I am a vine
creeping down the moon
I have no keeper
–Gloria Anzaldua Borderlands, 196
There is no settling for the nonhuman. It is always turning, forever in transit, fugitive, beating with its hooves both marking and making the ground with every movement. We can use Schenchner’s formulation of the not/not; I am not human, yet I am not/not human. A vision that blurs the given signifier put upon bodies as ‘human’ into an unnamable, unmappable kind of body. Existing as a foil to the preconceived, preconstructed notion of the ‘human’, nonhuman animation moves in radical opposition to the normatives this signifier assumes. In turning nonhuman there is no destination, no place to turn to or into, but rather it is a petition to acknowledge that we have not settled on human. To face the reality that the promise of ‘human rights’ is a flawed one, and one continues to exist as object within an institutionalized life. This is a life bifurcated, in constant states of betweenness, fluctuating through different abilities and negotiated positions.
The nonhuman is never not human, it is a contrast to enlightenment’s vision of the human. In other words the nonhuman couldn’t exist without the notion of the ‘human’, it is in its disavowal that another kind of connectivity is developed, another kind of presentness. In reference to the captives presented to the Spanish court in 1493 Taylor observes their presence in an objectified state, “Present, yes, but present as strange, inhuman objects.” (Taylor, 10) The nonhuman turning makes this reality not so strange, and addresses the reclamation of objecthood. This reclamation creates an awareness, a presentness that the body is and can be used as an object in contemporary society. It is an awareness that our physical body and the biopower it produces can be monetized at the ruthless hands of corporate entities. It is not a ‘free’ body but rather a body who is constantly seeking freedom through the cracks of normative semantic fabrics.
The nonhuman is, “the eternal absentee” (Paz, 45) whose presence is always felt in the absence of the ‘human’. It is what is forgotten and omitted, overlooked and under-common. It is the felt absence of a’humanity’ never received, the lack of this promise, a frontier-like nostalgia for a concept never actualized. Its definition can encompass the animal, the alien, the thing, the object, the environment, dissolving the boarder between what is simply human and not. You can be a creature of darkness or the vine creeping down, because there are no essential boarders to what the body can become.
Taylor, Diana. "¡Presente!" ¡Presente!. 1-46. New York: NYU, 2018. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Boderlands: La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987. Print.Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1985. Print.