Proximity of the Object

Detail from Cover

And except for one television network, we have found intelligence everywhere in the galaxy.

—John Belushi, SNL, 1976

The smell of formaldehyde—and the concomitant aura of the Naturalist golden age—is today fainter, though still discernible, still romantic in the animal wing of the Harvard Museum of Natural History than it was fifteen years ago, before the then Museum of Comparative Zoology merged with the Harvard University Herbaria and the Mineralogical and Geological Museum. Arthropods appear preserved, exoskeletons sporting gemlike luster in dazzling array. Skilled taxidermy has prepared, stuffed, and mounted into action poses myriads of amphibians, reptiles, fish, birds, and mammals. After the bears in permanent attack, the quadrupeds caught in eternal surprise, the rodents ever at work, the mustelids ever at play, one comes at last upon a single human skeleton, taking humble place leaf-like atip its branch of the evolutionary continuum—unstuffed.

It is surrounded post-merger by some additional primate skeletons which have, for the viewer, made the transition from life-like to memento mori a bit less jarring—but elsewhere in the museum, you will have seen the skin and fur and faces of mounted gorillas and orangutans and chimpanzees without coming across any stylings of human meat or human hide. The incongruity stands as an exemplum of the ongoing difficulties, despite the best and most brilliant-intentioned of decenterings, to wholly repudiate our perspectives of human exceptionalism. Animal, Mineral, Vegetable: Ethics and Objects, a collection of papers from the eponymous conference, edited and introduced by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, testifies—sometimes delightfully—to this modal ineluctability whilst trying to think the exanthropic.

That division of posthumanist theory that problematizes the proximity of human and animal (as opposed, for example, to that between human and cyborg) seems to have found particularly amenable soil in Medieval and Early Modern studies: Cohen’s period of expertise and a phrase qualifying the conference subtitle but dropped, perhaps ill-advisedly, for the book to accommodate some essays on latter-day subjects.

One of many reasons for the period and paradigm affinity being the prominence in medieval ideology of the notion of a Great Chain of Being relating (albeit hierarchically) all matter and life, paradigmatic in that it is devoid of the radical disjunction to come between human and animal mind since Descartes. Indeed, the privileged method for approaching the exanthropic in Animal, Mineral, Vegetable is across an implicit continuum traversed via the figure of the hybrid. Thus, fourteenth-century records of boys raised by wolves (in Karl Steel’s essay) show at once the human minus its claim (via uprightness) to sovereignty over the animal corpus and the wolf plus capacity for speech; the vegetable women (Peggy McCracken’s essay) in twelfth-century versions of Roman d’Alexandre offer a kind of sexualized childhood delimited not by time but by space: human life qua vegetable becomes self-sustaining, mortal but practically eternal, sexually passive, virginal, and as immobile as a plant’s; even stones in this kind of ontology may exhibit human features (in Kelly Roberton’s essay on the “world-making” capabilities of medieval stones) or human affinities (in Valerie Allen’s piece on Albertus Magnus)—for a similar matrix (divine, confounding of human reason) animates them all.

The notion of continuum, however, is not an unproblematic one—especially for Derrida, whose seminal essay The Animal That Therefore I Am is universally cited, though not, it seems, yet universally ingested and understood. The problem, as recent systems theory has noted, is precisely in this disavowal of the work of human projection, the representation as it were of the outside and the Other inside. Perhaps the most concise articulation of the impulse in its ambivalence occurs in Jane Bennett’s essay on hoarders as the unwitting actors of material agency, an essay that gives itself the competing maxims of keeping objects rather than human persons in the foreground and of treating the human persons not as mentally ill but as...