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Oliver Jones
April 19th, 2011
CSCT 767
Dr. David Clark
“The Common Destiny of Creatures”: Animal Capital and Biopolitical Sovereignty in Cormac
McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”
In “Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West”, Cormac McCarthy
characterizes America’s westward expansion under the aegis of Manifest Destiny as the
boundless hostility of a violent cosmos towards the various life forms (human and otherwise)
that populated the American borderlands in the mid 19th century. Tracking the rampages of a
group of filibuster mercenaries in the wake of the Mexican-American war, the novel presents a
universe where every encounter announces the possibility of violence, the potential for its
outburst amplified by a logic of commodification that anticipates the ultimate convertibility of all
life into capital. The coalescing of free labour and military avarice facilitates an industry as
adept at transforming bat guano into gunpowder as it is at collecting human scalps for bounty. In
a barren landscape thoroughly reified by the exacting gaze of military enterprise, the presence of
any creature in excess of the social bond represents an affront that must be commandeered,
crushed, catalogued, or converted for sale. Prefaced with a quote from the Yuma Sun announcing
the discovery in Ethiopia of a 300 000 year old skull bearing evidence of scalping, McCarthy’s
bleak fiction recasts the imperial expansion of the American frontier through the enterprise of
free men of the Republic as an atavistic, a-historic sadism that demands ultimate conquest over
every beast of the field. The novel’s particular representation (or rather “rendering”) of
American expansion as the natural development of an a-historical cosmic atavism suggests the
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naturalization of a capitalist imperialism and opens the cultural logic of McCarthy’s text to a
biopolitical critique.
In this paper, I will argue that “Blood Meridian” presents the historical expansion of the
territorial United States as a mercenary enterprise whose hostility to life is unbounded by the
process of commodification. The harvesting of living beings, human and animal, as capital is a
theme which recurs throughout McCarthy’s work, and here it constitutes a crucial component in
a fictionalized historical narrative that connects the mythology of the American dream with a
structural metaphysics of history devoid of any teleology of historical continuity; one made in
the anthropomorphic image of a de-centered, carnivalized bestiary. The novel’s staging of
history as spectacle through the public execution of a performing circus bear suggests a mimetic,
fetishistic “rendering” of what Nicole Shukin terms “animal capital” within a mythology of
political power the constructs the subsumption of participatory nature within a tautological
capitalist ecology. The novel’s representation of the rendering of animal capital suggests the
essential ruthlessness of a capitalist bios that reproduces itself across the novel’s historical
narrative as the genocide and wasting of indigenous populations, the mass slaughter of the
buffalo, and finally the advance of the territorial infrastructure of the imperial nation state. I
will argue that the spectacle of animal capital, among the dominant images within the novel’s
mythology, presents an a-historic construction of a capitalist nature made in the image of war,
and that this image implicates the novel’s historical mythology within a narrative of capitalist
biopolitical sovereignty: “Blood Meridian” presents a boundless, perpetual war within nature as
the founding gesture or instantiation of the social order and codifies this within the national
mythology of the frontier. However, the mythology that grounds the novel’s organization of
human community produces an unstable margin between human and non-human lives, and in the
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ideological universe of the novel, the juridical and political question of dispensation of life and
death is determined by the capricious regard of a militant capitalist necessity. Indeed,
McCarthy’s inversion of Manifest Destiny posits the porous instability of the hierarchy between
human and non-human animal to suggest their mutual enslavement within an eternal conflict that
plays out as the expansion of the American frontier and the rise the imperial state that
administers biopolitical modernity and holds sovereign power over homo sacer or bare life. As
such, the novel enacts a biopolitical mythology in which the state of exception emerges in the
random exchanges between a nomadic imperial capitalism and the detritus of living creatures
scattered about the landscape of the Mexican-American borderlands – a state of exception which
collapses biological hierarchies in the pursuit of capital and the expansion of market territory.
The result is the catastrophic breakdown of biological hierarchy through the mythological
production of a hostile biopolitical order where every form of life becomes a medium of
exchange.
As I have suggested, “Blood Meridian” mythologizes the historical development of
imperial capitalism in the Southwest as the spontaneous eruption of a violent cosmology. The
image of animal capital as spectacle1 is central to the development of this motif, and haunts
many of the novel’s major scenes. The concluding chapter of the novel in particular
mythologizes this violence as the perpetual reiteration of a cosmic dance of history, an image
realized through the spectacle of a dancing bear slain by gunfire amidst the revelry at the novel’s
terminal hospice in Fort Griffin, Texas. This image is significant to a critique of “Blood
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Spectacle should be understood in the Debordian sense as the production of the appearance of
society or social life through “news or propaganda, advertising or the actual consumption of
entertainment” as this definition captures spectacle’s efficacy beyond the reproduction of images
and suggests its singular integration as the dominant economic and social formation in
contemporary capitalist society (Debord, 12-15).
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Meridian” which seeks to interrogate the novel’s narrative investment in the “rendering” of
animal capital and the history of biopolitical capitalism.
The final scene describes “a dimly seething rabble...coagulated within” the interior of a
bar, the assembled witnesses to an unfolding catastrophe (McCarthy, 324). Inside,
An old man in a tyrolean costume was shuffling among the rough tables with his hat
outheld while a little girl in a smock cranked a barrel organ and a bear in a crinoline
twirled strangely upon a board stage defined by a row of tallow candles that dripped and
sputtered in their pools of grease. (324)
The kid, the novel’s nameless protagonist, aged thirty years and recast as “the man” by the
narrator, discerns the otherworldly Judge Holden amidst the revellers, and notes intrigue
involving the judge, who is seated “among every kind of man...among the dregs of the earth in
beggary a thousand years” (325). The judge disappears and the costumed showman, “shaking
the coins in his hat”, is accosted by the same group of men (326). An “incoherent” dispute
ensues (326). One of the men draws a cavalry revolver from his hip and shoots the bear
“through the mid-section” (326). The bear groans and resumes the dance in frenzy before he is
shot again: “holding his chest...he began to totter and to cry like a child and he took a few last
steps, dancing, and crashed to the boards” (326).
The disturbing scene is central to the novel’s mythology. In the ensuing pages, the judge
and the man discourse on the absence of historical telos and the murky provenance of the order
of things. The judge declares the unfolding scenario “an event, a ceremony. The orchestration
thereof. The overture carries certain marks of decisiveness. It includes the slaying of a large
bear” (329). He explains that “the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains
complete within itself it owns arrangement and history and finale” before adding “there is no
necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves” (329). After the judge intones
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“only that man who...has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at
last that it speaks to his inmost heart...can dance” the man objects: “even a dumb animal can
dance” (331). The judge is baleful:
Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All
others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step
down in the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that dont. (331)
The novel’s final scene renders non-human life in the performance of spectacle as the archetype
for a universal mythology of history made in the image of war. The novel’s fiction thereby
enacts a de-historicizing representation which animates the sign of the animal within a supreme
cosmology that plays out as the historical expansion of the frontier and the rise of American
industry.
In “The Dance of History in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’”, John Emil Sepich
connects the infamous final scene with the theme of historical “cycling”, linking the novel’s
mythology to a supremely bellicose order of history (Sepich, 20-21). For Sepich, the scene
subsumes the novel’s key historical referents (the decline of the Anasazi in advance of the
Spanish conquest of the continent, the genocidal devastation of the Navajo, the collapse of the
beaver trade, “the westward reach of the pioneers...the hunt of the southern buffalo herd”) under
the vindictive final judgement of a supreme or divine warfare (20-21). Sepich’s reading
emphasizes the historical mythology which grounds McCarthy’s historical fiction and suggests
the novel’s ruthless metaphysics of history: the novel presents the historical development of the
Southwest (and the devastation wrought in its wake) as part of the sequential development of
imperial powers and modes of production that brought ecological and humanitarian catastrophe
to the majority of human and non-human lives subsumed within their productive matrices. Here
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conquest is mythologized as the engine of universal history; the American frontier is but the
battlefield on which imperial capitalism triumphs over every beast of the field.
While Sepich’s attentive reading clarifies many of the mythological aspects of
McCarthy’s narrative, he appears to overstate the novel’s investment in an anthropocentric
construction of history by neglecting the connection between the scene’s sad spectacle and the
delusory carnival described in the same series of sermons in which the judge declares that “war
is god” (McCarthy, 249). Describing the world as “a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with
chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent” and “an itinerant carnival, a migratory
tentshow”, the judge renders the history of the cosmos as a desultory menace made in the image
of a carnivalized bestiary; one of unthinkable provenance and unknowable destiny (245). The
description of history as a staged event (or series of events) involving chimerical illusions and
the staging of animal life in an amusing spectacle has certain resonance with the judge’s
conclusive ordination of war as holy force: the event ordained by the judge in the final chapter
transpires in a geography bearing the name “Griffin” within a series of a carnival revels
involving an anthropomorphic circus show. Indeed, the exceptional spectacle of animal
slaughter in the conclusion of the novel, a tropological figure implying the divination of a
restless future made in the jesting image of an eternal war at the heart nature, appears oddly
attuned to the mimetic logic of rendering which Nicole Shukin critiques in “Animal Capital:
Rendering life in Biopolitical Times”.
Shukin describes the “rendering” of animal capital as a “biopolitical theory of mimesis”
that seeks to extend the concept beyond the cultural emphasis on “realist rendition” within a
critique that encompasses the economic mode of production (21). As a counter to an
“overdetermination by aesthetic ideologies invested in distinguishing culture and economy”,
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Shukin develops her biopolitical theory of mimesis as a way of implicating rendering in both the
literal and figurative reproduction of the “ontological politics” and “social flesh” of capitalism
(21). Developing this theory as a critique of the “ontology of production” developed by Hardt
and Negri in “Multitude” (an “immanent” biopolitical ontology that curiously abstracts the
reproduction of social bios from its material contingency upon “the lives of nonhuman others”),
Shukin deploys the concept of rendering animal capital to extend biopolitical critique into the
ideological conditions of capitalist production which “dissolve and reinscribe” species
boundaries “in the genetic and aesthetic pursuit of new markets” (9-11). Shukin’s concept of
rendering serves to index “both economies of representation...and resource economies trafficking
in animal remains”: her theory seeks to connect the rendering practices which represent nonhuman lives with the historical modes of production which facilitate their exchange in both flesh
and image (21-22).
Tracking the “‘interconvertability’ of symbolic and economic forms of capital via the
fetishistic currency of animal life”, “animal capital” describes “the semiotic currency of animal
signs and the traffic in animal substances” and “signals a tangle of biopolitical relations within
which the economic and symbolic capital of animal life can longer be sorted into binary
distinctions” (7). In effect, Shukin’s critique of the rendering of animal capital describes a
historical context in which the production of animal signs cannot be abstracted from the
production of animal products. The fetishistic animation of animal signs within an ontology of
production that renders a literal and figurative equivalence between the world of “nature” and the
material relations of capitalist production appears to Shukin as the rendering of animal capital in
the production of the social bios (“the form or way of living proper to an individual or group”):
for Shukin, the mobilization of animal signs is concurrent with the material conditions governing
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the destruction of non-human lives and reveals “an inescapable contiguity or bleed between bios
and zoe”, one which deploys mimetic figures of animality in the fetishistic rendering of the
object biopolitical sovereignty (9).
Critiquing Martin O’Connor, Shukin describes the material conditions of rendering (an
“industrial closed loop” resembling a tautological system integrating nature and capitalism) as
one which is contingent upon a “semiotic expansion of capital...into nature” and “the discursive
production of nature as participatory subject (81; Shukin’s italics). As such, the subsumption of
a “capitalized nature” transpires “primarily at the ideological or social imaginary level” (81;
Shukin’s italics). For both Shukin and O’Connor, the tautology of natural capitalism or
“capitalized” nature facilitates the production and consumption of non-human lives through the
extension of an ideology that imagines the ecological integration of capitalist production into and
within nature: capitalist nature is the mystifying fiction of nature’s participation in its own
wholesale exploitation.
The novel’s final chapter appears particularly amenable to Shukin’s biopolitical theory of
rendering, and suggests the mutual implication of material and representational processes in the
production of non-human lives for consumption. The spectacle of the slain bear suggests the
historical contingency of a prior mode of rendering insofar as we can understand the rendering of
animal capital as the inter-formation of biopolitical power in the economic and symbolic
relations that produce a commodified animality. Illuminated by the sputtering light of tallow
candles, the bear is compelled to perform the mimesis of a human faculty: dance. His hapless
wards exploit his labour to generate income; his movements are economized in the rendition of
the organ-grinder’s mechanical time. While the scenario is more than a century removed from
the context of digital rendering and “automobility” that Shukin’s theory attends, the scene
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fictionalizes the mutual implication of the economic and symbolic in the material and figurative
rendering of animal capital: recycled animal by-products maximize the visibility of the spectacle
for the patrons, the bear’s temporalized movement under the spell of musical time are subsumed
within the labour-time of cultural production as a use-value and exchangeable commodity.
On its own, the scene would suggest the fictional representation of the mimetic rendering
of animal capital in a bygone historical context, a context somewhat less alienated from the
current conditions of biopolitical production (in the novel’s fiction, the immediate conditions of
production and the investment of labour time are less obviously effaced than in the sanitized
mass-cultural production of animal capital that Shukin attends). But the novel’s representation
of a pre-industrial rendering of animal capital is significantly complicated by the scene’s
situation as a coda to the historical catastrophes and ecological devastations that haunt the final
chapter. Contextualized within the chapter’s broader narrative, the relevance of the scene to
Shukin’s theory of rendering becomes apparent: the scene indexes the systematic slaughter of the
buffalo and the proliferation of rendering industries that sprung up in its wake to a mythology
that describes the encroachment of we might call a “post-historical” mode of capitalist
production. The chapter, which begins with an old hunter telling a story “of the buffalo and the
stands he’d made against them” (McCarthy, 316), narrates the ecological devastation of the
continent as part of the sequential development of imperial and industrial modes of production.
The broader narrative implicates the final scene’s spectacle in the representation of the historical
violence that facilitated the expansion of the frontier. The spectacle emerges as component in a
national mythology largely sustained by the rendering of animal capital.
The hunter’s tale demonstrates both nostalgia and a boundless enthusiasm for the bounty
of the buffalo slaughter but his narrative is tarnished by images of carnal destruction:
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the animals by the thousands and tens of thousands and the hides pegged out over actual
square miles of grounds and the teams of skinners spelling one another around the clock
and the shooting and shooting weeks and months till the bore shot slick and the stock shot
loose at the tang...the tandem wagons groaned away over the prairie twenty and twentytwo ox teams and the flint hides by the ton and hundred ton and the meat rotting on the
ground and the air whining with flies and the buzzards and ravens and the night a horror
of snarling and feeding with the wolves half crazed and wallowing in carrion (316-317).
His tone shifts as he marvels at the scale of the industry. He describes driving teams heaving
under the weight of pure galena lead as he re-constructs the landscape as the industrial
architecture of slaughter: “on this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho
there was eight million carcasses for that’s how many hides reached the railhead” (317).
Describing a “last hunt” two years prior, he relates how they “ransacked the country” before
finally tracking and slaughtering a herd of eight animals. The gloss of nostalgia asserts itself
again: “They’re gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they’d never been at
all” (317).
Here, the destruction of the herds is nostalgically represented as the wasting of an
historical mode of production (one which is doubled in the devastation of the hunter’s livelihood
as it is in the termination of the indigenous populations’ way of life). But the man’s trek through
the bone fields emphasizes a scavenging enterprise which seeks to recover use and exchange
value from the waste, which can be recycled as agricultural fertilizer: “in the distance he could
see a train of wagons moving off to the northeast with great tottering loads of bones and further
to the north other teams of pickers at their work” (318). Indeed, the bone fields, are “filled with
violent children orphaned by war”, and the remains are fodder for further antagonism among the
“bonepickers”: the man shoots and kills an enterprising teenager who seeks quarrel with him
over the provenance of the man’s scapular of human ears (a token which Sara Spurgeon regards
as a trophy collected in the same “skewed spirit as Davy Crockett’s bearskins or Paul Bunyun’s
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logs...as natural resources...just another part of an infinitely exploitable landscape) (McCarthy,
322; Spurgeon, 94). The narrative even notes the boy’s discarded “Sharp’s fifty calibre” rifle,
bequeathed to his brother of twelve; a mass-produced object made obsolete and worthless after
the exhaustion of the Indian Wars and the slaughter of buffalo (323). The chapter situates the
historical continuity of the perpetual reiteration of the dance of history in the transition between
the harsh, adversary production of frontier life and an over-efficient, all-consuming industrial
capitalism.
Sara Spurgeon describes the scene in the bone wastes as the birth of a “new covenant...in
which man’s relationship to the wilderness” becomes “one of butchery on a scale scarcely
imaginable” and connects the novel’s representation of “the sacred hunter” with the “governing
myth of the new nation” that she recognizes in the novel’s perverse recasting of national
mythology of the American frontier (Spurgeon, 97-98). She regards the wasting of the buffalo
(and the industry that springs up from the waste) as the “logical culmination” of the geopolitical
and biopolitical agenda the judge announces earlier in the novel: “only nature can enslave man
and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him
will he be properly suzerain of the earth” (to which the judge adds “the freedom of birds is an
insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos”) (98, quoting McCarthy). Spurgeon considers the logic
that would have every life form “stand naked before it” as one that must destroy the world before
it can reign over it as “suzerain” and she connects this logic with the “pastoral paradox” Annette
Kolodny describes “at the heart of modern America’s relationship to the natural world”: “man
might, indeed, win mastery over the landscape, but only at the cost of emotional and
psychological separation from it” (98). She reads the novel’s narration of the encounter in the
wastes as evidence of the “inexorable force of myth” driving a figure of mankind “incapable of
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stopping, his actions governed, directed and justified by the myth his own deeds have reified”
(98). In the bone fields, we see the “governing mythology” of the nation state re-emerge as the
over-production of its reified edifice. Disconnected from the ecological catastrophes it wrought,
the national mythology of the frontier is reproduced through the perpetual destruction of its
object – the wilderness over which it claims dominion.
Spurgeon’s reading implicates the novel’s narrative form within the mythic figures it
animates in the retelling of history. The judge’s declaration of man as suzerain of the earth is
connected with the task of writing (he is recording specimens in his notebook), a task which
functions as “an attempt to bring everything under his control” by legislating that which would
disappear in the absence of the observer (Snyder, 130). The question of conservation is, for the
judge, entirely a question of representation, and the novel’s mythology is complicit with a
representational logic that seeks to reduce or render animal life within a symbolic economy
representing the entirety of nature. Indeed, the novel’s mythic reconstruction of the frontier
mimics this logic: the novel’s nostalgia is tinged by the impression of the irreversible destruction
of the object reproduced by its gaze. Of course, this nostalgia is no less tempered by a narrative
economy that adapts mimetic representations of a historical past within a mythology describing
the interminable ascent of divine war through the rampage of capitalism over the American
southwest. The representational logic that would consign all birds to zoos and either draw up
every creature in a ledger or expunge them from creation under the aegis of sovereign power is
reproduced by a narrative which mythologizes the mimetic rendering of animal capital to
aestheticize the development of a militant biopolitical order that would enslave nature within the
hermetic matrices of capitalist production. This to say that the novel’s symbolic production of a
nature subsumed within the arrangements of capitalist production reflects the material conditions
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which produce the ideology (the “social imaginary”) that sustains the rendering of animal
capital: the spectacle of animal capital represented in the novel’s closing scene animates a
biopolitical mythology in which the bios of the imperial state is produced in the mutual
antagonism between predatory wills of no fixed hierarchy. As such, the novel is both complicit
and concurrent with the rendering of animal capital, albeit in a mimetic mode somewhat
removed from the relations of production Shukin describes.
The slaughter of the bear, an ostensibly fictional scenario which the novel deploys to
suggest the sadistic triumph of industrial capitalist biopolitics over a mythological bestiary on the
stage of history, suggests the historical transition between modes of rendering fetishistic images
of animal life. We witness the transformation of animal signs from mythic figures grounding the
production of the bios in the ontology of nature to trafficable commodities grounding the
material production of a biopolitics that privileges the absolute convertibility of life as exchangevalue. Where, in an early episode, the mythic figure of a bear who attacks the filibusters acts “as
an avatar of the natural world”, carrying off a Delaware scout to an unknowable fate “like some
fabled storybook beast” (Spurgeon, 97, quoting McCarthy), the final scene recasts the mythic
power of animal signs as a function of the material relations brought to bear within the cruel
representation of the spectacle of animal capital.
The judge’s final remarks suggest the tangle of the material and the symbolic in the
ideological reproduction of a biopolitical mythology. His ambivalent language amplifies the
connection between the staging of the spectacle and its tropological content: the language of the
“floor of the pit” and “horror in the round” suggests war as a kind of theatre to be mastered by
those who would aspire to the dance of history. The judge himself aspires to the dance, and we
may assume that the bear’s murder spells the termination of a certain dance and its resumption
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by a new figure of history made in the mutant image of the monstrous judge. The bear,
previously standing in as an image for the mythic power of a consuming nature, is recast as a
slave rendered for barter, his life and death ultimately subject to the dispensations of property
law (indeed, his carcass attracts solicitors who would acquire the hide) (Spurgeon, 97; McCarthy,
333). The narrative’s deployment of this spectacle implicates the rendering of animal capital
(understood as the ideological deployment of animal signs in the material and symbolic
production of a participatory, “capitalized” nature) in the historical mythology which produces
the history of the nation as the taming of the frontier: the slaying of the bear becomes a spectacle
wherein a militant, industrious humanity is affirmed as the rightful heir and bearer of sovereign
power over the bare life of an “anthropophorous” bestiary; one wholly subsumed within the
economic and symbolic production of biopolitical modernity.
Jacqueline Scoones describes McCarthy’s tendency to illustrate “the magnitude of
sovereign power governing humanity [and explore] the ways individual life is imbedded in a
system that controls the collective ‘naked life’ of all” (Scoones, 132). In a footnote, Scoones
suggests that the Border Trilogy concerns an exceptional world (the Texas borderlands) where
“sovereign power...has achieved absolute power over life on earth through the law of nations”
and notes an interest in the “relationship between law and violence, how men construct laws in
order to control human nature, and the ways in which laws justify deaths in the name of life”
(152). Edwin Arnold highlights a line of dialogue in an early McCarthy screenplay that regards
language as part of the technological infrastructure of biopolitical authority: “language is a way
of containing the world. A thing named becomes that named thing. It is under surveillance. We
were put into a garden and we turned it into a detention center.” (Arnold, 37; quoting McCarthy).
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Both accounts suggest an abiding concern in McCarthy’s work with the biopolitical production
of a representational figure (mythic or historical) resembling homo sacer or bare life.
If we can discern the production of something like a figure of bare life in “Blood
Meridian”, it is in the final act. The judge describes the event as “a ritual which includes the
letting of blood”, suggesting something like a sacrifice. This would appear to disqualify the
episode as an example of the administration of bare life were it not for the judge’s hesitations
over “mock rituals” and his warning that “those honourable men who recognize the sanctity of
blood will become excluded from the dance” which thereby becomes “a false dance” (329; 331).
The paradoxical narration suggests the evacuation of the sanctity of life in a historical movement
whereby a falsehood or deception masks or distorts the severity of the operation of sovereign
power over life and death and effaces its essential violence. The murder of the bear appears as
an inconsequential casualty in the novel’s construction of the historical mythology of the nation:
“the great hairy mound of the bear dead in it its crinoline lay like some monster slain in the
commission of unnatural acts” (327). The bare life of the animal is produced by an ignoble
sacral logic which disregards the sanctity of life and death and their immanence to the production
of the bios.
An earlier scene aestheticizes the condition of animality common to the novel’s human
and non-human figures:
They struck up a fire about which they sat in silence, the eyes of the dog and of the idiot
and certain other men glowing red as coals in their heads where they turned. The flames
sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the
bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched
the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are
less without it and are divided from their origins...for each fire is all fires, the first fire
and the last ever to be. (244)
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Here the figure of humanity is unseated in the representation of zoe which observes a condition
of living common to the illuminated gaze of those creatures sitting in mute attendance before the
fire. They include domestic animals, an impoverished feral human taken under the perverse
ward of the judge, the mercenaries in the judge’s company and the travellers under their escort.
One might be tempted here to point towards the novel’s singular reference to “optical
democracy”, a phrase Dana Phillips regards as the novel’s intimation of “the equality of being
between human and non-human objects” (Phillips, 443). Surely, the image suggests an essence
common to the creatures in attendance, but each one of these beings is subsumed within the
biopolitical hierarchy. The bios bleeds across the zoe. Indeed, several, including the dog and
“the idiot”, are slaves. McCarthy’s optical democracy does not appear to extend political
recognition beyond the concern of a mercenary capitalist utility. Blood Meridian’s chief image
of biopolitical power is that of blood flowing through the spatio-temporal meridian of a
sovereign power made in the image of global empire. This image would appear to describe
something like bare life, but the novel universalizes this image as the immanent condition of a
universal ontology. The representation of all life, with humanity at the apex, as Gnostic fire in
the heart of matter thrumming with the pulse of eternity entirely de-historicizes the conditions in
which the subject and object of biopolitics are produced.
The novel leaves us with the impression, à la Agamben’s critique of Kojève in “The
Open”, of a humanity that “is not a biologically defined species” nor “a substance given once
and for all”, but “a field of dialectically tensions always already cut by internal caesurae that
every time separates...‘anthropophorous’ animality and the humanity which takes bodily form in
it” (Agamben, 12). The bare life the novel describes appears as component of the biopolitical
body produced by the novel’s historical mythology, and the mythology which animates the
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spectacle of slaughter as the dance of history is the same mythology that grounds the discursive
construction of the modern biopolitical state. The body of the slave, the “anthropophorous
animal”, is incorporated within the novel’s material production of the ideology (again, “social
imaginary”) that constructs and sustains “capitalized” nature through the spectacle of man’s
ceremonial triumph over “beast” on the stage of history.
McCarthy’s narrative presents a universe in which the wasting and destruction of life is
always subject to an economy of necessity which recognizes the irreducible contingency of every
object, event and encounter. As such, the novel represents an “immanent”, atavistic biopolitics
of the utmost instability, where the avarice of commerce ultimately determines questions of
right, typically through the exercise of violence, the outcome of which is never settled by any
predetermined biological hierarchy. In doing so, McCarthy’s a-historical vision of the Southwest
in the mid 19th century profoundly upsets the racialized schematic of a dignified human
civilization holding dominion over every beast of the field. Instead, we see a figure of humanity
perpetually constituted and reconstituted in relation to the adversary object of its antagonism; an
antagonism which always threatens to unseat (or upstage) the dominant power. We are left with
an anthropocentric mythology of history that reproduces an ideology that posits a demiurgic
power of creation endowed in equal part in the wilderness of nature and that machinery of
capitalist exploitation which would destroy it. The novel leaves us with the image of a humanity
enslaved to both natural domination and the domination of nature. As such, the novel reproduces
the symbolic and material relationships which construct the subject of biopolitical sovereignty
and extends the exceptional ideology which reconstitutes the bios in the always-already mimetic
image of the zoe.
18
In the final chapters of the novel, the kid hallucinates a visit from the judge while
recovering from surgery in hospital bed in San Diego. After reading in the judges’ eyes “whole
bodies of decisions not accountable to the courts of men”, the kid’s delusion transforms: “the
fool was no longer there but another man...an artisan and a worker in metal” (310). Seeking
“favour with the judge”, this “coldforger...hammering out...some coinage for a dawn that would
not be...is at contriving from cold slag...a face that will pass, an image that will render this
residual specie current in the markets where men barter” (310). The phantasm confirms the
judge as both arbiter of the state of exception which administers bare life and conspiring patron
in an enterprise of false transcendence which would render the ultimate equivalence and
exchangeability of life as commodity. The pun on “residual specie” confirms the novel’s
investment in a biopolitical mythology of capitalist history which would render all life as
common stock: the kid’s dream anticipates the rise of a market society that reduces all substance
to exchange value. We glimpse the birth of a world where the likeness of kind is a property of
the material and symbolic relations which produce the mythology that sustains biopolitical
power.
19
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