“An art of both caring and locking up”: Biopolitical

Thresholds in the Zoological Garden

Matthew Chrulew

SubStance, Volume 43, Number 2, 2014 (Issue 134), pp. 124-147 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2014.0015

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“An art of both caring and locking up”:

Biopolitical Thresholds
in the Zoological Garden
Matthew Chrulew

In the final sessions of the first year of his seminar on The Beast &
the Sovereign, Jacques Derrida takes up the question of modernity as the
epoch of biopolitics. In a remarkable close reading, he critiques Michel
Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the threshold of biopo-
litical modernity, both in terms of conceptual content and, especially in
the latter’s case, style. He takes as a prominent example the revolutionary
transformation from princely menagerie to public zoological garden, as
well as Carl Hagenbeck’s subsequent “revolution” in zoo design, which
inaugurate, he suggests, not a new biopolitical apparatus of power/
knowledge, but only a different form of the same fundamental structure
of sovereign power over the objectified beast. The stakes of Derrida’s ar-
gument are as significant as its history is burdened. It returns to elements
of the longstanding polemic between Foucault and Derrida over madness
and history, complicated here by Derrida’s reproach of Agamben’s own,
more recent cruel admiration of Foucault. It engages with the question
of historical thresholds, regarding both the development of biopower
and the history of the menagerie. If we read the Eleventh Session on zoo-
logical gardens together with the Twelfth on biopolitical thresholds, their
implications for contemporary thinking about human-animal relations
become clearer. I will suggest, contra Derrida, that the modern history of
zoological gardens does indeed cross important thresholds of biopoliti-
cal novelty. While he is no doubt right to insist on the persistence of a
human sovereignty that reigns over beasts, his argumentation obscures
the emergence, specificity and significance of biopolitical care. Being able
to understand and critique contemporary relations of power between
humans and animals requires genealogical attention to the particularity
of this dispositif.
Derrida’s lectures on the beast and the sovereign are erudite and
provocative, if incessantly recursive. As he explains in the summary
provided for the Ecole’s yearbook, his aim was:

© Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2014

124 SubStance #134, Vol. 43, no. 2, 2014
Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoo 125

to study sovereignty, the political and ontotheological history of its

concept and its figures. This year we deliberately privileged what
intertwined this history with that of a thinking of the living being (the
biological and the zoological), and more precisely with the treatment
of so-called animal life in all its registers (hunting and domestication,
political history of zoological parks and gardens, breeding, industrial
and experimental exploitation of the living animal, figures of bestiality
and bêtise, etc.). The point was not merely to study, from Aristotle to
contemporary discussions (Foucault, Agamben), the canonical texts
around the interpretation of man as a “political animal.” We had above
all to explore the “logics” organizing both the submission of the beast
(and the living being) to political sovereignty, and an irresistible and
overloaded analogy between a beast and a sovereign (B&S I xiii).

Derrida explores the “logics” of this relationship between beast and sov-
ereign—in which they both oppose one another and overlap, are posed
in hierarchy and analogy—in the genres of fable, philosophy and poetry
before turning to the more material register of the zoological garden and
the question of biopolitics.
The implications of this treatment for contemporary discussion of
the question of animal should be clear: it concerns no less than the place
of the living and the animal within Western political thought. Most promi-
nently in The Animal That Therefore I Am but also in these more recently
published seminars, Derrida seeks to deconstruct human exceptionalism
and the Cartesian legacy in Western philosophy and culture, and thereby
offers fruitful resources for thinking through the animal question, and
our ethical responsibility to nonhuman others, which have been taken
up in stimulating ways (Wolfe, Lawlor). Yet there are limits and potential
pitfalls to Derrida’s approach, particularly regarding its capacity to attend
to the historically specific subjection of animal bodies to power. Donna
Haraway (19-23) has questioned Derrida’s empirical and hospitable inter-
est in knowing about the actual animals he lives with and writes about,
while Dominique Lestel has pinpointed his lack of sustained attention to
ethology and sciences of animal behavior, modes of knowledge outside
of his disciplinary focus on a certain textual tradition (Chrulew, “The
Animal Outside the Text”). Nicole Shukin has argued that “thinking the
animal as specter” as Derrida does “risks depoliticizing [his] argument
... for animals as mortal creatures vulnerable to the capitalizing machin-
ery of the past two centuries” (37). It is likewise important to ask how
well his analysis of the beast and the sovereign adequately captures the
specificities of contemporary human-animal relations of power and care.
It is from the Tenth to the penultimate Twelfth Sessions of The Beast
& the Sovereign I that Derrida engages most directly with Foucault and
Agamben on biopolitics, as well as with the history of the zoo. Following
closely a particular article by Henri Ellenberger comparing “The Mental

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126 Matthew Chrulew

Hospital and the Zoological Garden,” which itself closely follows Gustave
Loisel’s famous three-volume history of menageries from 1912, Derrida
juxtaposes two events in the history of zoos, pre- and post-revolutionary
events that he inscribes as “indices” or “signals” with the dates of 1681
and 1792. Derrida quotes a text describing a scene at Louis XIV’s Versailles
menagerie where the Sun King himself had witnessed the dissection of
an enormous elephant. In this remarkable event, the sovereign and the
beast that Derrida had heretofore been tracing in so many literary and
philosophical figures face one another in a truly impressive and disturb-
ingly corporeal occasion of the production of scientific knowledge. Der-
rida writes:
You can picture that “ceremony”: a very large animal, an elephant, and
a very great sovereign, the beast and the sovereign were there together,
in 1681, in the same room, for the same anatomy lesson, the one alive
and the other dead, the living observing the dead, in the space and time
of a “ceremony” that was a dissection, i.e. an operation of knowledge,
a violence on the dead to see and to know. (B&S I 251)
After lengthy discussions in the preceding sessions of so many textual
pairings and intersections of beasts and sovereigns—in the fables of La
Fontaine, in the politics, philosophy, and psychology of Hobbes, Machia-
velli, Rousseau, Freud, Heidegger and Deleuze, in the novels and poems
of Valéry, Celan and Lawrence—the sovereign and the beast are here once
more paired, but this time in a rather visceral and morbid historical event.
Derrida’s first event, then, is this dissection of an elephant under
the gaze of the sovereign king. His second event is the reconstitution of
the menagerie after the French Revolution in the transfer of animals from
Versailles to the Paris Jardin du Roi, subsequently renamed the Jardin des
Plantes (a zoo with which Derrida admits he “nevertheless remain[s] en-
amored” [275]). This transition “from sumptuary beasts to useful beasts”
(283) established the menagerie as a public institution of science, educa-
tion and entertainment, a model that went on to be emulated throughout
Europe in the nineteenth century and shaped the zoological gardens we
know today (see Loisel; Baratay and Hardouin-Fugier). As the famous
story goes, the menagerie (which had declined in the eighteenth century)
was condemned by the revolutionaries as an icon of royal extravagance.
Diderot’s Encyclopédie entry proclaimed: “Menageries must be destroyed
when the people lack bread; it would be shameful to feed animals at great
expense when around you men are dying of hunger.” As Loisel (158-65)
tells it, the Jacobins marched on the menagerie to demand the animals’
freedom but, after some wise words from the attendant, reconsidered
their position in the case of the most dangerous beasts. Some animals
were taken to be skinned or eaten while others were released or escaped
into the woods to either perish or acclimatize. Those that remained were

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Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoo 127

eventually transported to Paris where a new menagerie was formed with

an explicitly civic and scientific purpose. As Ellenberger (64-66) recounts,
and Derrida (B&S I 282) recites, the Society for Natural History produced
a report, which included among its authors the celebrated alienist Philippe
Pinel, outlining the new role such an animal collection could play in the
republic.
These two moments in zoo history are placed together by Derrida in a
fashion that seems to ape Foucault’s signature style of juxtaposition—that
with which, for example, he opened Discipline and Punish by contrasting
the violent torture of Damiens the regicide with the gentle punitive reform
that replaced such spectacular punishment, or the two events in History
of Madness that “signal” the historical change in the treatment of the mad
“with singular clarity: in 1657, the founding of the Hôpital Général, and
the Great Confinement of the poor; and in 1794, the liberation of the mad
in chains [by Pinel] at Bicêtre” (xxxiii). Derrida’s dates are very close to the
latter pair, which mark the borders of Foucault’s Classical Age. (Indeed the
Versailles menagerie was founded not long after the Salpêtrière Hôpital
Général, and designed by the same architect, Louis Le Vau; it received
its first animals in 1664. On the culture of the Versailles menagerie, see
Senior; Sahlins.) Yet Derrida’s historical re-envisioning of these thresholds
differs significantly from those performed in Foucault’s archaeologies and
genealogies. Undermining the discontinuity suggested by his contrast of
the ceremony of elephant dissection and the post-revolutionary reform,
Derrida goes on to argue that these events, though they might on the
face of it seem incommensurable, in fact share a fundamental continuity.
Through a discussion of the thematic of “the king’s two bodies” developed
by Ernst Kantorowicz, Marc Bloch and Louis Marin, Derrida suggests that
this seeming revolution in the structure of the zoo (along with important
reforms that followed) is in fact simply a reconfiguration of the pairing
of the sovereign and the beast, what he calls, following Marin, “the trap
of the transfer of sovereignty of the monarch to that of the nation or the
people” (B&S I 290). The new zoo does not deconstruct the sovereignty
of the old menagerie; it is constructed not in the name of the freedom of
the animals but once more in that of human sovereignty and its scientific
knowledge of objectified zoological specimens.
The nature of this science is of great philosophical (if not necessar-
ily historical) interest to Derrida. Asking about the nature of the autopsy
as a theatrical procedure of knowledge that demands the objectification
of the living through attention to their dead bodies—he indicates that
the very room in which he is speaking was itself a theater for natural
history—Derrida remarks, in what is distinctly yet only implicitly Fou-
cauldian language, on “the suspicion, that the order of knowledge is never

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128 Matthew Chrulew

a stranger to that of power” (279). He continues: “It is not original but it

is not false, no doubt, to recall that the scene of knowledge ... supposes
... that one has taken power over the object of knowledge” (279). Derrida
is careful to give priority to those philosophers he takes to be Foucault’s
prime, if unacknowledged precursors in theorizing power/knowledge;
thus he names Husserl and especially Heidegger as the thinkers who
have outlined “the immense question of the ontological determination
of the entity as ob-ject” (279). Yet at the same time, his description of the
sovereign gaze in this combative, institutional, phenomenal scene evokes
Foucault’s own analysis, in The Birth of the Clinic, of the connection between
seeing and knowing. Foucault wished foremost to historicize the chang-
ing structure of medical perception and its concrete a priori, to articulate
and analyse the reorganization of the visible and the expressible in the
knowledge of life, disease and death. Derrida, through his elucidation of
the connections between pouvoir and savoir (as well as other connected
verbs in a list that includes vouloir [wanting], avoir [having] and voir [see-
ing]), seeks rather to downplay the appearance of a revolutionary change
in zoological organization between 1681 and 1792:
the structure of this setup of knowing-power, power-to-know, knowing-
how-to-see, and sovereign being-able-to-see is not, fundamentally,
revolutionized by the French Revolution. It is not interrupted ... One
has simply changed sovereigns. The sovereignty of the people or of
the nation merely inaugurates a new form of the same fundamental
structure. (282)
This “fundamental structure” is, he argues, the dissymetrical configura-
tion of political and scientific mastery over the animal as an object of
knowledge for human sovereignty, whether it be that of the king or the
people, the artist or the scientist.
While he is not yet explicit about it—it will be broached, though not
directly in relation to the zoo, in the following, Twelfth Session—one of
Derrida’s concerns in this passage appears to be to undermine Foucault’s
distinction between sovereignty and modern biopower, insofar as it might
be reflected in the history of the zoo. As Foucault articulated it in various
lectures and texts throughout the 1970s, sovereign power is that which
wields the death penalty, which takes as its right to kill and is content to
allow its subjects to live, while biopower is that which actively invests
in life itself and, while it cannot but allow death, takes as its core task to
nurture life and make it flourish. The viability of this distinction has of
course been central to recent prominent debates involving such thinkers
as Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito over the nature of
biopower, its relationship to sovereignty, its constitutive exclusions and
side-effects, and also where, when, and how one ought to figure what
Foucault called, in his influential final chapter of The Will to Knowledge, “a

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Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoo 129

society’s ‘threshold of biological modernity’” (143, translation modified;

see further Chrulew, “Animals in Biopolitical Theory”).
Derrida targets Foucault’s and Agamben’s claims to identify these
historical thresholds, questioning with what reason or authority one might
declare their existence, and ultimately how such thresholds themselves
ought to be conceptualized. He had in fact already broached this question
in the Third Session, where he allowed himself to chastise with unusual
vehemence Agamben’s pronouncements on novel events in thought and
history—statements that indicate Agamben’s own claim to priority or,
indeed, authorial sovereignty, his desire to be the first to say who was
first. Yet for all the merit in Derrida’s criticism of Agamben’s eagerness to
decide, is there not an opposite risk in his own unwillingness to decide upon
all such novel historical thresholds and events, which he unremittingly
problematizes whenever he comes across them in Foucault and others,
and refuses to assent to insofar as they are not “rigorously defined” (B&S
I 94) or indeed, insofar as they appear to demarcate new eras, epistemes,
or forms of power at all?
This becomes more explicit in the Twelfth Session, when Derrida
broaches the problematic of biopolitics directly. There, he questions what
he takes as the desire of Foucault and Agamben to pose a sharp threshold
in which biopower replaces sovereign power in modernity (despite the
fact that, as the latter at least recognizes, it is as old as politics itself). For
Derrida, Foucault’s thesis on biopolitical modernity is a naive and unjus-
tifiably decisive claim that assumes an untenable expertise to pronounce
upon discontinuities. Even more problematic, for Derrida, is Agamben’s
distinction of bios from zōē, and that of modernity from its ancient sources,
distinctions that are never so clear or secure as Derrida (somewhat mis-
takenly) believes the Italian philosopher would like. Derrida argues that
Agamben wants it both ways, “taking the Foucauldian idea of a specifically
modern biopolitics seriously” while at the same time being “keen to recall
that it is as ancient as can be, immemorial and archaic” (316-7). Thus, for
Agamben, in modern biopolitics the immemorial division and articulation
of natural life and political life become irreducibly indistinct, in a perpetual
state of exception approaching the norm. Derrida also takes issue with
the clarity of this threshold of indistinction, which Agamben describes as
the “decisive event of modernity”—a “foundational event” and a “radical
transformation” (Homo Sacer 4, emphasis removed). As Agamben “clearly
recognizes,” Derrida argues, “biopolitics is an arch-ancient thing (even if
today it has new means and structures)” (B&S I 330). This critique of the
idea of the biopolitical threshold, this attempt to “rethink the very figure
of the threshold” (333), Derrida argues, “compel[s] us ... to reconsider,
precisely, a way of thinking history, of doing history” (332).

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130 Matthew Chrulew

This question of how history ought to be thought and done is of

course central to the polemic waged between Derrida and Foucault in
the 1960s and after. The presence of such questions at the forefront of
Derrida’s reflections, along with other parallels, seems to justify pairing
the Eleventh Session (on the zoo) with the Twelfth (on biopower). While
during his discussion of the zoological garden and the mental hospital
Derrida at no point mentions Foucault or biopolitics, it is clear that one
of the targets of his argument is his former teacher who, he later recalls,
in the 1950s took some students including Derrida on a visit to Sainte-
Anne Hospital where they witnessed his dual-sided “examinations” in
psychopathology, “fascinating, terrifying, and unforgettable moments”
(311). The exploration of the interweaving of knowledge and power, the
focus on dissection and the medical gaze, and the prominence of the par-
allel of the menagerie with the insane asylum, particularly the question
of their historical thresholds—all of these elements clearly bear on the
Derrida/Foucault controversy.
This notorious exchange does not require extensive summary. Its
public archive begins with Derrida’s critique of Foucault’s history of
madness in his lecture on the “Cogito,” to which Foucault eventually
responded in 1972 (Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness”;
Foucault, “My Body, This Paper, This Fire”; “Reply to Derrida”). An often
indirect dialogue between the two thinkers continued throughout their
lives—from their varying readings of Greek philosophy to their differing
uses and critiques of psychoanalysis (see, for example, Miller; LaCapra
123-68)—and indeed continued after the death of Foucault in Derrida’s
unpublished 1986 lecture “Beyond the Power Principle” and the fuller
engagement “‘To Do Justice to Freud.’” David Boothroyd argues that
Derrida’s return to Foucault’s work in this lecture from 1991 should be read
as “an ‘act’ of hospitality—at once a personal gesture of remembrance of an
old friendship toward Foucault and a critical encounter with his work” (20).
But if, as Boothroyd puts it, this was a welcome staged chez Freud, at a hotel
or hospital (if not a couch) that is the home of psychoanalysis, and while
we might with equal effect stage a mutually challenging and illuminating
rendezvous chez Augustine, at a church or indeed in a confessional booth,
it is entirely appropriate and productive that in this seminar, following
his interest in questions of animal life, Derrida moves the terrain of their
encounter from the asylum and enjoys an afternoon at the zoo. Derrida’s
engagement with Foucault in The Beast & the Sovereign—both his walk
with Foucault as silent partner through the zoological gardens, and his
ensuing direct engagement with Foucault on the question of biopower—is
again a hospitable act, albeit a conflicted one. He defends Foucault from
what he sees as Agamben’s hypocritical esteem, the latter’s boast being

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Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoo 131

to reconsider, to correct and to complete Foucault’s analysis of biopower.

Derrida exclaims in an aside at one point: “poor Foucault! He never had
such a cruel admirer” (B&S I 330)—yet if anyone could have claimed
this title, it would have been Derrida himself, at least in 1963. And here,
almost forty years later, he again does not hesitate to deny the viability
and value of Foucault’s historical analyses—this time his distinction of
sovereignty and biopower.
Indeed Derrida’s deconstruction of Foucault’s threshold of
biopolitical modernity in The Beast & the Sovereign bears significant
similarities to his earlier engagements on the question of history and
historicity. In each of these encounters, Derrida sought to problematize the
position from which Foucault was able to perform his own historicizations
and problematizations, and indeed the coherence and stability of these
historicizations themselves. This was indeed the problem that structurally
obsessed Foucault’s historical research:
How to proceed, according to what logic, to inscribe or to situate within
an historical ensemble, episteme, configuration or epoch (it matters little
for the moment), the very thought which permits the interrogation of
this ensemble as an ensemble, and to put to it pertinent questions, and
to interrogate it as to its pertinent traits? (Derrida, “Beyond the Power
Principle” 5)

Yet the basis of this thought and interrogation was, for Derrida, unstable.
Did not his history of madness participate in the “hyperbolical” and “mad
audacity” of classical reason? (“Cogito and the History of Madness” 67).
Did not psychoanalysis prepare the ground from which Foucault was able
to critique psychiatry? And are not any periods or configurations that one
might want to delimit—ages, epochs, epistemes, dispositives, and their
thresholds—themselves deconstructible, haunted by a nondelimitable
excess or outside? As Derrida puts it,
The self-identity of its age [that is, the age of “the ‘we’ from out of which
the signatory of these lines, the author of The History of Madness and
The Order of Things, speaks, writes, and thinks”], or of any age, appears
as divided, and thus problematic, problematizable … as the age of mad-
ness or an age of psychoanalysis—as well as, in fact, all the historical
or archeological categories that promise us the determinable stability
of a configurable whole. (“‘To Do Justice to Freud’” 109)

Any historical configuration or threshold, for Derrida, is subject to disorder

and disturbance, to a difference from itself that problematizes the doing
and thinking of history but that also serves as the principle of historical
differentiation and eventality. This is no less so in the transformations of
zoological gardens which, despite the removal of bars and improvement
of treatment, nonetheless do not cease to sovereignly enclose and limit
animal freedom.

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132 Matthew Chrulew

Derrida is judicious in choosing Ellenberger’s essay as his primary

source and, perhaps, his proxy. This Swiss-Canadian practitioner and
historian of psychiatry was a prominent figure in the dynamic psychiatry
and existential psychology movements, which insisted, against a reduc-
tively medicalizing psychiatric therapy, on accounting for the inner world
experience of the patient (“A Clinical Introduction”; The Discovery of the
Unconscious). Not only does he emphasize the parallel between the asy-
lum and the menagerie, between the great confinement of social outsid-
ers which became the moralizing science of the mad, and the royal and
imperial confinement of animals which became the salvific science of the
wild. Ellenberger also draws heavily on the work of Ludwig Binswanger,
whose existential analysis combined psychoanalysis and phenomenology
to render intelligible the subjective experience of psychiatric patients. It
was Biswanger’s Daseinsanalyse that Foucault engaged with in his earli-
est work on Mental Illness and Psychology, before abandoning it for the
more Nietzschean approach of History of Madness. And via Binswanger,
Ellenberger also opens this analysis of the zoo and mental hospital (as a
stage for the encounter of Derrida and Foucault) to other important figures
and concepts: first, to the theoretical biology of Jakob von Uexküll and
its exploration of the subjective Umwelten of animals, and second, to the
philosophy of Martin Heidegger, who himself drew on von Uexküll in
his ontology of the poverty of nonhuman life, which Derrida repeatedly
deconstructs, and whose work Derrida never fails to reproach Foucault
for failing to adequately engage with or cite.
Derrida, of course, takes his distance from Ellenberger’s hypoth-
esis. Foucault had emphasized the shifting overlap of the perception of
animality with the seventeenth-century’s confinement and spectacular
display of the mad (History of Madness 145-159), and there are numerous
other correspondences in the history of the menagerie and the asylum.
Focusing on the ameliorations at the end of the Classical Age, at the time
of the rise of scientific psychology and positive biological knowledge, El-
lenberger writes that “there was a certain parallelism between the reform
of zoological gardens and that of psychiatric institutions. The creation of
the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes, ancestor of modern zoos, occurred
simultaneously with reform of ‘madhouses.’ One should therefore not be
surprised to see the name Pinel associated with both these movements”
(“The Mental Hospital and the Zoological Garden” 71). He had in similar
earlier work ventured some observations on this parallelism, identifying
resemblances between the behavioral responses of animals to the trauma
of captivity—most recognizably, stereotyped pacing along the edge of an
enclosure, but also nestling, emotional deterioration, and the effects of
social competition—and those of patients in mental hospitals, all while
seeking to avoid both anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. “There are,”

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Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoo 133

he wrote, “psycho-biological manifestations in higher animals which it

has in common with man; a close critical study of these manifestations
may help us to see more clearly certain phenomena in the normal and
the sick human mind” (“Zoological Garden and Mental Hospital” 138).
Ellenberger was interested in the iatrogenic effects of institutionalization
as exogenous factors to disease—a question not unrelated to Foucault’s
own investigations into the price paid for truth, health and salvation. But
Ellenberger did not quite share Foucault’s suspicion of psychological re-
form, and nor thus did he leave adequate room for a zoopolitical critique
of the “progress” of zoos in managing captive animals, whether on the
basis of the persistence of sovereign power (as Derrida would have it) or
the development of biopower (in a more Foucauldian vein).
Our question here is whether, on the basis of his reading of Ellen-
berger’s essay, as well as his foregoing literary, political and philosophi-
cal explorations of the structure of the sovereign-beast pairing, and his
subsequent deconstruction of the biopolitical threshold of modernity,
Derrida is justified in claiming that the passage from the menagerie to
the modern zoological garden “merely inaugurates a new form of the
same fundamental structure” (B&S I 282). My contention is that, on the
contrary, his insistence on the continuity of sovereignty defined against
and through the beast obscures important elements of the novelty of the
zoological biopolitics developed in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century
zoo through which new ways of governing animals emerge—different
forms of power that seek to nurture life through its own biological capaci-
ties and drives. In particular, Derrida’s focus on the objectifying power
seeing-to-know the dead beast reflects a repressive model of power, un-
able to recognize the experiential specificity of animal life and the way
in which it is known and invested in modern biopower.
In developing this argument, it will aid us to once more invoke
Foucault’s incitement to look beyond the formal system of philosophy to
the domains of discursive practice. For Derrida, Foucault did not pay the
attention to Heidegger and the philosophical tradition that his sense of
propriety demanded, and thus Foucault’s historicist analysis of biopolitics
betrays a naivety, or worse an effacement, when it comes to conceptual-
izing the technological care of the living. But might we not reverse the
equation and ask, following Foucault, whether for his part Derrida pays
enough attention here to the discursive and practical domain where
knowledge is produced and power is exercised over human and nonhu-
man subjects? In History of Madness, Foucault wrote that the signs of the
taming of unreason “don’t all come from a philosophical experience of
knowledge. What we need to address is a wide cultural surface. This is
signalled quite precisely by a series of dates, and with them an ensemble of
institutions” (47). And in his response a decade later to Derrida’s critique,

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134 Matthew Chrulew

Foucault took particular issue with the closed textuality of his “reduction
of discursive practices to textual traces” (“My Body, This Paper, This Fire”
573), a philosophical discourse which, Foucault argued, was blind to the
events with which it engaged, as also to other domains, archives and
dispositives of knowledge and power beyond the incestuous tradition
of scholarship Derrida repeated and deconstructed. In another response
originally published in Japanese, Foucault wrote that, “For me, the most
essential part of the work was in the analysis of these events, these bodies
of knowledge, and those systematic forms that link discourses, institu-
tions and practices, and these are all things about which Derrida has not
a word to say in his text” (“Reply to Derrida” 578).
Foucault makes similar methodological declarations throughout his
work. In his 1978 Collège de France lectures, he mused: “Of course, it’s
up to me, and those who are working in the same direction, to know on
what fields of real forces we need to get our bearings in order to make a
tactically effective analysis” (Security, Territory, Population 3). And in his
brief discussion of method at the start of the following year’s lectures on
economy and governmentality, he said that:
choosing to talk about or to start from governmental practice is obvi-
ously and explicitly a way of not taking as a primary, original, and
already given object, notions such as the sovereign, sovereignty, the
people, subjects, the state, and civil society, that is to say, all those
universals employed by sociological analysis, historical analysis, and
political philosophy in order to account for real governmental practice.
For my part, I would like to do exactly the opposite and, starting from
this practice as it is given, but at the same time as it reflects on itself
and is rationalized, show how certain things … were actually able to
be formed … In other words, instead of deducing concrete phenomena
from universals, or instead of starting with universals as an obligatory
grid of intelligibility for certain concrete practices, I would like to start
with these concrete practices and, as it were, pass these universals
through the grid of these practices. (The Birth of Biopolitics 2-3)
As his teacher Georges Canguilhem wrote, “Only contact with recent sci-
ence can give the historian a sense of historical rupture and continuity”
(31). Despite Derrida’s insistence on the necessary, if partial, externality of
his philosophical analysis to such discursive practices, our assessment of it
can only benefit from attending in more detail to the history of zoo biology.
Derrida is captivated by the scene of the elephant dissection and,
as with other aspects of these lectures, prefigures it a number of times
as a prelude to his eventual discussion (B&S I 251, 259, 273-5). When it
does take center stage, he returns to it often, with obvious fascination. He
emphasizes its “ceremonial” and “imposing” character (288) with the en-
trance of the Sun King in all his splendor, as well as the phenomenality of
this “elephenomenelephant” (282), and the significance in the production
of knowledge of the “autopsic” exposure, dissection and analysis of the

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flesh of a once-living being. At one point, in an extraordinary page-long,

single-sentence parenthesis (284-5), he begs his listeners to imagine the
scene, to represent to themselves “the enormous, heavy, poor beast, dead
or killed I know not how, dragged in from I know not where on its side or
its back into a luxurious room, a beast no doubt bloody, among doctors,
surgeons, or other armed butchers, impatient to show what they could
do but just as impatient to see and give to be seen what they were going
to see, trembling with lust for autopsy” (284). He indicates the theatrical
and spectacular nature of the dissection and of its role in sovereign history
and power that are themselves only produced through the performative
bluff of such ceremonies. For Derrida, this scene and what it offers to the
imagination encapsulates the conjunction of knowledge and power, hav-
ing and seeing, characteristic of the sovereign-beast pairing that remains,
despite latter reorganizations, at the center of the zoological garden.
Is there more to the story of the elephant? The tale itself has an in-
triguing provenance. Derrida quotes from Ellenberger who, he notes, is
quoting Loisel; yet the story is not Loisel’s own but is quoted, rather, from
the 1733 Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences (Fontenelle). Increasingly
central to the scientific pursuits of the Paris Academy in the last third of
the seventeenth century was the practice of animal dissection, fostered
particularly by the architect and physician Claude Perrault (Baratay and
Hardouin-Fugier 66-9). Perrault (1613-1688) was a prominent Academician
who took great interest in the scientific opportunities for understanding
exotic species offered by the menagerie (or more particularly, its supply
of animal corpses); he led a team that performed over a hundred dis-
sections and produced significant work in experimental science, and is
said to have died from a disease contracted when opening up the body
of a camel. (He was also the brother of Charles Perrault, the author of
popular fairy tales about whom Louis Marin, Derrida’s primary source
on the question of the fable, wrote repeatedly—a detail that would no
doubt have interested Derrida here, given the fabular thematics of his
seminar.) The dissection itself was carried out by Monsieur du Verney
who, being invisible to the King who asked about him upon his entrance,
“immediately arose from the flanks of the animal, where he had been, so
to speak, engulfed” (Fontenelle 323). Perrault, who had already in 1671
and 1676 published two “elephant folio” size volumes of natural history
resulting from his dissections, was present to direct and describe the
autopsy, although his report only appeared posthumously in the belated
third volume of his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux (on
these volumes, see Guerrini). The lengthy “Anatomical Description of an
Elephant”—the “most complete” (Perrault iv) such account offered in his
Mémoires—contained, in keeping with Perrault’s emphasis on expert ob-
servation and description over generalization and classification, extensive

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precise physical descriptions and measurements of the elephant’s body

parts, its limbs and organs, its bending knees, singularly formed feet,
large ears, wrinkly skin, adroit trunk, thick membranes, heavy entrails,
its bones, muscles and tendons (91-156). Perrault compared its features
to those of man and other animals, and compared the new knowledge
produced through the dissection to that of the ancients and other preced-
ing naturalists, correcting or confirming the writings of the likes of Galen,
Pliny and of course Aristotle, whose own work had been supported by
Alexander’s menagerie, as that of the Academy was by the Sun King’s. It
is, then, the account in the Histoire of this “most famous” and “memorable
dissection” that is repeated by Loisel, Ellenberger, and Derrida (among
others): “Never perhaps was there a more imposing [éclatante] anatomical
dissection, judged by the enormity of the animal, by the precision with
which its several parts were examined, or by the quality and number of
assistants” (Fontenelle 322, quoted in Loisel 298, quoted in Ellenberger
64, quoted in Derrida 250, 274, 280-1) 1
Yet though this autopsy is prominent in his chapter on the role of
menageries in descriptive zoology and comparative anatomy, Loisel does
not only recount the death and dissection of this elephant, but also its
life at the menagerie. In his earlier chapter on the royal menagerie in the
time of Louis XIV, there is a whole section devoted to this elephant’s story
(“Histoire d’un éléphant,” Loisel 115-8), full of lively and often humor-
ous anecdotes, which we can profitably read as an animal biography of
sorts.2 Loisel paraphrases much of it from an interesting set of anecdotes
sourced by Perrault from the animal’s keepers at the Versailles menagerie
and intriguingly nestled “word for word” but without comment among
his extensive and exacting descriptions of its anatomy (Perrault 518-9).
The unnamed African elephant was a gift to Louis XIV by the King of
Portugal, and lived in the menagerie for thirteen years before its eventual
death in January 1681. It was believed to be male, and only identified
as female in that post-mortem autopsy. The rare animal was the most
popular in the menagerie; visitors would come to draw and measure it,
“to study its habits” and investigate its intelligence (Loisel 116).3 It was
usually very docile, taking what was offered, even from children, and able
to use its trunk to untie the ropes that held it, and even to undo multiple
knots. And then,
One night, after being thus freed from its strap, it broke the door of its
lodgings so skilfully that its keeper, who slept nearby, was at no point
awakened; it went into several courtyards of the menagerie, knocking
over that which opposed its passage, and went to visit the other animals;
these, frightened of its enormous figure, unknown to them, ran away
into the most remote places of the park of Versailles. Yet it was a timid
animal, that had a particularly great fear of swine. (116)

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It required large amounts of food: “80 pounds of bread, 12 pints of wine

and two buckets of pottage” (116), as well as being fed by the public,
and eating grass on its walks through the park when weather permitted.
During winter, a fire was stoked in its draught-proof lodgings, while in
summer, its chapped skin was covered with dust to keep insects out of
the cracks. It liked to play with sheaths of wheat, and used straw to shoo
away irritating flies.
Its relationship to the viewing public was, like many zoo animals,
not always peaceful: “the public teased the elephant too often and the
beast sometimes took its revenge in a cruel way. It seemed to discern
the mockery and occasionally remembered. One day, to a man who had
already tricked it, pretending to throw something into its mouth, it gave
a blow with its trunk that knocked him down and broke two ribs; then
it trampled him underfoot, broke his leg, and, kneeling down, it tried
to pierce his belly with its tusks which fortunately only went into the
ground.” (117) Another man it crushed against a wall, while:
still for the same reason, it took revenge on a painter in a less cruel,
but more humorous way. This painter wanted to draw the elephant in
an extraordinary pose, which required that it have its trunk raised and
mouth open. To make it hold this pose, the painter’s servant threw fruit
at it that it took in its mouth; often the servant pretended to throw them,
the animal prepared to receive them, but it was deceived. The elephant
did not take long to notice that it was not on his own account that the
meddling servant employed this deception; the painter, who it saw was
in charge of him, could alone have given the order: so it was the painter
who suffered the punishment. When the latter was going to enjoy his
work, the elephant pointed its trunk at him, and released a surprising
amount of water that inundated the artist and his work. (117-118)
This incident is a long way from the autopsy, which Derrida describes
at one point as “this scene, this picture immobilized under the eye of a
painter” that nonetheless gives “the striking impression of a hand-to-hand
combat … the aftermath, of a duel” (B&S I 281). Clearly, immobilizing the
elephant under a painter’s eye was not always so easy amidst the hand-
to-trunk agonism of interspecies power struggles.
This was an animal, then, who was known not only in its death,
as a biological or zoological object, but in its life, as an inhabitant of the
menagerie, as a living subject. It was, moreover, an animal with its own
experience of the gardens, particular preferences and antipathies, with
specific relationships to its keepers, the public, and the other animals. It
was able to negotiate layers of intention, was well attuned to human de-
ception, and was capable of concocting its own effective and just response,
whether violent or comical. The story of the elephant does not only reveal
a sovereign power over the beast (supposedly conceived as mechanical
and objectified simply by its captivity); it also reveals the elephant’s life,

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its agency, its liveliness, its angry and playful resistance to captivity and
harassment.
Yet for all its liveliness, the life itself of the elephant was not yet
scientifically grasped and intervened upon through biological and psy-
chological knowledge in the manner of later centuries. After describing
the elephant dissection, Derrida moves on to discuss (and downplay) not
only the transfer of the menagerie to Paris after the French revolution,
but also later reforms in zoo design and practice. Following Ellenberger,
Derrida describes the influence of Carl Hagenbeck, the nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century German animal trader and collector, and designer
of Stellingen zoo near Hamburg, whose famous “system of limits” (B&S
I 298) replaced the bars and railings of traditional cages with the familiar
moats and ditches of modern exhibits. The “Hagenbeck revolution” that
led to larger, open-air enclosures resembling natural habitats was, for
Derrida, part of “a certain ecological progress, the economy of a new
ecology, an ecosystem that was not without a certain improvement in the
living conditions of both animals and the mentally ill” (297). Yet Derrida
is careful to insist that, once again, this is simply a question of the renego-
tiation of the system of enclosure, indeed of limits as such, the creation of
“limits, in absentia, as it were, even more uncrossable than railings but as
invisible as an interiorized and freely consented-to limit, as if these poor
captive and dumb animals had given a consent they never in fact gave to
a violence more sure of itself than ever, to what I’ll call repressive violence
with a liberal, idealist, and spiritualist grimace” (298. While Derrida does
recognize that a certain threshold of interiorization has been crossed, here
again, Hagenbeck’s inventions only modify the autopsic and phenomenal
model of the zoo, without deconstructing it; they indicate not a new form
of productive power, but simply a refashioning of the sovereign, repres-
sive power already and always implicit in the production of the human
over against the animal, the sovereign over against the beast.
In his book on The Birth of the Modern Zoo, Nigel Rothfels tackles
precisely this question of the “disjunctures or discontinuities between
menageries, zoological gardens, and now conservation centers”—disjunc-
tures that are self-interestedly propagated by “the conventional, progres-
sivist, institutional histories of zoological gardens” (25). He traces both
“significantly more continuity than the generally accepted narratives of
the history of zoological collections suggest” but also “generally ignored
discontinuities” (25) in the modern history of the zoo. Rothfels examines
in detail the Hagenbeck revolution, both in terms of the architectural
transformations that followed from Hagenbeck’s innovations in enclosure
design and theatrical display, and in terms of the narratives he deployed
to justify and market the zoo as a paradise and ark for beleaguered ani-

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Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoo 139

mals. Challenging these Hagenbeckian stories with which zoos today still
cloak themselves as salvific institutions (not dissimilar to the celebratory
narratives of psychiatric institutions, such as the legend of Pinel freeing
the chained madmen that Foucault targets) requires more than the sim-
plifying dismissal of all “revolutions” in zoological organization as mere
reconfigurations of sovereign objectification. Rather, we must be able to
recognize the specific nature of zoos’ mutations and the different forms
that power relations take within and outside their walls.
One specific reform, complementary to Hagenbeck’s, implemented
the careful intensification of observation, provision and nurture. More
than the democratization of the civic and bourgeois zoo after the French
revolution, more even than Hagenbeck’s revolution in zoo architecture,
in physiological treatment and in storytelling, the twentieth-century
zoo reforms instigated by Swiss zoo biologist Heini Hediger (1908-
1992) contributed to making the modern zoo an institution capable of
achieving its reproductive and paradisaical goals (see, to begin, Rübel;
Chrulew, “Preventing and Giving Death at the Zoo”). Following Hediger,
twentieth-century zoos devised techniques of care founded on biological
and psychological knowledge that came to understand and intervene
upon animals as living beings, as species, and as populations, in their
health, genetic wellbeing, reproduction, and psychological attunement.
Hediger’s reform of zoological organization through detailed knowledge
of and interventions in the lives of multiple species offers an exemplary
case of the emergence of biopower directed towards nonhuman animals
in which “methods of power and knowledge assumed responsibility for
the life processes and undertook to control and modify them” (Foucault,
The Will to Knowledge 142).
It is worth dwelling on some of its aspects. Hediger’s influential
writings and his work as the director of the Bern, Basel and Zürich
zoological gardens, as well as his institutional interventions at national
parks in Africa and at other zoos in Switzerland, Brazil, India and
Australia, were foundational for the biopolitical reforms underlying
modern welfare-centered zoo keeping. Hediger also contributed to the
fields of animal behavior and psychology. Though he was a colleague and
correspondent of the classical ethologists Karl Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen,
he resisted the reduction of animal behavior to the expression of innate
instincts or environmentally determined characteristics. As a follower of
von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory, and a student of Adolf Portmann, he insisted
instead on the importance of “the relationship between the animal and
its environment” (“A Lifelong Attempt to Understand Animals” 147) and
on the animal’s own world-forming agency. That is, for Hediger, animals
were not Cartesian bête-machines but subjects with their own distinctive
psychological makeup that differed not only according to species but also

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to life history and experience—an understanding of animals that made

a substantial difference to the nature of the power that he wielded over
their lives.
While he certainly thought autopsies were essential for knowing
cause of death and preventing disease in life, a more representative image
of Hediger is that on the back cover of his intellectual biography, showing
him patiently “waiting for the first elephant to be born in Switzerland
(Sahib-Fridolin, on February 16, 1963)” (Rübel). Hediger’s concern,
his knowledge and power, was directed toward living animals. In his
notebooks from his last years as director of Bern wildlife park (likely
also for his lectures at Basel University), amid extensive observations
and information on other species under his care, Hediger took notes
on elephants that contrast instructively with Perrault’s anatomical
observations based on dissection. He included information on their
evolution, on the history of their systematic classification by Linnaeus and
Blumenbach, and on the history of their presence in Europe and America,
such as the 1651 visit of the famous elephant “Hansken” to Zürich. He
made biological observations, with data on heights and weights, body
temperatures in different conditions, and observations on sleep patterns
at different ages, as well as typical forms of behavior to be encouraged or
avoided (such as stampeding, and common dangers at sexual maturity).
He remarked on their intelligence, idiosyncrasy and individuality. He
drew diagrams indicating where captive elephants were likely to become
injured (particularly the feet). He detailed ways of caring for them, bathing
needs, common forms of sickness and disease, the required dimensions
and makeup of enclosures, including pit and corridor type and size,
appropriate vegetation, fixtures, and floor conditions for their safety
and comfort, all based on readings in the scientific literature and his own
observations, as well as those collected from other zoos throughout the
world.
He also performed studies and published reports on the birth of
elephant young (The Psychology and Behaviour 92-3), on breeding them in
captivity, on elephant taming and training (following his experiences at
the Station de Domestication des Eléphants in the Belgian Congo, and
his regular inspections of circuses), and on elephant sleep and grief. Most
crucially, they like all animals were always to him living, resisting subjects
who must be governed not through violence but by using a meticulous
and refined individualizing and interiorizing power. Thus he described
the need:
that elephants should become accustomed to being chained at night in
a definite place in the den and that this should be done while they are
still non-dangerous and relatively simple to handle; the need for this is
closely linked with the problem of making a subsequently dangerous
elephant secure. When possible the chaining-up of them every evening

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should become such a habit that they are disturbed by its omission and
actively look for it. … It is only possible to keep elephants in a state
where they can be handled for any length of time after reaching maturity
by having established the process of chaining-up as part of the daily
routine and not, as formerly, as a method of forcing the animal to be
obedient. (Man and Animal in the Zoo 209)
In the modern zoo, animals are led to nestle into their confinement and
seek their own chains. The reforms of Hagenbeck and Hediger can be seen,
like those of Pinel and Tuke, as participating in a “double movement of
liberation and enslavement” (History of Madness 460) that justified animals’
continued confinement and captivity as in their best interests or those of
their species. To rephrase Foucault on madness, animality was “offered
to knowledge in a structure that was alienating from the very first” (459,
italics removed)—yet one that was obsessively aware of, and determined
to minimize or remove, this institutional alienation, to present the animals
as, indeed to make them be, wild and natural.
The technologies of power that Hediger pioneered were devoted,
through training, enrichment and breeding, to the flourishing of species
that nonetheless remained in captivity. As Ellenberger wrote, “Hediger
thinks that the trauma of captivity is primarily psychic, resulting from
the sudden change in mode of life. ... The animal uprooted from these
systems, as well as from his Umwelt, is completely disoriented” (“The
Mental Hospital and the Zoological Garden” 81). His entire work, in a
sense, consisted in the calculation and modification of animals’ internal
psychological and emotional states, the better to adapt and direct them
in the interests of the zoo, to aid in their adaptation to the enclosure as
their new territory. It is in the writings of Hediger and others that zool-
ogy as a science and practice of care “reflects on itself and is rationalized”
(Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics 3). For example, as Ellenberger points
out in reference to stereotyped behavior like the pacing so iconic of zoo
animals, “Hediger was the first to show that these repetitive movements
were psychopathological reactions to captivity” (“The Mental Hospital
and the Zoological Garden” 89). Monica Meyer-Holzapfel followed him in
making systematic studies of captive animals’ behavioral abnormalities:
abnormal escape reactions, refusal of food, aggressiveness, stereotyped
motor reactions, displacement and other compensation reactions, self-
mutilation, abnormal sexual behavior, perversion of appetite, apathy,
abnormal mother-infant relations, and prolonged infantile behavior and
regression. They were able to diagnose such abnormal behaviors, and thus
to modify the conditions of captivity so as to minimize them, through
psychological attention to each zoo animal’s world and state of mind,
their Umwelt and experience—not through dissection and objectification
but rather through attention to their life and subjection. Rather than the
violent reduction of animals to beast-machines or bare life, the zoo under

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Hediger’s care is a regime of productive power relations; its targets are

approached as responsive subjects, and are made to live what the zoo sees
as “happy” and “healthy” lives. In Hediger’s biological modernization
of zoological gardens we witness the emergence of a distinctive mode of
power, an intimate, professional biopolitical care.
Although Derrida’s primary source Ellenberger repeatedly cites
Hediger, singling him out as the pioneer of animal psychology, Derrida
pays no attention to this significant modern biopolitician. His focus only
on repressive objectification, and his insistence on problematizing all limits
and thresholds, blinds his account to the productivity and novelty of the
biopower that today encloses zoo animals under the pretext of sheltered
contentment and conservationist rescue. Indeed, his deconstruction of
the notion of freedom—such that not only “all zoological gardens and
psychiatric hospitals” but also “every house, every habitat (be it familial,
urban, or national), every place of economy and ecology also presupposes
thresholds, limits, and therefore keys” (B&S I 310)—aligns uncomfortably
closely with Hediger’s own infamous apology for captivity, in which he
pointed out that the lives of supposedly “wild” and “free” animals were
equally subjected to territorial limits, space and time patterns, predatory
relationships, and other restrictions. For Hediger, “the free animal does
not live in freedom” (Wild Animals in Captivity 4); rather the species is “to
some extent confined to its biotope” (7). Thus, he argued, “The life of an
animal which has reached this double state of harmony in captivity [i.e.
within itself and with its milieu] is just as complete, or incomplete, as
that of an animal at liberty” (29); indeed, he often claimed the former to
be superior. Animals born in zoos do not pine for a freedom they never
knew, and if released or escaped most often return to their cages, which
protect them as much as they imprison them, which make up in quality of
space what they lack in quantity. Moreover, Derrida’s (B&S I 299) under-
standing of the ecological progress by which zoo animals are now at least
afforded the freedom to reproduce (which differentiates the zoo from the
mental hospital) passes over the way in which such reproduction (when
it is not, indeed, prevented through contraception or sterilization) is not
allowed but in fact demanded by a genetically rationalized biopower in
ways that are damaging to the animals’ forms of life (Chrulew, “Manag-
ing Love and Death at the Zoo”).
Derrida perpetuates here, in relation to the sovereign and the beast,
what Foucault identified as a “repressive hypothesis” of power (The Will
to Knowledge). The two “signals” he analyzes “both concern mastery, …
indissociably political and scientific, over an animal that has become an
object of knowledge—knowledge of death, anatomical knowledge above
all—for the sovereign, the king or the people” (B&S I 273). Derrida’s ap-
proach seems only to comprehend human-animal relations through the

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tropes of mastery, dissection, objectification, mechanicity, sterilization,

blood, violence and death. Here and elsewhere in his later work, Derrida
conducts a very effective critique of the neo-Cartesian “animal-machine”
that is capable only of reaction and never of response, a notion found
equally in behaviorism and psychoanalysis. But his focus on animals as
“pure reactional machines” (301-2) and on the sciences of anatomy and
physiology struggles to comprehend the productive power of modern
zoo biopolitics. Following the anti-Cartesian von Uexküll, the work of
Hediger and the zoo biology he helped establish is based upon not an
objectifying reduction of animals, rendered brute and made knowable
through death, but rather a recognition of the subjectivity, responsive
agency and psychological experience of the living animals whose ac-
tions it seeks to direct and govern, to make live, and to enable to enact
their nature. Derrida’s focus is, as a pencil annotation makes clear, on the
“[objectifying to death of the object” (274)—whereas that of zoos today
is on the subjectifying to “life” of the subject. For Derrida, the “autopsic
model” of the zoo “de-vitalizes by simple objectification” (296)—whereas
biopower vitalizes through detailed subjectification. Elements of mastery,
control and sovereignty persist, and the production of death is certainly
not excluded from the modern zoo (see Chrulew, “Preventing and Giv-
ing Death at the Zoo”). But its central, most defining mode of operation
is, rather, the production of healthy animal subjects adjusted to captivity,
willing to breed and to perform their characteristic natures.
Derrida is uncharacteristically simplistic in his insistence on the
continuity between menagerie and zoo, and abnormally uncharitable
in his construal of “that linear history which remains, in spite of all the
protests they would no doubt raise against this image, the common
temptation of both Foucault and Agamben” (B&S I 333). Derrida offers an
important challenge to progressivist zoo narratives through “the gesture
of a deconstructive thinking—that we don’t even consider the existence
(whether natural or artificial) of any threshold to be secure” (310). This
gesture enacts “a greater vigilance as to our irrepressible desire for the
threshold, a threshold that is a threshold, a single and solid threshold.
Perhaps there never is a threshold, any such threshold. Which is per-
haps why we remain on it and risk staying on the threshold for ever.”
(333-4) But in addition to this deconstructive gesture, effective analysis
of zoo history and human-animal relations also requires other gestures,
archaeological or genealogical perhaps, that assume the converse risk of
identifying relative and unstable but nonetheless important mutations
in the structures of power. Derrida’s own desire and temptation seems
to be to reinscribe any proposed historical thresholds and novelties into
his generalized quasi-transcendental logic of différance. He claims that
his reservations about Foucault’s and Agamben’s concepts “don’t mean

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144 Matthew Chrulew

that I have no interest in anything that could be called a specificity in the

relations between the living being and politics, in what these authors so
calmly call ‘modernity.’ New things are certainly happening in this respect
today. / As they always are, aren’t they?” (326) Indeed they are—yet they
do not always happen in the same way. As Derrida himself admits, though
it might not itself be new, there are indeed “new means and structures”
and “incredible novelties” (330) within biopower. But his analysis of the
zoo in the previous session fails to recognize or effectively analyze them.
It remains important to trace the specific form such novel means and
structures take, how central or marginal they are at different times and
places, to recognize and analyze their different differences, configurations
and regularities.
It is to such a task that Foucault’s effective histories are directed.
Derrida argues in the First Session that the purpose of the deconstruction
of overly sharp divisions—whether between human and animal, bios and
zōē, classical and modern, sovereignty and biopower—is not to eliminate
all difference but to open up a newly differentiated space: “Every time one
puts an oppositional limit in question, far from concluding that there is
identity, we must on the contrary multiply attention to differences, refine
the analysis in a restructured field” (16). This too is the aim of archaeology,
“not to overcome differences, but to analyse them, to say what exactly they
consist of, to differentiate them” (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
171). The historical and conceptual thresholds Foucault proposes are not
intended to be singular, indivisible, pure, or unconditional; rather, “it is
always a discontinuity specified by a number of distinct transformations,
between two particular positivities” (175). Thus, for example,
The French Revolution—since up to now all archaeological analyses
have been centred on it—does not play the role of an event exterior to
discourse, whose divisive effect one is under some kind of obligation
to discover in all discourses; it functions as a complex, articulated,
describable group of transformations that left a number of positivities
intact, fixed for a number of others rules that are still with us, and
also established positivities that have recently disappeared or are still
disappearing before our eyes. (177)

It was for this reason that he warned: “We must meticulously guard
against looking for anything that looks like the advent of a major event
in the years that surround the reforms of Tuke and Pinel, either that of
the positive recognition of madness or that of a more humane treatment
of the insane. We should give back to the events of these years, and the
structures that made them possible, the liberty of their metamorphoses”
(History of Madness 425). This warning might equally pertain to the events
and metamorphoses, revolutions and reforms that have shaped and con-
tinue to shape the zoo.

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Biopolitical Thresholds in the Zoo 145

Though he was earlier at pains to distinguish himself from it—sug-

gesting that the “zooanthropological, rather than the biopolitical, is our
problematic horizon” (B&S I 65)—Derrida himself insists on the contempo-
rary importance of Foucault and Agamben’s reflections on biopower. And
it is to Derrida’s credit that, unlike many of the thinkers involved in this
debate, he explicitly relates the question of biopolitics to that of the animal.
It is increasingly clear that the capture, investment and management of
life itself by apparatuses of science, state and capital, so often thought in
relation to human politics and its animalization, is fundamentally tied to
the question of the nonhuman and our civilization’s ever more targeted
and intensified war against animals (Wadiwel). Foucault’s attention to
the historical specificity of power relations, as part of a genealogy of
inscribed animal bodies, remains indispensable if we are to answer the
important question: “What does biopolitics mean, what outcomes does
it produce, and how is a world continually more governed by biopolitics
configured?” (Esposito 31).
Derrida rightly questions the narrative of a decisive revolution that
would spell the eclipse of sovereignty, the conclusiveness of any thresh-
old of the emergence of biopolitics. Yet rather than becoming an effective
historical lever, the perpetual vigilance and hesitancy of his reading of
Ellenberger on the zoological garden has the opposite risk of, as Derrida
himself puts it, “remaining eternally on the threshold” (309), unable to
distinguish those significant changes in the organization of relations
between “man and animal” in the zoo and, indeed, outside it, in those
ever more artificial heterotopias where “wild” animals remain. Lingering
longer with these episodes in zoo history, we see that various revolutions
in zoo organization—democratic, architectural, biological and psycho-
logical—demonstrate, on the contrary, that we have certainly crossed
multiple thresholds of biological modernity such that, rather than sover-
eignly objectifying captive beasts, power now carries out detailed caring
interventions in the lives of its subjects, in the name of those very lives.
Curtin University, Perth, Australia

Notes
1. The dissection is described as “éclatante,” which is rendered in the English translation
of Ellenberger’s (originally French, contra B&S I 280n2) essay as “imposing,” but might
equally be “brilliant,” “glittering” or “striking.”
2. On “animal biography,” see Lestel 69-74.
3. From this point on, all translations from Loisel are my own.

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