An Anguished Self-Subjection:
Man and Animal in Werner
Herzog’s Grizzly Man
Stefan Mattessich
Santa Monica College
Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who no
longer have any essence or identity—who are delivered over, so to
speak, to their inessentiality and their inactivity—and who grope
everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an
inheritance and a task, an inheritance as task?
Giorgio Agamben
The Open
Werner herzog’s interest in animals goes hand in hand with his
interest in a Western civilizational project that entails crossing and displacing borders on every level, from the most geographic to the most
corporeal and psychological. Some animals are merely present in a scene;
early in Fitzcarraldo, for instance, its eponymous hero—a European in
early-twentieth-century Peru—plays on a gramophone a recording of his
beloved Enrico Caruso for an audience that includes a pig. Others insist in
his films as metaphors: the monkeys on the raft as the frenetic materialization of the conquistador Aguirre’s final insanity. Still others merge with
characters: subtly in the German immigrant Stroszek, who kills himself
on a Wisconsin ski lift because he cannot bear to be treated like an animal
anymore or, literally in the case of the vampire Nosferatu, a kindred spirit
ESC 39.1 (March 2013): 51–70
Stefan Mattessich
holds a ba in literature
from Yale and a
doctorate in literature
from the University of
California, Santa Cruz.
In 2002 he published a
monograph on Thomas
Pynchon, Lines of Flight
(Post-Contemporary
Interventions Series,
Duke UP), which was
a finalist for the mla
First Book Award. Since
then he has published
numerous articles on
contemporary literature
and culture in such
venues as differences,
New Literary History,
Modern Language Notes,
ELH, and Theory and
Event. He teaches English
at Santa Monica College
in Southern California.
to bats and wolves. But, in every film, Herzog is centrally concerned with
what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine” running at the heart
of that civilizational project, which functions to decide on the difference
between man and animal.
This decision entails separation but also proximity, hierarchy but also
genetic homology, particularly in the context of a contemporary (social)
Darwinian Weltanschauung and its correlative extension of technocratic
biopower into the whole of the animal (and natural) realm—a context
in which, as Agamben succinctly puts it, “The total humanization of the
animal coincides with a total animalization of the human” (The Open 77).
In the space of this chiasmus, things in their closed forms reveal a nonself-identity or determinate negation that indexes the crisis of historical
reflection and purpose to which Agamben refers in the epigraph. He suggests the depth of this crisis when he sees the locus of decision on this
chiasmic space as also in it—to shift into a political register, the decision
presupposes the state of exception on which it also bears or which it also
brings into existence. “Sovereign power” is expressed as a law that annuls
itself in being reduced to a tactic (let us say, of a war on terror), but it also
finds its legitimacy in the subject—homo sacer—to whom it is applied by
not applying, by virtue of its suspension. “At the two extreme limits of the
order” in question here, he writes, “the sovereign and homo sacer [bare
life] present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and
are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are
potentially homini sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom
all men act as sovereigns” (Homo Sacer 84). If the sovereign who takes the
law into his own hands is “correlative” with the subject on whom this law
bears, it is only because the subject’s personal sovereignty—its essence
or identity—has become an illusion. If homo sacer is foreclosed from and
for the sake of the sovereign as its vanishing other, so too sovereignty is
foreclosed to homini sacri, felt in a phantasmal law as at once a prohibition
(a “ban”), a withdrawal of protection (an “abandoning”), and a giving over
(in “abandon”) to its arbitrariness. Agamben writes, “Everywhere on earth
men live today in the ban of a law and a tradition that are maintained solely
as the ‘zero point’ of their own content, and that include men within them
in the form of a pure relation of abandonment” (Homo Sacer 51).
Agamben is not speaking here only of sovereign power at its “extreme
limits.” This “pure relation” at the “zero point” of law and tradition in fact
more persuasively describes the citizen in the extra-territoriality of its
globalization, “everywhere on earth” caught in a dual process of homogenization and polarization that alters the terms of identity on political,
52 | Mattessich
economic, social, and psychic levels. A privileged cultural register for this
experience is not by accident zombies or vampires, since in its combinations of motion and arrest, qualified and unqualified substance, bios and
zoe, man and animal, the type of homo sacer becomes one who “can be
killed but not sacrificed,” removed from the possibility not only of meaning but of apprehension (or revelation) as a “being” tout court. Again, this
indiscernibility is not an exception but a rule, a way to understand those
new terms on which identity is negotiated, and as such both normative
and constitutive; at its heart we find an “anthropological machine” producing the human by “recognizing” it, Agamben says, in the “non-man”
(The Open 26–27).
Herzog offers a particularly striking example of this global man, or
animal, in his aptly titled 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, which tells the
story of Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor from Los Angeles who traveled
every summer for thirteen years to Alaska’s Katmai National Park as a
self-styled animals rights activist and environmentalist. Treadwell lacked,
however, training and education for either role, and his motives turn out to
have more troubled roots, namely in that “abandonment” by, to, and of his
social world. As his motives develop into a more and more aberrant desire
“to be a bear,” as Herzog laconically puts it, they also bring the operative
principles of the anthropological machine to a breaking point. In the fall
of 2003, after an altercation with an airline agent on his way back to Los
Angeles, Treadwell returned against his own better judgment with his girlfriend, Amy Hueguenard, to the national park, where both were killed by
one of the wilder bears he knew there. The wilful and senseless character
of this event is jarring to say the least. One isn’t sure how to respond: with
disbelief, sadness, and forgiveness or coldness and dismissal. In mixing up
tragic and comic codes it passes finally into farce, suggesting once again
the condensations of (non)meaning or (non)identity that Agamben sees
as the product of that anthropological machine.
As such, the event also stands as more than an exception or an aberration; it tells us something about a social logic with which we typically
live. In what follows I link this logic to the drive that Lacan situated in a
disjunction between object and aim, underscoring in it a “plastic” capacity
to “find its aim elsewhere than in that which is its aim” and, in the “play of
substitutions” this entails, to obtain satisfaction in deflection, deviation,
or “drift” (he proposed the French dérive as a synonym for Freud’s Treib)
(The Ethics 110). This indifferent “aim” indicates a strange kind of “object,”
one caught up in a traumatic repetition oriented by an “absolute Other”—
finally the mother prohibited by the incest taboo—that can “be found at
An Anguished Self-Subjection | 53
the most as something missed” or in a state of “wishing” or “waiting” that
conjures only “its pleasurable associations” (52). Behind or around this
object, Lacan says, lies its inaccessible double, the “Thing,” as the principle of a “need” in the subject “to hallucinate his satisfaction” (138), to be
“deprived of something real” (150).
As I explore in more detail below, Treadwell’s relation to the roles he
played—activist and environmentalist—hinges precisely on this sort of
need. But he is not the only one in the documentary for whom this is true—
a fact of which Herzog is well aware. We feel it, for instance, in a statement
made by Warren Queeney, one of Treadwell’s friends (and another actor),
whom Herzog interviews for the film. “There’s an old story on the farm,” he
says, standing by palm trees near the Venice Beach boardwalk: “If it doesn’t
scare the cows, then who cares? Well, Timmie wasn’t scaring the cows, so
who cares?” This is meant as a defense of his friend, and the weight of
repetition in those last two words pulls the answer—“nobody”—away
from the judgment Queeney wants to contest. To care about Treadwell,
he implies, is not to care about his actions insofar as they were harmless,
the playing out of a fantasy, “no big deal.” But the polysemy of the word
“care” also opens up two further readings: that (not) caring in this way
meant nobody cared about Treadwell, not even Queeney, insofar as he
was another nobody, and that Treadwell was a nobody too, caught in the
same negative quantities and the same “play of substitutions” (or signifiers)
as everybody else. His death, then, perhaps especially in its senselessness,
highlights the drive-like dimension of the normal order in which Queeney
lives. He seems to intuit as much, at least for himself, when he admits to
Herzog that Treadwell haunts him: he didn’t “feel dead.”
Of course, Treadwell’s actions were harmful, most tragically for Amy
Huguenard, who is a special kind of “nobody” in the story, as we appreciate by the fact of Queeney (meanly? modestly?) excluding her from the
category of “cow.” Deliberately left off camera by Treadwell, who stylized
himself a loner on his expeditions, we see her full face only once, in footage taken shortly before she dies. “Veiled, obscured, unknown,” as Herzog
puts it, she functions as a representative of the “Thing” that orders the
field of speech and action for homini sacri like Treadwell, but also for
citizens like Queeney.
herzog assembled his documentary from a voluminous video archive
Treadwell left behind on his death. He also thought of himself as a filmmaker, although right from the first sequence, in which we see him, backed
by two idly grazing bears on an idyllic green meadow, speak to his camera
54 | Mattessich
as if in his own documentary (or reality television show), Herzog underscores the tenuousness of this identity, like all others, for him. Failure, we
sense, has indeed hit Treadwell hard enough to sever aim from object; even
when the identity is that of actor, and the aim to be what he could not be in
l.a., the shock continues to insinuate tentativeness into his efforts, pushing them more toward the private notations and experiments of a diary
written by someone with a lot of time on his hands (or an unemployed
actor). Failure also explains why he comes to Alaska, seeking, in the relief
from social pressure that a natural world affords, both the consolation
and opportunity that might set him right and make him “human” once
again. Oleg Gelikman, in a perceptive reading of Grizzly Man, recognizes
a pastoral mode at work here: Treadwell’s return to nature takes up the old
project of reconciling the conflicts and divisions of the human world. He
is thus a hero of the oxymoronic type proper to that poetic mode: typically
a “noble simpleton, mature child, [or] doglike human” who seeks “control
over the universe via omnipotent modes of thought” (1147).
Treadwell also comes to Alaska seeking a reflection of his dislodged status in the social world, his own in-humanity as someone not only deprived
of a role and a place but coping with roles and places that are inherently
in-human, reduced to a “bare life” for which the pastoral mode has indeed
become central.1 Hence, in that first sequence of the documentary the
bears in the background suggest a synecdoche for the camera; in their conspicuous indifference, in fact, they seem very like the audience that is not
listening or caring. They “frame” the framing activity in which Treadwell
is engaged at a point in mental space (the Big Other) from which he is
seen seeing himself or, rather, seeing this seeing of himself. In his analysis
of this first sequence, Gelikman notes a compression of background and
foreground in an “optical proximity” that is both spatial and symbolic
(1151). Another detail (not mentioned by Gelikman) supports this reading:
as Treadwell walks into the picture on activating the camera, he kneels
down and starts to tell us about the bears behind him. In the process he
obscures behind him one of the pair, so that, as he speaks in the plural, we
see only one; or, if we imagine the second to be, in that “optical proximity,”
absorbed in Treadwell’s body, what he says of them pertains as well to
him, as the other bear in the scene. Let us listen, then, to what he says. I
take the liberty of citing the monologue in its entirety, adding brief stage
directions to indicate corresponding gestures and tonal shifts:
1 Gelikman stresses the entrenched ideological dimension of the pastoral mode in
modern societies; in the narcissistic excesses of Treadwell’s ritual control over
nature he “feeds off the energies of a pastoral machinery” (1155).
An Anguished Self-Subjection | 55
He is thus a
hero of the
oxymoronic
type proper
to that poetic
mode.
I’m out on the prime cut of the big green. Behind me is Ed and
Rowdy, members of an up-and-coming sub-adult gang. They’re
challenging everything, including me. Goes with the territory.
If I show weakness … if I retreat, I may be hurt, I may be killed.
I must hold my own if I’m to stay within this land. Because
once there’s weakness, they will exploit it, they will take me
out, they will decapitate me, they will chop me up into bits and
pieces—I’m dead…. So far…. [He pauses, glances at them.]…
I persevere … “persevere?” … [He starts again.] Most times
I’m a kind warrior out here. Most times I am gentle, I am like
a flower, I am like a fly on the wall, observing, noncommittal,
non-invasive in any way. Occasionally I am challenged. In that
case, the kind warrior must, must, must become a Samurai,
must become … so formidable … so fearless of death … so
strong … that … you will win … you will win … so that even
the bears will believe … that you are more powerful. And in a
sense you must be more powerful if you are to survive in this
land, with the bear. No one knew that. No one ever friggin’
knew that there are times when my life is on the precipice of
death, and that these bears can bite, they can kill. And if I am
weak I go down. I love them with all my heart. I will protect
them. I will die for them. But I will not die at their claws and
paws. I will fight. I will be strong. I will be one of them. I will be
… master … [Freezes, bows his head.] … but still a kind warrior
… [Walking forward to the camera.] Love you Rowdy. [To the
camera.] Give it to me baby … that’s what I’m talking about,
that’s what I’m talking about, that’s what I’m talking about….
I can smell death all over my fingers.
Treadwell relates here a straightforward survival narrative for which the
bears offer a tension, a danger, a possibility of death. But the relevance
he seeks in his self-conscious fashion is not forthcoming because, in fact,
those from whom he seeks it are absent. We understand this absence to
be of other people when he refers to the “no one” who ever “knew” that he
is now “on the precipice of death.” This anomalous temporal shift suggests
past failures to attract attention or win recognition. Its unconsciousness
for Treadwell is, again, duplicated in the bears behind him (particularly
the bear occluded in him), who suggest that evaluative point from which
Treadwell wrestles with the vexed question of his identity in that other
l.a. world of ambition, competition, and zero-sum games.
Nature, then, is social in Grizzly Man. Literally, this is the case for the
animals we see—foxes as well as bears—that hang together in groups or
56 | Mattessich
“gangs” and as such indicate an only limited fitness in their function as
screens for the projection of an asocial human nature. Treadwell concedes
this lack of fit himself when the “Samurai” he plays in his survival narrative shifts to a “kind warrior” and the attribute of “perseverance” in the
face of death vacillates in his mind, leading him to attest other attributes
of gentleness, care, and love as well as other values of safety and security.
But that lack of fit is the same even when he projects a human sociality or
familialism. When he also plays at parenting, the animals he nicknames,
praises, minds, scolds, and instructs as if they were children remain as
uncomprehending as ever (if, admittedly, not always quite as indifferent).
We sense the character of the l.a. world to which Treadwell relates
in the field of the animals with a second temporal shift in his monologue,
from the conditional to the present tense, when he says, “I’m dead.” The
effect is uncanny enough when we know he is dead—literally decapitated
and chopped up. (Herzog gently pushes this effect by overlaying a caption,
just as Treadwell begins the monologue, indicating the year of his death.)
But it is more uncanny still when we understand him to mean not only that
his self-narrating drive is killing him but also that it has already killed him.
This latter inflection is brought out at a later point in the documentary,
in a remark to Herzog by a former girlfriend, Jewel Palovak, who says of
Treadwell and Amy Hueguenard, “They truly died doing what they lived
for.” She qualifies what she means as the praise of people “living life to
the fullest,” by which she implies following a dream, or something like a
regulative ideal, that makes their lives matter, that gives them substance.
The “truth” Treadwell and Huguenard lived is thus not simply established
by their death; death is what they were always “doing,” the signifier of a
relative or living death.
Jewel Palovak is not far here from the “bare life” that obtains under
what Agamben underscores as a sovereign power’s unconditional threat
of death, which is felt as an immanent law binding the subject by way of
an unconscious reproduction on corporeal levels of habit, disposition, and
perceptual-cognitive schemes. To be included in as excluded from the
space of political legibility entails, again, an internalization of sovereign
power as the empty form of your own personal sovereignty, functioning as a fantasy to deflect the more profound facts of social antagonism.
Treadwell hints at this empty form or fantasy in his sense of himself as
that Samurai, both outcast and rebel. In a different monologue he says of
himself, “I’m edgy,” and this phrase brings out another association: with
the wilderness that literally provides an “edge” for the outcast he is. His
edginess further discloses an uncertain corporeal identity in an admission
An Anguished Self-Subjection | 57
of prior problems with alcohol and drugs that his commitment to the
bears over the years has helped him quite literally to survive. His mindset
is that of someone going into rehabilitation or attending a gym—at still
another point he mentions having lost twenty pounds over one summer’s
expedition. This mindset is biopolitical in a slightly different sense than
I have emphasized thus far—indeed, it points to tensions in the concept
that might need more clarification here.
Agamben has been criticized for adhering to a notion of sovereign
power (cued to the state’s monopoly on violence) that weakens the inclusive exclusions or internal differences that control his account of political space as a state of exception.2 Foucault, by contrast, grounding this
political space in a generalized market society, distinguishes sovereign
power from a biopower that relies less on its “deductive” or “subtraction
mechanism” than on a direct generative fostering of individual and collective life.3 Biopower, for Foucault, “exerts a positive influence on life
[in] endeavor[ing] to administer, optimize, and multiply it” (History of
Sexuality 144). As such it rests not upon a threat so much as a “disqualification of death” (141) that is equally evident, we see, in the irony of saying
“I’m dead,” since it implies for Treadwell’s fantasy not only a living death
but an immortality (he tries to survive his own death). Foucault further
underscores for power, in the neoliberal paradigm of state disengagement,
a shift of function from simply limiting (or restraining) the “social irrationality” of market society to finding what he calls its own limitation in
it (Birth of Biopolitics 102). This suggests that the subject delimits power,
becoming the field of its exercise and the justification for a new managerial prerogative over its habits, feelings, intuitions, beliefs, and values—its
2 For an overview of the differences and also overlaps between Agamben and Fou-
cault on issues of biopolitics, power, law and norm, see Anke Snoek’s “Agamben’s
Foucault” (44–67).
3 Instead of a repressive “law” holding over the subject a power of life and death,
the internalized “norm,” and the normative space it governs, yields a “perspective regularity” in the subject that renders the law’s empty form immanent to
its spontaneous thought and action by synthetic rather than analytic means.
If in practice biopolitics coexist with sovereign power, it is not, as Agamben
maintains, because they are genetically linked at the origin of Western civilization’s project of self-governance, self-awareness, or autonomy; for Foucault,
rather, the first relates to the second as a tactic and in “demonic combinations”
(“Omnes et Singulatum” 311) that suggest uncertainty and instability more than
the necessity of an actualized tendency. Agamben has dismissed this critique
as “perfectly trivial” (Homo Sacer 87). It is not possible, he argues, to separate
juridico-institutional state power from biopower (6).
58 | Mattessich
“governmentality.” In this process, the subject identifies with a technocratic
authority exactly as the technocratic authority identifies with it.
If this process entails for the subject an internalization of the specialist’s evaluative “gaze” as well as its embrace of the self-monitoring “responsibility” it commands, Foucault locates it outside a “panoptic” discipline
associated with a prior historical stage in which sovereign power still
predominated; when the latter persists in a neoliberal context, it is in a
“demonic combination” (“Omnes et Singulatim” 311) with biopower that is
anachronistic (if hardly less effective or lethal) for the late modern state
form. The subject of that evaluative gaze appears, we might say, in a kind
of catachrestic split, seeing itself being seen as an administrative problem
and a statistical entity (part of a “population”).
As a consequence, we might still need, for a more precise registration of the psychic reality at stake in this split, the sort of psychoanalytic
rubric Lacan centres in the subject’s attempt to place the “I” where “it
was,” in the “passion of ” or “suffering from the signifier” that locates it in
a symbolic order (The Ethics 143). Lacan formalizes this attempt nicely in
a child’s locational confusion in the sentence: “I have three brothers, Paul,
Ernest, and me” (Four Fundamental Concepts 20). The inability to grasp
a difference between the I that counts and the I counted suggests a point
of generation (in symbolic order) for an imaginary coherence or plenitude
in the face of an accounting that leaves the subject as much out of the
account as l.a. has Treadwell. Between this point, or its gaze, in mental
space and the subject it constitutes, between the exclusion (or foreclosure) from and its inclusion in the account, Agamben sees a “dialectical
oscillation” expressing a paradoxical (non)identity, (non)belonging, and
symbolic (in)efficiency (Homo Sacer 177) that is not far from “demonic
combination” in the subject or in political space. But unlike Foucault, he
insists on the catechrestic split as an index of the decision (on the state
of exception, also on the articulation of bios and zoe, man and animal) or
“threat” that underscores in “bare life” a destitution that tends to drop out
of the positivism in Foucault’s account (at least for some of his adherents).
One register for a biopolitical condition in Grizzly Man appears in
Treadwell’s frustrations with women and his wavering sense of sexual
potency. These come through when, to rejoin the above cited monologue,
he demands that the camera “Give it to me baby”—the “it” being not only
the chance at sexual pleasure with others but sexual pleasure itself. The
camera then becomes curiously bisexual: it is a woman who gives herself
up to him, but it is also, as that agency which distributes sexual chances
or gives “it” to him, a man who promises and withholds, who castrates or
An Anguished Self-Subjection | 59
At stake is a
constitutively
impossible
“satisfaction”
that suggests, in
its normalizing
functions for the
subject, two
figures of
authority (or
primary object
choice).
feminizes in sticking “it” to him (or fucking him over). We are, of course,
clearly on psychoanalytic terrain here—specifically where the gaze, its
point in mental space, entails a question asked of the Big Other whose
desire is simultaneously an object and a cause of the subject’s desire. At
stake is a constitutively impossible “satisfaction” that suggests, in its normalizing functions for the subject, two figures of authority (or primary
object choice): the father, whose prohibitions hurt but also afford potential
recompense, situating the subject in a social and symbolic order, and also
the mother, whose curtailments of the satisfaction she herself supplies
is experienced as particularly arbitrary and unfair. The second but prior
maternal “no” generates, beyond or around the Big Other, a “Thing” that
combines the later paternal “no” (in its formative effect) with the earlier
pressure to do and not do. Both together produce in the subject an internalized authority that demands (on an “obscene” level) and punishes (on
the level of public law and order) the transgression of official moral codes.
In this sense, it forms what Lacan calls the “ferocious figure” (The Ethics
7) of a superego whose paradoxical injunction is to “Enjoy!”4
The latter accords well, of course, with the kind of authority claim
made by technocratic experts in promising happiness and health. Foucault
identifies, at the origin of biopolitics, the figure of a shepherd who manages his flock in accordance with a pastoral power (“Omnes et Singulatim”
303). This power underlies, in a neoliberal “art of government,” the search
for a “principle of … organization in the application to society of a schema
of rationality specific to nature” (Birth of Biopolitics 115).5 The kind of
care or even love at stake in this schema, however, also suggests a locus
of maternal solicitude (for children qua infantilized citizens) that Lacan
associates, again beyond or around that point in mental space of the Big
4 Lacanian critic Juliet Flower MacCannell gives a useful gloss of this double
imperative in the sadistic superego, which
tells you that the enjoyments you lack are nonetheless owed to you.
It then challenges you to go ahead and take your portion—”Enjoy!”
But (this is the sadistic part) you can do so only under conditions
that would humiliate you in front of others. The obscene superego
is what induces your enjoyment and punishes you for it at the same
time. If its voice touches you in your heart, it also stains you on
your surface. It is the postmodern form of guilt. (Hysteric’s Guide 9)
5 “The shepherd acts, he works, he puts himself out, for those he nourishes and
who are asleep,” Foucault writes. “He watches over them. He pays attention to
them all and scans each one of them. He’s got to know his flock as a whole, and
in detail. Not only must he know where good pastures are, the season’s laws,
and the order of things; he must also know each one’s particular needs” (“Omnes
et Singulatim” 303).
60 | Mattessich
Other, with a “Thing” animating not so much desire in its foreclosed but
stabilizing satisfactions (or sublimations) as a “breakdown by means of
which a certain psychic function, the superego, seems to find in itself its
own exacerbation, as a result of a kind of malfunctioning of the brakes
which should limit its proper authority” (The Ethics 143).6 Lacan traces
the paradoxical functioning of this “broken machine” to its origin in the
ethical and erotic “testing” (150) that qualifies the idealized “Woman” of
courtly love poetry. In this “terrifying, inhuman” figure of judgment and
jouissance, a “demand to be deprived of something real” appears in a “signification of the gift of love” that is as overdetermined as the word for this
woman in Provençal: Domna, Lady, corresponding to the verb domnoyer,
in which Lacan hears the sense of “playing around” or “caressing” as well
as the connection with domination. Just as significantly for Lacan, the
first syllable is the same as the French don, “gift,” and suggests the action
of the verb donner, “to give” (150).
We can hardly maintain that Treadwell is thinking of this history in
the “it” his sexualized camera (or “baby”) “gives” him. But he is caught in
a certain “abandon” before an arbitrary law that binds the subject to its
sadistic superego or, more specifically, to its obscene (or prelinguistic)
“beyond” or “other” (Lacan speaks of an “Other of the Other” here [66]) in
the will not to be anything more than a role. This, in turn, opens Treadwell
to the drive in its homeostatic “isolation from reality” and its affirmation
of a hallucinatory need or satisfaction that, for Lacan, is always met in
the pressure or urgency of a “state of emergency in life”—also at a “margin” or an edge (46). The law governing this state of emergency—again
the prohibition against incest—controls the situation and conduct of the
subject in socio-symbolic structures, and Treadwell would be as such only
one instance of the typical case, turning himself into the sign or object of
a regulated exchange on an unconscious level where desire and law are
fused. Indeed, Treadwell as such also exemplifies the shift of these structures of exchange into a state of exception on, precisely, the biopolitical
register of a “return to nature” (in, for Lacan as well, an “archaic form of
the pastoral” [88–89]).7
6 The “moral conscience,” Lacan says, further specifying the malfunction here,
“shows itself to be the more demanding the more refined it becomes, crueler and
crueler even as we offend it less and less, more and more fastidious as we force
it, by abstaining from acts, to go and seek us out at the most intimate levels of
our impulses and desires” (89). The situation worsens, of course, when our “acts”
involve giving in to impulses and desires rather than abstaining from them.
7 Treadwell stands for all of us as a kind of “everyman,” that is, insofar as we inhabit
what Slavoj Žižek calls a shift in contemporary global society from desire to
An Anguished Self-Subjection | 61
Along parallel lines, Juliet Flower MacCannell identifies in the subject a
“perverse reason” working on two levels: where it holds back from the field
of a universal legibility (or “symbolic seeming”) in a “skepticism regarding the law, including the law of sexual difference,” and where it evinces
a strong allegiance to the “absolute jouissance” of the mother” (18–19),
expressing thereby a “Law more implacable than that of sexuation, the Law
of Nature” (30). MacCannell’s primary focus in this account is the woman’s
(hystericized) relation to this “Law” (instantiated not in either parent but in
the figure of the male “pervert” qua eroticized type of the “total man” in a
post–Oedipal society), where she finds a dynamic of “permanent deferral”
from symbolic order. But insofar as this withdrawal or inhibition before
the “Thing” is central to that symbolic order, she goes on to posit a generally commodified “fantasy structure” in which both women (hysterics)
and men (perverts) experience “permanent deferral” as the structure of
identification itself, a condition of belonging in postmodern societies (9).
Here we have the best register for Treadwell’s “kind warrior,” who is
suspended not just between Samurai and parent, or between father and
mother, but also between male and female—more than once Treadwell
adverts to his sexually uncertain status, describing himself at one point
as “passive” and a “patsy.” On all these registers, Treadwell’s perversity is
grounded in the animals he fights and fights to protect, since they hold
down that “Law of Nature” and, in it, the sadistic superego with which he
is identified. This is obvious in the case of the bears, who aptly designate
its internalized authority as the Big Other’s gaze (in the background—and
in Treadwell—again as a kind of synecdoche for the camera). They are the
ones who castrate, who “decapitate” and “chop me up into bits and pieces.”
But the maternal side of this superego is also stressed in the documentary,
notably in Treadwell’s relationship to his mother, relayed by Herzog in
home movies of her and him as a child playing with pets. The connection is
sustained again in an interview that shows the mother hugging a childhood
teddy bear Treadwell routinely took with him on his expeditions to Alaska.
Nothing in this relationship, or in the mother, suggests the sort of polysemy Lacan spots in the Lady of courtly love. But the affective bond does
drive, from “the lost object to the loss itself as an object” that, in its negative
quantity, “gap,” or “distance,” is “directly enacted” in reality (Defense of Lost
Causes 328). In her recent work, political theorist Jodi Dean has persuasively
argued for this (im)material “Real” as the condition sine qua non of a communicative capitalism characterized by compulsive and compulsory relations to
digital media (like Treadwell’s camera). See, most recently, Blog Theory: Feedback
and Capture in the Circuits of Drive.
62 | Mattessich
hint at the strong allegiance to a maternal jouissance that folds Treadwell
into the biopolitical imperatives to care that govern his social world. Their
regulative function for his drive appears obliquely in another scene, one
not involving bears. In what begins as an idyllic moment at his campsite,
two young foxes scamper around, playfully interacting in the spirit more of
pets than wild animals. When one of them steals away with his hat and he
chases after, however, Treadwell’s sweetness segues quickly into hectoring
anger. Just as he warns the fox that it better not have taken the hat into its
den, where we surmise it will disappear forever, he comes suddenly upon
it, pointing his camera into its dark hole, which fills the screen with its
suggestion of arbitrary “enjoyment.”
This hole, this lack or gap, is central to what Herzog calls Treadwell’s
“darkest human turmoil.” In its structuring relation to his “Thing,” it generates the cliché, the sentimentality, and the increasingly bizarre behaviour
that attend Treadwell’s efforts to actualize the transcendence he wants in
his life. Herzog also detects its influence in more unstudied moments of
Treadwell’s footage, in the pauses and non sequiturs, in the sudden confessions of doubt and loneliness, and above all in the stretches between
takes when the camera is inadvertently left to record things like the idle
improvisations of animals or the breeze running through trees and brush.
At these points of suspension in the relation to a sadistic superego, Herzog
himself begins to feel how a “perverse reason” is more than just Treadwell’s
problem, how its deferral structures the emptiness of all social roles, not
just those he plays. This is why Herzog often lets the camera roll after the
people he is interviewing about Treadwell finish speaking. Such awkward
stretches, in the stylistic parallel they make with Treadwell’s own filmmaking, shift the locus of an animal nature once again into the human world.
They suggest, in the loneliness of suburban parents, waitresses, coroners,
or helicopter pilots, Treadwell’s same self-stylizing need to fill the voids
that lie around and within such limiting social identities.
In addition, Herzog implies Treadwell’s fantasy structure in their realism, especially when it converges with the abstraction Heidegger sussed
out with his term Bestand: nature defined as an undifferentiated “standing reserve” of energy available to be exploited and consumed. When, for
instance, Sam Egli, the helicopter pilot who transports the remains of
Treadwell and his girlfriend back to civilization, asserts that Treadwell “got
what he deserved” even if he meant well “helping with the resource of the
bears,” his sympathy betrays its own falsity; the same goes for a biologist
whose professed understanding of Treadwell’s desire to “become a bear”
is accompanied by monotonously cited statistics about the health of the
An Anguished Self-Subjection | 63
“bear population” in Alaska. This rationalism characterizes what Herzog
observes in the film is Treadwell’s “implacable enemy,” the “people’s world
and the larger civilization” for which he has “only mockery and contempt.”
But if Herzog reproves Treadwell for this “struggle,” he also leaves it tacitly
for us to infer its autonomous drive in the rationalism it appears to contest.
Its enemy, or backdrop, is, after all, just as implacable. Herzog calls it the
“overwhelming indifference of nature” that is all he personally sees in the
“blank stares” of the grizzly bears—the same internalized emptiness, void,
hole, or lack that both constitutes and disrupts Treadwell’s identity. There
is no “secret world” of the bears, Herzog avers, only a human nature that
indexes the “common denominator of the universe,” which is not for him
the “harmony” Treadwell presumed in it but only “chaos, hostility, and
murder.”8 Oleg Gelikman argues that this aversion to nature—this “sentiment of indifference”—in Herzog commits him to that rationalism and
precisely in its tacit need for a human “empathy.”9 But it is not clear that
Herzog simply sides with the likes of Sam Egli or the biologist either. In
the distance they put between themselves and Treadwell, they miss the
image of human society that Herzog is also trying to depict.
herzog’s uncompromising—Gnostic or Manichean—view on nature
and human nature brings us back to the question of care or, rather, to a
question—who cares?—that points in the answer to a “nobody” that cannot separate caring from not caring (like Warren Queeney). It helps us,
moreover, to remember that the internal split or difference in the concept
of care is the same for the fantasist as for the realist, for homo sacer as
for the expert or specialist (for the filmmaker or spectator as well), each
under the sway of a “pastoral” return to nature, a perverse reason, and
hallucinatory drive that reduces the sublimations (of desire’s lost object)
to a self-destructive repetition (of loss as itself the object or “thing”). Is
there a possibility in the order of biopolitics, the state of exception, for
a different kind of care? In Grizzly Man, Herzog gives no answer, but
he does hint at one in those unstudied moments of Treadwell’s footage,
their inadvertency and indirection pointing to a “drift” in the drive that
8 This sentiment is of long standing for Herzog; see its fuller explication in an inter-
view in Les Blank’s 1982 documentary on Herzog and the filming of Fitzcarraldo
and also at various points in Herzog’s book The Conquest of the Useless.
9 In the terms of his argument, “The vehemence of Herzog’s rebuttal” of Treadwell,
in the name of a more profoundly indifferent nature, betrays itself as “part of
the pastoral scheme.” “The sentiment of indifference presupposes an irreducible
demand for empathy” (1159).
64 | Mattessich
precipitates its self-destructive character into a different relation to the
world. Art is Herzog’s answer, in other words, even if it cannot, or at least
any longer, claim the sort of sublimation that would redeem its drive from
the destructive forces that determine it.
Let me come at this different relation from another register on which
the question of care has been unfolded, that found in the work of Heidegger, which is also very much concerned with the articulation of man
and animal in Agamben’s “anthropological machine.” Care is central, in
Being and Time, to a finite and conditioned freedom that is experienced
in either of two modes: as an inauthentic identification with the particular
predicates and demands of a given situation (an “existentiell actuality”),
and as an authentic acknowledgement of the fundamental contingency, or
non-necessity, of one’s life (an “existential potentiality”). One relinquishes,
that is, the idea that subjection to those demands can be transcended, or
even rendered authentic, via those predicates, via actions and satisfactions
that the will undertakes. One lets “be” the permanent state of subjection
to “demand” itself as the disruption of identity, a non-self-identity felt as
internal otherness or self-difference, in a relation to one’s own finality or
death. In the structure of care that appears here, Heidegger derives a “voice
of conscience” that, in the gloss given it by philosopher Stephen Mulhall,
“is not so much concerned with the familiar phenomenon of an inner voice
blaming or praising our specific deeds … as with what must be the case
about us for that phenomenon to be possible” (Wounded Animal 103).
Mulhall locates what I have called the sadistic superego in the inauthentic
identification with a transcendence one actualizes through the death drive,
expressed, again, in Treadwell’s “ ‘I’m dead.’ ” Genuine conscience or care,
by contrast, “speaks against … our inveterate tendency to conflate our
existential potential with our existentiell actuality; what it silently opens
up is the human individual’s internal otherness, its relation to itself as other,
as not self-identical but rather transitional or self-transcending” (103).
Heidegger also links internal otherness to the animal, or to the animality in the human, which presents a resistance, withdrawal, and indifference
that Mulhall sees as a “revealing refusal of the world as such to go along
with the essentially situated and attuned comprehension of human beings”
(107).10 The animal’s “blank stare” thus helps us to the care that disturbs
our inauthentic acquiescence to mere brute necessity; it facilitates a break
with that necessity rather than necessity itself. Indeed, when we confuse
10 Heidegger’s phrase in Fundamental Concepts is also translated as a “telling
refusal” (139).
An Anguished Self-Subjection | 65
Art is Herzog’s
answer, in other
words.
these things in the animal, or in our own animality, we resist the stimulus
the animal gives us to a “discovery of beings in general as indifferent to
us and hence of us as indifferent to them” (107). Heidegger calls the state
so discovered “boredom,” and in its peculiar suspension of will, action, or
comprehension he finds a uniquely human possibility.
Paradoxically, this latter possibility consists of the resistance to the
animal that takes place in the effort to relieve the boredom, to stage or
narrate our lives. Thus, if Treadwell demonstrates this sort of resistance
to the animal in the way he uses the animal as a pretext or springboard
for transcendence, he also finds boredom in living or “being” with them.
One can therefore say that at some level he (or his drive) is seeking a way,
against himself and without knowing it, to accept the facticity of his existence, to make it the meaning he misses. In this regard his drive takes on a
distinctly reiterative or performative dynamic that is also inherently conflictual. Because resistance is always self-resistance, one does not suspend
this drive so much as let it fail of its own accord or in its own drift, error,
or mistake. As Judith Butler, one of the most persuasive contemporary
theorists of this ethic, puts it, “The more I narrate, the less accountable
I prove to be. The ‘I’ ruins its own story, contrary to its best intentions”
(Giving an Account 67).11
The animal is central to this possibility precisely, for Heidegger, in being
excluded from it. Lacking a “world” in its “environment,” it lives only with
an instinctive “captivation” or “absorption” in itself that precludes “every
apprehending of something as something” (Fundamental Concepts 247–
48). This withholding of a world does not mean the animal is “closed off ”
from it either, only “outside the possibility” of this “openness” altogether. It
does, nonetheless, suggest a paradoxical kind of present inaccessibility and
opacity that Agamben, reading these passages, calls an “openness in a nonrelation” and links to an “essential disruption” (again from brute necessity).
11 Butler elsewhere indexes this drive to a desire for the law that founds the self-
conscious subject on its own prohibition—“an odd form of preservation,” she
writes, “eroticizing the law that would abolish eroticism” (Psychic Life 103). By
adding this performative contradiction to a body conceptualized by Foucault
as co-extensive with discourse and by Lacan as sacrificed to a symbolic law, she
draws from its negativity the consequence of a repetitive (or reiterative) drive
that, because it always fails, for the same reason leaves open the possibility of
“inadvertently produced discursive complexity [that] undermines the teleological aims of normalization” (93). At stake in this “reiterability” for the subject
is less an “unconscious outside of power,” Butler avers, than “the unconscious
of power itself ” as it paradoxically grounds identity in an always singular and
open-ended contingency” (104).
66 | Mattessich
If for Heidegger this (non)openness forms the background against which
the human world stands out, it does so as well in an extreme proximity.
Boredom and captivation “resonate.” They entail a similar “abandonment in
emptiness” and a fascination with that which obstinately “refuses itself.” If
they differ it is only insofar as the human being can apprehend the animal
disruption as such. The human is “simply an animal that has learned to
become bored,” writes Agamben. “It has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation” (The Open 70).
As this awakening can never take a determinate form or mode except
that of a self-resistant betrayal, Treadwell can only hint at its human possibility (even as he fails in the right kind of failure). But as exemplary also of
the subject in a biopolitical order, he also tests the plausibility of the whole
account, throwing Heidegger’s distinctions into disarray. For Agamben,
indeed, they remain within the operative ambit of the anthropological
machine; the human “grasping of the animal not-open” qua a not-grasping
of the open, if it does not exactly synergize for Heidegger with the “animalization of the human” that qualifies homo sacer (or the taking up “as a task”
by modern states of the very factical existence of peoples), does betray a
continuing hope for the sort of sublimation that would redeem the drive
in its indirection.12 Because nothing prevents the promise in boredom as
a state or mood from functioning as an ethical ruse, a dissimulation of
the “natural life” that now dominates the “people’s world,” authenticity can
always become just another fantasy.
For Agamben this indicates a need to think outside the anthropological machine altogether, to render it “inoperative.” He sketches such a
possibility—or pure potentiality—by reference to Benjamin’s reworking
of a Gnostic “separation” between nature and redemption (also revelation,
apprehension) as a space of non-knowledge, non-being, and also forgiveness. “Etymologists have always been left perplexed,” Agamben writes,
“when faced with the Latin verb ignoscere, which seems explicable as *ingnosco, yet which does not mean ‘not to know’ [ignorare], but rather ‘to
forgive.’ To articulate a zone of nonknowledge—or, better, of a-knowledge
[ignoscenza]—means in this sense not simply to let something be, but to
leave something outside of being, to render it unsavable” (The Open 91).
This forgiveness without salvation Benjamin continues to think in terms of
12 Heidegger was “the last to believe (at least up to a certain point, and not without doubts and contradictions) that the anthropological machine, which each
time decides upon and recomposes the conflict between man and animal,
between the open and the not-open, could still produce history and destiny
for a people” (75).
An Anguished Self-Subjection | 67
The death drive
here comes
from the space
of aesthetic (and
also ethical)
indeterminacy.
salvation: he finds the model for the form of thought at stake in its paradoxical space in works of art that disclose, in the “saved night” of nature,
“ideas” that would not be structured by externalized differences between
the human and the animal.13 These “ideas,” Agamben believes, “gather
creatural life not in order to reveal it, nor to open it to human language,
but rather to give it back to a closedness and muteness” that sustain an
“interval” or “reciprocal suspension” between the two terms and engender
something “neither animal nor man” (81). Agamben calls this something a
“new in-humanity” (83) and underscores as its principal quality a “transient
… rhythm of beatitude” (82).
Herzog sees in images that, as he puts it in Grizzly Man, “take on a
life of their own” and assume “their own mysterious stardom” in inadvertency, something of the “in between” character that Agamben assigns to
the state of “separation.” He also acknowledges that Treadwell produced
such images, even if he did not know it, even if he was caught fatally in
the reflex of an anguished self-subjection that kept him from knowing it.
But Herzog does not place as much hope in the “new in-humanity” that
art—even his art—might hold out. His pessimism finds fresh proof in
the fact that Treadwell inadvertently recorded the sounds of his and his
girlfriend’s death, a camera having been in operation (with its lens cap still
on) when the attack occurred. The death drive here comes from the space
of aesthetic (and also ethical) indeterminacy, as a “Law” in nature that
haunts, if it does not constitute, both the “glamour” of our images and our
new in-humanity. For this reason Herzog, listening through headphones
to their screams and moans in Jewel Palovak’s l.a. home, asks her to turn
it off, declares emphatically that “she should never listen to this,” and recommends that the tape be destroyed. In the limit it suggests both for and
also of art itself, Herzog can only insist on a denial or disavowal without
any redemption or “salvation” for or in the drive, Treadwell’s or anyone’s.
He opts for a “separation” more typical of the Gnostic (or Manichean)
aversion to a demiurgic nature.
To his credit, Herzog lets the most troubling implications of this decision not only pull him into Treadwell’s self-destructive investments in
arbitrary power but also pull those investments toward their most troubling contemporary edge. In one of the final sequences of the film, Herzog
shows us this edge in an “incandescent” rage Treadwell directs at the park
rangers and government officials who place limits on his “freedom” in the
13 Agamben quotes from Benjamin’s letter to Florens Christian Rang, 9 December
1923, reproduced in Selected Writings (389).
68 | Mattessich
wilderness. Their regulations rouse him to libertarian rants on the evils of
government that are infused with the same sexual frustrations and castration anxieties we have seen already in the film. He turns his “struggle”
or drama into a game he wins, repeatedly saying (and in repeated takes
as well) to his camera, “I beat you, I beat you motherfuckers.” It is in this
defiant spirit that he returns on his final expedition (after the altercation
at the airport) to Kitmai National Park, thus setting up the conditions for
the fatal attack. Amy Huguenard, meanwhile, increasingly trapped in his
self-destructive drive, emerges, in her relation for him to its structural void
or lack, as the true object as well as victim of his “motherfucking” rage.
Treadwell reminds Herzog here of Klaus Kinski, whose titanic “struggles” on the sets of the movies they did together (like Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre) are legendary; by extension, Herzog also associates Treadwell with the
colonialism Kinski embodied so well, not to say that neocolonialism with
the anti-statist right-wing populism that attends today’s autonomous corporato-financial power and generalized war. Herzog endorses none of this,
but the distance between him and Treadwell/Kinski is nonetheless also
a proximity. Again, Gelikman finds it in Herzog’s aversive relation to the
animal’s “blank stare,” which engenders an identification with Treadwell
that ironically commits him, not to the self-destruction he clearly observes
and condemns but to the sentimentality he also dismisses in the name of
that aversive relation (“Cold Pastoral” 1159). I am not sure how far to take
this. Nature’s indifference is still a social indifference in Grizzly Man, and
the sentimentalized violence Herzog might understand as natural still
qualifies a civilizational project as perverse, indeed psychotic. However
pessimistic he might be about any other than an inescapable complicity in
this project, his accounting of it still preserves a distinction between brute
necessity and the break with its inauthentic (existentiell) actuality. If he is
not exactly thinking in nature’s “saved night,” where Benjamin finds “ideas”
that fall outside Agamben’s anthropological machine, he is understanding
art to entail concern for what “must be the case about us” (as Mulhall puts
it) for the voice of conscience to take a sadistic form. Indeed, in attending
to this concern, Herzog has few peers.
Works Cited
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An Anguished Self-Subjection | 69
———. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford
up, 1998.
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926. Trans. Rodney
Livingstone. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings. Cambridge:
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Judith Butler. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford up, 1997.
———. Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham up, 2005.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. Trans. G. Burchell. New York:
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———. History of Sexuality, vol.1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage,
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———. “Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason.”
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Gelikman, Oleg. “ ‘Cold Pastoral’: Werner Herzog’s Version of Empson.”
mln 123.5 (December 2008): 1141–62
Grizzly Man. Dir. and written by Werner Herzog. Discovery Channel. 2005.
Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Trans. J.
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Lacan, Jacques. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan
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———. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Seminar vii. Trans. Dennis Porter.
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MacCannell, Juliet Flower. The Hysteric’s Guide to the Future Female Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Mulhall, Stephen. The Wounded Animal: J. M. Coetzee and the Difficulty
of Reality in Literature and Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton up, 2009.
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Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2009.
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