Experimenting at the Threshold: Sacrifice, Anthropomorphism, and the Aims of (Critical) Animal Studies

Abstract

Of all the beings that are, presumably the most difficult to think about are living creatures, because … they are in a certain way most closely akin to us, and … are at the same time separated from our ek-sistent essence by an abyss. —Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” Heir to the divided aristotelian vision of nonhuman creatures as, alternately, mute foils (Politics 9; BK. 1, Sec. 2) and behavioral mirrors (Parts 138–39, bk. 2, sec. 4) of “man,” the properly “political” animal, animal studies has displayed uncertainty about how and where to draw species boundaries. Among the provinces of this field of inquiry, none is more defined by this tension than laboratory biomedical research, where physiological correspondences underwrite animal models of human maladies, while presupposed ontological distinctions justify the consignment of nonhuman animals to treatment considered improper for human subjects. Conventionally, those distinctions have centered on a cluster of intellectual capabilities—reasoning, speaking, intending, remembering—the dearth or deficiency of which abrogates the nonhuman's right to dissent and legitimates the human claim of priority. “Animal studies” in this sense, designating a wide range of investigative operations employing nonhuman animal bodies, posits material resemblance and metaphysical incompatibility between researcher and the object of research.

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