The question of the animal commands a great deal of attention and interest across science studies and ethics, both in and out of the mode of academic philosophy. This gives editor Cary Wolfe a vast field to romp in, and the open space shows in this compelling, diverse collection of essays. Nearly every piece is in a markedly different idiom-almost a different medium-spanning from literary exegesis to erotic poetry to investigative journalism. Across the styles and subjects, though, core concerns do emerge.

Starting from the classical questions about animals' status that center on their abilities (to reason, say, or to speak, or to deceive), this volume's authors rejoin by proposing the following set of inquiries: How are animals implicated in stories about creativity, obedience, hierarchy, desire, and domination? Can they invite duty and responsibility as partners in ethical relationships? And finally, can we claim this range of powers-to make or erase traces, be languaging subjects, and so on-straightforwardly, after all?

In the long opening essay, Cary Wolfe introduces two figures that will recur throughout the book to differentiate humans from (other) animals: the Hand and the Face, each subtly rendered to represent some essential aspect of humanity. The authors in this volume will treat these criteria for human difference sometimes credulously, often doubtingly. But here, Wolfe himself may be too content to explicate and interrelate his sources, producing an intricate exercise in intertextuality with little in the way of his own voice. Throughout the piece, he invokes a cast of scholarly characters too large for his points about their interconnections to be tracked easily or with a sustained sense of relevance.

Wolfe is at his best when rounding up the scattered musings of Jacques Derrida on the animal from across his works: Derrida is a petulant, passionate, and playful delight, and Wolfe reads him to us with joy and some insight.

Indeed, in the wake of Derrida's death, many will find particular interest in the first print appearance of his lecture at Cerisy, a portion entitled here "And Say the Animal Responded?". Derrida focuses on Lacan, teasing apart what at first seems a passing concern of the Écrits-distinguishing reaction from response-but which is shown to be the ground on which Lacan stakes out his concept of subjecthood. Derrida professes no interest in denying that response and reaction, or even human and animal, are ultimately distinct; his project is to contest the reduction of the former and latter to the same division between subject and nonsubject. While he is persuasive, I am left with the feeling that he could have done a great deal more with his analysis here than to argue a negative case, and one easily granted. (Though this is perhaps more a criticism of where the lecture was broken up for publication than of its original scope.)

Paul Patton's contribution will be of significant interest to political theorists: through inspecting the morality of horsemanship, he specifically engages the question of ethical relations and social forms between parties of unequal status in a well-defined hierarchy. Having himself trained Australian stock horses, Patton posits the training relationship as a form of government (in a broad, Foucauldian sense). Modern, "non-violent" methods are the particular focus of this essay, defined in contrast to the striking, choking, and whipping of classical training practices. A "gentle art" of horse training and related pursuits like dressage and jumping is articulated by Vicki Hearne and by Monty Roberts (made famous as the Horse Whisperer of film). Training towards these stylized activities, on their view, is right because it is miming the natural, finding truth in the beautiful, and ennobling both horse and trainer through mutual trust and responsibility. To Patton, this "aesthetico-moral" defense is misleading, serving "to mask the reality of a relationship that was fundamentally coercive" (86). Citing Nietzsche, he profiles the parallels between this and the corrupt logic of shared values in slave morality. In the final analysis, though, Patton's condemnation is more of the "gentle" rhetoric than of the described activities per se, as he takes good-faith partnerships between animals and trainers to be lived instances of his conclusion that hierarchical relationships are "by no means incompatible" with ethical obligations (95).

Though others do so obliquely, Ursula Heise takes on the boundaries around the animal directly by inspecting clones, androids, and computer life. Judith Roof persuasively shows here that Freud manhandled the science of single-celled life in an attempt to massage it into serviceability for psychoanalytic theory, and that he took protista and humans to bookend the animal kingdom definitively enough not to have to discuss other species at all. And Steve Baker's piece on the animal in art is largely memorable for its inclusion of the haunting cover image: a haggard, blank-eyed chimp with human hands, holding a syringe like a cigarette. For his part, Alphonso Lingis contributes a lyrical meditation on multiplicity, rich interdependence, and the meanings of the face in the question of the animal, in prose careening unexpectedly from gorgeous to sophomoric. In a lucid passage, he writes,

The citizens do not lean against, rub against, fondle, smell, palpate one another's bodies, feeling the streams and the cascades and backwaters within; they look upon the blank wall of the faces, the pure surfaces extended over their heads. (178)

Charlie LeDuff takes us back out of the ether and to the greasy, bleak, specific landscape of Smithfield Packing Co. in former Lumbee Indian country of eastern North Carolina-the largest pork processing plant in the world, with a dizzying turnover of both hogs and workers. LeDuff went on assignment to Smithfield for a New York Times series on race in America, working the floor himself during the course of his reporting. His piece is a scathing look at the desperate conditions at the plant, facilitated by rigorous racial division and seething resentment across race lines. Taking division and dehumanization as a motif against a backdrop of animal slaughter is extremely effective, and it is achieved for the most part understatedly, as when "Fernandez would sometimes throw a piece of shoulder at a friend across the conveyor and wave good morning" (188).

Well-placed at the end of the collection, this piece invited for me a conclusion that amplifies suggestions to be found in Derrida and Patton: that the language used to contain animality and that of human social-political relationships can cross-illuminate. In the allegorical configuring of the Face and the Hand so that they may be the locus of animals' lack, I am reminded of the white supremacist fetish for the Blush. 'Adam' is said to mean "blood in the face" by Christian Identity adherents, who put forward the Aryan people as unique in their ability to blush; this indicates their descent from Adam, while Blacks and Jews and others must be of pre-Adamic origin. One might well ask which is more striking in this scheme, the spurious claims about differential blushing ability or the mystical relevance of the criterion?-and armed with such a question, one is less apt to make a similar rhetorical move. This particular volume on "the animal" is at its best when its authors are tuned in to human social meaning.

Moon Duchin, The University of Chicago

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