Analogical Animals: Thinking through Difference in Animalities and Histories

This essay takes up practices of comparison and analogy between human populations and animals that have been so problematized in discussions of J. M. Coetzee’s work. Through readings of Derrida and Haraway alongside German novelist Uwe Timm’s Morenga, it argues that analogical structures function as simultaneous differentiations and de-differentiations that allow for both similarities and differences to emerge. Far from collapsing differences, analogical thinking in Timm’s novel allows for specificities to emerge, rendering the broad, generic category of the animal far more complex.