Speculative Taxidermy

THE ALLURE OF THE VENEER205

ate in the generation of new objects. Thus the flattened skin of Inert relies
on allure for the purpose of alluding to other objects (where objects are
also understood as human/animal relations).
The flattened inside of the hide is in contact with the ground. It is there-
fore the flatness of the hide’s exterior surface that declares this wolf dead
despite the lifelike realism of the head and front part of the body. Any
scientific/natural history anchoring of the piece is problematized by the
ornate edging that circumscribes the animal skin—a device that is instru-
mental in the generation of specific metaphors. This border is an object of
liminality. It functions as a Derridean parergon, as that which is against,
besides, and in addition to the ergon.^40 Neither wholly outside nor inside, it
physically marks that which limits the border of the animal in relation to
the man-made materiality of the gallery space that surrounds it. This thin
layer of fabric extends the materiality of the animal skin while simultane-
ously containing it. Its man-made attribution, rendered undeniable by the
rhythmic, scalloped edge motif, frames the implicitly recalcitrant nature
of the animal hide through an Oedipal maneuver of totalization. The ma-
chine-made pre-encoded cuteness of the scalloped edge, a bourgeois state-
ment of conformism, regularity, predictability and domesticated feminin-
ity, contains the animality inscribed in the form and surface of the wolf ’s
hide. The wolf is thus passified and infantilized, in a sense castrated, and
indeed flattened in the sense Broglio intends. The castration narrative is
substantiated by Deleuze and Guattari’s argument:

Lines of flight or of deterritorialization, becoming-wolf, becoming-inhu-

man, deterritorialized intensities: that is what multiplicity is. To become

wolf or to become hole is to deterritorialize oneself following distinct but

entangled lines. To become a hole is no more negative than a wolf. Cas-

tration, lack, substitution: a tale told by an overconscious idiot who has

no understanding of multiplicities as the formation of unconscious. A

wolf is a hole, they are both particles of the unconscious, nothing but

particles, productions of particles, particulate paths, as elements of mo-

lecular multiplicities.^41

Deleuze and Guattari’s objection to the castration complex was based
on Freud’s “wolfman,” a neurotic patient who had a childhood nightmare
involving wolves.^42 In the dream, a small pack of white wolves threatened