"The Blindness of the Seeing Eye": Testing Anthropocentrism

In the main, social and scientific inquiry presume the specificity of human identity and both rest upon anthropocentrism as their unacknowledged and uninterrogated premise. Yet research from multiple fields increasingly raises significant questions regarding the presumption of human exceptionalism. Despite this scholarship, there remains a steadfast belief in, and commitment to, the integrity and unique capacity of human species being. There is a paradox at play here: the presence of, and even engagement with, compelling evidence which undermines the truth of human identity in fundamental ways, alongside a collective faith in this truth that proceeds relatively unshaken. The purpose of this thesis is to make inroads into this paradox and to reorient human identity as more of a question than a fact. In this task, the thesis plaits together sociology, psychoanalytic theory, feminist thought and Derridean deconstruction to explore this commitment to anthropocentrism as it spans a variety of thinkers, fields and empirical sites. The thesis opens with an exploration of how evidence of microbiological cognition is censored and foreclosed within scientific discourse, utilising Émile Durkheim’s work to underscore how this question of mind contains within it the question of species difference. Extrapolating upon this same muted worry regarding animal mind, the following chapter examines the textual unconscious of Jacques Lacan’s scholarship, illustrating how thinkers undermine the humanism of their own arguments in myriad and curious ways. Continuing this demonstration of how theorists struggle in their aim to define and moor human identity, an exploration of the scholarship of Roger Caillois provokes a radical revision of the logic of anthropomorphism, illuminating how it is absolutely constitutive of anthropocentrism. Elucidating the conceptual reliance of the human/animal divide on Cartesianism through a close reading of Sigmund Freud, the fourth chapter makes clear how this inheritance serves anthropocentric aims in its foundational assumption that matter is not itself mindful. Utilising the philosophical insights of Jacques Derrida, the final chapter considers the ways in which, in the ostensible gesture of affirming animal subjectivity, Animal Studies thinkers effectively sacrifice its possibility to the very humanism they claim to contest

Testing Anthropocentrism: Lacan and the Animal Imago

In an effort to complicate the human subject, this article considers the critical insights of psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan, focusing in particular on his essay, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I As Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949). ‘The Mirror Stage’ explains how we break from nature, differentiate ourselves from the animal and graduate from primordial subsistence as psychically folded into the first lightning strike of recognition that arrives with/as self-reflection. Curiously however, in sustaining his argument about the human specificity of the mirror stage phenomenon, Lacan relies upon ethological research on nonhuman self-recognition. This reliance of his argument on the figure of the animal has largely been interpreted in two ways: as an inconsequential detail, undeserving of theoretical exploration, or, as confirmation of Lacan’s self-evident anthropocentrism. For instance, Buse (2017) and Ziser (2007) have noted the significant discrepancies within ‘The Mirror Stage’ between Lacan’s understanding of primate self-recognition, and that of his main source, Wolfgang Köhler. Although, both thinkers hold the position that Lacan’s treatment of the animal in ‘The Mirror Stage’ provides sufficient textual evidence for a reading that endorses human exceptionalism. Departing from this prior research, I focus on these same textual irregularities within ‘The Mirror Stage,’ yet see something quite different taking place in these moments. In order to preserve the complexity of Lacanian material, in a detailed examination utilising close reading, I pick apart long passages of both Lacan and his sources and conclude that Lacan’s position on the animal is both ambivalent and ambiguous in character. This culminates in a lack of clarity regarding how to understand Lacan’s position on both the animal, and correlatively the human. In turn, acknowledging this uncertainty provides a novel way to approach this seminal text, and a justification to revise accusations of anthropocentrism, alongside dominant interpretations more broadly