"It's a question of words, therefore" : becoming-animal in Michel Faber’s Under the Skin

Abstract

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.