Jack London’s Wolf Cubs, Michel Serres’s Burning Ship and the Creaturely Situation

Abstract

This essay argues that the literary imagery of Jack London and Michel Serres performs a recalibration of the self-directing subject of post-Cartesian philosophy. This revision embraces an attention to the subject’s exposure to its environment, or what we call here the creaturely situation. Even if the terms of the creaturely situation appear in the original formulation of the Cartesian cogito, they nevertheless serve to reinforce its insistence on self-direction. This essay opposes the Cartesian model to the environmental materiality that appears in Serres and the adventure fiction of Jack London. While Descartes disposes of material concerns – does away, in fact, with his social and physical environment – in order to formulate the principle of cogito ergo sum, London’s 1906 novel White Fang imagines wolves and humans alike to be creatures subjected to a particular environment; they are both agentive and compelled. In these surroundings, agency becomes a matter of negotiation between (contingent) decisional power and (selective) environmental forces.