Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory by Cary Wolfe (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.3, 2005 755 Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory. By Cary Wolfe. Foreword by W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2003. xvi+ 237 pp. $49 (pbk $18); ?34.50 (pbk ?13). ISBN 0-226-90513-6 (pbk 0-226-90514-4). Animal Rites is an exciting book on an important topic. Its coverage of contemporary philosophy and critical theory is vast and various, and its application of this body of work to literarytexts (Hemingway is the subject of one ofWolfe's chapter-length case studies) and popular culture (Jonathan Demme's The Silence oftheLambs and Michael Crichton's Congo formthe other two case studies) convinced me that overt discourses of race, class, and gender sometimes cannot be understood without reference to the discourse of species. The writing is patient, thorough, and elegant. If you want to see what theory has been up to since Haraway and Zizek, this is an exhilarating tour of some key debates. Yet Wolfe's book is also full of frustratingswitchbacks. It is not that he gets bogged down in the old question of drawing lines between lemurs and lobsters or lobsters and lugworms, since for him living forms are everywhere differentiated by degree rather than kind and it is precisely forthis reason that the animal/human binary needs to be deconstructed. The real problem is that Wolfe's posthumanist and transdisciplinary theory of the discourse and ethics of species is, as he concedes, merely a snapshot. The argument against humanism is exhaustive, but the posthumanism that Wolfe's argument points to remains a shadowy entity. The theoretical problems here are admittedly considerable. Yet Wolfe's effortsto inch his way out of humanism keep coming round to the same old point. It is obvious enough that 'animal rights' rest on a thoroughly humanist conception of 'rights', clear too that critiques of racism and sexism in cultural studies are founded on 'speciesism'. But humanism keeps on poppingup in the oddest places: in Wolfe's view, Cavell, Lyotard, Levinas, Bauman, and Bhabha ultimately return us to discredited positions j ust as we thought we were on the point of breaking free. At the end ofthe book all we have is a glimpse (principally via Derrida) of a beginning. This probably says a lot about the state of play in this field. But ifthis is indeed the starting point, one wonders why Wolfe did not starthere. 'Can they suffer?' Wolfe's answer to Bentham's question is positive, fora straightforward and a complicated reason. It is straightforward in that human life is currently based on the systematic slaughter of living creatures. Wolfe tactically accepts the animal-rights agenda while emphasizing that its philosophical underpinnings remain inadequate. It is complicated because Wolfe's ultimate purpose is not to make animals more 'human' but to unsettle the category of the human itself. This is all very well, but it suggests that animals were never the real topic. Wolfe's animals remain animals in theory: Heidegger's lizard, Bateson's cat, Wittgenstein's lion. Wolfe criticizes those who take the animal's muteness forgranted, suggesting that 'the playful baring of the fangs between two wolves' signifies 'the bite that does not exist' and in turn 'a rela? tionship [. . .] whose "referent" [. . .] is itself the autopoiesis of the pack structure that determines those relationships' (p. 85). But this is surely a wolf in Wolfe's clothing: the fang-baring is more than a sneeze but a good deal less than a wink. It seems to me that animals are 'other than animal' and therefore ethically considerable not because they 'communicate' but because they make ontogenetic choices. When they bite back they remind us ofthe real. Keele University T. J. Lustig ...