analogies, was keen to distinguish between territory and property, pointing out that territory ‘must not be imagined as a property determined by geographical confines.’10 Territory, he adds, can also, in certain circumstances and for certain animals, be linked as much to time as it is to space. Thus, for example, cats establish what he calls ‘a definite timetable’: a given space is not divided but instead shared at different times. The cats leave scent marks at regular intervals. If a cat encounters one of these marks, it can assess whether it is fresh or a few hours old. In the first case the cat chooses a different route and in the second it continues calmly on its way. These marks, according to Lorenz, ‘act like railway signals whose aim is to prevent collision between two trains’.
Yet the cautious approach taken by Lorenz vis-à-vis possible misunderstandings (a caution which is very much relative since, on the same page, we will nonetheless be confronted with the notion of territory as a ‘headquarters’) is not quite as widely shared as might be suggested by what has so far been described. I have been referring to ornithologists, but they are not alone in taking an interest in animal territories. And that, as we say in colloquial terms, is where things take a turn for the worse.11
So, for example, in the historical inventory drawn up by the ornithologist Margaret Nice, I find a quotation from Walter Heape, who writes, in a book on emigration, immigration and nomadism published at the end of the 1920s, that
territorial rights are established rights among the majority of species of animals. There can be no doubt that the desire for acquisition of a definite territorial area, the determination to hold it by fighting if necessary, and the recognition of individual as well as of tribal territorial rights by others are dominant in all animals. In fact, it may be held that the recognition of territorial rights, one of the most significant attributes of civilisation, was not evolved by man, but has been an inherent factor in the life history of all animals.12
Need I point out that Heape is an embryologist and not an ornithologist? Should I also take into consideration information I discovered in probing a little deeper, notably the fact that he became famous for having successfully carried out, in 1890, the first transfer of embryos from an angora rabbit into the uterus of a female domestic rabbit (the Belgian hare), inseminated three hours earlier by a male of its own species? Does that have any bearing here? Could it be that the success of this transfer between two different types of creature (the two angora rabbits and the four little Belgian hares born as a result of the experiment are testimony to the success of the operation) might perhaps have encouraged Heape, like a form of authorization awarded to himself, to indulge in other types of transfer, without considering that these might involve risks of an entirely different nature, requiring very different precautions? In advancing such a hypothesis, I am, of course, guilty of exaggeration and, in a sense, am deliberately crossing boundaries myself, without due precaution, and in ways which may not always be in the best of taste. For it is not only a matter of style which is at stake in such analogies and comparisons, a matter of political or epistemological style, it is also a matter of taste. Isabelle Stengers proposes restoring Kant’s ‘sapere aude’, ‘dare to know’, to its original meaning, attributed to it by the Roman poet Horace: ‘Dare to taste.’ Learning to know something, she says, means learning to discriminate, learning to recognize what matters, learning how differences count, and learning all of that in the context of the encounter with all its attendant risks and consequences. In other words, it means connecting with the inherent plurality of what matters for these particular beings, the ones we are trying to get to know, and of what matters because of them. It is an art of consequences.13
It is precisely for this reason that I was filled with dismay on reading Michel Serres’ book Malfeasance.14 A sensation all the more acute because, until then, his efforts to ‘deterritorialize’ issues and concepts, to take them out of their fields of study and remove them from the temporalities in which they had been associated, represented a creative task which was at once daring and imaginative, teeming with connections, with translations, and with potentially rich and inventive relationships. Thus, in The Natural Contract,15 when he asks the question ‘What language do the things of the world speak, that we might come to an understanding with them, contractually?’, we are aware of the presence of an authentic network of analogies, which I would describe as generative, of analogies which enrich the terms of comparison, analogies which, through a series of interconnections, make us aware of qualities hitherto unperceived, and which are capable of reactivating an exchange of the forces of action, or agencies, between objects and living creatures. So is it with the earth, which, Serres tells us, speaks in terms of forces, of bonds and of interactions. In a later book, Darwin, Bonaparte et le Samaritain: une philosophie de l’histoire, Serres returns to this idea again, this time focusing more precisely on writing. Reading, he says, is not limited only to the codes of writing such as we normally understand it, and this is exemplified by good hunters, accustomed to reading, in the tracks left by wild boars, their age, gender, weight, size and a thousand other details: ‘The good hunter reads, having learned how to read. What does he decipher? A coded footprint. Yet this definition could equally well be applied to historic human writing itself.’16 Because, Serres goes on to say, writing is the line traced by all beings, living or non-living, all of whom write ‘on things and between them, the things of the world one on top of the other’. The ocean writes on the rocky cliff, bacteria write on our bodies, everything – fossils, erosions, strata, the glow of galaxies, the crystallization of volcanic rocks – is there to be read. We could read before we could write, and this possibility opens writing to a great many other registers, like ‘an ensemble of traces which encode a meaning’. ‘If history begins with writing, then all the sciences enter, along with the world, a new history, one which does not forget.’ Of course, these are daring juxtapositions on the part of Serres, interpretations which link what seemed destined to remain unlinked – if only because human exceptionalism keeps a careful watch over these separations of register. And this is precisely what Serres is interested in, this task of abandoning the sordid habit of placing the human at the centre of the world and of its stories, and instead opening history to myriads of beings which matter and without which we would not be here.
Malfeasance takes a very different subject, as is clear from the book’s subtitle: Appropriation through Pollution? From the very first pages, Serres turns his attention to territories: ‘Tigers piss on the edge of their lair. And so do lions and dogs. Like those carnivorous mammals, many animals, our cousins, mark their territory with their harsh, stinking urine or with their howling, while others such as finches and nightingales use sweet songs.’17 Such practices, according to Serres, are the ways in which the living inhabit a specific space, establish it and recognize it. These places are defined and protected by male excrement. All of them constitute different ways of appropriating, whether by men or by animals: ‘Whoever spits in the soup keeps it; no one will touch the salad or the cheese polluted in this way. To make something its own, the body knows how to leave some personal stain: sweat on a garment, saliva or feet put into a dish, waste in space, aroma, perfume, or excrement, all of them rather hard things …’18 Serres then observes that the verb ‘to have’, expressing possession, has the same origin in Latin as ‘to inhabit’. ‘From the mists of time’, he writes, ‘our languages echo the profound relationship between the nest and appropriation, between the living space and possession: I inhabit, therefore I have.’19 For Serres, the act of appropriating stems from ‘an animal origin that is ethological, bodily, psychological, organic, vital ….’ not from a convention or from some positive right: ‘I sense there’, he writes, ‘a collection of urine, blood, excretions, rotting corpses.’20 I have indicated already that, in this context, Serres is no longer concerned with a fight against anthropocentrism and against this strange historical amnesia to anything which is not human. His mission in this case is to mount an attack on all forms of appropriation through pollution, whether air pollution, the invasion of visual or sound space to which we are submitted in the form of advertising, cars, machines … all of them just as filthy and polluting as the excrements used to signal appropriation. ‘You obtain and keep what is properly yours through dirt,’ he writes, or, even more explicitly, ‘The
