136 chApter four
currents. A disciplined scholar has authority by virtue of having “mastered”
a body of knowledge and guards against the penetration of its mastered do-
main. In Garber’s case, her discovery of literature at the end of a text that
is already very clearly concerned with literature and its voice, its power,
and its authenticity in the world beyond itself offers us an interpretation
of the text that avoids the question of the animal in the name of literature.
If the text is about both—the ethical problem of human– animal relations
and the plight of literature in the moment of advanced capitalism—and we
feel compelled to choose one over the other, we might very well miss the
absolutely essential relation between them. By reading the animal strictly
as a trope, as a nonliteral means of speaking about literature, we fail to
understand how the text formulates a complex relation of dependency and
struggle between the animal and literary studies. Rather than to subju-
gate the ethical question of animal liberation to literary studies, we might
instead consider how the text relationally frames and negotiates animals
and/as texts. To do so necessitates a willingness toward vulnerable reading,
toward a reading practice by which we do not foreclose dependency and
struggle among “subjects” but rather concede to the porousness of our dis-
ciplined ways of knowing. Recalling Animal’s gesture of looking “into” An-
jali’s body and imagining therein a “nothingness” that creates “everything,”
perhaps through Coetzee’s text we are offered a related invitation to risk
seeing more than we are able to “know” concretely. Tailing Animal, what
we risk is being dispossessed of our disciplinary mastery and the authority
of our instantiated ways of knowing.
Costello’s Wounded Humanimality
In “Force of Law” (2001), Derrida argues: “In our culture, carnivorous
sacrifice is fundamental, dominant, regulated by the highest industrial
technology, as is biological experimentation on animals—so vital to our
modernity.... Carnivorous sacrifice is essential to the structure of sub-
jectivity, which is to say to the founding of the intentional subject” (247).
The unquestioned ability to inflict violence against animals is, for Derrida
as for Costello, a structural aspect of Western subjectivity. There is no way
then to challenge human mastery over animals without first calling this
subjectivity into question. But how might we accomplish this from within
it? The aging Costello relies on “seven decades of life experience” to argue