202THE ALLURE OF THE VENEERand flatness of animal skin, thus producing a substantially nonaffirma-
tive object. Essentially, Inert is a tableau-objet, in the sense that it frus-
trates the possibility of easy conclusions by displacing the viewer’s body
in a way that Wölfflin would have not approved. This structural precondi-
tion is essential to Inert’s ability to operate its agency. In chapters 2 and 3,
realistic, lifelike taxidermy, the kind championed by Browne, Shufeldt,
and Akeley as the artistic apogee of the practice, was inscribed within a
context of animal objectification driven by patriarchal systems of power.
This context, it was argued, began to emerge through the essentially pan-
optic spatializations of the cabinet of curiosities and natural history
illustration during the Renaissance. Thereafter, the decidedly Apollo-
nian epistemic essence of the classical age brought about an exacerbation
of animal objectification through an effective synergy provided by Car-
tesianism, the conception of the animal as automaton, and the emergence
of natural history as a discipline substantially based on the epistemic
truths provided by taxonomy. At this point, lifelike taxidermy became
the complex sedimentation of multiple and seemingly unrelated imperi-
alist and artistic discourses, which in different ways aimed at “preserving a
threatened manhood,” as Haraway would have it. Its perfectly idealized
realism became the materialization of the Apollonian essence that per-
petuated the epistemic value of the practice itself, well beyond the remit
of the classical episteme that initially produced it.
In the nineteenth century, the implementation of the practices of dis-
section and anatomical study became pivotal to the shift from natural
history to biology. Dissection, the violating of the surface, operated a de-
parture from the “field of concomitance of the natural history of the pe-
riod of Linnaeus and Buffon [which was] defined by a number of relations
with cosmology, the history of the earth, philosophy, theology, scripture
and biblical exegesis, mathematics (in the very general form of a science
of order).”^31 Georges Cuvier “toppled” the jars of the French museum,
“smash[ed] them open and dissect[ed] all the forms of animal visibility that
the Classical age had preserved in them.”^32 This shift involved the reconfig-
uring of the dynamics at play between the observed object, the eye of the
beholder, the spaces of optical inquiry, and the power/knowledge relation-
ships between the institutions and the observers.
From this perspective, Derrida’s summoning of the 1681 dissection of
an elephant for the gaze of Louis XIV, the greatest of kings, constitutes