When Species Meet (review)

One of the reasons why a certain theoretical left's answers to what it perhaps all too easily labels "rightist" conceptualizations of the political¹ are increasingly exposed as powerless may be the fact that this left has not been very good at offering positive accounts of what Donna Haraway in When Species Meet calls an "encountering." Instead, because much of this left's energies have been invested in insisting on a mystical and in some cases borderline theological otherness, it has tended to circumscribe the encounter as something that in the end always remains missed.

Take, for example, an encounter Haraway returns to at various points in her book, namely between Jacques Derrida and his cat.² One morning, the naked philosopher finds himself face-to-face with his cat, a speechless encounter that propels him into the consideration of a thought "that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, as something other than privation" (Derrida 417 qtd. 20). Haraway is with Derrida, but not all the way. What about the alternative forms of engagement that he could also have considered, she asks, and that "risked knowing something more about cats and how to look back, perhaps even scientifically, biologically and therefore also philosophically and intimately" (20)? This is the risk When Species Meet takes, a risk that haunts the knowledge it produces and to which I will therefore have to return later on.

Although the bestiary of When Species Meet also includes whales, cats, wombats, pigs, and a bunch of other creatures, the book's theorizing of the encounter develops for the most part through Haraway's philosophical, historical, autobiographical, and throughout scientific writings about dogs and the encounter between dogs and human beings. There are chapters on Marx and dogs as biocapital; on Emmanuel Levinas, Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and animal suffering; on the purebred dog breed of Australian shepherds; on Haraway's cyborg father; on the agility sport she practices with her dogs Cayenne and Roland. It is important to note the full implications of the encounters Haraway describes. When Species Meet does not simply provide a representation of animals "in nature, where change involves only the time of evolution, and perhaps ecological crisis, and [of] the human being in history, where all other sorts of time come into play" (25). Perhaps echoing the final line of Yeats' poem "Among School Children,"³ Haraway's is an encounter in which "all the dancers are redone through the patterns they enact" (25).

Adapting the term "contact zone" (216) from Mary Louise Pratt's work on colonialism,⁴ she "strives to build attachment sites and tie sticky knots to bind intra-acting critters, including people, together in the kinds of response and regard that change the subject—and the object" (287). Haraway's "becoming with" (3) does not simply lead to "positive knowledge" (21) about animals or human beings but transforms these species into what she calls "companion species." Again, it is important to understand the implications of this term correctly: "Companion species . . . is my awkward term for a not-humanism in which species of all sorts are in question" (164). The entanglement that the term evokes does not only undermine what Haraway here and elsewhere calls "human exceptionalism";⁵ it also shows that in When Species Meet, there is no "natural" animal. Such a theological construction remains outside of the book, or is present in it only as a figure that the book's practice of "becoming worldly" (3) unworks.

Indeed, Haraway claims her work to take place "after monotheism" (245), an "after" she describes as "worldly" (she does not use the word secular). As such, When Species Meet is part of what she calls "the posthumanities," which is also the title of the series in which the book was published. But what is this strange critter of the worldly posthumanities, given that at other places in the book Haraway characterizes her position as "not-humanism" and insists that...