Abstract
This essay takes Louis Agassiz's research on jellyfish, primarily his 1850 `Contributions to the Acalephae of North America', as a site for exploring the ethical implications of a muddled scientific and aesthetic gaze. Using Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of sensory embodiment, as well as modern ecophenomenological perspectives, the author re-examines the human–jellyfish encounter that Agassiz narrates, with a concern for two different ‘dislocated bodies’: that of the scientist who would reduce himself to only his observing eye, and that of the frequently dismembered animal specimen. Agassiz's rhetorical negotiations of jellyfish as high aesthetic forms rather than high life forms (understanding them as creatures that, in an era of humanist ocularcentrism, cannot properly ‘look’, but are wonderful to ‘look at’) make this essay an analysis not only of the nineteenth-century disembodied gaze, but also of the figurative language that transforms animal into image.
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