AustLit

'This essay reads Michel Faber's debut novel Under the Skin (2000) in the context of contemporary philosophical and literary-critical debates about the ethical relation between human and nonhuman animals. It argues that Faber's text engages with, but deconstructs, the traditional division of "no language, no subjectivity" by a heretical act of renaming human beings as "vodsels," and by an extensive process of figurative transformation. The paper then proceeds to a sustained analysis of the main character in the novel, Isserley, in the light of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's theories of becoming-animal, the anomalous, and becoming-molecular. The paper concludes that the novel engages in the limitrophy—Derrida's neologism—required to negotiate the abyssal limit between the human and nonhuman animal.' (Editor's abstract)