THE ALLURE OF THE VENEER203the apogee of the panoptic power that the positivistic affirmation of the
Enlightenment could produce. The famous anatomy lesson, described in
The Beast and the Sovereign, made “the beast as dead object, an enormous,
heavy body under the gaze and at the disposal of the absolute knowledge
of an absolute monarch.”^33 The slaying open of the animal body, along
with the power/knowledge relationships that enabled and justified it, con-
ferred on the animal the maximum visibility of affirmation—the total-
izing force resulting in the death of the animal.
Keeping this historical background in mind, we find that Galanin’s In-
ert becomes an intrinsically contradictory object suspended in the friction
between realism and abstraction (fig. 6.3). As an example of speculative
taxidermy, Inert can be understood as alluding to Latourian quasi-objects,
the type of objects characterized by a sense of hybridity that supplants the
order of modernity in the acknowledgment that certain objects play defin-
ing roles in actor-network systems shaping social relations between mate-
riality and concepts, between object and subject. Quasi-objects, according
to Latour, are “collective because they attach us to one another, because
FIGURE 6.3 Nicholas Galanin, Inert, 2009. Wolf skins and felt. Photograph by Wayne
Leidenfrost/PNG. Courtesy of the artist. © Nicholas Galanin.