Something I wrote today

Any readers of Hegel out there? Or London?

"It is not that Buck is really human, or that humans are really animals; I am not interested in drawing easy equivalences. What I am positing is that if Buck can be inserted into humanist equations, like Hegel’s, and remain a dog (or, in other words, if Buck can survive being made a metaphor for the merely human), the possibility for a literary understanding of human/animal relations becomes possible and promising; for if our goal is a different future, posthuman or not, and if that future depends upon reconceptualizing the human, without, on the one hand, falling back on nihilism (in which humans have no value, as such), or on the other, fulfilling the equally terrifying dream of an all-too-human future (in which humans are over-valued, as such), then we must begin to imagine, in our stories, and read into the ones that have already been written, the possibility that becoming human, or becoming animal, might at least avoid the inevitability of one “becoming” only at the expense of the other."