Abstract
The recent mass culling of mink in Denmark and elsewhere, following the animals’ contamination by a COVID-19 variant, is taken as a re-entry point into Derrida and Lacan’s mink-mediated conversation in The Beast and the Sovereign. Out of the etymological ‘stink’ attached to the mink emerges an animot gifted with (unlimited) ink, with a potential to disturb philosophies of language, to write back or strike back, as it has recently done in the form of alignments of dead yet resurfacing animals. In the wake of Derrida’s verbal disseminations around the vison, and of Lacan’s attribution of a ‘sort of language’ to the animal in The Formations of the Unconscious, this essay follows an animal pack with includes the 17 million mink programmed for (double) extinction by inhumation and cremation. A hauntology follows, adumbrated by Lacan’s interest in the ‘secretion’ of fur, mink oil and (psychoanalytic) sense, and by Derrida’s encounter with the neoliberal, crypto-vison Alain Minc in 1994.
Highlights
Is there, yet once more, something rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark? Before the start of the 2020 pandemic, the fur farming industry could claim to be bolstered by ‘healthy’ retail sales: the marketing of mink pelts was a thriving international affair, involving actors such as the American Mink Exchange or Kopenhagen Fur – in spite of what the US Fur Commission sought to discredit as the ‘radical theocracy’[2] of the Animal Rights movements
In the wake of their massive killing or ‘culling’, four million mink carcasses are scheduled to be unearthed in the summer of 2021 in North Zealand, after an initial test exhumation in May 2021 to assess the condition of the animals buried for over six months under a thin layer of soil and lime
Una lonza leggera e presta molto, che di pel macolato era coverta’.53
Summary
Freshly exhumated or due to be incinerated, the cohorts of Danish mink will have their ‘say’, to pick up the first, performative syllable of ‘And Say the Animal Responded?’16 The ‘culled’ animals, killed for fear they might spread a mutated version of SARS-CoV-2 known as Cluster 5, have kept resurfacing from their graves literally as well as textually – as underground workers lined up under lime yet repeatedly returning to haunt the headlines,[17] or as moles working ‘i’th’earth so fast’.18. How does the recent killing of millions of minks respond to the relatively minor appearance of one mink towards the end of Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign II and, much earlier, in Lacan’s Seminar V – hardly a cluster How do they speak or write back to a philosopher and an analyst’s reflections on animal semiotics/a-semiotics? First by inhumation by incineration, the mink manifest a form of ‘rite’ in excess; twice negated yet possibly not quite dead yet, they may be writing a parodic accelerationist manifesto, in keeping with the collapse of economic paradigms and neoliberal projects Their elimination to the power of two renders obsolete the anthropological and philosophical line on which Derrida concludes his seminar. It challenges classic approaches to the concept of ‘environment’ as an externalized, differential sphere – a challenge best rendered perhaps in Derrida’s formulaic phrase: ‘Lacan talks “mink”’.32 What is happening to 17 million mink is a grim repetition of Derrida’s ‘trace’ and Lacan’s ‘signifier’, respectively rewritten as two processes of effacement: to trash, to (s)ignify and turn to ash
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