Being and Becoming Animal and Modern

Superbly researched and indispensable, accessible without any sacrifice of scholarship, Atavistic Tendencies is engaging and stunningly persuasive.

Awash in blue nocturnal light, one could imagine, the Wolf Man sees his “primal scene” (father and mother in coitus a tergo, as if they were beasts), which then spawns an arresting dream of six white wolves in a walnut tree. There is also—no dream here—the figure of “Unzie, the Hirsute Wonder,” designated as an “albino aborigine,” fascinating circusgoers with his hairy form. And, in the confabulations of fiction, there is Night-wood’s Robin Vote down in the dirt with her lover’s dog, barking and crawling at the novel’s close. In fact, keeping company with “backwards” feet, “degenerate” teeth, and “aberrant” skulls in medical photography, there are story titles that tell a tale of animal: “The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear” (O. Henry’s short story) and The Hairy Ape (Eugene O’Neill’s play).

To read this treatise is to be convinced of atavism’s twentieth-century tendency to be pervasive and sharply paradoxical: it is everywhere; and everywhere it is, it is the sign of modern sensibilities—given shape through backward glance. That is to say, as Seitler states in many ways, the modern subject is an atavistic subject whose psychical workings are an “expression of animalism” (32). (Atavistic, according to Webster’s: “displaying characteristics of a previous cultural era or of a previous ancestral form.”) Freud’s case studies—the Wolf Man, the Rat Man, horse-phobic Little Hans, and Frau Emmy Von N. (diagnosed with zoophilia)—are only the most obvious examples of how the forms of animals (and human prehistory, as a consequence) surface in the psyche, tying the sexual drives, in Freud’s view, to animal urges and making instinct itself, as Seitler clearly conveys, quoting Freud, an “urge to restore an earlier state of things” (45). In this sense, the Oedipus complex is Freud’s reassurance that what is primal about human beings can be sublimated—though, and this is critical, only incompletely. The past of individuals—and, indeed, for Freud, of “the race”—appears in the present as trauma that is the past alive in the current moment.

Modern subjectivity is this polytemporal, layered existence that can’t shake a past it defines itself against. Hence, in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, the brawny, coal-stoking workers on a steamer are at once Neanderthal throwbacks in their labor—subject to the insult of “filthy beast”—and an extension of their machines, making them the very engines of modernity through their atavism. Even photography, used to striking effect by criminologist César Lombroso (in his famous shots of criminals, prostitutes, and sexual perverts that presume to locate animal qualities in these groups), is a technology that preserves the past. For though it divides the past from the present— this was you, a photograph says—it presents the body, in the present moment, as frozen in time. The photograph, like atavism, is an incarnation, a “living embodiment” (66) of a person’s pastness, making a body caught by the camera modern and unnatural (temporally backward) at the same time.

Seitler’s thesis is thus ineluctable. Atavism is indeed a “privileged lens” (1) through which to catch modernity thinking it is new. And (to switch metaphors) Seitler puts meat on these deconstructive bones. As you can tell, the Derridean locked opposites of new-versus-obsolete don’t just simply imply each other at every turn. They do so according to precise and intriguing cultural logics, which require careful moves if one would follow them. Seitler performs these moves with remarkable certainty and deftness. She deploys historical, theoretical, political, and, quite decidedly literary questions as she shows the specific contours of her central paradox. For instance, she situates early-twentieth-century subectivity in its setting of a focus on the visible, due to cinema and photography. Then she highlights...