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Anthropomorphism, the projection of human affect and capacity onto nonhuman animals, concepts, acts, and objects is commonly understood as an error. Across texts and contexts, modern and postmodern, anthropomorphism appears not only as a form of magical thinking, but also as a symptom of anthropocentrism, a rejection of pluralism, and the failure to appreciate nonhuman difference. It is the sticky residue of an exclusionary humanism. It is often violent in its foreclosures, but also dull-witted and a bit silly in its expansionism, papering over gaps in knowledge and knowability with unconscious assumptions and quaint attributions.
As a result, the critique of anthropomorphism is widespread, and agreement that it is a mistake is a rare site of consensus across disciplines and methods—humanist and posthumanist. Much posthumanist thought takes as its project the formation of a more ethical understanding of the world that displaces human centrality by seeking to account for “how forests think” (Eduardo Kohn), asking whether the Universal Declaration of Human Rights applies to robots, algorithms, coral reefs, or apes (Alexandra Huneeus), or describing new assemblages that are planetary in scale (Rosi Braidotti).1Within literary theory and criticism, Paul de Man’s brief reading of Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Baudelaire in the 1980s has remained formative in establishing the error and seduction of anthropomorphism as a literary device that substitutes fixity (the human as a referent) for indeterminacy (ongoing substitution).2
Following on de Man in an effort to account for key facets of the emerging field of animal studies, Mario Ortiz Robles asks about the animal condition as an example of this indeterminacy or trope. Addressing all non-human animals, as if they could report back on their condition, and addressing none of them by virtue of the address, which assumes that an answer would come in a human language, Ortiz Robles asks: “What is it like to be a trope?”3 An answer to this question of the character of being and the experience of language would require the projection of voice and mind, turning an animal into that which we could properly hear and understand. The silence that fills its place instead reveals a mute substitutability that allows for factory farming, domestication, and other forms of human manipulation. The questions “What...