Creaturely Love explores some of the ways in which desire makes us both more, and less, human. Focusing on key figures in modern philosophy, art, and literature—Nietzsche, Salomé, Rilke, Balthus, Musil, Proust —as well as pre-modern texts and fairy-tales—Fourier, Fournival, Ovid—this book examines how animals inform and influence the understanding and expression of love between people. From pet names to spirit animals, and allegories to analogies, animals constantly appear in our writings and thoughts about romantic desire. Creaturely Love argues that animals are not only “good to think with,” ... More

Creaturely Love explores some of the ways in which desire makes us both more, and less, human. Focusing on key figures in modern philosophy, art, and literature—Nietzsche, Salomé, Rilke, Balthus, Musil, Proust —as well as pre-modern texts and fairy-tales—Fourier, Fournival, Ovid—this book examines how animals inform and influence the understanding and expression of love between people. From pet names to spirit animals, and allegories to analogies, animals constantly appear in our writings and thoughts about romantic desire. Creaturely Love argues that animals are not only “good to think with,” as Claude Lévi-Strauss maintained, but also good to love with. Throughout Western history, we seem to need the figure of the animal to express our passions; and yet, ironically, we use these same creatures to disavow our own animal appetites. By following certain charismatic animals, during their passage through the love letters of philosophers, the romances of novelists, the conceits of fables, the epiphanies of poets, the paradoxes of contemporary films, and the digital menageries of the internet, this book demonstrates how essential “the creature” has been to our own conception of love through the ages. In our appropriation and deployment of the animal in our amorous expression, we are both acknowledging – and disavowing – our own animal aspect. It is this ambivalence that forms the focus of the book, which ultimately argues that what we adore in the beloved is not (only) their humanity, but their creatureliness.