After Physiologus: Post-Medieval Subjectivity and the Modernist Bestiaries of Guillaume Apollinaire and Djuna Barnes

Modernity and Post-Medieval Modernism

It has not often been pointed out that one of the most influential accounts of the modern subject is tied to a very old notion of the Fall, and given additionally an epochal marker as a transition from the medieval to the modern. In Jacques Lacan's reformulation of the Cartesian subject, it is explicitly the "theoreticians in the Middle Ages" who are repudiated: a "vital dehiscence constitutive of man," he writes in "Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis," "makes unthinkable the idea of an environment that is preformed for him (2007, 94)." A world of pre-established harmony is impossible given this rupture. Both moral and ontological correspondence are unfeasible with the subject broken off from the object world it now stands against: "the reabsorption of man's ego…by its reintegration into a universal good" as much as "the subject's effusion toward an object devoid of alterity" are a thing of the past (97). Modernity's speaking subject (parlêtre) is expelled from a medieval cosmology of correspondences and finds itself thrown into unhappy consciousness: "It is when the Word is incarnated that things really start going badly. Man is no longer at all happy, he no longer resembles at all a little dog who wags his tail or a nice monkey who masturbates. He no longer resembles anything. He is ravaged by the Word (Lacan 2013, 74)." The entry of God into history and materiality, Lacan suggests, divides the world from itself, setting up a familiar binary of animality and the spiritual excess of language and culture.

This "split subject," fractured from its somatic self-coincidence qua Animal, is left torn between the Word and body, logos and physis, and has been aptly cast as "the psychoanalytic equivalent of original sin" (White 1954, 117). Broken off now from a world of self-mirroring correspondences, the modern subject nonetheless still seeks its own image in the external realm of objects. The absorption of the world into the image of this desire seems in fact to form the very telos of the modern subject itself. As Leo Bersani sees it, this risks an "anthropomorphic appropriation" of the world: "Psychoanalysis has been the most authoritative modern reformulation of the Cartesian and the Hegelian opposition…between Nature and Spirit or between the res extensa and thought. The clinical subject of psychoanalysis successfully strips (I quote from Hegel) 'the external world of its inflexible foreignness [in order to] enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself'" (2010, 139-40). To be happy then, it seems, the modern subject has to transfigure the world into the forms of itself.

The postlapsarian subject of modernity, it may be said, is cast out of the hall of analogical mirrors that constitutes this idealized version of the medieval cosmos, left stranded in a fallen world it proceeds, doggedly, to negate in the image of its desire. Several thinkers after Hegel have sought to come to terms with this logic of negation and transfiguration. For Lacan, "the symbol first manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject's desire (2007, 262)."¹ For Maurice Blanchot, this primordial confrontation of logos and physis finds its archetypal expression in Adam's naming of the beasts. Citing Hegel ("Adam's first act, which made him master of the animals, was to give them names, that is, he annihilated them in their existence"), he writes:

The meaning of speech, then, requires that before any word is spoken, there must be a sort of immense hecatomb, a preliminary flood plunging all of creation into a total sea. God had created living things, but man had to annihilate them. Not until then did they take on meaning for him, and he in turn created them out of the death into which they had disappeared.

(1995, 323)

In these symptomatic accounts of late modernity, the descent of the logos inaugurates a universal death: God's creatures die into language, mortified as natural bodies to be...