Creaturely Love : How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human

180 Pages·2017·1.84 MB·English

by  Dominic Pettman

Creaturely love
Cary Wolfe, SerieS editor
42 Creaturely Love: How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human
Dominic Pettman
41 Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds
María Puig de la Bellacasa
40 Of Sheep, Oranges, and Yeast: A Multispecies Impression
Julian Yates
39 Fuel: A Speculative Dictionary
Karen Pinkus
38 What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions?
Vinciane Despret
37 Manifestly Haraway
Donna J. Haraway
36 Neofinalism
Raymond Ruyer
35 Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life
David Wills
34 All Thoughts Are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy
John Ó Maoilearca
33 Necromedia
Marcel O’Gorman
32 The Intellective Space: Thinking beyond Cognition
Laurent Dubreuil
31 Laruelle: Against the Digital
Alexander R. Galloway
30 The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism
Steven Shaviro
29 Neocybernetics and Narrative
Bruce Clarke
28 Cinders
Jacques Derrida
27 Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
Timothy Morton
26 Humanesis: Sound and Technological Posthumanism
David Cecchetto
25 Artist Animal
Steve Baker
24 Without Offending Humans: A Critique of Animal Rights
Élisabeth de Fontenay
23 Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut
Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste
Vilém Flusser and Louis Bec
22 Body Drift: Butler, Hayles, Haraway
Arthur Kroker
(continued on page 166)
CREATURELY LOVE
How Desire Makes Us More and Less Than Human
Dominic Pettman
posthumanities 42
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Portions of chapter 2 were previously published as “When Lulu Met the Cen-
taur: Photographic Traces of Creaturely Love,” NECSUS European Journal of
Media Studies 5, no. 1 (2015): 127– 44; reprinted with permission of NECSUS.
An earlier version of the Epilogue was published as “Wings of Desire,” Cabinet,
no. 55 (Fall 2014): 34– 39.
Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pettman, Dominic, author.
Title: Creaturely love : how desire makes us more and less than human /
Dominic Pettman.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2017. | Series:
Posthumanities ; 42 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016015359 | ISBN 978-1-5179-0120-2 (hc) |
ISBN 978-1-5179-0121-9 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Love. | Desire.
Classification: LCC BD436 .P424 2017 | DDC 128/.46—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015359
She would like to think the gods admire, however grudgingly, our energy,
the endless ingenuity with which we try to elude our fate. Fascinating
creatures, she would like to think they remark to each other over
their ambrosia; so like us in many respects; their eyes in particular so
expressive; what a pity they lack that je ne sais quoi without which they
can never ascend to sit beside us!
J. m. coetzee, ElizabEth CostEllo
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CONTENTS
Preface  ix
Introduction: On the Stupidity of Oysters  1
1 Divining Creaturely Love 9
2 Horsing Around: The Marriage Blanc of Nietzsche, Andreas-
Salomé, and Rée 15
3 Groping for an Opening: Rilke between Animal and Angel 22
4 Electric Caresses: Rilke, Balthus, and Mitsou 26
5 Between Perfection and Temptation: Musil, Claudine, and
Veronica 30
6 The Biological Travesty 38
7 “The Creature Whom We Love”: Proust and Jealousy 44
8 The Love Tone: Capture and Captivation 50
9 “The Soft Word That Comes Deceiving”: Fournival’s
Bestiary of Love 55
10 The Cuckold and the Cockatrice: Fourier and Hazlitt 60
11 The Animal Bride and Horny Toads 66
12 Unsettled Being: Ovid’s Metamorphoses 73
13 Fickle Metaphysics 80
14 Nymphomania and Faunication 85
15 Senseless Arabesques: Wendy and Lucy 92
16 The Goat in the Machine (A Reprise) 97
Conclusion: On Cetaceous Maidens 106
Epilogue: Animal Magnetism and Alternative Currents (or Tesla and
the White Dove) 114
Acknowledgments  121
Notes  123
Bibliography  147
Index  153
PREFACE
Suppose we considered the love of Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and
Juliet, or Swann and Odette from the perspective of the popular media-
friendly genre “animals in love.” Here the lovers are not “people” per se
but merely two creatures enamored with each other, like the two otters
holding hands while floating in the water in the famous viral video. We
might then treat a forbidden love between the Capulets and the Mon-
tagues like one of those novelty stories where an elephant is inseparable
from a dog or a pig from a hedgehog. While this comparison may appear
willfully perverse or facetious, denigrating humanity’s most cherished
state to something bestial, it has the benefit of jolting us out of certain
lazy, even dangerous habits of mind, specifically, those assumptions con-
cerning ourselves and the exceptionalism of our capacity for affection
and being affected.1
The traditional distinction essentially boils down to this: animals expe-
rience attraction, by instinct, whereas humans experience love, which is
instinct supplemented and complicated by cultural forces (law, art, lan-
guage, custom, psychology, and so on).2 New approaches to “the animal
question,” however, have troubled this simplistic and self- flattering dis-
tinction. Moreover, earlier depictions of passionate encounters, in con-
trast to the great anthropocentric engineering project of the three major
monotheisms, approach any boundary between human and animal to
be fluid, provisional, and easily erased (as we find in Ovid, among many
others). The pages that follow thus argue two contrary positions simulta-
neously, attempting to make peace with the contradiction by the closing
pages (noting that the conflict is more of an inevitable paradox, created
by the lover’s discourse itself, than a dialectic seeking resolution). On one
. ix