ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of the animal in the works of contemporary Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière; while animals and animal imagery are omnipresent in Laferrière’s texts, this question has not been addressed in previous scholarship. The chapter brings together theoretical strands from posthumanism and animal studies in order to rearticulate the status of bare life. Throughout Laferrière’s quasi-autobiographical novel cycle, I argue, the human’s proximity to animals serves to break down not only the hierarchical binary between the two but also the distinction betweenzoeandbios, between “mere life” and “more life.” For Laferrière, bodily or even bare life existence is not antithetical to meaningful living; rather, it represents the essential part of human experience that has been occulted by Western traditions of rationality. In taking animals seriously, Laferrière’s work ultimately allows us to make a claim for the validity of the bodily and the arational—contesting the reductivist logic of Agambenian bare life and reimagining sheer material aliveness as a potential site of (political) power.
