ABSTRACT
Rene Descartes views on animals are readily simplified, even traduced, but the standard interpretation of the Cartesian method has not been much more than modified. Human sovereignty arguably descends from the very possibility of a property right in animals, conferring as it does so an historical life that is denied to those constitutive others who possess only a brute, creaturely, existence. In social theory and social history, to take a different tack entirely, agency can be conceived of as the complement and correction to an overweening emphasis on the structuring power of 'society' or 'culture'. Attempts to avoid both the anthropocentric abstractions of moral philosophy and the etiolated conception of agency derived from classical social theory might be pursued by looking to work on agency and action in the behavioural and life sciences, and beyond. Flies and bedbugs, rats and roaches are not, to return to Matthew Candelaria's paean to nonhuman animal agency, 'free of human bondage'.
