The Love of The Wolf (Derrida)

Edinburgh University Press
Chapter Title: The Love of the Wolf
Book Title: Derrida and Other Animals

Book Subtitle: The Boundaries of the Human
Book Author(s): Judith Still
Published by: Edinburgh University Press. (2015)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt16r0jrr.6
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Derrida and Other Animals
This content downloaded from 62.204.213.86 on Mon, 11 May 2020 11:34:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
3
The Love of the Wolf
As soon as you speak of loving there he is.

[. . .] In what way is the wolf lovable? It is not the wolf species that
we love, it is not the wolf. It is a wolf, a particular wolf, a wolf-but, a
surprise-wolf. (Cixous, ‘Love of the Wolf’, 88–90)
Dès qu’on parle d’aimer il est là.
[. . .] Par où le loup est-il aimable? Ce n’est pas la race des loups que nous
aimons, ce n’est pas le loup. Il s’agit d’un loup, un certain loup, un loup-
mais, un loup-surprise. (Cixous, ‘L’Amour du loup’, 24–5)1
The question of gender and sexual difference will cross all the others.
(Derrida, Beast 2, xiii)
La question du genre (gender) et de la différence sexuelle traversera toutes
les autres. (Derrida, Bête 2, 14)2
The first sentence or phrase of Derrida’s seminar series on The Beast
and the Sovereign, which formed the core of the last chapter, is quite
remarkable: ‘La. . . le’. This untranslatable couple of syllables, which
might sound like a stutter, an inauspicious start, is initially translated
into English as ‘Feminine. . . masculine’ with the French original in
square brackets, which gets much closer to the connoted meaning
(drawing attention to the gender of ‘la bête et le souverain’) than the
sound or the literal meaning which might be rendered ‘the. . . the’.3
That rendition would lose not only the point but the subtle shift in
the repeated sound– not a tuneful ‘la. . . la’ or a standard repeated
definite article where the masculine prevails ‘le. . . le’, but ‘la. . . le’,
so close and yet so different in this particular language. The dreaded
gender mistake, failing to get the difference right, can be a point of
terror for many Anglophone students of French, or even Anglophone
teachers of French.4 English masks sexual difference at certain points
where French reveals it (the sexed object), and vice versa (the sexed
possessive); it also leans towards an objectification of the animal
as ‘it’ where French can only ever render ‘it’ as ‘il’ or ‘elle’, he or
she since there is no uniquely neuter pronoun in that language. The
language in which Derrida is speaking also permits another stutter,
110
sounding like ‘eh, eh’, which relates to the homophony in French

between the conjunction ‘and’ (et) and the copulative ‘is’ (est). ‘And’
could link together two completely unrelated things, perhaps the
beast and the sovereign, feminine and masculine; ‘is’ could suggest
ontologico-sexual attraction, the process of an identificatory meta-
morphosis, a liaison if not a hymen (Beast 1, 32–3; Bête 1, 59–60)–
Derrida later uses the English phrase ‘the odd couple’, which could of
course bring the reader back to ‘and’ (Beast 1, 137; Bête 1, 190). Just
as, at moments in Derrida’s exploration of linguistic and conceptual
possibilities, the beast is the sovereign, so the feminine can become
the masculine and vice versa– but these are moments. The lack of
fit between grammatical gender and gender signified here makes
language strain in a way that is hard to convey in English.5 Derrida
promises his audience, his pupils, echoing La Fontaine’s deferral in
‘The Wolf and the Lamb’, that he will, soon (‘tout à l’heure’), and,
following the animal, stealthily as a wolf (‘à pas de loup’), show them
the scene of sexual difference that his unconscious has been drawn to
in his choice of title for La Bête et le souverain. Yet it could be argued
that he does not quite make good his promise. For while he does,
unlike many commentators on sovereignty or indeed on animals or
beasts, persistently allude to the question of sexual difference, he
does not often bring it centre stage in this series of seminars, which
enables many of his readers to pass it over entirely.6 Yet even the
wolf– especially the wolf, who is fascinating with respect to politi-
cal writings throughout a long historical time span, which draw on
the wolf either as an image of man outside society (pre-social man,
the savage, the outlaw) or as an image of the bloodthirsty tyrant
– is gendered. Both the sovereign and the outlaw are traditionally
(hyper)-masculine even while either can deploy elements of feminin-
ity as part of the chain of significations they establish.7 Moreover the
wolf also figures in tales of relations between individuals, including
relations between the sexes in which young girls may be warned that
‘the worst wolves are hairy on the inside’ (Carter, ‘The Company of
Wolves’, 117).
Derrida does repeatedly point his audience towards the private
domain and to sexual difference– including regular and rhythmical
references to genre and gender (if only to draw our attention teas-
ingly to La Bête et le souverain), and citing, for example, Freud’s
Wolf Man, but this is much less developed in these seminars than
the political-philosophical aspect. I would argue of course that there
is always significant overlap between the two domains; and this is
111
Derrida and Other Animals
explicit in Derrida unlike many writers who are stricter in policing

boundaries. He presents the typically masculine figure of the sov-
ereign as Father, as paterfamilias, and vice versa; when following
Benveniste to track the word ipseity as the power to be recognised
as himself, the same-same, the proper, he indicates the etymological
links to master and husband (Beast 1, 66–7; Bête 1, 101–2). As noted
in Chapter 2, the wolf can be represented as all appetite, the one
who is going to eat you up, and thus the father (according to Freud),
but also the mother in the Wolf Man case history.8 Derrida tells us
of ‘The voracious violence of the wolf, who can also turn protec-
tive, paternal, and maternal’ (Beast 1, 80) (‘La violence vorace d’un
loup qui peut aussi devenir protecteur, paternel et maternel’ (Bête 1,
120)). Bruno Bettelheim picks up on this threatening (and then rescu-
ing) father in his interpretation of Red Riding Hood in The Uses of
Enchantment, which I shall discuss in the final section of this chapter.
Derrida cites the adoptive mother of Romulus and Remus and of
Mowgli– these are good mothers, who feed and nurture others
(étrangers) (Beast 1, 9–11; Bête 1, 29–31). But he also mentions
in passing the she-wolf who is deemed to have an excessive sexual
appetite. The body historically refused the gift of reason incorporates
of course both woman and wolf– as Derrida tells his audience more
than once in The Beast and the Sovereign: ‘in the place of the beast
one can put, in the same hierarchy, the slave, the woman, the child’
(Beast 1, 33) (‘à la place de la bête on peut mettre, dans cette même
hiérarchie, l’esclave, la femme, l’enfant’ (Bête 1, 60)).
In this chapter I shall reconsider some of Derrida’s intertexts that
featured in Chapter 2 in relation to the traditional sexual and psy-
choanalytical politics of the hungry wolf, then introduce women’s
writing from early in the twentieth century alongside contemporary
feminist writing which raises the question of the wolf-woman con-
juncture from a gynocentric perspective, and /or by complicating
sexual difference along with other differences. The fabulous wolf
frequently also allegorises hunting and predation in the private or
personal sphere on which the polis is built, but which politics wants
to ignore. The ‘insensibility’ of the wolf (Beast 1, 6; Bête 1, 26)–
represented as silent, imperceptible, and cruelly indifferent to the
suffering of his prey– may be designed to terrify yet proves uncan-
nily attractive in some legendary versions of the creature, represent-
ing the lure of the wild, in particular when he makes an exception
for one particular lambkin. The wolf is not (yet) domesticated, but
free– this is both alluring and dangerous for those supposed to
112
be confined to some extent within the domestic economy, the law

(nomos) of the household (oikos). I shall ask what it is to love or
be loved by a she-wolf or a wolf (with Renée Vivien and Hélène
Cixous), thereby also raising the question of the werewolf and other
stories about men who are really wolves (with Marina Tsvetaeva),
and revisions of Little Red Riding Hood (with Carol Ann Duffy
and Angela Carter).9 Cixous’s ‘The Love of the Wolf’ entwines itself
with three texts by Tsvetaeva, two 1937 essays around her love
for Pushkin ‘My Pushkin’ and ‘Pushkin and Pugachev’ (which are
collected in one volume in the French translation to which Cixous
refers, Mon Pouchkine suivi de Pouchkine et Pougatchov),10 plus
the long poem in French Le Gars (1922), based on a folk tale about
a young girl who falls in love with, and is loved by, a vampire-like
figure– shifting from victim to match in a way that is both interesting
and unsettling.11 Tsvetaeva is attracted not only by Pushkin’s writ-
ings and life in general, but, in particular, by the violent, elusive and
poetic Cossack rebel and imposter Pugachev who fascinated him,
and who is named ‘the Guide’.12 Tsvetaeva’s account of Pushkin
and Pugachev also suggests that the potential for revolutionary
political change may require love of the wolf.13 Pushkin’s desire for
revolt, for rebellion against Tsar Nicholas, thrusts him towards the
lupine outlaw Pugachev whose ‘mighty spell’ he falls under; in the
character of Grinev he will forgive Pugachev any atrocity, argues
Tsvetaeva.
Like most animals who have a significant role in the Western
imaginary the wolf has a certain conventional relationship to sexual
difference as sexual opposition. This is largely the masculine wolf– a
(sexual) predator devouring little lambs who need to be protected
by ‘shepherds’ (who ‘keep’ them of course to eat them themselves in
their own good time). The female wolf also crops up from time to
time either as a good (foster) mother or occasionally as sexual preda-
tor. Figuring the wolf, for the twentieth- and twenty-first-century
women writers I am interested in, is a way of thinking through the
relationship between women and the law (patriarchal law) as regards
sexuality, appetite and language– and the role of fear in keeping
distinctions, while laughter and desire may embrace what is feared.
This is a significant displacement of the sovereign-beast structure that
Derrida highlights, where the state has a tendency to fight terror,
real or imagined, with terror. The problem for all the writers who
struggle to reconfigure a response to the threat of violence is how
to engage with the seduction of the wolf without falling back into
113
romance. But maybe writing new, differently perverse, romances is

as good as it gets . . .
A certain tradition
Are women lambs (in la Fontaine’s Fables they can be lambs or
shepherdesses, figures of love) or she-wolves who consume men?
Are women treated as lambs, protected and controlled, in order to
prevent them from turning into wolves? Thus sexuality would be
policed, by terror, because it is feared (females might be the most
voracious cannibals),14 and fairy tales teach morals from an early
age. Whichever came first, the wolf or the lamb, it is clear that
women are mostly victims of male violence rather than the reverse.
The Roman proverb ‘man is a wolf to man’ is often turned to mean
that man is a wolf to women. In a novel about gang rape in Paris, La
Tournante, Elisa Brune has ‘the father’s friend’ (‘l’ami du père’) say:
‘We were taught that man is a wolf to men. It was to make us forget,
I think, that first of all he is a wolf to women’ (‘On nous a appris que
l’homme est un loup pour l’homme. C’est pour faire oublier, je crois,
qu’il est d’abord un loup pour la femme’).15
Werewolves are usually men; women are more commonly associ-
ated with cats– as witches. In a certain literary and filmic tradition
werewolves always kill the woman they love. The werewolf genre in
the cinema can be dated to the 1935 Werewolf of London (directed
by Stuart Walker) and the 1941 The Wolf Man (directed by George
Waggner).16 In the earlier film, Wilfred Glendon, a brilliant scien-
tist who is contaminated in Tibet, attacks his wife, the beautiful
and unhappy Lisa; in The Wolf Man the son of the local lord of
the manor (played by Lon Chaney, Jr) is bitten by a gypsy who has
transformed into a werewolf, and attacks the lovely young maiden
Laura with whom he has fallen in love. Publicity typically shows the
werewolf bent over the voluptuous heroine’s heaving bosom, her face
and flowing locks tipped down towards the viewer. We might note
the foreign or external origin of the curse– it comes from the outside
(outside the national or the domestic space). In a recent novel, The
Last Werewolf, the maxim that you kill the one you love is reiterated
in relation to the werewolf’s wife Arabella, who is his first victim.17
This novel allows for the rare possibility of a female werewolf, and,
in a postmodern turn, the final ‘last werewolf’ at the end of the tale
is a (pregnant) woman– this shift in the mode of werewolf reproduc-
tion a side-effect of an anti-viral (The Last Werewolf, 336). Deleuze
114
and Guattari celebrate werewolves and vampires precisely because

they do not ‘filiate’ but rather ‘infect’.18 The emphasis on propaga-
tion by mouth and teeth with no need for a mother to be involved (no
need for a vagina, dentata or otherwise) may seem to be something of
a masculine fantasy of reproduction– a perverse Pygmalion’s creativ-
ity or the author who lives on in his work of language. This is seen
in numerous works of science fiction, such as David Cronenberg’s
Rabid (1977). However, for Deleuze and Guattari it is a question of
multiplicity.
Plautus and Montaigne: querying the domestic

‘Man is a wolf to man’ is usually associated with Hobbes’s politi-
cal philosophy– which simply incorporates the subordination of
women to their sovereign husbands, more or less analogically to the
subjection of the people to the sovereign, slaves to their masters,
and animals to human beings. Hobbes, like others before him,
has, however, simply borrowed this phrase and turned it to his
own ends– terrorising his reader with the thought of the violent
chaos that would be the alternative to strong monarchs, husbands
or masters. The earliest example that Derrida finds of this Roman
proverb is in Asinaria, a comedy ‘of Asses’ (albeit remembered for
wolves) by Plautus, and the latter is indeed often cited as the origin
of the political-philosophical use of the phrase (although, as noted
in Chapter 2, in his play the phrase drifts from market-place trick-
ery into the domestic and the commoditisation of sex). Plautus was
born in Sarsina, in the north of Umbria which was then a colony
of Rome; he learnt Latin and came to the capital at a young age
(Beast 1, 61; Bête 1, 95). He was then something of an outsider, a
colonised subject albeit in a cosmopolitan city famous for its origin
with the adopted son of a wolf. In Asinaria, the wolf is said to be
the stranger in the city– not actually a barbarian, not an absolute
other, but your fellow man who is unknown (for as long as he is
unknown) to you and may try to cheat you in the market. However,
in the action of the play it is not even a stranger but your nearest
and dearest who are most financially and sexually dangerous, and
potentially violent. Mothers in particular are portrayed negatively
as greedy, controlling women, but the men in question, husbands
and sons, are also deceitful, lascivious and weak. There is a degree
of bathos in this farce– relative to the Romans as noble wolves or
even fierce and savage wolves on the battlefield, as Hobbes will show
115
them– the battleground here is the oikonomia and a ludic power

struggle between the sexes and the generations. Men are all creatures
of appetites (wolves in that sense) and the home or the family is a
hostile environment. The action moves between the home, the mar-
ket-place and the brothel– the brothel in a sense combining the other
two.
The key sentence is placed in the mouth of a merchant (known
only as Mercator): ‘when one does not know him, man is not a man,
but a wolf for man’ (lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis
sit non novit (Act 2, scene 4, line 496)).19 Derrida points out that it is
a scene of lending or giving credit (Beast 1, 61; Bête 1, 96), which is
true in the sense of a merchant entrusting money to someone he does
not know: ‘But notwithstanding, never will you induce me today to
trust this money to you, a stranger’ (‘me numquam hodie induces,
ut tibi credam hoc argentum ignoto’). We should note, however,
that the merchant is not loaning money but simply making payment
for some asses he has bought from Demaenetus, an old gentleman
of Athens– he wants the latter to be present rather than simply
handing over the cash to his steward who is a stranger to him. He
is right not to trust the ‘steward’ since in fact it is Leonida one of
Demaenetus’s slaves who is masquerading as the steward Saurea.
However, the presence of Demaenetus, treated by the merchant as
a guarantee that all is well, in fact simply confirms the trick, since
Demaenetus wishes to get his hands on the money rather than let the
steward hand it over to his wife who controls the purse strings– s o
he encourages and underwrites his slave’s deception. The money is to
go to his son to pay for a year’s worth of favours from his beloved,
Philaenium– who would give them to him for free but is forced into
prostitution by her mother. Philaenium treats the slaves Leonida and
Libanus seductively in order to persuade them to give the money
to her lover, and then agrees to bestow her favours on Demaenetus
for a night to show gratitude for the cash. I would point out that
in the Roman world brothels were called lupanars, literally dens of
she-wolves, and lupa (she-wolf) was a slang term for prostitute.20
Men project predatory and voracious behaviour on to women who
are sexually active outside the marital law. Thus no one comes well
out of the story– while the proverb specifies ‘to a stranger’ most of
Plautus’ characters are above all ‘wolves’ to their spouses or chil-
dren. We fear strangers but are most at risk from our nearest and
dearest.
In Montaigne’s ‘Upon Some Verses of Virgil’ (Essays, Book III,
116
chapter 5) ‘homo homini’ is said to be either ‘deus’ or ‘lupus’– a

divine or lupine alternative to humanity that Hobbes will echo in the
dedicatory epistle to De Cive which I analysed in the last chapter.
Here the context is less political than domestic, a discussion about
the contract of marriage, and whether or not a man should marry,
the answer being that it depends on the man’s temperament (Derrida,
Beast 1, 58–60; Bête 1, 92–6). A good marriage, if such a thing
exists, explains Montaigne (with a cautious conditional as Derrida
indicates), will try to represent the conditions of friendship rather
than love– friendship for Montaigne, I might add, existing primarily
between men.21 Montaigne makes a comparison with a caged bird,
a wild animal brought into the home, citing Socrates on the double
bind of the domestic: you want to be inside when you are out and
vice versa. After Plautus’ cynicism it is hardly surprising to learn
that whatever a man does he will ‘despair’ (in Montaigne’s words)
or ‘repent’ (quoting Socrates’ words). Matrimony as a bird-cage:
‘is one of the examples of what thus lets itself be tamed– trained,
broken, domesticated– h ere an example of [. . .] domestication in
the proper sense of the term, one of those conventions, both human
and animal, that bend a living being to the law of the household or
the family, to the oikos and the domus, to domestic economy’ (Beast
1, 59) (‘c’est un des exemples de ce qui se laisse ainsi apprivoiser–
dresser, dompter, domestiquer– ici de cette [. . .] domestication au
sens propre du terme, une de ces conventions à la fois humaines et
animales qui plient un vivant à la loi de la maison ou de la famille, à
l’oikos et à la domos, à l’économie domestique’ (Bête 1, 93)). Even
the head of the household, the domestic sovereign, is thus trapped
in this unhappy double bind– wanting to be inside or outside the
cage, wherever he is not. Thus, according to Montaigne, the mar-
riage alliance is a perfect example of man as a wolf– or god– to
men. A feminist reading might claim that men here are discussing
paying the price of choice; women of their times had rather fewer
choices, and were more at risk (of domestic control and even vio-
lence, of poverty and isolation outside the family home). Yet of
course the structure of the double bind (tied to the family in Gregory
Bateson’s work) can enfold any psyche, including, I would add,
animal ones– in spite of Lacan’s magisterial declaration that animals
do not have an unconscious, in a formulation that Derrida calls
ridiculous (Beast 1, 114; Bête 1, 161–2). Animals too can be driven
mad by contradictory demands. I shall soon turn to women and
wolves . . .
117
Werewolves, solitude, bestiality, and Rousseau’s

Confessions
In another of his series of cultural references, Derrida draws our
attention to the fact that Rousseau, at one point in his Confessions,
worries that he is becoming a werewolf because he reads so much.22
His confession that he was living as a loup-garou because of his
passion for reading is rendered as living like ‘an outlaw’ in J. M.
Cohen’s English translation of the Confessions, outside society and
thus outside the law, as Derrida (delighted) indicates (Beast 1, 64;
Bête 1, 98).23 I would add that the Petit Robert dictionary quotes
Rousseau to illustrate the old use of loup-garou (werewolf) to mean
sauvage, farouche, solitaire (savage, wild, solitary). There is a link
between the wolf (who is not domesticated as the dog is) and solitude.
Rousseau is writing about reading, but not speaking; the legendary
werewolf, unlike a vampire, cannot talk when he is transformed– he
is a lonely howling beast. We could note that Vivien’s eponymous
lady with the she-wolf in ‘La Dame à la louve’ is always characterised
as ‘solitary’, more quality than accident, which links her to her she-
wolf in the story. Neither has any desire for intercourse.24 Vivien’s
lady thus identifies with her wolf in her ‘farouche’ resistance to
social (or sexual) intercourse, and refusal to be the prey of any man.
Rousseau’s identifications are, however, more ambiguous. Tsvetaeva
will give the same wild and solitary character to her Pushkin’s
Pugachev too, as Cixous tells us: ‘There remains the infinite solitude
of the wolf, invisible and unrecognised except by himself’ (‘Love
of the Wolf’, 98) (‘Il reste la solitude infinie du loup, non reconnu,
invisible, sinon par lui-même’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 39)). On a visible
level, throughout most of Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter,
Pugachev is surrounded by fellow rebels– his solitude is thus that
which is as unrecognised as it is inevitable for the sovereign, outlaw,
lover or wolf. As Derrida indicates: ‘a sovereign is always alone (that
is both his absolute power and his vulnerability, or his infinite incon-
sistency) [. . .] he is the being of exception’ (Beast 2, 7) (‘un souverain
est toujours seul (c’est à la fois son pouvoir absolu et sa vulnérabilité
ou son inconsistance infinite) [. . .] il est l’être d’exception’ (Bête 2,
29–30)).25 While observers inform us that wolves are pack animals,
and that any solitary wolf is usually a young male about to pair
bond and then acquire a family which develops into a pack, it is
more often the exceptional lone wolf which captures the literary and
mythic imagination.26 Rousseau moves between private space (the
118
choice to read voraciously) and political persecution as an example

of lupine solitude. He also tells his reader that he is perceived, and
cruelly persecuted, as a wolf or lycanthrope, ferocious or mad, after
the publication and condemnation of Emile (Confessions XII, OC, I,
591); and perhaps he can therefore empathise with the sauvage or the
beast (Derrida, Beast 1, 100–1; Bête 1, 145–6).
Bestial cruelty and criminality, Derrida points out, is generally
held to be the preserve of man rather than beast; he turns from
Rousseau to Lacan, and the latter’s classical assertion that what
separates Man from the Beast is the Law (Beast 1, 102–34; Bête 1,
147–86). While this draws on the metaphysical opposition between
the animal with innate instincts and man who acquires traits and is
thus responsible in law, Derrida sees a small saving grace in Lacan’s
critique of theories of inherited criminality. However, Lacan’s ren-
dering of all animal aggression as innocent, also makes innocent all
human violence towards animals; in both cases harm would be done
without doing wrong. The practical effects of such views are seen
daily, Derrida argues, in many forms of cruelty to animals includ-
ing the millions of animals killed without question. Derrida tracks
what is deemed to be a uniquely human bestiality alongside human
bêtise (stupidity) in Deleuze and Guattari, and alongside fraternity
in Lacan:
There remains the immense risk of what is still a fraternalism of the
‘fellow’. This risk is double (and also affects Lévinas’s discourse, let it
be said in passing): on the one hand, this fraternalism frees us from all
ethical obligation, all duty not to be criminal and cruel, precisely, with
respect to any living being that is not my fellow or is not recognized as my
fellow, because it is other and other than man. In this logic, one is never
cruel toward what is called an animal, or a nonhuman living creature.
One is already exculpated of any crime towards any nonhuman living
creature. And specifying, on the other hand, as Lacan does: ‘It is a fellow
that it [this cruelty] is targeting, even in a being of another species’, does
not change or fix anything. It is always my fellow that I am targeting in a
being of another species. So the fact remains that I cannot be suspected of
cruelty with respect to an animal that I cause to suffer the worse violence.
(Beast 1, 107–8)
L’immense risque demeure de ce qui reste néanmoins un fraternalisme du

‘semblable’. Ce risque est double (et il vaudrait aussi pour le discours de
Lévinas, soit dit en passant): d’une part, ce fraternalisme nous libère de
toute obligation éthique, de tout devoir de ne pas être criminel et cruel,
justement, à l’égard de tout vivant qui n’est pas mon semblable ou n’est
119
pas reconnu comme mon semblable, parce qu’il est autre ou autre que
l’homme. Dans cette logique on n’est jamais cruel envers ce qu’on appelle
animal ou un vivant non humain. On est d’avance innocent de tout crime
à l’endroit de tout vivant non humain. Et quant à préciser, d’autre part,
comme le fait Lacan: ‘C’est un semblable qu’elle [cette cruauté] vise,
même dans un être d’une autre espèce’, cela n’arrange ni ne change rien.
C’est toujours mon semblable que je vise, même dans un être d’une autre
espèce. Il reste donc que je ne peux être soupçonné de cruauté à l’égard
d’un animal que je fais souffrir de la pire violence. (Bête 1, 154)
Freud’s ‘Wolf Man’ goes through a phase of torturing small animals,

pulling wings off flies or crushing beetles underfoot, and imagining
cruelty towards larger animals.27 This is immediately reinscribed by
Freud into human sexuality, in terms of its sado-masochistic tenden-
cies; as in the passage Derrida quotes from Lacan, there is no ethical
question raised in relation to animals as such. Taking up Derrida’s
point about the alibi provided with respect to cruelty towards non-
human living creatures (and thus lesser human beings too in the
end) by this ‘uniquely human’ quality of violence, I should note that
Pushkin is well aware of the recorded atrocities committed by the
historical figure Pugachev, and his bands of Cossack and peasant
fighters, when he constructs his own Pugachev. Tsvetaeva com-
ments on Pugachev’s ferocity, and the subsequent seductive appeal
when Pushkin imagines his generosity to one young man, spared
from the usual slaughter. Equally Tsvetaeva’s lad (‘le gars’) will kill
his Maroussia’s mother and brother to slake his appetite. However,
neither this bestiality nor their willingness to spare a beloved victim
makes these figures peculiarly human (nor purely animal) in Cixous’s
reading– rather it is the beast-human borderline which is made more
complicated by her rapprochements.
With respect to the werewolf in particular, I should note that the
wolf is one of the most common creatures into which man is imag-
ined metamorphosing in myths and legends. Ovid places Lycaon,
transformed into a wolf by Jove to whom he had offered a meal of
human flesh, in the very first book of Metamorphoses. There is also
Little Red Riding Hood– the wolf masquerading as a grandmother
– and our proverbs and fairy tales imagine the wolf as a master of
disguise, even reinventing himself in sheep’s clothing. Pugachev is
similarly elusive, sometimes taking on the part of a rightful sover-
eign, Peter III. The Enlightenment loup-garou is both the real wolf
who eats men and the man who turns into a wolf (thus opposites and
similar), who is compelled to feast on human flesh, or imagines that
120
that is the case– a s in the entry ‘Lycanthropy’ in the Dictionnaire

de l’Académie (1762) to which Derrida refers (Beast 1, 100; Bête
1, 145). The Encyclopédie article loup-garou is written by D.J., the
chevalier de Jaucourt, an Enlightenment figure who writes against
slavery and in sympathy with native American sauvages. He strongly
rejects the idea of werewolves along with a poetic list of other fabu-
lous and untranslatable monsters that used to haunt and terrorise the
unenlightened:
We should be eternally grateful to these enlightened centuries, even if the
only blessings that they bestowed on us were to cure us of the existence
of werewolves, spirits, lamias, monsters, Liliths, shades, spectres, genies,
demons, fairies, ghosts, imps, and other nocturnal phantoms so suited
to troubling our souls, disturbing us, overwhelming us with fear and
trembling.
Nous devrions à jamais les bénir ces siècles éclairés, quand ils ne nous
procureraient d’autres biens que de nous guérir de l’existence des loups-
garous, des esprits, des lamies, des larves, des liliths, des lémures, des
spectres, des génies, des démons, des fées, des revenants, des lutins, &
autres fantômes nocturnes si propres à troubler notre âme, à l’inquiéter, à
l’accabler de craintes & de frayeurs.28
What is it we should really be afraid of? Other men? As Lacan inter-

prets homo homini lupus in his Ecrits: ‘cruelty implies humanity’.29
In the Encyclopédie articles lycanthrope and lycanthropie, there is
mention of the devil disguising men as wolves (not a real transforma-
tion), and then longer analysis of the sickness whereby men imagine
they turn into wolves, and therefore adopt wolfish behaviour– and
sometimes thereby convince others– as in the Dictionnaire de
l’Académie.
The week before Derrida draws his seminar audience’s attention
to the passages in Rousseau’s Confessions regarding the persecu-
tion (as if Rousseau were a werewolf) which followed the condem-
nation of his Emile, he had highlighted a different passage in the
Confessions (Book VI, OC, I, 248–9). In this case, as in the example
of his appetite for reading, Rousseau was once again in the private
or domestic realm: he discusses his notorious shyness, particularly
with respect to well-born or well-educated women, in relation to an
episode in the late 1730s when he was about twenty-five years old.
He tells his reader that he had to introduce himself to some brilliant
ladies, who happened to be his travelling companions on the way
to Montpellier, or he would have been taken for a loup-garou (this
121
time translated into English as ‘an absolute boor’, Confessions, 236).

Here Derrida emphasises once again the relationship of the wolf
to the law: Rousseau does not want to be unsociable and ‘outside-
the-law’ (Beast 1, 96; Bête 1, 139).30 I might note in addition the
link, if only by negation, between the wolf and an erotic encounter
– Rousseau begins by joining the ladies for meals, then gains some
confidence in conversation, and finally begins an amorous relation-
ship with Madame de Larnage. His frankness about the fact that she
is less beautiful as well as older than her newly-wed friend may seem
similar to the discourtesy shown by Vivien’s dogged narrator Lenoir
in ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’; however, Rousseau presents himself
equally ‘warts and all’, and is clear about his strong emotional bond
with this generous, sensitive and warm individual. What in Plautus
could be cruelly comic is here translated into sensibility. His youthful
timidity is unexpectedly his greatest weapon in inspiring this more
experienced woman to make the necessary advances while he, like
a wild animal, is always about to make his escape. In Rousseau’s
famous Discourse on Inequality, he argues against Hobbes that
wolves, and men in the state of nature, are fearful rather than aggres-
sive. Like the young Rousseau in this episode in the Confessions, they
are always about to flee, rather than always about to pounce with
slavering jaws. This is rather a different image of the wolf from the
one Cixous and Tsvetaeva are celebrating, where the delicious thrill
for the beloved/victim, like the child listening to a fairy tale, is more
related to fear for their safety rather than anxiety that the wolf will
run away from them.
Rousseau’s uncertainty about his position in such society even
leads him to disguise himself as an Englishman (Mr Dudding) in
spite of the fact that he does not speak a word of English nor know
anything about England, and thus he is uneasily at risk of being
unmasked.31 His entrance into the field of romance means that he
is no longer in danger of being labelled a loup-garou, and yet it is
his very lone wolf or outlaw qualities that make him dangerously
attractive to the woman who seems able to persuade him to make
an exception for her. While she may not be quite a lamb, a woman’s
reputation is always at risk from a penetrating gaze such as that of
the Marquis who accompanies them. The period is one in which
amorous liaisons of all kinds are common, yet social death is always
a risk for women who transgress the law, as many fictional heroines
discover. In fact the Marquis, whose merciless social wit would seem
to make him a wolf to his fellow men, certainly in the shy and soli-
122
tary Rousseau’s eyes, is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, who uses his sar-
castic assaults on the young man’s weaknesses as a suitor to disguise
the fact that he has discovered their secret love affair.
Renée Vivien and ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’32

In this section I am going to take a detour away from Derrida’s
explicit intertexts, to focus on a short story by Renée Vivien (1877–
1909), ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’ (‘La Dame à la louve’), the
opening story in her 1904 collection La Dame à la louve, which
is exceptional in rewriting the human-wolf relationship in entirely
female terms.33 Derrida’s intertexts in The Beast and the Sovereign
are overwhelmingly dead white males, in spite of the tantalising
glimpses of the importance he places on sexual difference. And occa-
sionally he even falls into an uncharacteristic discourse of ‘beyond
sexual difference’, speaking of ‘man as humankind, this time, beyond
sexual difference, man and woman (homo homini lupus)’ (Beast 1, 9)
(‘l’homme comme genre humain, cette fois, au-delà de la difference
sexuelle, l’homme et la femme (homo homini lupus)’ (Bête 1, 28)).
Granted his brilliant dance with questions of sexual difference else-
where, for example in Choreographies, Spurs (Eperons) or ‘Voices’,
it seems appropriate to introduce more voices to the discussion.34
Vivien is better known as a poet, and her short stories have been
described as approaching ‘poèmes en prose’.35 In this sharp tale she
dissects the unhappy relations between the sexes in the microcosm of
a sea voyage. This is a classic device of enclosure where characters
are trapped together, and so neither her dogged male narrator, a
slave to his appetites, nor the eponymous lady can walk away; we
assume he would most likely have preferred easier meat if not for
the confinement of the ship, but she is the only woman on board (his
repeated, perhaps rather defeated, phrase like a chorus to his comic
song).36 More pertinent to this chapter is the figure and reality of the
(she-)wolf, and what Vivien might be suggesting about the threshold
between the human and the animal which has exercised so many
(male) philosophers over the years. The lady’s choice is to love her
she-wolf rather than any man or even woman. The reader follows the
narrator’s hounding of the lady with the she-wolf during the journey,
which ends with a violent storm at sea. While the lady and the she-
wolf choose to perish in each other’s arms rather than for one to be
saved without the other, Lenoir saves his skin and so can tell the tale.
History is written by the victors.
123
Lenoir and other narrators in Vivien’s collection are degraded

male author figures not dissimilar to some of the comically rewritten
canonical examples in Duffy’s herstory The World’s Wife– such as
the dull and self-satisfied Orpheus, or the even more boring Aesop
who sees animals as no more than fodder for his sayings, and who,
I might add, used wolves to represent the ultimate danger, never to
be trusted.37 Orpheus imagines that he charms both animals and
Eurydice; Duffy gives voice to Eurydice, figured here as the writer’s
wife, helping in the production of the works, and thus the legend, in
material ways as well as acting as muse:
Big O, was the boy. Legendary.
The blurb on the back of his books claimed
that animals,
aardvark to zebra,
flocked to his side when he sang,
fish leapt in their shoals
at the sound of his voice,
even the mute, sullen stones at his feet
wept wee silver tears.
Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself,
I should know.)
And, given my time all over again,
I know that I’d rather speak for myself
than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess,
etc., etc.
In fact, girls, I’d rather be dead.38
The two women writers, witty and poetic, deploy twin strategies:
re-writing history from the female subaltern point of view, and
showing the dominant point of view of the man as so transpar-
ently self-deluding that he can no longer delude his audience. A
contrast might be made with the narrator of the poet and essayist
Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste (1926)– a lso someone who frequents
brothels and who writes ‘j’ai touché à des femmes’– not exactly ‘I
touched women’ but maybe ‘touched on them’, ‘scarcely touched
them’. Derrida analyses this work, the very title connoting the mas-
culine, over a session, imagining the narrator’s moue of distaste– la
moue (a facial expression signifying irritation or disdain) replacing
l’amour (Beast 1, 183–205; Bête 1, 249–75). However, apart from
the many other elements separating Vivien or Duffy from Valéry,
the masculine chain– male author, male narrator, male protagonist
124
– sets up rather a different reading effect from that of Vivien’s short

stories. Derrida suggests, for instance, that a number of key sentences
in Monsieur Teste (such as ‘la bêtise n’est pas mon fort’, another
untranslatable sentence suggesting something like ‘stupidity is not
my strong point [or forte]’) could be ascribed to author, narrator or
protagonist– there is an uncanny mirroring or echoing between the
three.
Vivien’s story sets dog imagery against the magnificence of Helga,
the loving she-wolf, in a way which references the tradition that
sees the dog as servile against the freedom of wild animals– w e
could think back to La Fontaine’s fable of ‘The Wolf and the Dog’
or forward to Deleuze and Guattari. For Vivien the focus is less on
real dogs,39 even if these are bred to work and to serve men in return
for their keep, than on men as dogs, servants to their base appetites
which they have to feed, who call women bitches (and other animal
epithets seen by men to be degrading) if they service their needs
and indeed if they do not. Our weak and vain male narrator, Pierre
Lenoir, is specifically located on the title page in 69 Ladies Street (‘69,
rue des Dames, Paris’); his habitat can be retrospectively interpreted
when he tells his reader that he has an indiscriminate sexual appetite.
Vivien refers elsewhere to man as ‘a rutting dog’ (‘un chien en rut’);
in this story her lady tells the narrator ‘Men who fuss round women,
any women they can find, are like dogs sniffing at bitches’ (‘The Lady
with the She-Wolf’, 159) (‘Les hommes qui s’empressent autour de
femmes, n’importe lesquelles, sont pareils aux chiens qui flairent des
chiennes’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 23)). Vivien’s representation of men
as rutting dogs who see women as nothing more than bitches is a
careful displacement of the narrator’s self-image as a ‘gay dog’, as
men used to say admiringly.40 Sexist (and speciesist) language, as we
would anachronistically term it, is subtly reworked.
Semblables and autres

This use of an unreliable male narrator apparently to focalise female
characters, but in fact also to turn the spotlight on himself in a way
he does not recognise, is a device Vivien uses repeatedly in the col-
lection of which this is the title story.41 I should note Vivien’s acute
awareness of the connotations of names, not least her own several
pseudonyms over the years. Here Pierre Lenoir is like a stone (feeling
nothing, at least for others), and the title of another story in the col-
lection, ‘Cruauté des Pierreries’, points us to the cruelty of a man who
125
works with precious stones. Pierre is a common name, which leads

the reader to the sense this could be any man. But Lenoir, ‘the black’,
perhaps suggests that he is Jesuitical and villainous even before he
speaks. The lady herself is exceptionally pale (associated with foam
on the waves and snowy wastes), and paleness has many connota-
tions of course, including perversity in Baudelaire, but also chastity,
coldness and so on.42 Tsvetaeva will invert this attachment to pallor,
for her the snowy wastes are a backdrop highlighting the blackness
to which she is devoted in all its various forms. She remembers child-
hood walks which ended at a famous statue of her beloved Pushkin:
I loved the Pushkin Monument for its blackness– the reverse of the
whiteness of our household gods.43 Their eyes were totally white but
the Pushkin-Monument’s were totally black, totally full. The Pushkin-
Monument was totally black, like a dog, still blacker than a dog because
the very blackest of them always had something yellow above the eyes or
something white under the neck. The Pushkin Monument was black like
the piano. If they hadn’t told me later that Pushkin was a Negro, I would
have known, that Pushkin was a Negro.
From the Pushkin Monument I also got my mad love for black people,
carried through a whole lifetime. (‘My Pushkin’, 324)
La Statue-Pouchkine, je l’aimais pour sa noirceur– l’inverse de la blan-
cheur des dieux de nos foyers. Eux, leurs yeux, ils les avaient tout blancs;
la Statue-Pouchkine les avait noirs, du noir épais. La Statue-Pouchkine
était noire comme un chien, non, plus qu’un chien, parce que le chien,
même le plus noir, aura toujours du jaune sur les yeux, du blanc dans le
cou. La Statue-Pouchkine était noire comme le piano. Si l’on ne m’avait
pas dit plus tard que Pouchkine était nègre, je l’aurais su: Pouchkine c’est
un nègre.
De la statue de Pouchkine me vient cet amour insensé pour les Noirs,
un amour de toute la vie. (‘Mon Pouchkine’, 18–19)
Both writers are pushing against the grain, the one in her protago-
nist’s embrace of pale lunar coldness (while in other stories she also
celebrates the cruelty of the desert or the jungle), the other in her
passion for blackness both symbolically and politically.
Lenoir’s narrative appeals first to mesdames, then he gives up
on that audience (although he tells us he is a real ladies’ man) and
turns explicitly to men as auditors or readers for most of the story.
This produces an effect of homosociality avant la lettre (before Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick coins the term to account for social male bonding
that represses the homosexual44). As Lenoir addresses his fellow
men, he claims that they understand each other almost to the point
126
of tedium: ‘There is such a fraternity of feeling between us that con-

versation is almost impossible. This is the reason I so often shun the
monotony of male company, too identical to my own’ (‘The Lady
with the She-Wolf’, 157) (‘Il y a entre nous une fraternité d’âme si
complète qu’elle rend une conversation presque impossible. C’est
pourquoi je fuis souvent la monotone compagnie des hommes, trop
identiques à moi-même’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 21)). The quotation
shows Vivien’s wit even as she makes a serious point about fraternity
and ipseity.45 Derrida has of course written extensively about frater-
nity, above all in Politics of Friendship. The social or political com-
munity of semblables excludes the animal and the woman– a lthough
women serve a purpose of mediating between men (perhaps prevent-
ing tedium) and enabling men to reproduce themselves, and thus
excluding women is an autoimmune reaction.
In Tsvetaeva’s long poem Le Gars (The Lad) 46 there is a section
entitled ‘Les Compères’ which shows the voracity and violence
of guests apparently come to celebrate the birth of the heroine
Maroussia’s son by the baron she has married in the absence of her
beloved ‘lad’. She was supposed, on the lad’s instructions, to spend
five years without entertaining, but her weak husband has bowed to
peer pressure and allowed his ‘semblables’ to come into their home.
They urge: ‘Empty it and smash it up’ (‘Vidons-la, puis brisons-la’
(94))– ‘la’ (it) is of course a glass (la coupe), but the French gender
system allows the ambiguity of imagining it is Maroussia who is to
be emptied out and broken. There is violence underlying Lenoir’s
homosociality too. These rapacious guests are human wolves (homo
lupus homini) with ‘Brigands’ teeth’ (‘Dents de brigands’)– not the
wolfish wolf who dazzles in the lad willing to sacrifice himself for his
beloved. Theirs is the fraternity that Derrida finds in psychoanalytic
accounts of the founding of society:
When Lacan talks of this ‘eternal fraternity’, we must not hear in it merely
the sort of edifying, irenic, pacifistic, and democratic praise which often
denotes and connotes so many appeals to fraternity. [. . . Lacan] does not
forget the murderous violence that will have presided over the establish-
ment of the law, namely the murder of the father, thanks to which (thanks
to the murder, thanks to the father, thanks to the murder of the father)
the guilty and shameful sons come to contract, through a sort of at least
tacit oath or sworn faith, the equality of the brothers. The trace of this
founding criminality or this primitive crime, the memory of which is kept
by the (animal) totem and the taboo– this murderous trace remains inef-
faceable in any egalitarian, communitarian, and compassional fraternity,
127
in this primitive contract that makes of any compassional community a

confraternity. (Beast 1, 107)
Quand Lacan parle de cette ‘fraternité éternelle’, il ne faut pas y entendre

seulement cette sorte d’éloge édifiant, iréniste, pacifiste et démocratique
qui souvent dénote et connote tant d’appels à la fraternité. [. . . Lacan]
n’oublie pas la violence meurtrière qui aura présidé à l’instauration de
la loi, à savoir le meurtre du père grâce auquel (auquel ‘le’ meurtre, ou
auquel le père, ou auquel le meurtre du père), grâce auquel, donc, les fils
coupables et honteux en viennent à contracter, par une sorte de serment
ou de foi jurée au moins tacite, l’égalité des frères. La trace de cette
criminalité fondatrice ou de ce crime primitif dont le totem (animal) et le
tabou gardent la mémoire, cette trace meurtrière reste ineffaçable en toute
fraternité égalitaire, communautaire et compassionnelle, dans ce contrat
primitif qui fait de toute communauté compassionnelle une confraternité.
(Bête 1, 153–4)
Derrida argues that his emphasis on the brother or the semblable (in
Levinas as well as here in Lacan) neither addresses the question of
the non-human nor the problem of ‘all those who do not recognise
their fellow in certain humans’ (‘tous ceux qui ne reconnaissent pas
dans certains hommes leurs semblables’)– the worst prejudices of
race, class or sex (I would add) or even against one particular indi-
vidual (Beast 1,108; Bête 1, 154). The baron’s fellows can attack
Maroussia and her child because she is a woman, and furthermore
she is contaminated by her association with this being (‘le gars’) who
is not a semblable: her infant is potentially the child of the vampire-
werewolf. Likewise Rousseau is designated a (were)wolf before he is
persecuted, and Vivien’s lady can be left to die because of her she-
wolf associate and association as well as her sex.
The appetites of the compeers are the base ones despised by
Vivien’s lady:
‘As long as into

My stomach goes
And flows out
Wine –
who cares!’
‘Pourvu qu’entre
Dans mon ventre
Et qu’en sorte
Vin –
qu’importe!’ (Le Gars, 94–5)
128
Finally they sum up with fraternity: ‘– C ompères, fraternisons!’

(95), literally ‘– Compeers, let us fraternise’ or ‘Fellows, let us join
in company’.47
Lenoir finds his fellow men almost tedious because they are ‘trop
identiques’, Vivien’s wonderfully witty and hyperbolic formulation
for semblables. Yet there is no communication or communion with
women, only pursuit and transactions. The narrator’s empty words,
addressed to females whom he hopes to bed,48 are the companion
to his misreading of the lady– h e interprets her consistent rejection
of him as flirtation in complete contradiction of all evidence. He
asserts boldly: ‘She had certainly taken something of a fancy to me’
(‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 156) (‘Je lui plaisais certainement
quelque peu’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 20)). This is a classic ‘no’ means
‘yes’ view of women, and, for a rake like Lenoir, (feigned) resistance
would add to the fun of the chase and makes the object more desir-
able. Lenoir tells his imagined audience:
She was adroit enough not to let me see the profound pleasure which
my advances caused her. She even succeeded in maintaining her habitual
expression of defiance in her yellow eyes. What a marvellous example of
feminine wiles! The only result of this ploy was to increase the violence
of my attraction to her. Sometimes a long resistance can be an agreeable
surprise, rendering victory more triumphant . . . (157)
Elle eut l’habileté de ne point me laisser voir le plaisir profond que lui
causaient mes avances. Elle sut même conserver à ses yeux jaunes leur
habituelle expression défiante. Admirable exemple de ruse féminine!
Cette manœuvre eut pour unique résultat de m’attirer plus violemment
vers elle. Les longues résistances vous font quelquefois l’effet d’une agré-
able surprise, et rendent la victoire plus éclatante . . . (21)
We might note the underlying violence in his reference to his intended

‘victory’, even in the case of this fatuous fraternal chap whom the
she-wolf discards as a threat. I would also point out his belief that he
causes ‘profound pleasure’ (not just pleasure) in the lady– superficial
resistance but deep-down deep pleasure– s uch is his self-confidence
and ‘knowledge’ of feminine wiles. As well as the social ‘wiles’, ‘la
ruse’ might conjure up the cunning of the wolf conjoined with the
feminine. The reference to the lady’s yellow eyes49 also binds her to
the wolves, hunted and persecuted by men who suppose these wolves
to be hunters of men in spite of the lack of evidence.50
In the long history of non-human animals figured as lacking
reason (Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, to name but a few of
129
Derrida’s references), another example of ‘la raison du plus fort’, it

is of course man who has the privilege of bêtise– animals cannot be
said to be bêtes (stupid) because they are not endowed with reason in
the first place, not free and have no will. Man’s auto-positing or self-
proclaiming as unique thus willingly, or sorrowfully, embraces the
fatal flaws and original sins that lie alongside more obviously hubris-
tic qualities. Derrida discusses the specificity of the French language
that brings together (and separates) bête as an adjective and bête as
a noun, and the philosophical discussions that posit stupidity as a
particularly human quality, at considerable length (Beast 1, 68–9,
138–84; Bête 1, 104–5, 191–250). The position that bêtise is ‘proper
to man’ (138) (‘le propre de l’homme’ (192)) and the assumptions
underlying it, which Derrida pursues most extensively in relation to
Deleuze and Guattari,51 is analogous to the classical argument out-
lined above, which Derrida traces in Lacan, that it is only man who
is bestial, in the sense of cruel, and that it is only ever a fellow man
(semblable) who is the target of such bestial cruelty, and not other
living beings. Following Derrida, we might ask if this functions as
an alibi both for the way animals can be treated, and for the exclu-
sion of some (shifting) categories of human being from the category
of semblables. Vivien follows a Flaubertian line of displaying bêtise
for the reader, the bêtise of a degree of culture, of laying down
the law and making judgements. Yet in bringing the reader to the
point where all men are shown to be both devoid of rationality and
casually cruel (finally leaving lady and she-wolf clinging to a piece of
wood in a stormy sea)– as are the males in this récit, driven only by
their instincts to survive and to rut– might the reader track the lady
to a reinterpretation of the dumb wolf (who understands what is
going on, and masters her survival instinct by her virtue)? The body
traditionally refused the gift of reason incorporates of course both
woman and beast.
I should note that many other women in the stories collected in
La Dame à la louve, are intimately associated with wild animals. ‘La
Saurienne’ (‘The Saurian’) tells of a crocodile woman whose eyes
are put out by the terrified (but so brave!) narrator– c learly fighting
terror with terror. Because of the focalisation through Mike Watts,
convinced he is in terrible danger, readers cannot tell ‘the truth’,
but may suspect his projection onto a solitary old woman, like the
witches stoned to death in Carter’s ‘Werewolf’ with their animal
familiars. The dualism which might be detected in Vivien’s fiction,
perhaps like the dualism in Tsvetaeva, setting the poet against the
130
world, which Cixous celebrates, could be argued to effect at least

a partial and temporary displacement. It is not the kind of reversal
that leaves hierarchies comfortably in place such as the Orwellian
‘four legs good, two legs bad’, because the poet dies– as the heroine
so often dies whether in male or female-authored fiction. In ‘My
Pushkin’, for example, Tsvetaeva identifies lupine blackness (here, in
Europe in 1937, given a racial materiality), death and poetry:
The Russian poet– is a Negro, the poet– is a Negro and the poet– was
struck down.
(Oh, God, how it all came together! What poet among those that were
and those that are, isn’t a Negro and what poet– h
asn’t been struck down
and killed?) (‘My Pushkin’, 321)
‘Le poète russe est un nègre. Le poète est un nègre. Le nègre, on le tue.
Nécrologie du poète.
(Seigneur, comme c’est vrai– q uel poète, vivant ou mort n’est pas un
nègre? Quel poète n’a pas été assassiné?) (‘Mon Pouchkine’, 14)52
The real social, economic and political forces which align with the
cultural hegemony of semblables (and not only in a context when
totalitarian regimes are particularly ascendant) make the gesture of
reversal more resonant in its very impotence. Even Pugachev, whose
Cossack peasant revolt is very successful for a time, seems doomed in
hindsight to the failure which comes in due course. The marginality
and vulnerability of the speaker is the context to, and pretext for, the
text– suspending the efficacy of its judgement.
Vivien, born in England as Pauline Tarn, is a kind of sexual
refugee in the Sapphic circle in Paris; her stories are published just a
few years after Oscar Wilde dies broken in Paris after his sojourn in
Reading Gaol. The weakness of homosocial men revealed in Vivien’s
stories leaves us with no phallus erected; where there is divinity, it is
usually in the shape of a goddess. In ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’
there is a broken mast, a ‘floating wreckage’ (162) (‘épave flottante’
(29)) from a sunken lifeboat, but this cannot even do the work hoped
for, that is to say saving (let alone (re)producing) life. There is no
Father, no sovereign, no master of the house– t here is merely an inef-
fectual lieu-tenant, some body who stands in. Derrida argues that the
apparently secular foundation of modern sovereignty, as a covenant
amongst men in Hobbes, is in fact fundamentally theological, with
the sovereign a lieu-tenant taking the place of God (Beast 1, 52–4;
Bête 1, 85–7). But Vivien’s lieutenant is a debunked representative,
appearing briefly, only ‘more or less’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’,
131
161) (‘tant bien que mal’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 28)) in command of
organising abandoning ship. Yet he is the one who makes the classi-
cally auto-immune political declaration that there is no room at the
inn, or rather no space in the lifeboat, for an animal (in animal form);
the threshold of tolerance has been reached.53
Lenoir consistently represents the lady as strange, and she is
indeed completely different from anyone else on board ship (and
also a foreigner).54 For a start, she is clearly clever. The narrator has
a horror of intelligent women; he says the lady is: ‘turning out to
be not only a shrew but a prude and a bluestocking to boot!’ (158)
(‘Prude et bas-bleu autant que chipie!’ (23)) when she tries to explain
herself– he just wants sex.55 When the storm breaks we also see her
courage; there is a striking distinction between her constant calm
and the madness of the men cramming into lifeboats: ‘Men in a panic
were jumping in, with loud and incoherent cries’ (62) (‘Des affolés
se précipitaient, poussant des cris incohérents’ (28)).56 I would note
the loss of language in this crisis– humanity is reduced at dawn to ‘a
grey stupor, a mass of creatures and larva-like beings swarming in a
twilight limbo . . .’ (162) (‘une stupeur grise, un grouillement d’êtres
et de choses larvaires dans un crépuscule de limbes . . .’ (28–9)). This
is le vivant not even la bête– simply life surviving (perhaps another
specification of Agamben’s recurrent and ambiguous trope of ‘bare
life’). I shall return to the question of language, but first turn to
appetite.
Vivien and appetite

Vivien notoriously died of starvation amongst other forms of sub-
stance- and self-abuse, and this biographeme is often brought up by
those writing on her work, for example when encountering a skel-
eton in the narrator’s description of the lady: ‘Her emaciated body
had the fine and fragile delicacy of a handsome skeleton’ (157) (‘Le
corps émacié avait la délicatesse fine et frêle d’un beau squelette’
(20)).57 Without endorsing anorexia, it is nevertheless interesting
to consider the question of appetite in her work– both the virtuous
struggle (as an ethical or rational decision) to choose to rise above
appetites, and the nausea (as a response of the senses or the uncon-
scious) which the appetites (of others) can inspire. The choice of a
wolf as partner or avatar is interesting since our image of the male
wolf can be a sexual predator prowling for prey, in versions of Red
Riding Hood for example.58 I will not mention the 1980s pop song
132
‘Hungry Like the Wolf’. The wolf after all is typically associated with
a voracious appetite even though there is a hint in La Fontaine’s ‘The
Wolf and the Dog’, as I have indicated, that freedom is even more
important to the wolf than filling his belly– t his is the key difference
between the wolf and the dog, who has agreed to be man’s servant
in return for food. But is this the male wolf according to tradition?
And is it then only as mother that the legendary she-wolf rises above
appetite, even if importantly as adoptive as well as biological mother,
maternal nurturing being seen as just another bodily instinct? Vivien
does something different from that tradition– s he both unites female
human-being and female wolf and resists the wolfish association with
ungovernable appetite which she places firmly on the side of men
in society and male dogs, without confining woman or she-wolf to
maternal self-sacrifice.
The lady, far from greedy, is sickened by raw appetite; she
describes her nausea as an appropriate response to the reified world
of men:
‘I recoil from the vulgarity of men as I do from a stale smell of garlic, and
I am as disgusted by their sordidity as I am by the reek of sewers. [. . .]
Morally, I am sickened by men and, physically, I am repulsed by them
. . . I have watched men kissing women on the lips whilst indulging in
obscene fumblings. The spectacle of a gorilla could not have been more
revolting.’ (159)
‘la vulgarité des hommes m’éloigne ainsi qu’un relent d’ail, et leur mal-
propreté me rebute à l’égal des bouffées d’égouts [. . .] Moralement,
[l’homme] m’écoeure; physiquement, il me répugne . . . J’ai vu des
hommes embrasser des femmes sur la bouche en se livrant à des tripotages
obscènes. Le spectacle d’un gorille n’aurait pas été plus repoussant.’ (24)
Vivien brings together the smell of half-digested food (strong-tasting

garlic, typical of the French man for an English woman of the day
perhaps) and the reek of the sewers, food become excrement, remind-
ing the reader of the lower orifices as she speaks of the mouth on
which kisses are pressed.
When the narrator sees half-naked hairy sailors, he unexpect-
edly smiles, remembering the insulting gorilla comparison– to me
there is something threatening about his being cheered up by that
memory. Is he fantasising about what could happen to the virgin
lady if there is a shipwreck and the men give full rein to the beast
within them unless he offers his gentlemanly protection? He may be
projecting the satisfaction of his own desires on to the lower orders.
133
In ‘Nut-brown Maid’ (‘Brune comme une noisette’), in a moment of

sadistic abuse of physical strength, another male narrator (who is
on the whole far preferable to Lenoir) forces Nell, the woman he is
pursuing, to swallow a toad, to eat her words, for she has said that
she would prefer to eat a toad than to kiss him. The words from her
mouth (exteriorising ‘vociferation’ as Derrida puts it in his discus-
sion of orality in The Beast and the Sovereign) had not convinced,
but her acting them out by putting the toad in her mouth and thence
her stomach (Derrida’s interiorising ‘devourment’, the companion to
‘vociferation’) does the trick. It is a radical re-writing of the fairy-tale
prince imprisoned in the frog and transformed by a kiss. At the other
end of the twentieth century, Carol Ann Duffy will write with cool
intelligence like Nell’s in relation to the naive and romantic Little
Mermaid who wanted to lose her fish tail for the agony of fishnet
tights in which to dance with a prince:
I could have told her– look, love, I should know,
they’re bastards when they’re Princes.
What you want to do is find yourself a Beast. The sex
is better. Myself I came to the House of the Beast
no longer a girl, knowing my own mind,
my own gold stashed in the bank,
my own black horse at the gates
ready to carry me off at one wrong word,
one false move, one dirty look.59
The question is where the power lies. The narrator of Duffy’s poem
is aware that she needs to have knowledge, confidence, experience,
money and a physical, indeed animal, means of escape. Would
Lenoir, if he only had the chance, take pleasure in forcing the lady
to choose between the hairy gorilla sailors and himself, between
eating a toad and kissing a frog ‘prince’? The lady had said to Lenoir
(when more subtle forms of rejection have failed to discourage him):
‘I cannot understand how a woman of any delicacy at all can submit
to your filthy embraces without repugnance. As a virgin my disdain
for men is equal in its degree of disgust to the nausea felt by the
courtesan’ (159) (‘Je ne comprends pas que la femme la moins déli-
cate puisse subir sans haut-le-cœur vos sales baisers. En vérité, mon
mépris de vierge égale en dégoût les nausées de courtisane’ (24)).
Even those who are paid to pretend pleasure are in fact nauseated by
Lenoir’s kisses, she tells him. He just thinks that she is the one who
is playing a role, and laying it on a bit thick (‘Décidément, pensai-je,
134
elle exagère son rôle’). For after all he has had a few pitiful whores
but the Parisian ladies still like him, he says. The virgin lady estab-
lishes here an equality of disgust between herself and the ‘bitches’ or
‘pitiful whores’ as Lenoir refers to her ‘courtesan’– a rather more
courteous term for a sex-worker.
The narrator is later overcome by sea-sickness, a more prosaic
form of nausea, and another turn of orality after filthy kisses, swal-
lowing and speeches. Indeed, due to the storm, for the first time in his
life he neglects his appearance and appears improperly dressed, as he
puts it. The visceral reaction to the natural world (sea-sickness) has
stripped away temporarily his superficial demeanour, the decorated
mask or shield with which he arms himself as he goes out to conquer
ladies with his oral skills. The lady is calm in the face of danger while
he fantasises his own death, weeps as he touches his skull, experi-
ences his skeleton and imagines: ‘My flesh would turn bluish and
black, swollen more than a bulging wineskin. The sharks would seize
on bits of my severed limbs, floating here and there. And when my
body sank to the bottom of the sea, crabs would crawl sideways over
my rotting flesh and feed gluttonously on it’ (160). (‘Je serais une
chair bleue et noire, plus gonflée qu’une outre rebondie. Les requins
happeraient par-ci par-là, un de mes membres disjoints. Et, lorsque
je descendrais au fond des flots, des crabes grimperaient obliquement
le long de ma pourriture et s’en repaîtreraient avec gloutonnerie . . .’
(26).) There are no ship-board meals in this tale, which could have
been a narrative possibility; instead the one description of eating
is this extraordinary fantasy of predation and gluttony. Formerly
potentially lusty signifiers of virility (swollen, members) are rein-
scribed here as damaged rotten flesh to be mauled by the creatures of
the sea. It combines the author’s revenge on the arrogant (and poten-
tially vicious) narrator, with his brief moment of self-recognition
about a wasted life, a life given over to appetite and flesh in a sexual
sense. The vision of the sharks and crabs feasting on his body also
gives the reader a nauseating sense of what eating flesh might mean.
The social bond is based on sacrifice– something must be able to be
put to death– usually animals.60
Women and she-wolves

The lady is, however, strange, as Lenoir describes her, as well as
a stranger (étrangère) in this story not only because of her intelli-
gence, courage and self-control– there is also the relation between
135
human and animal, la dame et la louve. The story portrays a canny

and uncanny mirroring between the woman and the she-wolf– they
respond to each other physically, in their ways of being, in their eyes,
fur, and attitude, and they take responsibility for each other. These
are key terms in the history of men differentiating themselves from
animals– as those unable to talk, or more particularly to respond
and be responsible (in law). According to the narrator:
An aura of harsh and solitary pride, of angry recoil and retreat, emanated
from this woman. Her yellow eyes resembled those of her she-wolf. They
had the same look of sly hostility. Her step was so silent as to be disturb-
ing. No one can ever have walked with so little sound. Her clothing was
of a thick material which looked like fur. She was not beautiful, nor
pretty, nor charming. But she was, after all, the only woman on board.
(157)
Cette femme dégageait une impression d’orgueil rude et solitaire, de fuite
et de recul furieux. Ses yeux jaunes ressemblaient à ceux de sa louve. Ils
avaient le même regard d’hostilité sournoise. Ses pas étaient tellement
silencieux qu’ils en devenaient inquiétants. Jamais on n’a marché avec si
peu de bruit. Elle était vêtue d’une étoffe épaisse, qui ressemblait à une
fourrure. Elle n’était ni belle, ni jolie, ni charmante. Mais, enfin, c’était la
seule femme qui fût à bord. (20–1)
We might note that the wolf-woman shares even her silent step with
the wolf, the typical stealthy ‘pas de loup’ to which Derrida draws
our attention. The silenced woman may have been deprived of her
voice by man who has arrogated the word to himself, yet here the
reader has rather the sense of a chosen silence which is ‘disturbing’.
Lenoir is noisy by contrast: he chatters incessantly. Aristotle tells
us that man is a political animal– this lady, in common with most
of the other female characters in Vivien’s collection, resists the city
(polis). She is a lone wolf, maybe even rogue wolf: the rogue being
the one upon whom the community must turn. She is an outcast,
perhaps even an outlaw,61 but is so by her own rational decision –
based on an analysis of the city of men, as well as a visceral reaction
(nausea) to men’s practices. When Lenoir dares to lay a hand on
the lady, she turns on him: ‘she sprang round like a she-wolf to face
me. “Go away,” she commanded with almost savage determination.
Her teeth gleamed strangely like those of a wild animal beneath the
menacing snarl of her lips’ (157–8) (‘d’un bond de louve. “Allez-vous
en”, ordonna-t-elle avec une décision presque sauvage. Ses dents de
fauve brillaient étrangement sous les lèvres au menaçant retroussis’
136
(22)). We might note the emphasis on her teeth. The she-wolf mean-
while has a woman’s eyes when she gazes at the lady: ‘She stroked
Helga’s ungainly head whilst the animal contemplated her with a
deep womanly gaze’ (158) (‘Elle caressa la lourde tête d’Helga, qui la
contemplait avec de profonds yeux de femme’ (22)).
I am arguing that Vivien is a woman deliberately re-writing the
wolf-woman conjunction. The stereotypical wolf (le loup) is a hunter
with a voracious appetite– the man in pursuit of a woman in the
Duran Duran song. La louve is split. In The Beast and the Sovereign,
Derrida references the adoptive mother of Romulus and Remus and
of Mowgli: these are good mothers, who feed and nurture others
(étrangers), but he also mentions the she-wolf deemed to have an
excessive sexual appetite (Beast 1, 9; Bête 1, 29). Vivien’s story led
me to one key intertext, cut out by the censor from Baudelaire’s Les
Fleurs du mal in 1857, ‘Femmes damnées. Delphine et Hippolyte’
(‘Damned Women. Delphine and Hippolyta’). In this text we see
women, specifically lesbians, figured as running wolves– w omen
with disordered, aberrant, extreme sexuality. Vivien gives us some-
thing very different.
The lady explains that for so long she has been breathing forest
air, snowy air, ‘vast empty expanses of Whiteness, that my soul has
come to resemble that of a she-wolf vanishing into the distance’
(159) (‘Blancheurs vastes et désertes, que mon âme est un peu l’âme
des louves fuyantes’ (24)). We might note the specificity of gender
in this quotation, especially granted that the French language typi-
cally generalises the animal,62 and the plural form, in the masculine,
and turn to one of the many reasons why Vivien might have chosen
a she-wolf to accompany the lady in this story, by making a com-
parison with Baudelaire’s lesbian couple who are like male wolves,
and disordered souls. Baudelaire was a favourite of the young poet,
but Vivien becomes very critical of his representations of women in
general and lesbians in particular (notably Sappho– a great poet
for Vivien, who translates her work, but, above all, a sexual preda-
tor in Baudelaire’s fevered imaginings).63 This is the last verse of his
‘Femmes damnées. Delphine et Hippolyte’, an apostrophe addressed
to the lesbian couple:
Far from your kind, outlawed and reprobate,
Go, prowl like wolves through desert worlds apart!
Disordered souls, fashion your own dark fate,
And flee the god you carry in your heart.64
137
Loin des peuples vivants, errantes, condamnées,

A travers les déserts courez comme les loups;
Faites votre destin, âmes désordonnées,
Et fuyez l’infini que vous portez en vous!
Four of Baudelaire’s words in this verse are echoed by Vivien in
the phrase quoted above: ‘les déserts’ becomes ‘Blancheurs vastes
et désertes’; his reference to souls (‘âmes désordonnées’) turns into
‘mon âme est un peu l’âme’; running wolves (‘les loups’) turn to
‘louves fuyantes’ which also picks up on the exhortation ‘fuyez’.
In Vivien’s story, Helga is first introduced with the words: ‘a large
beast lay sleeping in the trailing folds of her skirts’ (156) (‘une grande
bête dormait dans les plis traînants de sa jupe’ (19))– a very intimate
position. She reacts in hostile fashion to the man– ‘the large beast,
lifting up its muzzle, growled in a sinister manner’ (156) (‘la grande
bête, dressant le museau, grogna d’une manière sinister’ (19))– who
says “ ‘You have a very bad-tempered dog there’” (156) (‘ “Vous avez
là un chien bien méchant”’ (20)). However, this is not a male dog but
une louve, a female wolf– again Lenoir fails to recognise the nature
of the beast, ‘the dreadful animal’ (157) (‘l’affreux animal’ (20)).
This image of the she-wolf at the lady’s feet could again be a rewrit-
ing of Baudelaire’s ‘Delphine et Hippolyte’:65
Calm at her feet and joyful, Delphine lay
And gazed at her with ardent eyes and bright,
Like some strong beast that, having mauled its prey,
Draws back to mark the imprint of its bite.66
Etendue à ses pieds, calme et pleine de joie
Delphine la couvait avec ses yeux ardents
Comme un animal fort qui surveille une proie,
Après l’avoir d’abord marquée avec les dents.
The mention of the bite mark, a kind of savage writing, or at least
labelling, is echoed in the emphasis Lenoir places on the Lady’s
lupine teeth (‘Her teeth gleamed strangely like those of a wild animal
beneath the menacing snarl of her lips’ (158)). These are teeth which
could certainly imprint their mark on you.
Derrida brings together eating and language in the iconic dialogue
between Red Riding Hood and her grandmother-wolf: ‘The one,
vociferation, exteriorizes what is eaten, devoured, or interiorized:
the other, conversely or simultaneously, i.e. devourment, interiorizes
what is exteriorized or proffered’ (Beast 1, 23) (‘L’une, la vociféra-
tion, extériorise ce qui se mange ou dévore ou intériorise, l’autre,
138
inversement ou simultanément, la dévoration, intériorise ce qui

s’extériorise ou se profère’ (Bête 1, 46)). His style may not be close to
the poetry of Baudelaire, Vivien, Tsvetaeva, or Duffy but, like Cixous
a kind of foreigner, he too lovingly stretches language to show the
complex of relations which can be so hard to spell out in plain
English or even French (a language more comfortable with abstrac-
tion). The preceding sentence runs: ‘Devourment, vociferation, there,
in the figure of the figure, in the face, smack in the mouth, but also
in the figure as trope, there’s the figure of the figure, vociferating
devourment or devouring vociferation’ (Beast 1, 23) (‘Dévoration,
vocifération, voilà, dans la figure de la figure, dans le visage en pleine
gueule, mais aussi dans la figure comme trope, voilà la figure de la
figure, la dévoration vociférante ou la vocifération dévorante’ (Bête
1, 46)). While the French can play with the fact that figure means
both ‘trope’ and ‘face’, the translator must keep deciding which
to use. Animals of course are often considered not to have a face–
whether in common usage or in the specialist sense of Levinas– nor
are they held to have access to human speech or writing. Both Cixous
and Derrida also deploy ‘gueule’, which, by contrast to ‘figure’, is
primarily used to mean specifically an animal’s mouth (especially the
maw of a carnivore), and ‘se jeter dans la gueule du loup’ (throwing
yourself into the jaws of the wolf) is equivalent to entering into the
lion’s den in the English idiom. No doubt because it is the term for
the mouth of a lower being, ‘la gueule’ is then used for human beings
in a whole range of slang expressions, sometimes aggressive, such as
those which English might render as ‘shut your mouth’ or ‘stuff your
face’.67
Delphine is portrayed in Baudelaire’s poem warning Hippolyta
about male lovers who will do her violence:
Over you, like a herd of ponderous kine,
Man’s love will pass and his caresses fall,
Like trampling hooves.
Ils passeront sur toi comme un lourd attelage,
De chevaux et de bœufs aux sabots sans pitié.
In ‘Sappho to Philaenis’ (1633) John Donne represents lesbians as
virgins: a man would husband them, plough their furrow, make their
sterile bodies fertile, while a woman leaves no trace.68 Baudelaire’s
lesbian is at once less narcissistic (Donne’s Sappho stares longingly
into a mirror) and more violent. In his poem the arguments are
couched in fierce language: Delphine claims that once Hippolyta has
139
offered herself to ‘un fiancé stupide’ (a ‘lubber groom’ in Huxley’s

translation), Hippolyta would then return to her. She declares to
Hippolyta:
Go– and bring back, all horror and disgust,
The livid breasts man’s love has stigmatized.
Et, pleine de remords et d’horreur, et livide,
Tu me rapporteras tes seins stigmatisés . . .69
As Hippolyta does in the poem, Vivien will reject harsh taming–
being used by, or rather, metonymically, as, a domestic animal, cattle,
cow– b ut via a more positive identification and one that is more
hostile to homosociality. Luce Irigaray, too, re-writes the ‘virgin’
as a woman who does not need a man to transform or complete
her, but is self-possessed.70 ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’ represents
Helga as both a symbolic figure and a sensual material being. From
‘the wolf’ or ‘wolves’ in Baudelaire, Vivien takes us to a particular
she-wolf who is named. She reconfigures the animal imagery which
her male predecessors have used to conjure up women: Donne’s fish
and birds suggest nature in unchanging innocence, but it is above all
Baudelaire, with his predatory Delphine and lesbians condemned to
be running wolves, who is reformulated with Vivien’s inter-species
couple.
When the storm is raging and they are preparing the lifeboats:
‘Helga howled like a bitch. She howled wretchedly, like a bitch
baying at the moon . . . She understood’ (161) (‘Helga hurlait comme
une chienne. Elle hurlait lamentablement, comme une chienne à la
lune . . . Elle comprenait’ (28)) (author’s emphasis). The emphasis
on animal understanding of death is repeated– and the narrator’s
(inhuman?) response is to want to kill the she-wolf (specifically to
beat her, to flatten her with a piece of wood or an iron bar, but no
such phallus substitute is at hand). Lacan would note: bestial cruelty
surely aims at another human being. Such murderous impulses are
common to a number of the narrators in Vivien’s collection, when
faced with an accurate and honest assessment of a situation (instead
of flattery) made by a woman. In ‘La Soif ricane’, Jim says of Polly:
‘I’ll definitely end up killing her one day, just for the pleasure of con-
quering her . . .’ (‘Je finirai certes par la tuer un jour, pour le plaisir
de la vaincre tout simplement . . .’) (36).
Aristotle asserts that animals can only feel and express pleasure
and pain, while men can express justice and injustice.71 Helga’s
howling may be seen differently– a s grieving; she is not in physical
140
pain, but she is singing a lament for she understands that death is
nigh for both the lady and herself. The Cartesian formulation sug-
gests that animals can react but they cannot respond, and hence
cannot be held responsible and must be excluded from the social
covenant.72 In Vivien’s short story the lady and the she-wolf are in
sight of land, floating on a broken mast, when the exhausted lady:
turned towards Helga as if to say: ‘I can’t go on . . .’
And then something sad and solemn occurred. The she-wolf, who had
understood, let out her despairing howl so that it reached the land, so
near and so inaccessible. Then, raising herself up, she placed her front
paws on the shoulders of her mistress, who enfolded her in her arms.
Together they disappeared beneath the waves . . . (162)
se tourna vers Helga, comme pour lui dire: ‘Je suis à bout . . .’
Et voici que se passa une chose douloureuse et solennelle. La louve, qui
avait compris, prolongea vers la terre proche et inaccessible son hurle-
ment de désespoir . . . Puis, se dressant, elle posa ses deux pattes de devant
sur les épaules de sa maîtresse, qui la prit entre ses bras . . . Toutes deux
s’abîmèrent dans les flots . . . (29) (Vivien’s emphasis)73
To return briefly to the question of language: women’s language

is disenfranchised since nothing the lady can say is understood;
the male narrator hears what he chooses to hear even if that is the
opposite of what she means, as if her words were animal sounds. In
the fantastic short story ‘Wolf-Alice’, Angela Carter’s eponymous
protagonist is similarly both exceptional, as a wild child, and also
everywoman:
In the lapse of time, the trance of being of that exiled place, this girl grew
amongst things she could neither name nor perceive. How did she think,
how did she feel, this perennial stranger with her furred thoughts and
her primal sentience that existed in a flux of shifting impressions; there
are no words to describe the way she negotiated the abyss between her
dreams, those wakings strange as her sleepings. The wolves had tended
her because they knew she was an imperfect wolf; we secluded her in
animal privacy out of fear of her imperfection because it showed us what
we might have been, and so time passed, although she scarcely knew it.
(The Bloody Chamber, 122)
Articulate and gifted with language, unlike ‘the ragged girl with brin-
dled lugs [. . . who] would have called herself a wolf, but she cannot
speak’ (The Bloody Chamber, 119), nevertheless Vivien’s lady is not
allowed to have logos. Her logic is disparaged as impertinence– t he
‘blue-stocking’ insult links her to a long lineage of women whose
141
analytical intelligence is represented as unnatural, sterile and ulti-

mately meaningless.74 The genealogy is critical, and also conjured
up, though differently, by Duffy’s reference in ‘Little Red Cap’ to
‘the glistening, virgin white of my grandmother’s bones’ in the belly
of the male poet-seducer-wolf. The bones are a figure for silenced
female predecessors, eaten up, the male poet-seducer-wolf (‘vocifer-
ating devourment or devouring vociferation’) perhaps digesting their
words and spitting them out in his own name. Man keeps reason,
as well as poetry, for himself, even though in Vivien’s tale men are
reduced to incoherent cries in the crisis. Before and after the crisis
Lenoir certainly has words, but they have little meaning when he
speaks to the lady, and he puts faith in superficial style rather than
substance. The most banal of poets, he likes to produce a tedious
succession of metaphors on fire, ‘enflammées’ or ‘passionate compli-
ments’ (157) (‘métaphores enflammées’ (21)), knowing that is what
women want. While Vivien loves poetry, empty and manipulative
words are not what the lady wishes to hear. Lenoir is betrayed by his
words at every turn when he addresses his putative audience (hoping
it will be his semblables, his brothers), since, as much as the lady, the
reader, even if not a woman, can surely not be the dupe of any of
his absurd claims– laughter or a wry smile has to be the response,
yet he hated looking ridiculous above anything else.75 Thus the only
successful communication within the short story is inter-species– the
lady and the she-wolf understand each other.
In spite of Helga’s lament, neither female is afraid– unlike the
men on board the ship. It is fear (terror), according to political think-
ers such as Hobbes, which makes men obey laws (Derrida, Beast 1,
39–43; Bête 1, 67–73). Vivien’s women are unafraid– unlike the
men– in spite of real danger from the natural or social world. Thus
they are mistresses of themselves– as outlaws– u nlike those who are
allegedly masters of themselves who are entitled to be citizens in the
Kantian model of the state. Of course not all women would react
like the lady. She praises (most) women for their loyalty, sincerity,
generosity and patience (158; 22–3). This is of course unlike Lenoir’s
vision of women when he complacently advises ‘never believe a
word they say’ (158) (‘ne jamais croire un seul mot de ce qu’elles
vous disent’ (22)). However, the positive qualities attributed to most
women by the lady can contribute to their subjugation, which is
perhaps why the lady does not choose to love a woman in this story
but rather a kindred outlaw spirit in the shape of the she-wolf.
In a certain tradition animals are seen as not being free in the way
142
that men are– they are not free to disobey the law of nature (and
thus to change for better or worse as men can) and equally not free
to choose to obey or disobey human law (and hence cannot be held
responsible as men are, for example in courts of law). For Heidegger
animals cannot die– t hey only cease to live.76 In this story of course,
Helga does choose to disobey the instinct for self-preservation,
the natural law, out of love, and the wolf-lady seeks to make free
choices, mistress of herself, however difficult her situation– neither
is quite sovereign or beast, perhaps not even female, as the phi-
losophers understand them. And the lady is clearly intended to be an
independent woman– seeking to make free choices however difficult
her situation.
Cixous and other loving
Cixous and Tsvetaeva

While Vivien’s she-wolf and lady unite in rejecting appetites, and
Rousseau’s figural and real wolves in his Discourse on Inequality,
and Rousseau himself as werewolf in his Confessions, are above all
timid rather than aggressive and voracious, most modern rewritings
of the figure of the wolf rejoice in the access it offers to exploring
the pleasure and pain of eating and being eaten. Vivien comes closer
to this in a different story in La Dame à la louve, ‘Trahison de la
forêt’ (‘Forest Betrayal’): the brutal and self-satisfied narrator Blue
Dirk boasts of his killing a tiger, but then Joan, his loyal companion,
is devoured by a tigress– an interesting death in its representation
of eating and a degree of pleasure on the part of the eater. Joan is
described as an excellent and fearless hunter with the eyes of a lynx
(‘des yeux du lynx’) (‘Trahison de la forêt’, 65). She seems to know
that the tigress is the real danger, and, just before she is devoured
(‘dévorée’) (70), she talks of death, a subject she has never previously
discussed: ‘you must be very naked. No flesh, no bones. A form-
less, limitless mass’ (‘on doit être très nu. Pas de chair, pas d’os. Une
masse sans forme et sans contours’) (68). Joan will be transformed
from the person named Joan into a kind of thing. As the tigress eats
her, Blue Dirk hears a sound he will never forget: ‘that mewing, both
furious and satisfied, and that crunching of the bones in that terrible
jaw’ (‘ce miaulement à la fois furieux et satisfait et ce broiement des
os sous l’affreuse mâchoire’) (70). The reader has only the utterly
insensitive Blue Dirk’s narrative to go on and cannot tell if there is
143
any meaningful meeting between Joan and the tigress– in spite of her
suspicion that the ferocious tigress is waiting, Joan has gone to fetch
water after she has said all on the subject of death that she has to say
(‘j’ai dit tout ce que j’avais à dire’) (69). She does not cry out for help
– Dirk imagines an ambush and the tigress ‘sinking her claws deep
into her breast, she must have bitten her on the lips, which prevented
her from calling for help’ (‘lui enfonçant ses griffes dans la poitrine,
elle avait dû la mordre aux lèvres, ce qui l’avait empêchée d’appeler
au secours . . .’) (69). The reader may choose to interpret this lethal
encounter between two killer females as an embrace and a kiss–
ultimately satisfying.
The combination of wolf, carnivorous appetite, and red-blooded
sexual desire has more often been placed in the masculine– the
wolfish sexual predator prowling for prey is typically represented as
male, even in Plato with an older man pursuing a younger (the heter-
onormative being queered from the outset). Plato is the source for a
rare staging in The Beast and the Sovereign of an erotic scene, a vora-
cious sexual appetite (mentioned in passing with respect to louves
as well). Socrates tells Phaedrus that the lover ‘has an appetite and
wants to feed upon you’ then gives the verse ‘as wolves love lambs so
lovers love their loves’.77 Derrida segues from one of his references
to Phaedrus to a mention of Cixous’s short essay ‘The Love of the
Wolf’, which is cited as ‘a text that ought to be quoted and studied
in extenso for an infinite amount of time’ (Beast 1, 210) (‘un texte
qu’il faudrait citer et étudier in extenso pendant un temps infini’
(Bête 1, 281))– implying a hyperbolic appetite for analysis, although
in fact Derrida devotes to it only one page out of the 460 odd pages
of volume one of The Beast and the Sovereign before returning to La
Fontaine. A new edition of Cixous’s collection of essays in transla-
tion, Stigmata, which includes ‘Love of the Wolf’, has a foreword
by Derrida which speaks of the importance of drawing attention to
stigmata, to the wound at the origin of writing, and affirms yet again
his admiration for Cixous, both the person and the work: ‘immense,
powerful, so multiple but unique in this century’; today, in his eyes,
‘the greatest writer in the French language’. This book, he says, is: ‘a
weave of poetic narratives, this unprecedented book overflows our
language, the “French language”, in every way while nonetheless cul-
tivating and illustrating it in a rare and incomparably new fashion. A
practically untranslatable fashion.’78
In the first part of Cixous’s tri-partite book L’Amour du loup et
autres remords there are two key non-human animals. The one that
144
takes up the most space is ‘her’ cat, Thessie, and the challenges that
love for a cat poses, in particular the question of translation between
cat and human. The pains and pleasures of love between woman and
cat are both far from, and close to, those of love more generally. ‘The
Love of the Wolf’ signals that:
Love begins with a cat. A kind of lost, accidental, furry baby arrives. A
kitten they say. A kitten par excellence: the found beast, the abandoned
creature who was meowing– i n Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. She comes into
our home one fine morning, the poignant figure of the child we no longer
dared hope for, bestowed by the gods, and without requiring a biological
mother, or father for that matter.
This kitten given by nobody, a gracious creature, is loved without being
asked its name. (‘Love of the Wolf’, 88–9)
L’amour commence avec un chat. Arrive une sorte de bébé velu perdu,
accidentel. Un chaton dit-on. Un chaton par excellence: la bête trouvée,
l’abandonnée qui miaulait– dans l’Agamemnon d’Eschyle. Elle entre sous
notre toit, un beau matin, figure poignante de l’enfant inespéré, accordé
par les dieux, et sans obligation de mère biologique ni de père, d’ailleurs.
Ce chaton donné par personne, créature gracieuse, on l’aime sans lui
demander son nom. Jusqu’au jour où il devient lion. (‘L’Amour du loup’,
24)
Hospitality which aspires towards the unconditional typically,
and dangerously, entails not asking a name from the stranger, but
that kitten’s name may be lion (‘L’Amour du loup’, 24). In Derrida’s
commentary on fables in relation to political force and power, he
gives the example: ‘I’m called Lion and, you’ll listen to me, I’m
talking to you, be afraid, I am the most valiant and I’ll strangle you
if you object’ (Beast 1, 217) (‘je m’appelle le lion et que, vous allez
m’écouter, je vous parle, prenez peur, je suis le plus vaillant et je vais
vous étrangler si vous objectez’ (Bête 1, 291)). He is referring inter
alia to La Fontaine’s ‘The Heifer, the Goat, and the Ewe, in Society
with the Lion’ (‘La Génisse, la Chèvre et la Brebis, en société avec le
Lion’, Fables, I, 6). In the expanded version of Cixous’s essay, in place
of the phrase ‘Jusqu’au jour où il devient lion’, there is a long quota-
tion from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, which tells of the adopted lion
cub who grows up to massacre sheep, flooding the house with blood,
an outlaw I might suggest. Adoption of a kitten or a cub figures the
adopted child– the found beast becomes the foundling– who breaks
and devours us. One of Cixous’s examples is the dark figure of the
silent Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)– ‘le
sauvage’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 24). Heathcliff is described by Cathy
145
as: ‘ “a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.”’79 When he turns his attentions
to Isabella, Cathy tells him: ‘ “I like her too well, my dear Heathcliff,
to let you absolutely seize and devour her up”’ (Wuthering Heights,
145)– I sabella is the lamb in that formulation and Cathy the ambigu-
ous protector. Cathy loves Heathcliff herself as a reflection, typical of
the love for the foundling ‘whom our narcissism nurses’ according to
Cixous (‘Love of the Wolf’, 89); Cathy says: ‘ “he’s more myself than
I am”’ (121), and she loves his love for her.
The question of translation between cat and human is raised most
sharply in other chapters in L’Amour du loup in terms of the differ-
ent relations to birds: the narrating woman ‘je’ (whom we might take
to be Hélène Cixous, but the autofictional play is always complex
in her highly self-referential writing) wishes to liberate a stunned
bird; Thessie’s, the cat’s, passion for the bird is of another order.80
The narrator’s attempt to deny the cat a bird that came back from
the dead opens up the question of the ethics of human versus animal
codes. Later in the work, the narrator appreciates the cat’s enjoy-
ment in drinking the blood and tearing out the organs of a pigeon
she has captured. After eating her first pigeon comes the first night in
seven years when Thessie does not come to sleep with the narrator
immediately– things will never be the same again now she has learnt
pleasure in cruelty and how to devour. The child grows up.
Cixous focuses largely on masculine predators in ‘The Love of the
Wolf’: the wolf is ‘le gars’ (Tsvetaeva’s ‘lad’), Pugachev, Heathcliff
or Othello. However, her ‘analysis’, perhaps better termed a poetic
weave, as Derrida does, unsettles any comfortable reading of sexual
difference as sexual opposition or heteronormativity:
Tsvetaeva inscribes the genealogy of her own imaginary in a whole
lineage of Pushkin’s love mysteries. These always involve duels, dual rela-
tions that are so intense, so red-hot, so white-hot, that in the glare you
forget even the dimension of sexual difference. (‘Love of the Wolf’, 91)
C’est dans toute une lignée de mystères amoureux de Pouchkine que
Tsvetaïeva inscrit la généalogie de son propre imaginaire. Il s’agit toujo-
urs de duels, de relations duelles, si intenses, portées au rouge, au blanc,
qu’on oublie même, dans l’éblouissement, la dimension de la différence
sexuelle. (‘L’Amour du loup’, 27)
For Cixous’s Tsvetaeva, lambs can be boys (Grinev) as well as girls

(Maroussia), and lambs can eat up wolves as well as be eaten by
them. Duels here suggest lethal amorous couplings, such as that
between Joan and the tigress in Vivien’s ‘Forest Betrayal’, but there
146
is also a reference to history; Pushkin was killed in a duel with a

French Officer, d’Anthès. Tsvetaeva describes the impact on her of
a painting that depicts this final duel (one of many) which hangs in
her mother’s room in ‘My Pushkin’ (319–20).81 In The Captain’s
Daughter, Pushkin depicts a duel between Grinev and Shvabrin,
who mocks Grinev’s poetry and his love for Maria Ivanovna whom
Shvabrin wants to seduce himself, and, in a figural sense, there are
many more ‘duels’ in the texts. The English translation has to lose an
elusive allusion to gender in ‘Il s’agit toujours de duels, de relations
duelles’, the masculine noun ‘duel’ (armed combat), followed, in
apposition, by relationships qualified by the feminine plural adjective
‘duelles’ meaning dual or ‘between two’, allowing the sense of ‘duel’
to open up as it does in the beast and the sovereign duo (Beast 1, 32;
Bête 1, 59).
In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida points to the undecid-
ability between the subjective and the objective genitive in Cixous’s
paradoxically ambiguous title– the hovering between the love of the
wolf for the lamb (whom he can eat up) and the lamb’s love of the
wolf (who loves the lamb). Unlike the version in Stigmata, I would
choose to retain the definite article in Cixous’s title (‘the’ love of
the wolf), in spite of the awkwardness in English, in order to keep
the play between the two genitives. The double genitive in which ‘a
two-way, reversible relationship between terms replaces a simple
subordination of one term to another’ seems particularly appropriate
for these relationships; and the difficulty of following slows reading
down and helps to hold at bay ‘quick-fix moral and political judge-
ments’.82 Sometimes English uses the present participle for this kind
of ambiguity, ‘loving Helen’, but it does not work for a common
noun such as wolf except in the plural (so the translator could have
had ‘loving wolves’), which would take away Cixous’s amorous
specificity (love of one particular wolf). These ambiguous genitives
unsettle properties and the proper (of sexual difference) with their
focus on the gift and love:
What attaches the wolf to the lamb, she [Tsvetaeva] reckons, is the fact
that he hasn’t eaten him.83 Painful mystery of the gift that returns through
reflection: what the wolf loves in the lamb is his own goodness. It is
thanks to the lamb that the wolf accedes to the plane of love– the love
that gives itself without hope, without calculation, without response, but
that nevertheless gives itself, seeing itself give itself. The wolf given to a
lamb of the Grinev type who doesn’t even notice the enormity of the gift
– that’s really love. (‘Love of the Wolf’, 98)
147
Ce qui attache le loup à l’agneau, devine-t-elle, c’est qu’il ne l’a pas

mangé. Mystère douloureux du don qui fait retour par réflexion: ce que
le loup aime dans l’agneau, c’est sa propre bonté. C’est grâce à l’agneau
que le loup atteint le plan de l’amour– celui qui se donne sans espoir, sans
calcul, sans réponse, mais, quand même se donne, se voyant se donner.
Le loup donné à un agneau genre Griniov qui ne remarque même pas
l’énormité du don, ça c’est vraiment de l’amour. (‘L’Amour du loup’,
39)84
Derrida is particularly struck by the element of sacrifice in

Cixous’s account of the wolf’s love for the lamb (Beast 1, 210; Bête
1, 282), the Christ-like renunciation by the loving, giving, wolf:
This wolf that sacrifices its very definition, its identity as a wolf, for the
lamb, this wolf that doesn’t eat the lamb, is it a wolf? Is it still a wolf?
Isn’t it a delupinized wolf, a non-wolf, an invalidated wolf? If it were a
false wolf there’d be no interest. No, we’ve made no mistake, this wolf is a
real wolf: right up to the last minute it might eat us, the axe doesn’t falter,
right up to the last minute. (‘Love of the Wolf’, 93–4)
Ce loup qui pour l’agneau sacrifie sa propre définition, son identité de
loup, ce loup qui ne mange pas l’agneau, est-il un loup? Est-il encore un
loup? N’est-il pas un loup délupisé, un non-loup, un annulé? Si c’était un
faux loup aucun intérêt. Non, ne nous trompons pas, ce loup est un vrai
loup: jusqu’à la dernière seconde il pourrait nous manger, la hache siffle
sans arrêt, jusqu’à la dernière seconde. (‘L’Amour du loup’, 32)
The carnivore that ultimately sacrifices its appetite may seem to draw
Cixous closer to Vivien’s rewriting of the wolf. Yet there remain
important differences. Derrida is struck by Cixous’s play between
‘force’ (kept as ‘force’ in Bennington’s translation, which allows the
necessary echo through the range of contexts, but which could some-
times be translated by ‘power’) and fear. The fear of the wolf (‘la
peur du loup’) is another of these ambiguous genitives, more striking
in French than in English which has a preference for the apostrophe
followed by ‘s’ as marker of the possessive. Vivien’s lady seems to
feel no fear– she is not the child (not even the child within us) who
loves to be frightened and thrills at the thought of the wolf coming
to eat you up.
Derrida points out the wide range of intertexts in Cixous’s piece
(just as he himself has a range of interlocutors in The Beast and the
Sovereign), and she does indeed make fleeting references to a variety
of authors from Aeschylus to Kleist to show, for example, with a
quotation from Agamemnon, how the adopted sauvage may start as
148
a kitten but grow to be a lion. However, she herself sets it up more

intimately in her 2003 version with her first words laid out like a
dedication and enclosed in the arms of a parenthesis in French: ‘(Ce
texte qui suit les traces de Marina Tsvetaïeva est un bon-d pour un
loup secret)’ (‘L’Amour du loup?’, 17). Although in the 1994 article,
and thus in the English translation, the epigraph is simply ‘This is a
bo(u)nd for a wolf’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 84), and only at the close of
an added paragraph do we find: ‘Following in Tsvetaeva’s footsteps,
this reading is a bo(u)nd for a secret wolf’ (84), reversing the use of
italics. In either case, the text is specifically following the tracks or
traces of the Russian poet and playwright Tsvetaeva (1892–1941).
I prefer animal tracks, or non-specific traces, to Cohen’s choice of
‘footsteps’, a translation which binds us to the human. It is also a
bon-d for a secret wolf, which is a mysterious formulation; un bon is
a good thing or man, or a bond or token, something which is good
to be exchanged (appropriate for a work of language). The dash
ties the good to a ‘d’ (Derrida’s initial) making it a bond, a leap or a
bound, certainly appropriate for a wolf: Vivien’s eponymous heroine
turns ‘d’un bond de louve’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 22) (‘she sprang
round like a she-wolf’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 157)) as I have
noted. In the English the brackets go around a ‘u’, perhaps even
more evocative for the pensive reader in the days of text-messaging.
French readers can let their minds float on possible semi-harmonies
with bander to have an erection, or the double bande (double bind).
Cixous’s bond to her fellow experimental and daring writer,
Tsvetaeva, expressed in a number of works, is not, however, an
exclusive endpoint to the intertextual trail. The bond, or lupine
bound, is doubled in Tsvetaeva’s own passion for Pushkin, as the
stranger, her strange foreign origin as a poet or even as a person
(‘Love of the Wolf’, 85) (‘son origine étrangère’ (‘L’Amour du
loup’, 17)), or as her ‘literary mother’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 91) (‘la
mère littéraire’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 27)). We might note the oscil-
lation between distance and proximity– the foreign, even African,
strangeness of Pushkin85 and the maternal element: ‘the mother-
text, Pushkin’s’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 91) (‘le texte-mère, celui de
Pouchkine’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 27)).
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the specific and the
general in this pattern of texts which ‘overflows language’ as Derrida
puts it. Cixous begins with ‘The stranger arrives’ or the arrival of the
stranger. This is a classic starting point for a story or film, but also
a typical account for Cixous of her own creative process, and also a
149
specific reference to Tsvetaeva’s writing about these particular texts

by Pushkin. What will be called ‘the wolf’ is here named ‘le Dehors’,
the Outside (a stronger phrase than the outsider, this is someone who
is the outside, the unknown), who comes in and carries her off, but
‘even inside he remains the outside’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 85) (‘même
à l’intérieur il reste le dehors’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 17)). The wolf is
of course a creature of the wild forest, fors reminding us of ‘outside’
the city walls, outside the law. As Angela Carter puts it in her textual
jouissance of the lupine: ‘One beast and only one howls in the woods
by night’– w
e may howl with pleasure as well as pain (‘The Company
of Wolves’, 110). The outside(r) is elusive and attractive, as well as
dangerous, also a trick of language, words, ordinary and extraordi-
nary, such as ‘love’ read in books, a foreign land.86 When Carol Ann
Duffy writes, in her version of Red Riding Hood, of the birth of the
female poet in the forest outside her home town she tells us:
Lesson one that
night,
breath of the wolf in my ear, was the love poem.
I clung till dawn to his thrashing fur, for
what little girl doesn’t dearly love a wolf?87
Better still was her discovery of the wolf-poet’s books:
As soon as he slept, I crept to the back
of the lair, where a whole wall was crimson, gold, aglow with
books.
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head,
warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
As in Cixous’s ‘The Love of the Wolf’, the poet describes love as sep-
aration from the world, a lair in the forest, a secret which is fragile,
threatened by the possibility of the death of the other– w
hich Duffy
as Red Cap, half following the fairy tale, brings about with a chop of
the axe. This image of liberating female violence is sometimes under-
stood by critics as feminist stridency, and I am afraid that Duffy’s
Mrs Aesop also wields a castrating axe, although juxtaposition with
‘Mrs Midas’ in the same collection allows a lyrical melancholy to
tinge the loss of love, bringing the lost one inside oneself to mourn
him (another form of consuming, consummation). Yet the poet
herself has to make the break in order to find her voice, rather than
end up bleached bones like her grandmother silenced inside a canoni-
cal (even when outsider) wolf. In all these texts there is autofiction
(Adrian Henri might be Duffy’s wolf), there is a more general par-
150
ticularity (of the young girl who became a poet), and then a greater
generality of a solitary adolescent falling in love with the Outside
rather than trying to stay in the city or polis of semblables.
There is the possibility of escaping a purely external threat, a
Lenoir, but ‘the love of the wolf is that complicated thing, the danger
from within, the possibility of being complicit with what threatens
us’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 87) (‘Le danger de l’intérieur c’est cette chose
compliquée qu’est l’amour du loup, la complicité que l’on peut avoir
avec ce qui nous menace’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 21)). We can flee
when hatred threatens, but when it is the tortuous love (‘le tortueux
amour’) that (is the wolf that) shows its teeth the daughter’s senses
are avid (the unconscious) and her heart is blind (the ego).88
We love the wolf. We love the love of the wolf. We love the fear of the
wolf. We’re afraid of the wolf– there is love in our fear. Fear is in love
with the wolf. Fear loves. Or: we’re afraid of the person we love. Love
terrorizes us. Or we call the person we love our wolf or our tiger, or our
lamb in the manger. We are full of teeth and trembling. (‘Love of the
Wolf’, 88)
Nous aimons le loup. Nous aimons l’amour du loup. Nous aimons la peur
du loup. Nous avons peur du loup– il y a de l’amour dans notre peur. La
peur est amoureuse du loup. La peur aime. Ou bien: nous avons peur de
la personne aimée. L’amour nous terrorise. Ou bien la personne que nous
aimons, nous l’appelons notre loup ou notre tigre, ou notre agneau dans
la paille. Nous sommes pleins de dents et de tremblements. (‘L’Amour du
loup’, 23)
Derrida emphasises the importance of the mouth, teeth and

tongue, and ‘the violent rush to bite, engulf, swallow the other, to
take the other into oneself too, to kill it or mourn it’ (Beast 1, 23)
(‘la violente précipitation à mordre, à engloutir, à avaler l’autre, à le
prendre au-dedans de soi, aussi, pour le tuer ou en faire son deuil’
(Bête 1, 46)) in the figure of the wolf. As I have noted, ‘figure’ in
French, though not in English, has an echo which permits a reference
to the wolf’s face, with its slavering jaws, more familiar as the gueule
with which Cixous also teases us in ‘The Love of the Wolf’– the
question is posed to Levinas– does an animal have a face? Cixous
too stresses eating and being eaten in her account of the love of the
wolf:
From the moment we embrace, we salivate, one of us wants to eat, one of
us is going to be swallowed up mouthful by mouthful, we all want to be
eaten, for starters, we are all born-eaters from way back, old ogrelings or
151
ogrelets, we are full of sharp appetites and teeth– but better not say it or
else we would never dare to love. Or to be loved. (‘Love of the Wolf’, 89)
Dès que nous nous embrassons, nous salivons, l’un de nous veut manger,
l’un de nous va être avalé par petites bouchées, tous nous souhaitons être
mangés, pour commencer, tous nous sommes d’anciens mangeurs-nés,
d’anciens ogrelets ou ogrissons, il ne faut pas le dire que nous sommes
pleins de dents et de faims aiguisées, sinon nous n’oserions jamais aimer.
Ni être aimés.) (‘L’Amour du loup’, 25)
Born-eaters, here mangeurs-nés– later Cixous proposes us as born-
eaten mangés-nés (39). The reader who is listening might almost hear
an allusion to ‘mon Genet’ (my Genet), one of the writers celebrated
by Cixous in La Jeune née whose title likewise echoes his name.
She makes a reference to his place in Derrida’s Glas (‘L’Amour du
loup’, 38), which she hears (almost) ringing in ‘gars’ as it is tolling
‘beware’ (gare) as in ‘gare au loup’ (beware of the wolf, which slips
into loup-garou). It is just the ‘l’ missing, almost elle (she). The sound
of Genet in your mouth and your ears (key features of Red Riding
Hood’s wolf) again queers sexual difference, writing, desire and oral
pleasure.89
In her epic poem Le Gars, translated as The Kid by Cixous’s trans-
lator Cohen, Tsvetaeva dramatises the dreams of oral pleasure when
the heroine Maroussia first dances with ‘le gars’, the vampire:
You are the fruit
I am the knife.
You are the dish
I am the eater.
Your eater will do you honour.
Your skin is smooth
Making my tongue tingle
Your skin is soft
Making my saliva flow.
C’est toi le fruit,
C’est moi le couteau.
C’est toi le mets,
C’est moi le mangeur.
Ton mangeur te fera honneur.
Ta peau est lisse
A faire claquer ma langue.
Ta peau est douce
A faire couler ma salive. (Le Gars, 30)
152
Maroussia is implicitly compared to a peach, a common metaphor,

but Tsvetaeva’s deceptively simple, and frequently monosyllabic,
language is subtly polysemic: the ‘douce’ for Maroussia’s skin could
be gentle, soft or sweet to taste. It makes the reader aware of the
cannibalistic vocabulary that otherwise might be a dead metaphor,
commonplace for lovers, or for descriptions of young women, by
literalising it in the context of a vampire-lover– or werewolf. Cixous
points out how the flesh-devouring lad in the red shirt, ‘gars rouge’,
echoes ‘garou’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 96; ‘L’Amour du loup’, 37). But
the danger comes from within, from love or from the unconscious
or, in a bodily form, from ‘les entrailles’. The French term denotes
the intestines, but is also used to refer to the innermost self, the seat
of the emotions, perhaps ‘the bottom of the heart’; it can also mean
the womb. The decision by the American translator to render ‘le
gars’ by ‘the kid’ throughout now becomes even more pointed as he
translates ‘les entrailles’ in both Tsvetaeva and Cixous by ‘womb’.
Thus Tsvetaeva’s:
Chaud cri des entrailles:
– C’est moi, ma promise! (‘L’Amour du loup’, 38)
becomes:
Hot cry from the womb:
– It is I, my promised one! (‘Love of the Wolf’, 97)
This pre-judges all kind of decisions including whose ‘entrailles’ the

cry comes from since only females have wombs. The French allows
it to come from deep inside the ‘gars’ (rather than from, say, the kid
inside her womb), and does not allow it to be undecidable which
would probably be the most faithful solution. In the very end of the
poem the lad and Maroussia are one heart and one body– the vam-
pire-wolf has sacrificed himself, but she has sacrificed her brother
and her mother to his appetite, has left her son with her husband,
and risks losing her soul.
Tsvetaeva, Pushkin and Pugachev

The other polysemically saturated example of the sacrifice or love of
the wolf in Cixous’s essay is Pushkin’s Pugachev. Tsvetaeva argues
that Pushkin is in love with, is bewitched by, Pugachev– o
r at least
with the Pugachev that he creates in his 1836 novel The Captain’s
Daughter (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 382; Pouchkine et Pougatchov,
153
92). Pushkin is well aware of the discrepancies between his poetic

creation and the man who can be deciphered in historical records
since he himself had attempted a report on Pugachev for Nicholas I
some years earlier. This ‘History of Pugachev’ mainly covers events
from the end of 1772, when Pugachev appears as a drifting ‘unknown
vagrant’ amongst the Cossacks (‘A History’, 452), to Pugachev’s exe-
cution in January 1775 (541–2) after the suppression of his rebellion
against Catherine II ‘the Great’– the largest peasant revolt in Russia’s
history, characterised by numerous atrocities. Pugachev intermit-
tently takes on the role of the assassinated Peter III.90 The Pugachev
whom Pushkin loves (‘endless love’ says Tsvetaeva) is the outlaw, the
wolf who loves the lamb (who loves the wolf). The lamb in question,
with whom Pushkin identifies, is ‘Griniov’ (Petr Andreevich Grinev),
the narrator of almost all of his novel. For Tsvetaeva, Grinev, a
sixteen-year-old naive (barely-educated) country noble boy, magi-
cally turns into a thirty-six-year-old poet once Pugachev enters the
narrative, as the Guide first imagined as a wolf in a snow storm
(The Captain’s Daughter, 337).91 Thus in terms of sexual and other
differences what we have is an exiled female poet in her mid-forties
seeming to remember how, as a six-year-old girl, she identified with
(and still does identify with) a mature male poet, who imagines
himself a gently-born rustic adolescent boy loved and enchanted by
a violent peasant92 or Cossack rebel who becomes his benefactor
in spite of the fact that they are on opposite sides in what is more
or less a civil war.93 Tsvetaeva insists that Grinev’s feelings are far
more than gratitude– love for the person who killed your beloved’s
parents in front of you cannot just be down to gratitude, it must be
amorous bewitchment (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 385; Pouchkine et
Pougatchov, 96)– a nd that his feelings are increased with each suc-
cessive encounter, including Pugachev’s final sign with his head just
before he is executed. There is even magic in his appearance (black
hair and beard), his smile, tenderness, majesty, and humour when
he cannot read a note: ‘some kind of animal-like child’ (‘Pushkin
and Pugachev’, 386) (‘une sorte d’enfant-fauve’ (Pouchkine et
Pougatchov, 97)).94
Tsvetaeva’s analysis creates a story of doubling and displacement.
The Captain’s Daughter seems conventional enough in its plot: a
gallant young soldier (Grinev) falls for his captain’s daughter, but
his father refuses them permission to marry because she is below
him in status. After numerous heroic adventures during the war
with the rebel forces of Pugachev they are finally united: he saves
154
her from the wicked and treacherous Shvabrin who is trying to force
her to marry him and she saves him from prison after he is falsely
accused of treachery himself.95 However, Tsvetaeva is convincing in
her case that the true love story is the less conventional one between
the young soldier and the rebel Pugachev, or rather between the
author, Pushkin, and Pugachev– and she places herself in this chain
of substitutions– she too has been enchanted by Pushkin’s Pugachev.
When he first emerges as a black spot in a white blizzard he could
be a wolf– a nd then he wanders, elusive, voracious, bloody and
fierce, black and hairy. I would add that he is intimately associated
with fur coats in the story. The iconic exchange in the narrative is
Grinev’s gift of his own hare-skin jacket that the larger Pugachev
bursts out of (The Captain’s Daughter, 342) at the close of their first
encounter, and the later return gift of a sheepskin coat ‘off his own
back’ tied on a fine Bashkir horse (The Captain’s Daughter, 398).
Each is thus enveloped in a skin coat that the other had worn, an
intimate exchange, each keeping the other warm. The practical as
well as sensual fur also evokes the wild beast. Vivien’s lady is always
wrapped up in fur-like material and dreaming of snowy wastes.
Carter writes of her ‘Wolf-Alice’: ‘it is as if the fur she thought she
wore had melted into her skin and become part of it, although it does
not exist’ (The Bloody Chamber, 119).96
Cixous does not dwell in this essay on the question of sovereignty
which is so critical in The Beast and the Sovereign, but, as well as a
wolf, Pugachev is also a sovereign (even if an imposter); when he frees
Grinev’s beloved Maria Ivanovna for his sake he says: ‘Go free, pretty
maiden: I grant you freedom. I am your Sovereign’ (The Captain’s
Daughter, 419) (‘Tu peux sortir, la belle, je t’offre la liberté; le sou-
verain, c’est moi’ (Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 100)). Tsvetaeva makes
the contrast with the insipidly healthy and round-cheeked Empress
Catherine, all in white, wearing a nightcap, who encounters Maria
or ‘Masha’ on a park bench, and pretends to be a lady of the court.
‘How much more regal in his gesture is the peasant who gives himself
the name Ruler, than the ruler who presents herself as a hanger-on
at court’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 388) (‘Comme il est plus royal, le
geste du paysan qui se dit souverain devant celui de la souveraine qui
se donne pour dame de compagnie’ (Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 100)).
While Tsvetaeva acknowledges that Catherine is good and kind, and
that Pushkin respects her, she sees her as ‘the lady-patroness’ (‘la
dame patronnesse’), a hateful figure, a patronising matron, sweet
to the point of being honeyed or sugary, which makes even the
155
six-year-old poet want to die of boredom– the antithesis of a thrill-

ing wolf. For Tsvetaeva there are two real marriages in the book: that
between the Empress and Maria (sugar and vanilla, I would say),
and the one between Grinev and Pugachev (sealed with blood and
fur). There are a series of counterparts to Pugachev, for instance he
is ‘the savage wolf’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 389) (‘le loup sauvage’
(Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 102), while Savelich, Grinev’s loyal old
family servant, is a faithful dog. All the other characters in the story
are stock figures, even Masha (the innocent first love); they are at
best nice or lukewarm, against the fire,97 passion and darkness of
Pugachev. The true ‘interior’ enemy is the monstrous Shvabrin while
Pugachev may be the ‘exterior’ enemy (or enemy on the outside), but
is a true friend even if Grinev would have had to do his duty and kill
him in battle had circumstances dictated.
There is a very different reading effect in ‘A History of Pugachev’,
which is not written by the poet Pushkin but rather by a ‘prose
writer’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 392) (‘prosateur’ (Pouchkine et
Pougatchov, 107))– the reader is disgusted rather than enchanted
by the terrorist Pugachev who commits numerous atrocities, while
in The Captain’s Daughter the focus is on the exceptional act of
grace: he saves someone and the reader identifies with the one who
is spared. Pugachev in ‘A History’ is morally weak and cowardly–
allowing his woman Kharlova (and her seven-year-old brother) or
his friend to be killed by his comrades (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 394)
(‘A History’, 473–4).98 He is not a hero, not even a real wild animal
but ‘one who allows bestial deeds’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 398) a
‘fauteur de fauves’ (Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 115). Pushkin writes
the fiction after the history, transforming Pugachev; thus the novel is
‘the retort of the poet to the historical Pugachev. The lyricist’s retort
to the archive’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 399) (‘la riposte du poète au
Pougatchov historique, la réponse du lyrisme aux archives’ (Pouchkine
et Pougatchov, 116)). He wrote the history for others, Tsvetaeva
claims, the fiction for himself: ‘Pushkin’s Pugachev is a poetic liberty,
just as the poet himself is poetic liberty, a liberty that in the poet plays
itself free from assiduous images and assigned imitations’ (‘Pushkin
and Pugachev’, 399) (‘Le Pougatchov de Pouchkine, c’est la liberté
du poète, comme le poète lui-même est liberté, laquelle, en elle-même,
se débarrasse des images importunes, emporte les images imposés’
(Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 117)). She emphasises the poetic process
of purification, knowledge, sight, and forgetting, of love of the wolf as
revolutionary, overturning order, a kind of bouleversement.99
156
Little Red Riding Hood

Derrida makes a number of references to the iconic tale of Red
Riding Hood, including in relation to the Wolf Man (Beast 1, 64;
Bête 1, 99). The savage wolf of course features in many popular
stories that have been retold over the centuries in different variants
including the tale of the ‘Three Little Pigs’, ‘The Goat and her Three
Kids’, and ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids’ (which is also a
reference point for Freud’s Wolf Man) as well as ‘Little Red Riding
Hood’. Canis lupus used to be the most widely distributed land
mammal apart from homo sapiens, and man’s history of domesti-
cating other animals, then seen as property,100 inevitably brought
about conflict with the wolf viewed as competitor, predator and thief
(Marvin, Wolf, 8–9, 35–48). I should note, however, that Derrida
raises but decides to leave open the question why certain animals
have fascinated fabulists and political philosophers more than others.
Lupopohobic fables, including Aesop’s in the sixth to fifth centuries
BC about the boy who cried wolf or the shepherds who try to tame
wolf cubs, combine warnings about wild carnivores with the use of
the wolf to represent a wicked human being. The fairy tales typically
involve a combination of a thrill and a moral message: the greedy
wolf eating up unwary young creatures (and the old grandmother in
Red Riding Hood), but then meeting his comeuppance. The animals
he has swallowed are often reborn from his stomach– sometimes
after his death and sometimes replaced by stones which will bring
about his death. It is perhaps a peculiarly satisfying end for the audi-
ence (made bloodthirsty by the tale) when the wolf is undone by his
appetite or literally or symbolically fed flesh (sausages or stew) as
part of his downfall. In ‘The Goat and her Three Kids’, and ‘The
Wolf and the Seven Little Kids’, it is the mother who takes revenge
on the wolf for eating her children; but in ‘Red Riding Hood’ it is the
hunter or wood-cutter. The hunter skins the wolf and takes the pelt
home– this adoption of the animal’s skin, to which I have referred
earlier in relation to The Captain’s Daughter or ‘The Lady with the
She-Wolf’, is used to neat effect in Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes,
one of many modern revisions.101
Derrida points out that Freud tells us that the wolf (whether
legend or nightmare) is always the father. A key psychoanalytic
reference point for Red Riding Hood is Bettelheim, who points out
that there are many traditional versions of the tale, the most popular,
and his own favourite, being the Brothers Grimm’s ‘Little Red Cap’
157
(Rotkäppchen, 1812). Charles Perrault’s moral tale is earlier (Le

Petit Chaperon Rouge, 1697102) but vastly inferior according to
Bettelheim because the warning message about burgeoning female
sexuality is too clear for his taste: Perrault’s young girl is asked to
undress and gets into bed with the wolf (who is not disguised as a
grandmother). When she asks him what his big arms are for, the wolf
replies that they are for embracing, and the tale ends with a moral
about how dangerous wolves are, especially ones that seem nice, but
follow young girls in the street (The Uses of Enchantment, 168). For
Bettelheim this means that the Perrault tale is not a real fairy tale
which must have meanings on different levels that you discover as
you grow and partially create for yourself. The seduction attempt
is so obvious, he declares, that the girl must be stupid or a fallen
woman (169). I might note that Bettelheim here seems to protest too
much.
Carter’s short story, ‘The Company of Wolves’, like the film, con-
tains a series of lupine vignettes, examples of the dangers of wolves,
in particular werewolves (although that name is not given until a
few pages in (113)), wolves who are really men.103 A killer wolf
trapped in a pit changes (back) into a man when dead; a witch turns
a wedding party into a band of wolves; a man who vanishes on his
wedding night returns and transforms into a wolf on learning that his
wife has married again. It has a feel of ‘on dit’, indirect free speech
to represent all our traditional worries about the cunning ferocious
carnivore lurking in the shadows of the woods– particularly danger-
ous when famished, in some ways reminiscent of the Encyclopédie’s
collection of wisdom about wolves in the Enlightenment. The wolf
has ‘slavering jaws’ (110) and cannot listen to reason (111). If a child
strays from the straight and narrow path ‘for one instant’ then the
wolf will attack– the hyperbole of ‘for one instant’ helps the reader
to recognise the social role played by the emphatic warning about
the lethal consequences of errancy. For Bettelheim, the fact that Red
Riding Hood recognises the beauty of the external world (here forest
birds, animals and fungi) suggests the danger she may return to the
pleasure principle which dominates the world of the infant (a more
primitive form of existence), and has not yet recognised the difference
between what one would like (straying from the path to pick flowers)
and what one ought to do (go straight to your grandmother’s house,
say good-morning and not peek in corners).104 Carter rehearses the
threat: ‘Before he can become a wolf, the lycanthrope strips stark
naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if
158
the Devil were after you’ (113). The solitary and reclusive (mad old
man or grandmother)– those who choose to live apart (outside the
law, Derrida would suggest)– are likely victims alongside the young
girls who must be warned.105 Carter suggests that the melancholic
howling wolves are ‘mourning for their own irremediable appetites’
but that there is no redemption (112). Thus far the author is in
accordance with the classic narrative.
However, once she embarks on the main dish, the meat of Little
Red Riding Hood, Carter both strips bare some of the anthropo-
logical or psychoanalytical assumptions about the function of the
tale and challenges the moral. The girl’s red shawl ‘has the ominous
if brilliant look of blood on snow’ (113), and then explicitly, in the
following sentence: ‘she has just started her woman’s bleeding’, a
critical moment for patriarchal control of female sexuality. Bettelheim
claims that this is a fairy tale for an older girl, unlike, say, ‘Hansel and
Gretel’, aimed at a younger audience for whom the mother (witch) is
all-important; it is the male who is crucial both as dangerous seducer-
destroyer and strong, social rescuer, and: ‘the wolf is not just the
male seducer, he also represents all the asocial, animalistic tenden-
cies within ourselves’ (Uses of Enchantment, 172). This is why Red
Riding Hood gives the wolf such detailed instructions about how to
get to her grandmother’s: it represents her inner ambivalence about
seducing her father. The red cap, for Bettelheim, suggests a premature
transfer of sexual attractiveness from (grand)mother to Red Riding
Hood. Bettelheim’s psychoanalytic account is less clear about the
oppressive elements of social control of women which Irigaray, for
example, would highlight.106 Carter, however, does not separate into
two characters or functions the wolf-seducer and the hunter-rescuer–
her handsome gentleman hunter already has blood on his chin when
he arrives at the grandmother’s house. The last thing the grandmother
sees is a young man, eyes like cinders, with huge genitals, ‘Ah! huge’
(‘The Company of Wolves’, 116), approaching her bed.
Red Riding Hood knows she is ‘in danger of death’, and hears
the voices of the young man’s gaunt grey brothers in the garden: ‘the
company of wolves’ (117). At this point, after the teasingly ambiva-
lent elements of the young man’s attributes, Carter turns the tale
definitively in her own direction. The girl responds to the wolves’
concert: ‘It is very cold, poor things, she said; no wonder they howl
so.’ The wolves are like a band of brothers or comrades, which is a
change of emphasis from the usual solitary wolf of the fairy tale. For
Deleuze and Guattari there is always a multiplicity of wolves, always
159
a wolf pack, growing by contagion (rather than filiation). The criti-

cal distinction is the choice to be attached to the edge of the pack of
wolves rather than in the middle.107 Red Riding Hood takes off her
shawl, ‘the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifices, the colour of
her menses, and since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid’
(117). Addressed affectionately, as a familiar animal, ‘my pet’, by the
wolf/man she takes off each item of clothing, as the lycanthrope does,
and burns it on the fire– t here is no going back. Then she addresses
him and freely kisses him. When he begins to slaver and talks of
eating her, she ‘burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat.
[. . .] She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the
lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and
eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage
ceremony’ (118). The English phrase ‘his fearful head’ manages to
convey the ambiguous French genitive ‘la peur du loup’– should the
lamb be afraid of the wolf or vice versa? She partakes of forbidden
fruit– putting savages’ meat into her mouth– in the delicate groom-
ing ritual which brings together non-human animal behaviour with
the diets or ceremonies of ‘other’ humans.108 The final sentence runs:
‘See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws
of the tender wolf.’ This is indeed, in Cixous’s phrase ‘the love of
the wolf’. The wolf is (made) tender; the ‘carnivore incarnate’ (‘The
Company of Wolves’, 116, 118) is himself tender, like meat ready to
eat, just as the girl’s response to his brothers is a tender, gentle one.
The Brothers Grimm’s nineteenth-century variation on the tale is a
further doubling, a retelling with a second wolf; this time Red Riding
Hood has learnt her lesson, rushes to her grandmother and tells her
of his approach thus together they defeat this wolf. For Bettelheim
the wolf was an externalisation of the ‘badness’ which children feel
will swallow them up if they go contrary to parental admonitions
(Uses of Enchantment, 177); however, there is resurrection and the
girl has been reborn to a higher plane. The hunter is the other side
of the father, the one who rescues the girl from the consequences of
her wish to seduce him and to be seduced by him (to be loved by him
more than anyone else); his violence has served a social purpose and
his daughter is pulled out of the wolf’s stomach in a second birth, rid
of her weakness after regressing to darkness and to pleasure-seeking.
Carter’s belated (post-Freudian) tale ‘knows’ this argument or this
interpretation– and chooses defiantly to relish both pity for the cold
and hungry and also amorous passion, both tenderness and the erotic
(with its element of danger and fear).
160
Carter’s ‘Wolf-Alice’ is taken by the nuns, who find her embar-

rassing and insufficiently tractable, to live with the nocturnal and
unsanctified Duke and thus to be his servant. She finally creates for
him a kind of second birth, after she has learnt how to clean herself
and deal with her own menstruation, by licking him. She brings him
to a kind of humanity, figured by his reflection in the mirror gradu-
ally appearing, whereas previously he was a lone predator without
a mirror image. This could of course be read as continuous with her
domestic ‘service’ role. Christine Delphy amongst others has pointed
out the feudal economy that regulates a wide range of unpaid labour
performed by women, including the emotional mirroring or psy-
chological reflecting of men-folk to keep their egos in shape for the
world of paid work.109 Nevertheless Wolf-Alice’s act of compassion
for an old person, solitary, wounded and in pain, albeit in such a
violent context, could be compared to the nurturing performed by
her own wolf foster mother or to the turning point in ‘The Company
of Wolves’ when the girl reaches out to the howling wolf pack in
the cold, feeling pity for the other rather than hatred, fear or revul-
sion. It is quite different to the economically self-interested behav-
iour of the grand-daughter in ‘Werewolf’, who piously displays her
grandmother’s severed hand as evidence that she is a werewolf and
thus should be expelled from the community. It is a sacrificial and
hospitable gesture (like washing feet), as well as an animal gesture
like that of a she-wolf, if rather different from Tsvetaeva’s Pugachev
or ‘le gars’ as virile wolves that love and save their lambs.
Cixous’s comment on Red Riding Hood is that children can live
ambivalence, can see both grandmother and wolf at the same time:
Grown-ups pretend, but children take pleasure. The wolf says to the
child: I’m going to eat you up. Nothing tickles and delights the child
more. It is a mystery: why is the idea that you are going to eat me so
frightening and so enjoyable? We need the wolf for such delight. The wolf
is the truth of love, its cruelty, its teeth, its claws, our tendency towards
ferocity. Love is when you suddenly wake up as a cannibal, in any way,
or even destined for devouring.
But happiness is when a real wolf does not eat us. (‘Love of the Wolf’,
94)
Les grandes personnes font semblant, mais les enfants jouissent. Le loup
dit à l’enfant: je vais te manger. Rien ne chatouille autant l’enfant de
délice. C’est le mystère: pourquoi me fait tellement plaisir et tellement
peur l’idée que tu vas me manger? C’est pour ce délice que l’on a besoin
du loup. Le loup est la vérité de l’amour, sa cruauté, ses crocs, ses griffes,
161
notre aptitude à la férocité. L’amour c’est quand tout d’un coup on se

réveille cannibale, et n’importe comment, ou bien promis à la dévoration.
Mais le bonheur c’est quand un vrai loup ne nous mange pas. (‘L’Amour
du loup’, 33)
Bettelheim comments: ‘it is the child’s unconscious equation of
sexual excitement, violence, and anxiety which Djuna Barnes alludes
to when she writes: “Children know something they can’t tell; they
like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!”’ (Uses of Enchantment,
176). It may be, however, that Barnes is more challenging than he
imagines. According to Tsvetaeva, children fall in love with the Guide
Pugachev (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 391; Pouchkine et Pougatchov,
104), and The Captain’s Daughter has the magic of the classic tale.
It is the prison and the freedom of the dream, with Pugachev as the
father who loves and ‘massacres’ (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 391;
Pouchkine et Pougatchov, 105), the dark night, while the Empress
is the rationality of daylight. Perhaps the child does not necessarily
move from the thrill to the moral as Bettelheim suggests.
Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Little Red-Cap’ tells of the love of the
wolf as a step (pas, the French might say) on the path for a young
girl becoming a poet. Duffy points out that she is using the original
title in Grimm’s fairy tales for ‘Little Red Riding Hood’– a s in the
folk tale, the death of the voracious wolf is required.110 She presents
it as an autobiographical version of the story, beginning with the
landscape of Stafford where she grew up. The young girl has a rela-
tionship with an older male poet (presumed to be Adrian Henri), ‘the
wolf’, but the fear of being consumed by the wolf is translated into
her triumph over him– t he hunter as deus ex machina is removed.111
The violence of the fairy tale is ‘waiting to be used’, not something
Duffy would necessarily have developed otherwise. A female voice
is asserted against the weight of the male poetic tradition. Duffy
suggests that the grandmother’s bones are a figure for our silenced
female predecessors. ‘Little Red-Cap’ also has a number of ambigu-
ous references to birds. The girl delivers a living bird to the wolf who
eats it for breakfast in bed in ‘one bite, dead’– later she learns that
‘birds are the uttered thought of trees’. Poetry is flowers, music, and
also blood. The collection ends in ‘Demeter’ with flowers, brought by
a daughter to a mother, as a figure for motherhood– also autobio-
graphical in a way, Duffy tells her readers.
The outlaw, poet, rebel, wolf, lover stand outside, or on the
margins of, society which holds together by fear– m en and women
162
are made afraid to break the law, including the laws relating to
gender (‘la. . . le’). Hobbes claims that outside society man is a wolf
to man, but, even without tracking his source in Plautus, I could
note with Rousseau that Hobbes shows that competitive social man
is a wolf to men and women too– or instead. Yet the horror of the
voracious wild is used to keep subjects in line. Thus the romance of
the lone wolf or the rogue individual, which remains a delight and a
creative inspiration to the Cixousian or Tsvetaevan reader, may yet
help guard against the terror that lurks even in fraternal democracy.
There are many examples which bring together the love of the
wolf, social exclusion and death, and I shall end with just one final
rewriting in a different genre: Le Loup, a ballet, whose plot derives
from Jean Anouilh and Georges Neveux, choreographed by Roland
Petit and created by the Ballets de Paris, first performed in the Théâtre
de l’Empire on 17 March 1953.112 This is devised by men, but in a
sense co-created by the female dancer whose body helps tell the cruel
tale of love and death ‘conte cruel d’amour et de mort’.113 The ballet
is usually assumed to have elements of ‘Beauty and the Beast’, with
an unhappy ending, and elements of werewolf stories. On the day
of his wedding a bridegroom runs off with a gypsy, telling his bride
he has been changed into a wolf so that she will accept a captured
wolf (who had been ‘shown’, had to do his ‘turn’ as part of a wild
animal show) as substitute husband. Little by little the bride discov-
ers that her partner is a real wolf– and they live from fear to love in
a universe of sensibility and sensuality (‘un univers de sensibilité et
de sensualité’114)– effectively outlaws in a small solitary house in the
forest. Then ‘the village gossips appear gradually like ghosts. They
surround the little house and, very excited, condemn the monstrous
act committed by the young woman. They tear down the house.
They separate the bride from the wolf’ (‘Les commères apparaissent
peu à peu comme des fantômes. Elles cernent la maisonnette et, très
excitées, condamnent l’acte monstrueux de la part de la jeune fille.
Elles défoncent la maison. Elles séparent la mariée du loup’).115 The
commères are the female counterpart of the compères of Tsvetaeva’s
Le Gars; women too, especially mothers, have a role in the repro-
duction of social structures– theirs might not be the same kind of
violence as that of the compeers but their strictures can reinforce
household law on behalf of patriarchy. Human law and order is thus
to be re-established with everything and everyone back in their place.
However, the bride will not accept her tritely mendacious human
husband when he decides to return to her. When the people of the
163
village hunt down the wolf she defends him and dies with him. The
tale of forbidden love which ends in the death of the lovers is familiar
– yet the strange detail of the bridegroom imposing as his substitute
a savage beast on his bride is less so. The emphasis on the animal-
ity of the wild lover in the ballet, whether the prosthetic teeth or the
repeated gesture of pricking of ears, helps to defamiliarise.
To return to female authors: as Cixous wrote in one of her earli-
est publications, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’: ‘Woman must write
her self: must write about women and bring women to writing,
from which they have been driven away as violently as from their
bodies– for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal
goal. Woman must put herself into the text– as into the world and
into history– by her own movement’ (245) (‘If faut que la femme
s’écrive: que la femme écrive de la femme et fasse venir les femmes à
l’écriture, dont elles ont été éloignées aussi violemment qu’elles l’ont
été de leurs corps; pour les mêmes raisons, par la même loi, dans le
même but mortel. Il faut que la femme se mette au texte– c omme
au monde, et à l’histoire,– de son propre mouvement’ (‘Le Rire de
la Méduse’, 39). The patriarchal law of interdiction cuts between
female and male, child and adult, animal and human. Feminist revi-
sions then suggest that she-wolves and women can be male poets
in love with revolutionary wolves, sovereigns and rogues, mothers
or adoptive mothers, virgins or sexually liberated, but are not to be
fitted comfortably into the patriarchal woman-virgin-mother-whore
complex of commodification. Writing the wolf, the outside the law
may bring in ‘Other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns’
(d’autres femmes, d’autres souveraines inavouées’) as Cixous puts it
(‘Laugh of the Medusa’, 246; ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ 40), also other
outlaws, challenging a tidy boundary between human and animal,
preferring ‘l’entre’, entering the in-between.
The poets (in the broadest sense of the word) writing about the
love of the wolf thus obliquely confront the two fears that keep sub-
jects in check: fear of the wild outside of the polis (la bête) and fear
of the consequences of disobeying the Law (le souverain), the Father,
little king in his house, which and who make you a subject (see
Derrida, Beast 1, 39–43; Bête 1, 67–73). For Hobbes, life is essen-
tially fearful, and thus subjects should be grateful for protection. For
many women, there are indeed reasons to be fearful, and some of
the authors discussed in this chapter have particular experiences of
terror (including Nazism and Stalinism or social exclusions relating
to their sexual choices). And yet they write about, say, a queer love
164
for the outlaw such as Pugachev, who defies the sovereignty of the
state as monopoly of violence (Derrida, Beast 1, 17; Bête 1, 38); or
they mock the recognition and gratitude demanded along with their
domestic labour in the voice of, say, Eurydice. Whether celebrating
sexual desire or singing the praises only of inter-species companion-
ship, these marginal figures reinscribe ‘man’ and ‘animal’ if only for
the space of writing and reading. To give Cixous the last word:
When I write, I become a thing, a wild beast. A wild beast doesn’t look
back when it leaps; doesn’t check that people are watching and admir-
ing. Those who do not become wild beasts when they write, who write to
please, write nothing that has not already been written, teach us nothing,
and forge extra bars for our cage. (‘We Who Are Free, Are We Free?’,
218)
Notes
1. ‘L’Amour du loup’ was originally published in a theatre review (La
Métaphore) in 1994; this was re-published in a more concise form
in Hélène Cixous, L’Amour du loup et autres remords, 17–40. My
thanks to Mairéad Hanrahan for telling me about Cixous’s love of
the wolf on Oxford station many years ago. ‘Love of the Wolf’, trans.
Keith Cohen, in Stigmata, 84–99, is a translation of the original
expanded version. While I have consulted this translation and refer-
ence it I have preferred to retranslate the French myself– in some
cases I shall indicate what might be at stake in the difficult translation
decisions. I should like to thank Joanne Collie for discussing these dif-
ficulties with me, always a pleasure, and Kathryn Batchelor for advice
on translating Le Gars– all remaining infelicities are my own. One
of the decisions I have made is to translate ‘il’ by ‘he’ rather than ‘it’.
I have chosen to translate the title by ‘The Love of the Wolf’ when I
allude to the essay, in spite of the awkwardness in English, in order
to emphasise the double meaning in French to which both Cixous and
Derrida draw attention.
2. This quotation comes from Derrida’s presentation of the seminar for
his American audience in spring 2003, cited in the ‘Editorial Note’.
3. Later ‘La bête et le souverain. La . . . le’ (e.g. 97, 100) is rendered ‘The
[feminine] beast and the [masculine] sovereign. La . . . le’ (63, 65).
There is no particularly elegant means in English of conveying what
Derrida is doing.
4. See Nancy K. Miller, ‘The French Mistake’, in Getting Personal:
Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts (London:
Routledge, 1991), 48–55. His majesty the ego, the internal exter-
nal examiner, checking for accuracy, upholds the law of gender,
165
and watches the Anglophone French academic, perhaps particularly

women who hesitate sometimes to speak in public in any case, feeling
they are transgressing simply by opening their mouths, as Cixous
relates in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula
Cohen, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de
Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985 [1980]), 245–64 (251)
(‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, L’Arc, 61 (1975), 39–54 (43–4)).
5. A good example in the first session of the 2002–3 seminar series is
Derrida’s reference to ‘une “il”, féminin conjointe au masculin’ (Bête
2, 25)– the ‘conjointe’ with its feminine ending follows ‘féminin’
which we assume to be a masculine noun (‘le féminin’, ‘the femi-
nine’) rather than an adjective describing ‘il’– w hich as a personal
pronoun would be masculine, but is being used as a homophone for
the feminine word ‘île’ (island). The ‘conjointe’ seems so strange that
it requires a footnote from the French editors (who, as a matter of
policy, very rarely provide footnotes). ‘Tel dans le tapuscrit’– that is
how it is in Derrida’s typescript– if it were not for the comma then
you might think (grammatically) that the footnote key should attach
itself to ‘féminin’ which would be an adjective. In English translation
the complex straining at gender in language is much reduced– ‘ “une
‘il,’” feminine conjoined with masculine’ (Beast 2, 4) with no need for
a footnote.
6. See Lynn Turner, ‘When Species Kiss: Some Recent Correspondence
Between animots’, Humanimalia, 2:1 (2010), and Oliver, Animal
Lessons, for exceptional examples of reading Derrida on animal dif-
ference and sexual difference.
7. The absolute monarch, never mind the oriental despot who so often
represents the European sovereign in the Enlightenment, is not a
homogeneous or monolithic figure of virility– assuming too much
coherence in patriarchy can lead to over-optimism about the power of
gender bending to subvert masculine authority.
8. ‘Freud sees in the wolf, without hesitation, [. . .] a substitute for the
castrating father, the more so in that the father often said in jest to
the Wolf Man as a child, “I’m going to eat you.” Later in the analy-
sis, the mother becomes just as much a wolf, if not a she-wolf, as the
father’ (Beast 1, 65) (‘Freud voit dans le loup, sans attendre, [. . .] un
substitut du père castrateur, d’autant plus que le père disait souvent
en riant à l’Homme aux loups enfant: “Je vais te manger.” Plus tard,
dans l’analyse, la mère devient aussi loup, sinon louve, que le père’
(Bête 1, 99)). Derrida analyses this case history in detail in ‘Fors’,
trans. Barbara Johnson, Georgia Review, 31:1 (1977), 64–116; ‘Fors’,
in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Cryptonymie: le verbier de
l’homme aux loups (Paris: Auber-Flammarion, 1976), 7–73.
9. In terms of biography as well as writing these writers are interesting
166
for their oppositional sexuality, and their complicated relationship to

maternity and to appetite. For instance Vivien, anorexic, is a lesbian at
a time when male homosexuality is a crime in England where she was
born; Tsvetaeva, Cixous and Duffy all have sexual and amorous rela-
tionships with both women and men, unmarried or married to others.
While Duffy as the youngest might be assumed to have fewer material
difficulties to overcome this would be overly optimistic and her open-
ness about lesbian maternity is unusually bold. Tsvetaeva’s relation-
ship to her children is shrouded in sorrow and mystery– one daughter
starved to death in an orphanage, one was sent to the Gulags. Cixous
has written about her Down’s Syndrome baby.
10. Tsvetaeva also wrote a number of poems relating to Pushkin between
1913 (before she left Russia) and 1937; and she translated some
of his poems into French. See Stephanie Sandler, Commemorating
Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2004), chapter 6, ‘Marina Tsvetaeva’s Pushkin and
the Poet’s Identities’. ‘My Pushkin’ and ‘Pushkin and Pugachev’ are
both translated in Marina Tsvetaeva: A Captive Spirit. Selected Prose,
Introduction by Susan Sontag, ed. and trans. J. Marin King (London:
Virago, 1983), 319–62, 372–403. I shall also quote from the trans-
lation into French to which Cixous refers: Mon Pouchkine suivi de
Pouchkine et Pougatchov, trans. André Markowicz (Sauve: Clémence
Hiver, 1987). See ‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 384–5; Pouchkine et
Pougatchov, 94–5. The translation in Stigmata follows the French
spelling for Russian names (e.g. Pougatchov, Griniov) except for
Pushkin and Tsvetaeva. I have followed a more common English
transliteration for Russian names. Thanks to Polly McMichael for
advice on Russian names and monarchs– any remaining mistakes are
my own.
11. Marina Tsvetaeva, Le Gars (Paris: Des femmes, 1992, preface by Efim
Etkind). After reading The Vampire by A. N. Afanasyev in his collec-
tion of popular tales, Tsvetaeva wrote a long Russian poem in 1922
on this theme; it took three months, then a further eight months to
transpose it into a French poem– which is this book. While a vampire
traditionally sucks blood, the ‘gars’ devours his prey like a wolf. The
crossover between a vampire figure and a (were)wolf is also a feature
of Carter’s ‘Wolf-Alice’ in the character of the Duke whose ‘eyes see
only appetite’ (The Bloody Chamber, 120).
12. See ‘A History of Pugachev’, in Alexander Pushkin, The Collected
Stories, trans. Paul Debreczeny (London: Everyman’s Library, 1999),
443–543. This is, Pushkin tells his reader, an ‘incomplete piece of his-
torical research’ (443) written in 1833–4 on the basis of the archives
then available and some eyewitness accounts. Pugachev also features
in Pushkin’s short novel The Captain’s Daughter (The Collected
167
Stories, 326–442), which was first published in 1836– a fter the his-
torical account as Cixous and Tsvetaeva point out. In other words,
Pushkin is well aware of the recorded atrocities committed by the
historical figure and his bands of fighters when he constructs his own
Pugachev. ‘The Guide’ is the title of the chapter in which Pugachev
first appears; and following this initial episode Tsvetaeva refers to
Pugachev as the Guide. Cixous points to her fondness for everyday
monosyllables such as ‘gars’ or ‘guide’ as names for these wolves; The
simplicity is complex.
13. This is to be distinguished from the totalitarian politics of Stalinism;
the impact of Stalinism on Russian poets, and their response, is
brought out by Cixous in a number of works. Apart from Tsvetaeva,
she has written on Mandelstam, and wrote a play about the poet Anna
Akhmatova, and her close friends Lydia Chukovskaia and Nadezhda
Mandelstam in 1950s Russia. See Cixous, Voile noire, voile blanche,
French original and translation by Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, New
Literary History, 25.2, (1994), 222–354. Thanks to Martina Williams
for drawing this play to my attention.
14. According to Bettelheim, in some early French versions the wolf
makes Red Riding Hood drink her grandmother’s blood and eat her
flesh (see Mélusine, vol. 3 (1886–7) and 6 (1892–3)). See Claude Lévi-
Strauss, ‘Cannibalisme et travestissement rituel (anneé 1974–1975)’,
in Paroles données (Paris: Plon, 1984), 141–9 (144–5), for some
comments on the way in which female cannibalism is rarely a neutral
social phenomenon.
15. Elisa Brune, La Tournante (Paris: Editions Ramsay, 2001), 135. My
translation. Thanks to Dylan Sebastian Evans for drawing this text to
my attention.
16. There are earlier silent versions: a 1913 Canadian film The Werewolf;
The White Wolf (1914) and Le Loup-Garou (1923). There have also
of course been many more recent filmic versions of the werewolf story,
including a 2010 remake of the original Wolf Man, directed by Joe
Johnston and starring Benicio del Toro in the lead role, which raises
questions about the intersection of lycanthropy with ‘lunacy’ and
domestic abuse by the patriarch (of his wife, children and servant).
While the Wolf Man’s father is also a werewolf, and kills the wife
he loves, the del Toro character is killed by his beloved– a sacrificial
act for which he thanks her as he dies. Other well-known examples
of films inspired by the myth include John Landis’s An American
Werewolf in London (1981).
17. Glen Duncan, The Last Werewolf (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011),
chapters 13–14.
18. See Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1730– B ecoming-Intense, Becoming-
Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible . . .’, in A Thousand Plateaus,
168
232–309, e.g. 241–2; ‘1730– Devenir-intense, devenir-animal, deve-

nir-imperceptible . . .’, in Mille Plateaux, 284–380, e.g. 295–6.
19. Titus Maccius Plautus, Amphytryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides,
Captivi, trans. Paul Nixon (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard
University Press and Heinemann, 1916). There is an issue of ‘who’ or
‘what’ in translation; it seems obvious to translate the phrase as ‘when
one does not know him, man is not a man, but a wolf for man’– but
Derrida points out that it is grammatically possible to say ‘wolf [the
wolf] is a man for man, which is not a man, when one does not know
him’. Is the wolf ‘who’ or ‘what’? (Beast 1, 61–2; Bête 1, 95–7).
20. Thomas A. McGinn, The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman
World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004) writes: ‘one
of the terms they [i.e. Romans] commonly employ to describe brothel
only succeeds in conveying a sense of misogyny. Lupanar (or lupanar-
ium) signifies in a literal sense “den of wolves,” specifically she-wolves,
since the word for female wolf, lupa, is often used for prostitutes. Such
terminology emphasises the rapacious, predatory, and greedy nature
of the prostitute as a type, and, at the same time, denies her human-
ity’ (7–8). The term lupanar also exists in French as a euphemism for
brothel, and thus femme or fille de lupanar for prostitute.
21. See my Derrida and Hospitality, chapter 3, ‘Friendship and Sexual dif-
ference: Hospitality from Brotherhood to Motherhood’.
22. See Derrida (Beast 1, 98–101; Bête 1, 142–6) on Rousseau’s half a
dozen references to wolves and werewolves in his Confessions.
23. Rousseau, Confessions, in OC, I. Rousseau, The Confessions, trans.
J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 47.
24. Derrida begins the first session of the second series of The Beast and
the Sovereign seminars (11 December 2002) with some questions
about the meaning of the phrase ‘Je suis seul(e)’, which he very par-
ticularly places in both the masculine and the feminine. (The fact that
the English equivalent ‘I am alone’ does not require a decision as to
gender means that the emphatic inclusivity of Derrida’s written for-
mulation is lost.) He asks his audience to: ‘Meditate on the abyss of
such a sentence: I am alone with you, with you I am alone, alone in
all the world. Because we’re always talking about the world, when we
talk about solitude. And the relation of the world to solitude will be
our subject this year. I am alone with you in the world. That could be
either the most beautiful declaration of love or the most discouraging
despair-inducing testimony, the gravest attestation or protestation of
detestation, stifling, suffocation itself’ (Beast 2, 1) (‘Méditez l’abîme
d’une telle phrase: je suis seul(e) avec toi, avec toi je suis seul(e), seul(e)
au monde. Car il y va toujours du monde, quand on parle du solitude.
Et le rapport du monde à la solitude sera notre sujet cette année. Je
suis seul(e) avec toi au monde. Cela peut être la plus belle déclaration
169
d’amour ou le plus désespérant témoignage, la plus grave attestation

ou protestation de détestation, l’étouffement, la suffocation même’
(Bête 2, 21)). Vivien’s lady would be happy to be alone with the she-
wolf. But if human company is the only company that is counted then
being with her persistent suitor Lenoir would make her long to be
alone (with herself).
25. This quotation from Derrida comes in the context of his introduc-
ing a strange aphorism from Heidegger to the effect that ‘les bêtes ne
sont pas seules’: ‘the beasts are not alone’ (or perhaps ‘beasts are not
alone’).
26. See Garry Marvin, Wolf (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 19–24.
Deleuze and Guattari are two cultural commentators who do focus
on the pack or band rather than the lone wolf or werewolf– b ut do
not follow natural history in seeing this as an extended family– they
prefer to imagine the pack growing by infection: ‘Propagation by
epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity,
even if the two themes intermingle and require each other’ (Thousand
Plateaus, 241). (‘La propagation par épidémie, par contagion, n’a rien
à voir avec la filiation par hérédité, même si les deux thèmes se mélan-
gent et ont besoin l’un de l’autre’ (Mille Plateaux, 295). This work
has had a mixed reception from those currently working on critical
animal studies; for example, Oliver comments, with some accuracy:
‘Even Deleuze and Guattari, whose notion of “becoming-animal”
is intended to unseat the Cartesian subject, show little concern for
actual animals’ (Animal Lessons, 4). Derrida made the same point
in his seminars, saying that for Deleuze, as for the psychoanalysis
he is challenging, it is always only about man (Beast 1, 142; Bête 1,
196).
27. Sigmund Freud, ‘From the History of An Infantile Neurosis (The
‘Wolf Man’) (1918 [1914])’, ed. and trans. James Strachey, Penguin
Freud Library, Vol. 9, Case Histories II, ed. Angela Richards
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 225–366 (255).
28. ‘Lamies’ are fabulous monsters who were reputed to devour children;
‘larves’ and lémures’ are spirits of the dead who pursue the living. See
Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making
Mock (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) for an account
of various bogeymen and their female equivalents such as Lamia (28,
82).
29. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans.
Bruce Fink (New York: Norton), 120; Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 147.
Quoted in Derrida, Beast 1, 97; Bête 1, 140.
30. Derrida does not refer back to Of Grammatology, but we might be
irresistibly reminded of his writing on Rousseau and sex in terms
of the supplement, including the particular solitary supplement of
170
masturbation. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore

and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), trans. Gayatri
Spivak; De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967).
31. See Geoffrey Bennington, Dudding: des noms de Rousseau (Paris:
Galilée, 1991) for an analysis of this episode.
32. An earlier version of this section was published in Women, Genre
and Circumstance: Essays in Memory of Elizabeth Fallaize, co-edited
with M. Atack, D. Holmes and D. Knight (Oxford: Legenda, 2012),
96–108. As well as presenting this as a paper at the conference
in memory of Elizabeth Fallaize at the Institute of Germanic and
Romance Studies (October 2010), I gave a version at a Paragraph
conference (Merton College, Oxford, September 2010), and another
version at a panel (‘Following Derrida Following the Animal’) organ-
ised by Mairéad Hanrahan at the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
French and Francophone Studies conference (‘Human-Animal’, San
Francisco, April 2011). I should like to thank the various audiences
for their comments.
33. ‘La Dame à la louve’, the opening story in Renée Vivien, La Dame à
la louve (Paris: Gallimard, 2007 [1904]), 19–29; ‘The Lady with the
She-Wolf’, trans. Elizabeth Fallaize, in The Oxford Book of French
Short Stories, ed. Elizabeth Fallaize (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 156–62. Translations from other stories in La Dame à la louve
are my own. Not a great deal has been written on Vivien, and very
little on this collection of stories– m
ore emphasis has been placed on
her life and on her poetry. See, for example, Karla Jay, The Amazon
and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Renée Vivien (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988); Diana Holmes, French Women’s
Writing 1848–1994 (London: Athlone, 1996), 83–103; and Marie-
Ange Bartholomot Bessou, L’Imaginaire du féminin dans l’œuvre de
Renée Vivien: De mémoires en Mémoire (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses
Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2004).
34. Jacques Derrida in conversation with Hélène Cixous and Verena
Andermatt Conley, ‘Voice I . . .’, boundary 2, 12.2 (1984), 50–67;
Jacques Derrida and Verena Andermatt Conley, ‘Voice II . . .’,
boundary 2, 12.2 (1984), 68–93; Jacques Derrida and Lucette Finas
and Verena Andermatt Conley, ‘Voice III . . .’, boundary 2, 12.2
(1984), 95–8. Jacques Derrida, Eperons: les styles de Nietzsche
(Paris: Flammarion, 1978); Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche’s
Styles. Éperons, les styles de Nietzsche, trans. Barbara Harlow
(Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1979). Christie V
Macdonald, ‘Choreographies: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’,
in Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida, ed. Nancy J. Holland
(Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 23–42.
35. Martine Reid, ‘Présentation’, in Vivien, La Dame à la louve, 7.
171
36. Vivien is witty in order to make a point with her depiction of Lenoir–
a rather different kind of comedy to Plautus.
37. Aesop uses wolves as a figure of untrustworthiness for instance, in
‘The Wolf and the Crane’, Aesop’s Fables, trans. Laura Gibbs, Oxford
World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), fable 46,
93.
38. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Eurydice’, in The World’s Wife (London: Picador,
1999), 58–61 (59). Thanks to John Michael Fairless for sharing Duffy
with me– happy memories of talking about books and sometimes
arguing about them.
39. There is a famous photograph showing Nathalie Barney (Vivien’s
most celebrated lover) with what looks like a much-loved dog– a
greyhound type breed and so thin and elegant. Barney also mentions
her fondness for dogs in ‘Renée Vivien’, in A Perilous Advantage: The
Best of Nathalie Clifford Barney, ed. and trans. Anna Livia (Saline
MI: New Victoria Publishers, 1992), and it is attested by biographers.
40. The narrator says that when he is terrified ‘only the instinct of the
animal in rut survived in me’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 161) (‘il
ne survivait plus en moi que l’instinct du rut’ (‘La Dame à la louve’,
27)). I would compare Derrida’s remarks on bêtise and priapism
(Beast 1, 222–4; Bête 1, 297–9).
41. La Dame à la louve collection has a range of male narrators of different
nationalities, for example the murderous Italian Giuseppe Bianchini in
‘Cruauté des Pierreries’ (‘The Cruelty of Precious Stones’); a Scot; the
American Jim who daydreams of scalping Polly, his savior; and also
legendary male figures such as Ahasueras. This shows similar male
behavior across cultural boundaries, and concomitantly female loyalty
and fidelity to self and to chosen friends, partners, or other women in
‘Les soeurs du silence’ (‘The Sisters of Silence’) or ‘Le voile de Vasthi’
(‘The Veil of Vasthi’).
42. In the Baudelaire poem, ‘Femmes Damnées’ (Damned or Doomed
Women), that I shall quote at length ‘tout à l’heure’, in due course,
Hippolyta lies in ‘la pâle clarté des lampes languissantes’ (‘The lamps
had languished and their light was pale’); she is a ‘pâle victime’ (‘pale
victim’). His suggestion of fragility and gloom is a very different use
of pallor to that of Vivien. Some feminist readers, noting the refer-
ence to paleness in Vivien’s writing, make a link to a moon cult (say,
Artemis) and Amazons– w ho, in one version, founded Mytilene, the
capital of Lesbos. The narrator points out that ‘As she listened to
me, she affected a faraway look’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 157)
(‘Elle affectait, en m’écoutant, une distraction lunaire’ (‘La Dame à la
louve’, 21))– in fact not an affectation, we presume.
43. The translator, Marin King, suggests that this may refer to a bust of
Zeus in her father’s study.
172
44. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and
Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985).
45. In another story in La Dame à la louve collection, ‘L’Amitié féminine’
(Friendship between Women), Vivien, writing at the very beginning of
the twentieth century, argues that a famous example of male friend-
ship (David and Jonathan) is in fact amorous passion, and that women
have a greater gift for friendship– a nalysing a different biblical case of
Naomi and Ruth.
46. It is very difficult to find the right translation for this title– Tsvetaeva
is notoriously difficult to translate in any case. I feel that ‘the lad’
would be a more neutral rendition than ‘the kid’ which is Cohen’s
choice– but lad is also far from ideal.
47. In Rogues, the unusual term ‘compeer’ (meaning a comrade or
someone who is equal in status or rank) is used as a translation for
semblables.
48. He asserts that the words do not matter, only ‘the way in which they
are said’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 156) (‘l’art de les prononcer’
(‘La Dame à la louve’, 19)) when courting women.
49. Balzac’s novella ‘The Girl with the Golden Eyes’ (‘La Fille aux yeux
d’or’) proposes a young woman who is more attractive than the lady
with yellow eyes, but may be an indirect reference for Vivien (who
chose to move to Paris in part for the Sapphic circle she could become
part of) as a tale of lesbian love in Paris in which the heroine meets
a tragic death. See Honoré de Balzac, ‘La fille aux yeux d’or’, in
Ferragus. La fille aux yeux d’or (Paris: Flammarion, 2014); ‘The Girl
with the Golden Eyes’, in The Girl with the Golden Eyes and Other
Stories, trans. Peter Collier, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
50. Steff Penney uses a native American character to express the view that
wolves rarely attack humans in The Tenderness of Wolves. Marvin
emphasises in Wolf how ‘As a consequence of how the carnivorous
ways of wolves entered into human concerns, human groups waged
campaigns of extermination against the wolf and were successful in
eradicating it from most of its territory. In much of Europe this was
accomplished centuries ago, while in most of North America this hap-
pened only a generation ago’ (8).
51. In particular, Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 150–1; Différence et
répétition, 196–7, and Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1730– B ecoming-Intense,
Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible’, in A Thousand Plateaus;
‘1730– Devenir-intense, devenir-animal, devenir-imperceptible . . .’,
in Mille Plateaux.
52. See Bernadette Fort, ‘Theater, History, Ethics: An Interview with
Hélène Cixous on The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies’,
173
New Literary History, 28:3 (1997), 425–56, for a similar slipping

between categories: ‘all those who were born accused, accused of
being Jews, women, conspirators, blacks or poets’ (442).
53. See my Derrida and Hospitality, chapter 5, ‘The Dangers of Hospitality:
The French State, Cultural Difference and Gods’, for the phrase ‘seuil
de tolérance’.
54. He comments for example on her ‘curious countenance’, or that she is
‘a strange creature’ (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 156) (‘le curieux
visage’, ‘un être bizarre’ (‘La Dame à la louve’, 19)); ‘I have never seen
such a strange face’ (157) (‘Jamais je n’ai vu de visage aussi étrange’
(20)). Again in ‘Brune comme une noisette’, the narrator repeats,
although the nut-brown maid he is pursuing is pretty, she is not like a
woman– as he perceives women.
55. She responds to the man’s first approach ‘somewhat tartly’ (‘The
Lady with the She-Wolf’, 156) (‘avec quelque sécheresse’ (‘La Dame
à la louve’, 19))– t here is a (stereo)typical association of women with
liquidity, helped by that familiar trick of the French language la mer/
mère. Vivien shows the reality of the sea as dangerous, and resists any
comforting liquefaction of her female characters– the lady is dry in
style and bony in body.
56. In the second story in La Dame à la louve, ‘La Soif ricane’ (‘Mocked
by Thirst’), dangerous nature is not the sea, but fire in the prairies–
brave Polly calmly fights fire with fire and saves the weak male narra-
tor as well as herself. He comments: ‘I hated her because she wasn’t
afraid. Oh! How I hated her! . . . I hate her savagely, because she is
stronger and braver than I am’ (‘Je la haïssais de ne point avoir peur.
Oh! comme je la haïssais! . . . Je la hais férocement, parce qu’elle est
plus forte et plus vaillante que moi’) (36).
57. Marie Perrin, in Renée Vivien. Le corps exsangue De l’anorexie à la
création littéraire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003), writes that ‘The Lady
with the She-Wolf’ is ‘the most convincing argument for the link
between anorexia and female power’ (‘l’exemple le plus probant du
lien entre anorexie et pouvoir au féminin’) (116).
58. Although Angela Carter re-writes this in ‘The Company of Wolves’,
made into a film with Neil Jordan in 1984, to allow a female to trans-
form into a desiring wolf. Catherine Hardwicke’s film Red Riding
Hood (2011) allows the same possibility.
59. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Mrs Beast’, in The World’s Wife, 72.
60. See Derrida and Nancy, ‘Eating Well’. For analysis of this piece see my
Derrida and Hospitality, chapter 6, ‘Animals and What is Human’.
61. Edward the Confessor’s laws define the outlaw as a man with a wolf’s
head caput lupinum; see Agamben, Homo Sacer, 104–11. Unlike
Derrida’s The Beast and the Sovereign, Agamben’s account of the wolf
(or of bare life) is not sensitive to issues of sexual difference.
174
62. There are interesting examples in Cixous’s writing on cats that move
between the typical grammatical masculine (le chat) and the specificity
of feminine (la chatte) since her cat is female; see, for example Messie
(Paris: Des Femmes, 1996).
63. For her critique of Baudelaire on lesbians and Lesbos, see L’être double
(Paris: A. Lemerre, 1904), the novel written under one of Vivien’s
other pseudonyms or alter egos– the American Paule Riversdale.
Vivien was baptised Pauline Tarn, but chose to reinvent herself in
Paris. While Vivien is certainly attracted to Sapho as a lesbian poet,
the poetry should be prioritised.
64. Translated by Aldous Huxley, in The Cicadas and Other Poems
(New York: Harper & Bros, 1929). Another translation refers to
werewolves.
65. Of course the image of a lady with an animal at her feet (a lapdog, for
example) or with its head in her lap is a common motif in writing and
painting.
66. This evokes the Red Riding Hood story; see Bruno Bettelheim, The
Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991 [1975]), ‘Little Red Riding Hood’,
166–82. The girl comments to the wolf-grandmother: what big teeth
you have. The wolf is undone by oral greediness as Bettelheim puts
it (178). In The Beast and the Sovereign Derrida associates dévorer
[devour] above all other terms historically linked to the wolf.
67. ‘But sometimes it’s the wolf that falls into the jaws of the lamb’ (‘Love
of the Wolf’, 98) (‘Oui mais parfois, c’est le loup qui tombe dans la
gueule de l’agneau’ (‘L’Amour du loup’, 39)). The reader might note
Cixous’s repetition of ‘gueule’, e.g. for fire (‘L’Amour du loup’, 35)
which needs feeding ‘aliment’ (37).
68. As Baudelaire will do, Donne imagines one woman seducing another
in ‘Sappho to Philænis’:
Thy body is a naturall Paradise,
In whose selfe, unmanur’d, all pleasure lies,
Nor needs perfection; why shouldst thou then
Admit the tillage of a harsh rough man?
Men leave behind them that which their sin showes,
And are as theeves trac’d, which rob when it snows.
But of our dallyance no more signes there are,
Than fishes leave in streames, or Birds in aire.
69. Derrida remarks on the title of Cixous’s collection Stigmata – the

wound at the origin of writing (in Cixous, Stigmata, 2005, x).
70. See ‘La Chasteté paradoxale’ (‘Paradoxical Chastity’) in Vivien’s La
Dame à la louve for virginity as fidelity to self. The theme of virginity,
not as the state of being physically ‘intact’ but as self-affection, runs
175
through Luce Irigaray’s works, and is commented on in a number of

essays in Luce Irigaray: Teaching, ed. Luce Irigaray and Mary Green
(London: Continuum, 2008).
71. Aristotle, Politics 1253a, 2–18; see Derrida, Beast 1, 347–9; Bête 1,
460–3.
72. The Cartesian line is followed, for example, by Hobbes, who excludes
animals (and gods) from the possibility of the (social) covenant as
indicated in Chapter 1. See Derrida, Beast 1, 39–58; Bête 1, 67–92.
73. These are the final words of the tale, with the author’s italics and
parentheses. Might this be Vivien speaking directly rather than Lenoir?
74. In La Jeune Née, Cixous repeatedly uses the syllable con – which
occurs in many key French terms including those relating to knowl-
edge (‘connaissance’ and so on) and recognition (‘reconnaissance’).
The translator of The Newly-Born Woman, tries to convey this by
inserting ‘cunt’ into the English equivalents– of course this makes the
point rather more bluntly; it is hard to convey the critical link to the
seventeenth-century Précieuses who were ridiculed for avoiding dirty
syllables (‘syllabes sales’). While twenty-first-century readers too may
laugh at that preciosity, it is the reaction of those who are perhaps
desperate to be appreciated for their minds and language rather
than imprisoned in bodies to be worshipped, utilised, brutalised and
policed.
75. He claims to detest ridicule (true, though he makes himself ridiculous),
but not to know fear (‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’, 156; ‘La Dame
à la louve’, 20)– which is clearly untrue: he is reduced to a gibbering
wreck when danger threatens, and thus made ridiculous by the gap
between his words and reality.
76. See Derrida, Beast 2 e.g. 121ff.; Bête 2, e.g. 182ff.
77. Plato, Phaedrus, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett
(London: Sphere, 1970), vol. 2, 257.
78. Foreword in Cixous, Stigmata (2005), x.
79. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985),
141.
80. See Elizabeth Behnke on Merleau-Ponty and the phenomenology
of living-with-cats in Animal Others, ed. H. Peter Steeves. On the
subject of pets we might note the provocation: ‘tous ceux qui aiment
les chats, les chiens, sont des cons’ (Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1730–
Devenir-intense, devenir-animal, devenir-imperceptible . . .’, in Mille
Plateaux, 294).
81. She depicts d’Anthès as a failed poet jealous of Pushkin’s poetic genius,
although the usual version is that it was the honour of Pushkin’s wife
that was at stake.
82. Malcolm Bowie, ‘Thomas Adam Pepper’ (first published as ‘Read
Slowly, Read Again: Thomas Adam Pepper and the Importance of
176
Difficulty in the Practice of Theory’, 1998), in Song Man: Selected

Essays of Malcolm Bowie 2, ed. Alison Finch (Oxford: Legenda,
2013), 291–6 (294–5). This comment specifically refers to reading
Heidegger and includes other challenging grammatical techniques
such as the ‘middle voice’ which occupies the territory between active
and passive, which are also applicable to Cixous and Derrida.
83. Cohen’s translation uses ‘it hasn’t eaten it’ for ‘il ne l’a pas mangé’–
where the wolf has not eaten the lamb. This allows the ambiguity that
the lamb might be female (Maroussia) or male (Grinev)– the lack of
a final ‘e’ on ‘mangé’ means that the lamb is not simply feminine (the
word is masculine). I have settled for the masculine person as Grinev
is the dominant example in the paragraph. To refer to these figures of
animals with the neuter ‘it’ is a decision that the animal is not a person
which is a decision that the French does not have to make.
84. It is a complex decision how to translate Cixous’s reflexives: ‘se
donne’ translated on each occasion by Cohen as ‘gives of itself’.
85. As Cixous indicates, Tsvetaeva is transfixed by the ‘blackness’ of
Pushkin (and Pugachev), which operates on a range of semantic
levels, including ethical and political points, shades in a painting, the
Black Sea or a reference to Othello’s love for Desdemona. We might
add the concrete detail that Pushkin’s great-grandfather, Ibrahim
Petrovich Hannibal (1696–1781), was Ethiopian, brought to Russia
from Turkey in 1704 as a gift for Peter I, who adopted him. Pushkin
expresses pride in this remarkable African heritage and wrote an
unfinished novel about his great-grandfather, The Blackamoor of
Peter the Great (1827–8); see The Collected Stories, 3–40. This also
fascinates Tsvetaeva who identifies strongly with anti-racist struggles
(see, for example, ‘My Pushkin’, 324–6; ‘Mon Pouchkine’, 19–22)
although this particular political message is not explicit in the allusive
and elusive Cixous text.
86. Cixous emphasises the life of books in almost all her works. See, for
example, her childhood memories in Reveries of the Wild Woman:
Primal Scenes, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2006) (Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage. Scènes
primitives (Paris: Galilée, 2000)). ‘I used to read in the Clos-Salembier
because it was impossible to survive without books. I mean to live
without light, without mind or spirit, without reality without sleep
without peace without bread’ (47) (‘Je lisais au Clos-Salembier parce
qu’il était absolument impossible de survivre sans livre, c’est-à-dire de
vivre sans lumière, sans esprit, sans réalité sans sommeil sans paix sans
pain’ (82)).
87. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Little Red-Cap’, in The World’s Wife, 3–4.
88. This is a specific reference to Maroussia in ‘Le Gars’, as well as a more
general reference to the daughter function (for a mother).
177
89. See Mairéad Hanrahan on Genet’s tale of eating a cat: ‘Une Écriture
retorse: La réponse de Genet à ses juges’, French Studies, 68:4 (2014),
510–25.
90. Catherine II had seized power after dethroning her husband Peter III
who was assassinated.
91. Cixous, in a slight departure from Tsvetaeva and Pushkin, insists on
the fact that the mysterious ‘dark shape’ is not a wolf but a thing, ‘la
chose’ (‘Love of the Wolf’, 91; ‘L’Amour du loup’, 28), or a Signifier.
92. Tsvetaeva points out in ‘Pushkin and Pugachev’ that Pushkin–
unusually amongst Romantic writers– chooses a hero from near past
history, his father’s generation– a man, a real peasant.
93. Not only is Tsvetaeva in exile from Russia, but she is spurned by most
other (White) Russian exiles because her husband has become a spy
for the Soviets. The questions of class and allegiance, as well as sex,
sexuality and age, are critical here.
94. I am citing from the French as well as the English translation because
Cixous’s reading is closely entwined with the French version she has
read.
95. According to the novel he goes to prison for love of Masha– he does
not want to dishonour her by publicising their love, which is his excuse
for consorting with the enemy. However, in line with Tsvetaeva’s
interpretation it might seem more convincing that the noble Grinev
goes to prison because he recognises himself as a traitor in his love for
Pugachev.
96. See Sarah Kay on the significance of animal skin in medieval literature
often written on processed skin: ‘Legible Skins: Animals and the Ethics
of Medieval Reading’, Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural
Studies, 2 (2011), 13–32. Thanks to Emma Campbell, also working
on the animal-human boundary in medieval writing, for sending me
a copy of this article. Miranda Griffin has a book in progress with a
chapter on the significance of skin, fur and clothing in the construction
of, and blurring between, categories of human and animal in three
French werewolf narratives from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
97. For Tsvetaeva, love for Pugachev (for an incomprehensible and
dangerous object) is a secret fire, and the Russian word for ‘guide’,
vozhatyi, echoes in its central syllable zhar the word for fire (as
well as a charm chary) which she hears as a rhyme; see Sandler,
Commemorating Pushkin, 222.
98. Tsvetaeva does allow that some positive elements come through in the
‘History’: Pugachev’s humour, physical bravery in battle, language,
the love felt for him by the common people, his impressive voice and
his gaze, also his humanity (‘Pushkin and Pugachev’, 397–8).
99. This reminds me of the character of the Mother in Cixous’s La Ville
parjure ou le réveil des Erinyes (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1994)– h er
178
ethical demand for true confession and apology from those who
brought about the death of her sons, unmoderated by political prag-
matism, does not bring about a happy ending (a Fascist dictator takes
over the city and floods the cemetery where the poor and the marginal
have found shelter). However, the fact that an emotional and ethical
stand can cause destruction and devastation does not make it wrong.
100. Domestication raises very complicated questions– not least in terms
of the history of what may be seen as man doing something to animals
or as a mutual socialisation, at least up to a point. See Sykes, Beastly
Questions, especially chapter 2, ‘Animal “Revolutions”’.
101. Roald Dahl, Revolting Rhymes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982). The
narrator meets the girl (who has shot the wolf herself with no inter-
vention from a hunter, moved more by his fur than his teeth) a few
weeks later:
I came across Miss Riding Hood.
But what a change! No cloak of red,
No silly hood upon her head.
She said, ‘Hello, and do please note
My lovely furry wolfskin coat.’
When called in to help the little pig in another rhyme, the sharp-
shooter, Miss Hood, ends up with a second wolfskin coat and also a
pigskin travelling case . . .
102. Charles Perrault, ‘Le petit Chaperon rouge’, in Contes (Paris: Poche,
2006), 4–9.
103. Carter did a considerable amount of work on fairy tales apart from the
revisionary collection on which I focus here (The Bloody Chamber) –
which she adapted into radio plays (such as The Company of Wolves,
BBC Radio 3, 1 March 1980) as well as the film In the Company of
Wolves, dir. Neil Jordan (1984). She edited Angela Carter’s Book
of Fairy Tales (London: Virago, 2005) which brings together The
Virago Book of Fairy Tales (London: Virago, 1990), also published
as The Old Wives’ Fairy Tale Book (New York: Pantheon, 1990),
and The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales (London: Virago, 1992),
also published as Strange Things Still Sometimes Happen: Fairy Tales
From Around the World (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993). She also
translated The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (London: Gollancz,
1977) and Charles Perrault and Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont,
Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (London: Gollancz,
1982).
104. In an earlier version of the tale, the girl must choose between fas-
tening with pins and sewing with needles (Bettelheim, The Uses of
Enchantment, 170–1).
105. In another tale in The Bloody Chamber collection, the first of the
179
lupine trio, ‘The Werewolf’, Carter makes explicit that old women
who attract attention because of their difference or solitude– a ‘black
cat, oh, sinister! follows her about all the time’ (108)– are killed by
human, social agency. We can even guess, through the supernatu-
ral trappings, that the grandmother’s enviable home is taken from
her by the grand-daughter who demonstrates that the old lady is a
werewolf.
106. See Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter
with Carolyn Burke (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985), e.g.
chapter 8, ‘Women on the Market’, which deals with women as com-
modities (170–91); Ce Sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977),
‘Le Marché des femmes’ (165–85). The collection also takes issue with
Lacan’s account of feminine sexuality.
107. See Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1914: One or Several Wolves’, in A

Thousand Plateaus, 28–31; ‘1914– U n seul ou plusieurs loups?’,
in Mille plateaux, 38–52. See Beast 1, 144–6; Bête 1, 199–201, for
Derrida’s comments on this chapter and its sarcasm at the expense of
Freud’s case history of the Wolf Man.
108. See my Enlightenment Hospitality, chapter 3, ‘The New World:
Eating the Other’, for a juxtaposition between the reaction of a mis-
sionary (Paul LeJeune) and that of a trader (Samuel Hearne) to First
Canadians and the habit of eating ‘vermin’.
109. See Christine Delphy and Diana Leonard, Familiar Exploitation:

A New Analysis of Marriage in Contemporary Western Societies
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992) for an analysis of the emotional and
social work which is a significant element of domestic labour for
women.
110. In a conversation with Barry Wood recorded in Manchester in 2005,
and reproduced on the website sheerpoetry.co.uk (accessed 23 April
2012).
111. In another autobiographical poem about leaving a relationship, a

gentler, sadder one, ‘Mrs Midas’ (The World’s Wife, 11–13), the
husband ends up in a caravan in the woods listening to the voice of
Pan. In ‘Queen Herod’, the dangerous boyfriend is figured as ‘The
Wolf. The Rip. The Rake. The Rat’ (8).
112. The music was written by Henri Dutilleux– the wolf first danced by
Roland Petit himself. Petit tells in J’ai dansé sur les flots (Paris: Grasset,
1993) of visiting his friend the playwright Jean Anouilh (they had
already collaborated on Les Demoiselles de la nuit) to ask for a story
– Anouilh remembered ‘une histoire cruelle’ that Georges Neveux
had told him some years earlier. Anouilh related ‘how, through love,
a wolf becomes a man and how men filled with prejudices destroy
him so that everything returns to its place, as it should be, in order’
(‘comment, par amour, un loup devient un homme et comment les
180
hommes remplis de préjugés le détruisent, pour que tout revienne en

ordre, comme il faut, à sa place’) (J’ai dansé, 210).
113. Henri Dutilleux, in Gérard Mannoni, Roland Petit (Paris: L’Avant-
scène ballet/danse, 1984).
114. Georges Arout, La Danse contemporaine (Paris: F. Nathan, 1955).
115. Programme notes, Opéra National de Paris, saison 2012–13, 52–3,
from Jean Anouilh, Georges Neveux, Le Loup (Paris: Editions
Ricordi, 1954).
181

The Love of The Wolf (Derrida)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Love of The Wolf (Derrida)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Edinburgh University Press

Chapter Title: The Love of the Wolf

Book Title: Derrida and Other Animals

The Love of the Wolf

As soon as you speak of loving there he is.

sounding like ‘eh, eh’, which relates to the homophony in French

explicit in Derrida unlike many writers who are stricter in policing

be confined to some extent within the domestic economy, the law

romance. But maybe writing new, differently perverse, romances is

and Guattari celebrate werewolves and vampires precisely because

Plautus and Montaigne: querying the domestic

them­– t­he battleground here is the oikonomia and a ludic power

chapter 5) ‘homo homini’ is said to be either ‘deus’ or ‘lupus’­– ­a

Werewolves, solitude, bestiality, and Rousseau’s

choice to read voraciously) and political persecution as an example

L’immense risque demeure de ce qui reste néanmoins un fraternalisme du

Freud’s ‘Wolf Man’ goes through a phase of torturing small animals,

that is the case­– a­ s in the entry ‘Lycanthropy’ in the Dictionnaire

What is it we should really be afraid of? Other men? As Lacan inter-

time translated into English as ‘an absolute boor’, Confessions, 236).

Renée Vivien and ‘The Lady with the She-Wolf’32

Lenoir and other narrators in Vivien’s collection are degraded

– ­sets up rather a different reading effect from that of Vivien’s short

Semblables and autres

works with precious stones. Pierre is a common name, which leads

of tedium: ‘There is such a fraternity of feeling between us that con-

in this primitive contract that makes of any compassional community a

Quand Lacan parle de cette ‘fraternité éternelle’, il ne faut pas y entendre

‘As long as into

Finally they sum up with fraternity: ‘­– C ­ ompères, fraternisons!’

We might note the underlying violence in his reference to his intended

Derrida’s references), another example of ‘la raison du plus fort’, it

world, which Cixous celebrates, could be argued to effect at least

Vivien and appetite

Vivien brings together the smell of half-digested food (strong-tasting

In ‘Nut-brown Maid’ (‘Brune comme une noisette’), in a moment of

Women and she-wolves

human and animal, la dame et la louve. The story portrays a canny

Loin des peuples vivants, errantes, condamnées,

inversement ou simultanément, la dévoration, intériorise ce qui

offered herself to ‘un fiancé stupide’ (a ‘lubber groom’ in Huxley’s

To return briefly to the question of language: women’s language

analytical intelligence is represented as unnatural, sterile and ulti-

Cixous and other loving

Cixous and Tsvetaeva

For Cixous’s Tsvetaeva, lambs can be boys (Grinev) as well as girls

is also a reference to history; Pushkin was killed in a duel with a

Ce qui attache le loup à l’agneau, devine-t-elle, c’est qu’il ne l’a pas

Derrida is particularly struck by the element of sacrifice in

a kitten but grow to be a lion. However, she herself sets it up more

specific reference to Tsvetaeva’s writing about these particular texts

Derrida emphasises the importance of the mouth, teeth and

Maroussia is implicitly compared to a peach, a common metaphor,

This pre-judges all kind of decisions including whose ‘entrailles’ the

Tsvetaeva, Pushkin and Pugachev

92). Pushkin is well aware of the discrepancies between his poetic

six-­year-­old poet want to die of boredom­– ­the antithesis of a thrill-

Little Red Riding Hood

(Rotkäppchen, 1812). Charles Perrault’s moral tale is earlier (Le

a wolf pack, growing by contagion (rather than filiation). The criti-

Carter’s ‘Wolf-Alice’ is taken by the nuns, who find her embar-

notre aptitude à la férocité. L’amour c’est quand tout d’un coup on se

and watches the Anglophone French academic, perhaps particularly

them– the battleground here is the oikonomia and a ludic power

chapter 5) ‘homo homini’ is said to be either ‘deus’ or ‘lupus’– a

that is the case– a s in the entry ‘Lycanthropy’ in the Dictionnaire

– sets up rather a different reading effect from that of Vivien’s short

Finally they sum up with fraternity: ‘– C ompères, fraternisons!’

six-year-old poet want to die of boredom– the antithesis of a thrill-

232–309, e.g. 241–2; ‘1730– Devenir-intense, devenir-animal, deve-

69. Derrida remarks on the title of Cixous’s collection Stigmata – the