Stalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal by Carrie Rohman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp 208. $90.00 cloth, $29.50 paper

Timofeeva, Oxana

Oxana Timofeeva

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Criticism

Modernism in the Animal Trap?

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CriticismVolume 55 | Issue 2 Article 62013Modernism in the Animal Trap?Oxana TimofeevaInstitute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of SciencesFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticismRecommended CitationTimofeeva, Oxana (2013) "Modernism in the Animal Trap?," Criticism: Vol. 55: Iss. 2, Article 6.Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol55/iss2/6 331Criticism Spring 2013, Vol. 55, No. 2, pp. 331–337. ISSN 0011-1589.© 2013 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309MODERNISM IN THE ANIMAL TRAP?Oxana TimofeevaStalking the Subject: Modernism and the Animal by Carrie Rohman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp 208. $90.00 cloth, $29.50 paper.It’s interesting to observe how ani-mal studies, or, to be more precise, critical animal studies, occupies a more and more significant place among what is broadly called human sciences. This is a part of a massive twentieth-century tectonic shift, where the very core of human sciences, i.e., the human itself, meets its limit. The human subject bids 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 332 OXANA TIMOFEEVAnatural science are mainly trying to think about animality as another kind of subjectivity either by prag-matically locating this question in the domain of ethics, politics, and science or along the lines of a theoretical and critical deconstruc-tion of classical philosophy and the metaphysical tradition. The animal turn in human sciences, most gen-erally inspired, perhaps, by Peter Singer’s practical ethics and ani-mal liberation movement, but also by the theoretical interventions of Deleuze and European post-Hei-deggerianism, shapes a peculiar crossing point between philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, literature, and other arts.Carrie Rohman’s Stalking the Subject is a good example of inter-disciplinary academic research in this field. It applies posthumanist theory to literary studies—namely, to studies in British modernist liter-ature. Rohman thus does not speak about modernism in general, or the subject in general, or the animal in general; her work consists of criti-cal analysis of works by T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, H. G. Wells, and Djuna Barnes that focus on the figure of the animal or animality. Such a clear framework, however, allows the author to make rather deep observations about so-called human nature as it is repre-sented in this specific historical and cultural context, and to interrogate the most universal questions about the limits of humanity as tested by various experiences of sexuality, violence, poetry, etc.Rohman emphasizes that her work is mostly inspired by Gary Wolf’s philozoophy, but work by Ju-dith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Gilles De-leuze, George Bataille, and Jacques Derrida—authors who deal with the human rather than with the an-imal, properly speaking—are other primary references. If Gary Wolf is searching for a “proper” nonhu-man animal, Rohman addresses in-stead the experience of the human animal, exploring the thresholds and the borders, the places whereof the human and animal encounter each other within the world of the human rather than in the realm of the supposed animality per se. The question here, then, is not about what constitutes the animal, but how the animal makes humans think about themselves. Literature is taken as a place of such encoun-ters because as the world of words, the domain of an extremely culti-vated language, it tends to meet its opposite, the nonspeaking animal, as its very ontological limit.Modernist literature gives es-pecially wide room for rethinking subjectivity through its relation to the animal. As compared to a classical canon, in which animals generally serve as representations of human merits and defeats, mod-ernism takes animals seriously. Doing so creates another form of cultural sensibility and new modes of expression, different from those  ON STALKING THE SUBJECT 333found in classical humanist univer-sality. Modernism establishes a kind of imaginary space, inhabited by and crossed by transitional, mon-strous figures, in which human be-ings hardly recognize themselves. These are figures of the retreat of the human, of the failure of the humanist project, or the end of the anthropic perspective. Modernist desire is constituted around the sys-tem of distorting mirrors in which faces are altered. From such mir-rors, various nonhuman “others” are staring back at “us,” incessantly bothering, troubling, and bringing into question our properties and identities.Together with the other major representative of the nonhuman, the machine, the animal is the main object (or subject?) of modern-ist fears and phobias (like all those famous animal phobias in Freud), but also the main subject of desires, hopes, and expectations. Thus, the (chrono)logical order of Rohman’s narration about modernist subjec-tivity, always obsessed or haunted by the ghost of animality, develops in an explicit move from phobia to desire, from abjection to fascina-tion, from rejection to dissolution.Rohman’s own understanding of modernism, first of all, refers back to the discoveries of Freud and Darwin. She identifies a cru-cial point in the history of culture when the arrogance of Western hu-manist subject faces the fact of its animal ancestry:The discourse of species in modernism is specifically framed by this dialectic between Darwinism and Freudianism, which further explains the centrality of the human/animal dichotomy in literature of the period. Indeed, the development of psychoanalysis in the early twentieth century should be contextualized as a logi-cal response to the humanist crisis set in motion by evolu-tionary theory. (22)Starting from this point, human-kind step by step loses its privilege over the rest of the animal king-dom and has to recognize that it bears in itself all the indelible traces of its animal past.As Rohman emphasizes, Dar-win revealed that human beings were not God’s creatures, onto-logically different from all other species, but just a certain—albeit a highest—level of a general evolu-tionary chain. Freud, for his part, showed that “traces of human-ity’s own origins were still em-bedded in the individual’s mental and physical structures” (6). In both cases, man turns out to be “the animal among others” (and this is the title of the chapter in which Rohman defines her theo-retical and methodological appara-tuses). Traditional humanism will try to save face when confronted with these discoveries, to keep the 334 OXANA TIMOFEEVAprivilege of men, and if in Darwin there is still a certain species hier-archy, which gives a rule for social Darwinians to esteem one race or another according to its higher or lower degree of “humanity” or “animality,” then in Freud there is an obligation to transcend animal nature in the course of individual human development. However, these two paradigmatic shifts—the one of the evolution of species and the other of the unconscious—al-ready trigger a double anxiety pro-duced by the idea of the existence of the animal other either as a neighbor from the outside, with whom we nevertheless share a single species universe, or as a very nonhuman in-side of the human subject itself.Chapter 2, “Imperialism and Disavowal,” starts with a critique of the limits of a postcolonial approach, which “has privileged the catego-ries or race and gender in an effort to rearticulate our understanding of modernism’s imperialists bina-ries” but “has failed to examine the fact that these discourses sought justification through the discourse of species” (29). Rohman empha-sizes this underestimation of the species question in gender and queer studies, as well, reminding us again and again that repres-sions and oppressions within the human world actually derive from our primal repression and rejec-tion of animality. Certain humans sometimes find themselves beyond the border of humanity precisely because this border exists and pro-duces itself, so that the domain of the human shapes itself through the function of exclusion. According to Rohman, “displacing animality onto marginalized groups, whether they be Jews, blacks, women, or the poor, is a common feature of mod-ernist literature” (29). Thus, T. S. Eliot’s “Sweeney among the Night-ingales” (1920) inscribes animality into a framework of the “lowness” of human impulses, and the racial other, in particular the Jew, and the sexual other, the woman, clearly rise behind the poet’s species imagi-nary. Sweeney as a figure of confu-sion can never fully erase his own unclean animal nature and thus generalizes the poet’s heteropho-bia and misogyny. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), in turn, draws a figure of “Africanized animality”: men’s animal nature “is textually embodied by Africa and Africans” (46), and the process of civiliza-tion echoes the process of evolu-tion as a means of “transcending” this “dark” nature. Finally, “D. H. Lawrence must also be numbered among the modernist writers who deploy the discourses of species and of races to explore the contours of the human” (52). Lawrence’s at-titude is clearly idealistic and nos-talgic “for the preindustrial and precivilized man” (53) when, for example, in his The Plumed Ser-pent (1926) the writer pictures the ambiguity of the relationships be-tween Americans and Mexicans.  ON STALKING THE SUBJECT 335All three cases demonstrate both an insistence on animal ancestry as a background of the so-called civi-lized society and the racial drama already paradoxically inscribed in a kind of posthuman perspective.If the texts analyzed in chapter 2 generally “project animality away from the Western subject,” then the characters depicted in chapter 3, “Facing the Animal,” reveal “the inevitable return of animality for the European” (64). The most strik-ing example here is H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), which exposes “the repression in-herent in an Enlightenment project of transcendence that attempted to deanimalize the human subject” (64). This text, Rohman claims, “bears witness to the inherent vio-lence of the humanizing process which creates Jacques Lacan’s split subject” (72). The voice of the ani-mal (the puma’s scream at the hor-rifying Moreau’s factory), which suffers enormously in order to be transformed into a rational being, expresses this rupture, dramatically inscribed into human culture as its constitutive moment of pain. In his later novella, The Croquet Player (1937), Wells “narrativizes the dia-lectic between evolution and psy-choanalysis” (64); animal ancestry appears as a kind of ghost from the past, becoming the basis of an indi-vidual’s deep neurotic structure.The last part of this chapter returns to Lawrence’s idealistic appeals to the infinite wisdom of animal nature. His poem “Fish” (1923) is especially remarkable on this point, since here the fish serves as an example of a being living in its own element or environment. Silent fish in water appear as the very image of immanence, of ani-mal’s conformity to its natural es-sence: in this analysis, Rohman refers to Heidegger’s and Bataille’s speculations on the immanence of animal nature, best of all symbol-ized and expressed by “fishness.” In his poetic fascination, Lawrence is trapped by this kind of metaphysi-cal projection. The radical alter-ity of the fish, as celebrated by the author, reflects a sort of passeist utopia, which, being pushed to the extreme, in Lawrence’s poem ends up suggesting both the vitalist con-ception of the unknowable and ir-reducible animal world, as well as the Christian symbolism of the fish.Since Lawrence “is perhaps the British modernist most engaged with the species problem through-out his work,” which “signals a deepening disgust with humanism in its rational mode” (100), chap-ter 4, “Recuperating the Animal,” concentrates on his novels Women in Love (1920) and St. Mawr (1925). According to Rohman, “[T]he ani-mal possesses the kind of being that Lawrence wants to recuperate in humans, a being that rejects mech-anistic forms of self-consciousness and embraces radical mystery” (101). She emphasizes the ideologi-cal gesture of privileging ontology 336 OXANA TIMOFEEVAover epistemology, characteristic of both Lawrence and Heidegger, but draws our attention to the fact that whereas in Heidegger the animal is “poor in world,” in Lawrence’s nos-talgic antihumanism animals rather enjoy a more pure mode of being, “unspoiled by cultural reification and intellectual posturing” (111), which can reveal itself, in par-ticular, through human sexuality.Consequently, Rohman’s final chapter, “Revising the Human,” represents an attempt to pave the way to a literary becoming-ani-mal through sexual peripeties in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). Its main character, Robin Vote, “figures nonidentity as a form of subjectivity . . . where the nonlin-guistic, the undecidable, and the animal serve to revise what counts as human” (133). Yet, this version of utopia is organized around the spoilt  upper-class subject’s desire to return to nature (embodied in the rather idealistic figure of Robin as a wild woman, who, with her “openness towards alterity,” fi-nally escapes the human realm), the modernist desire to transgress the limits of human with all the restrictions of its language, society, etc., the utopia of a nonrepressed sexuality as an ultimate liberating practice. However, sexuality is mis-leading. It will never bring us to the animal; even in imitating animality it goes in the opposite direction—not towards a final “revising” of the human, but towards further refining the human, by means of a sexual transgression.It seems that if for classical liter-ature and literary studies an animal stands as a metaphor for a human, then in Carrie Rohman’s book it stands for a metaphor for a non-human, but a nonhuman always already related to a certain kind of human. A human and a nonhuman here are produced by each other, and Rohman’s book interprets dif-ferent kinds of human subjectivity as produced by and rising from the metaphorical encounter with the animal. Similarly to the protago-nist of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, who cannot find her way among repressive human identities, albeit woman or lesbian, since they are all insufficient in comparison to her radical gesture of becoming-ani-mal, the author theoretically goes further than postcolonial, gender, and other identity studies, by trying to examine the very limits of these identities posed by animality. But is this ultimate shift to animality ever really possible? It seems that the subjectivities at stake demonstrate, in various ways, the impossibility either of an ultimate detachment from what is called “the animal nature” or of an ultimate attach-ment to it, marked by the desire to become-animal. Perhaps literature itself, and modernist literature in particular, are the symptom of this very impossibility. The question that should be raised here is how to escape the new opposition between  ON STALKING THE SUBJECT 337the “bad” human and the “good” animal, which would be a reversal of the classical binary based on the affirmation of exclusively human merits (thought, awareness of death, language, etc.)? How to escape the trap of the vitalist be-lief—deeply inscribed in modern-ist culture itself—in a form of life as a “natural” or bodily force of resis-tance against repressive human in-stitutions without thinking through the complex ambiguity of the rela-tions of the two? But even if this trap is unavoidable, the injection of animality into critical discourse remains extremely useful. The generalized animal other of moder-nity is like a good psychoanalyst: it causes the human to speak out his or her fears and radical doubts, to confess, to verbalize various “sins” the human is made of.Oxana Timofeeva is a Senior Research Fel-low at the Institute of Philosophy of Russian Academy of Sciences and is the editor of the “Theory” rubric at the New Literary Observer magazine (Moscow). She is part of the working group “Chto Delat?” (“What is to be done?”). She is the author of the books History of Animas: An Essay on Negativ­ity, Immanence and Freedom (Jan van Eyck Academy, 2012) and Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (New Literary Observer, 2009).

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Modernism in the Animal Trap?

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