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Animal mirrors
Michael Ziser
a
a
Department of English, University of California, Davis , One
Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA E-mail:
Published online: 27 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Michael Ziser (2007) Animal mirrors, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical
Humanities, 12:3, 11-33
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ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 12 number 3 december 2007
To me a painted paroquet
Hath been a most familiar bird
Taught me my alphabet to say
To lisp my very earliest word.
Edgar Allan Poe, Romance, Poetry and
Tales 53
Logographical necessity (anangke
logographike) ought to be analogous to
biological, or rather zoological necessity.
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination 79
I
n a strange but consistent form of looking
backward to look forward, literary theorists
from Baudelaire to Lacan to Derrida have used
the writings of Edgar Allan Poe as the pretext for
what they themselves are on the verge of
articulating. To understand pure poetry or the
play of the letter in the unconscious or the abyssal
structure of interpretation, they reflect, one must
look back at Poe.
1
The present essay will parrot
this strategy of Poevian retrospection to formu-
late (and locate in both nineteenth-century
American cultural history and twentieth-century
poststructuralist theory) a new, strongly ecocri-
tical claim: that human psychological and
linguistic structures arise through an openness
to and repetition of the languages the
meaning of the scare-quotes will become apparent
below of non-human animals that, in Jacques
Derridas words, do not merely encompass
[them] but mark [them] irreducibly from the
inside (Eating Well 116). Poes writings
inaugurate an ecocritical tradition distinct from
the established discourses of animal rights and
sociobiology that repositions questions about
human subjects, language, and artifacts within a
traversing and circumjacent world of biological
signification, the zoosemiosphere.
2
The most concentrated expression of this
transspecific ecology of the letter is Poes
well-worn poem The Raven, a poetic treatise
on and instance of zoosemiotics, the
systematic investigation of how human language
relates to other modes of symbolic communica-
tion and to the properties displayed by animal
communicative systems (Sebeok 8). Poes
investment in the transspecific linguistic quand-
ary is not exhausted by this single poem, however,
nor can the consequences of his response to it be
confined to the sources, contexts, and influences
of his era. Understanding the full ecotheoretical
implications of Poes zoopoetics requires a much
wider ranging exploration of his depictions of the
non-human other as they appear in his original
texts and reappear in the influential
Lacanian critical discourse built atop them. In
the first section below, I will provide the
michael ziser
ANIMAL MIRRORS
poe, lacan, von uexku ll,
and audubon in the
zoosemiosphere
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/07/030011^23 2007 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/09697250802041004
11
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theoretical framing required to reclaim both
Poe and Lacan for second-wave ecocriticism by
working though the complex relationship between
Poes writings and those of his most influential
reader, which provide both aid and resistance to
the articulation of a transspecific ecology of the
letter. In the second part, I will elaborate the
specific historical grounds for my zoosemiotic and
ecocritical reading of Poes most famous poem by
detailing the significance of its debt to the
extensive ornithological literature of the
antebellum period, most crucially John James
Audubons public lectures, private journals,
and remarkable Ornithological Biographies
(183139).
the apprentissage of poe and lacan
Poes testy relationship with the
Transcendentalist mainline of American nature
writers, his taste for the pseudoscientific and the
artificial, and his association with (apparently)
non-environmental genres (gothic, detective fic-
tion, and surrealism) have combined to keep him
out of the first ranks of the ecocritical canon.
3
Compounding matters, the influential set of
discussions initiated by Jacques Lacans reading
of The Purloined Letter identified Poe with a
structuralist-linguistic interpretation of the
human unconscious and drew attention away
from his possible environmental entanglements,
an oversight not remedied in the more recent
historicist approaches to his work. Lacans
suspicion of natural history and biological
approaches to human psychology, and his
ultimate idiomatic alliance with abiological
sciences game theory, formal cybernetics,
mathematics, and topology is a well-known
chapter in the history of psychoanalysis. Post-
Lacanian psychoanalyst Andre Green puts the
matter as concisely as possible: Freud was for
continuity [between biology and human psychol-
ogy]; Lacan for separation (262). For all of his
subversion of certain conventions of rationalized
psychoanalysis, Lacan never questioned what this
essay will dispute: the opposability of biologism
and symbolic structuralism. Allow me to
laugh, he writes in The Function and Field
of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,
if [my] remarks are accused of turning Freuds
work away from the biological foundations he
would have wished for it towards the cultural
references with which it is rife (E

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
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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 with the

Seminar on The Purloined Letter, a highly
technical presentation of his insights into the
underlying structure of the unconscious, occa-
sioned by a detective tale of Poes that is itself
notable for its insularity and hyperanalytic
character. One could hardly ask for materials
further removed from the zoological situation of
humankind. In the seminar, Lacan famously
notes the way that Poes story involves successive
iterations of a hierarchy of knowledge made up of
three positions: he who does not see (the Real); he
who sees that the other does not see (the
Imaginary); and, finally, he who sees that the
partial seeing of the second person leaves him
vulnerable to manipulation (the Symbolic). As
Lacan analyzes the story, characters in the tale
and all human subjects rotate through each of
these positions: in the first iteration, the King
does not see the Queen with the incriminating
letter, which she hides in plain view, and the
Minister sees this situation and turns it to his
advantage; in the second, the Prefect of the
Parisian police doesnt see the letter in the
possession of the Minister, who leaves it in plain
view, and Dupin sees that he has done this; and in
the third, the Minister does not see the new,
replacement letter left by Dupin, who leaves it
exposed to Lacan, who now can place Dupin
under his interpretive power.
Attentive and sympathetic readers, whose
number has included both Jacques Derrida and
Barbara Johnson, will here naturally and auto-
matically desire to continue Lacans argument by
insisting on a fourth rotation: Dupin, living up to
the dupe and the double in his patronym, allies
himself with the imbecilic King-who-doesnt-see
when he styles himself an avenging Atreus, thus
shifting the psychoanalytic detective (Lacan) into
the Imaginary and placing us (Lacans readers)
temporarily in the position of those who can
witness Lacan succumb to the inexorable slide
from symbolic analyst to the imbecilic object that
he himself has imagined.
7
There is, in Lacans
view, no metalanguage not even the metalan-
guage of a psychoanalytic epilogue within which
the analyst might find refuge. But Lacan, acting
out the blindness he has previously seen so
clearly, goes on to offer what seems to be a highly
technical and illuminating postscript to the
seminar, patiently explaining his attempt to
exemplify the process of symbolic substitution
that underlies the human subject formation, a
process of one-upmanship in which transcenden-
tal laws are produced and absorbed. Precisely at
the moment that Lacan comes most surely into
his own voice his tone towards Poe and Dupin,
his erstwhile masters, now assuredly metacritical
he begins to inhabit the analytic blindness
represented before him by the King, the Prefect,
and Dupin. Like those earlier figures, Lacan has
left something right out in the open for us to
view, though he cannot himself call attention to
it: that the abiological mathematical and symbolic
methodology that would come to form the basis
and law of Lacans future work is established at
the moment of catastrophic blindness.
What is the positive content of this blindness?
As Barbara Johnson the most brilliant reader of
Poes tale, Lacans seminar, and Derridas
critique has demonstrated, the theoretical one-
upmanship in the discussion of Poes text would
seem both to re-enact Poes own prefatory
remarks in The Murders in the Rue Morgue
about the game of even and odd and bear out
Lacans ultimate insistence that linguistic and
psychological processes are fundamentally mat-
ters of repetition (the Wiederholungszwang
originally described by Freud). On this view,
even Lacans own discourse and Johnsons is
not immune from the compulsion to repeat:
psychoanalysis is the repetition of the structure
which it tries to untie. For Johnson, the
particular value in Lacans work (and her own)
lies in the way it momentarily captures or seems
to capture the deferral of the letter-in-flight
through the use of a mise en abyme, a formal
transgression of formal logic that allows Lacan his
simultaneous turn at the end of the seminar as the
13
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insightful analyst and mystified analysand and
Johnson her own recontainment of Derrida and
Lacan from within their writings. The endpoint of
this line of thinking, now familiar from many
poststructuralist deployments, would seem to lie
in Lacans and Johnsons preferred figure for
enframed and abyssal repetition, the mirror,
which serves as the abiological foundation of
the Lacanian subject.
But does the antifoundationalist line of
Lacanian psychoanalysis end here, in a form of
symbolic absolute speculation? Johnson, it is vital
to note, is far too canny a thinker to allow her
exertions on behalf of this abyssal structure to
settle into such machinic complacency, and she
ends her piece with the thought that the true
otherness of the purloined letter of literature has
perhaps in no way been accounted for (Frame
of Reference 250). There is a sense, as there was
at the end of Lacans seminar, that Johnsons talk
of mirrors and mises en abyme has left something
out in the open for us to find and articulate.
Accepting her tacit invitation, I will argue that
such true otherness is the challenging other-
ness of animal language to which Lacanian
psychoanalysis (and poststructuralist thought in
general), with its anthropolinguistic assumptions
about subject-formation and its operation in
language, is necessarily and revealingly blind.
Furthermore, and more provocatively, I argue
that the otherness of animal language is not just
another in the chain of others that emerge and are
absorbed in the process of subjectivization, but
that it is the otherness whose uncanny reappear-
ance, as Freuds essay on the subject suggests,
structures the human unconscious.
8
While pre-
serving some of Lacans insights into the
operation of language and the unconscious, I
would therefore like also to preserve his blindness
specifically, the notion that the inhuman
dimension of human language belongs solely to
the inanimate world of symbolic formulae rather
than the rich world of animal sign systems (the
zoosemiosphere). This is an attempt by no means
to ground poststructuralism in an empirical
scientism, but rather to allow it to overrun its
unspoken anthropological bounds by restoring
the apparently structural figure of the mirror to
its historical and zoological context. A careful
reading of Lacan and Poe reveals that the path of
reflection through the mirror of the human
subject originates in the animal.
By an apparently uncanny coincidence, The
Murders in the Rue Morgue the inaugural tale
in Poes three-part series of detective stories and
the harbinger of The Purloined Letter begins
with the captivity, self-regard in the mirror,
escape (through a problematically open window
frame), and recapture of a simian culprit whose
literal otherness makes its identity indecipherable
(and its location undiscoverable) to the police.
9
The work of Dupin in the later tale (and the long
chain of twentieth-century critical speculation
engendered by it) thus appears to have been
anticipated by The Murders in the Rue
Morgue, a notion quite in keeping with the
Lacanian presumption of a pervasive
Wiederholungszwang.
10
Accordingly, it is
worth reading the earlier story not merely as
the inaugural exhibition of C. Auguste Dupins
analytic brilliance, but simultaneously as a
proleptic indication of his blindness. For Dupin
is in fact structurally blind to several key clues to
the mystery that Poes earlier tale exposes to the
reader during an opening sequence intended to
serve as an introduction to Dupins stupendous
powers of ratiocination. Tracing his companions
thoughts through a variety of apparently arbitrary
associations, Dupin deploys natural history terms
(genus, species) that serve as clues to the
taxonomic denouement (403). Or rather, the
narrator deploys them through Dupin, for they
enter the story before the nature of the crime has
been revealed, and hence lie outside of Dupins
diegetic horizon and awareness of the specifics of
the case. Dupin is therefore mouthing the
solution to the crime before he has even
become aware of it. The curious textual outcome
of this zoographic anticipation is that the
narrator, despite apparently lagging behind
the brilliant Dupin, has actually beaten him to
the troubled animal difference at the heart of the
story and can even articulate it (albeit without
being aware of doing so). This peculiarity results
in the narrator describing his efforts at compre-
hending Dupins clues not as a failure of
projective imagination but as an effort of
remembrance (421). Dupins later condescending
14
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hints about the criminals identity who, he tells
the uncomprehending narrator, displays
an agility astounding, a strength superhuman,
a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive,
a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from
humanity, and a voice foreign in tone to the
ears of men of many different nations, and
devoid of all distinct or intelligible
syllabification
do not so much cement his claim to analytic
mastery over the orangutan as highlight the prior
inhabitation of his own discourse by an unnamed
but recognizable animal other (423). From this
point of view, the narrators deafness to or
unwillingness to concede Dupins allusions to a
clear difference between human and animal takes
on the quality of mockery of Dupins claims to
transcendental reason; the narrators interjection
a madman! both an ironic hypothesis about the
killer and a gentle reminder of the narrators
earlier admission that he and Dupin might have
been regarded as madmen by the rest of the
world.
Transspecific anticipation occurs even before
the text of The Murders in the Rue Morgue
proper. In that story, the subject of Dupins
initial demonstration of his intellect is the
talentless actor Chantilly, who had attempted
the role of Xerxes in the tragedy of the same
name by Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon. Xerxes
(1714) supplies the epigraph for the most
explicitly grotesque of Poes short stories,
Four Beasts in One The Homo-
Cameleopard (1840), which features the
Seleucid king, Antiochus Epiphanes, drunkenly
inhabiting the form of a giraffe and demonstrat-
ing his super-human agility and apparent
madness (188, 186). This intertext places the
transspecific context of The Murders in the Rue
Morgue beyond the purview of even the narrator
and helps complete the circuit between the
animal in that text and the unseeing sovereign
in The Purloined Letter. If there were any
doubt that the chain of signification for Poe is in
fact a kind of circle (or better, a Mobius strip)
uniting the animal with the symbolic, it is
dispelled by the narrators curious assertion that
the Semitic god of fate, Ashimah, is an ape, a
connection he justifies on the grounds of a
fanciful etymological connection between
Ashimah and Simia. The only distinct
phrases heard by witnesses to the crime on the
Rue Morgue, uttered by the Maltese sailor upon
finding his orangutan on a murderous
rampage, are sacre, diable, and mon
Dieu! (40709).
Such a cynical view of human intelligence is
characteristic of Poe, who was fond of pointing
out the connection between the most highly
refined human reason and the brute instinct
exhibited by animal life:
The line which demarcates the instinct of the
brute creation from the boasted reason of man,
is, beyond doubt, of the most shadowy and
unsatisfactory character a boundary line far
more difficult to settle than even the North-
Eastern or the Oregon. The question, whether
the lower animals do or do not reason, will
possibly never be decided certainly never in
our present condition of knowledge. While the
self-love and arrogance of man will persist in
denying the reflective power to beasts, because
the granting it seems to derogate from his own
vaunted supremacy, he yet perpetually finds
himself involved in the paradox of decrying
instinct as an inferior faculty, while he is
forced to admit its infinite superiority, in a
thousand cases, over the very reason which he
claims exclusively as his own. Instinct, so far
from being an inferior reason, is perhaps the
most exacted intellect of all.
11
Lacan is likewise caught up in a kind of
anthropocentric knowingness that is betrayed by
its own words: the text of his essay on The
Purloined Letter is littered with references to
the animal other that has been elided from the
main discourse, particularly on the ostrich
(10), the creature (29), and the tracks (15).
Most notable is his identification of the analyst
with the rex et augur (27), the king who
anticipates events by examining the behavior and
anatomy of birds (augur, from av- (bird) and gar-
(speech)). He comes closest to articulating the
connection towards the close of his seminar, when
he describes the human subject of a determining
symbolic order as an animal: The audacious
creature is, of course, reduced here to the state of
15
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imbecilic blindness in which man finds himself in
relation to the wall-like letters that dictate his
destiny (2930). What remains unspeakable for
both Dupin and Lacan, even when they explicitly
take up the animal as an object, is the zoological
force that always preconditions their utterances.
That force, embodied in the Rue Morgue
narrators combination of knowingness and
ignorance, ultimately obliges Dupin to shave
closer to the empirical and present the one piece
of supplemental physical evidence (concealed
from the police and the reader) that he has used
to crack the case: a tuft of hair left at the scene,
which the narrator finally recognizes as non-
human. The entirety of Dupins positive identi-
fication thus comes down to a discrimination
between the hair of humans and orangutans, a fall
into the empirical that represents quite a come-
down from Dupins pretensions to recherche
analysis. More importantly, Dupins triumphal
seizure of the hair echoes the original murder
scene, in which the excited orangutan grasps,
examines, and rips out tresses of Madame
LEspanayes hair. Detective work, like psycho-
analysis, reties the knot it tries to untie.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue thus
exhibits the primordial form of the same
rotational methodology Lacan pointed out in the
The Purloined Letter. In the former story,
however, the speculative process of symbolic
repetition continues across the species line and
terminates not in a technical mise en abyme but
in a complex transspecific encounter before a
mirror. If we trace back the motivations for the
murder which is, so to speak, the life of the
story as far as they will go, we eventually arrive
at a primal scene in which a penned ape desires to
mimic the actions of his captor as he shaves the
beard from his face in front of a mirror. Razor
in hand, and fully lathered, it was sitting before a
looking-glass, attempting the operation of shav-
ing, in which it had no doubt previously watched
its master through the keyhole of the closet
(42829).
Although Lacans writings about The
Purloined Letter appear designed to conceal
this zoological speculative terminus, some of his
other writings serve to confirm it. The curious act
of identification with the reflection of the human
other through the repetition of a ritual of self-
difference (the shaving) that inaugurates The
Murders in the Rue Morgue presciently
sketched the unhappy process of human sub-
ject-formation described in Lacans essay on The
Mirror Stage, which launched him on his public
career and with which he opened the first
English-language selection of his 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
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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
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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
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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

crits, and an account of the inaugural

moment of American ornithologys most famous
career. Audubon described his first involvement
with birds in words that anticipate some of the
details of Poes first detective tale:
One incident which is as perfect in my
memory as if it had occurred this very day,
I have thought of thousands of times since,
and will now put on paper as one of the
curious things which perhaps did lead me in
after times to love birds, and to finally study
them with pleasure infinite. My mother had
several beautiful parrots and some monkeys,
one of the latter was a full-grown male of a
very large species. One morning, while the
servants were engaged in arranging the room I
was in, Pretty Polly asking for her breakfast
as usual, Du pain au lait pour le perroquet
Mignonne, the man of the woods probably
thought the bird presuming upon his rights in
the scale of nature; be this as it may, he
certainly showed his supremacy in strength
over the denizen of the air, for, walking
deliberately and uprightly toward the poor
bird, he at once killed it, with unnatural
composure. The sensations of my infant heart
at this cruel sight were agony to me. I prayed
the servant to beat the monkey, but he, who
for some reason preferred the monkey to the
parrot, refused. I uttered long and piercing
cries, my mother rushed into the room, I was
tranquillized, the monkey was forever after-
ward chained, and Mignonne was buried with
all the pomp of a cherished love one.
19
Although Myself was not published until fifty
years after the Murders in the Rue Morgue and
there is no existing record in Poes biographies or
the Poe log of the two men ever having crossed
paths, the possibility of a direct historical
connection between Audubons man of the
woods and Poes orangutan (literally man of
the forest) or between the Du pain of
Audubons parrot and Dupin (whose seal is
made of bread) cannot be entirely ruled out.
Audubon embarked on a tour in 1839 promoting
the publication of the inexpensive octavo edition
of the Birds of America, traveling through
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
and Charlestown before the 1841 publication of
The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Poe was in
Philadelphia through 1841, and might have heard
Audubon deliver the story about the ape and the
parrot in one of his public appearances in that
city, or he might have got the story from one of
his literary colleagues, who were acquainted with
Poes longstanding interest in parrots (Mabbott 1:
35354). The chain that extends through Poe to
the Lacanian matheme may thus have begun in
the mouth of Audubons parrot, the augur that
could well have been the first to speak the
analysts name. Beyond this speculative historical
connection, Audubons anecdote can serve as a
22
animal mirrors
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Lacanian fable about infantile investment in the
linguistic competence of a parrot against the
oppressive physical coordination of an ape.
Audubon is in this text himself a kind of
parrot: as a languageless infant, he can only
reproduce the direct speech of another (in this
case, the parrot). The passage into the orthopedic
domain of language is understood not as a
decenterment into the symbolic but as a passage
from inarticulate anthropoid to avian songster.
In Audubons telling of the tale, his career as
an ornithological scientist and illustrator is a
compensation for this original powerlessness to
prevent violence against birds. Given the popular
conception of Audubon as a benign pastoralist
and eloquent spokesman for the conservationist
viewpoint espoused by the society that now bears
his name, however, it is possible to miss the full
significance of this biographical anecdote. Far
from simply avenging or undoing the original
anthropoid violence to the voice of birds,
Audubons artistic practice repeated it again
and again. His written works reveal the deep
connection in his mind between painting and
killing. Audubon was an avid hunter, and his
journals are filled with long lists of the animals
sacrificed to his extreme scientific and artistic
ambitions: the first significant mention of bird
life in his Mississippi River Journal, for example,
reads: We shot thirty partridges 1 Wood Cock
27 Grey Squirels a Barn Owl a Young
Turkey Buzzard and an autumnal warbler.
20
Nearly every journal entry that follows includes
such catalogs of slaughter.
Death in Audubons works is present not as a
hidden, vitiating subtext of historical violence but
rather as an emphatically present point of
reference from which the condition of mortality,
shared by bird and man, as enabling subjective
perception is acknowledged and evaluated
through the scene of apprentissage. It is more
than a curious fact that, even though he did a fair
amount of his own hunting, Audubon rarely used
the pronoun I with the verbs killed or shot
in his journal, preferring either we or no
pronoun at all. This is true, at least, when the
animal killed is an insectivore or herbivore. When
a raptor or carrion feeder is involved, however,
Audubon does tend to use the I. In the first ten
entries of his Mississippi Journal, for instance,
I appears with the words shot or killed
only in relation to fish hawks, buzzards, turkey
vultures, and a thrush (the one exception), even
though the total list of birds killed by the party in
the same interval includes more than a dozen non-
carnivorous species. Audubons personhood is
only called forth when it finds in its prey an
analogue to its own tendency to predation. The
pronoun I, which usually functions as the most
economical way of naming the subject/object split
in English, becomes available to Audubon only as
a conflation of those two categories. The function
of the I in ornithological discourse, to adapt the
full title of Lacans essay on the mirror stage, is for
Audubon a way to commemorate a transspecific
repetition.
Audubons emphasis on transspecific recipro-
city can be traced all the way back to the
technical breakthrough that allowed him to
develop from provincial painting instructor to
world-famous artist. His technique was to sketch
birds not from life or from stuffed and mounted
specimens, as many of his contemporaries had
done, but from freshly killed birds that were
posed in lifelike attitudes by running sharpened
wires through their still warm bodies. It is a
gruesome technique, but Audubons description
of his first experiments in this direction makes it
clear that to him it represented a kind of intimacy
with rather than mastery over the birds. The
passage in which Audubon first describes his
breakthrough is full of substitutions of man for
bird and bird for man, the net effect of which is
to make the moment of encounter as riveting for
the artist and spectator as it is for the bird:
Young as I was, my impatience to obtain my
desire filled my brains with different places
nay I not unfrequently dreamt that I had made
a New discovery, and long before day one
morning I leaped out of bed fully persuaded
that I had attained my object. I ordered a
horse to be sadled and without answering to
any of the various questions put to me,
mounted and moved off at a hard Gallop
toward the then little Village of Noristown
distant about Five Miles. on arriving there
not a door was open nay It was not yet day
light I therefore rode toward the River took a
23
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bath and in time returned to the Town and
entered the first oppened Shop Enquired for
Wire of different sizes, bought some, Leaped
on my Steed and was at Mill Grove again in a
very Short time. the wife of my Tenant
I really believe thought that I was mad, as on
offering me Breakfast, I told her I wanted my
Gun and a curious scene ensued about this
which is not worth your while to hear off to
the Creek and down with the first Kings Fisher
I met! I picked the bird up and carried it home
by the bill, I sent for the Miller and made him
fetch me a piece of soft board, when he
returned he found me filing into Sharp points
pieces of my Wire, and proud to Show him the
substance of my discovery, for a discovery
I had now in my brains, I pierced the body of
the Fishing bird and fixed it on the board
another Wire passed above his upper Mandible
was made to hold the head in a pretty fair
attitude, Smaller Skewers fixed the feet
according to my notions, and even common
pins came to my assistance in placing the legs
and feet. the least Wire proved a delightful
elevator to the Birds Tail and at Last there
Stood before me the real Mankin of a Kings
Fisher. (761)
There is a very odd homology between
Audubons fisherman-like baiting of the wire
hooks and the bird that he selects as his
representative victim in this retrospective recon-
struction the Kings Fisher a homology played
up by Audubons awkward and vague reference to
the Fishing bird. As if to make this subtle point
explicit, Audubon refers to his posed bird as a
Mankin, or little Man. The moment of his great
artistic vision is presented through the bemused
eyes of the local miller, a narrative triangulation
that repeats or is repeated by the structure of
the anecdote about the death of Mignonne, this
time with Audubon in the place of the ornitho-
cidal ape and the Miller in the place of the silent
human witness.
Audubon wraps up his miniature
Kunstlerroman with this sentence:
Reader this was what I Shall ever call my first
attempt at Drawing actually from Nature, for
then Even the eye of the Kings fisher was as if
full of Life before me whenever I pressed its
Lids aside with a finger. (761)
Audubon may mean that the freshly killed and
posed bird looked alive when its eyelids were
propped open, but he might also mean that that
the birds eye looked upon Audubon in this
moment as if he were alive. In Audubons eye and
hand the bird seems to live; in consenting to the
presence of the bird in coming in contact with
the bird Audubon as a man registers as if full of
life. Audubons practice is an explicit instance of
the orthopedic transspecific intersubjectivity that
Lacan enacts but cannot bring himself to identify.
Such textual and historical indications of the
transspecific intersubjective origin of the human
self are carried throughout Audubons work, but
nowhere more so than in his depiction of the
black vulture, the most important bird in the
Birds of America. Although the prominence of
vultures at the opening of Birds of America is
due in the first place to the ordering of Aves
established by Cuvier, Audubons acknowledged
scientific precursor, Audubon had an underlying
fascination with vultures. The facts of Audubons
life reveal that he actually pursued intimacy with
vultures; he kept vultures as pets. He devoted
more pages in his Ornithological Biographies to
the black vulture than to any other bird. His
images of the carrion feeders are among the first
images of the first volume of Birds of America.
And his major contribution to the ethology of
birds was his experimentally tested hypothesis
that vultures find their food by sight rather than
by smell, as had long been supposed.
When Audubon was making the original
sketches for his painting of the vulture, he
recorded the process in his journal. Drawing all
day, I finished the carrion crow, it stunk so
intolerably, and Looked so disgusting that I was
very glad when I through it over Board
(Writings and Drawings 55). At first glance,
this journal entry seems to offer more fodder for
critics who fault Audubon for predicating the
artistic finish of his portraits on the finishing
off of his subjects. But even though the spirit of
the sentence is to refuse the contiguity of artist
and subject, the protagonists of the sentence, man
and bird, do not maintain a stable relationship as
grammatical subject and object over its course.
This may seem to be a minor point, but multiply
it by the several hundred times such a structure
24
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occurs in Audubons journal and some light is
shed on the way this eccentric man habitually
thought of subjects and objects. In light of this
blending of agency, the double meaning of
carrion crow (Audubons name for the black
vulture) becomes strangely significant. Originally
so called because it is a crow that ate carrion, this
bird is now a crow that is carrion: that is, at death
its relationship to carrion has changed from one
of predator and prey to simple identity. If we
want to describe it fully, we could say it is a
carrion carrion crow. At the same time, Audubon
himself has assumed the position of predator with
relationship to the dead vulture: he is himself a
sort of carrion crow crow. Indeed, his language
has a bit of beak in it: he finished the carrion
crow even though it looked disgusting. The
absorbing blackness with which Audubon has
painted his vulture requires us to squint our eyes
and crane our necks in a vulturine scrutiny of the
birds interior spaces. Carrion carrion crow and
carrion crow crow: if we carry out the logic of a
situation in which Audubon becomes a crow and
a crow becomes carrion, theres no avoiding the
implication that a second casualty of the painting
is Audubon himself: he becomes a carrion carrion
crow crow.
This might be dismissed as a poor sort of
algebra except for the fact that such an uncanny
doubling is visualized strikingly in Audubons
one other portrait of the black vulture
(see Fig. 1). Two heads seem to emerge from
one feathered body; or perhaps they are super-
imposed images of the same head at different
times: once as the object of the painters gaze,
once as the painterly appraiser. The ecology of
vision in this painting is crucial: one vulture
looks into the dead deers eyes (preparing for the
customary first course); we look expectantly into
the eyes of the second vulture, our prey; and as
that vulture peers back at our eyes, we are
ourselves cast as prey (vultures being one of the
few birds capable of consuming human beings).
The relations between hunter and hunted, viewer
and viewed, have been dissolved by Audubon in a
synoptic representation of intersubjectivity.
If Audubons fascinated doubling of the
vulture is the result of his need to reconcile his
Fig. 1. John James Audubon, Black Vulture. Bird on left and deers head painted c.1829; second bird added later.
Watercolor, pastel, graphite, and collage on paper, 23
3
8
36 in. Collection of the New-York Historical Society.
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destruction and consumption of birds with his
equally powerful identification with and depen-
dence on them, the raven represents an avian
alterity that resists this annihilating embrace. In
early American nature writing, the raven repre-
sents a bridge between the intense intersubjective
lesson of the mute vultures and the garrulousness
of the songbirds.
21
Credited even in the nine-
teenth century with a high degree of
intelligence, a tendency to invade human terri-
tory, a high level of conjugal fidelity among
mated pairs, an ability to mimic the human voice,
and a consuming passion for rotting flesh, the
raven provided the most uncanny zoosemiotic
display of the more-than-human. Audubons
biography of the raven, first published 1841,
takes shape against the human efforts to destroy
the bird: first those of the generic farmer, who
comes in for a lecture from Audubon about the
positive services rendered by the raven; then by
Audubon himself, who tries but repeatedly fails
to bring down his required specimens. The latter
half of the account is taken up with anecdotes
about the cleverness of the raven in avoiding
capture and, crucially, in communicating with
one another:
Would that I could describe to you, reader, the
many musical inflections by means of which
they hold converse during these amatory
excursions! These sounds doubtless express
their pure conjugal feelings, confirmed and
rendered more intense by long years of
happiness in each others society. In this
manner they may recall the pleasing remem-
brance of their youthful days, recount the
events of their life, and express the pleasure
they enjoy. (7980)
Of most interest is what Audubon, following the
custom established by earlier bird writers, has to
say about the ravens insinuative and imitative
abilities:
When domesticated, and treated with kind-
ness, it becomes attached to its owner, and will
follow him about with all the familiarity of a
confiding friend. It is capable of imitating the
human voice, so that individuals have some-
times been taught to enunciate a few words
with great distinctness. (82)
Poes own explanation for the presence of the
raven in his eponymous poem (1845) has little to
do with contemporary ornithological considera-
tions of the roosting habits and call of Corvus
corax, nor does he confirm the scholarly
conjecture that he lifted it from Charles
Dickenss fictionalization, in Barnaby Rudge, of
his two pet ravens (Grip and Grip II).
22
In The
Philosophy of Composition, his notorious retro-
spective account of the composition of the poem,
Poe claims that the titular figure appeared only
belatedly as a delivery vehicle for the refrain
nevermore, which is itself a mere carrier of the
sonorous o and producible r that Poe wished
to introduce into his musical score. In need of a
non-reasoning creature capable of speech, Poe
at first hit upon a parrot before substituting the
tonally more appropriate raven (Essays and
Reviews 18). Poes self-pronouncements like
those of the King, Dupin, and Lacan would
seem to lead away from any specifiable zoological
referent and towards a wholly formal under-
standing of language and logic the precise
identity of the bird a matter of absolutely no
consequence for the poems music. The parrot, as
we have seen, has its own set of complicating
intertextual and biographical entanglements for
Poe, and its mention multiplies rather than
eliminates his blindness to the zoosemiotic
context of human language and psychology.
The very structure of The Raven is a
repetition of this passage into meaning that is
realized as anthropocentrically at the same time it
is grounded in the zoosemiosphere. The poem
consists of a series of descriptions of an
apparently arbitrary physical encounter with an
animal before finally becoming distinctly emble-
matical in the final lines. As Poe explains it in
his later essay, the poems narrator begins to
invest the birds little meaning discourse with
his own lugubrious interpretations, until in the
15th and 16th stanzas he poses the questions is
there balm in Gilead? and shall [I] clasp a
sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore
whose answers must have preceded their framing.
When the raven answers with the anticipated
nevermore, it is now repeating not just its own
refrain but the unspoken word of the narrator.
The narrator has become the heretofore unknown
26
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unhappy master whose initial despairing cry of
nevermore! established the burden of the
poem. The animal sound and the human sense
of nevermore both anticipate and repeat one
another. This circularity is key, as it reveals the
structural necessity of the unmeaning vocal sign
the signal or the mark in the development of
the meaningful literary language of the poem. In
exactly the same way that Dupin and Lacans
analytical insights are founded in a moment of
panzoological collapse, the decisive move to the
metaphorical metalanguage in the poem occurs
precisely at the moment that the human speaker
is being physically consumed by the raven
take thy beak from out my breast suggesting
that the passage from mimicry to full speech
takes place only at the cost of a clear physical
division between man and animal. Seen from the
other side of the mirror, the nevermore
refers to the abandonment of the non-human
by the human, but only and precisely as a kind of
non-linguistic signal. The point of Poes zoose-
miotic lesson is that man can have full
language only as an animal, and that, as
man, he can have language only as a chain of
material signs. In both cases, humankinds
semiotic horizon is necessarily open to the history
and presence of the non-human animal. Poes
poem is a transspecific transaction within the
subject in which the anthropoform animal
borrows the language of the avian songster to
prophecy to itself both the silencing of the
meaningful speech of the bird and the disap-
pearance of the inarticulate ape. The answer to
the narrators wished-for transumption of his debt
to lanimot, in the wished-for
language of man, is repeated in
our own whispered tracking of
the transspecific letters on the
page: nevermore.
23
notes
I would like to thank the participants of the
Psychoanalysis and the Human stream of the
2006 ACLA conference on The Human and Its
Others, whose helpful reactions to an early ver-
sion of my argument have been incorporated
below. My first zoosemiotic thoughts were
stimulated by a deceptively simple question that
Barbara Johnson posed to me.
1 Charles Baudelaire found in Poe an uncanny
anticipation of his own thoughts and words: The
first time I opened one of his books I saw, to my
amazement and delight, not simply certain sub-
jects which I had dreamed of, but sentences which
I had thought out, written by him twenty years
before (qtd in Quinn 15; see also Hyslop and
Hyslop). Jacques Lacan placed his reading of Poe ^
The Seminar on The Purloined Letter ^ at the
head of his collected writings (E

crits 11^48). InLe

Facteur de la ve rite Jacques Derrida models his
own central critique of the notion of full speech
on Dupins signature-within-quotation-marks.
2 The zoological investments of post-phenomen-
ological thought have been highlighted in recent
years in a series of monographs, articles, and
essay collections on the question of the animal in
Continental philosophy and art. See Steeves,
Baker, Lippit, Calarco, Wood, Wolfe (Animal Rites
and Zoontologies), Haraway, and Agamben.
A representative sample of the crucial work is
anthologized in Atterton and Calarco. Jacques
Derrida wrote searchingly about the question of
the animal throughout his career, becoming more
explicit in the most recent entries in what he calls
his zoo-auto-oto-bio-bibliography.
3 Poe is not included in any of the major nature
writing anthologies, nor does he play a significant
part in any of the ecocritical monographs or essay
collections. Despite this, Poes involvement in the
natural-scientific culture of his time ^ as an avid
consumer, reviewer, and producer of scientific
(and pseudoscientific) writing, running the gamut
from seashell manuals (The Conchologists First Book)
to arcane tracts on cosmogenesis (Eureka) ^ was
extensive. See Swirski.
4 On Lacans intellectual debts to these figures,
see Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan 142^43. For a
dismissal of the language of bees, see The
Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis (E

crits esp. 245^46); for the

distinction between the animal eye and the
human gaze, see Lacans comments in The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (102^03,
111^12); on the absolute differentiation from apes,
see the analysis of The Mirror Stage below.
Koje' ves scholastic use of the animal runs through
his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (39^40 and
passim).
27
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5 On Poes riddles, see the astonishing work of
John Irwin. Although there have been a handful of
ecocritical arguments that make use of Lacanian
theory, I can find none that address, historically or
analytically, the ecocritique that is internal to
Lacanian thought. Perhaps the best-known appli-
cation of Lacanian psychoanalysis to ecology
comes via Slavoj Z

izek in the form of a critique of

the self-contradictory elements of fantasy in
environmentalism as an ideology and social move-
ment in Enjoy Your Symptom!, which argues that
ecologically oriented decenterment relies on a
surreptitious teleological subordination of nature
to man (185^86). Timothy Mortons Ecology
without Nature is a markedly more sophisticated
development of Z

izeks basic critique from within

the ecocritical canon.
6 On apprentissage and dressage as high-profile
zoosemiotic phenomena in human culture, see
Sebeok122^27, and works by Heini Hediger.
7 This proposed fourth turn has the advantage of
providing us with the four kings in a game of
draughts that Poe offers as his model of detection
in the peroration to The Murders in the Rue
Morgue (Poetry and Tales 398). It also agrees with
the intertextual connection made belowbetween
the detective tales and Poes slightly earlier Four
Beasts in One ^ The Homo-Cameleopard (Poetry
and Tales 181^88).
8 In the philological source Freud consults in the
course of his essay on The Uncanny, the
unheimlich is specifically identified with an animal
that is neither domesticated nor wild ^ some-
where between captivity and freedom. Section
(b) of Freuds lengthy citation of the word heimlich
in Daniel Sanders Worterbuch der Deutschen
Sprache reads in part, in the original: von
Thieren zahm, sich den Menschen traulich
anschlieend. Ggstz. Wild, z. B.: Thier, die weder
wild noch heimlich sind, etc. (253). Although the
definition begins in a conventional opposition
between the wild and domesticated, the illustra-
tion introduces a mysterious kind of animal
described as weder wild noch heimlich ^ that
is, neither alien nor familiar ^ that seems per-
fectly to embody Freuds vision of the unfamiliar
familiarity of the uncanny.
9 Poes sources for his orangutan are unclear,
though hypotheses apparently include news
accounts of marauding monkeys, folklore about
apes, and zoological descriptions from Cuvier and
others. See the head-note on the story in
Mabbotts edition of Poes works (2: 521^27), and
an update by Mitchell. The Mystery of Marie
Roge t, the middle tale in the trilogy, presents a
radical meditation on the relationship between
language and life, both of which are aborted in
the story of a victim of a back-alley operation.
Indeed, an entire line of ecofeminist analysis,
focused on the relationship between the chimpan-
zees victims, Marie Roge t/Mary Rogers, and the
Queen, would be a welcome complement to the
argument I am building here. Such an argument
might resurrect, in ecocritical guise, the psycho-
analytic arguments of Marie Bonaparte, Lacans
springboard and target in the seminar on Poes
third tale, and focus on the parallels between
what Lacan calls the decisive foetalization or
specific prematurity of man and the abortion
plot and abortive structure of Poes middle tale.
10 At first glance, this tale would seem to be radi-
cally different from the later Purloined Letter:
the latters bloodlessly intellectual and diplomatic
game playing out in the insular halls of power, the
formers brutish andmotiveless violence occurring
very much in public. Yet Poe has clearly gone to
great lengths to make clear that the crimes and
their solutions are different versions of the same
process. The most direct evidence of connection
is the shared scenes of the crime: a hearth within
an apartment building. InThe Murders in the Rue
Morgue, the throat of Madame LEspanaye has
been cut so viciously that her head falls off under
the touch of detectives and the strangled corpse
of her daughter, Mademoiselle Camille
LEspanaye, has been stuffed up into the chimney
in a room with an open safe filled with a few old
letters (405). These details, along with Dupins
discovery of a greasy ribbon (425) used to knot
the ponytail of a Maltese sailor, which leads to his
identification of the orangutans owner, are
echoed in the description of the purloinedletter
hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon from a
little brass knob just beneath the middle of
the mantel-piece [. . .] This last [letter] was
much soiled and crumpled. It was torn
nearly in two, across the middle ^ as if a
design, in the first instance, hadbeen altered,
or stayed, in the second. (695)
Likewise, the refined citation from Cre billons
Atre e that closes The Purloined Letter recalls
the dehumanizing discussion of Chantilly, an actor
28
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in Cre billons Xerxes, in The Murders in the Rue
Morgue (698, 402^04).
11 Instinct vs Reason ^ ABlack Cat in Poetryand
Tales 370^72 (370). Poes geographical analogy does
not divide the USA into brute and rational sec-
tions (as would an allusion to the Mason^Dixon
line, for instance), but takes for granted that
reason resides north of the American border. For
Poe, there is no anthropological metalanguage in
the USA.
12 On Poes double use of the verb to pen
with regard to animals, see Stanley Cavells
musings on The Imp of the Perverse and The
Black Cat 3^36.
13 Not all living things and their semiotic systems,
of course, but only those that travel in pathways
that are available to the human sensorium. The
historyof Westernbiological science canbeunder-
stood as the extension of the human sensorium
through the mediating practices, instruments,
and imaging devices of apprentissage and dressage:
where the zoosemiotic overlap may once have
primarily included prey animals and livestock, it
now includes mycoplasmas and mole rats. Good
warrant, then, for accepting Bruno Latours
description of modern sciences as the speech
prostheses of provisional objects in the environ-
ment, the variety and attunement of which are
constantly growing.
14 The influence of von Uexku ll is difficult to
gauge, owing perhaps to his persistent self-
conception as an anti-Darwinian biologist (though
his theory is better seen as of another order
altogether than Darwins), his flirtation with
theism (a common idealist position since
Berkeley), his association with the Nazi regime in
the 1930s, and the inadequacy of his prose style
(exacerbated by poor translations). In the past
two decades, von Uexku ll has resurfaced as a pre-
cursor of: zoosemiotics (see below); first- and
second-order cybernetics (Maturana and Varelas
theory of autopoiesis); the Artificial Life research
program (especially in the writings of Rodney
Brooks); and the ecophenomenology founded on
the writings of Merleau-Ponty (see Brown and
Toadvine). Ira Livingston has recently laid out the
stakes of the autopoietic revolution in Between
Science and Literature.
15 Poe reaches a similarly ecopheno-
menological conclusion at the conclusion of
Eureka, though it is couched in the theological
language of his era:
He [the Divine Being] now feels his life
through an infinity of imperfect pleasures ^
the partial and pain-intertangled pleasures
of those inconceivably numerous things
which you designate as his creatures, but
which are really but infinite individualizations
of Himself. All these creatures ^ all ^ those
who you term animate, as well as those to
which you deny life for no better reason
than that you do not behold it in operation
^ all these creatures have, in a greater or
less degree, a capacity for pleasure and for
pain: ^ but the general sum of their sensa-
tions is precisely that amount of Happiness
which appertains by right to the Divine
Being when concentrated within Himself.
These creatures are all, too, more or less,
and more or less obviously, conscious
Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper
identity; conscious, secondly and by faint
indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with
the Divine Being of whom we speak ^ of an
identity with God.Of the two classes of con-
sciousness, fancy that the former will grow
weaker, the latter stronger, during the long
succession of ages which must elapse before
these myriads of individual Intelligences
become blended ^ when the bright stars
become blended ^ into One. (Poetry and
Tales1358)
Viewing Poes religious cosmology as the interior
monologue of an autopoietic zoological process
provides an alternative way of understanding
Emersons and Poes interest in producing a kind
of public (intersubjective) privacyin their writings,
a subject taken up in Louis Renzas recent book on
American privacy (87^103)..
16 In addition to introducing von Uexku lls
concepts of Innenwelt and Umwelt in The Mirror
Stage (1949) and The Function and Field of
Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (1953,
Fink 244), Lacan refers directly to the Umwelt und
Innenwelt derTiere in his1932 doctoral dissertation,
De la psychose parano|aque dans ses rapports avec la
personnalite (337).
17 For von Uexku lls zoological mirror, see
Environment and Inner World of Animals 234.
For Merleau-Ponty on the fold, see The Visible and
the Invisible 250. Bernard Stiegler, in contrast,
29
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views the epiphylogenetic mirroring that propels
the individual into temporality and community as
fundamentally technological (175^79). Stieglers
analysis, which will be elaborated in a second
volume, depends fundamentally on anunderstand-
ing of language as definitively divided into animal
(signaling) and human (signifying) dimensions,
an obvious begging of the question and an avoid-
ance of both evidence from the biological sciences
and the critique of metalanguage from Derrida
and Lacan.
18 A question now arises as to Lacans motives in
downplaying or denying the zoological continuism
of his thought. Why does he turn instead to the
language of mathematics, a historically anthropo-
logical kind of non-human semiotics? There is no
way to answer this question with any certainty,
but one suspects that it may have something to
do with the fact that the popular late nineteenth-
and early twentieth-century discourse of human^
animal continuism was already inhabited by the
kind of romantic assumptions concerning human
intention that Lacanwas interestedin dismantling.
This is particularly true of George Romanes,
whose anecdotal and anthropomorphizing work
on animal behavior was widely circulated in
Europe during Lacans education. It is possible,
then, to view Lacan as interested in freeing the
animal from its entrapment in the conscious
human projection of the animal as interlocutor,
his failure to cite or fullyengagewith the compara-
tive psychology of the times constituting not an
abandonment of the animal but a recuperation of
it in an authentic form through the backdoor of
mathematicized cybernetic theory. This would be,
from an ecocritical point of view, an admirable
strategic abstraction, one that might find some
support in the gestures towards zoology in the
official inaugural text of cybernetics,
Norbert Wieners Cybernetics, and indeed one
that some writers on the posthuman have
adopted in an attempt to unite the zoological and
technological strands of posthumanism. See Heise
59^82.
19 John James Audubon, Myself in Writings and
Drawings 765^84 (765^66). Curiously, Irmschers
edition offers a misprint, Migonne (me, gone),
for the Mignonne (cutie) of Maria Audubons
two editions of this essay, first published in1893.
20 Audubon 3. There has been a great deal of
work on Audubon that assesses this association
between violence and natural history. Constance
Rourkes Audubon ascribes violence to the realities
of frontier life, while Elsa Guerdrum Allens scho-
larly History of American Ornithology before Audubon
attributes it to standard scientific practice.
Annette Kolodny argues inThe Lay of the Land that
Audubons artistic project was indebted to a nine-
teenth-century Americanworldview that equated
knowledge with violence in a national project of
conquest under cover of exploration. For more
nuanced views of the relation between art and
violence in Audubon, see New 53^104 and
Irmscher188^235.
21 Joel Barlowes Advice to a Raven in Winter
(1812) is the best-known example, but there are
many more ephemeral verses that dwell upon the
bird. For one example that closely parallels Poes
later work, see G.F.W.s The Raven.
22 On the sources of The Raven, see Mabbott
1: 353^74.
23 One way of explaining Poes interest in the
more-than-human dimension of poetic speech is
through recourse to the classical topos of ars
longa, the notion that a durable poetic act
escapes from the conditions of mortality that
define the human condition. See Browns The
Poetics of Extinction. Brown, reiterating
J. Gerald Kennedys argument in Poe, Death, and
the Life of Writing, holds that Poes signature
move is to alienate the specifically anthropoform
consciousness from the human body and then
memorialize it in the structure of the artwork.
Browns reading ignores a great deal of the phe-
nomenal complexity of Poes writing ^ which is
clearly embracing extinction as much as trying
to outrun it ^ and too hastily assigns a human
identity to the other minds that form the cen-
tral problematic of his work. There is no reason
to assume that all signs of intelligibility in Poe
necessarily imply an anthropological foundation,
as that is the precise question with which Poe
always wrestles. Although Barbara Johnson
makes no mention of the anthropozoological
situation of The Raven, her argument that
Poes experiment in mechanical language
ultimately destroys the distinction between
mechanism and naturalness so central to basic
understandings of Romanticism also destroys the
rationale for distinguishing between the repeti-
tive, mechanistic, empty languages of animals
and the full language of man. See A World of
Difference.
30
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Michael Ziser
Department of English
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
USA
E-mail: mgziser@ucdavis.edu
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