When the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris learned in 1836 that it had the chance to buy a live, young orangutan, it was excited by the prospect. Specimens were the focus of the Museum’s activities, and this particular specimen seemed especially promising, not only because the Museum had very few orangutan specimens in its collection, but also because of what was perceived to be the orangutan’s unique place in the natural order of things, namely, at the very boundary between the (...) animal kingdom and humans. Frédéric Cuvier, the superintendent of the Museum’s menagerie, urged that studying the orangutan’s mental faculties would help resolve fundamental questions regarding the similarities and differences between animals and humans. Archival and printed sources allow one to reconstruct the orangutan’s capture, acquisition, and subsequent career at the menagerie in greater detail than has generally been possible for animals of nineteenth-century zoos. Scientists, artists, the public, the press, and even musicians sought to engage with the orangutan, seeing in it not just another ape or monkey but a special creature unto itself at the animal/human boundary. Key to their fascination with the orangutan was the question of proximity—just how close was the orangutan to humans? The orangutan’s story illuminates not only how the animal-human boundary was conceived at the time but also the problematic status of the zoo as a site for scientific research and the roles of scientific and non-scientific actors alike in constructing how the orangutan was understood. (shrink)

This thesis draws on Jacques Derrida's idea of 'differance' to argue that, within post-Darwinian humanist culture, the category of 'the human' can only be defined by differentiating it from 'the animal'. Following Derrida, this project seeks to 'determine the number, form, sense, or structure' of the 'plural and repeatedly folded frontier' between these two categories. Chapter 1, 'Becoming Human', examines the chronological boundaries between the human and extinct hominids such as 'Homo erectus' and Neanderthals. It reads contemporary scientific accounts of (...) 'how we became human' to demonstrate that they preserve the conceptual framework of earlier creation myths. However, despite their humanism, these accounts inevitably unsettle the boundaries between human and animal by revealing the play of traces across them. Chapter 2, 'Acting Human', reads Descartes' 'Discourse on the Method' with Judith Butler's theory of gender performance to argue that the human can only be identified by its behaviour. Those who do not behave 'correctly', such as people with autism, threaten humanism and are consequently punished. Conversely, when animals are seen to 'act human' this is dismissed as anthropomorphism. However, these possibilities demonstrate that human behaviour is not tied to an internal essence. Chapter 3, 'Talking Human', deconstructs the opposition between human language and animal communication which underpins contemporary humanist discourse. The human voice is identified with presence, truth and subjectivity, while animals are mute, inarticulate objects. However, the human subject is never fully in control of its communication, as demonstrated by blushing and involuntary nonverbal 'leakage'. I conclude that 'language' and 'the human' are constituted only by referring to each other. This thesis critiques the mythology of humanism in order to challenge the unethical acts that are committed in the name of the human. (shrink)