Ghostly Presences: Tracing the Animal in Julia Leigh’s The Hunter

Abstract

To be speaking of the animal in the title of this chapter is of course a provocation. In fact, one of the crucial concerns of contemporary human-animal studies and critical animal studies is to point out that there is no undifferentiated mass of animals that could be subsumed under a general moniker that suggests sameness while maintaining a fundamental difference from human beings. The “animal question,” as it were, may even be called the central concern of any scholarly inquiry into animality, anthropocentrism and, more generally, the humanist veneer of the (post)humanities. “The animal, what a word,” Derrida famously cried out: “it is an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to the living other” (23).