The Rhetorical Invention of Man: A History of Distinguishing Humans from Other Animals by Greg Goodale (review)

Tracing the rhetorical construction over time of an exclusionary Western concept of Man, Greg Goodale clarifies Derrida’s rather obscure argument about humanity’s conceptual estrangement from other animals. In this process, Goodale demonstrates that the interdisciplinary field of animal studies is a fit and fascinating companion for rhetorical studies and argues that we humans—even Homo academicus—should reinvigorate social networks and explore communicative channels that connect us with other animals. As its subtitle announces, the book offers a history of human thought about relationships between humans and other animals. By analyzing texts from antiquity to the present, Goodale shows that human self-identification as something separate and distinct from other animals—and by extension from the rest of nature—is neither “logical” nor inevitable and is therefore subject to reform.

In a personal prologue to the book, Goodale raises the moral question of how we humans should understand our relationships to other animals and examines his own self-contradictory responses to the question. He then proceeds in chapter 1, “Man is an Invention,” to introduce categorization as a linguistically enabled, uniquely human way of imposing order on the world. In the particular case of the category Man, he shows how categorization can intersect with two other powerful habits of Western thought—distinction and hierarchy—to isolate and elevate Man as Lord over women, beasts, and the rest of the natural world.

Various methods of rhetorical analysis, in turn, take the spotlight throughout the first four chapters of the book as Goodale examines a historical parade of texts from Plato and Aristotle through their successive translations and to their appropriation in postmodernist thinking. He demonstrates how poststructuralism unveils the instability of categories, how translation can erode a text’s conveyance of its original author’s world view, how close reading and thick description of texts can expose concurrent but contradictory logics of familiarity and estrangement in constructing Man, and how the rhetorical strategy of definition enacts the exclusionary logic of distinction. Many of the texts Goodale examines in these chapters are fascinating in and of themselves, including successive translations of a single passage from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, definitions from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, and medieval records of criminal charges against animals and witches. In chapter 4, “The Distinction of Man,” Goodale draws from feminist philosophy inspired by Carol Gilligan’s studies of women’s moral development to describe an alternative, more inclusive, relational mode of human self-identification. Particularly influential to his argument are Women’s Ways of Knowing by Mary Belenky et al. (1986), which famously formulated a partial (relational) epistemological stance purportedly more familiar to women than to men, and Genevieve Loyd’s Man of Reason (1993), a history of Western philosophy’s gradual abandonment of women’s ways of knowing in favor of impartial reason unburdened by relational obligations.

In the following three chapters, Goodale argues that expelling affiliative habits of mind from legal, political, moral, and academic discourse limits human relationships with other animals (including other human animals) in ways that are intellectually and morally costly. Although he laments the loss over time of other animals’ as well as women’s ways of knowing in academe and elsewhere, he offers reason to hope for their eventual revival. Beyond the rise of ethology and comparative psychology in the sciences and the “animal turn” in the humanities, Goodale, in his epilogue, points to signs in popular culture that suggest a more inclusive human identity formation process is underway, one that acknowledges and values human continuity with other animals. An example he draws from personal observation is a transformation of property based discourse about “pets” and “owners” into relation-based talk about “companion animals” and their adoptive “parents” or “families.” Although the affiliative impulse behind such language extends only to some nonhuman animals, some of the time, and only in some...