In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida critiques the pervasive division between “the human” and “the animal” as philosophical constructs. He asks, “What are at the edges of a limit that grows and multiplies by feeding on an abyss?” (31). For Derrida, this “abyss” arises from the rigid splitting apart of categories that are mutually dependent. Giorgio Agamben centralizes this question of definitions in his work on the “Anthropological Machine” in which “the production of man through the opposition man/animal, human/inhuman” operates on a failed binary logic (37). To say that the human is separate from but related to the animal is already to exclude and include both categories within each other. Both Derrida and Agamben thus trouble representational definitions of “human” and “animal.”
Following from this theoretical background, this panel focuses on representational figures that emerge in nineteenth-century British science, literature, and theater that deconstruct traditional boundaries between human and animal. The panel provides a range of perspectives within Critical Animal Studies and Nineteenth-Century Studies. Each paper takes up liminal figures that question the definition of the human in relation to the animal. In particular, children and dogs recur in these papers as intermediaries. As such, their very presence disrupts the Cartesian divisions of human as separate from animal/machine.
The papers on this panel demonstrate that the question of human-animal relations is part of larger ethical crises in the nineteenth century over definitions of the human. Because “boundary conditions” are also spaces in which to find solutions, this panel seeks to demonstrate alternative forms of being and becoming with both human and animal figures through its focus on a liminality that reflects the porosity of borders and challenges traditional definitions of human and animal.
Panel Participants:
Kaitlin Mondello is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at City University of New York, The Graduate Center.
Michael Gamer is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Elisha Cohn is an Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University.
Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze is a Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Comparative Media Studies and Writing.
Shun Kiang received his Ph.D. degree in English from Northeastern University in May 2015 and is an assistant professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College.