Aesop's symposium of animal tongues

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to ‘triangulate’ in a theoretical fashion three textual sites that address in quite different ways the ‘animal turn.’ The first site is comprised of the first literary texts studied in the medieval classroom, a collection of Aesopian fables. The second is a collection of modern and postmodern studies of animality – most notably by Marin, Agamben, Derrida, Wolfe and Oliver. The third is the Vita Aesopi, a rarely studied biography that served in the late Middle Ages as a prolegomenon and metafable for the fables themselves. What holds these three discursive sites together is their sustained interrogations of language, and most preeminently, of metaphor. Metaphor, as well as a number of closely related locutions such as ‘clinamen,’ ‘l’aperto’ and ‘l’animot,’ is essential in our attempts, both medieval and modern, at conceptualizing and redefining the foliated frontier between the so-called animal and the so-called human. The vigilance with which the demarcations between human and animals, humans and things, and humans and children are watched over and safeguarded tells us much about the assailability of what they seek to preserve: an abstract notion of the human as unified, autonomous, and unmodified subject. Diana Fuss, ‘Introduction: Human, All Too Human’