Spenser’s “Open”

Abstract

Continental postmodernism’s influential “return to ethics” has recently revisited such figures as Bataille, Girard, Kristeva, Lacan, and others in order to pursue the question of the animal as the repressed other of Western culture. At the same time, a recent trend in early modern cultural studies has begun investigating sixteenth—and seventeenth-century perspectives on human- animal difference. This essay does not attempt an impossible—and, perhaps, even undesirable—bridging of early modern and early modernist inquiries into animal being. But, in its broadest scope, it is concerned with how The Faerie Queene opens up beyond its own historicity to take its place in a genealogy of Western culture’s ongoing discourse, from Aristotle to Descartes to Heidegger, on the question of the animal as bearer of absolute alterity. This essay offers no polemic on whether Spenser’s poetry anticipates a liberal humanist preoccupation with animal rights. Rather, it eventually focuses on a particularly moment early in The Faerie Queene that reveals Spenser’s anxiety that our access to animality—more particularly, to insect-being—is less mediated than we might think.