180FOLLOWING MATERIALITYstate. The awakening Benjamin finds in surrealist works thus involves an
essential notion of agency grounded in the possibility of recuperating
commodities as critical tools. In this sense, Benjamin configures a model
of commodity fetishism in which the object is animated by human
agency as well as imbued with its own agency, establishing an important
object/subject fluidity. It is in this sense that animal skin plays a key role
in speculative taxidermy—it emerges as the materiality generated by hu-
man/ animal relations of the body (both animal and human), relations
capable of undoing the deliberate forgetting produced by commodity fe-
tishism and enabling new connections to arise between the past and the
collective.
Similarly to Shukin’s double entendre of rendering in the context of
animal capital, the surrealist object appears as challenging crux of seem-
ingly unrelated discourses, all intrinsically intermingled with and by
technocapitalist economies. The ambiguous duality of “the body as ob-
ject” and “the object as body” is endowed with a political charge grounded
in the reconfiguration of the role played by materiality in art and as
articulated by the surrealist object-assemblage itself.
In Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics,
Joanna Malt focuses on the montage aspect of the surrealist object.
Materials (machine made and animal derived) and, most importantly,
surfaces effectively substitute the dream as “authentic voice of the
human unconscious” and as the predominant underlying psychoana-
lytical base to understand surrealist art.^58 Quite rightly, Malt claims
that the persistent psychoanalytical fetishistic approach to surrealist
objects has traditionally diminishes their signification as works of art
within a broader frame of reference: “the dream model too quickly
becomes a normative stricture and reduces surrealism’s power to sur-
prise and reveal.”^59 The predominantly psychoanalytical configura-
tion of animals within the surrealist paradigm inevitably positions
animals within the objectifying, anthropocentric parameters of the
analytics of finitude, according to which psychoanalysis is a promi-
nent, disciplinary manifestation.^60 As Kelly Oliver argues in Animal
Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human, “Freud is especially fond of
trotting out animals to perform the Oedipal drama. Freud stages the
Oedipal complex, along with castration, anxiety, neurosis, and the pri-
mary processes, using animals, which appear on cue whenever his
theory is in doubt.”^61