The Animal Capital of Recession in Danielle McLaughlin’s Dinosaurs on Other Planets

Abstract

"Following Nicole Shukin’s notion of “animal capital” (2009, 3), which “simultaneously notates the semiotic currency of animal signs and the carnal traffic in animal substances” (7), this article investigates the capitalist interdependence between the cultural and material dimensions of animal life as represented across Danielle McLaughlin’s short story collection Dinosaurs on Other Planets. The first section highlights potential theoretical connections between Shukin’s notions of “rendering” as well as “animal’s saving grace” (2018, 95) and Maurizio Lazzarato’s conception of futurity under the “logic of debt” (2012, 25). The second section analyses the texts’ depiction of the “contingency” that market life has upon animal life, such that the system of debt exacerbates cruelty toward humans and nonhumans alike, with animal bodies being “rendered” as food or artefacts (Shukin 2009, 20). The third section reveals how the “ambivalence of animal signs,” meaning the “capacity of animal life to be taken both literally and figuratively” (Shukin 2009, 6), interacts with the characters’ anxieties regarding the recession and economic migration. Keywords: animal capital, rendering, animal’s saving grace, debt, economic migration, post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, recession "