Truth's Body

In a chapter titled ‘The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses’ from Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard considers a confession that he suggests science requires of animals, a confession that he writes ‘in the final moment’ is of ‘rationality’:

As Baudrillard argues later in the essay, ‘In a world bent on doing nothing but making one speak, in a world assembled under the hegemony of signs and discourse, their [animals'] silence weighs more and more heavily on our organisation of meaning.' Science's effect is to make wordless bodies eloquent with reflexes, mechanisms and behaviours, to produce a body of knowledge from the uncertainty of animal presences. While Baudrillard's work is centred on the late twentieth century's industrial-scientific regime, these processes are a continuation of the concerns of natural historians in the golden taxonomic age that went hand-in-hand with nineteenth-century imperial expansion.