and law—from the carefully grafted patriarchal branches, to the repeated evocations of animal sacrifice, to the many forms of real and metaphorical cutting that are carried out in the name of human wholeness and belonging. Such highly charged and performative forms of cutting are of the kind that concern me the most—that provoke my curiosity as to how they work, and my doubt as to whether they work at all. Certain “cuts,” I argue, produce their intended effect in addition to their opposite. To separate radically, to divide decisively—isn’t this ultimately a means to bring about forms of inclusion, connection, protection, and integrality? Like the Greek pharmakon, the poison that brings out the cure, “the cut” in its most divisive forms can generate a bind, as when a scapegoat, “cut off” from a community, helps create alliances between the people inside. I want to argue in this dissertation that even our most subtle figurations of difference (in critical theory and in the ethics of admitting nuance and gradation), can give rise to, and depend upon, a decisive, “sacrificing” form of the cut. As we attempt to represent or to recognize what Jacques Derrida refers to as “differences in the plural,” we depend often upon the 1 possibility—or even the threat—of sameness and exaggerated separation, the very fantasies or fantasms that différance, as a movement of spacing that is always also signatory and entangling, is supposed to work against and interrupt. A question that spurs this dissertation is the question of who. Who gets to inhabit the field of infinite, non-binary differences? Do animals reside there in the same way that humans do, or in some alternative if authentic way? Is the question of differences the key to nuancing our misleading, inherited representations of “the animal”? Philosophical and theological discourses that think of human beings as somehow absolutely different (marked by a “constitutive Lack” or a “Fall from grace”) uphold a field of “Difference proper” from which animals are by definition excluded. Whereas the human is defined in connection with a break from Nature, an unforeseeable future, an inherent alienation from self, with laws that cannot be met and desires that can never be fulfilled, “the animal” is presented in terms of sameness: sameness between a species and the members of it, symmetry between an animal’s instincts and its capacity for fulfilling them, and even an “essential” sameness across the animal kingdom, so that a single animal (from the ape of Heidegger, to the snake of Lévinas, to the tick of Agamben) can be said to represent them all. This dissertation demonstrates that notions of human Difference or “Lack,” while claiming a sort of incompleteness or insufficiency in the human being, cooperate with a desire for integrity and sameness in that they expel a certain animality from the criteria of what can be considered human. In response to this complex of ideas, this dissertation searches for ways to liberate the Lack from the task (or the sacrifice) of creating the 2 human over against an inadequate vision of “the animal.” It does so by tracing, in works of literature, philosophy and natural history, the workings of an irreducible difference within the realms of animality. However, I argue that noting or exploring the differences within animality and within our ideas of animality is not sufficient for truly and newly formulating a relationship between humans and animals or between the “us” and “them” at large. The value of Difference (with a capital d) must be examined even in its most subtle and apparently generous enunciations. This is what I attempt to do by examining a nineteenth-century moment where a genre of French- language natural history gives shape to a fabric of microscopic differences that enmesh and disseminate the human being. Even in the articulation of this web we find sacrifices that relegate the other (often a feminized other) to the order of “the same.” The mesh of infinite Difference can not only accommodate these othering or victimizing “cuts,” but may indeed take flight from the violence of their sacrificial operation. In my search for the hidden discriminations achieved by logics of Lack and world-visions of coupure, I’ve chosen to pursue the objects of my second obsessive curiosity, les animots. Animal-words, animals in words, animals seemingly without words that we speak so much about: these are the inexhaustible referents of Jacques Derrida’s “neographism,” l’animot (CITE). (Singular in its letter, the term is phonically plural, rhyming with les animaux.) I want to study mots (words) and systems of differentiation by peering into teeming throngs of animals—in literature, in culture, and in the enigmatic scriptures that continue to inflect them both. I also want to interrogate “the Animal,” this construction of Enlightenment philosophy, which, 3 like so many heightened instances of “the cut,” upholds a form of differentiation (human versus animal) to create coherences on either side of the divide.

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