The Dizzying Pursuit of Meaning—Circling an Ideal, since 1791: Bourke’s What it Means to be Human

What does it mean to be Human? This is a question that has been asked for centuries but still makes us pause and wonder. Joanna Bourke’s historical investigation of this question demonstrates in enthralling detail that there is no definitive trait or lasting element that can be held up as constituting the human. Bourke explores personhood, the animal, pain, faces and physiognomy, carnivorism and consumption from the Haitian Revolution (1791) to the present. In order to deconstruct what means to be human, Bourke captivatingly draws on diverse sources: newspapers, advertisements, fictional characters such as Kafka’s Red Peter, Charlotte Bronte’s Heathcliffe, the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft, late 18^th and 19^th century discussions of carnivorism and vegetarianism, literary portrayals of Haiti and fears of cannibalism, scientific ‘discoveries’ such as animal to human organ transplants (the example of the baby, Stephanie Fae who in 1984 was given a baboon’s heart, chapter 17), facial grafting, cosmetic surgery, sexuality and “rejuvenation”. Bourke’s discussion is accessible to a broad, non-specialist audience, and is not heavily laden with theory. However, she does refer to critical theorists to support her discussion, most consistently Derrida’s deconstruction of humanity and animality. This book would be of interest to persons researching themes, in an Anglo-American context, such as rights, colonialism, history of popular culture, and questioning the animal. Relevant sections or select chapters could be used as provocative additions to undergraduate and graduate course modules in history, law, anthropology, cultural studies, literature, gender studies and race studies.

The scope of the book is ambitious and broad, yet this is its strength: Bourke tackles a subject that is loaded with theoretical and popular significance. Each chapter includes images, some gruesome and disturbing, that elicit emotional responses from the reader. The experience of seeing, reading and processing the material offered in the book itself proves the book’s main contention that the best answer to the question of what it means to be human is perhaps that there is no answer.

To illustrate this, Bourke uses the analogy of ants crawling on the Möbius Strip – a “one-sided surface, with no insider or outside; no beginning or end; no single point of entry or exit” (9). The Möbius Strip is used to support the argument that biology and culture, including the definition of animal/human, have no definitive boundaries or limits. In twenty chapters, divided into six sections, Bourke explores the violence that has come from “humanity’s obsessive attempts to demarcate the territory of the human from that of the animal – to tie a knot in that Möbius strip in order to declare ‘here! Is the fully-human. There! Are the others …” (378). Bourke concludes that what is needed is “negative zoelogy”, the “injection of instability and indeterminacy into our discussions” (10) to the point that there is no known. Rather there is the, “unknowability of all animals, including human ones” (16). This unknowability, which Bourke believes is a fundamental tenant of historical research, is posited at the conclusion of the book as a hopeful, Derridean gesture towards embracing the rich complexity of being. Bourke’s Möbius Strip analogy is posited in contrast to perspectives that suggest minimising difference as a way to address the oppression wrought by the pursuit of limit and definition throughout history.

The author introduces her explicitly Anglo-American investigation by discussing a letter to the editor written by an “Earnest Englishwoman” in 1872. In this letter the woman is asking, satirically, whether women can be granted the same rights as those given to animals. Playing with the question raised in this letter, Bourke shifts the framework of humanity from one of mankind, to women, where “the Earnest Englishwoman’s ‘women’ stands in for all sexes and genders” (2...