To be human, nonetheless, remains a decision

Humanism as Decisionism in Contemporary Critical Political Theory1

Diego H. Rossello
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile

Abstract: This essay suggests that humanism is a decisionism in contemporary critical

political theory. Despite obvious and multiple differences, leading critical theorists like
Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj iek, Eric Santner, and Jrgen Habermas, among others,
share an investment in stabilizing the human being as a ground of the political. This
stabilization of the human should concern political theorists, this essay argues,
because it uncritically reproduces conceptual affinities between the notion of the
human being and sovereign authority. By investing in the stability and centrality of the
human being these theorists perform what will be called, paraphrasing an often
neglected argument by Carl Schmitt, a decision to be human. Contrary to conventional
wisdom, I suggest that Schmitts decisionism is not merely circumscribed to
sovereigntys juridical dimension, but that it also includes a commitment to Gods
decision to become human in Christ. Against this decisionism as humanism the essay
draws on Walter Benjamin, Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida to propose an
alternative politics that destabilizes humanity and sovereignty through the emergence
of the animal, or what will be called melancholic lycanthropy.

Key words: humanism; decisionism; melancholy; sovereignty; animality

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 ... while it may generate anxiety, animal subjectivity
does not threaten modern rule [...] Superior
intelligence enabled humans long ago to domesticate
animals, ensuring that any subjectivity they might
have will lie safely beneath human rule.

Wendt and Duvall, Sovereignty and the UFO

... a sound political conception depends above all on

concentrating on the human person [...] the part of
animality in such a set-up is immense. [...] It follows,
therefore, that a work of education, taming the
irrational to reason [...] must be pursued within the
political body, it follows that this latter must be in a
state of tension and defense against perpetual
internal and external threats of disintegration and
destruction...

Jacques Maritain, Christianity and Democracy

... I only wanted to tell you that the fine formula: the
human is a human to the human a human homo
homini homois no solution, but rather only the
beginning of our problematic. I mean this critically,
but in a thoroughly affirmative way, in the sense of
the verse: To be human, nonetheless, remains a
decision.

Carl Schmitt, Dialogue on Power and Access to the

Holder of Power

Introduction

In this paper I suggest that humanism is a form of sovereign decisionism in

contemporary critical theory. According to my reading, leading critical theorists like

Slavoj iek, Giorgio Agamben, Eric Santner, Jrgen Habermas, and the predominant

theoretical approaches to human rights, despite their obvious and multiple

differences, share an investment in stabilizing the human being as a ground of the

political (iek, 2009; Agamben, 1998, 2004, 2008; Santner, 2006, 2012; Habermas,

2003, 2010). This stabilization of the human should concern political theorists, I

suggest, because it reproduces metaphysical affinities between the notion of the

human being and sovereign authority. Thus, whereas humanism is often portrayed as a
2
much needed barrier against the excesses of sovereign power, I argue that humanism

is co-implicated with sovereigntys metaphysical assumptions in the first place.

In a provocative essay, Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall explore the

metaphysical affinity between sovereignty and humanism and coin the term

anthropocentric sovereignty (Wendt and Duvall, 2008). According to them,

anthropocentric sovereignty operates under the modern assumption that only humans

rule (or question rule, for that matter): neither God nor Nature can rule or challenge

human rule. Hence, anthropocentric sovereignty remains metaphysically blind to non-

human forms of life. Wendt and Duvall focus on non-human alien life but their essay

has implications for animal life too. Their concern is that the sovereign state, because

it cannot establish whether UFOs are extraterrestrial, remains ill-equipped to securitize

the UFO threat, and can only produce ignorance about it. In the course of their

discussion the authors mention, but do not fully explore, the possibility of an animal

exception to anthropocentric sovereignty.

Wendt and Duvall believe that although anthropocentric sovereignty could be

unsettled by claims such as animal conscience and animal rights, in the end while it

may generate anxiety, animal subjectivity does not threaten modern rule either

physically or ontologically (2008, 624). However, one may ask: how is anxiety

generated by a threat that has already been securitized? Wendt and Duvall

circumscribe the possibility of an animal exception to animal conscience or rights, but

3
what if there are other forms of emergent animal subjectivity that may question

anthropocentric sovereignty? According to my reading, an animal exception is still

conceivable; and melancholy, instead of anxiety, is the affective disposition that can

help us grasp the implications of such exception.

Mobilized mainly in psychoanalytic contexts, melancholy is often understood as a

response to the lost object that, unlike mourning, refuses to accept such loss and

remains pathologically attached to it (Freud, 1917). But melancholy has a richer history

beyond its rendering in psychoanalysis. Ancient Byzantine physicians, early modern

physiologists, and contemporary psychiatrists focus on a peculiar inflection of

melancholia called lycanthropy: the acute melancholic syndrome of depersonalization

where the person feels, and acts, as if he or she has turned into an animal (Burton,

2001; Fahy, 1989). According to my reading, the undecidable status between humanity

and animality brought about by melancholic lycanthropy can be conceived as an

animal exception that requires periodic and sustained decisions to be human: a

decision to be human is made in order not to be taken over by animality.

The notion of decisionism, as it is well-known, is intrinsically linked to Carl Schmitts

theory of sovereignty. According to the German legal theorist, sovereignty is defined

by the capacity to decide on the exception: sovereign is he who decides on the

exception (Schmitt, 1985, p. 5). But before this argument in his book Political Theology

of 1922, Schmitt had access to another version of decisionism in the work of a writer

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he admired: the mystical Catholic poet Theodor Dubler. Schmitt showed a sustained

interest in Dublers work throughout his life; he dedicated a short study to the epic

poem Das Nordlich in 1916 (Schmitt, 1991), and included a line of this long poem in a

script he wrote to be broadcasted on the radio, in 1953 (Schmitt, 2015 p. 31). The

suggestive line of Dublers poem included by Schmitt in the script reads: to be

human, nonetheless, remains a decision [Doch Mensch zu sein, bleibt trotzdem ein

Entschluss] (Schmitt, 1991).2

What this quote by Schmitt reveals is the co-implication of humanism and sovereign

decisionism. Focusing on this co-implication is important because it gives us critical

purchase not only on the affinities between sovereignty and humanism, rarely focused

on, but also on the critical discourses that are supposed to question them. Critical

political theorists and human rights theorists pit humanism against sovereignty in the

hope of limiting, if not bringing to an end, the unchecked exercise of sovereign power.

But instead of questioning affinities between sovereignty and humanism these

theorists inadvertently reinforce them by buttressing humanism without ever

unsettling anthropocentric sovereigntys metaphysical comfort zone. Thus, drawing on

the works by Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin and Roberto Esposito, and in contrast

with humanist critical theorists, this paper proposes a critique of humanism as

decisionism based on melancholic lycanthropy (Derrida, 2008; Benjamin, 2003;

Esposito, 2012a).

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The paper proceeds as follows. The first section introduces, both historically and

analytically, the notion of melancholic lycanthropy. I find a sustained interest in

lycanthropy in the canon of political theory, and suggest that lycanthropy can inform a

critique of sovereignty and humanism. Section two tracks and questions, from the

perspective made available by melancholic lycanthropy, different versions of

humanism as decisionism in the works of relevant contemporary critical political

theorists. Section three concludes by highlighting the contribution that melancholic

lycanthropy can make to critically assess our contemporary attachment to the stability

of the human person and its dignity.

I. Melancholic Lycanthropy: To Be Or Not To Be Human

Recent works in critical political theory have put the lycanthrope (from the Greek

lykos, wolf) at the center of their analysis (Agamben, 1998; Dumm, 2005; Derrida 2009;

Rossello, 2012; Dienstag, 2015; Torrano 2016). Derrida and Agamben, for example,

find in the lycanthrope a liminal figure that resists assimilation into the civilizing

practices of the sovereign state and remains outside the contours of the political.

Whereas for Agamben the lycanthrope is a figuration of the homo sacer, the person

that can be killed without committing homicide or sacrifice, for Derrida the werewolf

points us to the outlaw, a creature that roams in the contours of the law. Despite the

contemporary return of the wolf-man, taking lycanthropy seriously will no doubt still

6
be seen as idiosyncratic, and so it may be worthwhile to track the figure through the

canon of political theory.

Revealing references to lycanthropy in the canon of political theory go back to Platos

discussion of the degeneration of political regimes from enlightened rulers to wolf-like

tyrants. According to Plato in The Republic, a tyrant gradually becomes more blood

thirsty, driving people into exile, killing his kinsmen and ultimately turning from man

into a wolf (Plato, 2003, p. 280). Lycanthropy also features as a concern in Jean

Bodins inaugural formulation of sovereign authority and in James I, the melancholic

philosopher-king who was forced to defend the grounds of his own investiture.

Contrary to the consensus among French Catholic theologians of the time, Bodin

argued that it is clear that men are sometimes transmuted into beasts while their

human shape and reason remain and this is done either by the power of God directly,

or He gives this power to Satan the executor of his will (Bodin, 1995, p. 128).

Conversely, James I took sides with ancient Byzantine doctors and physiologists (Atius

of Amida and Plautus Aegineta) and claimed that lycanthropes were not possessed by

the devil (nor presumably, inspired by God, which Bodin also countenances) but

suffered an acute melancholic syndrome (King James I, 2008, p. 57).

In his book The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, one of the most exciting and

puzzling English writers of the 17th century, dissented from ancient Byzantine

physicians who classified lycanthropy as a kind of melancholy, and suggested that this

7
malady should be categorized instead as a type of madness or frenzy (Burton, 2001,

pp. 139143). Burton defined lycanthropy as lupinam insaniam, or wolf-madness,

when men run howling about graves and fields in the night, and will not be persuaded

but that they are wolves, or some such beasts (Burton, 2001, p. 141). Thomas Hobbes,

the most exemplary theorist of sovereignty and Burtons contemporary, famously

draws on Plautos phrase homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man, to allegorize the

anarchical and pre-political state of nature, before the creation of a sovereign state

(Hobbes, 1998, p. 89). In addition, Derrida has recently discussed Jean Jacques

Rousseaus self-description in the Confessions as a loup-garou, a werewolf or outlaw

(Derrida, 2009, p. 63).

Beyond the canon of political theory, contemporary psychiatry defines lycanthropy

either as the belief that one can change himself or other into a wolf or some other

animal, and links it to related syndromes such as insania lupina; melancholia;

melancholia zooanthropia (Campbell, 2009, p. 569), or simply conceives of it as a

severe type of depersonalization (Surawicz and Banta, 1986, p. 38). Scholars in

psychiatry have also noted that the notion of lycanthropy has now expanded so as to

embrace the delusional transformation not only into a wolf, but also into other animal

species (Keck et. al. in Blom, 2014, p. 96). As I conceive it, the notion of melancholic

lycanthropy includes, but is not limited to, its uses in psychiatric discourses.

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Beyond the vernaculars of psychology and the history of political thought, post

humanist theorists as well as scholars interested in melancholy ultimately remain

inattentive to the potential of lycanthropy but may contribute to our thinking about it.

Post-humanist theorists in general, and those focused on animal studies in particular,

have been performing a sustained critique of humanism with consequences for the

realm of ethics but remain at a distance from political theory (Hayles, 1999; Haraway,

2004; Calarco, 2008; Weil, 2012; McCance, 2013). On the other hand, debates

surrounding the politics of melancholia often do not attend to the link between this

peculiar affect and animality (Brown, 1999; iek 2000; Mladek and Edmundson, 2009;

Ferber, 2013). In this context, it may be instructive to turn to Benjamin, Derrida and

Esposito, whose works offer unexplored conceptual resources for linking lycanthropy

to a critique of sovereignty and humanism.

Benjamins writings destabilize the notion of human being as they mobilize, and give

life to, a vast repertoire of non-human forms of creaturely life such as dogs, angels,

stones, among many others (Hanssen, 2000; Santner 2006). Among Benjamins

improbable creatures I single out the melancholic prince discussed in his book on the

German Trauerspiel, because his or her indecisiveness, together with the process of

de-personalization that affects him or her, seems to undermine not only the

foundations of sovereign power, but also the princes own human status. According to

Benjamin in the Trauerspiel book, the prince ceases to be a representative of God on

earth and is affected by melancholy. This melancholy is not only religious, but also
9
physiological: the melancholic is afflicted with a superabundance of black bile

characteristic of the rabid dog (Benjamin, 2003, 152). Thus, in Benjamins description,

the melancholic prince of the baroque mourning play cannot decide on the exception

and fails to secure not only the state but also his or her status as human. Discussing

princely melancholia Benjamin writes: in the ruler [Herrscher], the supreme creature,

the animal [Tier] can re-emerge with unsuspected power (Benjamin, 2003, p. 86).

Esposito also reflects upon the link between melancholy and the stability of the polity.

On the one hand, Esposito alerts us about the political valence of melancholia as an

affective disposition associated with both mental and civil instability, but he ultimately

remains inattentive to a possible connection with animality (Esposito, 2012, p. 27 and

30). On the other, he discusses the problem of the animal in the human, but misses its

link with melancholy, and focuses instead on the exclusion of animality in the

conceptual construal of human rights. Esposito reminds us that the Catholic

personalist philosopher Jacques Maritain was a key inspiration for the Universal

Declaration of Human Rights, and that he had little esteem for the animality of the

human being. According to Esposito, for Maritain (a) human being is a person

precisely because (and only if) it maintains full control over its animal nature, and

adds (a)nd the reason why human beings have an animal nature is so they can

measure against it their sovereign status as a person (Esposito, 2012a, p 89).

10
Derrida also challenges the notion of the human individual considered as autonomous

and self-contained, presupposed in our conceptualization of rights, by focusing on the

notions of ipseity and autos.3 According to Derrida, [b]efore any sovereignty of the

state, of the nation-state, of the monarch, or, in democracy, of the people, ipseity

names a principle of legitimate sovereignty (Derrida, 2005, p. 12). Thus, ipseity, the

self or selfhood, the autonomous individual human being construed by the Western

philosophical tradition, not only bears the marks of sovereignty, but is sovereignty

even before the state. Through the notions of lycology and lycanthropy, among

others, Derrida renews his critique of a self (sovereign and human) haunted by the

animal that therefore he or she is.4

But Derrida and Benjamin cannot be brought together easily, for Derrida has a

powerful critique of Benjamin, one that is highly relevant to the issues explored here:

Derrida is indebted to Benjamins critique of sovereignty, but Derrida also alerts us to

the problematic status of melancholy in Benjamins argument. Derrida objects to

Benjamins argument on creaturely melancholy, of the sorrow of animals, nature and

the indecisive prince, because Benjamins take on creaturely mournfulness occurs

within the time frame of redemption (Derrida, 2008, p. 20). According to Derrida,

Benjamins understanding of melancholy is ultimately postlapsarian, it occurs after the

fall and after original sin (Derrida, 2008, p. 20), and it bears the marks of its

redemptive framing. Thus, Benjamins reading of melancholy misses the moment in

11
Genesis, still in Eden, when human authority over animals is established by way of the

power of naming.

Derrida argues that in the re-turn to the timelessness of paradise that is staged in the

German baroque mourning play, melancholy equalizes all creaturely life by way of a

via negativa: creatures are now equal on the basis of their irredeemability. But for

Derrida, there is an important if usually overlooked asymmetry here. Focusing on the

second version of Creation in Genesis, when God invites Adam to name the animals,

Derrida argues that God summons the animals in order to subject [] them to mans

command, in order to place them under mans authority [] God destines the

animals to an experience of the power of man (Derrida, 2008, p. 21). By naming the

animals, Adam establishes his prerogative to subject [assujetisse], tame, dominate,

train, or domesticate the animals born before him and assert his authority over them

(Derrida, 2008, p. 16). Derrida here mobilizes a vocabulary central for political theory:

subject, authority, power, domination, among others. For Derrida the scene of Adam

naming the animals is a political scene, a foundational moment of human authority

over non-human creatures, even though it occurs in a time when there was not yet

time (Derrida, 2008, p. 22), namely, in the timelessness of Creation before the fall.

Taking Derridas critique of Benjamin seriously calls us to think about the political

importance of acts (both inaugural and daily thereafter) of subjection of animals and

nature. In the act of naming, Adam extracts himself from the realm of animality, and is

12
bound to be the lord of his own animal body and of non-human forms of life: Adam

performs a decision to be human. Seen in this light, lycanthropy, the kind of

melancholic syndrome that brings forth an undecidable state between humanity and

animality, signals the possibility of undoing the originary act of subjection, or at least

of marking creaturely resistances to it. Thus, lycanthropy serves to trace and question

the theoretical and philosophical discourses that refer to or enact, willingly or

unwillingly, the primal scene of animal subjection. This is important because the

founding moment of the de-animalization of man is necessary for sovereignty and/as

humanism to come to be. The fact that this decision to be human is never over, the

fact that it recurs is key to any project that seeks to analyze its singular configurations

in different periods, texts, and thinkers.

II. Deciding to be Human in Contemporary Critical Political Theory

In the introduction I suggested that Schmitts decisionism is not merely circumscribed

to the juridical dimension of state sovereignty, but that it stages a metaphysical

commitment to the stability of the human person as such. Schmitts understanding of

sovereign decisionism bears the marks of his framing in terms of political theology, and

remains attached to Gods decision to become human in Christ (Schmitt, 1996). This

theologico-political decision to become human leads Schmitt to a politics of

stabilization of the civitas humana, or the human city, widely understood.5 But the

complicity between sovereign authority and the human person, or the affinity

between modern sovereignty and humanism, has often been downplayed in the hope
13
that a right kind of humanism could provide a limit to sovereign power. As we shall

see, the works by Habermas, iek, Agamben and Santner are all representative of this

idea, even if their approaches to the human differ widely. Thus, liberal subjects who

deliberate; anti-melancholic subjects of the passage l'acte; and mortalist humanists

who focus on vulnerability, all claim to be opposing Schmitts state-based sovereign

decisionism. But are they really opposing Schmitt? Or are they re-citing him?

The work by Eric Santner, an otherwise refined and challenging reader of Benjamins

work, is a good example of how a critical project that re-works Benjamins insights on

creaturely life risks falling back into merely replaying the decision to be human. In his

book The Royal Remains, Santner offers an alternative narrative of the development of

political modernity. Whereas the now conventional story is one of re-distribution of

power from top to bottom in the break from absolute monarchy to popular

sovereignty, Santner argues that the royal remains after democratic revolutions. These

remains take place, and are displaced, in the transition from the political theology of

royal authority to the biocracy of popular sovereignty.

Drawing on Ernst Kantorowiczs argument in The Kings Two Bodies, Santner holds that

the political theology of royal authority depends upon the doctrine of the double body

of the king. On the one hand, the king has a mortal body, vulnerable to illness, aging

and decay; on the other, the king bears a mystical-supernatural body whose

immortality and invulnerability are required and presupposed in royal succession.

14
According to Santner, the distinction between two kingly bodies does not disappear

with the advent of democratic revolutions but gets re-distributed in each citizen of the

new sovereign body: the people.

The Royal Remains offers an impressive account of the excitations of the flesh of the

political in a variety of theoretical registers (political theology, psychoanalysis, political

theory, and more) and sensitizes us to the pressures, and not just the liberations

(usually focused on) that may result from democratic revolutions. However, my

investigation of humanism as decisionism leads me to depart from Santner at a crucial

point: his insistence on that which distinguishes the human political community from

any other form of life. Linking the notion of flesh with his prior notion of creaturely

life, Santner argues:

By creaturely I do not simply mean nature or living things or sentient beings,

or even what the religiously minded would think of as the whole of Gods

creation, but rather a dimension specific to human existence, albeit one that

seems to push thinking in the direction of theology. It signifies a mode of

exposure that distinguishes human beings from other kinds of life: not

exposures simply to the elements or to the fragility and precariousness of our

mortal, finite lives, but rather to an ultimate lack of foundation for the historical

forms of life that distinguish human community (Santner, 2011, p. 5, emphasis

added).

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This paragraph sums up the most salient insights in Santners work and its most

thought-provoking limitations. Santner restates the distinction between humans and

other forms of life three times; why? As we shall see later on, his thrice-stated decision

to be human can be seen as a theologico-political decision upon the animal exception.

This decision was already anticipated in the early pages of the book, when Santner

states that he plans to rework Benjamins insights towards a kind of philosophical

anthropology (Santner, 2011, p. xx). However, why are these decisions necessary, if at

all? Santner justifies these decisions by alluding to a certain dimension that seems to

push thinking towards theology.6

But this push towards the theologico-political is neither irresistible nor irreversible. On

the contrary, Santners emphasis on the push towards theology may also incite a

counter-push: a process of melancholic depersonalization that withdraws from the

theologico-political dimension of sovereignty and sensitizes us to the emergence of the

animal that (in Derridas terms) therefore we are. In Santners terms, we might suggest

that this pre-symbolic and pre-somatic stuff that pushes towards the theological might

in fact be pushing towards what, drawing on Derrida, we may call the lycological. This

is what forces Santner to decide upon it. What I call melancholic lycanthropy

reorients us from a sphere that is allegedly characteristic of the human being, but

which can be seen as a metaphysical and onto-theological recasting of sovereignty,

towards a melancholic depersonalization that encounters and makes room for the

animality in/of the human being.

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In many ways Santner is indebted to Giorgio Agamben. Agamben too is concerned with

a widespread re-distribution of the indistinction between human and animal in

modern sovereignty (Agamben, 2003). Agamben reads the possibility of becoming wolf

as part of a condition in which everyone is bare life and a homo sacer for everyone

else (Agamben, 1998, p. 106). Modern sovereignty generates bare life, Agamben

argues, because Hobbess view of the state of nature as a place where man is a wolf to

man is never totally excluded by contracting into a sovereign body. Quite the opposite,

the lupization of man and humanization of wolf is at every moment possible, because

the violent state of nature is presupposed in the civil state (Agamben, 1998, p. 106).

Reworking the Schmittian category, Agamben calls this excluding inclusion of the wolf

in the city the state of exception (Agamben, 1998, p. 109).

Agambens focus on lupization and humanization may suggest his position is close to

my own. But there are important differences here. From my perspective, Agambens

main concern in his reading of Hobbess political theory is the ever present risk of de-

humanization, namely, the transformation of the human being into a life that is

superfluous and expendable. Agambens genealogical recuperation of the werewolf

figure as an outlaw insists on this concern: he reminds us that the wargus or caput

lupinem of the laws of Edward the Confessor never ceases to be a human being, even

if (or precisely when) it is figured as a wolf. Thus, Agamben reads the werewolf as a

17
figuration of human vulnerability, not as the possibility of an animal exception with

potential for questioning anthropocentric sovereignty (Agamben, 1998, p. 109).7

Paradoxically, it can be argued that Agamben performs a humanization of the wolf: he

imposes a philosophical anthropology of human vulnerability onto incipient symptoms

of lycanthropy. As we saw with Santner, so, too, with Agamben, there is here a

decision to be human. Agamben makes clear that at issue [here] is not simply fera

bestia and natural life (as if animals and nature were irrelevant for the issue under

consideration: sovereignty) but a sovereign-led process of de-humanization that

culminates in the concentration camp (Agamben, 1998, p. 106). Thus, while Agamben

reads the indistinction between man and wolf as an attack on the dignitas of the

human being, I suggest we can also read it as the emergence of the animal that resists

humanization, that is to say, as a symptom of resistance to the forceful de-

animalization of the human being.

Attending to lycanthropy may offer an antidote to the stabilization of the human being

favored by humanism as decisionism. But the risk here is that we might fall into a

peculiarly despondent affect, characteristic of critical approaches, often dubbed as left

melancholia. This risk is important if it prevents us from affirming lycanthropys

political potential. In an insightful article, Wendy Brown discusses ambiguities of the

melancholic temper in the leftist political imaginary. According to Brown, Benjamin

had a well-developed appreciation of the productive value of acedia, sadness, and

18
mourning for political and cultural work, and even conceived of melancholy as

something of a creative wellspring (Brown, 1999, p. 20). But Brown also

acknowledges that Benjamin was a fierce critic of left melancholia, namely, of the

mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to feelings, values and

worldviews that constitute the left and which remain thinglike and frozen, deprived

of life force, in the hearts of the would be leftist (Brown, 1999, p. 26). Brown invites us

to resist the traditionalist and backward-looking aspects of left melancholia and to find

new ways of invigorating classic ideals of the left such as dignity, equality, and

freedom (Brown, 1999, p. 26).

Brown, like Benjamin, is both attracted to and repelled by melancholy. The attraction

in Benjamins understanding of melancholy stems from a certain fidelity or loyalty to

the world of things, mediated by the knowledge that the melancholic contemplator

embraces dead objects [] in order to redeem them (Benjamin, 2003, p. 157). The

redemptive power of melancholy is added by Benjamin to a historical trend, traceable

from Aristotle to Marsilius Ficinus, that links the saturnine temper to genius and

scholarly pursuits. The worry about melancholy, however, apparent in both Brown and

Benjamin, resides precisely in its alleged contemplative impulses that breed passivity,

inaction, sloth, deferral, and suggests self-absorption, isolation, self-centeredness and

disconnection from people and things. These traits are often emphasized by critics of

the politics of melancholia who argue for the primacy of the (revolutionary) act for

obtaining a radical political change. According to these critics, the melancholic is the
19
paradigmatic product of capitalism, the isolated and inactive individual who remains

immersed in capitalist social relations even (or precisely) when she or he sorrowfully

denounces them.

Slavoj iek represents the anti-melancholic position, provocatively linking melancholy

with what he describes as the politically correct stance regarding the lost object.

According to iek, the melancholics fidelity to the lost object explains postmodern

political agendas like the ones furthered by queer and postcolonial studies. iek sees

melancholy at work when gays and lesbians are conceived as remaining loyal to the

initial, and repressed, identification with the same-sex libidinal object, and when

colonized populations are thought of as melancholically attached to their traditional

ways of life despite their violent immersion in global capitalism. iek believes that the

postmodern politics of melancholia cannot question the capitalist social relations that

structure our life in common, offering instead a merely politically correct commentary

on those relations (iek, 2000).

iek also reads the rehabilitation of melancholia in the postmodern political agenda

as typically anti-Hegelian. Whereas iek understands the work of mourning as killing

the object for a second time by finally coming to terms with the loss, melancholy

resists the notional sublation of the object and remains suspended in its attachment to

it. Melancholys stark resistance to move on, to reabsorb or re-appropriate the lost

object, remains an obstacle for the dialectical movement of affirmations and negations

20
embraced by iek. According to him, melancholy interrupts the dialectical Aufhebung

because it confuses lack (the motor of dialectics for iek) and loss. But nothing was

actually possessed and then lost, iek argues, (the object is lacking from the very

beginning . . . its emergence coincides with its lack) and so the translation of lack into

loss paradoxically reinforces the idea of our possession of the object and allows the

melancholic to possess it in its very loss (iek, 2000, p. 660). The ambivalence that

Brown and Benjamin cultivate in relation to melancholia is ultimately dismissed by

iek on behalf of a radically emancipatory act.

ieks anti-melancholic stance is partnered with a materialist theology that

emphasizes continuities between Marxism and Christianity criticizing what he sees, in

Derrida and Levinas, as a melancholic primordial passivity [that is] infinitely indebted

and responsible to the call of an Otherness [and] never acquires positive features but

always remains withdrawn (iek, 2000, p. 664). iek calls for us to attend to the

theological significance of the incarnation of God in Christ as a religious suspension of

the ethical that disrupts the social and political fabric of the pagan world. 8 Here, we

have the original lost object, once God became man, there was no longer a God one

could return to or become (iek and Milbank, 2009, p. 31), and we have ieks

favored response: do not try to recover God, nor mourn its passing, but rather endorse

the becoming-human of God as well as the impossibility of going back to a purely

transcendent God, at a distance from human affairs. This is the challenge of embracing

what iek calls the monstrosity of Christ.

21
However, according to iek the Holy Spirit remains in (and through) the community of

believers and the promise of its realization on earth is to be found in Marxism, the only

metaphysical position that can deliver on the promise. The Holy Spirit thus becomes

the specter of communism haunting Europe, and the world. Thus ieks theological

materialism seeks to articulate Marxism and Christianity as the sole two metaphysical

positions alternative to liberal-capitalism (see iek, 2000, p. 2).

ieks re-reading of Christianity joins Schmitts theory of sovereignty in celebrating the

political implications of a God that decides to become human. But whereas Schmitt

seeks to honor the Christian God-made-man by thinking the sovereign representative

in the image of the authority exercised by the Roman Catholic Church (Schmitt 1996),

ieks materialist theology emphasizes the fact that once God decides to become

human (and dies as human) the immaterial God ceases to exist, and sovereignty is

exercised by a community of human believers. Whereas incarnation means for Schmitt

that political authority should be circumscribed to a personal and decisionist

representative sovereign, for iek sovereignty takes the form of a community of

believers embracing some version of communism. In both cases, however, human

sovereignty remains untouched and is grounded in Gods metaphysical decision to be

human. Thus, although Schmitts political theology and ieks materialist theology

seem to derive distinct, and ultimately opposed, political implications from

incarnation, they both find in God-made-man an event that ultimately informs and

22
animates their political theories.9 We can see their commonalities best from the

perspective of lycanthropy and this is one of the virtues of this perspective.

A political theory of lycanthropy, inspired by Benjamin, and Derrida, and

complemented by Esposito, mobilizes melancholic lycanthropy precisely to show the

link between sovereignty and the onto-theological foundations of becoming human.

From the perspective of lycanthropy, ieks conception of the monstrosity of Christ

wants to have its cake to become human and eat it too to become monstrous.

According to iek, following a remark by Hegel, Christs monstrosity lies in the fact

that the finite fragile individual is inappropriate to stand for God (iek and Milbank,

2009, p. 74). What iek (and perhaps also Santner) does not see is that monstrosity is

not engendered by the abyss of dignitas separating the humble human vessel from the

Almighty God. Rather, the abyss of dignitas, reinforced by incarnation, is already at

work in the human -- between the human, its own animality, and the rest of non-

human animals. Incarnation may be seen from this perspective as actuating this prior

trauma: a re-humanization that goes back to the violent subjugation whereby Adam

named the animal, and inaugurated humanism.

Unlike iek, Habermas and Francis Fukuyama return to Aristotle to vouchsafe the

dignity of the human person. As is well-known, Aristotle argued in The Politics that he

who is unable to live in society [] must be either a beast or a god: he is not part of a

state (Aristotle, 1996, p. 14). Aristotles fundamental cartography of the human city

23
remains as vibrant as ever, or so it seems. To this day, political theorists draw on

Aristotle to defend a certain enlightened idea of human nature against modern science

and technology: to play God regarding biotechnologies may in fact turn the human

species into mere cattle. The contribution lycanthropy might make here is necessary,

even pressing.

Fukuyama relies on an Aristotelian understanding of human flourishing to oppose the

perils of a Huxleian world caused by contemporary biotechnology (Fukuyama, 2002).

Jrgen Habermas, also draws on Aristotle to reassert the humanist contours of our

moral and political self-understanding. Habermas mobilizes Aristotelian intuitions to

sensitize us to the disruptive and dehumanizing potential of developments in science

and technology, specifically the manipulation of the human genome. Habermas asserts

that, unlike the ethos advanced by biotechnologies, our lifeworld continues to be in a

sense, Aristotelian, namely, we do not think twice before distinguishing between

inorganic and organic nature, plants and animals [] animal nature and the reasoning

and social nature of man (Habermas, 2003, p. 44).

For Habermas, humans, who are neither beasts nor Gods receive orientation from

distinctions between the natural and the artificial, what is grown and what is made,

despite the fact that these distinctions no longer have the ontological traction they

once did. By enabling us to treat other human beings as means, and not as ends in

themselves, biotechnologies destabilize the distinctions that shape our sense of moral

24
community. The possibility of manipulating the genetic information of humans to

come, creating designer babies or enhancing certain physical capabilities, threatens

the moral self-understanding of humanity. If the dignity of human life is obtained

through socialization and intersubjective agreements achieved by communication,

Habermas says, the alteration of genetic information of future generations of human

beings frames them as objects and leaves them irrevocably outside of the moral

conversation.

The perspective provided by lycanthropy invites us to consider the possibility that

Fukuyama and Habermas share, perhaps unwittingly, Schmitts decision to be human.

For Fukuyama and Habermas, the problem is not, as it was at times for Schmitt, the

depersonalizing forces of the state as a machine (which undoes the possibility of

decision) but rather the technology of biotechnology, which increases some choices

like what kind of babies to have but at the cost of undermining the thing that makes

choosing significant: humanity itself. Whereas Fukuyama advocates for national and

transnational regulation of the use of biotechnology (for instance, to prevent human

cloning), Habermas recasts the project of a moral community to secure our self-

understanding as members of the species of humanity (Fukuyama, 2002, pp. 5663;

Habermas, 2003, p. 40). Habermas ultimately advocates an ethics of the [human]

species (Habermas, 2003, p. 37).

25
The positions of Habermas and Fukuyama are in tension with critical perspectives that

show the constitutive instability of human nature. These perspectives either stress the

unstable nature of human nature by attenuating the distinction between human, and

machine, i.e. in the figure of the cyborg discussed by Katherine Hayles and Donna

Haraway, or by interrogating the distinction between human and animal, i.e. in

Derridas deconstruction of logocentrism and Deleuzes notion of becoming-animal

(Hayles, 1993; Haraway et al., 1991; Derrida, 2008; Deleuze and Guattari, 2004). As I

see it, the notion of melancholic lycanthropy introduced in these pages has strong

affinities with such post-humanist positions and generates compelling responses to the

effort now to generate an ethics of the human species.

But lycanthropy also posits its own specific contribution to make to political theory.

Focusing on an affective disposition that makes the human status undecidable,

lycanthropy offers a glimpse of a road not taken where the central figure is not the

Schmittian decision to be human, but rather a more hospitable disposition towards the

undecidability that haunts such decision. By focusing on such undecidability,

lycanthropy questions the link between sovereignty and humanism, and this

questioning has consequences for our contemporary understanding of what it means

to be human, and what it means to protect and respect the human being and other

non-human creatures. Thus, according to the perspective made available by

lycanthropy, even notions such as human rights can be seen as decisions to be human.

26
III. Concluding Remarks

As we have seen, contemporary critical theorists like Santner, Agamben, iek, and

Habermas, despite their many differences, coincide in performing different versions of

what I called a decision to be human. These authors decide to be human as a reaction

against different versions of an animal exception: the creaturely pressures produced

by the ex-citations of law and sovereignty; the lupization of man generated by the

state of exception; the melancholic passivity of postmodern ethics; and the

manipulation of the human genome that risks turning human beings into mere cattle.

Thanks to these decisions, anthropocentric sovereignty remains strong and the

symptoms of lycanthropy remain more or less under control.

Or so it seems. After the horrors of WWII the notion of universal human rights became

the new conceptual ground for fostering an unconditional respect for human dignity. It

was decided that, after Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags we have good

reasons to be on guard against excesses of the sovereign nation state, and to invest in

the protection of human dignity as a way of impeding the return of such excesses. But

we also, perhaps mistakenly, dismissed the idea that human dignity conceived in this

way depends upon something like the mechanisms of investiture on which divine royal

authority depended, and modern sovereignty still depends.

Santners reading of Kantorowicz helps us grasp this paradox of dignitas in a way that

is significant for my argument on lycanthropy. In a little noted discussion at the end of

27
his book, Kantorowicz suggests that the human, just like the king, is also the product of

an investiture. Kantorowicz reads Dante Alighieris Divine Comedy as positing the

question of whether:

the capacity of Being Man [] did not amount to an office, the highly

responsible office of Man towards mankind an office equal in rank and

responsibility and universality with papatus and imperiatus and adorned with a

Dignity no less sempiternal than that of either the emperor or the pope: the

Dignity of Man (Kantorowicz, 1997, p. 460).

Kantorowicz seems to suggest that being human is also a high office with a dignitas

attached to it. Humanisms of different sorts have tried to sustain and reinforce the

investiture of the human in distinct ways, but often with a tendency to miss the fable

or the fictive aspect of the human office (Kahn, 2009). Humanism has a tendency to

overact its role melancholic lycanthropy reminds us of this. Thanks to this reminder,

we can see that after WWII Schmitts theory of sovereignty was deemed unable to

guarantee human dignity, and some turned to the Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain

for an alternative.

Maritains Christian democratic vindication of the dignity of the human person

seemed more attuned to the new and incipient post-sovereign conceptions of global

citizenship. Maritain believed (in tension with Schmitt) that contemporary liberal

democracy could be reconciled with Christian values and the enforcement of human
28
rights. Recent works in human rights scholarship remind us that Maritain was

influential in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948

(Dougherty, 2003, p. 100; Moyn, 2015). For him Catholicism pointed in a different

direction than it did for Schmitt, and this was an important challenge to Schmitt

However, in a chapter especially dedicated to Animality and Personality, Maritain

recasts (transfers) the Schmittian decision to be human to, and in, each and every

human person. Maritain holds that because the person is an animal gifted with

reason the part of animality in such set-up is immense and therefore a work of

education, taming the irrational to reason, and developing the moral virtues, must

constantly be pursued within the political body (Maritain, 2011, p. 100). According to

Maritain, we have yet emerged so little from animality; the part of malice, of latent

barbarism and of perversion is so great in us that the task of securing the dignity of

the human person requires a struggle against the darkest forces in our own selves

(Maritain, 2011, p. 101). Here animality is recognized but is treated as irrationality and

barbarism.

This gloomy cartography of human nature was a product of the midcentury barbarisms

in which Schmitt himself played a part. But Esposito reminds us that Maritains project

of subjugating the animal in the person exhibits tensions that press themselves more

forcefully upon us when we attend to the very declarations of human rights designed

to settle them. From this perspective, human rights are themselves the product of a

29
decision, of a universal declaration to be human and to have rights as humans, and of

the institutional mechanisms (investitures) then put in place and legitimated by such

declarations (Hamacher, 2006). Thus, we may see the declarations of human rights as

having not just a politically progressive dimension, but also a domesticating, sovereign

function. The perspective of lycanthropy contributes to the understanding of this

unexpected sovereign function of humanism under the guise of human rights. It also

calls our attention to the limitations of the humanist approach.

For example, let us consider the following scenario where lycanthropy has been used

to pathologize oppressed minorities. Early twentieth century American physicians

argued, in a pseudo-scientific fashion, about the alleged tendency in African Americans

(both men and women) to suffer from lycanthropy understood here as the excessive

sexual appetite of the werewolf (McWhorther, 2009, p. 155). Perhaps the

consequences of this pathologization are more long lasting, and deeply ingrained, than

one may have thought. One may be tempted to suggest that the legacy of

animalization of a racial minority in terms of lycanthropy could still contribute to the

framing of African Americans as a threat that leads to securitization and, further, to

the justification of police brutality. Claiming human rights in this context, without the

theoretical caution instilled by lycanthropy, may not break entirely free from the

securitizing gesture.

30
But a politics of lycanthropy may help us break with the circularity of the security

dilemma the dilemma that concerned Wendt and Duvall. Lycanthropy can be

affirmed precisely to subvert pathologization and securitization, as when queer black

feminist scholars frame their critique of gender and racial biases in academia through

the figure of the werewolf (Calafell, 2013), and when eco-feminists see werewolf

heroines in literature and film as performing animality in ways that question patriarchy

and a disenchanted understanding of nature (Bourgaut du Coudray, 2003). In addition,

recent exploratory studies on the notion of species identity disorder or species

dysphoria have been undertaken, and the otherkin subculture (a group of people who

identify themselves as part human and part animal) has gained public notoriety (Earls

and Lumire, 2009). Scholars see in this subculture potential for a transpecies identity

that represents: a fluid position that questions categories including concepts of

species and dimorphic concepts of gender (Johnston, 2013).

Thus, beyond left melancholia, lycanthropy speaks of the possibility of shape-shifting,

malleability, contingency and transformation; of drawing on the resources of animality

to reshape the contours of the political and the self in new and unexpected ways,

beyond the securitizing imperatives of both sovereignty and humanism. Critical and

democratic theorists attentive to lycanthropy may find their humanism defeated by it,

but they may also find that lycanthropy also opens possibilities for metamorphosis and

change.

31
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1
I would like to thank Julieta Surez-Cao, Ins Valdez, and two anonymous reviewers for comments,
suggestions and criticisms. Special thanks go to Bonnie Honig for her substantial feedback to several
drafts of this paper. All remaining mistakes are my own.
2
The line quoted by Schmitt belongs to Dublers poem Entschluss [Decision], see Schmitt (1991).
3
The notions of ipseity and autos are discussed and alluded to in several texts by Derrida. However,
substantial treatments of these notions can be found in Derrida (1973), Derrida (2005) and Derrida
(2009).
4
For a discussion of lycology and lycanthropy see Derrida (2005, pp. 69 ff) and Derrida (2009, pp. 100 ff).
5
In Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Schmitt argues that the modern state can learn from the
formal superiority of the Roman Catholic Church. Schmitt writes: But it [the Catholic Church] has the
power to assume this or any other form because it has the power of representation. It represents the
civitas humana. It represents at every moment the historical connection to the incarnation and
crucifixion of Christ. It represents the Person of Christ himself: God become man in historical reality
(1996, p. 19).

37
6
Although it is not quite clear what Santner means by this, it can be inferred that he has in mind a
certain critique of the theologico-political dimension of modern sovereignty; of the excitation of human
life by its entrance in the mythical-legal realm of law described by Benjamin in his famous Critique of
Violence. But why should we see this excitation exclusively or even primarily in terms of the theological
political frame that Santner wants to privilege?
7
I borrow this critique of the notion of vulnerability as the new (mortalist) humanism from Honig
(2010).
8
According to iek, the Derridean/Levinasian postsecular thought generates what he describes as a
postdeconstructionist and indeconstructible form of spirituality based on an always-already withdrawn
and unattainable Otherness (iek, 2000, p. 664).
9
This affinity between Schmitts decisionism and ieks understanding of the act has also been
identified by Erik Vogt, see Vogt, (2006, pp. 1429). In the case of iek the centrality of incarnation is
particularly striking because it goes against a plurality of critical discourses, ranging from mainstream
Marxism to psychoanalysis, that iek otherwise seems to endorse.

38