[ PM L A

the changing profession

Human, All Too

Human: “Animal
Studies” and the
Humanities TRYING TO GIVE AN OVERVIEW OF THE BURGEONING AREA KNOWN AS
ANIMAL STUDIES IS, IF YOU’LL PERMIT ME THE EXPRESSION, A BIT LIKE
herding cats.1 My recourse to that analogy is meant to suggest that
cary wolfe “the animal,” when you think about it, is everywhere (including in
the metaphors, similes, proverbs, and narratives we have relied on
for centuries—millennia, even). Teach a course or write an article
on the subject, and well-intentioned suggestions about interesting
material pour in from all quarters. In my field alone, there’s not just,
say, the starring role of bear, deer, and dog at the heart of William
Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and the futility of trying to imagine Er-
nest Hemingway without his fraternity of bulls, lions, and fish or
Marianne Moore without her menagerie of pangolins and jellyfish.
There’s also King Kong, Babe, Charlotte’s Web, Seabiscuit, The Silence
of the Lambs, The Horse Whisperer, and The Fly. There’s the art of
Damien Hirst, Joseph Beuys, Sue Coe, William Wegman, Bill Viola,
Carolee Schneeman, Lynn Randolph, and Patricia Piccinini. And
all those bird poems, from Percy Shelley’s skylark and John Keats’s
nightingale to Edgar Allan Poe’s raven and Wallace Stevens’s black-
bird. As any medievalist or early modern scholar will tell you, the
question of the animal assumes, if anything, even more centrality in
earlier periods; indeed, recent and emerging scholarship suggests a
picture in which the idea of the animal that we have inherited from
the Enlightenment and thinkers such as Descartes and Kant is better
CARY WOLFE is Bruce and Elizabeth
Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice
seen as marking a brief period (if the formative one for our prevail-
University. His books include Animal ing intellectual, political, and juridical institutions) bookended by a
Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of pre- and posthumanism that think the human/animal distinction
Species, and Posthumanist Theory (U of quite otherwise. So there’s also William Hogarth and Hieronymus
Chicago P, 2003), the edited collection Bosch, The Faerie Queene and Beowulf. And, of course, there is the
Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal
central place of the animal in non-Western literature and culture,
(U of Minnesota P, 2003), and the forth-
written and oral, which would require another essay altogether.2
coming volume What Is Posthumanism?
(U of Minnesota P, 2009). He is founding Beyond literature, art, and culture, the Western philosophical
editor of the series Posthumanities at canon and its thinking of the animal/ human difference are being
the University of Minnesota Press. reconfigured and reinterpreted not just on the strength of Conti-

564 [ © 2009 by the moder n language association of america ]

124.2 ] Cary Wolfe 565

nental philosophy but also in certain wings the PBS series Nature. Similarly, it owes its

the changing profession

of the analytic tradition. And there’s plenty existence in no small part to the emergence of
of crossover (mainly from the analytic side) the animal rights movement in the 1970s and
between philosophy and the legal sphere in to that movement’s foundational philosophi-
the burgeoning area of animal rights law, led cal works, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation
by scholars such as Gary Francione and Ste- and, later, Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal
ven M. Wise. (According to the Animal Legal Rights (works that animal studies, signaling
Defense Fund, more than eighty law schools its recent critical turn, has sought to revisit
in the United States offer courses in animal and question).
law.) There’s animal television, and lots of it, To be sure, scattered work on the animal
including the flood of animal-related factoids, was being carried out in various fields in the
portraits, field studies, vignettes, and exposés humanities and social sciences as far back as
that is the Animal Planet channel. And, last the 1980s; one thinks of the historian Harriet
but certainly not least, there’s food, with all Ritvo’s important book The Animal Estate
its ritualistic, sacrificial, psychological, ethi- and its investigation of “breeding” in Victo-
cal, and ecological dimensions, made plain rian culture across lines of class and species,
in immensely popular texts such as Michael James Serpell’s In the Company of Animals,
Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.3 Marc Shell’s analysis of the psychic and sym-
My litany is meant to suggest some of the bolic economy of the pet, the diverse and
challenges involved in writing about animal important work done in and around ecofemi-
studies, not the least of which is a daunting nism by Carol Adams, Andrée Collard, and
interdisciplinarity that is inseparable from its others, and, in literary studies in the United
very genesis (one that makes the interdiscipli- States, texts such as Margot Norris’s Beasts of
narity that obtains between, say, literary stud- the Modern Imagination. And the landmark
ies and history look like a fairly tidy affair by publication of Donna Haraway’s Primate Vi-
comparison). One might think that much of sions opened the 1990s with a remarkable
the material I have mentioned so far could be interdisciplinary synthesis that in effect de-
safely set aside by scholars focused on literary fined a new, resolutely cultural studies era in
and even, more broadly, cultural interpreta- what would come to be called animal studies.
tion, but specialization is no more justifiable Scattered but similarly important discussions
for animal studies at the moment than it was were taking place in the theoretical litera-
for feminist scholarship or queer theory in the ture—Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
heady days of their emergence. Animal studies, musings on “becoming-animal” in A Thou-
as a branch of cultural studies (I will eventu- sand Plateaus (and also, in a different regis-
ally want to question their association), would ter, in their book on Kafka), Jacques Derrida’s
probably not exist, at least not in its current discussion of Heidegger’s thesis on the animal
form, without the work done in field ecology as “poor in world” in Of Spirit: Heidegger and
and cognitive ethology over the past twenty to the Question, Georges Bataille’s Theory of Re-
thirty years (Allen and Bekoff; Bekoff; Grif- ligion, and Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection.
fin; Pepperberg; Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker, But what appears different about the
and Taylor)—work brought vividly before emergence of animal studies in our moment
the popular imagination by films such as the is the gradual opening up of a theoretical
story of Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist, and and critical space of its own. A sure sign of
Jane Goodall’s documentary The People of the the emergence and consolidation of animal
Forest: The Chimps of Gombe and by television studies is the growing number of conferences,
documentaries such as The Animal Mind, in symposia, publication venues, and special
 566 Human, All Too Human: “Animal Studies” and the Humanities [ PM L A
journal issues devoted to the topic in North published important titles by Leonard Law-
the changing profession

America and abroad. There has been a spate of lor, Gary Francione (Animals as Persons),
conferences on the topic, beginning roughly Stanley Cavell and cocontributors, and Mat-
with Millennial Animals, at the University thew Calarco, among others. Equally striking
of Sheffield in 2000, and extending to what is the number of special journal issues over
promises to be the largest academic gather- the past few years, including Animal Beings,
ing on the topic ever, Minding Animals, to a special issue of Parallax edited by Tom Ty-
be held in Australia in 2009. In between have ler; DerridAnimals, for the Oxford Literary
been events at York University; Vanderbilt Review, edited by Neil Badmington; recently
University; the University of Wisconsin, Mil- published special issues of Configurations
waukee; Harvard University; the University of titled Thinking with Animals and edited by
Texas, Austin; and many other institutions; an Richard Nash and Ron Broglio; and not one
ongoing panel stream at the last few confer- but two special issues of Mosaic devoted to
ences (both national and international) of the the topic (The Animal). And there is the new
Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts; online journal Humanimalia (www.depauw
and growing interest at the Association for the .edu/ humanimalia), the robust H-Animal
Study of Literature and Environment. Two of corner of the H-Net humanities online fo-
the earliest book series were Harriet Ritvo’s rum (www.h-net .org/~animal), the Journal
Animals, History, Culture, at Johns Hopkins for Critical Animal Studies, published by the
University Press, and Animal, edited by Jona- Institute for Critical Animal Studies (www
than Burt and handsomely published by Reak- .criticalanimalstudies .org/ JCAS), and Soci-
tion Books, which takes the unique approach ety and Animals, published by the Animals
of devoting each volume to a single animal (so and Society Institute, which operates under
far, entrants include dog, oyster, ant, rat, and the rubric of “human-animal studies” (a label
more than a score of others). Other presses whose stakes I will revisit in a moment). And,
have an ongoing if not dedicated relation to if this reading list isn’t long enough for you,
work in animal studies, such as the University a massive bibliography on animal studies is
of Illinois Press (Animal Studies Group; Baker, available online (Kalof et al.).
Picturing; Fudge, Renaissance Beasts; Linzey), Across the board, it is certainly true, as
the University of Chicago Press (Wolfe, Ani- Erica Fudge (a leading British historian of an-
mal Rites; Kuzniar; Grenier), Routledge (Har- imal studies) has noted of her discipline, that
away, Primate Visions; Tester; Fuss), the State new work on animals such as Nigel Rothfels’s
University of New York Press (Steeves; Scapp moves “away from an earlier form of history
and Seitz; Mitchell, Thompson, and Miles), which focused on human ideas about and at-
and MIT Press (Thompson; Burghardt; Dia- titudes towards animals in which animals
mond, Realistic Spirit; Kac, Signs of Life). were mere blank pages onto which humans
Of particular note is the series Posthu- wrote meaning” and instead “traces the many
manities, at the University of Minnesota ways in which humans construct and are con-
Press (which has published Donna Haraway’s structed by animals in the past” (“History”).
When Species Meet and reprinted Michel Ser- But the larger question—and it is perhaps
res’s The Parasite and plans forthcoming titles marked by the use of the cultural studies tem-
devoted to the topic by younger scholars such plate, associated with ethically and politically
as Nicole Shukin and Tom Tyler). Columbia attuned scholarship, to assimilate animal
University Press, under the leadership of studies—is how the internal disciplinarity of
Wendy Lochner (senior executive editor for history or literary studies or philosophy is un-
religion, philosophy, and animal studies), has settled when the animal is taken seriously not
124.2 ] Cary Wolfe 567

just as another topic or object of study among on a massive scale and the Holocaust of World

the changing profession

many but as one with unique demands. Rather War II. (In reality, the scale is not remotely
than treat the animal as primarily a theme, comparable, since ten billion land animals are
trope, metaphor, analogy, representation, or killed each year in the United States alone for
sociological datum (in which, say, relations food, the vast majority of them—about eighty
of class, or race, or gender get played out and percent—under the deplorable conditions of
negotiated through the symbolic currency of factory farming [Center for Food Safety].)
animality and species difference), scholars in We might have thought that we, as students
animal studies, whatever their home disci- of literature and culture, could safely leave to
plines, now appear to be challenged not only the side the massive amount we have learned
by the discourses and conceptual schemata from fields such as cognitive ethology over
that have shaped our understanding of and the past twenty or thirty years about animals
relations to animals but also by the specific- and their remarkable capacities, but doesn’t
ity of nonhuman animals, their nongeneric our assessment of the meaning and stakes of
nature (which is why, as Derrida puts it, it a novel or a film change, animal studies asks,
is “asinine” to talk about “the Animal” in after (at least some of) the animals treated in
the singular [Animal 31]). And that irreduc- it undergo an ontological shift from things
ibility of the question of the animal is linked to, in some sense, persons—a shift recently
complexly to the problem of animals’ ethical registered with seismic force in the decision
standing as direct or indirect subjects of jus- by the Spanish parliament in June 2008 to ex-
tice4—a problem that invites a critical and not tend fundamental human rights to great apes,
just descriptive practice of disciplinarity to protecting them from painful experimenta-
assess how this newly robust entity called the tion and other forms of exploitation. Indeed,
animal is plumbed, repressed, or braided with as Étienne Balibar, Giorgio Agamben, Marjo-
other forms of identity, other discourses (race, rie Spiegel, and others have pointed out, vio-
gender, class, sexual difference), in works of lence against human others (and particularly
literature and culture. racially marked others) has often operated by
In other words, as the philosopher Cora means of a double movement that animalizes
Diamond puts it, the difference between hu- them for the purposes of domination, oppres-
man and nonhuman animals “may indeed sion, or even genocide—a maneuver that is ef-
start out as a biological difference, but it be- fective because we take for granted the prior
comes something for human thought through assumption that violence against the animal
being taken up and made something of—by is ethically permissible.
generations of human beings, in their prac- As I have argued elsewhere, this suggests
tices, their art, their literature, their religion” two important things about animal studies:
(Realistic Spirit 351). The problem for students first, that it studies both a material entity
of literature and culture is how to avoid the (nonhuman beings) and a discourse of spe-
thoroughgoing ethnocentrism that such a re- cies difference that need not be limited to its
alization invites, how to articulate what a criti- application to nonhumans alone and, second,
cal view of such “makings” might look like—a that taking animal studies seriously thus has
question that becomes all the more pressing nothing to do, strictly speaking, with whether
in the light of the persistent comparison (by or not you like animals. Given what we have
Diamond, by Derrida, by J. M. Coetzee in The learned in recent decades about many non-
Lives of Animals, and by Charles Patterson in human animals—the richness of their mental
an entire book called Eternal Treblinka) of and emotional lives, the complexity of their
our systematic abuse and killing of animals forms of communication and interaction—
 568 Human, All Too Human: “Animal Studies” and the Humanities [ PM L A
many scholars now think that we are forced liberalism (politically) are extended—indeed,
the changing profession

to make the same kind of shift in the ethics of extended in a rather classic sort of way.
reading and interpretation that attended tak- In piggybacking on the cultural studies
ing sexual difference seriously in the 1990s template (if you’ll allow the phrase in this
(in the form of queer theory) or race and context), animal studies too readily takes on
gender seriously in the 1970s and 1980s. In itself some of the problems that have made
such a genealogy, animal studies is only the cultural studies a matter of diminishing re-
latest permutation of a socially and ethically turns for many scholars. Ellen Rooney, for
responsive cultural studies working to stay example, has observed that cultural studies is
abreast of new social movements (in this case, “perhaps even more intractably caught than
the social movement often called “animal literary criticism in the dilemma of defining
rights”), which is itself an academic expres- its own proper form”; it is “a welter of com-
sion of a larger democratic impulse toward peting (and even incompatible) methods, and
greater inclusiveness of every gender, or race, a (quasi-)disciplinary form increasingly dif-
or sexual orientation, or—now—species. ficult to defend, intellectually or politically”
Such a genealogy, appealing as it is, ought (21). Even more pointedly, Tilottama Rajan
to give us pause, however, for at least a cou- has argued that this “dereferentialization”
ple of reasons that have to do with the overly and “inclusive vagueness” has allowed much
rapid adoption of the cultural studies template of cultural studies to be appropriated for the
for animal studies. The rubrics animal studies ideological work of the neoliberal order, in
and human-animal studies are both problem- which capitalist globalization gets repackaged
atic, I think, in the light of the fundamental as pluralism and attention to difference (69).
challenge that animal studies poses to the As “a soft-sell for, and a personalization of, the
disciplinarity of the humanities and cultural social sciences” (74), she writes, the effect if
studies. In my view, the questions that occupy not the aim of cultural studies in the human-
animal studies can be addressed adequately ities “is to simulate the preservation of civil
only if we confront them on two levels: not society after the permutation of the classical
just the level of content, thematics, and the public sphere” into an essentially market and
object of knowledge (the animal studied by consumerist logic of “representation” (69–70).
animal studies) but also the level of theoreti- For my purposes here, the problem, in other
cal and methodological approach (how animal words, is not just the disciplinary incoherence
studies studies the animal). To put it bluntly, or vagueness of current modes of cultural
just because we study nonhuman animals studies; the problem is that that incoherence
does not mean that we are not continuing to or vagueness serves to maintain a certain his-
be humanist—and therefore, by definition, an- torically, ideologically, and intellectually spe-
thropocentric. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of cific form of subjectivity while masking it as
humanism—and more specifically of the kind pluralism—including (in this case) pluralism
of humanism called liberalism—is precisely its extended to nonhuman animals. In this light,
penchant for the sort of “pluralism” that ex- animal studies, if taken seriously, would not
tends the sphere of consideration (intellectual so much extend or refine a certain mode of
or ethical) to previously marginalized groups cultural studies as bring it to an end.5
without in the least destabilizing or throwing This is so because animal studies, if it is
into question the schema of the human who to be something other than a mere themat-
undertakes such pluralization. And in that ics, fundamentally challenges the schema of
event pluralism becomes incorporation, and the knowing subject and its anthropocentric
the projects of humanism (intellectually) and underpinnings sustained and reproduced in
124.2 ] Cary Wolfe 569

the current disciplinary protocols of cultural coalesces around questions of agency and the

the changing profession

studies (not to mention literary studies). (In- social.” McHugh is no doubt right to agree
deed, as Susan McHugh notes in her overview with Fudge that the distinction between “sub-
of literary scholarship on animals, “a system- jectivity” and “agency” is a useful one in this
atic approach to reading animals in literature connection, enabling us to understand (on the
necessarily involves coming to terms with a model of actor network theory, for example)
discipline that in many ways appears orga- how animals and our interactions with them
nized by the studied avoidance of just such have historically shaped our world quite apart
questioning.”) For Rooney and Rajan—many from questions of the intentionality or under-
others could be added to the list—the problem standing of the animals concerned (one might
with cultural studies, at least in its hegemonic say the same about humans, of course). But
modes of practice in North America, is that such an explanation has little to tell us about
despite its apparent oppositional, materialist, the ethical differences that attend our inter-
and multicultural commitments, it ends up actions with inanimate and sentient agents.
reproducing an ideologically familiar mode The literary and philosophical end of animal
of subjectivity based, philosophically and po- studies has been interested in precisely those
litically, on the canons of liberal humanism differences, for a range of obvious reasons,
(whose most familiar expression would be the including the mobilization in literary texts of
extension of the juridical subject of “rights” identification and sympathetic imagination
from the human to the animal sphere).6 The regarding animals and how they experience
full force of animal studies, then, resides in its the world, the intensity of our emotional at-
power to remind us that it is not enough to re- tachments to them, and, in philosophy, the
read and reinterpret—from a safe ontological critical assessment of just those sorts of phe-
distance, as it were—the relation of metaphor nomenological, ethical, and ontological ques-
and species difference, the cross-pollination tions and why they matter.
of speciesist, sexist, and racist discursive But my point here is also different from
structures in literature, and so on. That un- the essentially Gramscian notion of criti-
dertaking is no doubt praiseworthy and long cal consciousness that underpins even very
overdue, but as long as it leaves unquestioned diverse approaches in cultural studies, a no-
the humanist schema of the knowing subject tion voiced, for example, in the assertion that
who undertakes such a reading, then it sus- disciplinary practice “becomes a productive
tains the very humanism and anthropocen- rather than a reproductive environment”
trism that animal studies sets out to question. when, “in the spirit of critical reflection . . .
And this is why, if taken seriously, animal the intersubjectivity of meaning can be ex-
studies ought not to be viewed as simply posed, and educational institutions, the class-
the latest flavor of the month of what James room, the discipline, and the university can be
Chandler calls the “subdisciplinary field,” seen to construct and condition knowledge,”
one of “a whole array of academic fields and so that “literary study, as the study of textu-
practices” that since the 1970s “have come to ality . . . reveals the epistemological struc-
be called studies: gender studies, race studies, tures that organize how we know, how our
and cultural studies, of course, but also film knowledge gets transmitted and accepted”
studies, media studies, jazz studies . . .”—the (Peck 51)—with the animal studies rider just
list is virtually endless (358).7 noted: that animals, on the cultural studies
My point here is rather different from model, are now recognized to be partners (as
McHugh’s observation that animal studies agents) in that enterprise. Such a picture of
is “an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that critical consciousness—commonsensical and
 570 Human, All Too Human: “Animal Studies” and the Humanities [ PM L A
attractive as it may be—actually closes off the question of the animal in terms of the capac-
the changing profession

human from the animal of animal studies ity for thought or language “determines so
and thus reinstates the human/animal divide many others concerning power or capability
in a less visible but more fundamental way, [pouvoirs], and attributes [avoirs]: being able,
while ostensibly gesturing beyond it. And it having the power to give, to die, to bury one’s
is the tacitly assumed schema of subjectiv- dead, to dress, to work, to invent a technique”
ity underwriting such a disciplinary prac- (27). What makes Bentham’s reframing of the
tice (the picture of the human as constituted, problem so powerful is that now “[t]he ques-
for example, by critical introspection and tion is disturbed by a certain passivity. It bears
self-reflection that is, after all, a hallmark of witness, manifesting already, as question, the
humanism) and not just the range of its in- response that testifies to sufferance, a passion,
terests (however putatively progressive, mul- a not-being-able.” “What of the vulnerability
ticultural, or antianthropocentric) that must felt on the basis of this inability?” he contin-
be fully examined. It is a question, as Derrida ues; “what is this non-power at the heart of
has put it, of the nature of the “auto-” of the power? . . . What right should be accorded it?
human as the “autobiographical animal,” of To what extent does it concern us?” It con-
“what calls itself man,” the concept of the hu- cerns us very directly, in fact, for “mortality
man that “man” “recounts to himself” to then resides there, as the most radical means of
enable his recognition of the nonhuman other thinking the finitude that we share with ani-
in a gesture of “benevolence” wholly charac- mals, the mortality that belongs to the very
finitude of life, to the experience of compas-
teristic of liberal humanism (Animal 29–30).
sion” (28). Instead of recognizing the moral
I invoke Derrida here in part because his
standing of animals because of the agency or
late essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am
capabilities they share with us (which has been
(More to Follow)” (and the recently published
the dominant strategy, most obviously in the
book that shares its title) is arguably the sin-
animal rights philosophy of Singer or Regan),
gle most important event in the brief history
Derrida fundamentally questions the struc-
of animal studies. In that essay, the force of
ture of the “auto-” (as autonomy, as agency,
Jeremy Bentham’s famous question about the
as authority over one’s autobiography) of hu-
standing of animals—the question is not, can
manist subjectivity by riveting our attention
they talk? or can they reason? but can they
on the embodied finitude that we share with
suffer?—is that nonhuman animals, a finitude that it has been
the business of humanism largely to disavow.
the word can [pouvoir] changes sense and sign
here once one asks “can they suffer?” The word
(And in this Derrida has been joined by other
wavers henceforth. As soon as such a question important philosophers, such as Agamben,
is posed what counts is not only the idea of a Cavell, and Diamond, to name just three.)
transitivity or activity (being able to speak, to But equally important for the matter at
reason, and so on); the important thing is rather hand (and this point is often overlooked in
what impels it towards self-contradiction, some- Derrida’s later work on “the question of the
thing we will later relate back to autobiography. animal”) is that there are two kinds of fini-
(Animal 27–28; emphasis mine) tude here under which the “man” of the “hu-
manities” labors; and the first type (physical
For Derrida, putting the question in this way vulnerability, embodiment, and eventually
“changes everything” because “from Aris- mortality) is paradoxically made unavailable
totle to Descartes, from Descartes, especially, to us, inappropriable by us, by the very thing
to Heidegger, Levinas and Lacan,” posing the that makes it available and appropriable—a
124.2 ] Cary Wolfe 571

second type of “not being able,” which is the This is not to say that most of the work done

the changing profession

finitude we experience in our subjection to thus far in animal studies is not in the cultural
the radically ahuman technicity and mecha- studies mode (it is); nor is it to say that there
nicity of language (understood in the broad- is not valuable work to be done in the cultural
est sense as a semiotic system through which studies vein in animal studies. It is simply to
creatures “respond” to each other). This fact point out that one would think animal studies
has profound consequences for what we too would be more invested than any other kind
hastily think of as “our” concepts, “our” read- of “studies” in fundamentally rethinking the
ings, “our” histories, which are in an impor- question of what knowledge is, how it is lim-
tant sense not ours at all. Derrida’s work on ited by the overdeterminations and partialities
the animal enables us to address the problem of our “species-being” (to use Marx’s famous
of ethnocentrism raised earlier in Diamond’s phrase [77]); in excavating and examining our
observation about what we have made of our assumptions about who the knowing subject
relations to animals, but without leaving us can be; and in embodying that confrontation
impaled on the other horn of the dilemma— in its own disciplinary practices and protocols
either Gramscian critical consciousness or (so that, for example, the place of literature is
the search for ethical universals, endemic to radically reframed in a larger universe of com-
rights philosophy, that is calculated to meet munication, response, and exchange, which
such ethnocentrism. now includes manifold other species).
Derrida’s point is that, yes, it is true that Equally important for animal studies is
what we think of as personhood, knowledge, that this second type of finitude, Derrida ar-
and so on are inseparable from who “we” are, gues, is shared by humans and nonhumans
from our discourses and disciplines, but at the moment they begin to interact and com-
the same time “we” are not “we”; we are not municate—to “respond,” as he puts it—by
the “auto-” of the “auto-biography” that hu- means of any semiotic system, even the most
manism gives to itself. Rather, “we” are always rudimentary. As Derrida puts it in a famous
radically other, already in- or ahuman in our passage from the interview “Eating Well”:
very being—not just in the evolutionary, bio-
[I]f one defines language in such a way that it
logical, and zoological fact of our physical
is reserved for what we call man, what is there
vulnerability and mortality, which we share, to say? But if one reinscribes language in a net-
as animals, with animals, but also in our sub- work of possibilities that do not merely encom-
jection to and constitution in the materiality pass it but mark it irreducibly from the inside,
and technicity of a language that is always on everything changes. I am thinking in particular
the scene before we are, as a radically ahuman of the mark in general, of the trace, of iterability,
precondition for our subjectivity, for what of différance. These possibilities or necessities,
makes us human. And this means, as Derrida without which there would be no language, are
puts it, that “what calls itself man,” what “we” themselves not only human. . . . And what I am
call “we,” always covers over a more radical proposing here should allow us to take into ac-
count scientific knowledge about the complex-
not being able that makes our conceptual life
ity of “animal languages,” genetic coding, all
possible (Animal 30). It is precisely here, in forms of marking within which so-called hu-
this second aspect of radical finitude, that we man language, as original as it might be, does
can locate the difference between the schema not allow us to “cut” once and for all where we
of the knowing subject relied on by human- would in general like to cut. (116–17)
ism (or Gramscian cultural studies) and the
rethinking of that schema forced on us, I am Here, as I have argued in detail elsewhere,
arguing, by an animal studies taken seriously. animal studies intersects with the larger
 572 Human, All Too Human: “Animal Studies” and the Humanities [ PM L A
problematic of posthumanism, not in the dard charge leveled against the animal rights
the changing profession

sense of some fantasy of transcending human philosophy of Singer and Regan: that it tac-
embodiment (as Katherine Hayles rightly itly extends a model of human subjectivity to
worries in How We Became Posthuman) but animals, who possess our kind of personhood
rather in the sense of returning us precisely in diminished form).8 This is not to repudi-
to the thickness and finitude of human em- ate humanism but merely to articulate how
bodiment and to human evolution as itself a many of its admirable ambitions and values
specific form of animality, one that is unique (kindness and charity toward the weak, the
and different from other forms but no more innocent, and the oppressed, for example) are
different, perhaps, than an orangutan is from undermined by the conceptual frameworks
a starfish. The implications of this fact for the used to make good on them. It is a matter,
first half of the term animal studies are brac- then, of locating the animal of animal studies
ing indeed, because if we pay serious atten- and its challenge to humanist modes of read-
tion to the diversity of animal forms and of ing, interpretation, and critical thought not
ways of being in the world, then we are forced just “out there,” among the birds and beasts,
to conclude, as Matthew Calarco puts it, that but “in here” as well, at the heart of this thing
“the human/animal distinction is, strictly we call human.
speaking, nonsensical. How could a simple
(or even highly refined) binary distinction
approach doing justice to the complex ethical
and ontological matters at stake here?” (143).
On the strength of that weakness, that break- NOTES
down, we are returned to a new sense of the 1. My title refers to Nietzsche, of course, and, more lo-
materiality and particularity not just of the cally, to the important collection Human, All Too Human,
in particular its introduction and first section, entitled
animal and its multitude of forms but also of
“Animal” (Fuss). For reasons that will become clear, the
that animal called the human. term animal studies should be taken throughout as fully
As for the second half of the rubric ani- marked by “scare” quotation marks; similarly, animal
mal studies, I want to emphasize that one can should be understood as shorthand for nonhuman animal,
again for reasons that will become clear in due course.
engage in a humanist or a posthumanist prac-
2. Works on the animal have appeared in all the ar-
tice of a discipline. That point is papered over eas just listed: literary modernism (Norris; Rohman),
by the generic moniker studies, which ob- American literature (Allen; Mason), British Romanti-
scures how the double finitude just discussed cism (Kenyon-Jones), metaphor and poetics (Malamud),
uniquely determines animal studies. Just film and mass culture (Burt; Lippit; Wolfe, Animal Rites
and What; Shukin; Clarke), art and display (Lippit; Baker,
because a historian or literary critic devotes
Picturing and Postmodern Animal; Kac, Signs and Tele-
attention to the topic or theme of nonhuman presence; Thompson; Wolfe, What; Rothfels), early mod-
animals doesn’t mean that a familiar form of ern and medieval culture and theology (Salisbury; Fudge,
humanism isn’t being maintained through Brutal Reasoning, Perceiving, and Renaissance Beasts; Tes-
internal disciplinary practices that rely on a ter; Daston and Mitman; Shannon; Boehrer; Agamben;
Linzey). This list is representative but not exhaustive.
specific schema of the knowing subject and
3. In Continental philosophy, representative dis-
of the kind of knowledge he or she can have. cussions include Lawlor; Calarco; Steeves; Acampora;
So even though your external disciplinarity Wolfe, Animal Rites and “Thinking”; in analytic phi-
is posthumanist in taking seriously the exis- losophy, Mack; DeGrazia; Rachels; Regan; Singer; Cava-
lieri; Steiner; Cavell et al.; Nussbaum; in law, Francione,
tence and ethical stakes of nonhuman beings
Animals as Person and Animals, Property; Wise; on food,
(in that sense, it questions anthropocentrism), Pollan; Marcus; Scapp and Seitz.
your internal disciplinarity may remain hu- 4. For a range of views on this question, see Cavell et
manist to the core. (Indeed, such is the stan- al.; Francione, Animals, Property; Wise.
124.2 ] Cary Wolfe 573

5. I say “a certain mode” here because, as has been duly ———. The Postmodern Animal. London: Reaktion, 2001.

the changing profession

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