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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

Derrida and
Textual Animality
For a Zoogrammatology of Literature

Rodolfo Piskorski
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

Series Editors
Susan McHugh
Department of English
University of New England
Biddeford, ME, USA

Robert McKay
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK

John Miller
School of English
University of Sheffield
Sheffield, UK
Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing an
‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human excep-
tionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences that haunt the
margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary studies. Such
work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-disciplinary questions. How might
we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from other animals?
What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with other species?
How might we locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures?
This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the
‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as the
key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have codes,
calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly other
order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to animalise
the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of animals and
interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read as objects of
fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human concerns), this
series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by
tracing the engagement of such figuration with the material lives of animals. It
examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with
animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of literary
arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history. We publish
studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to
the present and with reference to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres
and critical methods. The series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also
accommodating related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and
contexts (from theatre and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing
and other cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages.

Series Board
Karl Steel (Brooklyn College)
Erica Fudge (Strathclyde)
Kevin Hutchings (UNBC)
Philip Armstrong (Canterbury)
Carrie Rohman (Lafayette)
Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14649
 Rodolfo Piskorski

Derrida and Textual

Animality
For a Zoogrammatology of Literature
Rodolfo Piskorski
Cardiff University
Cardiff, UK

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-51731-1 ISBN 978-3-030-51732-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51732-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
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 To
Fernando
 Praise for Derrida and Textual
Animality

“With its novel readings underpinned by the conceptual paleonym of

‘arche-animality’, Derrida and Textual Animality: For a Zoogrammatology
of Literature is a groundbreaking contribution not only to (Derridean)
Literary Animal Studies but also to the kind of Critical Posthumanism
that is still willing to engage with deconstruction’s vital insights into the
trace and into humans’ relationship to ‘the animal’.”
—Laurent Milesi, Tenured Professor of English at Shanghai Jiao Tong
University, China, and editor of James Joyce and the Difference of
Language (2003)

“Derrida and Textual Animality is a rare beast: a contribution to literary

animal studies that is equally invested in the question of the literary as it
is in the question of the animal. Recuperating the ‘linguistic turn’ for the
‘animal turn’, Piskorski shows how writing is always already co-implicated
with animality. This is a welcome and productive reminder that literary
animal studies must come to terms with Derrida’s infamous dictum that
‘there is no outside-text’.”
—Kári Driscoll, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature,
Utrecht University, The Netherlands, and co-editor of
What Is Zoopoetics?

vii
 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Animal as Text, Text as Animal: On the Matter

of Textuality 29

3 The Arche-Animal: Totemic Deconstruction

and Psychoanalysis 65

4 The Thought-Fox: The Poetics of Animal Form 119

5 Transcending Signs: Becoming-Animal in Black Swan 167

6 Animal Supplementarity in Lispector’s The Apple

in the Dark 209

7 Conclusion 259

Index 263

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 5.1 Nina and her mother Erica sit near the three-part mirror 171
Fig. 5.2 The camera has been digitally erased from the image so
that it is not visible in the reflection 177
Fig. 5.3 The camera, clearly positioned very near Portman’s right
arm, is not visible in the mirror 178
Fig. 5.4 Pankejeff’s drawing of the tree and wolves from his dream
(Freud in Davis 1995, 32) 187
Fig. 5.5 Bidirectional line of textual influence in The Wolf Man 193
Fig. 5.6 Davis’s diagram for the structure of Nachträglichkeit in
the Wolf Man’s childhood (1995, 35) 194
Fig. 5.7 Bidirectional line of textual influence in Black Swan 198
Fig. 5.8 Nina’s arms fully transform into black wings 198
Fig. 6.1 Simia Dei, detail of an illuminated initial (Hunterian
Psalter, folio 176r). Another ape holding a mirror is
included in an initial in folio 76v 249

xi
 List of Tables

Table 4.1 Absolute and secondary mimologism and conventionalism

(Genette 1994, 51) 126
Table 4.2 Distribution of lines into three poetic levels 150

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Why do animals matter for literature? They might matter as simply an

‘end’ that can then be conveyed by any given ‘medium’—literature,
for example. Conversely, the recent scholarly attention towards literary
animals highlights a more radical relevance of animality beyond that of
mere topic: it could be argued that in recent criticism illuminated by
posthumanism and Animal Studies, animals matter precisely due to their
matter. The material embodiment of animals is believed to offer a stark
contrast to the linguistic constitution of textuality, to the extent that
animals ‘in’ literary texts are said to illuminate—and sometimes chal-
lenge—the workings of literature. This is a relatively common view in
the literary scholarship on animals, a tendency which Kari Weil names the
‘counter-linguistic turn’, in which animals’ supposed lack of language is
refashioned as an asset reliant on their bodiliness:

Although many current projects are intent on proving that certain animals
do have language capabilities like those of humans, other sectors of animal
studies are concerned with forms of subjectivity that are not language-
based. Instead, they are concerned with ways of knowing that appear to
work outside those processes of logocentric, rational thinking that have
defined what is proper to the human, as opposed to the nonhuman animal.
(2006, 87)

© The Author(s) 2020 1

R. Piskorski, Derrida and Textual Animality,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51732-8_1
2 R. PISKORSKI

As Weil’s term suggests, this turn critiques the ‘linguistic turn’ in

twentieth-century Continental philosophy which, in literary studies, is
most often associated with Jacques Derrida. Writing in PMLA in 2005,
James Berger describes the wider consequences (in scholarship, art, and
popular culture) of this counter-linguistic turn:

[W]ith increasing influence over the past fifteen or twenty years we can
see in the academic humanities, in some literary fiction, and in areas of
popular culture varieties of what we might call a counter-linguistic turn.
[…] Their central claim is that there is an other of language, whether or
not this other can be conceptualized, and that language does not go “all
the way down.” (2005, 344)

As one of the symptoms of this counter-linguistic turn, Berger cites

‘studies across several fields that stress materiality or physicality. This
work often focuses on the body, which serves as a crucial and contested
boundary marker for the limits of language’ (ibid.). And in neurologist
Oliver Sack’s popular writings, he argues that ‘the deepest experience of
living as a human–animal, the most basic form of consciousness, is not
symbolic or linguistic. It is bodily, a sense of at-homeness in the body’
(350). In his 2017 book Bioaesthetics, Carsten Strathausen identifies a
rise of biologism in the humanities, detectable in the prominence of the
digital humanities and other strands of the ‘posthumanities’. For him,
deconstruction and hermeneutics are losing ground to empirical models
for the study of texts and culture due to a fatigue introduced after almost
a century of focus on the ‘being of language’ (2017, 4). He credits the
1996 Sokal hoax with a considerable impact on the credibility of ‘con-
structivist’, to the benefit of ‘realism’ (which he glosses as ‘an utterly
nonsensical juxtaposition’) and biologism.
In this biologically informed approach to the humanities, the focus on
the animal side of the human, or on what we could call our uncanny
proximity to animals, functions to stress their distinct type of embodi-
ment, since the material existence we share with them encounters in our
linguistically saturated nature a limit to this proximity. The emphasis on
bodily matter engendered by such similarity would serve to posit matter
once again as that which would ground ontology, as a way of writing
it out of ‘theory’ and the constitutive powers of language. Such matter
could easily be found in objects, or the mineral and vegetal kingdoms, but
the fact that humans and animals are otherwise extremely similar works
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

to underscore this materiality—and its push into language—in ways not

available to other beings. Animals would represent, then, an exteriority to
language, conceptuality, reason, and literature, exposing literary texts to
their own limitations. I shall attempt, however, to expose the metaphys-
ical foundation of such an analytical frame by revisiting Derrida’ s critique
of the simple evocation of matter. His complication of the material/ideal
dichotomy will be shown to represent a more productive response to this
duality and this will have crucial consequences to a thinking of animality
as grounded on bodily materiality.
The counter-linguistic turn is often associated with a strand of critical
theory, philosophy, and political theory known as New Materialism, iden-
tified broadly as a ‘return’ to materiality after the supposedly excessively
textual focus of post-structuralism. Thus, in their edited collection New
Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Diana Coole and Samantha
Frost situate New Materialism in opposition to ‘constructivism’, the claim
that reality is socially/culturally/linguistically constituted, which they
attribute to the cultural or linguistic turn. According to them, ‘the domi-
nant constructivist orientation to social analysis is inadequate for thinking
about matter, materiality, and politics in ways that do justice to the
contemporary context of biopolitics and global political economy’ (2010,
6). Materiality is here contrasted with idealism or ideality, in which the
cultural turn is deemed to be interested. However, it is important to high-
light that ‘ideality’ for Coole and Frost functions similarly to what some of
the contributors call ‘mentation’—products and processes of the human
mind. Conversely, in the Continental tradition which I discuss throughout
the book, ideality as opposed to materiality is characterised by not being
located in spatio-temporality. Therefore, even mental processes—to the
extent that they are events —are materialised in time and space in a way
that pure idealities are not. This difference will have sizable consequences
to my discussion of the destabilisation of the dualism materiality/ideality
undertaken by deconstruction. Another crucial aspect of mentation as
described by New Materialists, which is thought to include culture, signi-
fication, language, etc., is that it refers to an exclusively human sphere of
existence and experience. Hence, they critique constructivists’ inability to
analyse the non-human world and occasionally describe them as reducing
reality to a set of human concerns. However, for thinkers often charac-
terised as constructivists and post-structuralists, such as Derrida, some
issues ascribed to mentation (language, for example) are neither wholly
4 R. PISKORSKI

or primarily human, nor are they essentially ideal, as I discuss in detail

throughout the book.
Having said that, it is not clear if Jacques Derrida is one of the
constructivists Coole and Frost have in mind, even though he, of il n’y a
pas d’hors-texte fame, is often identified as one of the main postmodern
and post-structuralist thinkers. One therefore wonders who has claimed
or is claiming the points they are criticising. When they argue that ‘mate-
riality is always something more than “mere” matters, [it is] an excess,
force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-
creative, productive, unpredictable’ (9), it is reasonable to assume they
are positing someone who does argue that materiality is mere matter,
and that it does not contain theses forces that make it active. Because
the constructivist thinkers are not named or cited, one would be safe to
include Jacques Derrida or Judith Butler in that list, even though what
is presented as a critical, new approach to matter—such as the point that
matter has a difference that renders it productive—is similar to ‘construc-
tivist’ arguments often posed by Derrida, among others. That similarity
is sometimes openly acknowledged, as when Coole and Frost point out
that new materialists have ‘reinvent[ed] materialism in response to the
criticisms that radical constructivists and deconstructionists righty made
of earlier critical materialisms and realisms, Marxism in particular’ (25).
However, picturing Derrida and Butler among the targets of New
Materialism might turn out to be inaccurate, as the contributions to the
volume often engage in depth with both in a way that explores their
thinking of materiality. For example, Pheng Cheah shows that matter in
Derrida must be thought in connection with text, where the latter is not
allowed to be reduced to idealism (2010, 73). Cheah argues that decon-
struction explains the emergence of both matter and text by means of
the mechanism of iterability, which produces materialities and idealities.
In her contribution, Sara Ahmed defends the cultural turn as engaging
with the phenomenology espoused in the introduction, citing Butler as an
example (2010, 234, 246). In fact, Ahmed opens her chapter with a refer-
ence to her article ‘Imaginary Prohibitions’ (2008) in which she stakes
out a position critical to the radicalism claimed by the New Materialisms.
More focused on feminist thought, her article cites several thinkers who
identify—and criticise—Butler as a constructivist, which is, as we saw, not
the case in Coole and Frost’s volume. Despite the identification of Butler
and others as targets, Ahmed still pinpoints a common rhetorical gesture
by New Materialists characterised by asserting that something is not so,
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

suggesting other uncited writers who would argue that it is so (2008,

34–5). The methodological problem with this gesture is twofold. Firstly,
often the criticised arguments, either implied or articulated, are untrace-
able to any reasonable writer, such as a belief that subatomic particles
are invented, not discovered (Coole and Frost 2010, 11–2). Secondly,
the theoretical formulations presented as critically incisive and innova-
tive New Materialist claims are strikingly similar to arguments already put
forth by constructivists. In short, as Coole and Frost describe it—and
Ahmed analyses it—New Materialism seems to be either another name for
the critical approach to materialism already under way in post-structuralist
thought, or a rebuttal to claims no sensible thinker would defend, which
then compels it to linger on the defence of simple facts, such as the reality
of subatomic particles.
In the register of literary criticism, this materialism more often than not
goes hand in hand with a methodological anti-formalism: literary texts are
read as intricate forms of paraphrase of the real, material, embodied lives
of animals, which means their textual form is secondary (see Shapiro and
Copeland 2005). Interestingly, a radical formalist approach to texts could
be attempted in the name of the very focus on embodiment and materi-
ality that guides the interest in animals within certain sectors of Literary
Animal Studies. Hence, this formalism could be defended as a type of
anti-speciesist literary criticism. If we read this in Cartesian terms, this
sort of formalism would suggest an independence of the (animal) body
(form as the body of the text) from the soul-or-mind, or even some kind
of radical materialism that prioritises bodies before souls. However, as we
shall see, many literary scholars approach animals as objects in literary
texts, as subject matters that can be and indeed are at stake at any other
medium. At the level of object, this approach attempts to circle the speci-
ficity of animality as a different form of embodiment, while at the level
of method, the text itself, as the form or embodiment of signification, is
overlooked.
For example, Robert McKay frames the emergence of Literary Animal
Studies by stating that ‘[i]n the mid- to late-1990s, very few scholars
were concerned with the near omnipresence of nonhuman animals in
literary texts’, and he accuses those works which did try to address ‘the
animal question’ before then of ‘coming nowhere near capturing the full-
ness of animals’ presence in literary and cultural history’ (2014, 637).
Similarly, Marion W. Copeland praises Literary Animal Studies which
‘approached canonical literature […] and found rich untapped sources of
6 R. PISKORSKI

information on both human relations with and attitudes toward other

animals’, sources whose ‘mining […] has become one goal of Literary
Animal Studies’ (2012, 99, emphasis added). McKay and Copeland
defend seemingly disparate views on the relationship between animal
‘presence’ and textuality: whereas the former believes animals are present
in texts (omnipresent, in fact), the latter seems to suggest that literary
discourse is a medium capable of delivering us hard nuggets of important
information about animals, who one assumes are therefore very present,
albeit elsewhere. But McKay’s subtle shift from ‘omnipresence in texts’
to ‘presence in literary and cultural history’ points towards a belief in that
material presence of animals despite and outside texts. If animals are ‘pre-
sent’ in texts, they are apparently represented therein, à la Copeland, as
pieces of information. She finally confirms hers and McKay’s similarity
by asserting that some ‘poetry […] brings readers into the presence of
other-than-human animals’ (ibid.). The ‘presence of non-human animals
in works of fiction’ is also mentioned by Shapiro and Copeland, who also
decry (the presence of?) animal ‘absent referent[s]’ (2005, 343).
Two interrelated gestures are performed in these position papers. On
the one hand, we have the belief that animals can be made to be present in
texts by means of appropriate writing or reading practices. On the other,
there is a clear sense in which animals inhabit a completely separate realm
against which the literary pushes. Both are joined in the assumption that
some sort of presence may be evoked by means of textual networks of
references, and, more importantly, that this evocation is the overarching
work of textuality and literature. This formulation owes its logic to the
very concept of form and how it has been understood in poetics.
However, as I shall discuss in more detail, there are many reasons why
a formalist textual approach that could rightfully be called anti-speciesist
is ultimately untenable. Still, as we saw, the animalised meanings that
underpin the very formulation of formalism would seem to invite us to
strive to make formalism work in the name of a non-speciesist poetics and
criticism that would liberate the body of form from subjugation to the
soul of content. The whole problem seems to stem from the double pres-
sure exercised on form—that it be the way texts appear but also that it
always points to a what other than itself—and this connects to some of
Derrida’s complications of the material/ideal duality in the concept of the
signifier. Echoing such Derridean caution, Strathausen criticises the unnu-
anced approach to this dichotomy present both in the counter-linguistic
turn and in some forms of constructivism:
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

Today’s biologism fetishizes material objectivity and scientific reductionism

in much the same way that constructivism fetishized abstract concepts and
social conventions. Both “isms” pit matter against meaning, objects against
concepts, when, instead, they should concentrate their efforts to examine
how each of them codetermines and reproduces the other.’ (2017, 12)

Despite the fruitful suggestion, Strathausen’s ‘constructivism’ is more

often than not associated with deconstruction and Derrida, in such a
way that would constitute a misreading of the project of deconstruction.
Derrida is not a thinker of ‘language’ in the traditional sense, and his
deconstructive approach, as I will show, represents precisely the sort of
effort Strathausen is proposing.
Another contribution to the area of Literary Animal Studies is Pieter
Vermeulen and Virginia Richter’s introduction to their edited volume of
the European Journal of English Studies titled Modern Creatures, where
they put forward the privileging of the concept of ‘creature’ and of ‘the
creaturely’ as key frameworks in the work of animal studies (2015, 2).
Their main reference point is the work of Anat Pick, whose definition
of the creaturely they cite: ‘[t]he creaturely is primarily the condition of
exposure and finitude that affects all living bodies whatever they are’ (3).
And it is crucial to their project that Pick situates her emphasis on crea-
tureliness as part of a resistance against the tendency to project human
traits onto animals. Another important influence is the work of Eric
Santner, whom they credit as also responsible for the scholarly relevance of
the term ‘creaturely’. However, they underline some differences between
Santner and Pick regarding creatureliness, especially the former’s under-
standing that human vulnerability and exposure is not only a product of
its biological, animal nature. For him, human contingency is determined
not only by its embodied vulnerability, but also by its exposure to ‘spir-
itual forces’ and ‘social textures […] that uncannily animate the human
body’ (5).
In the area of Literary Animal Studies, Susan McHugh’s writings are
among the most perceptive to this problem and to the perceived necessity
of some kind of formalist poetics of animality. For her, animals ‘at once
serv[e] as a metaphor for the poetic imagination and voic[e] the limits of
human experience’. But, beyond that, their ‘peculiar operations of agency,
these ways of inhabiting literature without somehow being represented
therein, present tremendous opportunities for recovering and interro-
gating the material and representational problems specific to animality’
8 R. PISKORSKI

(2009a, 487), but also to literature, since she entertains that ‘species
being works in literary texts as a function of what we think of as their liter-
ariness’ (488). She argues that ‘the problem of animals [is] written into
the metaphysics of speech and subjectivity’ (489). Despite her discussion
of animal agency, she criticises the temptation of transferring subjectivity
onto animals, suggesting that ‘sublimation of cross-species violence […]
derives from the valorization of psychic interiority as the defining quality
of the human in literary research’ and such ‘subjectivity entails a very
specific and limiting story of agency’ (2009b, 365). She understands that

the focus on embodiment, surfaces, and exteriority […] perhaps most

clearly distinguishes animals as agents of an order different from that of
human subjectivity—more precisely, as actors operating in accordance with
a logic different from that of intentionality or psychological interiority.
(2009a, 491)

However, she does not believe that privileging this beyond-human

embodiment is the answer to the methodological problems posed by
animals, since this reliance on animal transcendence misses the point of
the enmeshing of animality and text. She holds that the argument for
the irrelevance of literature and textuality for animals is groundless, since
‘messy entanglements of human and animal agents become sedimented
even in cultural practices without immediate ties to animals’ (490). There-
fore, she defends the argument I am putting forth that one must find an
answer to animal representation which is, at the same time, a methodolog-
ical and a theoretical position. She couples the issue of how to account for
animal subjectivity (and/or animal embodiment) with the cultural prac-
tices that support and are supported by the very concepts of animal being.
Thus, in literature, for example, McHugh would suggest both that one
not privilege texts about animals being portrayed as transcendent to textu-
ality or to the human world, and that one be attuned to how textuality
itself as a cultural practice is suffused with the very issues it is trying to
represent. As it is, her thinking is not only a call for a different thinking
about animals, but also a qualified call for a formalist criticism attuned to
the animality of textuality itself, to the ‘countless animal aspects of texts’
(2009b, 363).
Nevertheless, McHugh arrives at a conundrum. Texts exhibit animal
aspects and animal being is enmeshed into textuality, but that still does
not tell us about the texture of animal agency. An animal subjectivity
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

similar to a human’s threatens to efface any animal specificity, and misses

the fact that even human subjectivity is constructed on the basis of a meta-
physics of inside and outside wholly organised by concepts such as body
and soul. On the other hand, ascribing to the animal a transcendence to
language and text suggests wishful thinking, and ignores the extent to
which this transcendence is prescribed by language itself. McHugh’s way
out is openly guided by ‘the Deleuzian assumption […] that animality
permeates language, literature, and everything as a line of flight or poten-
tial for becomings’ (2009a, 493), a position with which I not only agree
but that I also explore to some extent in Chapter 5. I believe, however,
that there is a second, Derridean answer to the problem, which is more
attuned to the issues raised by literary signification.
Several other literary scholars have approached the issue of animality
from a Derridean perspective. In their introduction to Seeing Animals
After Derrida, Sarah Bezan and James Tink stress the importance of
considering Derrida’s work on animals (and the wider ‘nonhuman turn’
in the humanities) against a backdrop of questions and challenges posed
to Derrida and his overall thought (2018, ix). For example, they iden-
tify in readings of Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, even by
those supportive of its general project, a disappointment with the text’s
apparent refusal ‘to consider fully what the animal is as such’ and with the
‘lack of specificity’ of Derrida’s animal (x, xii). A different approach under-
scored by them is reading the animal in Derrida as part of ‘the ongoing
problem of the trace of the Other’: the argument goes that, even if the
animal as a motif only emerged in his later texts, it came about as contin-
uation of the issues of différance and the trace. As they put it, ‘in this case
the condition of the living is far from being a state of the human being
that could be simply attributed as animality, but instead an idea of arche-
writing, as in an organization of traces and signs as a text that are the
preconditions of understanding subjectivity and being’ (xii). However, the
‘restatement’ of the early Derrida of arche-writing in the animal lectures
is not an uncontroversial observation, since literary studies, critical theory,
and philosophy have seen a turn towards ‘ideas of life, the bioethical
and the affect, and indeed ecocriticism, which are sometimes levelled
against deconstruction’, in the years after Derrida’s death (xiii). Bezan
and Tink then identify Timothy Morton and Claire Colebrook as two
examples of thinkers who are attempting to bridge deconstruction with
the recent ‘non-textual turn’. Finally, Bezan and Tink’s own project is to
explore the visual aspect in Derrida’s anecdote of being naked before the
10 R. PISKORSKI

cat’s gaze in order to inquire ‘how the human comes to be exposed and
made vulnerable in relation to the (in)visible animal’ (xiv). For them, the
ethical project before us involves acknowledging ‘the inherent meaning of
nonhuman materiality’, and ‘the limitations of human perception’. This
ethical call is similarly polarising, since it also separates the field of animal
studies in two. They cite Giovanni Aloi’s diagnosis of two different views
on the issue of animal visibility, with one group reliant on the posthu-
manist distrust for visibility as ‘truth-constructing’ and another counting
on visibility as an epistemological strategy (xv).
Sarah Bezan connects Derrida’s project in The Animal That There-
fore I Am to some emerging areas such as new materialism, speculative
realism, and object-oriented ontology (Bezan 2018, 66). She sees those
fields as allies to animal studies, as she argues that ‘a wide variety of
scholars in the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, posthumanism,
and animal studies more broadly’ are united in ‘dismantling transcen-
dental humanism’ and criticising ‘the human’s strategies of mediation of
the natural world, whether it be through consciousness, language, [or]
spectrality’ by means of a ‘combat’ against the ‘transcendental mediation
of “Nature”’ (69). This is a very sweeping statement, as the fields she
mentions clearly contain a wide range of different views of materiality.
Timothy Morton, especially, whom she mentions in this context, writes
against the belief in the possibility of simply doing away with the media-
tion of ‘Nature’. More serious, however, is the mischaracterisation of the
Derridean position by his inclusion in this list (nominally, but also as an
important thinker for many within those fields). The so-called linguistic
turn with which Derrida is commonly associated actually emerges in his
work as a rejection of transcendentalism that still constantly rejects any
kind of simple material reality. Derrida addressed the pitfalls of materi-
alism as a solution against transcendentalism several times in his writing,
and answered questions directly on this issue in interviews.
Christopher Peterson has criticised the general impulse of posthu-
manisms that interpret the linguistic turn as excessively humanist, and
thus reject it in the name of a critique of human exceptionalism and
a focus on materiality. For him, these critics, such as New Materialists,
in their attempt to read humanity in other-than-human terms (embod-
iment, affect, biology, evolution, etc.) overestimate their own power of
controlling the meaning of the human, thereby reasserting the very excep-
tionalism they sought to overturn. Bluntly, he entertains, ‘does what we
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

call the human retain any sense outside the discourse of anthropocen-
trism?’ (2018, 2). He does not suggest that we simply accept human
exceptionalism, but recognise its phantasmatic endurance beyond declara-
tions of its demise. Similarly, he stresses the necessity of a methodological
(but also an epistemological and a phenomenological) human-centredness
for any relation to the other as other. I shall discuss attempts to over-
turn anthropocentrism (and their failure) throughout the book and
more specifically when I analyse Donna Haraway’s similar posthumanist
critiques of Derrida for being overly humanist.
A crucial contribution to the field of Derridean Animal Studies is the
edited collection The Animal Question in Deconstruction. In her intro-
duction, editor Lynn Turner states clearly that the collection’s remit
is ‘to take Jacques Derrida seriously when he says that he had always
been thinking about the company of animals and that deconstruction has
never limited itself to language, still less “human” language’ (2013, 2).
Apparently as a response to the title ‘The Autobiographical Animal’—
the conference in which the The Animal That Therefore I Am lectures
were given—Derrida provides a helpful overview of animal figures that
populated his texts. However, Turner argues that ‘these […] animals
have largely escaped wider attention’. On the other hand, she points out
that many scholars have emphasised that ‘Derrida’s work pointed to the
deconstruction of the elevation of “man” above all others well before the
pedagogical “tipping point” of The Animal That Therefore I Am’ (3).
Thus formulated, the remit of the book seems two-pronged. On the
one hand, it is concerned with the exploration of animal figures in Derri-
da’s texts that have been overlooked in Derridean scholarship (the insect
of ‘Tympan’; the sponge in Signsponge; the wolves, elephants, and lions
in The Beast and the Sovereign; the mole in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writ-
ing’; the lion in his ‘Introduction’ to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry; not
to the mention the more famous hedgehog from ‘Che Cos’è La Poesia’;
and the cat from The Animal That Therefore I Am). On the other hand,
the book strives to locate the importance of animality as a structural
concept for the very project of deconstruction (embedded in a discussion
of more-than-human language, for example) even when animal figures are
not being directly discussed by Derrida. It is arguable that the book excels
mostly in the former endeavour, but it is the latter venture with which I
am especially concerned. Throughout this book, the decision to privilege
structural—rather than topical—animality will be continuously argued in
theoretical, methodological, philosophical, and ethical terms.
12 R. PISKORSKI

Therefore, I argue that it is symptomatic of the co-implication of

animality and language as they are understood by philosophical tradition
that this conundrum concerning the animal is the one Derrida faces when
deconstructing the linguistic sign. More specifically, the question of how
to approach the materiality of signs is the problem that opens the way
for Derrida to propose most of his ideas. In his lengthy intervention in
Husserl’s thought, Derrida attacked phenomenology’s disavowal, in the
name of ideal transcendentality, of all that is bodily and material. This
attack did not entail a triumphant materialism, since Derrida’s deconstruc-
tive reading, instead of simply refuting what Husserl proposes, identified
in his formulation the unspoken possibility both of Husserlian idealism
and of a naïve empirical materialism. Originary difference, its play and
work, différance, the trace, iterability—these are all names for that which
is enmeshed in its material support but which cannot be reduced to it.
Literary Animal Studies can, therefore, find both the specific materiality
of the animal and the bodily form of texts in the impure undecidable of
that which is neither material nor immaterial. Similarly, it is well known
that, in Of Grammatology, Derrida frees writing from its subordination
to speech to show that all of language depends on a certain scriptural
function derived from what he terms arche-writing.
Just as arche-writing is situated ‘before’ the common differentiation
between speech and writing, I argue that ‘before’ the distinction between
human and animal as the metaphysical distinction between spirit and
body, there must be a sort of pure difference that makes the differen-
tiation between body and soul possible. I call that the arche-animal .
Leonard Lawlor has discussed this Derridean recourse to old names in
the ‘second phase’ of deconstruction, after the initial moment of over-
turning the classical hierarchy (e.g. speech/writing, human/animal) (see
Derrida 1987, 41–3, 71). The second phase ‘reinscribes the previously
inferior term as the “origin” or “resource” of the hierarchy itself’, so that
this term ‘becomes what Derrida calls an “old name” or a “paleonym”’.
Lawlor sees these terms as ‘the experience of a process of differentiation
that is also repetition’, or as ‘the experience of language where language
is taken in a broad sense’ (2007, 30).
In a Derridean Literary Animal Studies, animals cannot be regarded as
simply matter, since it is clear that they are animated matter, whose spark
of life engenders auto-affection and movement. Their bodies cannot,
however, be wished away in a repetition of speciesist, Cartesian conclu-
sions that would consider these bodies to be simply cases for animal
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

minds. An animal subjectivity, constructed in the human mould, would

make the animal itself vanish. And if this entire formulation is, as I argued,
coextensive with the structure and functioning of signification, it should
be both possible and desirable to read the animated matter of texts, their
play of form. The form of a text (its grammar) should be detachable from
both its content (semantics) and its substance (phonology, graphematics,
typography, etc.), in order for us to get at the animal aspects of texts. But
is that even possible? Is form ever identifiable in texts in any way separable
from its meaning and material support?
The representation undertaken by signs is essentially linked to
animality. As I shall show, there could be no representation without
animals, insofar as they provide us with the play of form. However, it
is impossible for it to emerge phenomenally, in texts, as such, for that
would require the process of signification to appear without actually signi-
fying anything. Similarly, there is no signification which is not, in a way,
trapped in the support of a substance, since there are no signs without
a sensible face. It is therefore only possible to identify the moment
when or the site where textuality reveals the scar of the impossibility of
simply signifying. In a text, signification appears to collapse into either
dumb marks on a page or abstract, conceptual meaning, both of which
I believe to be counterproductive objects for Literary Animal Studies.
But pinpointing signification as such—that which makes specific mean-
ings possible—would be crucial for understanding the arche-animal as it
works in literary texts and I shall explore whether signification as such can
be an object of literary analysis.
Other scholars have also stressed the enmeshing of animality and
textuality. Kári Driscoll, discussing animal literature under the name
‘zoopoetics’, advances that the latter is engaged with the ‘constitution’
of the animal in language but also with the constitution of language
in relation to the animal. He entertains that zoopoetics might even be
‘the most fundamental form of poetics’, since it involves the funda-
mental distinction between human and animal as it is usually based on
language (2015, 223). Driscoll includes an important historical aspect to
his point, since he maps an explosion of zoopoetics around the time of
early twentieth-century literary modernism and industrial modernity. The
crisis of language, or Sprachkrise, explored by the animal texts of the early
1900s, represents, for Driscoll, a diminished faith on the representative
powers of language, which he views as intrinsically intertwined with a
crisis of anthropocentrism and a crisis of the animal. An acute awareness
14 R. PISKORSKI

of the ‘prison-house of language’ and the desire to escape it led artists and
writers to explore zoopoetics, since ‘any attempt to escape the boundaries
of linguistic consciousness must proceed via the animal, which exists on
the boundary of language and meaning, forever eluding conceptualisa-
tion, slipping toward the ineffable’ (222). Ultimately, Driscoll defends
that the question of language itself has always been (also) the question
of the animal. In his view, Literary Animal Studies approaches animals
as ‘present[ing] a specific problem to and for language and representa-
tion’ (227) and he justifies this position with reference to the privileged
position of animals in the mythical accounts of the origins of art, music,
poetry, and language.
His volume, co-edited with Eva Hoffmann, What Is Zoopoetics? Texts,
Bodies, Entanglement furthers the project of zoopoetics. In their intro-
duction, they emphasise that ‘zoopoetic texts are not—at least not
necessarily and certainly not simply—texts about animals’, which is a claim
I will be exploring in depth. Rather, these texts’ ‘“poetic thinking” (i.e.
the way they reflect on their own textuality and materiality), on ques-
tions of writing and representation, proceeds via the animal’ (2018, 4).
Crucially, they stress that literary animals thus understood are no less real
or more alienated from animals in the ‘real world’. Firstly, because in texts
‘there are, strictly speaking, no “actual” animals […] that “we” might
allow to “be themselves”: there are only words, or rather, animots ’,1
which means that there is a limit to how ‘accurate’ a ‘real’ animal might
be textually represented. Secondly, because even ‘our encounters with
animals in the “real” world are both material and semiotic, and hence […]
the relationship between “real” animals and “literary” animals is not that
of an original to a copy, but rather reciprocal and irreducibly entangled’
(6).
The chapters collected in What Is Zoopoetics? explore these theoret-
ical and methodological positions in various ways, although some essays
undertake readings which I argue to be grounded on arguments from
the counter-linguistic turn, which means they deviate somewhat from the
definition of zoopoetics offered by Driscoll and Hoffmann, and are thus
less relevant to my project of zoogrammatology. For example, Nicolas
Picard, in ‘Hunting Narratives: Capturing the Lives of Animals’, argues
that zoopoetics ‘examin[es] the way in which creative language constructs
textual animals’ (2018, 27–8). However, the exact meaning of the expres-
sion ‘textual animal’ is not made clear, with an abundance of arguments
that emphasise that the animals in question are not textual, and that the
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

role of the text is simply to translate these non-textual animals. Animals

are said to be ‘transcribed’, ‘captured’, and ‘restored’ by poetic language,
which is tasked with ‘(re)establish[ing] the connection between man
and the rest of creation’ (28). This rehearses classical arguments about
language as that which both estranges humans from the material truths
of nature and offers the means to bridge that gap, if properly reformed—
in this case as zoopoetics (as I discuss in more detail in Chapter 4 with
reference to Gérard Genette). Picard’s focus on hunting narratives—and
hunting as a motif—leads him to privilege the notions of capture and
decipherment, as when a hunter interprets signs and traces in order to
capture an animal. This priority threatens to relegate attention to textu-
ality (and to poetics) to the background to the benefit of a focus on
extra-textual animal materiality, as gathered by the image of the animal
footprint, ‘the physical production of a living organism’ (31). For Picard,
in hunting narratives, footprints signal ‘someone passed this way’—a
metaphysical understanding of the trace, which in Derrida is understood
as not reducible to a modified form of presence. The interpretation of
animal tracks leads to the insight that ‘the world is a book, the earth a
blank page’ (33), but this realisation clashes with continuing references
to a simple process of decryption of animal truths. The insight that the
reality of the world itself is textual does not affect the conceptualisation
of the nature of animals and their signs, nor, crucially, the methodolog-
ical approach to textual analysis. Despite suggesting that all narratives
derive in some way from a hunting quest, Picard abandons this metafic-
tional line of thought in order to analyse the subject matter and plot of
actual hunting narratives. His assertion that the ‘poetics of the zoon […]
questions and constructs animals’ lives through semiotic and hermeneutic
processes’ is belied by a sustained textual approach that envisions animal
presence as extra-textual, and semiosis as a temporary detour on the way
to such presence.
In ‘The Grammar of Zoopoetics: Human and Canine Language
Play’, Joela Jacobs analyses stories in which dogs narrate by means of
human language and underscores the moments in the texts in which
such language fails their canine users (2018). She argues that the dogs’
moments of unsuccessful language use point to a distinction between
human language (together with narration and literature in general) and
canine communication. For Jacobs, the dogs experience human language
‘as a central obstacle to the perception of the world and the self’, whereas
their scent-based communication is able to ‘instantly’ (i.e. directly)
16 R. PISKORSKI

perceive reality (67). The characterisation of human linguistic abstraction

as a screen that covers over a prelinguistic and extra-textual reality is a
common feature of the counter-linguistic turn, but is also an echo of a
tradition of ascribing human exceptionalism to a human defect which is
rooted, according to Derrida, in Greek, Biblical, and Freudian thought,
among others. I believe that the insights from this tradition are not
productive for a zoopoetics as they separate the zoo- from -poetics, while
relegating textuality at the same time as it fetishises animals’ connection
with nature.
Michaela Castellanos presents an approach to Moby-Dick which aims
to avoid ‘reading [whales] as metaphors representing something other
than whales’ (2018, 130). For that purpose, she gives an overview
of nineteenth-century discourses about the taxonomic classification of
whales and their impact on theories of evolution and frames Melville’s
novel as openly about whales. However, some of the methodological
statements contradict this strategy, as she highlights the fact that the
whale is a ‘literary animal’, an ‘animal created by words’, and she quotes
theories on zoopoetics by Aaron M. Moe and Kári Driscoll approvingly,
which do not support her materialist focus on ‘real’, non-textual whales.
She reads Moe’s and Driscoll’s zoopoetics differently, however, arguing
that Moe’s contention that ‘the material animal body creates an impulse
to grasp it in language’ (131) frames the poetic process as a ‘straight-
forward translation’ from animal into language. Conversely, she praises
Driscoll’s claim that animality and language are inseparably intertwined
and holds that this is the case of Moby-Dick. Nevertheless, her overall
historicist approach to the novel’s whale repeats the metaphor and trans-
lation gestures that she criticises. The whale is repeatedly said to be the
‘site’ on which discourses are negotiated, or a ‘repository’ and ‘recepta-
cle’ that ‘registers’ historical anxieties. If the animal body is the scriptural
space where discourses collide, it is not co-constituted alongside such
discourses. And the language of ‘receptacles’ for pre-existing meanings
describes precisely the notion of a straightforward translation from one
discourse (historical, political, biological, cultural, etc.) into a literary one
by means of animals. While extremely valuable, the historicist approach
is, in my view, less productive for zoopoetics precisely because it does
not take into account the ‘inseparable intertwinement of animality and
language’ and sees literary texts as paraphrases of cultural and historical
discourses, whereas zoopoetics criticises just this gesture of paraphrase,
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

such as in approaches that see animals as mere stand-ins for human

meanings.
Paul Sheehan proposes a ‘zoopoetics of extinction’, introducing it by
means of the killed albatross in Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, which is said to have taken a symbolic and ‘metapoetic signifi-
cance’ (2018, 167). While a poetics of species extinction is both produc-
tive and urgent, the actual poetic framing of the issue by means of the
Rime and the disappearance supposedly engendered by its language seems
to diminish the theoretical complications of animal textual ‘presences’.
There are two main complications: one concerning the structure of pres-
ence and absence in texts, and another associated with the relationship
between animal species and animal individual.
The first complication is detectable in Sheehan’s claim that the
metaphoric meanings acquired by the noun ‘albatross’ (a source of
frustration, a burden, etc.) mean that ‘the actual, material animal is
occluded, […] forced to become a metaphorical substitute’ (167). For
him, ‘the material embodiment of the bird’ is ‘“swallowed up” by
language, absorbed into its predetermined anthropocentric directives’
(168). However, the Rime’s albatross never had, at any point in its textual
trajectory, a material embodiment, as Driscoll and Hoffmann point out in
their introduction regarding the ‘presence’ of animals in zoopoetics texts.
There was never an albatross—or albatrosses—in the poem, only networks
of references, whose only materiality is the materiality of the signifier itself.
Thus, Sheehan’s argument that ‘language can also restore and reaffirm
what language has taken away’ (169), in this context, suggests that appro-
priate writing and/or reading practices could in fact make animals present
in texts, and constitutes a belief in what Gérard Genette calls ‘poetic refor-
mation’, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 4. For Genette, it is an
illusory trust in the (potential) mimetic power of language that supports
the view that poetry’s calling is to improve on everyday, failed language.
This relates to the second complication, as Sheehan argues that zoopo-
etics can ‘restor[e] to the albatross its status as a particular species with
a particular history—an actual bird, not just a metaphorical substitute’
(169). This misses the fact that the poem is not concerned with alba-
trosses as a species or a group of birds, but with one individual animal
that is then killed by the Mariner. In fact, the material embodiment that
Sheehan mourns depends on precisely this individuality—as I argue in
Chapter 3, an animal species is never a material entity, since it is always
18 R. PISKORSKI

already implicated in the abstractness necessitated by its iterative produc-

tion. As Sheehan puts it, ‘the animal itself [the albatross in the poem] [is]
a large oceanic bird comprising about twenty-one species’ (167). This
reveals a tension between the (singular) albatross in the poem (‘a bird’,
‘the animal itself’) and the abstract multitude of a whole or even several
species. Discourses on extinction are indeed focused on the disappear-
ance of animal species, but Sheehan’s point about the animal disappearance
supposedly undertaken by language focuses on one animal individual; in
fact, his argument depends on the materiality that can only accrue to
singular individuals in order to lament its erasure. As I argue in detail
throughout the book, the dynamics between animal species and animal
individual is not only vital for any discussion of literary representations of
animal, but also for any theory of signification itself , since the iterative
play of ideality and materiality is at the heart of the functioning of the
linguistic sign, a functioning I claim is essentially linked to animality.
Much more attuned to the concerns of zoogrammatology is Belinda
Kleinhans’s article on Günter Eich’s late texts. In her analysis of his prose
poems, Kleinhans privileges not animals as ‘objects’ of writing, but as a
part of a ‘complicat[ion] [of] the relationship between the animal in the
text and the animal as text’. Kleinhans’s analysis is grounded on her argu-
ment that the lines between ‘language and animal(ity)’ are blurred, which
has major consequences for conceptions of language and meaning (2018,
45). She demonstrates that Eich, by naming the genre of prose poems
he wrote a ‘mole’ and having them ‘burrow through language’, disturbs
the traditional framework whereby language captures animal reality, and
introduces moles not only as subject matter of the text but as ‘the textual
genre itself’ (51). In her conception of zoopoetics, animality is some-
thing that is not only followed by language in order to be represented,
but rather forms literary language and textuality themselves. This clearly
has sizable consequences both for texts and for animals, as it suggests that
the former are more material than mere cultural abstractions and that the
latter are not simply bodily matter. Her conception relies on the deci-
sion—present both in her methodology and, according to her, in Eich’s
poetics—‘to break the referentiality and metaphoricity of language’ (55).
With that, she seems to insist that a zoopoetics must grapple with the
meaning-making procedures of language (and with how these are related
to animality), and not only with the referential content of texts.
Another crucial contribution to the theorisation of zoopoetics is Aaron
M. Moe’s Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry. Moe defines
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

it as ‘the process of discovering innovative breakthroughs in [literary]

form through an attentiveness to another species’ bodily poiesis ’ (2014,
10). This focus on form is, I argue, very welcome, as it allows Moe
to theorise poetics and animality together. For him, zoopoetics ‘moves
toward material gestures of the text’ and identifies in those gestures the
echoes of animal poiesis —animals’ ‘makings through their innumerable
nuances of bodily movement, symbolic gesture, [and] symbolic vocaliza-
tion’ (7). Thus, analysing a poem by Ray Gonzalez that describes several
snakes nailed onto a wall, forming ‘twisted letters’ as they writhe, Moe
argues that the poem ‘finds a way to give the writhing bodies voice’,
since ‘the poem’s materiality […] emerges from an attentiveness to the
snakes’ [movement]’ (6). I discuss such a focus on form—as well as on the
materiality of language—in detail in Chapter 4, where I argue it is essen-
tial in order to understand how signification and animality both work
according to an iterable logic of ideality and materiality. Therefore, in
my reading of Ted Hughes’s ‘The Thought-Fox’, I answer Moe’s call to
‘look at alphabetic language differently’ (7). For him, zoopoetics must
take the question of iconicity seriously, whereby ‘an attentiveness to the
spatial, temporal, visual, and auditory dynamics of a poem’ is encour-
aged. This reinforces Moe’s argument for the importance of form, since
‘iconic poems move away from emphasizing the “meanings” of words
and toward a word’s shape, gestures, and therefore implied movement’
(7). This same impulse is also present in zoogrammatology as I propose
it, and it is borne out of methodological, theoretical, and philosophical
conclusions regarding the intertwinement of animality and signification,
and the speciesist consequences of treating the materiality of the text (its
body) as a transparent vehicle for extra-textual presences. Moe argues that
this latter approach is systematically part of the ‘Western tendency to look
through words rather than at them’, according to a belief that ‘language is
something “invisible”—something that exists less in the body and more in
the interiority of the mind’ (7–8). The enquiry of this tendency occupies
a considerable portion of Derrida’s deconstructive project, and I discuss
in depth his analyses of the reasoning—present in Saussure, Husserl, and
others—that language is not material. I argue, following Derrida, that
the dematerialisation of spoken language—together with the insistence
on, and the denigration of, the materiality of writing—explains not only
the phono-logocentrism of the Western tradition, but also its anthro-
pocentrism and speciesism. As I demonstrate, Derrida does not simply
20 R. PISKORSKI

defend the materiality of language (or of the signifier), but in fact decon-
structs the material/ideal opposition in what becomes a vital contribution
to thinking of animality in/and language.
Despite Moe’s useful methodological and theoretical orientations, my
project diverges from his in two main aspects: firstly, he is at pains to
argue that animals’ poeisis (which zoopoetics is credited with echoing)
is produced by means of intentionality and agency. This is less urgent for
zoogrammatology, which understands that the materiality of language and
animality is co-constituted, regardless of whether animal materialisations
are produced intentionally by animals. In the wake of Derrida and Lacan,
it becomes less relevant whether signification is mastered by agency, since
even human sovereignty is complicated by the unconscious, the signifier,
language, etc., and even ‘human’ language is not thought as a human
phenomenon, characterised as it is by différance and the trace, as I discuss
in more detail in Chapter 2.
Similarly, I do not share Moe’s trust in the linguistic iconicity for
which his methodology calls. Whereas I argue for the importance of a
methodological insistence on iconicity and formalism in order to theo-
rise animality and language together, this insistence can only occur within
a horizon of its own failure. As Genette shows at length in his Mimo-
logics, the belief in the iconicity of language—which he calls ‘mimological
reverie’ and identifies in various moments throughout history—is not
borne by linguistic and philosophical evidence, and ultimately serves to
uphold notions of the transparency of language and of human sovereignty.
As I argue in detail in Chapter 4, it is necessary to act as if the sheer mate-
riality of language were meaningful in itself, in order to avoid an overt
focus on textual subject matter to the detriment of textuality, but also to
recognise that no signification or referentiality can function based solely
on materiality.
Another literary critic who has offered similar accounts of the (animal)
materiality of texts is Sarah Bouttier, who responds to the question of the
‘creaturely’, starting from Anat Pick’s work, in order to make the point
that texts can be thought as creaturely as well. This textual creatureli-
ness stems from a text’s ‘being embodied and finite at the same time,
in a way that redefines their materiality and referentiality’. Their mate-
riality as texts secures their bodiliness while their struggle to establish
‘their objects’ presence in the world’ opens them up to finitude—they are
constantly being denied an embodiment which is other than their textual
selves (2015, 111).
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

She suggests that not all texts can be considered to be creaturely,

however, even if a creaturely textual object is not a ‘sine qua non for
creaturely textuality’ (ibid.). Rather, she views objects which are crea-
tures as facilitators for the creatureliness of texts. Bouttier grounds her
understanding of text on Derrida and ‘deconstructionist theory’, since
they portray the text as constantly ‘navigat[ing] between self-referentiality
and a gesturing towards the outside’ (113–4). Starting from Derrida’s
description of a poem as a hedgehog, Bouttier entertains that ‘the poem
is theorised as embodied because it binds together letter (itself) and
meaning (a reference to what is outside itself)’, and is defined by this
‘double allegiance’ (114). She suggests that the most successful a text can
be in representing animal reality’s creaturely embodiment is by precisely
offering up its own textuality—it is textuality itself and not its capacity
for representation that is most productive for referencing the animal.
‘The text intimates a sense of the creaturely by gesturing towards a crea-
turely reality without trying to express it in a mimetic manner, but rather
by being something itself and sharing that presence with the creaturely’
(115).
She also addresses what I am going to call the issue of ‘corpus selec-
tion’, namely: how does one choose which text to analyse when the
overarching argument being made is about the very character of textuality
itself? Would a strategy of careful selection (choosing texts about animals,
for example) undermine the argument for the importance of textual mate-
riality and the secondarity of referentiality? She concedes that ‘it remains
that the representation of the creaturely impacts a text’s form to the point
that it changes genres’ and she calls attention to the fact that Deleuze
and Guattari, when writing about becoming-animal, ‘invariably choose
texts and works of art dealing with animals’. For her, ‘this is consistent
with their idea that the animal object plays an active part in the creative
process of becoming animal—it is not only chosen by but actively alters
the work of art and its producer’ (117). In short, she proposes that the
creatures referenced by creaturely texts, rather than simply furnish a target
for linguistic representation, turn out to actively ‘account for the [text’s]
form’ (117–8).
Thus, within that context, I call the study of the arche-animal in
literature zoogrammatology, since it mirrors grammatology, the scientific
study of arche-writing as proposed by Derrida.2 Of Grammatology initially
appears to propose a scientific field that would study (arche-)writing, but
Derrida underscores the impossibility of such a project from the start:
22 R. PISKORSKI

‘writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service of science—and even-

tually its object—but first […] the condition of possibility of ideal objects
and therefore of scientific objectivity. Before being its object, writing is
the condition of the epistémè’ (Derrida 2016, 29). By a process of substi-
tution already familiar to Of Grammatology, one could write: Animality
is not only an auxiliary means in the service of literature—and eventu-
ally its object—but first the condition of possibility of signs and therefore
of representation. Before being its object, animality is the condition of
mimesis.
A Derridean Literary Animal Studies, as a zoogrammatology, can work
to reveal this condition. However, just as writing eludes the scrutiny of
science since it turns out to be merely the effect of a repression of the
‘older’, more generalised arche-writing, it is likely that these animal condi-
tions of signification are effaced by the very procedures that seem to offer
readers the animal, the intended referent or meaning of an ‘animal’ text.
How does one go about ‘ignoring’ the animal meaning in order to read
the animal conditions? For Judith Butler,

this is no easy matter. For how can one read a text for what does not
appear within its own terms, but which nevertheless constitutes the illegible
conditions of its own legibility? Indeed, how can one read a text for the
movement of that disappearing by which the textual ‘inside’ and ‘outside’
are constituted? (1993, 37)

Therefore, this book takes as its starting point that the practice of
paleonymy is one of the main aspects of Derrida’s deconstructive read-
ings, especially the ones which are concerned with the tension between
the materiality of bodies or signifiers and the ideality of subjectivity or
signifieds. I propose paleonymy—by putting forth the arche-animal—as
necessary both to properly approach animals as objects of study or of
representation in literature and to devise an appropriate critical method-
ology. As I hope to show, the aporias regarding animal being feed into
and are fed by similar aporias regarding the character of texts and the
meaning-making they enact. Thus, the series of readings I offer below
takes seriously the invitation for a more formalist approach to literary
texts: they do not focus on texts about animals and, even if they do,
they do not privilege the animal content of those texts. Rather, I strive
for a third option, dissimilar from either formalism or paraphrase, which
attempts to locate the conditions and consequences of the signification
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

process: that which happens at the interface of form and content. These
conditions and consequences, due to the co-implication of object of study
and methodological approach that I have suggested, will ultimately be the
arche-animality of the text. In other words, I attempt to read the arche-
animal because it represents a more productive object of study than the
usual, heavily loaded concept of ‘the animal’, but, at the same time, this
arche-animal is also the focus of a methodological approach that tries to
skirt both formalism and idealism.
Initially, in Chapter 2, I situate the analytical strategy mentioned above
of foregrounding animal embodiment in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of
Animals, and I underscore such a strategy’s inadvertent admission of the
constitutive powers of language in literature’s attempt to grapple with
embodiment. Next I discuss in more detail the co-implicated character
of language and materiality and offer a critique of some interventions
in Animal Studies and their reliance on a thinking of the body. I then
shift the discussion onto a Derridean ground by revisiting his early writ-
ings on Husserl where he exposes the similarities between language and
animality, and I conclude by discussing how Derrida’s deconstruction of
the linguistic sign and introduction of the trace opens a space for thinking
the animal differently.
Assuming that linguistics and animal embodiment share the same
origin, in Chapter 3 I turn to a reading of Sigmund Freud’s Totem and
Taboo as a way of providing a genealogy of the materialisation of both
animal and linguistic bodies so as to map the extent to which they overlap.
In my reading, I show that the totem animal discussed by Freud has to be
thought as an arche-animal that is neither ideal as the notion of species
to which it belongs, nor material and singular as one specific member
of that species. This is especially important because the totem animal,
in Freud’s account, provides totemism with its symbolising capacity. The
emergence of totemism is presented by Freud as the shift from nature
to culture, so that this shift will be grounded on a totemic language
dependent on the arche-animal. This semi-mythical shift, caught up as it
is in Freud’s infamous notion of the ‘primal crime’, furnishes some of the
same aporias as the passage from natural symbol to conventional signifier,
whose discussion is central to Derrida’s deconstruction of the linguistic
sign. The strange temporality of this passage is explained by Derrida by
means of Nachträglichkeit, a concept from Freud himself. Finally, this
chapter addresses the concept of the arche-animal in its relationship to
materiality and ideation in more detail.
24 R. PISKORSKI

In Chapter 4 I explore the consequences for literary analysis and

theorisation of the zoogrammatology described so far by reading Ted
Hughes’s poem ‘The Thought-Fox’ for its zoogrammatological contri-
bution to debates concerning the nature of poetic language. I start by
discussing Derek Attridge’s presentation of Roman Jakobson’s ‘poetic
function’ and the aporias it raises, which I argue are derived from the
repression of arche-animality. I then review Gérard Genette’s account of
theories of linguistic representation and how different strands of poetics
dealt with them. This segues into a discussion of the benefits and traps
of formalist criticism and the historical background of the concept of
‘form’. The apparent advantages of formalism are called into question
by a revision of Derrida’s critique of the material and ideal aspects of the
linguistic sign in Of Grammatology. Finally, I analyse how ‘The Thought-
Fox’ responds to these concerns by means of its intertwining the very
nature of poetic representation with animal representation. I argue that
the poem acknowledges the arche-animality of the fox in its constitutive
role in the functioning of linguistic meaning. By associating successful
poetry-making with an animalistic visual onomatopoeia (the use of repe-
tition of the letter w to represent fox pawprints), the poem identifies
the work of poetry with accurate representation of reality, at the same
time as it equates that accuracy to a certain reverie brought about by the
arche-animal.
Chapter 5 continues some of the psychoanalytic focus of Chapter 3
but changes textual genres completely by analysing Darren Aronofsky’s
2010 film Black Swan for its reflections on the possible uses of animality
in signifying practices. I start my discussion with a brief outline of the
film’s plot as evidenced by my analysis of one crucial scene, along with
what could be called a standard Lacanian interpretation. After that, I
delve more deeply into some of the thematic strands that organise the
textuality of the film and set up its investment in arche-animality. I move
on to discuss animal representation itself, which leads me into its role in
psychoanalysis in general, and especially in Freud’s case study about the
Wolf Man. I read Freud’s account for its disruptive arche-animality, before
connecting it both to Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-animal and the
film’s becoming-swan. Rather than reading the swan referred to in the
title as a metaphor, or the ballet plot both in the film and in the libretto
as metaphors for the psychosexual madness suffered by the protagonist,
I analyse the assumptions made by the film regarding representation and
its relationship to material embodiment. I argue that the film presents
 1 INTRODUCTION 25

a duality between (artistic) representation as grounded in formal tech-

nique—which I call dancity—and representation as occurring when these
techniques are transcended, which I call transcendanse. Both options are
shunned, however, by the becoming-swan depicted in the film, which I
claim to be a figure of arche-animality.
Finally, Chapter 6 analyses animality in Clarice Lispector’s novel The
Apple in the Dark, as it is crucial to the novel’s concern with the human
passage (or the re-treading of the passage) from nature to culture. Rather
than a stage in such a journey, the animal is revealed by the novel as
an arche-animal, an articulating supplement which precedes—and thus
makes possible—the differentiation between stages in an evolutionary
scale. I locate the paleonymy of arche-animality primarily in the poetics of
light and dark prefigured in the title, but also in the novel’s concern with
temporality and (animal) mortality. This concern is channelled primarily
through the figure of giving birth. ‘To give birth’, in Portuguese, is intrin-
sically connected to light, since one would say, to mean ‘to give birth to
someone’, either dar a luz a alguém (‘to give the light to someone’)
or dar à luz alguém (‘give someone to the light’). I read the flicker in
the novel between the two variants of the expression as indicative of a
paleonym that not only interprets the poetics of light and dark but also
critiques common understandings of animal embodiment.
This series of analyses thus represents an attempt at identifying arche-
animality in a variety of textual genres and traditions, so as to diagnose
the different mechanisms by means of which the vulgar concept of the
animal is produced out of the repression of arche-animality. If my read-
ings constitute a demonstration of the concept of arche-animality as a
theoretical issue, they also offer examples of zoogrammatology as a crit-
ical practice, one that can expand Literary Animal Studies beyond the
remit of texts about animals.

Notes
1. A Derridean neologism combining the French words ‘animals’ (animaux)
and ‘word’ (mot ). I return to this animal-word in Chapter 3.
2. I first proposed zoogrammatology in my article ‘Of Zoogrammatology as
a Positive Literary Theory’ (Piskorski 2015).
26 R. PISKORSKI

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 CHAPTER 2

Animal as Text, Text as Animal: On the Matter

of Textuality

Introduction
As a privileged example of the kind of counter-linguistic criticism outlined
in the Introduction, one can read J. M. Coetzee’s musings on animality
in The Lives of Animals (1999) as both an instance of, and an incentive
for, this view. With it, Coetzee—by the means of his character Elizabeth
Costello—has encouraged the privileging of embodiment as the tenor of
literary research into animals.
In this lecture disguised as novel (or novella), the fictional author
Elizabeth Costello is invited to give a talk at an American university on
a topic of her choosing, and she decides to speak about animals both in
philosophy and in literature. Her contribution to the approach to animals
mentioned above is based on her focus on the animal’s radically alien
being-in-the-world as compared to human reason and abstract thought:

To [human] thinking, cogitation, I oppose [the animal’s] fullness, embod-

iedness, the sensation of being – not a consciousness of yourself as a kind
of ghostly reasoning machine thinking thoughts, but on the contrary the
sensation—a heavily affective sensation—of being a body with limbs that
have extension in space, of being alive to the world. This fullness contrasts
starkly with Descartes’s key state [cogito ergo sum], which has an empty
feel to it: the feel of a pea rattling around in a shell. (33)

© The Author(s) 2020 29

R. Piskorski, Derrida and Textual Animality,
Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51732-8_2
30 R. PISKORSKI

Coetzee has in fact become a sort of patron for literary research into
animality, having been invited to contribute chapters to books on the
topic and to give talks in Animal Studies conferences, as well as by
being an author whose work is often the focus of said research.1 Accord-
ingly, Costello offers later in the novel her take on good and bad uses
of animals in literature. Comparing the poem ‘The Panther’ by Rilke
with Ted Hughes’s ‘The Jaguar’ and ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’, she
argues: ‘In that kind of poetry, […] animals stand for human quali-
ties: the lion for courage, the owl for wisdom, and so forth. Even in
Rilke’s poem the panther is there as a stand-in for something else’ (50).
To this ancient fabular textual animality—widely criticised nowadays as
anthropomorphic2 —Costello contrasts Hughes:

Hughes is writing against Rilke. […] With Hughes it is a matter—I empha-

size—not of inhabiting another mind but of inhabiting another body. That
is the kind of poetry I bring to your attention today: poetry that does not
try to find an idea in the animal, that is not about the animal, but is instead
the record of an engagement with him. (51)

This approach has proved immensely popular with literary scholars,

to the point that poetry (synecdochally standing for all of literature)
and animality are said to be aligned in challenging human linguistic and
rational limitations.3 Even beyond that, it has been suggested that what
we may call the literary branch of Animal Studies can contribute basically
that: a representation—and a defence—of the otherness of animals. Again,
Costello offers us the model:

Writers teach us more than they are aware of . By bodying forth the jaguar,
Hughes shows us that we too can embody animals—by the process called
poetic invention that mingles breath and sense in a way that no one has
explained and no one ever will. He shows us how to bring the living body
into being within ourselves.4 (53, my emphasis)

It is clear, therefore, that the argumentation depends wholly on the

distinction between body and mind. Only insofar as animal being is taken
to be saturated with embodiment can Costello argue that animalistic
literary texts are able to account for a ‘bodily engagement’ with some-
thing other than language. In truth, the question before us (that I address
for most of the present book) is whether such animal embodiment is
anything other than merely the Other of language. If the very concept
 2 ANIMAL AS TEXT, TEXT AS ANIMAL: ON THE MATTER OF TEXTUALITY 31

of non-linguistic, non-rational animal life whose phenomenality would

challenge the powers of referential language can be shown to be caught
up with linguistic function, then Costello’s ‘poetic invention’ would in no
way transpose the limits of textuality.
As it is, Coetzee’s wording itself exposes the doubling effect that refer-
entiality produces with respect to the matter of animal being: while the
materiality of bodies (always first and foremost an animal body, even
though Costello stresses the commonality of embodiment across the
living) is taken to be that which lies outside of language marking its limita-
tions, the same matter is also at work within language as that which makes
representation possible—as the phenomenal, signifying breath which must
be articulated with (signified) sense in order for ‘poetic invention’ to be.
Therefore, within language itself, a corporeality which is always animal-
istic can ‘already’ be found, even ‘before’ linguistic signs attempt to reach
for the supposed extra-linguistic matter of animal embodiment: the signi-
fier as the material face of the linguistic sign, the concrete breath which
is articulated with sense in order to produce meaning and reference.
This chapter explores these notions by discussing the complicity
between the signifier and matter, and the intimate connection between
the former and animals.5 I then analyse how the writings of some
Animal Studies authors fail to recognise that complicity. In order to
situate the connection between signifier and animal, I discuss Derrida’s
early engagement with Husserl, which serves as a window both to tradi-
tional, metaphysical understandings of language but also to the evolution
of the concept of language in early Derrida. Finally, I analyse Derri-
da’s deconstruction of the linguistic sign—and his introduction of the
trace—to identify both the limits of the signifier/animal equation and
the theoretical ground for zoogrammatology.

The Materiality of Language

and the Signifying Body
Geoffrey Bennington has stressed the specularity which creates a double
effect of materiality in two distinct sites in the network of elements asso-
ciated with the linguistic sign as proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure—the
referent as well as the signifier:
32 R. PISKORSKI

This tripartite division [signifier, signified, and referent] gives us the

appearance of a reign of ideality (signified, concept, the intelligible) which
touches on both sides a realm of materiality. Upstream, in first position,
things, the world, reality; downstream, in third position, the signifier, the
phonic or graphic body that linguistics has always thought of […] as that
of a word […]. Following a specular structure, we can valorize either the
domain of ideality […] or the ‘hard’ materiality of things and, via a perilous
extension, of the signifier. We can distribute as we wish the values of truth
and illusion in these two realms without escaping the basic schema: the
sign has always been thought of on the basis of this distinction between
the sensible and the intelligible, and cannot be thought otherwise. (1993,
26–7)

The accusation of radical linguistic relativism (in which referenced

bodies would always already be only the result of the very act of refer-
encing) can be staved off if ‘the phonic or graphic body’ of the linguistic
sign be considered in its irreducible affiliation to an entire metaphysics
of the body as the animal component of human existence. To the extent
that even the bodies of humans can only be thought in articulation with
animal embodiment,6 the sensible/intelligible schema, so succinctly gath-
ered under—or maybe even produced by—the body-and-soul structure,
owes its intelligibility to the concept of animality. In other words, it is not
that Costello is wrong because animals are always already language, she is
wrong because any language (even the Rilke poem she derides) appears
to be haunted by the materiality which is made possible by the concept of
animality—that of the signifier. However, the primordiality of either the
animal body or the signifier—with respect to their matter—can never be
sufficiently determined and one will continuously haunt the other, both
as product and matrix. In other words, it is unclear—and perhaps even
aporetically indeterminable—whether materiality flows from the signifier
to the animal body, or vice versa; whether the body is primordially an
animal phenomenon that influences language, or an effect of the mate-
rial aspects of language itself. It would be necessary to concede that the
linguistic signifier and the animal are co-dependent.
As Judith Butler has consistently argued, the body whose materiality is
supposedly undisavowable is constituted by language and the sign as their
constitutive outsides. To the extent that signs work to signal and reference
‘bodies’, the latter are marked by that operation of referentiality:
 2 ANIMAL AS TEXT, TEXT AS ANIMAL: ON THE MATTER OF TEXTUALITY 33

The body posited as prior to the sign is always posited or signified as prior.
The signification produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body
that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims as that which precedes its own
action. If the body signified as prior to signification is an effect of significa-
tion, then the mimetic or representational status of language, which claims
that signs follow bodies as their necessary mirrors, is not mimetic at all. On
the contrary, it is productive, constitutive, one might even argue performa-
tive, inasmuch as this signifying act delimits and contours the body that
it then claims to find prior to any signification. This is not to say that
the materiality of bodies is simply and only a linguistic effect which is
reducible to a set of signifiers. Such a distinction overlooks the materiality
of the signifier itself. To posit by way of language a materiality outside of
language is still to posit that materiality, and the materiality so posited will
retain that positing as its constitutive condition. […] Can language simply
refer to materiality, or is language also the very condition under which
materiality may be said to appear? (1993, 30–1)

Cary Wolfe approaches the same issue as a frame to understand

different attempts of overturning humanism. Insofar as ‘the human’
traditionally

is achieved by escaping or repressing not just its animal origins in nature,

the biological, and the evolutionary, but more generally by transcending
the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether, (2010, xv)

trying to simply affirm the materiality of embodiment does not escape the
realm of humanism, since embodiment’s characterisation as material is co-
extensive with its disavowal by humanism. Rather, Wolfe’s posthumanism

names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just
its biological but also its technological world, the prosthetic coevolution
of the human animal with the technicity of tools and external archival
mechanisms (such as language and culture) […]—and all of which comes
before that historically specific thing called “the human”. (ibid.)

Wolfe’s Derridean approach enables him to indicate the conceptual

contraband at play in posthumanisms which fail to skirt metaphysics:
34 R. PISKORSKI

What Derrida helps us to see […] is that just because a particular discourse
[…] presents itself as a materialist rendering of the problem of conscious-
ness in relation to embodiment, does not mean that the discourse is not
metaphysical. (43)

As suggested above, Costello intends to engender, by way of literary

language, the possibility of engaging with extra-linguistic animal embod-
iment, but she is ‘positing by way of language a materiality outside
of language’ when she reveals that poetic invention can only work
by mingling ‘breath and sense’. Butler is writing against the strategy
according to which the body is invoked as a reality whose ‘hard’ matter
has to be conceded by the constitutive powers of language. Akin to such
strategy is the invocation of animal reality as foreign to human concep-
tuality and language, a reality whose concession rests once again on the
persuasive powers of the rhetoric of materiality.
Against Butler’s suggestion that the very concept of materiality—
thought to secure a space outside the grasp of language—can only be
intelligible by means of language itself, one may object that the talk of
‘intelligibility’ and ‘rhetoric’ in no way leaves the realm of the linguist,
and that the animal—as non-human—and its body (or bodies in general)
represent (a word which might also be refused in the same gesture) the
break and end of language as world-building. More radically, theoretical
issues in Animal Studies can sometimes be derided as totally unrelated to
real animals, whose life (another term in the rhetorically powerful chain
of materiality) is a power with which theory has to reckon as something
absolutely exterior. Finally, there are those who, while conceding that
language shapes the world in one way or another, would argue that the
animal—precisely for being non-human—is the shape of existence beyond
a linguistically saturated world.
However, following Butler, it would be important to point out that
animals-as-exterior-to-language is still a concept of such exteriority and,
as such, in no way leaves the realm of language or avoids the burden of
intelligibility. ‘Matter’ is supposed to mark a radical exteriority to concep-
tuality, but, as Butler puts it, ‘to have the concept of matter is to lose the
exteriority that the concept is supposed to secure’ (31). Another related
issue, even if only chiasmically, is the constitutive role of animal corpore-
ality in the shaping of the linguistic signifier, which will then be accused
of always failing to represent that very corporeality. In other words, the
invocation of (or call for) the reality of animals beyond the cultural and
 2 ANIMAL AS TEXT, TEXT AS ANIMAL: ON THE MATTER OF TEXTUALITY 35

philosophical issue of access (as cultural, linguistic access to reality) makes

recourse to the supposedly unavoidable materiality of animal being, but
that is precisely the meaning and effect of the concept of animal as
produced by or alongside textuality. As I suggested above, the material
appearing of language (the efficacy of signifiers) cannot exist without
the materiality it borrows from animals’ bodies, but the latter can only
be intelligible by the means of the material linguistic signifier. That will
mean that (the materiality of) language and (corporeal) animality are
co-implicated. Butler strongly supports this point when she argues that

the materiality of language, indeed, of the very sign that attempts to denote
“materiality,” suggests that it is not the case that everything, including
materiality, is always already language. On the contrary, the materiality of
the signifier (a “materiality” that comprises both signs and their significa-
tory efficacy) implies that there can be no reference to a pure materiality
except via materiality. Hence, it is not that one cannot get outside of
language in order to grasp materiality in and of itself; rather, every effort
to refer to materiality takes place through a signifying process which, in
its phenomenality, is always already material. In this sense, then, language
and materiality are not opposed, for language both is and refers to that
which is material, and what is material never fully escapes from the process
by which it is signified. […] Apart from and yet related to the materiality
of the signifier is the materiality of the signified as well as the referent
approached through the signified, but which remains irreducible to the
signified. This radical difference between referent and signified is the site
where the materiality of language and that of the world which it seeks
to signify are perpetually negotiated. […] Language and materiality are
fully embedded in each other, chiasmic in their interdependence but never
fully collapsed into one another, i.e., reduced to one another, and yet
neither fully ever exceeds the other. Always already implicated in each other,
always already exceeding one another, language and materiality are never
fully identical nor fully different.7 (68–9, last emphasis added)

In a similar problematising vein, Jean-Luc Nancy, in his dense essay on

the body ‘Corpus’, delineates the constraints which traditionally limit
thinking of the body: ‘properly speaking, we only know, conceive, and
even imagine a signifying body [corps signifiant ]’ (2008, 67). Despite the
fact that for the most part of the essay Nancy will attempt to propose
new modes of thinking, he also describes the traditional metaphysical
formulations that have shaped our concept of the body as always already
a signifying body, caught up with the concept of sense: ‘[the body] should
36 R. PISKORSKI

operate as the place-holder and vicar of sense’ (ibid.).8 He describes the

trappings of a concept of the body which always portrays it as the body
of sense:

We can only conceive of completely hysterical bodies, paralyzed by the

representation of an other body—a body of sense. […] The signifying
body—the whole corpus of philosophical, theological, psychoanalytic, and
semiological bodies—incarnates one thing only: the absolute contradiction
of not being able to be a body without being the body of a spirit, which
disembodies it. (67, 69)

It is, therefore, often a failure to recognise the limitations of both

idealism and naïve materialism that will result in the exteriority of animal-
as-embodiment to language. Such formulation has, at any rate, been
adopted in Animal Studies circles as a philosophical strategy in the attempt
to attack speciesism and anthropocentrism. Next, I shall attempt to briefly
critique three such strategies for their reliance on a problematic under-
standing of the body of animals, as they can be found in the work of
Carol J. Adams, Cora Diamond, and Donna Haraway.

Rhetorics of the Body

Carol J. Adams, in her otherwise exceptional work in the intersections of
misogyny and carnivorism, puts forth a problematic conceptualisation of
the body when she introduces the concept of the ‘absent referent’ to refer
to the slaughtered bodies of animals who get turned into meat: ‘through
butchering, animals become absent referents. Animals in name and body
are made absent as animals for meat to exist. […] Live animals are thus
the absent referents in the concept of meat’ (1990, 40).
In her formulation of the process of reference—or lack thereof—that
obtains between meat and animal, it is not clear what ‘referent’ is taken
to mean, if by ‘referent’ we understand that which is necessarily under
erasure and absent in the formal process of meaning-making. As it is,
all referents are absent in language and the productivity of the signifier
(as when she argues that animalised language can be used to oppress or
describe the oppression of humans) in no way describes the special struc-
ture of disappearance to which she argues animals to be exposed. When
she argues that ‘within the symbolic order the fragmented referent no
longer recalls itself but something else’ (45–6), it is not clear whether she
Another random document with
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 Note du transcripteur
On a fidèlement reproduit l'orthographe et l'accentuation du
livre, sauf que dans les mots suivants, qui ont été corrigés
selon l'usage courant dans le texte:

page 1, ligne 2: CHAMPETRE → CHAMPÊTRE

p. 6, l. 15: Ét vous → Et vous
p. 90, l. 5: me trouvé-je → me trouve-je
p. 105, l. 11: extrêmités → extrémités
p. 117, l. 8: d'ètre époux → d'être époux
p. 123, l. 7: l'illusion disparoit → l'illusion disparoît
p. 130, l. 11: dégoutantes → dégoûtantes
p. 198, l. 3: traine → traîne
p. 210, l. 15: succedent → succédent
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LES NUITS
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