From Animality Back to Humanity: The Metaphors and Shortcomings of BEASTARS

Interests: anime, comics, and gaming culture studies / gender / space / intellectual history. An observer at the margins, overflowing with empathy.

Introduction

Animals are the other that humans seek to exclude, and the symptom through which humanity maintains its ontological consistency. Two intertwined developments have shaped human perceptions of animals as culture has developed in the information age. Technological revolutions and the diversification of media have expanded animal representation beyond picture scrolls and writing into photography, film, and animation. Meanwhile, the human–animal relationship has shifted from domination and subordination toward a discussion of coexistence. The growth of ecological and neo-Darwinist movements has given particular emphasis to this shift. Humans have begun to attend to their own animal aspects and to recognize the distinctive forms of intelligence animals possess. The distinction between humans and animals is no longer as clear-cut as it was once imagined to be. Against this background, anthropomorphic animals and their representation in media have attracted attention, becoming bound up with the social and cultural problems of particular periods in human history.

BEASTARS, an anime adapted from a Japanese manga, recently broadcast on major Japanese television channels and licensed for release in China, has won over animation fans, earning a high rating of 9.3 on Douban, mainland China’s prominent film and television review site. Like the American animated film Zootopia, it anthropomorphizes animals and takes place in a society where carnivores and herbivores coexist and all meat-eating is illegal. Yet BEASTARS also retains some of the conventions of Japanese school anime: its main setting is a school rather than public spaces or workplaces, and its protagonists are students rather than working adults. The story opens by exposing the deadly threat concealed within animal society. At an animal school that should have been safe, a carnivore has killed and eaten a herbivore student in a “devouring” incident. The culprit has escaped, and the animals cannot find any clues. This devouring breaks out of the protective swaddling of the traditional Japanese school story while setting a dark tone for the entire plot. As relationships develop among the protagonist Legoshi, a North American gray wolf; Louis, a red deer and vice-president of the drama club; and Haru, the dwarf rabbit Legoshi likes, the search for the killer advances step by step. Along the way, a succession of events probes the deeper political problems beneath this animal society’s peaceful surface.

By Donna J. Haraway.

The popularity of BEASTARS rests on more than its consistent animation, excellent editing and direction, twisting, turning plot, and penetrating characterization. More importantly, it uses animals as a metaphor for human society, asking how a fair and reasonable order might be established in a society that cannot escape animal instinct. Its questions concern not only species but also gender and class. Generally, anthropomorphism gives animals human social attributes and emotions, continuing to shape its characters around human values. Actual animals are absent from the screen, replaced by a collection of “men in furs” (Lundblad, 2009: 496). Such representations still expose the dreary anthropocentric discourse behind them. Yet the process of humanizing animals and thereby excluding them is also a process in which humans encounter animals. When a work satirizes human society through food-chain relations that biological conditions make unavoidable, it also presents the animality within humans that they have no choice but to confront.

I. Animality: The Central Problem of BEASTARS

What distinguishes BEASTARS is not its use of animals to illustrate problems in human society, but its use of anthropomorphism to discuss human “animality.” Animality does not mean some attribute possessed by animals. It refers to the bestial elements within humans that they have had to confront and deal with throughout the historical process of constituting themselves as human. Rather than pursuing concrete improvements in animal welfare, the concept points toward the complexities of human history (2009: 497), providing a basis for reflection on human–animal relations.

“Animality” is not an exclusively modern or contemporary concern. Early psychoanalysis, for instance, was closely connected with Darwinism and placed great emphasis on human animal instincts. In its account, civilization emerged from nature and eventually became nature’s opposite: it signified not only human progress but also the repression of human instincts. To allow what had been repressed a reasonable outlet, humans needed to remain within reach of animals (Bender, 2004: 20). In the 1960s, the neo-Darwinist movement, marked by Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, swept across the world. People not only began to take humanity’s biological basis seriously but also came to regard it as a constituent of particular social behaviors and institutions, with wide-ranging political consequences.

Precisely for this reason, more recent discussions of animality have approached the issue from another direction, pointing out that power permeates the relationship between humans and nature. Although humans have been pulled down from their pedestal above animals, they continue to construct differences between themselves and animals. Evolutionary studies of animality still revolve around a teleology of human survival: how humans organize humanity and animality to ensure their own continuation. And when they use animals to annotate human life, they fail to question the prejudices embedded in the scientific procedures used to study those animals. Latour once expressed his indignation at the problem of so-called modernity: our attempt to establish impossible binary oppositions between nature and society, humans and nonhumans (Latour, 2010: 34–37). In a work devoted to animals, Derrida goes further. The emergence of humans and their socialization rest not only on the construction of differences from animals but also on exposing wild animals’ vulnerabilities and domesticating them; these processes form the basis of human politics and socialization (Derrida, 2008: 96). In short, humans constitute themselves by continually constructing differences from animals and drawing boundaries against them. They then use the human–animal boundary and species taxonomies to classify and arrange life into hierarchies. How to manage the unavoidable animality within the human, and separate animality from humanity, becomes a question of governance. The repression and exclusion of animality form the basis of anthropocentric discrimination. To confront “animality” is to confront a power relation and its extensions into other social problems.

As Bennett and Royle summarize Derrida’s view of animals, the animal question prompts us to consider the irreplaceable singularity of each kind of animal, extending this inquiry to the “other” as a whole. Literary works—poetry—also play a crucial role (Bennett & Royle, 2009: 206). Here BEASTARS takes a radical stance. First, it presents the “devouring” as an unsolved murder, while also presenting it as part of natural succession within an ecosystem. A predator eating its prey is considered to be following the laws of nature. Only in a humanized society that emphasizes the continuation of social life does it become an act of barbarism, an unresolved social problem that casts a shadow over the animals’ identities. At the same time, understanding “devouring” through human law and morality means more than recognizing the operation of a food-chain hierarchy: it also allegorizes the bloody reality of the strong preying on the weak in human society. The story does not ground its thinking in the interminable everyday life of late capitalism, draining pervasive political problems of their force. Instead, it creates a traumatic event that exposes the hierarchy beneath everyday life and raises the question of herbivores’ standing and survival. It makes the other reappear from beneath the fantasy of belief in a just society—a fantasy that makes carnivores continually diminish themselves and cede power in an attempt to achieve a hypocritical equality based on differential treatment. This constitutes a left-wing mockery of the pluralism founded on representative democracy in the real world. Legoshi’s self-discipline and repression of desire as a physically powerful animal carry this reality into individual experience. They flesh out his character while drawing viewers who project themselves onto him into reflection on animality.

The other appears not only in the structural threat carnivores pose to herbivores but also, concretely, in the abjection of Haru, a female dwarf rabbit. Dwarf rabbits are among the weakest animals even within the herbivore world. Since childhood, Haru’s unalterable biology has prompted excessive deference from other animals. They treat her as someone to be cherished, but she has never felt the sincerity of their gaze. Seeking to escape this neglect, Haru becomes aware that she can use sex as a bargaining chip. By repeatedly having sex with male animals, she experiences the feeling of being taken seriously. Yet this is precisely why she ultimately becomes a “she-devil” whom everyone shuns, subjected to contempt and violence. Sex unexpectedly becomes a tool for breaking through animal society’s moral fantasy, but also a form of moral transgression and self-debasement through which she constructs her identity. When crude moral discipline conceals the predator–prey relationship between carnivores and herbivores, sexual power relations become desire’s obscene point of breakthrough. Through animal instinct, concern with the other thus turns toward the power structure of relations between the sexes. This turn does not establish gender oppression as an independent issue. Rather, it becomes part of the broader question of the other, extending the attention to otherness embodied in animality. Thinking about nature and gender is brought together, as in the concerns of poststructuralist feminism. In the construction of civilization, nature is named, used, and conquered; this process rests in turn on excluding nature’s primitive, chaotic, and irrational elements. At the level of a cultural account of nature, the Oedipal myth of psychoanalysis not only establishes the complicity between civilization and masculine logic but also abjects humanity’s primordial femininity and animality to constitute the human ontologically. The abject consists precisely of things that confound cleanliness and nature, things muddled and not quite what they seem (Kristeva, 2018: 5). Patriarchal rites separate men from women through evolutionary rituals that exclude the abject, ensuring men’s domination over women (Luo Ting, 2003: 5). The entry of sexual relations into animality means that Haru, in confronting the truth of animal hierarchies, must also accept that the gender structure constitutes her as an abject subject. Through her identification with abjection, Haru as a character opens up the possibility of a feminist practice that confronts animality.

The problem BEASTARS addresses is not animals but humanity’s “other,” charging the story with the tensions of cultural studies. Yet we must also recognize that, after exposing animality’s threat to society, BEASTARS has to face the question of how to handle it. The ways it does so often expose an unconscious beneath the text that runs counter to the political criticism the text intends to convey.

II. The Anthropological Machine of BEASTARS

Confronting the truth of the “other” also gives rise to strategies for reinterpreting and rationalizing external objects. An “anthropological machine” operates widely wherever distinctions are drawn between humans and animals. By identifying and excluding animals, it historically constitutes humanity’s identity as a species. In Agamben’s account, the anthropological machine begins by judging the distinction between inside and outside. Humans establish their own boundaries by constructing the animal; animality therefore becomes a constituent that sustains the human. Yet establishing human identity also requires humans to disavow their connection with animals. This produces a political state of exception: an inclusive exclusion of animality (Agamben, 2019: 45). The anthropological machine is thus not the opposite of human animality. It is always a working machine embedded within the problem of animality, supplying the prohibitions by which distinctions are drawn. The development of modern and contemporary biology has provided a basis for its operation. On one side, it seeks to produce and identify the “animalization of the human,” excluding it in order to manufacture enemies and sublime objects. On the other, it finds internal support for the human in the “humanization of the animal,” preserving the cultural centrality of humanity (2019: 46). The latter process poses an important question for cultural products featuring anthropomorphic animals. When we identify the human within unavoidable animality, and animality becomes an almost insurmountable obstacle bound up with social problems, how does the anthropological machine subtly construct and exclude the animality that remains in anthropomorphic animals as it humanizes them?

We must therefore return to the framework of the anthropological machine to examine BEASTARS once more. By transforming animal desire into a matter purely of social governance—of deviance and normalization—the story produces the reverse of its illuminating premise: it returns to a political humanitarianism that repairs trauma, and to the construction of school anime’s comic fantasies.

1. From Appetite to Erotic Desire

Eating is linked to the life drive and regarded as an instinct essential to animals’ survival and reproduction. In BEASTARS, it becomes the key source of conflict. Carnivores, which in nature live by preying on herbivores, become docile bodies that obey social law and repress their own nature. In a work that takes this environment as a given, asking where the social contract originated seems beside the point. What matters is that it has become a transhistorical structure, producing the effects of patriarchal civilization: the paradox of castration through which animal drive is transformed into desire within civilized society. One manifestation of this transhistorical transformation is the aestheticization of the animals’ food. The cultural traces of manufactured products dominate animal society’s eating habits. Pre-phallic objects connected with the Real—the dismembered fragments of animal corpses—are absent, replaced by the cooked-foodism found only in human society. Something similar appears in Žižek’s analysis of Coca-Cola (Zizek, 2012: 118–119). As a partial embodiment of the American spirit behind it, Coca-Cola is rendered sublime at a suitable aesthetic distance. Once that distance collapses, it becomes a horrifying abject object. Actual meat, together with the terrifying carnivorous surplus that exceeds meat itself, is suspended; held at an appropriate aesthetic distance, it becomes a sublime object, an object of desire registered in the Symbolic Order. The shock of the “devouring” therefore lies not only in killing an animal in violation of social morality but also in the fear of “predation,” a primal act connected with animality. The former understanding still revolves around legality and illegality, addressing the vicious circle of fulfilling and repressing desire. The latter is the real signified of the “cruelty” expressed by the former: a surplus inherent in the signifier that cannot be symbolized—a trauma connected with the pre-Oedipal stage.

Distinguishing animal drive from desire as symbolized in human society helps us trace Legoshi’s emotional development. On a full-moon night in the anime’s first episode, the normally meek gray wolf, accustomed to repressing his instincts, catches Haru’s scent. His carnivorous impulses awaken, and he attacks her in a frenzy, wanting to eat her. Yet after restraining her and wounding her arm, he suddenly comes back to himself. He lets her go and sinks into profound guilt. This is Legoshi and Haru’s less-than-pleasant first encounter, but it also leaves him unable to forget her appearance and scent, providing an occasion for him to recognize his cross-species sexual desire. As the story develops, Legoshi is bewildered by his inability to distinguish his erotic desire for Haru from his appetite for her. The black-market storyline brings this confused desire to its first concentrated eruption. Legoshi and his classmates stumble into the black market, the only place that sells meat to carnivores. Driven by an internalized moral law, he condemns his companions for giving in to their appetites. To resist the temptation of meat, he runs as though for his life, until he encounters the black market’s gatekeeper, Gohin the panda. Through their searching conversation about appetite and erotic desire, Legoshi begins trying to recognize his heterosexual desire within animal instinct.

This account reveals a structural transformation in Legoshi’s feelings. His access to truth lies in confronting the gap in desire opened by the clash between two mechanisms of desire. The first is language, already present as a precondition, which transforms animality into an appetitive temptation that can be articulated and grasped. The stage performance in episode 4 vividly embodies this mechanism, appearing as an impasse of desire. Legoshi turns make-believe into reality when he starts a real fight with Bill, who has secretly stashed away rabbit blood. Legoshi accepts the sublimation of animality into a sign of appetite, transforming an indescribable trauma into a political problem that can be discussed. The black market deepens this symbolization. It produces enticing meat whose connection with animal corpses is neither severed nor secure, drawing Legoshi into the dialectic between desire and moral injunction. The second mechanism is erotic desire, which can likewise be articulated and captured in an image. It organizes the school-story plot and constitutes Legoshi’s fundamental heterosexual fantasy. Yet appetite and erotic desire clash within the story, opening a gap through which fantasy can be traversed.¹ The predator–prey relation ultimately points toward the predator’s consumption of its prey in a way that effaces the prey’s singularity—an animal impulse to erase the object. By confronting the object’s death, predation ultimately dissolves the imagined sexual relation founded on distance, pointing toward the substance of the claim that “there is no sexual relation.”

Yet in this transformation we also see the anthropological machine “suture” the trauma of animality. Once Legoshi begins to acknowledge his erotic desire for Haru, appetite and erotic desire—intertwined and in conflict—are neatly separated. In episode 10, Haru is kidnapped by the Shishigumi. Catching her scent once again awakens Legoshi’s fighting instinct. This time, however, that instinct is no longer connected with animal impulse: it has taken a roundabout route through the filter of romantic fantasy. Gohin’s role in making this possible cannot be overlooked. In the black-market episode, he already acts as Legoshi’s guide to desire, urging him to separate his desires in order to escape his predicament. During the break-in to rescue Haru in episode 10, he becomes the witness to the transformation of Legoshi’s desire. From the perspective of symptomatic reading, why not imagine this episode as a wedding? Aided by his “father,” Gohin, who also bears witness, Legoshi the son overcomes countless trials and finally finds a substitute for his desire: a wife named Haru, an objet petit a. A story that confronted animality has completed its transformation into a romantic sitcom. In short, by neatly separating appetite from erotic desire and making erotic desire a means of easing appetite, the story avoids the gap their conflict creates. The problem of animality is sutured into a manageable problem of human desire, transformed into an apparent opposition between obeying and violating the social order.

The heterosexual fantasy on screen is not without progressive significance. In the depth of cross-species communication it promises, wolf–rabbit hybridity means that the two subjects undergo deterritorialization and reterritorialization out of their respective ecological worlds, continually generating new surplus experiences. Deleuze and Guattari use the relationship between an orchid and a wasp as an analogy. In scientific taxonomy, orchids and wasps are far apart. Yet in the event of pollination, the orchid deterritorializes, making its flower’s reproductive parts imitate a wasp and becoming part of the wasp’s world; afterward, it reterritorializes as a pollinated orchid. The wasp deterritorializes to become an extension of the orchid’s reproductive organs, then reterritorializes as a wasp within the simulacrum the orchid has constructed. Each life continually becomes through this circulation of equal intensity, taking the circulation further (Deleuze & Guattari, 2010). Wolf–rabbit interbreeding is not merely a rebellion against animal society’s segregation. It is itself a continually creative movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Beyond mutual imitation at the level of a single stratum, it also captures genuine growth: a becoming that creates a new species and social order distinct from both wolf, the carnivore, and rabbit, the herbivore.

Haraway offers a critical reading of similar arguments: this becoming remains textual and detached from concrete settings. Actual animals receive no attention in these texts; what they describe transcends ordinary earthly life and treats it with contempt (Lundblad, 2009: 497). The immediate consequence is to ignore the social character of the anthropological machine. In episodes 10 and 11, although Haru awakens to her subjectivity as an abject being in the face of the lion’s attempt to eat her, shattering his civilized veneer with a paranoid fury, she ultimately still depends on Legoshi for her rescue. The traditional narrative core of a hero rescuing a damsel in distress remains intact, underwritten by an unshakable biological foundation. After all, a rabbit cannot possibly deal with a powerful, calculating lion; help from a strong wolf seems perfectly reasonable. Yet it is precisely this unquestionability that embodies a fantasy of masculinity that is anything but neutral. As animality exposes the relation in which the strong prey on the weak, the male’s ferocious hunting disposition finds biological support while retaining a principled restraint. This constitutes the appeal of the “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” Haraway analyzes (Haraway, 2017: 50–134). The famous film Tarzan presents this dynamic. On the one hand, Tarzan is an animalized human—a savage—whose embodiment of the blurred human–animal relationship alarms human society. On the other, he is also an ideal man partly freed from civilization’s repression and castration of men: strong, brave, proactive, and utterly devoted to Jane. He thus wins human civilization’s recognition once again. The animality that provokes alarm is contained by the anthropological machine of masculine myth, transformed into a savage blemish registered and accepted by society. The original BEASTARS manga does depict the psychosocial problems hybrid species face. Legoshi’s mother, a gray wolf–Komodo dragon hybrid, dies by suicide. The homicidal maniac Melon, a cheetah–gazelle hybrid, is likewise the offspring of predator and prey, a mirror that foreshadows the wolf and rabbit’s future. Unfortunately, as traumas the protagonist experiences and troubles he encounters, they ultimately become stepping stones toward new possibilities for the wolf–rabbit relationship.

2. The Politics of Inherent Transgression

By making erotic desire, once separated out, a means of resolving social problems, the wolf–rabbit romance quietly makes animality’s traumatic elements disappear. It draws our thinking back into the struggles of human politics. At the same time, it shifts the focus away from an openness to animality and toward conflicts among solutions internal to the anthropological machine. In contrast to Legoshi, who uses erotic desire to channel animality, Louis seeks to become a Beastar, occupying the pinnacle of power in animal society. He attempts to pursue humanitarian governance from within the structures of public power, seeking a way out of animal society’s problems through human political thinking.

Louis, a red deer, is a herbivore with considerable personal ability and pride, respected and loved by the student body. He also has a secret past: he was once sold on the black market. That experience made him acutely aware of the currents beneath animal society’s peaceful surface. While carefully concealing his childhood trauma, he accepted the social promise his adoptive father held out to him: becoming a Beastar would enable him to change society. Aloof and painstakingly diligent, he builds authority among the students and works hard to maintain it in pursuit of his political ideal. Even after the Shishigumi kidnaps Haru, the woman he loves, he painfully relinquishes her, trying to sacrifice his private self for a greater public self. It is precisely the preferential redistribution of power toward herbivores in the existing animal society that makes his present standing possible. Having experienced society’s dark side, Louis understands this deeply. He remains restrained even amid widespread acclaim, unswerving in his ideal of changing society. At the same time, he intensely loathes Legoshi’s hypocritical veneer of friendliness: it is precisely such behavior that attempts to conceal the truth of animal society.

In their initial characterization, the commoner’s ethos embodied by Legoshi addresses repressed desire and enters politics on that basis. Louis, as the personification of law, is already a leading player in politics. Their ways of life are entirely different, and their personalities are opposed. Yet their structures of desire are almost identical. Legoshi is a Kantian body: before confronting his desire for Haru, he always regards “showing weakness” as a moral duty and an unconditional command. In this intense carnivorous self-restraint, he seeks the “enjoyment” that stabilizes his self, exposing the obscene dimension of the superego (Zizek, 2012: 95–96). Louis, meanwhile, reacts to his childhood trauma by choosing to believe in the broad, smooth path his father has laid out for him. His unconditional, religious faith in the position of Beastar likewise leads him into an obsessional structure. He works diligently and lives frugally, repressing the other in order to deny himself enjoyment (Zizek, 2006: 107, note). By investing his faith in society and law as represented by his adoptive father, Louis enters into false activity, evading the terrifying moments of silence through incessant acts of self-affirmation (2006: 143).

The story’s development gives both characters a way to establish an appropriate distance from an overbearing superego. The key changes lie in two acts of “disobedience” during the Shishigumi’s kidnapping of Haru. Legoshi violates the cross-species taboo, using heterosexuality to channel the superego fantasy bound up with his repressed animal impulses, so that he can better protect Haru as a man rather than as a carnivore. Next, to prepare for confronting the real culprit in the devouring, he becomes Gohin’s pupil and learns martial arts. He thus gives his aggression a legitimate form: fighting techniques permitted by human society. After the devouring case ends, he awakens to the so-called “true meaning of strength” and sets out on the road to becoming “human.” Louis, for his part, finally disobeys the mayor, the embodiment of law, who has advised him to ignore the Shishigumi’s actions. He follows his desire and goes to rescue Haru. This act also defies the adoptive father who has placed such high hopes in him. After the Shishigumi incident, spending his days with the lion Ibuki allows him to accept his own weakness. During Legoshi’s decisive battle with the devouring’s true culprit, Louis even offers him his right foot—the symbol of his enslaved status—to eat. This is both a symbolic ritual that addresses past trauma and an act of “showing weakness” born of trust from the depths of his soul. Legoshi overcomes the injunction with love; Louis learns to tolerate his own shortcomings.

Thus, in both the direction of character growth and the substantive route toward resolving conflict, the law absorbs its own violation. By distancing themselves from an overbearing moral law, allowing a measure of “small but certain happiness” in transgression and a limited expression of their base desires, the characters complete the “inherent transgression” of their desire. In functional terms, inherent transgression names the effect whereby power produces its own opposite in the course of its operation—violating power and exposing its defects. Power is itself its own division (2006: 33). Through this division, the other is captured within a presupposed symbolic position, making the other’s absence possible and accomplishing domination’s inclusive exclusion. Here Agamben’s anthropological machine converges strikingly with the mechanism of inherent transgression. Precisely when it insists on distinguishing humans from animals, the anthropological machine also incorporates their “indistinction.” It excludes the exception by including it, making it “bare life” and revealing the operation of divided sovereign power (Wang Qin, 2016: 17). The anthropological machine therefore does not rest on a united front against animality. It brings animality inside in order to abject it. In BEASTARS, food-chain relations are tirelessly emphasized through an unexamined biological vision; interspecies relations are thereby extracted and suspended as a backdrop. Meanwhile, Legoshi and Haru’s heterosexuality constitutes a typical form of animality accepted by human society: the reproductive instinct. The desire to prey becomes a problem that hovers around erotic desire and appears only occasionally.

By continually transgressing and establishing law, inherent transgression constitutes the division and movement of human moral law itself, the better to manage an animality that can never be escaped. A radical ideal rests on breaking the impasse in desire’s movement, not repeating this dreary, endless motion. The conflict between Legoshi’s and Louis’s political identities points to desire’s nonidentity. Yet it is equally clear that animality is absent from this movement. It is symbolized as a negative side of social norms—sexual desire, individualism—that can be identified and supplemented, then transformed into a positive psychology of human self-realization. The story’s radical task now is to respond to the riddle it has posed, strip away the cheerful veil of a teen romance drama, and confront the impasse of animal drive: Legoshi’s still-concealed desire to hunt Haru, for instance. As Žižek argues, desire is supported by law while also becoming entangled in its transgression, whereas drive breaks desire’s vicious circle (Zizek, 2006: 50).

III. Conclusion: Breaking the Animal Myth

Jiang Yuhui has described three paths for a radical animal philosophy (Jiang Yuhui, 2017: 97–109). The first is Agamben’s discussion of the open. Agamben reverses Heidegger’s anthropocentric distinction between the ways humans and animals face the world. He argues that precisely because animals lack a world, humans can recognize in animality the potential to choose not to act (potential-not-to): they can become aware of the loss of the possibility of being human, and so confront the profound boredom arising from originary possibility (102). The second path consists of Deleuze and Guattari’s internally interactive becoming-animal and Haraway’s conception of symbiosis. Rather than treating the blur between humanity and animality as a space internal to humans, through which humans transform into animals, these accounts emphasize the complex interactions and rhizomatic structure of networks of becoming. Such hybridity does not produce an indistinct chaos because anomalous individuals always emerge to guide the multiple directions of symbiosis (103, 105–106). The third approach comes from speculative realism, which emphasizes animals as irreducible “alterity” that humans cannot grasp through any direct experience (103–104). “Alterity” is not the becoming of a relation but a rupture in the proximity between humans and animals: a terrifying gulf. All these approaches share a critique of, and reflection on, the forces that maintain human boundaries. Since escaping anthropocentrism is impossible, a metaphysical transformation of human–animal relations must be founded on the coming apocalypse of the Anthropocene—in other words, on the arrival of the death of the human. This death does not mean humanity’s extinction or the end of history. It means abolishing the anthropological machine, burying the proper name “human,” and existing as part of autopoiesis–Gaia.² For Agamben, this is boredom in which potentiality is present; for Žižek, it is the vast desert of the Real.

The problem with BEASTARS is that it remains insufficiently sensitive to the human, holding fast to the boundaries of the human and returning from animality to humanity. In a conversation with the acclaimed independent musician Kenshi Yonezu, its author Paru Itagaki says that BEASTARS has always placed its concern for humans above its concern for animals. It depicts “human drama,” attending to human nature rather than animality. Yonezu perceptively replies that human nature often needs animality in order to become visible (Paru Itagaki × Kenshi Yonezu dialogue). This already articulates the extimate relationship between animals and humans, and the essence of a critique of animality. Unfortunately, BEASTARS has still not escaped the anthropological machine—not because it neglects animals, but because its narrative continues to evade the other that sustains the human. Jiang Lifu’s postcolonial critique of Aravind Adiga’s prizewinning novel The White Tiger may apply equally to BEASTARS (Jiang Lifu, 2010: 89–95). Balram, who comes from the very bottom of Indian society, meets the gaze of a captive white tiger in a zoo and experiences a spiritual communion with it. In that encounter, he recognizes his own oppression and that of his compatriots: they are like white tigers imprisoned in a zoo. He therefore decides to identify with the animal and change an unequal society. Yet, after successfully establishing a school at the end, Balram hopes to raise an entire school of “white tigers.” He thus turns the white tiger into an elite figure, rescuing it from the debased position of animality—and returns once more to the humanity–animality binary…

We therefore need to see through the new obsession generated by the characters’ relationships, where we discuss the wolf–rabbit pairing and endlessly imagine that love can make up for the bestial element that constitutes civilization’s paradox. We need to subject the story’s development to hysterical questioning. In reality, faced with the enjoyment that perpetuates civilization and with biopolitics, we find ourselves with nothing.

References

• “BEASTARS” Feature: Paru Itagaki × Kenshi Yonezu Dialogue [「BEASTARS」特集 板垣巴留×米津玄师対谈]. (2018, November 8). Retrieved December 18, 2019, from Comic Natalie.

• Agamben, G. The Open: Man and Animal [敞开：人与动物] (Lan Jiang, trans.). Nanjing: Nanjing University Press. (Original work published 2002.)

• Bender, Bert. Evolution and “the Sex Problem”: American Narratives during the Eclipse of Darwinism. Kent: Kent State UP, 2004. Print.

• Bennett, A. & Royle, N. (2015). “Animality Makes the Poetic Shine” [动物性让诗性发光] (Li Ping, trans.). Shanghai Literature [上海文学], no. 4.

• Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (2010). Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 2: A Thousand Plateaus [资本主义与精神分裂（卷2）：千高原] (Jiang Yuhui, trans.). Shanghai: Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House.

• Derrida, J. (2008). The Animal That Therefore I Am (David Wills, trans.). New York: Fordham University Press.

• Haraway, T. (2017). Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science [灵长类视觉——现代科学世界中的性别、种族和自然] (Zhao Wen, trans.). Zhengzhou: Henan University Press.

• Lundblad, M. (2009). “From Animal to Animality Studies.” PMLA, vol. 124, no. 2.

• Latour, B. (2010). We Have Never Been Modern [我们从未现代过] (Liu Peng and Agnès Chalier [安涅思], trans.). Suzhou: Soochow University Press. (Original work published 1991.)

• Kristeva, J. (2018). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [恐怖的权力：论卑贱] (Zhang Xinmu, trans.). Beijing: The Commercial Press. (Original work published 1980.)

• Zizek, S. (2014). The Sublime Object of Ideology [意识形态的崇高客体] (Ji Guangmao, trans.). Beijing: Central Compilation & Translation Press. (Original work published 1989.)

• Zizek, S. (2006). The Plague of Fantasies [幻想的瘟疫] (Hu Yutan and Ye Xiao, trans.). Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Publishing House. (Original work published 1997.)

• Jiang Lifu [姜礼福]. (2010). “Animal Politics in Allegorical and Comic Narratives: A Reading of the Postcolonial Ecological Thought of The White Tiger” [寓言叙事与喜剧叙事中的动物政治——《白虎》的后殖民生态思想解读]. Contemporary Foreign Literature [当代外国文学], no. 1.

• Jiang Yuhui [姜宇辉]. (2017). “How Should We Look at Animals? Rethinking Animality at the Edge of the Anthropocene” [如何凝视动物？在人类纪的边缘重思动物性]. New Arts [新美术], no. 2.

• Luo Ting [罗婷]. (2003). “Maternity/Abjection in Kristeva’s Discourse of Power and Literary Representation” [克里斯蒂娃关于母性/卑贱的权力话语与文学表现]. Foreign Literatures [国外文学], no. 1.

• Wang Qin [王钦]. (2016). “‘Potentiality,’ Animals, and Death: Rereading Xiao Hong’s The Field of Life and Death” [「潜能」、动物与死亡——重读萧红《生死场》]. Modern Chinese Literature Studies [中国现代文学研究丛刊], no. 10.