The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice by Tobias Menely (review)

In The Animal Claim, Tobias Menely develops a compelling genealogy of how “animal claims regarding injury or interest come to be acknowledged in a given community” (p. 1). Seeking to recover the way in which the voice of the suffering animal underlies the notion of sensibility in eighteenth-century philosophy and literature, Menely argues that sensibility implies that “we already inhabit a world in which we are subject to the claims of other expressive creatures” (p. 3). The cries and gestures of suffering animals call out to humans. Sensibility to the “creaturely voice” compels us to advocate for suffering animals, and thus humanitarian language is spurred on by the voice of the animal other. Positing the communal ethics of sensibility allows Menely to argue that the liberal idea of community “as a closed system of reciprocal entitlements” is rigidly exclusive and thus deeply impoverished. A community of sensibility, however, persists in being “constitutively open to those whose voices lay claim to rights not yet recognized” (p. 1). Menely locates openness to the creaturely voice in Enlightenment semiotics and psychology as well as in the public sphere of print culture. The genre of poetry in particular “sought to incorporate the impassioned voice and creaturely perspective” that had a “distinctive capacity to address and move a growing reading public” (p. 7). Eighteenth-century humanitarian poetry then influenced lawmakers’ arguments for the first significant legislation for animal welfare, Martin’s Act (1822). The Animal Claim focuses on sensibility to animal suffering in the long eighteenth century, yet the ethical and political questions it explores are as relevant today as they were in the eighteenth century: to what extent are we sensible to the animal cry? What does sensibility to the animal cry obligate us to do?

The book begins with two chapters on eighteenth-century philosophy that suggest animal expression through vocalizations or gestures are a form of address that “establish a relation, anticipate a reception, [and] appeal for a response” (p. 19). This challenges the idea, first put forward by Aristotle and often reiterated in political philosophy, that human “communicative reason” allows participation in the polis, which excludes the interests of animals. Menely’s account draws on Henry More’s correspondence with Descartes. Descartes argued that, because animals were bête machines, their cries were mere reflexes, whereas More suggests that animals address humans with voices and gestures. Menely then traces similar ideas about the communicative capabilities of the animal sign through the work of the naturalist John Ray, Bernard Mandeville, and Edmund Burke.

The following chapter picks up on this theme of the status of the animal sign by analyzing the potential for human/animal communication as it is described by Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Even though they are not known for their animal advocacy, these philosophers are cogently reread by Menely as preoccupied with how “the creaturely voice haunts human self conception and community formation” (p. 45). Hobbes “establishes the anti-metaphysical ground work for the development of sentimental ethical naturalism,” which develops later in the eighteenth century (p. 45). Hume admits that communicative passions are exchanged between humans and animals, and such “sympathy produces communities that are exposed to animal affect” (p. 63). Rousseau’s argument that self-interest and pity exist prior to reason counters the model of reciprocity in liberal contract theory. By privileging pity, Rousseau asserts that human community is based on “one’s responsiveness to a prior voice” (p. 79).

After rereading these enlightenment philosophers, chapters 3 and 4 turn to an analysis of poetry and poetic vocation in animal advocacy. With the rise of publishing and the public sphere, poets began to explore the cause of animals in their work. This creates a communication structure in which the poet has been addressed by the creaturely voice, and then speaks on behalf of these animals in poetry directed toward a humanitarian public. In chapter 3, Menely argues that both Alexander Pope...