_Wild Animus_ is a book written by Rich Shapero. The full title is _Wild Animus_ and it was published by TooFar Media in Half Moon Bay, California, in 2004. The book's cover features original Neocolor artwork by François Burland and additional graphics by Sky Shapero, with cover design by Adde Russell. The author also has other works titled _Arms from the Sea_ and _The Hope We Seek_. The narrative of _Wild Animus_ is set in the Alaskan forest, which is described as steadily rising, patched with muskegs, and trenched by rivers, with ridges and crags breaking through and glaciers appearing at the heads of valleys. Mount Wrangell's giant white dome towers into the midday sky, its icy curve glinting, and thousands of blue hatches splitting its flanks, suggesting something stirring within. The mountain's summit appears smooth from a distance, broken only by a few points of rock, but closer, these rocks reveal three craters, with coils of steam rising from the northernmost. The central themes of _Wild Animus_ revolve around the concepts of passion, will, conflict, and love, often expressed through the imagery of animals. The title itself, "Wild Animus," refers to "an animus" as "a spirit, an animating passion," but also as "the will to destroy," akin to "animosity". The book explores the idea that "the passion within us that attacks to possess, and surrenders for love". Key characters mentioned in relation to the book include Ransom, Lindy, Calvin, Yasuda, Hank, and Ida. Ransom is described as writing a novel about "Wolves and sheep," and when asked who wins in this conflict, he responds, "They both do," clarifying that "It’s a love story". This idealistic view is noted by Yasuda. Calvin, who seems to be reviewing Ransom's book for technical accuracy, makes a comparison between killing and sex for animals, describing it as "a state of rapture," noting that humans, as omnivores, have "a little of that in us". He suggests that the common lexicon of "the wolf’s role in the ecology of ungulate prey populations" does not "quite capture it". Calvin also tells Ransom that there is "something special" about him, and that he is "invigorating to be around," like "dawn in the woods". The narrative includes the concept of "Animus" as a wild god who creates and destroys, capable of "cannonades" that turn temples to smoke, and who surrenders "everything to the ram". This "Animus" is portrayed as insensate, with its jolts causing "slides, waves and breakers" to crash into each other, forming giants. The text suggests a journey of ascent with the assistance of wolves, who are described as "agents of my ascent," serving the desires of "Animus". The imagery includes the shifting of gravel beneath hooves, the expansion of the "crack of day," scratched boulders and flattened grass pointing in the same direction, tiny white blooms rising from rock chinks like "far stars," and a slope where clouds lift at its crest. The wolves move in a line, appearing as "six silhouettes in a shroud of fog". The book also touches on the discomfort of some characters with the portrayal of Lindy as a "wolf pack," indicating a "recoil across the line" when this characterization is repeated. At one point, Ransom is asked to tell others about himself and _Wild Animus_. He trembles and closes his eyes before chanting, suggesting a deep, internal, almost spiritual connection to the material: "Shrinking loose, the walls. The roof falls. Animus withdraws". The final imagery mentioned evokes a physical and spiritual journey, with hooves whisking riffles, crashing through sastrugi, and approaching a "dark pyramid of rock" with "skeins of melt streaming down its face," leading to a crater rim described as the "sanctum" and "throne" of Animus. Ransom is depicted as galloping to meet Animus, "powdered and glittering, hooves and horns polished, white fur woven with crystal thread," with a plea to "Dear god, don’t deny me". The dome then "jerks and grinds, whipping my spine". The narrative expresses a fear of weakness and links rage to desire. Overall, _Wild Animus_ appears to be a work that delves into profound psychological and mythical landscapes, using animal symbolism to explore the inner passions and conflicts of its characters, particularly the dynamic between destructive will and the capacity for love and surrender. # Further Exploration The excerpt from "Wild Animus" introduces several potent themes: a profound sense of **interconnectedness and shared experience** ("Your fever is mine, your spirit, your mania"), a focus on a **primal, wild force that both creates and destroys** ("I am the wild god Animus. I create and destroy"), the **disruption and overthrow of established orders and past forms** ("My cannonades turn the temple to smoke. Child of my heart, I’m casting it down, dashing the intricate stage to powder, obliterating the return"), the embrace of **chaos, unreason, and continuous transformation** ("Animus roars, insensate. The jolts add slides, waves and breakers crash into each other, forming giant"), and the **presence and significance of nonhuman elements** in this dynamic ("Below, the wolves bunch at the prow of the cake"). These themes resonate with and sometimes clash against ideas present in other sources. ### Themes Highlighted or Supported by Other Sources **1. Interconnectedness and Shared Experience / "We-ness"** The initial lines of "Wild Animus" strongly suggest a blurring of individual boundaries and a deep, possibly non-consensual, merging of internal states ("Your fever is mine, your spirit, your mania"). This theme finds significant support in various sources: - **"We-ness" as a Fundamental Desire:** William Marsiglio's "Chasing We-ness" directly explores the "desire for a sense of belonging" as a "fundamental yet complex aspect of who we are as a species". His work is informed by various disciplines and addresses "dyadic or ideational forms of we-ness with people and groups," stemming from motivations like family love, romantic love, companionship, and shared beliefs within "thought communities". Marsiglio highlights the ongoing societal tension in balancing "I" and "we" perspectives, noting a "growing reluctance to see ourselves as Americans with a collective consciousness that steadfastly promotes the common good". - **Self-Other Relationality:** Simone de Beauvoir's central philosophical theme is the "opposition of self and other" and the need to "work out a synthesis of it". This search for synthesis aligns with the implied merging in "Wild Animus." - **Interdependence and Becoming-With:** Donna Haraway's work, especially in "When Species Meet," emphasizes "patterns of relationality" and "intra-actions" that need rethinking, arguing that "human nature is an interspecies relationship". Her concept of "becoming with" is crucial, suggesting a process where identities are co-constituted through interaction, as seen in her example of dog training, where the human and dog together form an "open" space where they ask, "who are you, and so who are we? Here we are, and so what are we to become?". This idea of continuous becoming and interdependency echoes the "fever," "spirit," and "mania" being shared and indistinguishable. - **Dialogical Self and Community:** Charles Taylor's concept of "dialogical-selves" posits that identity is not developed in isolation but "negotiate[d] through dialogue... with others". This "psychological blurring of boundaries between self and other" further supports the notion of deeply interconnected identities. Watsuji's "intersubjective account of ethics" suggests that authenticity can only be realized when the "self" is annihilated through the "nondual relation of self and other" within the community. - **Empathy and Connection to Nature:** Anthony Nanson's "Storytelling and Ecology" explores how storytelling fosters connection with nature, self, and others. Zygmunt Bauman, drawing on Lessing and Arendt, suggests that truth "emerges at the far end of conversation" where "no partner is certain of knowing, or is able to know, what that end may be". This highlights the relational and emergent nature of understanding and shared reality. **2. Primal, Wild Force / Duality of Creation and Destruction** "Wild Animus" proclaims, "I am the wild god Animus. I create and destroy", indicating a powerful, untamed, and dualistic force. - **Human Nature as Virtuous and Wicked:** Richard Wrangham, in "The Goodness Paradox," argues that humans are "neither all good nor all bad," having "evolved in both directions simultaneously". This directly supports the idea of a single entity possessing both creative ("virtuous") and destructive ("wicked") aspects. - **Irrationalism and the Unconscious:** Dada and Surrealism, according to David Hopkins, emphasized "mental investigation" and embraced "irrationalism" as a thorough acceptance of "forces at work beneath the veneer of civilization". This resonates with "Animus" as a "wild god" and its "insensate" roaring. Carl Jung's work extensively explores the "animal soul" and archetypes, noting that the anima (a feminine archetype) "wants life," including both "good and bad," and "lives beyond all categories". This aligns with Animus's dual nature and untamed quality. Nietzsche, as mentioned by Derrida, "re-animalizes" the genealogy of concepts, suggesting a return to more primal, non-rational understandings. - **Myth and Primal Forces:** Brian Arthur Brown notes that "Light and darkness, the heavens and earth, purity and defilement, reality and illusion—all these are perennial themes finding expression in the major religious traditions of the world". The "wild god Animus" can be seen as an archetypal manifestation of these primal dualities. Karen Armstrong notes that myths are "often rooted in the experience of death and the fear of extinction", implying fundamental, raw human experiences that resonate with the destructive aspect of Animus. - **Challenging Humanist Reason:** Charles Olson, a "fierce critic of rationalist humanism," believed that "western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects". This aligns with the "wild god" rejecting human-imposed order and categories. **3. Disruption and Overthrow of Established Orders** The lines "My cannonades turn the temple to smoke. Child of my heart, I’m casting it down, dashing the intricate stage to powder, obliterating the return" speak to radical deconstruction and a refusal of prior forms or cyclical returns. - **Critique of Social Structures and Dominant Ideologies:** Noam Chomsky's work challenges "oppressive social structures and advocate[s] for individual autonomy and critical thinking". Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, along with Foucault, "sought to trouble the order of the world, to force its obscure part, its disorder, its heterogeneity to well up out of the apparent sovereignty of order". This directly supports the tearing down of the "temple" or "intricate stage" mentioned in "Wild Animus." - **Breaking with the Past:** Marx's "Works of the Break" are described as a "rupture with its past, playing a pitiless game of deadly criticism with all its erstwhile theoretical presuppositions." This mirrors Animus's "obliterating the return." Roland Barthes's concept of "reactive formations" involves postulating a paradox against an intolerable "Doxa" (popular opinion), then continually seeking "a new paradox" when the old one becomes a new Doxa, a continuous process of "demystification" and displacement. This aligns with the idea of rejecting established norms and refusing to "return." - **Anti-Naturalization:** Donna Haraway's commitment to "queering what counts as nature" and "reinventing nature" and resisting the "construct/reality binary" is a form of challenging established categories. Her efforts to "desedimentation of this figure" (the cyborg) parallel the destruction of fixed forms. She critiques the "naturalization of genres" in literary theory, arguing that structures often deemed "natural" are "complex and heterogeneous" and historically produced. - **Rejection of Teleology and Essentialism:** The refusal to "return" resonates with critical theories that reject fixed "ends" or inherent "essences." Peter Mahon discusses "concrete posthumanism" as challenging "hard-and-fast distinctions between humans and nonhumans" and putting into question the category of "human" itself. This aligns with a destructive force that dismantles traditional definitions. In "The History and Ethics of Authenticity," an essentialist approach to authenticity is rejected because "who we are is constituted by conflicting wishes and desires," making it "impossible to discover one’s essential self through reflection". This mirrors the dismantling of a fixed, returnable "self" or "order." **4. Chaos, Unreason, and Continuous Transformation** The imagery of "jolts add slides, waves and breakers crash into each other, forming giant" evokes a process of chaotic, unbridled creation and becoming. - **Dissensus and Agonism:** Jean-François Lyotard's notion of the "differend" describes a conflict where "the rules of the game" are exploded and there is "no metalevel position from which it may be adjudicated". He argues that democracy depends on maintaining "heterogeneity" and that "only the differend allows for a true ‘interlocution,’ or, if you prefer, a true encounter with the other in all her alterity". Chantal Mouffe's "agonistic democracy" similarly argues that "far from jeopardizing democracy, agonistic confrontation is in fact its very condition of existence". This embrace of discord and clash is directly reflected in "Animus roars, insensate. The jolts add slides, waves and breakers crash into each other, forming giant". - **Processual Becoming:** Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's philosophy, with concepts like "lines of flight" and "machinic phylogenetic becoming", emphasizes continuous transformation and deterritorialization rather than fixed states. Their "rhizomatic evolutionary schema" challenges linear models and instead focuses on "transversal communications between different lines" and "assemblages (multiplicities made up of heterogeneous terms) that operate in terms of alliances and not filiations". This dynamic, non-linear, and heterogeneous becoming resonates strongly with the "forming giant" out of crashing waves and breakers. - **Fluidity of Meaning and Knowledge:** Janet Gyatso advocates reading for "processes (reaches, retreats, experiments, questions, worries) rather than positions" and accepting that ideas can be "opaque" and distinctions "hard to maintain neatly". This aligns with the chaotic, unformed nature of transformation. Alison Wylie's view of knowledge production as a "necessarily indeterminate, unstable process" further supports this embrace of flux. **5. Presence and Significance of Nonhuman Elements** The "wolves bunch at the prow of the cake" in "Wild Animus" highlights the active presence and varied reception of nonhuman actors. - **Human-Animal Entanglements:** Donna Haraway's extensive body of work, particularly "The Companion Species Manifesto" and "When Species Meet," centers on the "co-constitutive companion species" and the ethical and political implications of human-animal relationships. She emphasizes that animals are "semiotic agents" capable of "meaningful utterances" even if humans cannot fully understand them. This directly supports the significance of the "wolves" in the excerpt. - **Challenging Anthropocentrism:** Peter Mahon's discussion of posthumanism, especially in science fiction, directly addresses "thinking that not only explores what humans, animals, robots and AI do (and don’t) share, but also challenges how we might traditionally view and conceive of those entities". He notes how SF texts "confronting and succumbing to the problem of anthropomorphism" extend categories of folk-psychology to nonhumans. Deleuze and Guattari warn against "anthropologizing natural history", advocating for a "non-anthropocentric worldview". - **The Animal Gaze and Alterity:** Jacques Derrida's concept of the "animal gaze" presents the animal as an "absolute other" that dislocates human thinking. Haraway critiques Derrida for not fully engaging with actual animal workers who "have met the gaze of living, diverse animals and in response undone and redone themselves and their sciences". Giorgio Agamben's "anthropological machine" highlights how human identity is constructed through a "radical separation from animal life," an "original omission" in philosophy that new philosophies of the animal seek to reconfigure. The "wolves" in "Wild Animus" represent this nonhuman alterity. ### Clashes with Other Sources While "Wild Animus" emphasizes rupture, chaos, and the radical redefinition of self and order, several sources or philosophical traditions present opposing views: - **Emphasis on Reason and Order:** - **Kantian Philosophy:** Immanuel Kant's philosophy is foundational for emphasizing "reason" and establishing a "stable, coherent ground for true knowledge and ethical action". His focus on "transcendental" ideals and moral imperatives clashes with the "insensate" nature of Animus. - **Enlightenment Ideals:** Steven Pinker's "Enlightenment Now" champions "reason, science, humanism, and progress", presenting a view where scientific inquiry and rational thought lead to solutions and improved understanding. This directly opposes the embrace of chaos and unreason in "Wild Animus." - **Habermas's Communicative Rationality:** Jürgen Habermas consistently seeks a "rational organization of society" and a "consensus arrived at in communication free from domination". He aims to "nail at least some things down" and develop a "universalist approach to social inquiry", believing in a "developmental logic" of communicative reason. This commitment to rational consensus and clear distinctions contrasts sharply with Animus's chaotic, order-destroying nature. Habermas's theoretical partitions for knowledge and his concern for safeguarding "communicative reason conducive to the good life" also stand in stark contrast to the destructive, unreasoning force of Animus. - **Classical Political Philosophy:** Aristotle's dictum that "man is the political animal" where "the political becomes what the human animal does and the others do not" asserts human exceptionalism and political order, clashing with the blurring of human/nonhuman and the chaotic force of Animus. - **Continuity and Tradition:** - **Conservative Hermeneutics:** Some approaches prioritize preserving tradition and finding continuity. Hans-Georg Gadamer, while acknowledging the fluidity of meaning, also emphasizes the "matter at hand" as a unifying force in hermeneutic dialogue, and his work focuses on the importance of "tradition". This contrasts with Animus's "obliterating the return". - **MacIntyre's Virtue Ethics:** Alasdair MacIntyre advocates for reviving "Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition" and emphasizes the importance of "narrative" and "tradition" for a unified sense of self and meaning. This is a direct appeal to a "return" to older forms, which "Wild Animus" explicitly rejects. - **Philosophical Genealogy as Linear Progress:** While Deleuze challenges traditional evolution, some perspectives maintain linear development. Bertrand Russell, for example, notes the "continuity between animal and human minds" and implies a progressive understanding. Even some feminist science studies aim to "legitimate... feminist interventions" by placing them "in the canon of respectable philosophers like Kant, Locke, Russell, and the Vienna Circle". This "normalizing" gesture contrasts with Animus's radical break. - **Control and Predictability:** - **Scientific Determinism:** The aims of natural sciences often involve "prediction and control of nature". This systematic approach to understanding and manipulating the world stands in opposition to the unpredictable and "insensate" force of Animus. - **"Truth" as Fixed:** While the sources discuss the problematic nature of truth, a rejection of fixed truth and its replacement with constant disruption ("obliterating the return") would clash with perspectives that seek definitive answers or foundational truths, even if those are contested. For example, Scanlon's focus on "reasons that would need to be taken into account" in ethical principles suggests a search for rational reconciliation. In essence, "Wild Animus" presents a vision of chaotic, destructive, and transformative primal energy that deconstructs established identities and orders. This vision finds resonance with critical, poststructuralist, and certain existentialist or psychoanalytic traditions that embrace fluidity, conflict, and the de-centering of the human. However, it explicitly clashes with philosophical outlooks rooted in Enlightenment reason, universalism, the pursuit of consensus, and the stability of human-defined categories and traditions.