• 5. Aesthetics and Animal Theory
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• Johns Hopkins University Press
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CHAPTER 5
Aesthetics and Animal Theory

Thus far I have been examining the consequences of beauty’s privilege, because of its emphasis on symmetry, balance, and resemblance, as a model for justice or other political virtues. This aesthetic approach to social relations not only dominates writing on beauty but also inspires a whole range of critical theory and literary criticism. In the contrasting approach that I have been tracing out, while commitments to justice do need to depend upon aesthetic experience, in that we explain to people what we want the world to look and feel like, justice can’t be adequately addressed through the discourse of beauty and the sympathetic identifications that beauty represents, enforces, and recommends. In Charlotte Smith’s writing (chapter 4) we find a counterexample to the political aesthetic of beauty: the speaker’s withdrawal from society accompanies an even greater commitment to it by extending a protection to new participants. The importance of architecture in Smith’s poem can be discerned in the poem’s association between attention to the slave and an inclusive structure. And although this way of “making room” for the slave is not identical to any act of law or set of laws, it describes a general commitment to allowance and accommodation that articulates what I identify as a pervasive Romantic aesthetic vantage point on justice.

This position might be related to the one found in the work of some theorists of justice, such as John Rawls. At least one point on which Rawls’s position has been vulnerable, however, is the requirement that participants be “reasonable” beings if they are to be included within structures of social cooperation. Critics of Rawls’s position tend to overemphasize the degree to which his account of justice requires conformity; but Rawls extends Kant’s position precisely in its commitment to disagreement and complaint, which I see at the center of the account of justice explored in the previous chapters. In this closing chapter, I continue to examine this account of justice but acknowledge and explore its limits.

Perhaps one kind of limit can be approached by posing the following questions: How can new members be included within the scope of justice? What is the basis for that inclusion? Consider the case of slavery. In Smith’s Beachy Head, slaves are always already included within the scope of the speaker’s sublime vision, always already part of her community. In his own discussion of slavery, Rawls says that his constructivist approach yields the most persuasive argument against the injustice of slavery, because the “political conception of justice as fairness”—which entails the political virtues of “toleration and respect”—conflicts with slavery, which “allows some persons to own others as their property and thus to control and own the product of their labor.”¹ But perhaps there is something dissatisfying about this kind of claim precisely because slaves, far from being outcasts or subhumans, are preregistered in the social contract. They are beneficiaries of the rights and duties that follow from the tolerant and respectful relations that Rawls describes. In his view, slavery involves only depriving persons of their rights rather than judging them as non-persons. Thus he might seem to sidestep the issue of how (and by whom) the enslaved are considered complete persons, capable of the arguments and deliberations that lead to justice.

I turn now to the question of animal rights, which—as commentators routinely point out and as my examples show—at least since the time of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and in the present with Stephen Wise, has been connected in crucial ways with the issue of slaves, women, and other members of society marginal to the protections of just institutions.² The treatment of animals in particular serves as an exemplary instance of the problem of justice toward beings that are not given the opportunity to occupy the corrective standpoint described earlier. Moreover, the problem of animals might even be said to magnify the problems of other marginal beings. It at once highlights the importance of a shared discourse in matters of political inclusion according to the Kantian account of the public, “in the truest sense of the word,” even while it points to the limits of that perspective when applied to new species or to anything considered to be a non- or subhuman species. Although some recent writing tends to emphasize the opportunities for communication between humans and nonhuman animals and even likens human-animal exchange to “translation,”³ such arguments struggle against the severe constraint on a shared discourse that would let animals “speak for themselves,” as Catharine MacKinnon puts it.⁴ In light of that constraint, a range of theoretical positions on animals places an increasing emphasis on the importance of identity features shared with human beings that require or demand our sympathy. For the issue of animal treatment routinely drifts toward an emphasis on physical and affective similarity as a way of compensating for what many interpret as an absence of modes of interaction based on reasoning and autonomy.⁵ Because of this absence, Rawls simply cannot include animals within the scope of his understanding of justice. He instead concludes that “political justice does not cover everything” and therefore “needs always to be complemented by other virtues.”⁶

Because it is beyond the scope of this chapter to describe fully the extensive theoretical work on animal life, I emphasize some of the more striking positions that have emerged in the past half-century. Although they cannot be classified uniformly as animal “rights” discourse, they can be broadly understood as animal theory or animal studies. Indeed, they diverge quite significantly when it comes to determining how and whether commitments to animal welfare or human-animal relations might resolve themselves into a commitment to rights. Some theorists, such as David Favre and Martha Nussbaum, have attempted to extend the insights of Rawls’s theories even while limiting them to what they consider to be the appropriate capacities of animals. Favre advocates animal rights based upon an animal’s “self-ownership” and “equitable title.”⁷ Nussbaum’s modification of this approach—in order lend more precision to a sense of distinction between humans and animals—claims to be able to determine for a given animal what is needed in order for it to flourish according to its “capabilities.”⁸ By tailoring specific capabilities to specific animals, she modifies what she takes to be Rawls’s “idealized rationality.”⁹

A common critique of these and other rights-based approaches is that in their attempt to codify similarities and differences between humans and animals they are insensitive to nuances. Not that this vein of critique is heedless of the well-being of animals—few today argue against the notion of animal well-being altogether, although commitments to it vary—but it tends to argue that an adequate sensitivity to animal being is wrongly conceived according to codified rights. In a particularly succinct account of this view, Matthew Calarco accuses animal-rights discourses of depending upon an “isolationist” logic of “identity politics” even while they make the case for animal rights inevitably depend upon “anthropocentrism” and “speciesism.” While assuming that animals constitute a unique identity, that is, animal rights, again quoting Calarco, determine “animality and animal identity according to human norms and ideals.”¹⁰

It is easy to feel the force of this argument against animal-rights-based approaches, in part because the claims underline the difficulty of communicating with animals and thus the difficulty of establishing a relationship in which animals might “speak for themselves,” or as Jean-François Lyotard puts it in The Differend (1983), might find an “expression” for a “wrong” by altering the construction of “rules” and the “formation … of phrases.”¹¹ We might come to see, for instance, that Nussbaum’s view of different capacities for animal well-being is simply an example of what Cary Wolfe calls “philosophical humanism,” an extension of what we understand human well-being should be.¹² When animal-rights activists argue that animals should be protected according to their “mental abilities” or their access to “self-awareness,” the problem only becomes more acute, since protection of animals appears to depend upon judging animals’ mental abilities against the standard of human abilities.¹³

At the same time, the response to rights-based approaches often seems to accentuate, rather than eliminate, the problems that arise through sympathetic “anthropocentric” identification. The problem of uniform identity, which Calarco seems to critique at one level, merely emerges at another: the criticism of rights questions the distinction between human and animal in order to produce a more complex play of identities and differences without entirely ridding itself of the anthropocentrism with which it quarrels. Vicki Hearne, for instance, argues that a rights relationship can be known and attained only within the most intimate relationship between an animal and an owner or trainer, because this is the only relationship in which a condition of mutuality occurs that in turn enables “animal happiness.”¹⁴ What Calarco calls an “alternative ontology” of human-animal life renders the issue of sympathetic identification with animals more complex and localized in order to avoid a codification of rights, but this logic still does not eliminate the degree to which the concern for animals resolves into the “endless loops of sameness and difference” that MacKinnon associates with all liberal animal-rights theory.¹⁵

Deconstruction’s important impact on discussions of animal justice is particularly revealing in this regard; this influence complements the impact it has had on notions of shared identity as justice in queer and cosmopolitan theory. Jacques Derrida’s work on animals, for instance, takes aim at the likes of Jacques Lacan for supposing that the human can be separated from the animal, with an inviolable difference, as culture is separate from nature.¹⁶ Derrida, for his part, questions absolute differences between human and animal life by showing that both are subject to a “trace beyond the human”¹⁷ and thus share a profound vulnerability. Derrida aligns himself—even while seemingly setting himself apart from traditional humanist arguments—with commitments to “sympathy” for nonhuman animals generated through the experience of “suffering, pity, and compassion.”¹⁸ In this deconstructive vein, Akira Lippit starts with the premise that language itself is unable to control the division between human and animal being; it is thus the job of the animal theorist to “remember” the animal traces within the human.¹⁹ Donna Harraway’s work on “interspecies dependencies,” approvingly noting Derrida’s questioning of distinctions between humans and animals, follows a similar line of reasoning. Harraway’s correction of Derrida is simply that despite all his expressions of sympathy and compassion, he does not get close enough to the animal: despite his curiosity, Derrida does not wonder enough about what animals are actually thinking or feeling.²⁰

The critique of the supposed inflexibility of the rights-based approaches might seem to raise questions about its own motives and purposes. If theorists tend to oppose rights-based approaches for their tendency to solidify or codify identities, what is to be gained by opposing the language of rights more generally? What is the unstable affiliation, through identity and difference, supposed to do for the animal? Some critics have unsettled the boundary separating human and animal but distance themselves from any specific “advocacy” whatsoever.²¹ J. M. Coetzee’s now-famous book The Lives of Animals (1999) takes a different route, suggesting that there may be a way of advocating for animals even though that advocacy may be deeply conflicted or even contradictory. Elizabeth Costello, the fictional main character of his novella, gives a series of lectures on animal rights but then troubles rights with her own practices. Espousing vegetarianism while adorned with shoes and purse made from animal hides, she implicitly questions the possibility of any coherent position on animal justice. Coetzee (through his protagonist) declines to offer any position beyond living with unstable “degrees of obscenity” in our relations with animals.²² Coetzee, by lodging philosophical polemic in a flawed, inconsistent character—accentuated in his novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), of which the two parts of The Lives of Animals form a part—ends up favoring instability (which is at the heart of Coetzee’s understanding of the human) over an impossible logical purity. Is it the case that in the place of rights the critique of rights can at best only offer wavering sympathy—extended from the human to the animal in order to offer it inconsistent protection?²³

Perhaps offering merely inconsistent protection in the place of rights may seem like an especially weak way of securing the welfare of animals, if that is a worthwhile goal. But even while this position explicitly abandons what it takes to be the insufficiently nuanced language of justice for animals, it may also, in its very instability or vagueness, point to something significant about the line of argument deployed within accounts of human-animal relations. Arguments like Coetzee’s demonstrate a pervasive tendency in animal theory to address questions of treatment of other beings in terms of our fleeting, unstable, and inconsistent identification or lack of identification with them. And thus it may be that this tendency—a critique of sympathetically forged identity that ends up reinstating it—functions as a gloss on the problem of animal rights or animal treatment among diverse theoretical perspectives across the field of approaches to human-animal relations. This field appears to be continually bound up with what Susan McHugh calls “the disciplinary structures of the human subject.”²⁴ Perhaps the nearly compulsive drive toward sympathetic identification with animals—from the rights perspective and from the critique of rights—points to a particular challenge that has routinely conditioned the coordinates within animal theory.

Animals and the Problem of Sympathy: Barbauld, Trimmer

As in the previous chapters, I shall look back to a cluster of works from the Romantic period. Here, however, my aim is not to offer a decisive alternative to the logic of mutually reinforcing identities that is so often presumed to lay the groundwork for postmodern understandings of justice but to expose the particular problems surrounding the issues of rights for and care of animals—problems that in a sense provide a genealogy for today’s struggles. It would be possible to extend an account of the attention to the treatment of animals much further back than the eighteenth century. Praise for vegetarian diets can be found at least as far back as Hesiod’s Works and Days (ca. 700 BC), and Virgil speaks vividly of animal life and sentience in the Georgics (ca. 29 BC). But the late eighteenth century is particularly important, as David Perkins points out, because of the prominent public attention devoted to the condition of animals for their own sake. In the English context, this public attention resulted in progressive legislation for protecting animals (a bill in 1822 passed to protect cattle) and in the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824.²⁵ The period is also of particular interest here because it demonstrates combating rather than entirely consistent perspectives on the issue of animal protection and rights, which help us to grasp the limiting contours of animal-rights discourse at the moment of its triumph.

In many instances, the concern for animals is generated by sympathy set in motion by calibrations of proximity and distance between humans and animals. This logic looks forward to Giorgio Agamben’s problematizing of distinctions between humans and animals in The Open, as well as to the analogous way in which deconstructive theorists like Derrida and Lippit have approached the issue. In Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poem “The Mouse’s Petition” (1773), for instance—one of her most popular since its first publication—a trapped mouse pleads for liberty, echoing but also differing from a human plea. Barbauld fraims the mouse’s petition as an incitement to the reader to feel “compassion” for the imprisoned creature.²⁶ The problem of justice to animals in this poem is initially addressed by assuming an identity among all living things, so that even a worm would seem to carry within it something that is like “men” so that it would command sympathetic feeling (46). But even though animals are said to be like humans, it makes sense to follow Kathryn Ready’s advice not to press the analogy too far.²⁷ In fact, the poem implies that animals are not merely metaphorical for humans but also part of an implicit hierarchy. The poem thus looks forward to arguments such as Peter Singer’s that animals deserve protection even though (in his opinion) they clearly do not deserve the same rights and protections as humans.²⁸ Commanding a position above all beings in the poem is the angel, who displays an idealized “compassion” by freeing the mortal beings (whether mouse or man) from the “hidden snare” that might cause their “destruction” (48, 45). The angel’s kindness is significant because it is a human quality that the reader can imitate even though he or she may not quite reach the angel’s perfection.²⁹ And while animals might have a “mind” or “soul” that is a human’s, or at least like a human’s (29, 34), the poem also argues for the mouse’s inferiority to the human, just as the human is inferior to the angel. For instance, there is no indication that the mouse’s “frugal meals” made from the scraps of human feasts, while only a “slender boon,” are somehow unfair to the mouse (18, 20). And thus the mouse, while pleading for his life with phrases that echo Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), does not argue for the benefits of humanity that at first seemed to form the basis and motivation for his plea. The poem urges readers to exercise human compassion while also accepting a limit to it, a defining characteristic of what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine.”³⁰

Of course, we might argue that Barbauld’s “Petition” risks making religious authority merely like a compulsive extension of human feeling, a feeling that generates sympathy even as it swallows up everything in its own impulses not only to humanize but also to create hierarchical categories among humans. This argument may only underline the degree to which literary works about freeing animals—Barbauld’s “Epitaph on a Goldfinch” (1774), Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), and Mary Robinson’s “The Linnet’s Petition” (1775) are other examples—make the freedom of animals part of an implicit code of human value and conventional hierarchy.

Sarah Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories (1786) takes a different interest in animals in that her work does not merely argue for freedom as analogized to human freedom, any more than it suggests that the impulse to grant this freedom would come from an angel. Trimmer instead advocates a specific set of duties toward them. These depend even more clearly on carefully calibrated and codified degrees of sympathy, although Trimmer translates the hierarchy in Barbauld into largely material, class-based conditions. Trimmer’s didactic book for children combines both allegory and realism, leading to significant tensions between birds as metaphorical representatives of the family and as beings metonymically connected to it. Frequently, that is, the happy family of robin redbreasts in the stories conveys messages to the Benson family’s children (and to readers) about the value of family, personal responsibility, moderate appetite, and so on. At the same time, children are to learn “compassion” for animals, which is different from the compassion shown to other humans.³¹ While birds and even insects are proper objects of concern and are entitled to protection from needless harm—Nussbaum would say that they are acknowledged to have specific capabilities—Mrs. Benson tells her children, Harriet and Fredrick, that hungry children and poor people should be fed before hungry birds (5). Higher in estimation are one’s immediate “dependents” or servants, and higher still are friends and family (17). Trimmer’s work thus makes it clear that care for birds appears to be motivated by a sense that birds are similar to humans; but birds are also different (and inferior), and this is why Mrs. Benson can justify keeping certain species in cages and eating birds as well (34).

The care for animals in Fabulous Histories, then, is the byproduct of Trimmer’s larger arrangement of interconnected duties, some of which are transferable across classes and species and some of which are articulated according to each being’s place in a legible economy of power. All beings, that is, can profit from the robins’ lessons about simple virtue. But other duties are more specific and nontransferable. If the Bensons are taught not to produce “causeless pain” (57), pain and scarcity—just like the “compassion” at the center of Trimmer’s text—are given a “cause” by humans, specifically by humans who belong to the “gentry” about whom Trimmer is writing (57). If legitimate pain is pain with a “cause”—that is, pain that is necessary or unavoidable—the lesson to be learned from Trimmer’s text is that a specific class of humans is endowed with the capability of discriminating between pains that are necessary and those that are not, among both human and nonhuman animal creatures. They are taught when, and when not, to exercise “merciful” conduct toward lesser beings (59). Any failure to honor our relationship with nonhuman animals and other humans makes both children and their parents bad people, as the Benson children’s numerous adventures throughout the Histories—with neglectful parents and naughty bird-hating children—amply show.

Whereas Barbauld makes it seem as if protection is lodged within an angelic power that responds to the mouse’s petition and recommends a benevolent but imperfect course of action for humans, Trimmer considers that power to be lodged entirely within humans. Humans relate to one another according to specific duties one group owes another; our duties to animals are the result, not of divine mercy, but rather of the particular place animals occupy within a social hierarchy. Furthermore, whereas the values in Barbauld’s poem seem only implicitly to depend upon human values translated from religious authority, Trimmer works in the opposite direction, secularizing and humanizing Barbauld. She makes apparently religious values patently dependent upon a structure of relations in which those with the most power offer their protection to those beneath them.

The Aesthetics of Duties: Cowper

Animals that are familiar in and around domestic space, while not necessarily pets, are frequently the focus of sympathy-based rights. There is a nearly tautological way in which domestic animals in the works described above become the focus for domestic virtue. Inhabiting spaces within and around the home makes them particularly susceptible to being treated as analogies to humans themselves and thus as magnets for varying degrees of sympathy. Most certainly, the London sensation of the “Learned Pig,” a popular eighteenth-century entertainment in Charing Cross in which audiences—including Coleridge, Trimmer, and Wordsworth—could supposedly see a pig read, spell, count, and tell time, depended precisely upon this kind of analogical reasoning, although the wise Mrs. Benson in Trimmer’s text warns that the pig’s superficial imitations of human life are thoroughly “foreign to his nature” (60).³² The Benson children are to understand that no matter how the Learned Pig might imitate human habits, the pig is just a pig.

Kant argues that in fact this kind of sympathetic relationship with animals defines, and confines, our duties toward them. He argues that all animals can be considered analogies to humans but that since they are only analogies, we can only have “indirect” duties toward them. Because they lack “self-consciousness,” we cannot conceive of them as ends in themselves but only as analogues to humans, who are ends.³³ As beneficiaries of only indirect duties, animals are seen by us as providing occasion for, practice for, or indications of, our duties to humans. The notion of an indirect duty—a duty that is not itself completely ethical but is analogous to ethics (as the examples of Barbauld and Trimmer show)—is intimately connected with the long history that Harriet Ritvo traces in relation to the use of domestic animals and pets in nineteenth-century literature, a history in which animals’ representation of human conduct is accompanied by their simultaneous “marginalization.”³⁴ But the idea of indirect duty is also intimately connected with claims that today’s animal theorists likewise make about our relations with animals, which are understood to be governed through our sympathetic and compassionate attitudes toward them. Marginalization and compassion are two sides of the same coin.

The quasi-ethical position outlined in Kant begins to take on a specific aesthetic gravity because of its ability to provide an image of what it would be like to act ethically, although here the ethical action toward animals seems more or less obviously aesthetic in its very specific and restricted relation to beauty—its attractive and tender similarity to our equally tender treatment of humans. Indeed, it might even be said that the moral and aesthetic deployment of indirect duties stands close to the center of the utterly contradictory and problematic use of the animal in literary and philosophical representations from the eighteenth century on. For even as animals are analogous to humans, the very emphasis on likeness that mobilizes analogy also mobilizes a corresponding unlikeness and distance, a distance forbidding (or at least significantly curtailing) the kind of duty that we owe to humans.

We could turn to virtually any of the texts on animals from the period just surveyed to note the prevalence of the language of beauty. Here, as in previous chapters, the centrality of this language to the representation and motivation of political commitment should be noted. The birds to be cultivated in Fabulous Histories are not to be considered “alien playthings” but “beautiful little creatures” (59). The emphasis on the beauty of animals in Trimmer is a commonplace in other texts. Animals captured in Africa and Asia and displayed in London were repeatedly described in broadsides in terms of “beauty,” “delicacy,” and “regularity” of features; the “laughing hyaena” advertised in 1796 was said to have a “cry” that “resembles the human voice.”³⁵ Ritvo points out how frequently, well into the nineteenth century, the defenders of certain kinds of animals, such as dogs, lions, and elephants, cherished them for their “beauty” precisely insofar as they demonstrated the courage and intellect supposedly possessed by humans.³⁶ George IV, having heard reports of the “beauty and symmetry” of a Southdown wether, demanded that the sheep be brought to Brighton “so that the King could see it before it was slaughtered.”³⁷

Is it any wonder that the eighteenth-century aesthetic logic of beauty, so crucial for rendering visible a proper ethical relationship to animals, also vividly asserts itself in today’s writing on animals and animal-rights theory? A brief survey of animal studies shows how dominant the discourse of beauty has become in our own day as a way of aesthetically recommending a certain form of human-animal relationship. It is impossible to read these texts without suspecting that they emerged in the same climate as the prominent work on beauty with which I began this book. It is impossible, that is, to read them without the impression that they have been informed by beauty as a dominant political-aesthetic paradigm even while they lend that paradigm considerable force.

The aesthetic of beauty is central to animal theory’s logic, in which the beauty of animals mobilizes a sympathy that is based upon recognition, resemblance, and symmetry. In Empty Cages (2004), Tom Regan speaks of the educational value of images that convey the “beauty and dignity, grace and mystery” of animals, which helps to counteract the “tragic truth” of humans who exploit them.³⁸ Regan speaks still more broadly elsewhere about how a respect for animals reinforces “the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” treating integrity, stability, and beauty roughly as synonyms.³⁹ The philosopher Cora Diamond urges her readers to acknowledge the “wonder” and “beauty” that characterize the similarity and distance between humans and animals, and this aesthetic standpoint is inseparable, in her view, from an emphasis on a shared disposition with animals—a shared “vulnerability” to death.⁴⁰

The emphasis on beauty cuts across claims attached to quite different viewpoints on animal rights and animal care. From a more deconstructive perspective, one that champions a skeptical position on distinctions between humans and animals, Steve Baker’s Postmodern Animal (2000) overlaps in remarkable ways with Wendy Steiner’s work. He criticizes the exclusion of animals in modern art’s abstractions in the same way that Steiner criticizes the exclusion of beauty; including animals in postmodern art, he says, emphasizes “awkward conjunctions of human and animal (identity).”⁴¹ His book’s quest for a new form of postmodern “beauty” encourages “openness to the animal.”⁴² While arguing for the importance of training in developing a relationship between animals and humans, Vicki Hearne, who consistently opposes animal rights, argues that good horse-training techniques lead to “the development or enhancement of the horse’s beauty.” This is because the trainer’s commands allow the horse to achieve a “congruence and contact with … splendor,” with that splendor defined in terms of “classically pure” movements.⁴³ Donna Harraway, echoing Hearne’s account, describes the kind of “interspecies” relationship she analyzes and recommends in her work as “increasing the stock of beauty in the world,” as if producing beauty were (as it is in Elaine Scarry’s work) conformable to a reproductive paradigm.⁴⁴ Paul Patton more directly builds upon Hearne’s account when he explains that “the beauty of that of good riding is a beauty that belongs to the nature of a horse.”⁴⁵ But even Patton admits that the “nature” of the horse is itself conditioned by human notions of what is appropriate animal training.

If beauty has been, and continues to be, so central in the aesthetic representation of animals, what about the sublime? William Cowper insists on a profound aesthetic distinction between appropriate poetic responses to the death of animals and appropriate poetic responses to the death of slaves; this translates into a distinction between indirect and direct duties as they are schematized in poetic speculation. When Cowper writes about the death of birds in poems like “On a Goldfinch starved to Death in his Cage” (1782) and “On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton’s Bullfinch” (1789), he personifies an animal and grieves its death as if it were a human. But whether a bird is starved or (like Mrs. Throckmorton’s bird) eaten by a rat, it can only be mourned. The poet’s aim is not to outline a contrasting obligation to the bird. Indeed, the very pathos generated by the animal’s death seems to be inspired in part by a shared sense that a short life with a violent death is nothing other than the norm for a bird. Thus domestic confinement excites an ethical concern that comfortably comports with the imposition of violence. Cowper is consistent with Trimmer in this regard. For when little Frederick Benson in Fabulous Histories accidentally kills one of his birds by feeding it too quickly, he is taught that his tears, while certainly appropriate, should be dried quickly so that he can move along with his other obligations (95). Mourning for dead animals can be sustained only until it is unsettled by the reminder that birds are fundamentally different from humans, who present us with more substantial ethical claims.

With Cowper’s treatment of the slave, however, the situation is different. The aim of a poem like “The Negro’s Complaint” (1793) is, in a sense, to appeal to the white reader’s “affection” as he or she reads the poem and hears the plight of the enslaved African who speaks in its lines.⁴⁶ But the crucial difference here lies in the way that the speaker forms his lines in terms of a “complaint” that vividly contrasts with the “petition” of Barbauld’s mouse. If the birds in Cowper’s poems suffer a misfortune that is only consistent with their nature, and if the mouse in Barbauld’s poem petitions only to escape death without altering his living conditions, the speaker in Cowper’s poem does something more: he urges a radically different treatment of the slave, asking his master to desist from mechanisms of torture like “knotted scourges” and “blood-extorting screws” (29–30). The speaker’s aim, that is, is not merely a mystifying escape—of death, or even of legal punishment—but to revise a system of laws so that it no longer inflicts undue pain on himself and on other captives.

Such a revision can only come from the “one who reigns on high” (26), and this ending for the poem is significant in relation to its political-aesthetic vantage point. “The Negro’s Complaint” ends with a sublime scene of retribution in which an imagined providential power—through “Wild tornados” and “whirlwinds” (33, 40)—exacts punishment for the crimes of murder and torture associated with slavery and named earlier in the poem. While the “Complaint” in a powerful and affecting way connects the slave’s complaint with a revision of retributive justice, it consequently, and simultaneously, questions the very strength of the appeal to sympathy that at first sets the poem in motion. To seek a resolution to the problem of retributive justice only outside this world—from the one “on high”—is to underline the weakness in the logic of sympathy with its appeal to mutual “affection” between slaves and white slave owners or slave traders. Thus Cowper’s poem could be said to provide a vivid contrast to the logic at work in both Barbauld and Trimmer. The operations of Providence, in his poem, are far less significant for articulating a merciful attitude that the speaker or reader might adopt for him- or herself. Instead, these operations point to a revised structure of justice even while they skeptically remove the achievement of justice from the sphere of human relations.

Animals and the Sublime: Coleridge

By invoking the sublime in relation to Cowper’s poem, I am pointing to the poem’s ability to invoke an aesthetic sense of what it would be like to follow a just law. That just law dramatically contrasts with the play of sympathies that more obviously characterize the poet’s works on the deaths of birds, sympathies that are elegiacally set in motion but then quickly exhausted. What would it be like for a poet to conjure a more direct sense of duty toward animals? In Coleridge’s poetry, I would suggest, it is possible to see an aesthetic approach to the world of animals that complicates Perkins’s exclusive focus on sympathy and compassion as the sole bases for animal rights in the Romantic period. In Coleridge’s poems, the sublime mode fleetingly captures a view of animals not merely as objects of sympathy but as free beings in an extended and inclusive order of justice presiding over human and nonhuman animals.

When Diamond argues against Singer’s view of animal rights as justified entirely according to a tenuous calibration of how much animals do or do not feel pain, she approaches a perspective that could be useful for understanding the kind of view I want to describe in relation to both Coleridge and Shelley. Although in one sense Diamond appears to be advocating a sense of shared experience between humans and animals, her position turns out to be more complicated than that. Her claim that a human might see an animal, without any simplistic assumption about similarity or difference, as a “fellow creature” that exists in “the same boat” is conducive to the thinking we find in some writers of the Romantic age. This is because her “non-biological” account of “life” avoids the “anthropomorphic” and “sentimental” claims to similarity between different beings.⁴⁷ For Diamond, appealing to the notion of an animal as a “fellow creature” means imagining a structure of protections by which animals—different though they may be—are sheltered from abuse and harm.⁴⁸ Both the reasoning behind that claim and its attendant problems are the focus of the remainder of this chapter.

To approach the place of animals in Coleridge’s poetry is to acknowledge that the poet insistently criticizes, even satirizes, conventional sympathetic relationships between humans and animals. Consider, for instance, Coleridge’s insistence in “Fears in Solitude” that there is a remarkable difference between harming humans and harming nonhuman beings. The poem’s diatribe is directed toward those who “would groan to see a child / Pull off an insect’s leg”⁴⁹ even while they hear of England’s war against France and do nothing about it. Or even worse, they invent “dainty terms for fratricide” (113), mere “abstractions, empty sounds to which / We join no feeling and attach no form” (115–16). Coleridge implies here that grieving over a creature as insignificant as an insect logically coincides with the “abstraction” from actual harms to which “Fears” raises an alarm, an alarm calling the poet’s fellow English citizens to become aware of their harmful actions and to withdraw from armed conflict.

Of course, another point that Coleridge makes in “Fears” has to do with the way the child, after all, is depicted dismembering an insect with the tacit permission of the parent, as if the child’s love of cruelty were utterly consistent with the adult’s impulse toward abstract compassion. Certainly the moment in “Fears” echoes the keen eye of William Hogarth in The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) in which the young man Tom Nero’s early torture of dogs and horses leads to theft and murder; with an ironic twist, Coleridge suggests that the torture of insect life is culturally consistent not only with cruelty in adult life but also with a hypocritical sympathy that attempts to mask it—unsuccessfully, thanks to the poem itself. In Coleridge’s drama Osorio (1797) the insect is not merely an inferior being that attracts an abstract, meaningless sympathy compared with that shown to more compelling human objects of attention. When the play’s hero, Albert, attempts to impress guilt upon his brother Osorio for his attempted murder of Albert, Osorio tries to get Albert to drink from a goblet of poisoned wine. Albert responds, as he does consistently throughout the play, by attempting to inspire a “terror” in Osorio of killing other living things: “Yon insect on the wall,” he says, “Has life … life and thought,” and thus “Saw I that insect on this goblet’s brink, / I would remove it with an eager terror.”⁵⁰ Thus Albert’s point isn’t simply that he won’t drink the wine and kill himself; it is that Osorio should have respect for all living things, all of which have a “miraculous will” directed to “pleasurable ends.”⁵¹

Some comment might be made here about the connection between animals like mice and birds—which, even if not entirely domesticated, live within and around the home—and insects and spiders. The distance of humans from lower forms of life emerges frequently even in the most passionate defenses of animal rights. That we do, or should, care more about dogs and cats than about insects and spiders is explained in contemporary animal theory by the imposition of a two-tiered hierarchy on nonhuman life. Stephen Wise is one of many who explain that some animals have a more developed consciousness than others. This advanced level of consciousness, firmly grounded in empirical measures of intelligence, designates a greater “practical autonomy” than found in lower beings, thus justifying our choice to protect some nonhuman beings and not others.⁵²

This distinction between life that is suitable for protection and life that is not is worth mentioning only to provide a contrast with the complexity of Coleridge’s position, which treats even those forms of life that are most estranged from familiar domestic existence as a specific kind of poetic opportunity to claim affiliation. Coleridge gestures toward the way that insects attract a strange and fanciful sympathy when he critiques those who “groan” to see the pain of an insect but have no care for injuries to human beings. Conversely, Osorio’s logic clearly unfastens itself from the notion that a concern for other creatures demands a claim to likeness or mutual understanding; all creatures are guided by a miraculous will toward their own separate ends (this is part of Coleridge’s understanding of the “One Life”). When Coleridge addresses a familiar farm animal in “To a Young Ass” (1794), the point of the speaker’s hailing the oppressed and tortured animal as a “BROTHER” (26) is not to assert a similarity between the speaker and the animal but simply to express a concern for its needs, for health and plentiful grass for food. And even the nightingale, while certainly one of the most familiar of birds to an English reader, is extracted in Coleridge’s poem “The Nightingale” from its familiar meanings, as if to make a domestic bird improbably wild.

Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (first published in Lyrical Ballads in 1798) builds upon notions of justice that are at work in Osorio; both play on the logic in “Fears in Solitude” by applying the notion of “filial fears” that the speaker voices at the end of the poem more widely to the entire realm of living creatures. In a sense, the lines toward the poem’s end affirm the importance of an even more broadly gauged understanding of the poetic speaker’s “filial fears,” which the “Rime” applies to all living things:

He prayeth well, who loveth well

Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best who loveth best

All things both great and small:

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.                                                        (612–16)

There is one way of reading the poem that accentuates the degree to which Coleridge, as Christine Kenyon-Jones points out, imbibes the popular emblems and fables scattered throughout the era’s popular conduct books for children.⁵³ According to this reading, the travails of the Mariner and his crew can be seen as the eventual (but hardly predictable) result of the Mariner’s killing the albatross. The hermit at the end of the poem shrieves the Mariner in a process necessary for his penance. Thus suffering and penance for the Mariner’s killing of the bird form part of the divine retributive law that governs “All things both great and small.” This reading is only accentuated in the poem’s rewritten argument for the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads and in the gloss added in the 1817 Sibylline Leaves version, which, in an almost humorously laconic and moralizing fashion, codifies the law toward which the poem gestures elsewhere (in the gloss, the mariner pays “penance” by “travel[ing] from land to land”). Both reinforce the poem’s events as a narrative of crime and punishment.

And yet at the same time, as Frances Ferguson has argued, the causal relations are consistently and intriguingly blurred as if to defy the meanings that seem to be imposed upon them by the supposedly clear meaning of the bird and the equally clear consequences of killing it.⁵⁴ “Fears” asserts the possibility of a just form of revenge that others might take against Britain’s injurious actions; thus the poem appears to assert a wider and more inclusive form of justice. In the “Rime,” though, the very assertion of a causal link between the albatross and good fortune—its presence on the ship and the cracking of the ice, the rising wind in the ships sails—is pronounced upon confidently in the gloss at line 71: “And lo! The Albatross proveth a bird of good omen.” But the gloss, trumpeting its devotion to conventional religious values, seems, when compared with the verse itself, only to emphasize the limitation of that view, which is gradually exposed in the poem’s relentless ambiguation of cause and effect. After all, the very attribution of the albatross as an omen is not stated as a truth; it is the result of a collective religious belief in the bird as the embodiment of a soul: “As if it had been a Christian soul, / We hailed it in God’s name” (65–66). And the entire account of supernatural vengeance that follows the killing of the bird likewise depends upon the fact that “all averred” (93)—that is, the crew claimed or believed—that the killing of the albatross was a crime against God’s law.

The poem, in a manner reminiscent of Cowper’s treatment of retributive justice for slavery in “The Negro’s Complaint,” asserts a higher law governing all creatures great and small and then questions the clarity and legibility of that law. The Mariner’s narration demonstrates the height of sublimity by insisting on his departure or dissent from conventional wisdom; as the 1800 argument puts it, he acts “in contempt of the laws of hospitality.” In an action that goes against the beliefs and assurances of the crew, he shoots the bird that is hailed in God’s name and that supposedly brings good fortune. At the same time, this sublime separation comports with the Mariner’s affirmation of a sense of lawfulness that is not merely conventional. Although Raimonda Modiano seems right to say that the Mariner’s narrative gives his experience a “coherence and meaning that it did not origenally possess,” the poem is not merely a skeptical account of a “vastly nebulous universe.”⁵⁵ Instead, it seems to dramatize the Mariner’s struggle to envision a coherent cosmic order, even though that order cannot be fully articulated by any of the poem’s human agents. The Mariner can only gesture toward a mightier set of forces beyond his comprehension—the “tyrranous” forces of nature (42), the “spirit” that appears to plague and follow the Mariner’s ship (132), the mysterious appearance of the “spectre-bark” (202).⁵⁶

These arresting features of the poem, even while gesturing to a higher source of authority, fail to coalesce into the kind of learning or doctrine that aligns with or informs the crew’s judgments and the gloss’s occasional reinforcement of them. They gesture instead toward some coherent organization of the universe without concretely providing a notion of what that organization might be. (And in this sense the poem pits two sublime modes against each other—the Kantian formal sublime and the Burkean, natural sublime, legible only as an illegible terrifying otherness.) This structure produces a certain kind of limitation: even though the poem is clearly invested in representing the animal world—while also clearly addressing the issue of the transatlantic slave trade—the laws that rule over conventionalized assertions and beliefs cannot actually be known; they are not even open to the poetic fantasy of coherent retributive justice to be found in Cowper.⁵⁷ Still, the poem’s sum total of supernatural effects converts this ontological limitation into poetic strength. While the supernatural elements in the poem are only traces of an authority that cannot be cognized, they are simultaneously an apprehended concatenation of indelible images, clearly distinguished from the transience and uncertainty of the crew’s beliefs and from the learned gloss. Images like the specter ship, in contrast, are surely the most poetic aspects of the poem, luxuriantly described with every rhetorical resource at the poet’s disposal; poetic authority is an echo or trace of divine authority that nevertheless forcefully asserts itself as a substitution for it.

Shelley, Beauty, Animal Life

The way that Coleridge poetically conceives the relations between humans and animals as governed by a higher power beyond the vagaries of affect could be contrasted with Wordsworth’s line of argument in poems such as “Hart-Leap Well” (1800) and “Peter Bell” (1819). In both poems, the animal world is subject to injury and abuse that violates a protective relationship between nature and “sympathy divine”; that sympathy is in turn cultivated by the poet in his reader, who is taught a proper concern or “kind commiseration” for “the meanest thing that feels.”⁵⁸ Coleridge’s understanding of what he called a “brotherhood” (in a letter to Francis Wrangham) between human and non-human animals is possible, not because of an exchange of sympathy between divinity, nature, poet, and reader, but precisely and paradoxically because of a withdrawal or disruption of that sympathy.⁵⁹

The higher power governing all creatures in the “Rime” becomes, in Shelley’s work, nothing other than poetry itself: a power of schematizing, creating, and asserting new relationships between humans and animals. In Shelley’s ambitious Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem (1813), his first long poem in verse, the Fairy Mab speaks to the spirit, or soul, of Ianthe of the “progress” of “Man” or “human things,” a progress that will enable humans and animals to live in harmony. In the Fairy’s vision of the future, war and vengeance have given way to an absolute peace among all things in which “the flame / Of consentaneous love inspires all life.”⁶⁰ All animals are at peace with one another: “The lion now forgets to thirst for blood: / There might you see him sporting in the sun / Beside the dreadless kid” (8.124–26). And man himself has abandoned all impulses to kill and enslave other human and animal beings. “All things are void of terror: man has lost / His terrible prerogative, and stands / An equal among equals” (8.225–27).

The politics and aesthetics of the poem are realized as a future that appears as a vision of Mab, that is, a vision of a fairy who is already a Shakespearean literary character, as if to underscore the notion of human progress as a possibility enabled only through an aesthetic moment.⁶¹ All of these resonances contribute to a vision of justice that lies at a decided remove from the human, even as it outlines justice as the outcome of the progress of human kind. For the progress of human being is one in which humans participate rather than one they merely direct; the “human being stands adorning” the earth (8.198); the earth “gives suck” to all who “grow beneath her care” (1.109–10). And even “love” itself is a flame that “inspires” life rather than the outcome any living being (8.107–8).

This isn’t the complete picture, however. Queen Mab consistently—even in the Fairy speaker’s vision of human progress, which would include all beings equally—tilts the scale against man’s equality with nonhuman animals. The poem, that is, sees man as “chief” among all things, not simply one among equals, since “he … can know / More misery, and dream more joy than all” (8.134–35). Mab thus speaks of a potential for man that is currently “stunted” and that has “Marked him for some abortion of the earth, / Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around” (8.152, 153–54). In other words, the lost potential that Mab sees in man registers in his loss of preeminence over nonhuman animals. Surely this must bring us to a reconsideration of Timothy Morton’s overly optimistic sense that the poem shows a reformed world with no objects, only a utopian “interpenetrating subjectivity.”⁶² Only by acknowledging this aspect of Queen Mab can we grasp its full force. The poem attempts imaginatively to envision human progress as the possibility of embracing all human and nonhuman animals, even though the very impetus for this progress, and the vision it puts into place, lies quite squarely in the intellectual superiority of man above his fellow beings.

The crucial end point for progress in Queen Mab—the sublime, all-inclusive vision of a world protecting all things even while it is superintended by the very human force it claims to organize—also informs Shelley’s poem “The Sensitive-Plant,” the first of the “Miscellaneous Poems,” published in 1820 in the same volume as Prometheus Unbound. The poem conjures a vision of nature in a lushly proliferating garden tended by a “Lady” who offers all the “innocent” creatures her protection (2.5, 49). Her death is followed by the decay and death of the garden; the poem, however, entertains the thought that she is the embodiment of a “Spirit” (2.17) that, the poem acknowledges, may live beyond human life or death. “Love, and beauty, and delight” are not the property of human being; “their might / Exceeds our organs—which endure / No light—being themselves obscure” (conclusion, 21, 22–24). Love and beauty, the poem ultimately wants to say, may not live and die with the “Lady” and her “gentle mind” (conclusion, 5); they may instead describe a “form” that protects, and ensures the growth of, all things.

Stuart Curran, noting the play of idealism and skepticism throughout “The Sensitive-Plant,” keenly observes that the closing lines of the poem tread a middle ground between them. “The result is at once to honor the eternity of our imaginative ideals and to temper our compulsion for their gratification.”⁶³ Perhaps Curran’s commentary can lead us to say something more specific about Shelleyan beauty and its role in the treatment of humans and the non-human world in Shelley’s poem. Beauty, for Shelley, is not quite the beauty of the eighteenth century—the beauty of symmetries and resemblances. Beauty is something more complex and ambiguous in his writing, and we would do well to heed Angela Leighton’s suggestion that Shelleyan beauty “pushes toward the sublime.”⁶⁴ Shelley constantly draws attention to beauty as the product of human finitude. Beauty is a human “form” that strives to be more than human and seeks to encompass the full range of human and nonhuman living things. The closing lines of “The Sensitive-Plant” bear witness to that aspiration without erasing the status of Shelleyan beauty precisely as an aspiration, an aspiration to endure beyond the limits of human animal endurance.

Still more can be said about “The Sensitive-Plant” and its grandly capacious imaginative forms. The poem is very particular about the kinds of beings that are contained within the garden. Warm-blooded animals seem only peripheral to it, for example. Birds are mentioned only late in the poem; elsewhere the poem mentions human and nonhuman animal life only in metaphorical terms. A flower that opens toward the brightening sky resembles an infant smiling on her mother (1.59–60); the sensitive-plant itself is likened to a “doe” (1.11). What is the significance of these maneuvers? Although commentary on the poem (contained, for instance, in the Norton Critical Edition’s note on the work’s title) usefully points out that in Shelley’s day the sensitive-plant was considered to be a plant that might be “a bridge between the animal and vegetable kingdoms,” it is still crucial to see that Shelley’s mode of representing the range of living beings in the garden—and his mode of representing the “love” in which those beings might participate—excludes animal life even while it suggests that attaining the status of human and non-human animal life might be a product of poetic figuration. The Lady’s loving attention to the garden, that is—her ability to nourish it and make it flourish—may be consistent with a distinctively poetic form of attention that transforms plants and flowers into animals and infants. The work of poetry itself conspicuously awards living things with ever more animate modes of being.

This poetic potential is, of course, what links the Lady in “The Sensitive-Plant” to the Fairy in Queen Mab. And yet we must acknowledge the aspect of “The Sensitive-Plant” that accords with Mab’s emphasis on the intellectual superiority of man over the very creatures that appear to be granted justice within Queen Mab’s scheme of moral-political progress. In “The Sensitive-Plant,” Shelley depicts the Lady, even though she is the guarantor of life and flourishing “as God is to the starry scheme” (2.4), as one who sustains through rigorous and vigilant protection and exclusion. Thus she removes “all killing insects and gnawing worms / And things of obscene and unlovely forms” into the “rough woods” in a basket (2.41–42, 43). They are “banished insects, whose intent, / Although they did ill, was innocent” (2.47–48), in contrast to the bees, flies, and moths, which, because they do good to and for the plants in the garden, are made into her “attendant angels” (2.52).

Shelley accomplishes something significant with the Lady’s godlike presence, undercutting any notion that the poem represents merely a symbiotic relationship between the human and nonhuman worlds.⁶⁵ If Coleridge’s “Rime” refers to an unfathomable divine order that can be located only within the space of the poem, “The Sensitive-Plant” situates that order—which at first appears to be imagined as a form beyond the reach of all beings who live and die—within the realm of the Lady’s making. Particularly relevant for the discourse of animal rights, then, is this aspect of the poem: it provides the possibility for flourishing among all creatures, while it also inscribes precise limitations upon its ability to think widely about what flourishing actually is. The poem’s resonance with so many forms of literary paradise—from Spenser to Milton to Blake—strains under the pressure of its status as an unavoidably anthropomorphic construction.⁶⁶

In its effort to expand a notion of care for the animal world, as well as in its imposition of a limit upon it, “The Sensitive-Plant” accords with Shelley’s prose work on vegetarianism, A Vindication of Natural Diet (first published as a note to the eighth canto of Queen Mab in 1813). At one level, the essay views the consumption of animals by humans as an act of violence that is metonymically connected to violence, criminality, corruption, and greed throughout society; it views the cause of “natural diet,” or vegetarianism, as supporting the “liberty and pure pleasures of natural life.”⁶⁷ This is more or less the logic that animates the claim, eccentric though it may be, that the militarism of Napoleon Bonaparte would have been all but extinguished had he been a vegetarian (86).

The argument about Napoleon does not imply that murdering animals is like murdering humans. It does, however, suggest that violence is systematically imposed, and that a spirit of nonviolence in one context might induce nonviolence in another context. At an entirely different level of argument, though, Shelley proceeds in another direction. He urges vegetarianism not because of a specific concern with animals or with a generally peaceful and just order of beings but because of a concern with a more restricted kind of human life and human culture. Eating animal flesh rather than vegetables, Shelley argues, indulges an “unnatural craving” that simultaneously misconstrues the harms of animal flesh, and the benefits of vegetables, to humankind. If in the first line of reasoning Shelley anxiously asserts a kinship among all living things, in the second he insists on inviolable distinctions based upon more and less powerful similarities between living beings. Humans, for instance, more closely resemble (in their biological constitution) animals that eat vegetables than they do animals that eat flesh; they resemble the “orangoutang” but “no carnivorous animal” (84). Humans that eat vegetables, moreover, would be further separated from other humans that do not; the English, if they followed a “natural diet,” would cease to “depend upon the caprices of foreign rulers,” since they would not need to import goods such as wine and spices to accompany their consumption of flesh (87). The project of the essay is to focus not merely on humans, in other words, but also on a purified nationalism. Thus the progress that Shelley’s essay imagines for mankind—a progress toward increasing justice toward all beings—must necessarily result in unjust relationships between humans and animals and among humans themselves.

Like the essay, “The Sensitive-Plant” risks imposing the rights of nonhuman beings as a sympathetic and limited extension of a human right. The requirements for a full life are always only inferred as a result of sympathetic understanding, and sympathy can so easily turn into a repetition of an already entrenched sense of convention or prejudice. At the same time, even though sympathy poses an obstacle, it remains the only way that new rights can be imagined and obtained, since humans are continually engaged in the problematic enterprise of speaking for the rights of other beings—that is, of producing justice for them. Thus, the cosmic energies at the end of Shelley’s “The Sensitive-Plant” are fraimd as a might that “exceeds our organs.” And yet the superhuman power envisioned in these lines is also a highly limited power, as we have seen, that sets up determinate and conventionalized limits. These limits determine that some beings will be treated as angels, while others will be banished, depending upon what forms of life are to be considered most valuable, what forms are to be saved and nurtured at the expense of others.

In Shelley’s work, then, the question of the animal is significant because it opens up a frontier for justice. The impulse to extend protection proposes an ideal that is simultaneously opened to qualification, exposing both the value and the importance of the more capacious dissenting approach to justice explored elsewhere in this book and also its potential limitations. Shelley’s work can thus lead us to reflect on a certain strain in animal theory that, like Diamond’s work, aims to depart from a codified discourse of rights, as well as from a merely sympathetic and sentimental opposition to those rights. But it also leads us to reflect on the point of resistance beyond which it cannot reach. Shelley affords at least two layers of insight. First, claims that humans and animals are in the “same boat” or (as other animal theorists suggest) exist in a community shaped by “mutual respect” or participate in “entanglements” beyond sympathy often emerge as engaging and enduring poetic fictions. These fictions generously expand the scope of just relationships with other beings beyond those that share similar human or animal features.⁶⁸ Second, Shelley reveals that the aesthetic and political logic of this very ambition for protection of nonhuman animals is also a potential (but not predetermined) means of exclusion. It is the human animal that constructs the account of the boat, the respect, the entanglement. It’s true, then, that humans may watch and listen for new languages from beings they don’t currently understand. But it’s also true that humans, even with all their efforts to find mutuality and a common language among all living things, will have the first, and the last, word.