CODA245placed enchantment.^1 Her proposal considered the possibility of connect-
ing enchantment to ethics. Thus far, speculative taxidermy has been con-
textualized as a critical interface in which scientific realism is relentlessly
problematized, fragmented, and reconfigured. But in line with Gablik’s
original conception, speculative taxidermy can also subvert “modern tra-
ditions of mechanism, positivism, empiricism, rationalism, materialism,
secularism and scientism—the whole objectifying consciousness of the
Enlightenment.”^2 Yet, it is important to face the fact that an enchantment
involving taxidermy can only be a haunted one—one in which the animal
absence/presence is central, always unstable, and relentlessly polysemic.
Contemporary art has not yet renounced (as Gablik might have hoped)
the “affirmative art object” as a central catalyst, as the vanishing point of
discourses, and as a sedimentation of practices. Donald Preziosi argued
in 2011 that the contemporary art object is persistently haunted by its an-
cestral predecessor: the religious relic.^3 While it is important to clarify
that Gablik ’s advocacy of reenchantment is not situated in Christianity or
any other religious doctrine, it is also important to note that any enchant-
ment of western art would most likely build upon preexisting notions of
transcendence. Taxidermy is intrinsically aligned to the relic on the account
of its indexicality. Like the relic, the taxidermy object is a sign, a symbol, and
a trace that rests on institutionally constructed truth. However, this truth,
in contemporary art, is characterized by an important fluidity that renders
it unstable and precarious. This instability, as seen throughout the examples
discussed in this book, is where the possibility of a nonanthropocentric
positioning of the future can emerge. Therefore, as a relic, speculative
taxidermy can be a site upon which the magical, the mythical, and the
scientific might interplay without necessarily disavowing a political/ethi-
cal edge inscribed in its material register.
Krzysztof Pomian has argued that western collections of relics and cab-
inets of curiosities are associated with a substantial and undeniable link to
the sacrificial, which he structurally outlines as the process of removing an
object from the utilitarian sphere, for the purpose of entering a transcen-
dental connection with an invisible spiritual dimension.^4 As such, the relic’s
charged indexicality, its material claims for truth, essentially is a connec-
tive agent between the immanent and the transcendent. In this sense, in all
speculative taxidermy, the preserved animal skin constitutes the material-
ization of the abyss between human and animal. It is a surface thought out