CHAPTER ONE
The Lawâs First Subjects: Animal Stakeholders, Human Tyranny, and the Political Life of Early Modern Genesis
Puffing about his own acting skills in A Midsummer Nightâs Dream, Bottom declares that his âchief humor is for a tyrantââa role he glosses as âa part to tear a cat inâ (1.2.24â25). TYRANT; TEAR-CAT. With this âqueer jingle,â the Athenian who will become an ass associates the ranter with the render of flesh and casts the political figure of the tyrant as a monstrous butcher.1 In annotating the line, Shakespeareâs early editor George Steevens lists several examples of this striking phrase, including to ârend and tear a catâ (from 1610).2 The redundancy of ârendâ and âtearâ makes it difficult to gloss over the reference to dismemberment. Attributions of a âbeastlyâ ferocity or an animalistic taste for blood to tyrants were, of course, a rhetorical commonplace in the period. John Ponet, for example, calls the tyrant a âmonstre and a cruell beast covered with the shape of a manâ; another tract itemized him as âa Tigar, a fearse Lion, a ravening wolfe, a publique enimy, and a bloody murtherer.â3 But Bottomâs phrase maps tyranny across species in the reverse direction. A cat, ripped apart by human hands, indexes the tyrantâs perversity and violence.
One early editor of Shakespeareâs play, however, asserted that we would be âwholly mistakenâ to imagine it is âthe domestic animal, the cat, which is spoken ofâ by Bottom here. Another claimed that, instead, âwe should read, A part to tear a CAP in. For as a ranting whore is called a tear-sheet, . . . so a ranting bully is called a tear-cap.â4 These early efforts and others like them have intervened to prevent our taking âcatâ literally, and modern editors tend to glide past literal meaning to classify the phrase simply as a metaphorical or proverbial expression for ârant.â5 As one Victorian commentator asserted, âIt is difficult to believe that such a brutal and disgusting action, taking the words in their literal Saxon sense, could ever have happened.â6 Brutal, indeed. But as Derrida puts the point in a different context, at the bottom of everything else we might say about this, there âis a real cat, . . . a little cat[;] it isnât the figure of a cat.â7 The lineâs dramatic utility and poetic force depend on its literal sense.
To make vivid what he means by the tyrantâs part, Bottom in this line conjures the murderous dismemberment of a semi-domesticated household creature, one whose state of being Shylock (himself âa stranger curâ in Venice) would amplify as âa harmless necessary cat.â8 As we will see, to be both harmless and necessary is to be an innocent presence and an integral part. No âout-law,â the harmless, necessary cat is neither a threat nor an alien. Bottomâs association of questions of justice and political malfeasance with the little, liminal, literal cat suggests the stakes of thinking historically about the species dimensions of membership, not to mention the definitions of harmlessness and murder that depend on it. It asks us to hesitate before construing every textual animal as an overwhelmingly figurative artifact of human imaginative authorityâas though everything we represent were wholly humanized thereby (through projection, anthropomorphism, allegory, and so on) and as though âthe humanâ had sufficient categorical integrity and inevitability to achieve a total conversion of all things to itself. It requires us to resist any reflexive confinement of animal significance within the minor literary category of âanimal imagery.â
This chapter unearths the broader intellectual foundations for Bottomâs passing suggestion that, in their relations with humans, early modern animals could be understood as the subjects of tyrannyâthe most abiding concern across sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century political thought (alongside obedience, to which animals have a special relation, as we will see). It also explores what this understanding might teach us generally about the evolving terms and conditions of membership or belonging within a domain of governance as those criteria expand and contract in Western discourses.9 I am not (or at least not necessarily) conceiving of membership as a group of beings consciously committed to the shared principles of a voluntary social order. Such an Enlightenment ideal of consensual or contractarian democracy now seems a point of nostalgia just considering humans among themselves. Consent, externalized in transparent verbal expression, remains a critical forensic standard among humans. But because we no longer understand it as actually descriptive of an origin for human political life, our horizons for thought are ill served by continuing to wield the litmus of consent against determinations of animal stakeholdershipâwhile a great deal we might say about relatings across species is occluded by its vestigial bar against animal participation.
Instead of invoking (and then discovering!) an ontological âdivideâ between human and animal or even demonstrating that divide to be a blurry, shifting, or unsustainable one, this chapter pursues the ways living creatures before Descartes were held to be related within a shared regime of order or laws that governed them commonly. This is not to say that the terms and conditions of this order were equalizing but that profound ambivalence about humanness left room for greater cognizance of nonhuman claims than has become customary for us. While now âanimal rightsâ struggle against the grain of presumptions about consciousness and language that inform modern liberal thought and the species-inflected notion of âhumanâ rights it cultivated, these particular presumptions do not widely pertain in premodernity. At its very heart, this earlier dispensation incorporated cross-species relationships, and it named them in the firmly political terms of sovereignty and subjection. The political dimension then attributed to human/animal relations, as suggested in the introduction, refers not to the obvious fact that those relations involve power (âbruteâ or otherwise) but to legal and constitutional concerns such as the legitimacy of authority and the justifiability of its acts, the terms of subjection and obedience, and thus the setting up of parties, membership, and rights. Elucidating this perspective depends in part on historicizing inherited circumscriptions of what might be counted as âlanguageâ or âsignification,â even as we displace language-based ideas of social contract from their lingering monopoly on definitions of politics. Setting to one side later developments in philosophy, technoscience, and political theory (most obviously, Descartes and Hobbes), we can attend to the more natural-historical and theologically inclined sixteenth-century arrangements against which they proceeded.
Conrad Gesner, the Swiss compiler of the most important animal encyclopedia of the sixteenth century, introduces his magisterial, multivolume Historiae Animalium in the 1550s by distinguishing âliving creatures, . . . Fishes, Foules, Cattell, and creeping things,â from the whole balance of creation in precisely these terms of political participation. They alone, he writes, are âexpressely . . . submitted and vassalaged to [human] Empire, authority, and government.â10 Being ruled puts them inside a certain pale, rather than simply outside the city walls. They are âvassalsâ of human government. Human sovereignty is not unconditional, just as animal subjection entails its due measure of participation or âvoluntary servitude.â In 1578 Guillaume du Bartas confirms the fundamentally political cast of these conceptions. Addressing readers, he proposes that
soone as ever [God] had framed thee,
Into thy Hands he put this Monarchie:
Made all the Creatures know thee for their Lord,
And come before thee of their owne accord.
On the basis of their âknowingâ man to be a duly established monarch, a ruler by right, animals by âtheir owne accordâ acknowledge the sovereignty of man, whom Du Bartas calls the âKing of Creatures.â11 We find this rendering of cross-species relations in the idiom of politics in more practical contexts too. For example, the training manual An Hipponomie or The Vineyard of Horsemanship (1618) argues that although man was originally given âSoveraignty & ruleâ over animals, his fall made âall other Creatures which before were loving and obedient to Manâ turn instead âto Rebellion.â12 At the broadest level, this habit of explicitly reckoning animals and people as (sometimes even willing) parties in political relation figures a âzootopian constitution,â or cosmopolity, terms I will be using throughout this book.13
Political and fiduciary nomenclatures for relatings across species register nowhere in the human-exceptionalist, sovereign politics of the nation-state after the seventeenth century, a paradigm in which intensifying controversies about citizenship and human title center on clashes among humans. For this regime, animals have been fully objectified (as clocks or robots, in Descartesâs account) and relocated to the emerging disciplines of technoscience. In Bruno Latourâs account of this separation of the human (âcultureâ) from all things nonhuman (ânatureâ), animals become undifferentiated within humanityâs remainder, a nature now recalibrated as inarticulate.14 This historical homogenization revises the former status and particular distinction of animals. Astonishingly, yet partly for this reason, theories of biopolitics arising from a critique of the dynamics of the modern nation-state have virtually nothing to say about nonhuman living creatures. âThe biological,â instead, addresses a torsion within the human. Because they both analyze the modern state, Foucaultâs biopolitics and Agambenâs âbare lifeâ remain essentially human in reach. Foucault describes âthe set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy,â and Agamben distinguishes human âbare lifeâ from âanimal nature,â which lacks âany relation to law or to the city.â15 The phenomenon they address, however, an erosion of âcivicâ or stakeholding politics in the name of technologized (bio)management of human âlife,â repeats with a vengeance what a previous transition had already accomplished for nonhumans. Among the backfired colonizations of late modernity, in other words, humans, too, enter the categorical abyss of âlivestockâ first created for quadrupeds. But before these two recalibrationsâone ending any glimmer of animal stakeholdership, the other commodifying human citizens as âdocile bodiesââthe language of explicit political relation suffused a frame that was at once larger and smaller than the modern state: the more intimate cosmos of early modernity.
Into the beginning of the seventeenth century, as for centuries before, this constitutional frame derives overwhelmingly from the establishments described in the first chapters of Genesis, as the passages from Gesner and Du Bartas so clearly show. The broad âmultidisciplinaryâ impact of its hexameral verses in particular (accounting for the six days of creation) cannot be overstated. Enjoying overwhelming currency as the account that begins âin the beginningââand that in a culture that saw itself in a custodial or genealogical relation to that beginningâGenesis touched all spheres of learning. The Hexameron also specifically instanced natural history writing because it explained the diversity of creaturely life while setting forth the legitimate relations among natural kinds. Because early modern animals were understood to have their genealogical progenitors listed in its charter (just as early modern humans saw their ancestors there), the creatures of Genesis 1 represent animals as animals for the purpose of reflecting on their divine origin and our due relations with them. In other words, classifying them as âimageryâ entirely misses their import as natural-historicalâhere, literalâanimals. With effects that were integral to its theological traction, then, early modern Genesis also represented a founding document in the political sense and an origin story in the natural-historical sense.
Stemming mainly from intellectual traditions of book learning (rather than empiricism), classically derived natural history in early modern contexts operated less as a narrative about origins and more as a catchall of recorded knowledge, ancient and modern. In Latin and in vernacular translations, Plinyâs encyclopedic Historia naturalis dominated the natural-historical scene, and writers harvested some of their most memorable animal notions from its treasury. Pliny relayed the popular idea that âbievers . . . gueld themselves, when they see . . . they are . . . in danger of the hunters: as knowing full well, that chased they bee for their genetoires.â He also conveys the conceit that bears lick their cubs into shape: at âfirst, they seeme to be a lump of white flesh without all form, little bigger than rattons, without eies, & wanting haire; only there is some shew and apparance of claws that put forth. This rude lumpe, with licking t...