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crits 264).
Lacans discontinuism was imbibed from his
major non-Freudian sources Descartes, Kant,
Hegel, and Saussure for whom such a turn away
from the claims of the life sciences was de
rigueur. Henri Wallons insistence on disconti-
nuity over organicism in human psychological
processes and Alexandre Koje`ves notion of a
nonbiological I likely played the most immedi-
ate and decisive roles in this regard. The
generalized Animal that populates Koje`ves
writings does gain some specificity in the bestiary
of Lacans teachings, which nevertheless retain
the Hegelian commitment to the refutation of any
and all continuist claims emanating from the
natural sciences. As Green notes, Lacans writings
and seminars are in large part shaped and
punctuated by these turns away from the
biological in the form of curt asides (a dismissal
of the honeybee language reported by von
Frisch), negative examples (the birds that prove
the inferiority of animal vision to the expressly
human gaze), and direct philosophical statements
(the abyss separating the human from the ape).
4
The attunement to the linguistic that accompa-
nies and underwrites the turn away from bio- and
zoo-logical continuism is, for obvious reasons,
precisely what has attracted literary scholars to
Lacan, and it is this anthropolinguistic version of
Lacan that has been elaborated and applied to
readings of Poe and other writers. In tandem with
Poes own well-advertised interest in riddles,
codes, and hoaxes, it has directed critical
methodologies to the play of Saussurian linguistic
deferral in a poststructuralist psychoanalytic
idiom.
5
Missing from this interpretive tradition
is any sense of an accompanying grotesque to
use the telling word from the title of Poes first
collection of stories encounter with the animal
other as staged in the natural sciences or the
literary arts. As I will detail below, however, the
thought of both Poe and Lacan is historically and
logically dependent on a large body of zoological
research and animal engagement. These primary
and secondary texts converge on moments
of intense encounter between human and
12
animal mirrors
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non-human animals. Analytically, they converge
on an originary moment in which the speaking
human subject emerges from zooscopic reflection;
historically, they converge on the closely related
practices of apprentissage and dressage (the
confinement, training, and exhibition of animals
for scientific and entertainment purposes) that
make such reflection possible.
6
When Lacan was persuaded to publish his
works in 1966, he opened the E
crits. For
Lacan the crucial moment in childhood develop-
ment comes when the child substitutes an
imagined figure of organic wholeness for his
previous experience of physical and psychological
dependence and disintegration. This substitution,
which Lacan imagines through the metaphor of
the mirror, allows the child to attribute an
integral self to a previously dissociated bundle
of perceptions. The self produced by this act is, as
it were, constitutively aware of its factitiousness,
and the resultant sense of lack creates the appetite
for wholeness that the self will henceforth seek
from the big Other (the overarching cultural
system from which the self borrows complete-
ness) and one or more small others (objects the
separation from which defines the selfs
wholeness).
Lacan, as I have already indicated, explicitly
rejects the possible transspecific qualities of the
mirror stage, and among Lacanian scholars the
discontinuist reading of The Mirror Stage is
the standard and, given Lacans other disconti-
nuist statements and the anthropological habits of
the philosophical tradition in which he works,
probably the responsible one. Here, however,
I would like to elaborate another possible reading
of this key text in the ignition system of Lacans
anthropological machine, one that relies on both a
careful close reading and reference to an under-
emphasized archival source for Lacans ideas.
Though the DescartesKantHegelKoje`ve lin-
eage of Lacan has attracted most of the scholarly
attention, the relatively sparse documentary
record of Lacans early education also reveals a
great number of prominent biologists whose work
Lacan studied closely during his medical training
and for some years after as he was establishing his
psychoanalytic practice. What is worth under-
scoring though it can hardly be surprising
about this reading list is the predominance of
ethologists, animal psychologists, and
16
animal mirrors
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comparative psychologists. Included are: George
Romanes, whose collation of anecdotes about
animal behavior Mental Evolution in Animals
(1883) provided the spur to golden-age ethology
in both its behaviorist (Skinnerian) and ratioci-
native (Lorenzian) guises; the studies of animal
social organization carried out by Alfred Espinas
(Des societes animales, 1878) and Francois
Picard (Les Phenome`nes sociaux chez les ani-
maux, 1933); the animal psychology of Frederik
Buytendijk (translated into French as
Psychologie des animaux, 1928); the compara-
tive primatology of Wolfgang Kohler
(Intelligenzpru fungen an Menschenaffen, 1921)
and Winthrop and Luella Kellogg (The Ape and
the Child, 1933); and the biological philosophy of
Jakob von Uexku ll (Umwelt und Innenwelt der
Tiere, 1909) (Roudinesco 1990, 1997). These
ethological sources, far from representing a
credulous biologism that is superseded by
Lacanian theory, provide a richly ecocentric
intellectual context for that theory. This is clear
from the very opening of the essay on the mirror
stage:
Some of you may recall the behavioral
characteristic I begin with that is explained
by a fact of comparative psychology: the
human child, at an age when he is for a
short while, but for a while nevertheless,
outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental
intelligence, can already recognize his own
image as such in a mirror. This recognition is
indicated by the illustrative mimicry of the
Aha-Erlebnis which Kohler considers to
express situational apperception, an essential
moment in the act of intelligence.
Indeed, this act, far from exhausting itself,
as in the case of a monkey, in eventually
acquired control over the uselessness of the
image, immediately gives rise in a child to a
series of gestures in which he playfully
experiences the relationship between the
movements made and the reflected environ-
ment, and between this virtual complex and
the reality it duplicates namely, the childs
own body, and the persons and even things
around him. (75)
The ape here, on the standard reading, is
fleetingly invoked as the negative ground against
which the positive form of the human subject can
be imagined. A rhetorical feint seems to imply
that the distinction between child and chimpan-
zee lies in the childs ability to recognize its image
in the mirror only to concede in the following
paragraph that the chimpanzee, as clinical
observation has established, does in fact possess
such imagistic self-recognition. Lacan then places
the dividing line between ape and child at a
further remove: while the consciousness of the
ape ends with recognition and finding empty of
the imago an astounding intellectual feat that
might serve well as a description of Saussurian
insistence on the arbitrary nature of the signifier
that of the human subject develops out of the
repetition of that mastered imago. The echo of
this misrecognition (meconnaisance) constitutes
the subject of man. It is therefore easy to read
this as it is usually read: a displacement of the
human into a speculative void that remains
anthropocentric.
But if we look back at Lacans main source for
his information on chimpanzees and their
responses to their own reflections primatologist
and Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Kohlers
description of the Aha-Erlebnis in The
Mentality of Apes it is clear that even this
more delicate formulation will not hold. Far from
justifying Lacans surmise about species differ-
ence indicated by apes relative lack of interest in
their reflections, the original source contains an
extended description of the absorption of the
chimpanzees in their images:
When we gave the chimpanzees a hand-mirror
for the first time, they looked into it and at
once became intensely interested [. . .] They
dispensed with the human implement; having
once had their attention drawn to it, they
mirrored themselves in anything at all avail-
able for the purpose: in bright pieces of tin, in
polished potsherds, in tiny glass splinters, for
which their hands provided the background,
and, above all, in pools of rain water. I have
often observed Tschego for a long time sunk in
contemplation of her own reflection in a pool.
She played with it: bent far over it and drew
back slowly, shook her head backwards and
forwards, and made all kinds of grimaces, over
and over again. Finally, she dipped her great
17
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hand into the puddle, shaking and wagging her
head, and let the water trickle back onto the
picture in the water. As the creatures were
constantly looking at themselves, using even
tiny surfaces, which we humans would never
have thought of for using for this purpose,
they developed a pleasant and interesting
extension of their play. They slowly turned
the reflecting surface, or moved their heads to
one side, so that they could no longer see
themselves, but continued to look into it,
examining the images of one object in the
room after another, with unabated interest,
and it could constantly be observed that as
they turned the mirror they glanced quickly
from time to time towards the real, and, of
course, familiar, everyday objects that had just
appeared behind it [. . .] When they retired to
rest at night, their urine was often deposited
on the flat floor, where it formed shallow
puddles. As soon as this occurred, one or other
of the anthropoids could be observed bending
sideways, with eyes fixed on the liquid, and
moving his head slowly to and fro in order to
catch the reflection of objects from outside the
window. Other animals soon lose interest in
the reflections when non-optical measures
prove their unreality and unsubstanti-
ality. What strange beings are the chimpan-
zees, to be permanently attracted by the
contemplation of such phenomena, which can
bring them not the least tangible benefit.
(Mentality 32931)
More than simply misrepresenting a primary
source, Lacan has adopted Kohlers description of
the chimpanzees permanent attraction to reflec-
tions even after they prove unreal and unsub-
stantial as a description of a specifically human
characteristic. In attempting to draw an analytic
line between man and ape, Lacan has actually
founded his theory on evidence of their identity.
Lacans other major primatological source, the
Kelloggs The Ape and the Child, draws its
conclusions from an experiment in which a nine-
month-old chimpanzee named Gua is raised by
the researcher under the same conditions as his
fourteen-month-old son, Donald. Not only is
there a complex pattern of overlap and discre-
pancy in a variety of physical, linguistic, and
psychological abilities rather than a clear line of
demarcation between the two subjects, but the
influence of ape and child on the development of
one another is not controlled for. The primato-
logical intertext for Lacans text thus argues not
that the human subject emerges from an
originary repetition that can be rigorously
differentiated from the non-human, or even that
it emerges from a zoological process that occurs
separately from other forms of life, but that the
originating repetition is produced on the scene of
a zoosemiotic encounter between human and non-
human animals. The point here is not to rake
Lacan over the coals for irresponsible scholarship,
though the purging of his biological sources is
quite telling, or even to take him to task for
drawing an illegitimate line between man and
animal that anthropological mistake is at the
core of Western philosophy, as Derrida and
Agamben have both recently pointed out. More
interesting is the way that The Mirror Stage
like The Seminar on The Purloined Letter
literally enacts what it disavows at the level of
argument; that is, against all of Lacans program-
matic assertions to the contrary, it enacts the
intersubjective transspecific origin of the human
subject. In the scene of reading Lacans best
analogue of the unconscious process of subject-
formation Lacans argument requires illumina-
tion from a fact of comparative psychology,
making the chimps turn before the mirror
literally simultaneous with the appearance of
the image of the child. The actual scene of the
mirror stage, therefore, to recover it from the
camouflage in which Lacan invests it, is not that
of the child gazing at itself in a real or
metaphorical mirror but of a mirror in which
the human and the non-human animal gaze at one
another. Whether this mirror is placed perpendi-
cularly or obliquely to the line of vision and
hence whether this regard is of a captured animal
other or the self is the originary question
Lacanian psychoanalysis tries to untie. To adapt
Lacans adaptation of Chung Tzu: is the human
subject dreaming he is an ape, or is the ape
dreaming he is a human subject (Four
Fundamental Concepts 76)? The Mirror Stage
betrays an uncanny and that word is, as Freud
understood, already bound up with the animal
predisposition towards the basis of subject
formation in apprentissage and dressage.
18
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My comments on The Mirror Stage and
The Murders in the Rue Morgue have so far
been limited to a zooscopic phase of infant
development, but from the perspective of a post-
Lacanian ecocritical reading of the detective
stories what is most interesting about this
insistent intertextuality are its repercussions for
the theory of language that flows from The
Mirror Stage in Lacans later writings. For Poes
stories do not merely underscore the imagistic
continuity between the human and non-human
animal subjects but also indicate an analogous
transspecific continuity in the signifying chain of
language. The non-linguistic nature of the apes
cries in The Murders in the Rue Morgue,
which are ascribed by different witnesses to
various languages unknown to them, does
nothing to impede the detection of the killers
identity. As with the purloined letter, the content
of the apes language is completely irrelevant
to its communicative function; as with the letter,
the ape is a creature whose penning and
subsequent escape into circulation creates the
human drama.
12
In one of the clearest literary
examples of what Jacques Derrida has termed
lanimot, the expressly metalinguistic game of
The Purloined Letter is being folded back
upon the sublinguistic behavior of the orangutan,
and the difference between having the most
refined command of language and having no
recognizable language at all a difference that
has traditionally provided the most durable
philosophical justification for humananimal
discontinuism is collapsed (The Animal
409, 41516). What Poe has done by super-
imposing the two tales is to recast the syntaxless
vocalizations of the animal for as a matter of
simple definition the orangutan does not and
cannot possess human language alongside the
substanceless formal structures of metalanguage
in a way that reveals their phenomenal identity:
in both cases the sounds or marks made act as
physical rather than symbolic communication.
They act not like the commonsense conception of
language but, across the semantic frame, as
semiotic systems. At the level of analysis
introduced by Poe, then, human and animal
communications from the recondite allusion to
the howl of excitement are points along a
zoosemiotic continuum that provides the context
for human linguistic invention. Such radical
continuism is fully compatible with indeed,
the necessary extension of Lacans insistence on
the materiality of language and the non-avail-
ability of a metalanguage. As Derrida, who has
wrestled more explicitly with the implications of
biology, writes:
The idea according to which man is the only
speaking being, in its traditional form or in its
Heideggerian form, seems to me at once
undisplaceable and highly problematic. Of
course, if one defines language in such a way
that it is reserved for what we call man, what is
there to say? But if one reinscribes language in
a network of possibilities that do not merely
encompass it but mark it irreducibly from the
inside, everything changes. I am thinking in
particular of the mark in general, of the trace,
of iterability, of difference. These possibilities
or necessities, without which there would be
no language, are themselves not only human.
It is not a question of covering up ruptures
and heterogeneities. I would simply contest
that they give rise to a single linear,
indivisible, oppositional limit, to a binary
opposition between the human and the infra-
human. And what I am proposing here should
allow us to take into account scientific knowl-
edge about the complexity of animal lan-
guages, genetic coding, all forms of marking
within which so-called human language, as
original as it might be, does not allow us to
cut once and for all where we would in
general like to cut [. . .] And this also means
that we never know, and never have known,
how to cut up a subject. (Eating Well 116)
Despite coming in for critique from Derrida on
this subject, Lacan or Lacans text as read can
be understood to be aware of this continuity. In
The Mirror Stage, the childs constitutive
meconnaisance differentiates him or her equally
from both the chimpanzee and analyst, whose
instrumental intelligences unite them in a state of
unarticulated mastery over the signifying chain
through a recognition of its emptiness. The limit
between Lacans chimp and psychoanalyst-author
is, like the limit between Poes orangutan and his
detective, in the last instance undetectable. The
folding of the animal onto the analyst is
19
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a fulfillment of Poes own comments about the
identity of animal instinct and human reason and
a repetition of the course of his detective trilogy
and related writings, which prolong the undecid-
ability of the human subject. Poes writings allow
us to see that Lacans understanding of the
unconscious as structured like a language without
meaning (i.e., a symbolic or mathematical
system) opens the human subject not just to the
inhuman system of la langue but also to the
transspecific zoosemiotic environment: the Other
that speaks through the unconscious need not be
human or even humanoid, nor must it speak in
human language. Human beings cannot, of
course, have explicit rational conversations with
animals around them, but their consciousness is
traversed and conditioned by an underlying
unconscious structured by the meaningless
signifiers circulated by living beings in the
environment.
13
According to Thomas Sebeok, the semiotician
responsible for developing the linguistic meta-
field of zoosemiotics, this collapse of the human
animal distinction into a panzoological semiotic
process can be traced back in the scientific
literature to German zoologist and philosopher
Jakob von Uexku ll. Beginning in the first decade
of the twentieth century, von Uexku ll wrote a
series of articles and books attempting to
articulate a philosophical basis for the biological
sciences that would be distinct from the kind of
materialism that dominated physics and chem-
istry.
14
The search for an ontology adequate to
biology led von Uexku ll to the Kantian proposi-
tion that organisms could not be studied simply
as objects in an objective environment the way
billiard balls are analyzed in classical physics
but must be regarded in the first instance as
subjects whose physiological organization con-
structs an Umwelt (environment) that is parti-
cular to the individual organism. As von Uexku ll
puts it at the outset of his Theoretical Biology:
All reality is subjective appearance. This must
constitute the great, fundamental admission
even of biology. It is utterly vain to go seeking
through the world for causes that are inde-
pendent of the subject; we always come up
against objects, which owe their construction
to the subject. (xv)
Accordingly, every animal in a different place
and in a different manner seeks out from the vast
complexity of the inorganic world precisely that
which fits it; that is, it creates its needs itself
corresponding to its own construction type, and
as a simple matter of definition, then the
environment consists only of those questions
that the animal can answer (Environment and
Inner World of Animals 22245). Life is thus
precisely a matter of the exchange of signs
between the interior world (Innenwelt) and
individual environment (Umwelt) of the organ-
ism, which can be viewed as a sort of subjective
machine (von Uexku lls potentially misleading
word, akin to the Deleuzian usage) for informa-
tion processing. As Sebeok and other zoosemio-
ticians underscore, von Uexku ll reimagines life as
an explicitly environmental semiotic phenom-
enon (and vice versa semiotic phenomena can
be considered alive) and insists that all animals,
including human beings, exist in (to use images
from his later writings) a life-tunnel or
subjective bubble that may or may not overlap
with that of other organisms. Crucially, the
objective world (what von Uexku ll derisively
calls the environment of stones) is thus
inaccessible except as a summation of the
innumerable Umwelten of organisms.
15
Lacan, of course, relies very heavily on von
Uexku lls uncited biophilosophical terminology
in his description of the production of symbolic
edifices that generate the human subject.
16
Although Lacan implies that his anthropological
mirror stage is a refinement beyond what von
Uexku ll has articulated with regard to the general
class of InnenweltUmwelt relationships, von
Uexku ll in fact elaborated a theory of the
mirrored world or counterworld that devel-
ops in higher animals (i.e., earthworms and
above) and mediates the relation between
their motor nervous system and the environment.
The reflection, or mirroring, going on here is not
of the optical variety, as in Lacan, but lies in the
correspondence between the spatial arrangement
of stimuli and the spatial organization of the
nervous system. Mirroring is the essence of zoos
for von Uexku ll; it is where, to use a phrase from
Merleau-Ponty that has been elaborated by
recent ecophilosophers, the flesh of the world
20
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folds upon itself.
17
Like Dupin, whose exagger-
ated command of the simian criminal belied
his own involuntary immersion in and submission
to a prior zoological other, Lacans misconstrual
of von Uexku lls terms and his miscomprehen-
sion of his theory de-emphasizes the embodiment
of the mirroring and its explicitly continuist
zoological context.
18
To be clear, that context is
not simply that described by sociobiology that
the zoological mirror is a primordial determinant
of human consciousness that is shared with a wide
range of related life-forms but also an
ecohistorical one in which the beginnings and
outlines of the human subject lie not in the
evolutionary past but in the record of human and
animal interaction. Derridas recent comments on
his zootobibliography (zoo-auto-oto-bio-biblio-
graphy) gesture in this direction, as they turn on
the question of the animal mirror:
Wherever some autobiographical play is being
enacted there has to be a psyche, a mirror that
reflects me naked from head to toe. The same
question then becomes whether I should show
myself but in the process see myself naked
(that is reflect my image in a mirror) when,
concerning me, looking at me, is this living
creature this cat that can find itself caught in
the same mirror? Is there animal narcissism?
But cannot this cat also be, deep in her eyes,
my primary mirror? (The Animal That
Therefore I Am (More to Follow) 418)
This banal, everyday scene the household pet
looking at its owner underlies modern under-
standings of the operation of the human subject.
Behind the Lacanian matheme (all head and no
stamen) lie the continuist texts of Poe, Kohler,
and von Uexku ll; behind the continuist texts
themselves a transspecific communication
between men, and apes, and birds, and insects;
behind that communication a scene of orthopedic
anthropogenesis, with all of its protocols of
imprisonment and observation, by which man
captures and pens his zoological self. Lacans
theory of subject-formation not only provides a
way of understanding how the unconscious
operates as a historical register of signs, including
those not human in origin or destination, but it
also acts as a blind record of a specific non-human
sign system: the ape, in the cage, using the mirror
to look at the world outside. There are thoughts
of a once-penned ape the Kelloggs little Gua,
or perhaps Rana or Tschego or one of the other
chimps kept at Kohlers primate research center
on the island of Tenerife circulating through
Lacanian psychoanalysis, just as there is a
misrecognized orangutan on the loose on the
Rue Morgue.
la lettre vole e, volante
Thus far I have been tracking a number of
zoological repetitions within and between the
writings of Lacan and Poe. Within Lacan, I have
noted his repetition of The Mirror Stage in the
seminar on The Purloined Letter, his repeti-
tion of continuist biological research in The
Mirror Stage, and his repetition of the scene of
apprentissage in the biologists from whom he
draws. Within Poe: the mirroring of The
Murders in the Rue Morgue in The
Purloined Letter, and the literal mirroring of
the anthropoid in the former story. Between
them, I have remarked the fact that Lacans
encrypted musings on the animal repeat those
found in Poe; and, further, that Lacans repeti-
tion of his inquiry into animals (in The Mirror
Stage and Seminar on The Purloined Letter)
is itself a repetition of Poes own double-take in
the first and third of his detective stories. I would
like now to come full circle by returning to the
literal meaning of Baudelaires translation of
Poes Purloined Letter, La Lettre volee (the
letter flown, not the flightless ostrich of Lacans
seminar). That title literalizes the zoological
context I have recreated for both Poe and
Lacan, and suggests that flying letters form a
very long and complex literary chain that reaches
back into the era, just before Poes major
writings, in which American writers rendered
their contacts with the bodies and voices of birds.
What follows is my own repetition of the inquiry
into the zooscopic and zoosemiotic origins of the
human subject in a historical register, once again
using a text from Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven,
this time placed alongside not twentieth-century
theory but, in a bit of strategic literal-mindedness
that would do Dupin proud, contemporary
21
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popular American ornithological texts that center
on the capture and display of animal others.
The bird life of the New World had long been
the subject of intense interest by European
explorers and settlers. During the Harriot
expedition to Roanoke in 1585, John White
made a number of watercolors of indigenous
birds, and by the seventeenth century it was
practically mandatory that exploration reports
begin with a description of the hummingbird. In
the eighteenth century, British naturalist Mark
Catesby began painting sophisticated and beauti-
ful birds from habitats all along the Atlantic coast
south to the Bahamas. In the early 1800s,
Alexander Wilson, a Scottish immigrant and
popular poet, produced the first systematic
treatment of American birds, The American
Ornithology, to great acclaim from European
and American natural scientists. But the acknowl-
edged king of American ornithology is John
James Audubon, whose massive Birds of America
(made up of 435 plates bound in four double
elephant folios) subsumed all precursors and set
the standard for all ornithologists to come,
certainly in America and perhaps the world
over. The ravishing engravings were coordinated
with another publication, The Ornithological
Biographies, in which Audubon narrated his
own encounters with each bird species and
provided scientific descriptions. Affordable com-
bined editions of his original work were published
in large quantities starting with the royal octavo
edition of 183944. It is to the painterly and
verbal world of Audubon that any ornithological
consideration of Poe must turn.
There may be a specific point of intertextual
connection between Poes zoosemiotic tales,
Lacans E