In a brilliant analysis of the ambiguous boundaries that separate and bind humans and animals, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes an extraordinary text in the history of the messianic confusion of man and beast. A 13th-century Jewish bible depicts "the banquet of the just", in which the saved appear on the Day of Judgment with the heads of animals. Brian Dillon reviews books by Erica Fudge, John Gray and Stephen Wise.
Animal. By Erica Fudge. Reaktion. 182 pp. £12.95 sterling
This obscure messianic text is nothing less than a vision of creation transformed, humans and animals reunited in their natural, utopian state. Adam's naming of the animals in Genesis is undone; the rupture between speaking man and mute beast is healed when man rediscovers his animal nature: discovers, that is, his true happiness.
Contemporary animist utopias may be less gloriously emblematic, but they are no less surreal, joyful and disturbing. We tend to confine the confusion to childhood fantasy, a realm we happily cultivate, then condemn as mere whimsy, juvenile anthropomorphic excess. This reviewer was recently reminded of the oddity of that world on rediscovering a minor childhood classic. Tasseltip Saves the Day (a Ladybird book, naturally) tells the tale of Tasseltip and his friend Mr Mole inviting a host of genial creatures to the mole's housewarming party. This bucolic narrative of chatty little beasts is interrupted by an image of Robert Rat diligently catching fish for the evening's festive supper. For the adult reader, the whole seamless community is threatened here: how did the hapless fish (served up in a later illustration) escape the otherwise rigorous equality of the book's world? Utopia, it seems, hides a strict hierarchy, a necessary division between "us" and "them".
Erica Fudge's concise, cogent volume has much to say on the paradox of "like" and "not like" that animates our thinking about animals and the obscure frontier between us. It is a border we seem to want, by turns, to police viciously and breach worriedly. Fudge cites Walter Benjamin, who sees in the ambiguity of our relationship to the animal an elemental fear of what binds us to it. We shrink from its gaze precisely for fear that it will see the animal in us. We cannot deny our revolting proximity to the bestial, so we learn instead to master it.
Fudge is engaging on the contradictory history of this doomed effort at mastery. We insist upon our distance from the animal kingdom (the phrase itself is telling) while at the same time refashioning it in our image. When NASA sent a chimpanzee named Ham into space, he was greeted on his return as a great American "pioneer", his photographed grimace interpreted in the popular imagination as a satisfied smile at a job well done. In reality, of course, the chimp was mere experimental matter, entirely expendable (though, in the image Fudge reproduces, he seems to have grasped how to play his media moment, helpfully rehearsing the performance for his successor, Alan Shepherd).
Elsewhere, Fudge traces the 17th-century puritan objection to lap-dogs (a threateningly tactile presence, verging on the erotic) and the double standard that allowed British protesters against live calf exports to condemn the veal industry while munching bacon sandwiches on their picket lines. She is never less than insightful on the weird rituals to which we subject animals. From dog weddings to the fur trade, vivisection to the iconography of the HMV bull terrier, this is a fascinating book.
Fudge, however, shies away from a fuller engagement with the philosophical significance of her subject. Her passing etymological reflections are tantalising; she cites Jacques Derrida's assertion that, despite the history of philosophical efforts to differentiate humans from animals, it is still only humanity that can be described as "bestial". There is a whole tradition waiting to be explored in that single instance of exception.
Straw Dogs. By John Gray. Granta. 200 pp. £12.99 sterling
Like Fudge, John Gray quotes Wittgenstein's dictum: "if a lion could talk, we could not understand him". The history of Western thought is precisely the history of this attempt to separate humanity from animals on the basis of language, the soul and - most crucially - the faculty of reason. When Descartes declared that animals were unthinking machines, the taxonomist Linné replied that Descartes had clearly never encountered an ape. Between Descartes and Wittgenstein, nothing much had changed; the Enlightenment inherits a massive and hubristic abstraction from Christianity.
To declare humanity's exceptional status is to claim a ruinous dominion over nature, enforced in a relentless vision of progress. But progress is an illusion, a rationalist fantasy borrowed from religious salvation. In reality, history is an endless round of barbarity enacted in the name of reason.
Much of this is rather too starkly familiar. Gray's scattershot text attempts to borrow a style from the great philosophical aphorists he cites (Pascal, Nietzsche, Cioran), but he has neither the laconic courage of their convictions, nor the devious rigour of their paradoxical formulations. Everything is "argued" here through hectoring assertion, nothing through subtle or sustained thought. Most damagingly, Gray seems to be writing at some debilitating remove from contemporary philosophical treatments of the Enlightenment hubris he correctly diagnoses. From Benjamin and Adorno, through Foucault and Derrida to Agamben (just to stick with a certain "Continental" tradition), many have sought to overturn the anthropocentric hierarchy.
Unlocking the Cage. Steven M. Wise. Perseus Press. 336 pp. £10.99 sterling
One has the sense, however, with both books (and with Steven Wise's sedulous exploration of the scientific and legal case for animal rights) of a field of enquiry opening up, of interventions that will encourage further studies of both the past and future of the human-animal encounter. Wise claims that the debate on animal rights is in its infancy, currently at the stage that reflections on the morality of slavery had reached in Aristotle's time.
As these books demonstrate, the meeting of man and beast is one of humanity's most resonant, troubled and joyous encounters, material for both comedy and tragedy. The horse who walks into a bar (barman: "Why the long face?") also devours his fellows in Macbeth. These books suggest that we might at last see him for what he really is, and see ourselves there, too.
Brian Dillon teaches literature at the University of Kent. He is currently writing a book on culture and melancholy