The teeming and the rare: Displacements of sacrifice and the turn to insect life.

摘要

This is a dissertation on how the differences between human beings and animals have been represented through frameworks of sacrifice and sexuality.;Through readings of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Jacques Derrida's "Rams," my first chapter explores the inadequacy of "sacrifice" as a violent action that may be problematically legitimating. This concept of sacrifice is placed in tension with a different vision, that of an "ethics of response," which, far from negating sacrifice, sustains it as a figuration of the necessity and destructive potential of the encounter with the other.;I next trace a movement away from rapports of domination with animals in a "turn" to insect life. Although insects have been objects of a phobic orientation, I show that a non-phobic insect emerges in nineteenth and early-twentieth century works by Jules Michelet, Maurice Maeterlinck, Jean-Henri Fabre, Andre Gide, and Eugene Marais. Viewed as a thing of intricate beauty, the insect becomes the paradigm of our dissemination into a fabric of infinitesimal differences. Derrida returns to these currents in his writings on sexual difference with their unexpected entomological metaphors. The cuts of the "in-sect" contest the fascination with redemptive violence, including sacrifice, in works by Michelet or Derrida.;My third chapter explores a "zoo-curious gender discourse" that produces two imaginary shifts. On one hand, a recognition that differences, including sexual differences, cannot be regarded as the property of humans alone, as has been assumed by critics who valorize human differences while relegating animality to a zone of repetition without change. Secondly, the eroticized insect imaginary I describe reorganizes binary sexual difference into an operation that produces differences, including the multiple forms of homosexuality opened up in Gide's Corydon. .;Finally, I argue that theoretical concepts of Difference depend upon a notion of "the same," for example, in theories that link humankind to an inexorable differentiation while failing to explore evidence of authentic differences among animals. I study the ivory-billed woodpecker, an extinct bird whose tragic rarity has elicited the exuberance and the contradictions that, I believe, characterize our investment in exaggerated Differences and in the sacrifices that give them flight.