exemplaria, vol. 20, No. 1, 2008, 3–27

How to Make a Human KARL STEEL Brooklyn College, CUNY

Derrida’s late investigations into the question of the animal chart a path past the persistent humanism of Lacan, Heidegger, Levinas, and animal rights philosophy; they also identify the essential role the subjugation of animals plays in human self-conception. This self-conception, an inheritance from the Christian Middle Ages, suffuses the Middle English encyclopedia Sidrak and Bokkus, whose popularity and ideological conservatism suits it for illustrating the discourse’s characteristic features. Sidrak and Bokkus claims a set of properties for humans and denies them to animals, all of which it construes as fundamentally distinct from, and inferior to, humans. Yet unmistakable but persistent resemblances between humans and animals baffle human claims to uniqueness. The resemblances are not merely a threat to the human, for by invoking, and then denying, animal likeness to humans, Sidrak and Bokkus models the subjugation of animals. Because the human was an effect of such acts of domination, no human could abandon the domination of animals without abandoning itself; the human was therefore constitutively restless, always seeking a foundation it could never obtain. keywords animals, posthumanism, humanism, medieval, Derrida, Sidrak and Bokkus

For anyone who doubts that a horse is by its very nature better than wood, and that a human being is more excellent than a horse, should not even be called a human being. Anselm, Monologion 4 Lest he eat grass like an ox, he has subjected the ox to himself. William of St Thierry, Physics of the Human Body 2.7

The twelfth-century English monk Adam of Eynsham envisioned an afterlife in which King Henry II was made to wear white-hot armor and ride an infernal horse, his bowels pierced through by the nails of his saddle, while “cruel tormentours, wykyd fyndis, ful gretly with derisions and scornys vpbraydyd him” (Revelation, 123). Out of all the sins Henry committed during his long reign, Adam consigned Henry to © Exemplaria 2008

DOI 10.1179/175330708X268352

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torment because of his predilection for executing poachers.1 Adam’s vision belonged to a textual motif cautioning twelfth-century English potentates that “by the law of kinde” animals of the forest “ought to be slayne to euery man” (122).2 For Adam of Eynsham and other opponents of poaching laws, because humans alone are made in the image of God and for this reason are inestimably more valuable than animals, the execution of poachers defies the divinely ordained natural order. This “law of kinde” legitimizes, even demands, the human subjugation and killing of animals, even by poachers, and anyone who frustrates the law merits postmortem torments. Medieval writers often drew on the natural subjugation of animals to degrade other humans by animalizing them and in order to generate, defend, and resist various dominant ideologies and elite practices. Adam of Eynsham marshals the boundaries between humans and animals to resist royal encroachment on monastic privileges;3 by the same rationale, other medieval writers uphold the domination of peasants by the elite (Freedman, Images, 138–46); Christians find another way to voice antisemitism;4 and conquerors justify their conquests and hamper hybridization with their animalized subjects (Cohen, Hybridity, 40, 86–89, and 91–93). The shifting boundaries of prejudice and the mechanisms of its perpetuation among humans in the Middle Ages have deservedly received much attention, yet the prejudice of the human itself, particularly in relation to the animal, has yet to receive the attention it merits. While any prejudicial assumption requires analysis and reassessment, the prejudice for the human merits attention even if only to impede the malicious animalization of other humans that energizes so much inter-human prejudice.5 I distinguish my examination of human-animal boundaries from philosophical investigations that have preserved the human and denigrated the animal even while disestablishing the self-assurance of the autonomous, self-willed human subject. In so doing, I ally myself with the recent critiques of the persistent humanism of Lacan, Heidegger, and Levinas. Derrida, for example, in “And Say the Animal Responded?” observes that Lacan ascribes a special power to humans: while animals can only react, humans can respond. Unsurprisingly, Derrida wonders by what power humans grant themselves capacities they deny to animals. How, he wonders, can humans be so sure of their ability to respond? Derrida also queries how humans can deny themselves qualities they ascribe to animals, since according to Lacan, humans uniquely suffer an imperfection of mental order caused by their entrapment and construction by language. According to Derrida’s account, Lacan argues that animals, lacking language and subjectivity, possess an integrity humans can only wish to possess; animals “lack the lack” (Derrida, 139).6 Heidegger is equally assured in the separation of human from animal. Simon Glendinning’s observation that “Heidegger shares the classical humanist’s dogmatic and idealising tendency to conceive humanity by way of essential contrast to animality” (On Being, 62) is a common critique,7 for in the course of dispersing or elevating the self-present subject into being-in-the-world, Heidegger preserves the traditional impassable boundaries between insentient things, animals, and humans. In essence, Heidegger’s work echoes the humanism expressed in such works as the fifteenth-century Mirror of St Edmund:

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His wysdom may þou see if þou take kepe how he [God] hase gyffen to ylke a creature to be. Some he hase gyffen to be anely, with-owtten mare, als vn-to stanes. Till oþer to be & to lyffe, als to grysse and trees. Till oþer to be, to lyffe, to fele, als to bestes. Till oþer to be, to lyffe, to fele, and with resone to deme, als to mane and to angells. For stanes erre, bot þay ne hafe nogte lyffe, ne felys noghte, ne demes noghte. Trees are; þay lyffe, bot thay fele noghte. Men are; þay lyffe, þay fele, and þay deme, and þay erre with 22 stanes, [þay] lyffe with trees, þay fele with bestes, and demys with angels.8

Similarly, Heidegger argues that stones are in the world, but do not apprehend it in any way; animals, being weltarm or “poor in world,” apprehend the world they inhabit without apprehending their distinctiveness within their world; while humans—Heidegger’s angels, so to speak—uniquely apprehend the world and its objects as such. As Matthew Calarco points out, Heidegger’s approach to animality may be salvaged, to a degree, by his attempt to consider animal perception from the vantage point of the animal (“Heidegger’s Zoontology,” 22), but his refusal to see the same limitation or possibility at play in the umwelt—the subjective universe—of both animal and human bespeaks a profound resistance to the insights of the founder of ethology, Jakob von Uexküll, on whose work he draws. The inability of a creature to reflect on the world it inhabits should be the same, mutatis mutandis, for Uexküll’s famous tick as it is for a human, since each creature’s perception is limited by its appetites, what injuries it takes notice of, and the tools through which it satiates its desires and reacts to stimuli.9 But for Heidegger, the human’s perception of the world is fundamentally different from that of the tick, not because of the human’s purportedly more expansive umwelt, but because of its interlocked modes of being and perception from which Heidegger excludes all animals. For Heidegger, the human’s unique critical apprehension and unique condition for being make it “essentially, indeed ontologically, something more than a living thing” (Glendinning, On Being, 69). Animals remain segregated from the human even in the ethical philosophy of Levinas. In a much-discussed autobiographical feuilleton, “The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights,” Levinas calls the dog Bobby “the last Kantian in Nazi Germany” because it greets Levinas and his fellow prisoners with a joy apparently unaccompanied by hope for a reward. Although Levinas might have allowed Bobby into his ethical system, perhaps by recognizing it as “human” just as the dog recognized him as human, he responds to the dog’s joy by making it a foil for human mental capabilities. Levinas denies that Bobby has “the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives.”10 In a breathtaking misapplication of the lessons of Darwin, he argues elsewhere that because evolution split the human entirely from the animal, any ethical relationship between humans and animals can only shadow relationships between humans (Animal Philosophy, 49–50). As Cary Wolfe argues, by making consciousness key to the recognition of rights, animal rights philosophy also promotes an absolute concept of the human. Although Elizabeth Costello, the fictional novelist of J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, seems to evade this limitation, her approach to animal suffering finally commits the same fault, and thus is an exemplary instance of the problems of the rights-based

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approach. During a university lecture, Costello assails philosophy for the selfjustifying use of reason, that particularly human form of consciousness, as the chief determinant of which creatures deserve rights. In the course of her critique, she describes the thoughts of an ape, Sultan, captured by the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. Sultan initially responds with dismay and disappointment to a laboratory puzzle that makes it progressively more difficult for him to reach his meal of bananas. It is only after he resigns himself to what he feels is a betrayal that he complies with the scientists’ wish: Sultan stacks crates to reach the bananas. To scientific eyes, Sultan’s solution demonstrates both the purely instrumental intelligence of apes and the superiority of the human reason that designed the experiment; but science cannot see everything. Through the imaginative work of fiction, Costello shows that Sultan is no mere beast driven only by a predictable, merely gustatory frustration, but an unfortunate creature “at every turn . . . driven to think the less interesting thought” (29). For Costello, the human can escape the confines of its own mind by entering into the lives and thoughts of animals just as it enters into the inner lives of characters, whether real or fictional. Empathy and imagination are not mere daydreaming, but rather the grounds for rescuing animals from the enormities of industrialized slaughter, whose analog, Costello argues—to the dismay of some of her audience—is the Holocaust. Nevertheless the route Coetzee’s Costello takes—through art rather than philosophy—does not shelter her from Cary Wolfe’s argument that, so far as animal rights thinkers are concerned, “the animal other matters only insofar as it mirrors . . . the human form that is the ‘source’ of recognizing animals as bodies that have sensations, feel pain, and so on” (Animal Rites, 53).11 In these systems, the pain, fear, and love of the human becomes the model for determining other creatures’ capacities for these traits and by extension each creature’s rights. Costello imagines Sultan feeling what she herself would feel in such a situation; because Costello would be distressed, Sultan must be rescued.12 Such an approach, at its least self-critical, imagines the human umwelt not as subjective and inescapably immanent, but rather, at least insofar as it grounds ethics, as an objective understanding of the world that describes ideal capacities for sensation and desire that transcend any sensory or appetitive limitations.13 Whether an idealized human consciousness or corporeal sensitivity disguised under names such as “subject-of-a-life” (Regan, Animal Rights, 80),14 or Lacan, Heidegger, and Levinas’s assurance of the uniqueness of the human, this is anthropocentrism, a form, even the foundation, of ethical provincialism. Historicizing and thus defamiliarizing the (human) subject offers one way past this impasse. Joyce Salisbury’s work on animals, which argues for the changing permeability of human-animal boundaries from the early to the later Middle Ages, demonstrates that the borders of human subjecthood are not a transhistorical given (The Beast Within and “Human Beasts”).15 Her work nevertheless uses absolute categories of the animal and human. While speaking of Marie de France’s “sympathetic portrayal” of a werewolf, Salisbury suggests that this portrayal evidences a twelfthcentury tendency toward “more compassion for the animal part within us all” (“Human Beasts,” 18), but there is no discrete “animal part” in humans unless

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humans are understood to have a separate, secure “human part” independent of the very processes Salisbury tracks. Dorothy Yamamoto’s work on the indeterminacy of the human-animal boundaries avoids this error (“Aquinas and Animals” and Boundaries of the Human).16 Yamamoto examines categorical interstices between humans and animals and demonstrates how peripheral, low-class, or ambiguous figures—such as amphibians, wild men and women, or even Palamon and Arcite in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale—contaminate any definitive categories of the human and animal. Some of the most promising work on animals in the Middle Ages derives from the antifoundational work of Deleuze and Guattari. In their insistence on a world in which animals, people, and things constantly recombine in unbounded becoming, they undermine conceptions of a world of stable, merely interrelating monads. In their system, animals do not need to be considered as a wan imitation of the human, because no secure animality or humanity, as such, exists; no creature or thing can be reduced to being only with and for itself (Thousand Plateaus, 262). Furthermore, because of Deleuze and Guattari’s antipsychoanalysis, nothing can be fixed as an epiphenomenon of the tensions between the “molar unities” of Father, Mother, Phallus, and so on presumed by Freudianism to underlie the uses of animals in discourse, lived practice, and dreams; their critique therefore suggests an approach to animals freed from allegorical appropriations.17 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s charting of the intermingling masculine bodies of warhorse and human and their military accessories to form the “chivalric circuit” draws on this work. Cohen argues that animals, humans, and objects must be appraised together as they form various, temporary clusters of active being in which “no single object or body has meaning . . . without reference to the other forces, intensities, affects, and directions to which it is conjoined and within which it is always in the process of becoming something other, something new” (Medieval Identity, 76). What remains to be assessed are the mechanisms of making and perpetuating the differences between humans and animals or, at least, the discourses and practical realities of “forces, intensities, affects, and directions” guided by these various mechanisms. Even if barriers between humans and animals became, as Salisbury argues, a ludic zone in the later Middle Ages, this change did not result in subjectivized animals, while the only “rights” protecting animals were the property rights of their owners.18 Humans never ceased to domesticate or eat animals or to refuse reciprocity for these actions: in late medieval law, any domestic pig that ate a human was executed (Dinzelbacher, “Animal Trials,” Enders, “Homicidal Pigs,” and Pastoureau, “Justice exemplaire”), while no form of Christianity allowed its practitioners to deny the legitimacy of eating pigs without risking the suspicion of heresy.19 Yamamoto observes that “no single factor indisputably distinguishing us from the rest of the animal kingdom has been discovered, despite the best efforts of philosophers [or naturalists] over the centuries” (“Aquinas and Animals,” 89). I contend, however, that subjugation itself draws the boundaries—or rather boundary—between humans and animals. Subjugation resolves the various, shifting boundaries between humans and nonhumans into a single line separating humans from all other living things. Among

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these acts of boundary-making subjugation are not only eating, taming, and killing, but also the power to categorize. Cohen’s posthumanism should be reminded of the human unilateral domestication and consumption of animals. Though humans are ceaselessly transformed by conjunctions with objects, animals, and space, and though knights in chivalric narrative sometimes wish they were killed in place of their horses (Medieval Identity, 54–56 and 61), humans remain the masters: a horse belongs to a knight who might separate himself from a specific chivalric circuit by killing and eating his possession.20 In short, even an analysis that recognizes only unfixed inhuman assemblages cannot dissipate the irreducible presence within assemblages of the singular creature possessing something more than mere life. This is particularly true for the Middle Ages, where, at least in mainstream Christianity, only humans possessed bodies and souls destined for eternity.21 Because isolating the human within assemblages can be accomplished only by violently constraining the complexity of experience—or indeed by actual violence—my analysis does not reject Deleuze and Guattari, nor Cohen, for that matter. Rather than calling for a return to realia, my approach acknowledges their insights but focuses on the resistance to or the refusal to acknowledge the combinatory patterns they track. I focus on the violent efforts to split assemblages into idealized categories and on the ideological use and motivation of these efforts.22 I align my argument with Derrida’s work on the animal, which is for Derrida “not one question among others” but the question that “represents the limit upon which all the great questions are formed and determined, as well as all the concepts that attempt to delimit what is ‘proper to man,’ the essence and future of humanity, ethics, politics, law, ‘human rights,’ ‘crimes against humanity,’ ‘genocide,’ etc.” (Derrida and Roudinesco, “Violence,” 62–63). In his work on animals, Derrida seeks to sidestep ethical systems founded on the rights owed to subjects. He argues that even as they grant or recognize subjects’ rights, such systems also invariably deny subjecthood and hence ethical relationships to others. Derrida invokes Jeremy Bentham’s famous suggestion that “the day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.” Rejecting appeals to reason for determining rights, Bentham argues that the problematic of the animal should not be “Can they reason? nor, Can they talk, but Can they suffer?”23 From this rearticulation, Derrida derives the possibility of an ethics based around “not-being-able,” that is, around a shared vulnerability between creatures: What is this nonpower at the heart of power? What is its quality or modality? How should one account for it? What right should be accorded to it? To what extent does it concern us? . . . Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude we share with animals. “The Animal,” 396

Derrida aims to prevent the mere extension of “human rights” to animals. Extending rights based on positive capacities would only duplicate the “philosophical and juridical machine” this extension purports to critique (Derrida and Roudinesco,

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“Violence,” 65–66). Moreover, Derrida scorns facile “biologistic continuism,” which, in drawing humans and animals together into homology, effaces the differences between all animals, including those between all humans. In refusing to reduce the multiplicity of lived experiences, Derrida also aims to preserve the unknowable excess without which ethics degenerates into utilitarian calculations guided by assumptions of shared capabilities between self and other.24 Derrida’s direct utility to a medievalist reading of animals derives, first, from his resistance to tropic appropriations of singular animals, that is, his resistance to transmutation of animals through allegory into universal abstracts or into merely human qualities.25 The second use derives from the place of animals in his critique of the foundational human subject. He tracks the violent exclusion of the animal by which the human subject, even or especially within the Darwinian trauma of the collapse of anthropocentrism,26 exclusively claims “speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift, and so on” (“The Animal,” 373). Derrida argues that the disavowal of the possibility of animal subjectivity traverses “the whole history of humanity” and is of paramount importance to the formation of the human. “Carnophallogocentrism” (“Eating Well,” 280), the violent relationship to animals that grants humans their claims to unique possession of reason and self-awareness, therefore “institutes what is proper to man, the relationship to itself of a humanity that is above all careful to guard, and jealous of, what is proper to it” (“The Animal,” 383).27 Derrida’s punning title—“L’animal que donc je suis” (The Animal that Therefore I Am/Follow)—for one of his most sustained treatments of the animal exemplifies this argument. Revising Descartes’s cogito, Derrida discovers the human as not isolated before a world it apprehends through (or doubts in) its private thoughts, but rather in—or against—a world of other living things. In this active, ongoing, and violent relationship, the human cannot abandon the subjugation of animals without abandoning itself. All nonhuman creatures in this system of subjugation belong to a group Derrida refers to as “l’animot,” the “animals-animalword,” punning on the sound of “mot” (word) in the silent “maux” of the French plural “animaux.” As he explains: Among non-humans and separate from non-humans there is an immense multiplicity of other living things that cannot in any way be homogenized, except by means of violence and willful ignorance, within the category of what is called the animal or animality in general. . . . The confusion of all nonhuman living creatures within the general and common category of the animal is not simply a sin against rigorous thinking, vigilance, lucidity, or empirical authority; it is also a crime.28

416

This crime subsumes any nonhuman individual creature into a monolithic category condemned to pre-determined servitude to, dependence on, or, more generally, inferiority before humans.29 In this system, humans know themselves as human, or rather they retroactively create themselves as humans, because of what they do to animals and what they refuse to allow animals to do to them. To think otherwise mistakes “potent consequences” for “preexisting foundations” (Haraway, Companion Species, 6).30

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The ideological conservatism of the late medieval work Sidrak and Bokkus makes it especially useful for illustrating this widespread and longstanding discourse on humans and animals. Sidrak and Bokkus is a 12,000-line metrical encyclopedia in which the philosopher Sidrak answers the questions of King Bokkus. The questions largely resolve binaries into hierarchies—the prowess of the forest over that of the city, men over women, soul over body—to determine the proper relationships among humans, between humans and the rest of Creation, and most importantly between humans and their Creator.31 At one point, Sidrak32 poses the question: “Siþen we of Goddis liknesse be, / Whi mowen we not doo as did he?” (2787–88). The first half of the answer follows: To Goddis liknesse we ben dight: Þerfore he haþ ouen vs might Aboue eche oþer creature Þat he made here forto dure; And for þat liknesse so knowe we Alle þinges þat in erthe be. We kunne worche besily and wynne And almesdede knowe fro synne; All creatures we mowen take And seruauntes of hem to vs make; And all oþir þing þat is noght To Goddis liknesse here iwroght Haþ no knowing ne might þerto To do al þing þat we here do, Ne comaunde vs not þei ne may As þat [we] done hem euery day.33

2789–804

The answer demonstrates both the pedagogical purpose of the question and the anxiety that the paired question and answer were meant to quell. Clearly, Sidrak’s worry about the human likeness to God does not concern the human inability to perform such acts of omnipotence as creating a universe or raising the dead. Rather, the question presents an opportunity to determine whether humans are God’s special creatures, distinguished from the mass of other living things and destined for resurrection. Indeed they are, for, as Sidrak explains in the second half of the answer, although humans “mowen not neuerþelesse / Be as stronge and as wijs as” God (2806–7), they—or, in Sidrak’s parlance, “we”34—are, uniquely among worldly creatures, “worþi to þat blis” (2816) of the coming immortality. Sidrak might have reached this final reassurance by doctrinal proofs such as the solicitude of God, as evidenced by the special attention humans received during creation; by the incarnation and crucifixion; or even, tautologically, by the coming human resurrection. However, Sidrak’s chief proof that humans are God’s special creatures is that God has given them dominance over all other worldly creatures.

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Sidrak’s absolute demarcation of human from animal is of course a commonplace, as is its definition of the human as superior to the animal. Medieval sources tend to separate these two groups through an appeal to reason, a term that encompasses those capacities purportedly possessed only by humans, or at least those humans the text favors, whether philosophers, Christians, men, or noblemen.35 Participating in a Western philosophical tradition that, as Richard Sorabji argues, originates with Aristotle, Christian thinkers as diverse as the foundational Augustine and the unorthodox ninth-century court scholar John Scotus Eriugena36 have much the same ideas on reason, humans, and animals: “Animals do not laugh or make jokes, but that is not the highest human activity; nor do animals seek fame and glory and power, but our desire for these does not make us better than animals. The difference is in reason” (Augustine, On Free Choice, 69). “For it is precisely this that is man’s difference from the other animals, that he possesses reason, just as it is their difference from him that they do not” (Eriugena, Periphyseon, 375). While similar statements can be readily assembled from other medieval thinkers, John of Salisbury’s argument in his Metalogicon against animal reason and for human singularity encapsulates the whole tradition: Although brute animals have a certain power of discernment, whereby they select their food, shun snares, leap across precipitous places, and recognize relationship, still, they do not reason, but are rather moved by their natural instincts. . . . [At Creation] God, breathing life into man, willed that he partake of the divine reason. The soul of man, which comes from, and will return to God, alone contemplates divine truths. This prerogative is, in fact, almost man’s sole claim to preeminence over other animals.

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Sidrak too speaks of human “knowledge,” the text’s term to express the complex of capabilities encompassed by reason, as so extraordinary that were it not for angels, demons, and God, “human knowledge” might be understood as pleonastic, and, like the Metalogicon, Sidrak binds the human monopoly of reason in this world to the uniquely human assurance of immortality. In Sidrak’s answer, humans know the difference between “almesdede,” charitable acts, and “synne” and, in addition to this moral knowledge, also “know . . . alle þinges þat in earthe be.” On the other hand, Sidrak absolutely denies animals these capacities, for they “haþ no knowing ne might þerto / To do al þing þat we here do.” As much as Sidrak draws upon the typical human claim for the monopoly of reason, its substitution in line 2802 of the verb “to do” for “to know” tellingly indicates that knowledge does not refer only to the human capacity for abstract thought or meditation on divinity. The animal lack of knowledge implies not so much the inability to think as the inability to do as humans do. What “we here do” may include moral deeds and the compiling of encyclopedias, but it primarily means subjugation: because animals lack knowledge, “ne comaunde vs not þei ne may / As þat [we] done hem euery day.” Human knowledge, which “kunne worche besily and wynne”, encompasses with “kunne” both “knowing how” and “being able to.”37 Primarily, this means the knowledge of how and the capacity to do to other creatures: “All

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creatures we mowen take / And seruauntes of hem to vs make.” In this system of knowledge and dominance, what matters is the unilateral human ability to make use of animal labor. Neither the occasional exercise of free labor or thought by an animal nor humans’ labor for others of their own species affects this system. Sidrak guarantees humanity not by what humans can think or do for themselves or to each other but by their denial of “might” to other living things, which become known as animals when they are compelled to submit. As Sidrak explains, since humans were made in God’s likeness, Þerfore he haþ ouen vs might Aboue eche oþer creature Þat he made here forto dure; And for þat liknesse so knowe we Alle þinges þat in erthe be.

2790–94

The origins of the power to deny “might” are enigmatic, as are the causal relationships between might, knowledge, and likeness. Knowledge may derive from likeness to God either concomitantly with dominance or consequently as an outgrowth of dominance. “Þat liknesse” means the likeness of humans to God, which might give humans the concurrent power to dominate and know all earthly things; it might be a likeness to divine dominance that grants, in turn, knowledge of all earthly things. Although the French original, Sydrac le philosophe, is somewhat clearer,38 the lack of clarity in the Middle English translation should be thought of less as a mistake than as a representation in miniature of Sidrak’s position on the human and on the human relation to the animal. While the origins of knowledge are ambiguous, knowledge in Sidrak should be understood as active and at least partially rooted in the subjugation of animals, which itself demonstrates that animals lack knowledge. The intermingling of knowledge, dominance, and likeness in this consideration of the human, the animal, and God is consonant with key exegesis on what is among the most familiar statements of the human relationship to animals, Genesis 1:26: “And He said: Let Us make man to Our image and likeness: and let him have dominion [praesit] over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping creature that moveth upon the earth.” As Augustine explains in his Literal Commentary on Genesis 1.96: At this point we must also note that God, after saying “Our image,” immediately added, “And let him have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air” and the other irrational animals. From this we are to understand that man was made to the image of God in that part of his nature wherein he surpasses the brute beasts. This is, of course, his reason or mind or intelligence, or whatever we wish to call it.

This is just one source of Sidrak’s assumption that likeness to God is demonstrated by the human superiority to animals. As Augustine’s dialogue On Free Choice of the Will demonstrates, the human subjugation of animals proves this superiority. In the midst of a discussion on the origin of evil, Augustine invokes the foundational

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principle of rule, which is that the weak or incapable should be ruled by the strong or capable (12–13; see Gillian Clark, “Fathers and the Animals”). The first element in his argument is the superiority of humans to their natural subjects, animals. To substantiate this natural superiority—a problem in itself, as the natural should only have to be explained, not proved—Augustine sets out to demonstrate animal irrationality. He might have done so by citing activities animals cannot perform, such as building cities or writing treatises on reason. Conversely, to prove human reason, Augustine could have cited human engagement in these selfsame deeds. He could have defined humans and animals as independent categories brought together only for illustrative purposes to show how rule should work. Instead, Augustine posits a relationship in which humans act directly on animals: We often see animals that have been tamed by human beings. I don’t mean just their bodies; their spirits too are so much under human control that they obey a human will by a kind of instinct and habit. Do you think that there is any way that a wild animal, however strong or ferocious, however keen his senses, could in turn attempt to subdue a human being? Even though it could destroy a body by stealth? 12

His interlocutor replies no, and in response to another question, admits that since animals are animate “there is something that is present in our souls in virtue of which we are superior, which is lacking in their souls, thus allowing them to be subdued by us. It is obvious to anyone that it is something of considerable importance. What better name for that than ‘reason’?” (13).39 Humans have a faculty animals lack, and the proof of this faculty’s possession is not the ability to universalize or construct syllogisms or other such operations, but rather the ongoing human domination of animals. In Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will, the separation between humans and animals supports the temporal law of human civilization and the eternal law; in Sidrak, it supports or even manifests the human relation to God. But neither work can simply assume the division between humans and animals, despite Sidrak’s confident deployment of a “we” that excludes animals, despite Augustine’s characterization of animal submission as instinctual rather than forced. Subjugation is thus not simply a proof; for the human to assure themselves of being human, when the human is predicated on superiority to the animal, subjugation is a requirement, even an obligation. Sidrak thus lists animals’ attributes, actions, and finally bodies among those things that God made “for manis sake / And serue to man for euermore” (8204–5). Its two questions on the eating of animals demonstrate the unlimited scope of what humans may do to animals. Sidrak asks, “Is it any synne a man to ete / Al þing þat he may get?” (6771–72), and responds by noting first God’s love of humans, next His creation of plants and animals, and then their purposes: He made him [that is, humanity] lord of alle þise Hem to putte in his seruise And forto vse hem to his fode.

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For God made alle þinges gode And sithen he af hem leue þertil, He doth no synne, me þinke by skil, Þat of alle þinges eteth In mesure as he it geteth. For what he eteþ wiþ good wille, It may neuere do him ille, Þogh it were addre or snake.

6779–89

The root of this formulation is an exegesis on God’s allowing meat-eating to Noah;40 humans commit no sin in slaughtering and consuming animals.41 The sole limitation Sidrak places on eating is one repeated in Christianity at least since Augustine, namely, that everything can be eaten so long as it is eaten in moderation and “wiþ good wille.” The range of this sinless killing and eating includes even an “adder or snake,” which suggests the legitimacy of eating every animal, no matter how repugnant or dangerous. When Sidrak returns later in the work to this question from a medical, rather than moral, perspective (10431–45), it echoes the earlier answer, altering it only slightly for considerations of health. Once again, so long the meat is eaten in moderation, so long as the eater is in good health, all “was for manis mete / And al is holsom for to ete” (10435–36) and “to his kynde noon outrage make” (10438). Sidrak does limit the diets of sick people, but once they regain their health, they can eat anything they like. Sidrak places no other limits on eating, unlike, for example, the dietetic analysis of Hildegard of Bingen’s Physica, whose catalog of animals considers their edibility and denies those with noxious flesh to human eaters.42 Nor does Sidrak justify the late medieval prohibition on eating horses. Most notably, it ignores the Christian cycles of fasting, which were well developed by the time of this work’s composition and whose proscription of many animal products for nearly a third of the year would seem to invite explanation in a work so given to moral and naturalistic explanations.43 Sidrak represents human dominance of animals as unlimited by omitting these considerations, each of which, to be sure, had its own techniques for sacrificing the animal to the human. In so doing, Sidrak rejects any infringement upon dominance that would question the preeminence—and hence the existence—of the human subject. This unimpeded dominance extended not only over the bodies of animals but also over their minds by denying them knowledge of self, of sin, of salvation, of language, or indeed of any knowledge independent of human training. Joining in a longstanding tradition of encomia for dogs,44 Sidrak states that the dog is the “wittiest” beast (6959)45 but also observes that there is “noon [other animal] kyndelokere to man” (6962), for in Sidrak, canine intelligence is entirely devoted to hunting on behalf of its masters. Even those animals who injure humans, as do the ants and flies that “bite man somtide” (2203), serve humans by preventing them from being too proud (2204). Sidrak considers whether “Fisshes and foules and beestis echoone, / Haue þei soules or haue þei none?” (3633–34), answering that animals lack souls and thus lack

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immortality. It adds that there is no such thing as animal responsibility, since any animal act that might be thought a crime or a good deed results only from training: no good kunne þei do But þat men hem norissheþ to— Þanne haue þei witte of manis lerninge But of hemself haue þei noþinge.

3655–58

Lacking responsibility, animals cannot accrue merit through “almesdedes” that would make them fit to be the companions of angels (3635–38). In short, although Sidrak admits that animals have a kind of soul that moves their bodies and senses things, animal souls, unlike immortal human souls, die with their bodies.46 The animal soul is merely an “oonde,” a breath: But her soule, þat I oonde calle, Whanne þe body is deed, shal falle: It fereþ as an onde of thi mouth For it is to no man kouth; For whan þe word is out spoken And þe soun awey is cropen, It vanissheþ in þe eir away And no lenger it dure may.

3661–68

At a time when the language of power, as Michael Clanchy has shown, had ceased to be oral and had become documentary, Sidrak compares the animal soul to the relatively powerless form of human language. The written word was of course not the only means of enacting or displaying power in fifteenth-century England or in the thirteenth-century France that produced Sidrak’s original. Civic processions, public drama, sermons, and executions were all ways to display power, but Sidrak clearly means to denigrate the fleeting animal soul by contrasting it to the perpetuity of written words. What “soul” animals have is transient like speech and thus impotent in comparison to the written networks of human power in which this work itself participates. Sidrak further degrades animals by dismissing animal “speech” as mere noise to prevent it from being mistakenly elevated into a sign of reason. When it asks “Haue foules and beestes any speking / Or vnderstonding of anyþing?” it observes that “foules and beestis crieþ, bydene” and that “Whanne þat oone make a cry, / Þat other hereþ it redily / And crieþ to him a ein foot hoot” (11339–53). Forestalling the objections that it has just raised, Sidrak asserts that although animals do make noise, “what þei mene þei ne woot” (11354).47 Sidrak makes several points here: animals make noise only by “kinde” and “vsage” (11356), that is, by instinct; animal noise lacks meaning, so far as communication between animals is concerned; and noncommunicative animal noise nevertheless serves a purpose known only to humans. The meaningless noise of animals therefore signifies more than mere absence; it demonstrates animals’ lack of knowledge and the mere instinct guiding their actions. Thus, animal noise justifies human dominance and differentially manifests human

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freedom: “God to hem dighte” this lack of language so that “men shulde haue ouer hem mighte” (11357–58). Notably absent from this discussion of animal noise is the possibility of animals’ understanding human speech. Hunting manuals, an established genre by the time of the writing of Sidrak, detail the cries hunters use to guide their dogs in search of prey (Cummins, Hound, 113–14). Given Sidrak’s praise of dogs in hunting, it might have considered the vocabulary for commanding dogs. Nonetheless, even the inclusion of this vocabulary would have failed to challenge the relationship between humans and animals: lords should be understood by their servants, and so long as the servants cannot speak to each other privately, the position of the lord rests inviolate. Sidrak thus presents human domination over animals as so complete that no creature, by escaping relationships of domination, consumption, or service, may challenge the relation of humans to creation, and, by extension, to God. The denials of animal soul and language are among Sidrak’s most important efforts in dominating animals to establish the human. In the question on language, Sidrak implies that humans who do not acknowledge the meaninglessness of animal noises cannot know themselves as humans.48 After all, to apprehend animal noise as language would suggest that the human monopoly on language had slipped and with it the certainty in animal ignorance. More explicitly, Sidrak warns that animals must be denied souls “elles were beest lich to man” (3646). If animals were like humans, if animal objects were subjects of their own lives, then the purportedly natural domination of animals would be revealed as artificial. Sidrak’s claims of human specialness—namely, the human separation from and domination of the animal—might likewise be undone. The problem is not merely whether animals might rise to a status “lich to man,” but rather one of symmetry: to the extent that beasts are like humans, humans are like beasts. As the status of animals rises, that of humans must sink because of the loss of their uniqueness. As I have shown, in Sidrak the key privilege of the human likeness to God is immortality. Should all creatures meld into an undifferentiated mass, then none could gain salvation, for, as Sidrak’s answer on God’s omnipotence makes clear, salvation requires being singled out. This is not the only way to read the potential likeness of animals to humans. God, as Sidrak explains, “is lord and we knaue” (2811), and if He “wolde bidde hem bothe [i.e., Heaven and Earth] sinke, / Anoon he shulde do his biddinke” (8119–20). Humans dominate animals absolutely but are themselves abased before their Creator. Sidrak’s question “Siþen we of Goddis liknesse be, / Whi mowen we not doo as did he?” (2787–88) constructed the human by abasing the animal, and, in so doing, implicitly likened that abasement to that of humans before God. Paradoxically then, human impotence before God secures the human position over animals. If animals are to humans as humans are to God, then animals can no more rebel against humans than humans can rebel against God. While this interpretation impedes the breakdown of human uniqueness, the invocation of likeness as well as dominance drives the analogy both ways: the mutual nature of likeness complicates domination’s guarantee of difference. Sidrak argued that human domination over animals proved human likeness to God; if humans are to

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animals as God is to humans, then animals must share a similar relationship, one of likeness, with their immediate masters, as humans do with theirs. Indeed, just as often as Sidrak tries to prove human dominion over animals, it also raises and denies the possibility of animal likeness to humans. Given the problems of likeness I have elucidated, Sidrak’s constant return to this likeness might seem to disrupt human identity, but, in fact, the resulting, recurrent denials of likeness are precisely the point: by denying the evident likeness of animals, humans can engage in the activity that is so important to Sidrak’s conception of the human. Humans know themselves as human because animals have “no knowing ne might þerto / To do al þing þat we here do” (2801–2); subjugation is the chief of these actions. In other words, if beasts were not like humans, Sidrak would not be able to articulate discourses to subjugate animals and so generate the human. Mary Midgley’s Animals and Why They Matter relates a story that illustrates this point: a hunter on safari takes great pride in protracting the killing of an elephant over hours, even taking a coffee break between shots. As Midgley remarks: Sane people do not usually congratulate themselves in this way if they have merely smashed a machine or a plastic toy, or even blown up an enormous boulder. They choose a large animal because they can think of it, not just as an obstacle, but as an opponent—a being like themselves having its own emotions and interest. 16

So too in Sidrak. Its entries contain no essential definition of the human; they differentially produce the human through repeated assertions that God created animals for the sake of humans and through denials to animals of likeness to the human. In order to create the opportunity for such denials, Sidrak must constantly raise the possibility of just this likeness. Derrida remarked of the subject that “Not to be able to stabilize itself absolutely would mean to be able only to be stabilizing itself” (“Eating Well,” 270): in Sidrak the human requires a continual reenactment of subjugation to attempt a stabilization it can never attain. In order for humans to enact their dominance and therefore try to maintain their sense of an identity, animals must continue to threaten the boundaries of the human. Dominance, and therefore the human, must fail where there is no suitable object to be dominated: the “beest” must be in some way “lich to man” in order to allow a meaningful action of denying likeness, for power to be enacted, for domination to be proven, and thus for the human—this dominating creature—continually to make itself human. A pertinent joke appears in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Plato defines the human as a “two-legged creature without feathers.” In response the Cynic Diogenes, who often plays Plato’s foil in this work, plucks a chicken, brings it to the Academy, and declares it to be “Plato’s Man.” Plato revises his definition by adding “having broad nails” (43). This revision indicates that Plato’s purpose is not to find an adequate corporeal definition for humans but rather to defend human identity by excluding other creatures from his definition. If Diogenes procured a circus-trained elephant or even a legless human, Plato would presumably have had to retreat from proof by physical form and to reveal his underlying purpose by declaring humans human and animals animal regardless of material evidence. In responding to

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the plucked chicken or the trained elephant, Plato would become perhaps less confident in the absoluteness of his humanity, yet far more assured of his ability to declare himself human. To invoke Augustine’s formulation in On Free Choice once more, the proof of human superiority is the unilateral domination of animals, or, in other words, the ability to put animals in their place. Consider the denial of animal reason in the early fourteenth-century exemplary and doctrinal compendium Ci nous dit. A passage in this work restates the familiar relationship between human form and reason: Les bestes vont à .IIII. piés en senefiant qu’il sunt en leur païz; et nous alons a .II. en senefiant que nous ne sonmes pas ou nostre. . . . Et quiconques met l’amour de son cuer en terre, ainsi se fait il semblans aus bestes; maiz devons avoir tous nous desiriers ou ciel, que pour ce nous a Diex faiz. 1: 36–37 Beasts go on four feet to show that they are in their country; and we go on two to show that we are not in ours. . . . And whoever puts the love of his heart in the world makes himself resemble beasts; but we ought to have all of our desire in heaven, which is what God made us for.

But it then considers “cinges et pluseurs bestes” (“monkeys and several [other types of] beasts”), which “soivent bien aler a .II. piès” (1: 37, “often go on two feet”), thus logically raising the possibility that the bodies of monkeys and other bipedal mammals signify an inner life as noble as that of humans. Ci nous dit nevertheless maintains the privileges of the stereotypical human form by probing into the workings of the animal mind: “si n’i vont pas voulentiers s’il n’en sont contraint, pour ce qu’il n’ont pas sens raisonnable” (“but they do not walk that way willingly if they are not compelled to, because they are not reasonable”). Ci nous dit thus restores the ambiguous body of the monkey to its proper, unreasonable place by subordinating it to an unambiguously unreasonable simian mind. Because monkeys walk erect only when compelled, their intermittent occupation of the posture of reason in fact shows them at their most dominated, that is, at their most animal. The monkey’s inability to walk upright voluntarily captures it in a system in which it can neither act nor even mimic: it can only be compelled, and the compulsion reveals the human erect posture as singularly authentic.49 The final mental disposition of the monkey matters far less than the act through which Ci nous dit returns the monkey to its proper animality. While the similarity of the simian body to that of the human seems a threat, the similarity itself provides the opportunity for an especially potent action of subjugation that first simulates, then crushes, a threat to human identity. Ci nous dit need not follow its denial with further explanation, because the enactment of power makes explanation superfluous. Category disruption is often presented as liberative, but it also provides opportunities for dominant groups to reassure themselves of their own power. Such a function drives the discursive inability—or unwillingness—to abandon either the category threat of the animal or the foundation of the human subject on a humiliated animal object. Sidrak and several other medieval texts address the animal not because

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animals are comfortingly irrational but rather because they so disturbingly resemble rational humans. To rephrase Jeremy Bentham, the problematic of the animal is not quite “Can they suffer?” Rather, animals must suffer to guarantee that only humans can reason, speak, and finally be received into immortality. Generally speaking, no one’s humanity is reassured by destroying a rock. Wild boars, on the other hand, possessed strength, bravery, and vigor against which knights, during the hunt, proved their own ideal possession of the same traits. Other animals, including dogs and predatory birds, made fit companions or were admired for their prowess in hunting. Some animals might even be honored as co-worshippers, as in the Southern German ritual of the Umritt, in which horses were blessed with holy water and ridden into specially designed churches to gaze upon the Host.50 But for all this, the domination of animals also required that animals be scorned, their corpses treated as no human body should: the boar was eaten, the dog’s corpse often left in a ditch,51 the bird’s on a dungheap,52 and the horse’s, too, left to rot.53 A human death, like human life, merits respect; animal death, for the most part, merits no commemoration. Abjection does not contradict the respect sometimes accorded to animals, but rather was key to animals’ use. Likewise, the expression of likeness and denial in Sidrak and other texts continually reforms the human by providing occasions for domination of animals, the ongoing action that makes the animal animal and the human human. Matt Cartmill’s A View to a Death in the Morning considers the attraction of the now discredited paleoanthropological “hunting hypothesis,” which claimed that uniquely human capacities and traits evolved because Australopithecines turned from skulking in forests to predatory carnivorousness on the open plains. Adherents of the hypothesis embraced it for various reasons—to justify violence as the most fundamental human trait, to mourn the human separation from the community of animals, to reinforce post-war expectations of the coming nuclear eschaton—but they all understood that ferocity made the human, for good or ill (chapters 1, 2, and 10). I argue that a version of the hunting hypothesis was prevalent in the Middle Ages. When Henry II denied other humans the right to hunt—that is, the right to dominate animals—he stripped them of the full enjoyment and possession of their humanity. For this, Adam of Eynsham made him suffer. What suffering could have saved Henry from such a fate? What suffering, but that of animals?

Notes I thank Margaret Aziza Pappano, Helen Tiffin, and the Animal Studies Group at Queen’s University for allowing me to present an early version of this argument; Susan Crane, for her indefatigable guidance at all stages of my writing; and my wife, Alison Kinney, for cutting back the weeds. 1 Adam does mention, but only incidentally, Henry’s adultery and onerous taxation, but not Henry’s reluctance to fulfill his vow to go on crusade or his

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infamous encouragement of the murder of Thomas Becket. In Adam’s Latin, which Easting provides on the facing page, “de iure naturali communiter omnibus [irrational beasts] cedere deberent.” For similar twelfth-century complaints, see John of Salisbury, Policraticus, 28; Garnier of Pont-Sainte-Maxence, quoted in Queffelec, “Représentation,” 429; Nigellus Wireker, Speculum, 2563–70; and Walter Map,

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De nugis, 467. For a complaint against William I, see the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 221. For further discussion of complaints against the forest law and royal hunting, see Marvin, Hunting Law, 48–54 and 63–67. To encourage other potentates to treat monks well, Adam observes that Henry’s sufferings are somewhat relieved by the prayers of the “religious men” to whom “in his life for God he was full benyuolent oftyn-tymes” (Revelation, 205). For more on Henry’s relationship with monks, see Warren, Henry II, 394. The twelfth-century Cluniac Peter the Venerable wrote, “Lest I lie, I dare not profess that you [i.e., the Jews] are human, because I understand that the rational faculty which distinguishes the human being from other animals and beasts and renders him superior has been obliterated or suppressed in you” (quoted in Cohen, Living Letters, 259). I draw this last point partly from Wolfe, Animal Rites, 7, who argues that “we all, human and nonhuman alike, have a stake in the discourse and institution of speciesism.” He often returns to these thoughts (for example, 37–38, 43, 101, and 167). Derrida also considers the question of animal response via a reading of Through the Looking Glass in “The Animal that Therefore I Am,” 377– 78. Žižek expresses the same conviction as Lacan; e.g., “What distinguishes man from animals is thus again the excessive fixation on the trauma (of the lost object, of the scene of the shattering jouissance, etc.); what sets the dynamism that pertains to the human condition in motion is the very fact that some traumatic X eludes every symbolization” (Plague, 95; see, more recently, Parallax, 62–63 and 228). For further discussion of Heidegger’s distinction of humans from animals, see Agamben, The Open, 49–77; Calarco, “Heidegger’s Zoontology”; Lippit, “Magnetic Animal,” 1112–17; Derrida, “Eating Well,” 258, 266, 271, and 273; Derrida, Of Spirit, 47–57. For a summary of Derrida’s critiques of Heidegger, see Wolfe, Animal Rites, 62–66. David Wood crafted what may be the pithiest encapsulation of Heidegger’s persistent elevation of the human over the animal: “Heidegger’s destruction of the tradition, of ontology, is in the service of what is first a program of renewal. Later, less of a program” (“Comment ne pas manger,” 22). Simpson (Animal Body, 129) makes a similar observation on Heidegger’s “ex-istance” and medieval humanism. In a special issue of Semiotica devoted to Jakob von Uexküll, see Deely, “Umwelt,” 126, “What Uexküll

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uniquely realized was that the physical environment, in whatever sense it may be said to be the ‘same’ for all organisms . . . is not the world in which any given species as such actually lives out its life. No. Each biological life-form, by reason of its distinctive bodily constitution (its ‘biological heritage,’ as we may say), is suited only to certain parts and aspects of the vast physical universe. And when this ‘suitedness to’ takes the bodily form of cognitive organs, such as are our own senses, or the often quite different sensory modalities discovered in other lifeforms, then those aspects and only those aspects of the physical environment which are proportioned to those modalities become ‘objectified,’ that is to say, made present not merely physically but cognitively as well.” For an important correction to Agamben’s discussion of umwelt, see Wolfson, who explains that “‘Umwelt’ is not the animal’s subjective world, which we can never know, but merely what we can observe the animal to interact with” (“The Open: Uexküll”). Discussions of Levinas and Bobby include Peter Atterton, “Ethical Cynicism”; David Clark, “On Being ‘The Last Kantian in Nazi Germany,’” which critiques Levinas’s “reinscri[ption of] ancient ontotheological distinctions between the human and the animal”; and Llewelyn, “Am I Obsessed by Bobby?” 234–45. Wolfe also makes this point, for which he credits ecofeminist Deborah Slicer (Animal Rites, 35–36). Wolfe also critiques the “residual humanism” of Zygmunt Bauman, Homi Bhabha, Luc Ferry, Vicki Hearne, Levinas, and Lyotard (“in the end, for Lyotard, we may not be us, but at least we retain the certainty that the animal remains the animal,” 62). For a convenient review of animal rights philosophy, see Gruen, “Moral Status.” The misstep belongs to Costello, not Coetzee. For a sense of the complexity of Coetzee’s presentation of this character, see Marjorie Garber’s discussion of the dynamics of Costello’s family in Coetzee’s Lives, 73–84. In this, animal rights philosophy does not differ from Albert the Great’s zoology, for which see Guldentops, “Albert the Great’s Zoological Anthropocentrism,” who notes “animals are ranked and classified on account of the degree to which they resemble man” (222). Much else in Albert intriguingly anticipates twentieth-century views on animals: only humans can be properly said to have a face (227), which suggests Levinas; only humans have freedom of action (229), which suggests Luc Ferry; “the universal openness of the mind [in

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Albert] is mirrored in the infinite potency of the hand” (228), which suggests Heidegger. Regan describes the subject-of-a-life as a creature “with a biography, not merely a biology.” He argues that “subjects-of-a-life are the experiencing center of their lives, individuals who have lives that fare experientially better or worse for themselves, logically independently of whether they are valued by others” (Animal Rights, 93). My charge may perhaps also be leveled against Glendinning, who, to counter the problem of other minds, dislodges the self-present subject to make way for Derridean “reading” in which the ceaseless deferral of presence does not prevent and indeed is the very grounds for a decentered subject “reading” him or herself or others, whether human or animal. But while Glendinning briefly allows for dogs to read humans, what he describes is largely reading based on behavior and drives familiar to (human) subjects reading themselves. For critiques of Salisbury’s historical narrative, see Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts, particularly 5–6, and Guldentops, “Albert,” 243. For example, Yamamoto writes, “These mediaeval examples show that the Thomist assertion of a boundary-line—an essential difference—between humans and animals did not put an end to debate about what it meant to be really human. In fact, it even encouraged it, as both theologians and writers of imaginative literature toyed with the possibilities of approaching the borderline, or even of crossing it” (“Aquinas and Animals,” 88). For a compendium of the scattered work of Deleuze and Guattari on the question of the animal, see “Becoming Animal.” Also see Wolfe, Animal Rites, 169–71 and 177. For example, Aquinas (ST 2a2ae 64, 1 ad 3) observes, “He that kills another’s ox, sins, not through killing the ox, but through injuring another man in his property. Wherefore this is not a species of the sin of murder but of the sin of theft or robbery.” See Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast, for an introduction to the polemic dynamics of pig-eating in Christianity. For a representative, if overwrought, demand that Christians recognize the legitimacy of meat-eating, see Eckbert of Schönau’s Sermones contra Catharos, Sermon 6, “Contra secundam haeresim de esu carnium” (PL 195: 36C–39A). Cohen considers the problematic edibility of horses—the chief animal of the chivalric circuit—in Medieval Identity Machines (48), where he observes that various forces combined to make horseflesh

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taboo in the texts and practices he considers, and in a discussion of Gerald of Wales’s History and Topography of Ireland, in Hybridity (87). For more on Christian prohibitions against the consumption of horseflesh, see Sigaut, Viande, and Meens, “Eating Animals.” Robert Grosseteste explains that “si pauper pro necessitate carnem asini aut caballi manducaverit, non nocet” (“if a poor person eats an ass or horse out of necessity, it is not harmful,” “Early Penitential Writings,” 120). Briefly, it seems that the horses of the poor, draft animals that did not manifest the military and political power of the horses of the elite, would have been discursively similar to oxen and more nearly properly edible; but no animal associated with the elite monopolization of violence—dogs, falcons, horses—was legitimized as meat. For one articulation of this position, see Aquinas, On the Power of God bk 2, q 5, art 9, body, “Now this necessity [of eating] lasts as long as man’s animal life endures. But this life will cease in that final renewal of the universe, because the body will rise not natural but spiritual [1 Corinthians 15:44]: hence animals and plants will also cease to exist then.” I am inspired here by Grosz (Volatile Bodies, 163), who criticizes Deleuze and Guattari for neglecting “the very real torment of suffering individuals.” Taylor’s discussion of Bentham, Animals and Ethics, 46–49 (this quotation is on page 47) is a useful introduction to his place in the debate of animal rights in the West. For Derrida’s ethical considerations on animals, see “And Say?” 128; “The Animal,” 398 and 416–17; “Force of Law,” 246–47; and “Eating Well,” passim but especially 286, where he declares “responsibility is excessive or it is not a responsibility” (here, and in many other places, Derrida redirects Levinas away from anthropocentrism). For another summary, see Wolfe, Animal Rites, 69. Derrida refuses to let his own cat stand in for universal felinity. He writes, “If I say ‘it is a real cat’ that sees me naked, it is in order to mark its unsubstitutable singularity. When it responds in its name (whatever respond means, and that will be our question), it doesn’t do so as the exemplar of a species called cat, even less so of an animal genus or realm. It is true that I identify it as a male or female cat. But even before that identification, I see it as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, enters this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here

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is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized” (“The Animal,” 378–79). Derrida echoes Freud (“Resistances,” 173) in his criticism of “the anthropocentric reinstitution of the superiority of the human order over the animal order” by seeing the reinstitution as a “wounded reaction not to humanity’s first trauma, the Copernican (the Earth revolves around the sun), nor its third trauma, the Freudian (the decentering of consciousness under the gaze of the unconscious), but rather to its second trauma, the Darwinian” (“And Say?” 138–39). Derrida began this line of critique at least as early as Of Spirit, where he remarks that Heidegger posits, almost despite himself, a dialectical relationship between humans and animals (57). For a fuller survey of Derrida’s engagement with the animal, see Chrulew, “Feline Divinanimality,” 18.2. See further discussion of l’animot in “The Animal,” at 405, 409, and 415, and Derrida’s rich exploitations of it at 380 and 410, and the translator’s note, 369. For another summary of the Derridean critique of the place of the animal in Western philosophy and practices, see David Clark: “the killing of animals, and the concomitant construction of the ‘animal’ as that which may be freely put to death for the purposes of consumption, is profoundly related to the constitution of the human Dasein” (“On Being ‘The Last Kantian,’” 176). Also see Wolfe, “the formation of Western subjectivity and sociality as such . . . relies on the tacit agreement that the full transcendence of the ‘human’ requires the sacrifice of the ‘animal’ and the animalistic” (Animal Rites, 6). It is with such a critique in mind that Derrida argues that regardless of their differences, Levinas and Heidegger espouse “traditional humanism . . . to the extent that they do not sacrifice sacrifice. The subject (in Levinas’s sense) and the Dasein are ‘men’ in a world where sacrifice is possible but where it is not forbidden to make an attempt on life in general, but only on human life, on the neighbor’s life, on the other’s life as Dasein” (“Eating Well,” 279). Work on meat-eating that accords with the links Derrida draws between human carnivorousness and imaginations of power includes Adams, Fiddes, and Twigg. I am also drawing on Haraway’s “Beings do not preexist their relations” (Companion Species Manifesto, 6) and “‘the relation’ is the smallest possible unit of analysis” (20). My debt to Butler’s Gender Trouble should be obvious: “gender is always a

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doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed” (25). Sidrak and Bokkus was enormously popular: translations into Italian, Dutch, and Danish survive, as do more than seventy manuscripts of the French original, which dates from no earlier than 1291. Eight manuscripts (and one printed edition) of the English verse version are extant, dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; an English prose version survives in a manuscript fragment and three printed editions. Burton’s introduction to his edition of two of the English verse works discusses genre, manuscripts, and sources. The Middle English is quoted from the Lansdowne manuscript, which is the lengthier of the two. Apart from their differences in length, the Lansdowne and Laud versions are largely the same for the points discussed here. Both manuscripts date from the second half of the fifteenth century. Although the French version of Sidrak and Bokkus provides a narrative identifying the king and the philosopher, once the encyclopedia properly begins, the two names function only as designators for “question” and “answer.” Henceforth I refer to Sidrak and Bokkus as Sidrak, identifying the “characters” as “question” or “answer” if necessary. The question-and-answer structure of this work is typical of medieval encyclopedias; for example the Prose Salernitan Questions, edited by Lawn, and also Honorius of Autun’s Elucidarium (PL 172: 1109A1176D). Sidrak otherwise seems to have no larger principle of order, which raises questions of how it was intended to be consulted. The Lansdowne manuscript omits the “we”; the Laud manuscript reads “as we doo hem euery day” (1756). To resist Sidrak’s interpellation, I substitute “human” for Sidrak’s pronominal categories “we” and “he.” Sidrak does not merely present but also constructs the human as a group of creatures separate from every other living thing. However, its “we” and “he” obscure the mechanisms through which readers effect their membership in their group and exclude animal others by presenting humanness as a fait accompli. Unsurprisingly, the category “reason” was subject to much debate, its definitions shifting and unstable. For a wider consideration of the various definitions of this term, particularly in its polemical uses, see Dahan, “Usage de la ratio.” To be sure, Eriugena was not unorthodox in his own time, but, eventually (in 1225, at the Council of Sens), Periphyseon would be condemned.

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See MED, s.v., “coˇnnen” (v.), definitions 1–5, especially 1, “to have ability, capability, or skill,” and definition 3, “to have mastery of (a skill), be versed or competent in (a craft, occupation, activity).” The French version of the long passage from Sidrak quoted here is as follows: “Le roi demande: Puis que nos somes fait a la semblance de Dieu, por qoi ne poons nos faire comme il fait? Sydrac respont: Voirement Dieu nos a fait a sa semblance, et por ce nos a il doné seignorie sur toutes autres creatures que il fist et que totes nos facent reverence et sont a nostre commandement. Et por cele meesme semblance connoissons nos les choses qui sont et ont esté et seront, et si coinnoissons nostre bien et nostre mal et savons laborer et travaillier et gaaignier et vivre, et si savons nos toutes autres choses et toutes autres creatures en nostre servise travaillier et laborer” (Sydrac, 68–69; “The king asks, since we are made in the likeness of God, why can we not do as he does? Sydrac responds: God truly made us in his likeness, and because of this, he gave us lordship over all other creatures that he made and that all should do us reverence and be under our rule. And from this very likeness we know the things that are and were and will be, and we also know good and evil and we know how to labor and work and earn and live, and also we know all other things and all other creatures work and labor in our service”). Augustine makes this argument more briefly in Eighty-Three Different Questions, Question 13, “What Proof is There that Men are Superior to Animals”: “Among the many ways in which it can be shown that man is superior to animals by virtue of his reason, this is clear to all: animals can be domesticated and tamed by men, but men not at all by animals” (43–44). God grants meat-eating to humans in Genesis 9:2–4. Bede, Hexaemeron 2.9, PL 91: 107A, provides the standard interpretation of these verses by pointing out that humans were given domination over animals but “profecto esse super homines prohibet” (“surely it is forbidden to be over men”). From this insight, he develops a theory of right rule; the context of the verse indicates that neither the right of human rule over animals nor the extension of this rule to eating animals are under question. Interpretations akin to Bede’s are Gregory the Great, Moralia 21.15, PL 76: 203C–204A, and Jonas of Orleans, De institutione laici 2.22, PL 106:213D. Although humans may have been vegetarian before the Flood, they still dominated animals; e.g., Peter Comestor, Historia scholastica, PL 198: 1079C, on Lamech’s accidental killing of Cain while hunting. As Peter

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explains, he hunted “pro delectatione tantum, et usu pellium, quia non erat usus carnium ante diluvium” (“only for pleasure, and for the use of the hides, since flesh was not used before the Flood”). My translations. For the early development of some of these ideas, see Lewis, Study, 110–19. Augustine, City of God, 1.20: “When we say ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ we do not understand this of the plants, since they have no sensation, nor of the irrational animals that fly, swim, walk, or creep, since they are dissociated from us by their want of reason, and are therefore by the just appointment of the Creator subjected to us to kill or keep alive for our own uses 926).” Aquinas, ST 2a2ae, 64, 1, “Whether it is unlawful to kill any living thing” approvingly restates Augustine’s argument. For example, according to Hildegard’s Physica, the sick should eat piglets, but only until their health returns (PL 197: 1326A). The flesh of crows is unhealthy for humans because the crow is a natural thief (PL 197: 1298C); horseflesh is unhealthy because the flesh of non-ruminating animals is more difficult to assimilate than that of ruminates (PL 197: 1319B-C). Although Hildegard denies certain animals’ flesh to health-conscious human eaters, she never questions the right of humans to slaughter animals for food: she does not so much spare certain animals as reject them. For seasonal Christian abstinence from meat, see Laurioux, Manger, 103–13 and Chevalier, Alimentation carnée, 193–94. Sidrak’s silence on this may be compared to the Speculum sacerdotale, a fifteenth-century work that explains that Lent forbids the eating of terrestrial animals but allows the eating of fish because God cursed the earth and not the water (it perhaps draws on a source like Alcuin, Quaestiones in Genesim, PL 100: 518B). Sidrak might have taken stock of local Lenten custom, which may have allowed such surprising “fish” as rabbit fetuses (Tannahill, Food in History, 99–100) and beaver tails (Laurioux, 115), because they were associated with the element of water, and even barnacle geese, since these fowl were thought to hatch from barnacles, which were shellfish (van der Lugt, “Animal légendaire”). It may be that Sidrak omits discussion of Lent because Sidrak lived before Christ (Sidrak speaks of Christ in the future tense) and hence before Christian alimentary codes. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 12.2 (PL 82: 438B) is a typical expression of this praise; Isidore declares that dogs “extra homines esse non posse” (“cannot live without people”). My translation.

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The observation that the dog is the wittiest beast occurs only in the Laud manuscript of Sidrak. This animal soul was not generally thought to possess the immortality of the human rational soul. But see Honorius of Autun, Clavis physicae, “De anima irrationalium” (“On the Soul of Unreasoning Creatures,” 176–77), who himself draws from John Scotus Eriugena, Periphyseon, 375, which argues that the spiritual force that animates the animal should not die simply because the matter of the animal’s body has dispersed. For a similar argument, see Adelard of Bath, Conversations, 111– 19. The idea that animals make noise rather than language is one of ancient pedigree; see Umberto Eco et al., “On Animal Language.” Although various traditions mapped in this article grant the barking of dogs some meaning, they reserve abstraction for humans. I am echoing Agamben’s discussion of Carl Linnaeus (The Open, 26–27). Linnaeus’s zoology does not define the human through any unique physical characteristics, so humans must make themselves through self-knowledge, i.e., “man is the being which recognizes itself as such, that man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human. . . . In Linnaeus’s optical machine, whoever refuses to recognize himself in the ape, becomes one.” For a similar reading of mimetic simians, see Wolfe, who, in discussing the apes of Michael Crichton’s Congo, draws on Michael Taussig and Homi

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Bhabha to observe that “the animal other is accorded impressive mimetic prowess, only to have it immediately put to the service of a mechanical obedience whose most famous name in the philosophical tradition . . . is Descartes” (see Animal Rites, 179–86). Rothkrug describes the Umritt (“Popular Religion,” 30) and places this ceremony (ca. 1300 on) in the context of the emancipation of the ministeriales, who cemented their new position through sponsoring pilgrimages, reverence for the Host, and increased persecution of the Jews. The citizens of late medieval London, for example, used a place called “Houndsditch” beyond the city limits as a dumping place for, among other refuse, dead dogs (Sabine, “Butchering,” 351). A late sermon in Middle English Sermons observes “Trewly birdes raueners, when þei die þei be cast awey vppon þe myddynges as no þinge of valew, bot þe birdes þat þei dud þer raueeyn too ben born to lordes tables. Sicurly, on þe same maner is of þise raueners when þat þei die. But iff þat þei amend þei ben throwon owte in-to þe donghull of hell” (239). In Lydgate’s “Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep” the horse’s opponents scorn him because “A ded hors is but a fowle careyn” (204) and “Entryng the feeld he pleyeth the leoun; / What folwith aftir? his careyn stynkith sore” (222–23). Also see Albarella (“Meat Production,” 139), who suggests that the great number of horse bones in the barbican ditch of Norwich castle indicates that horses’ carcasses were dumped there.

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Notes on Contributor Karl Steel ([email protected]) is assistant professor of English Literature at Brooklyn College. He collaborates on the medieval studies blog In the Middle (jjcohen.blogspot.com) with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Eileen Joy, and Mary Kate Hurley. This is his first article.