World, war, zoo: zoo-break narratives in a biopolitical frame

ABSTRACT This article explores the implications of the recent proliferation of ‘zoo-break’ narratives in relation to the discourse on the Anthropocene and the figure of the sacrifice zone in particular. Taking the zoo cage as a manifestation of what Agamben calls the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of zoē within bíos, and hence of the sacrificial logic that constitutes the human subject at the expense of the animal, the article explores how in these ‘zoo-break’ narratives, the biopolitical framework breaks down, and how they lay bare the sacrificial logic of human exceptionalism. Focusing especially on the figure of the zoo-in-wartime, the article investigates how this sacrificial logic operates and asks how we might reframe these zoo-break narratives as productive sites for representing and reflecting on history and violence in a more-than-human sense. The article concludes by arguing that the figure of the zoo-in-wartime can also be read as a ‘frame of war’ (Butler) in which both human and nonhuman lives become grievable, but only if we engage in a mode of reading that resists the instrumentalising, extractivist logic of the sacrifice zone.


The zoo as sacrifice zone
What does it mean to think of the zoo as a 'sacrifice zone'?As Naomi Klein defines the term, sacrifice zones are areas of the world that are seen as expendable by global capitalism, reduced to mere resources, 'sacrificed' for the 'greater good' of securing the material conditions of post-industrial fossil-fuelled lifestyles. 1 Until recently, a defining feature of such sacrifice zones was that they were remote, 'disposable peripheries,' far from the urban centres of the global North and hence largely invisible to the general public.Zoological gardens, by contrast, have traditionally been situated at the heart of the major cities in Europe and North America, relying on a principle of visibility and spectacle in order to attract that very public.Furthermore, at least in their contemporary guise, zoos generally conceive of themselves as 'arks' committed to the preservation of species threatened with extinction often by the very processes of extraction, contamination, and depredation that typify the sacrifice zone.At first glance, then, the zoo and the sacrifice zone would seem to be incommensurateeven antithetical spaces, and to refer to the one as a form of the other would run the risk of obscuring what makes these spaces distinct and hence eroding whatever critical purchase the term 'sacrifice zone' may offer.Upon closer inspection, however, we may begin to discern certain continuities and isomorphisms between these two spaces, specifically relating to the peculiar logic that governs them, a logic that, following Derrida and others, we might characterise as 'sacrificial,' in the sense that it has as its aim the production of certain subjects, certain forms of life, whose value and meaning can only be guaranteed at the expense of others, whose lives are coded as inherently less valuable, and, implicitly, disposable. 2 The cages (or moats) of the zoo enclosures establish a boundary between human and animal that is both physical and symbolic.In essence, this boundary re-enacts the founding gesture of human sovereignty by means of what Giorgio Agamben famously calls the 'inclusive exclusion' of bare, biological life (zoē) within qualified, political life (bíos). 3The zoo as a whole thus constitutes a literal 'space of exception,' predicated on the inclusive exclusion of nature within culture, of 'wild' animals in an urban environment.In this sense, the zoo represents an inherently biopolitical space, in which the distinction between bíos and zoē, 'Man' and 'Animal,' is constantly renegotiated and reaffirmed. 4As an iteration of what Agamben terms the 'anthropological machine,' a politico-discursive apparatus, or dispositif, designed to shore up the category of the human, the cage establishes a 'zone of indeterminacy,' in which 'the outside is nothing but the exclusion of an inside and the inside is in turn only the inclusion of an outside.' 5 This zone is one of the key cultural sites where the figure of the human is continually produced in opposition to the nonhuman or inhumanan operation that requires the literal and symbolic 'sacrifice of the "animal" and the animalistic' 6 both in the sense of framing animal life as that which can and must literally be killed and consumed by the human, and in the sense of disavowing or violently suppressing the animality of the human itself.As such, this 'zone of indeterminacy' is a sort of 'sacrifice zone.'  Moreover, 'like every space of exception,' Agamben writes, 'this zone is, in truth, perfectly empty, and the truly human being who should occur there is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision in which the caesurae and their rearticulation are always dislocated and displaced anew.' 7 In other words, the boundary separating 'man' from 'animal' is fundamentally unstable and in need of constant reinforcement.Hence there is always a danger that the distinction between the inside and outside will prove untenable, and that either the animals will break free or we will find ourselves (literally or metaphorically) on the other side of the bars looking out.Indeed, as the history of zoological gardensparticularly that of the 'ethnographic exhibitions' (Völkerschauen) of 'exotic' or 'primitive' peoplesreveals, the question of who or what should be the spectator and who or what should be on display at the zoo is a perennially fraught one. 8The zoo, then, can be regarded as a sort of framing device, a space of the cultural imaginary where questions of identity and difference are worked through, especially at moments when the place and identity of the 'human' in relation to itself and its 'others' is in crisis. 9he question of framing is central to the discourse on the zoo.In his influential essay 'Why Look at Animals?' (1977), for instance, John Berger writes that 'in principle, each cage is a frame round the animal inside it,' much like the frames round pictures at a museum. 10The animals are offered up for the visitors' enjoyment in a panoptic schema that, according to Berger, precludes the animals' ability to return the gaze.Within this schema, animals are 'always the observed,' 11 objects of scrutiny and representation, and never subjects in their own right.Hence 'in the zoo the view is always wrong.Like an image out of focus.' 12 This sentiment is echoed by inveterate zoo-critic Randy Malamud, who insists that 'the animal we see in the zoo is not the "real" animal,' but rather an inauthentic specimen placed in a 'cultural frame' and made permanently available for human entertainment. 13Here we may begin to discern a latent essentialism or even romanticism at the heart of these critiques, whereby the artificiality of the zoo comes to serve as a foil for an idealised notion of animal life as authentic, pure, and 'frameless,' 14 a notion that of course hinges on a strict distinction between culture (humanity) and nature (animality).I will have more to say about Malamud and his approach to zoos later in this essay, but for now I would merely like to note how this conceptual framing itself mirrorsand in a certain sense reproducesthe 'inclusive exclusion' at the heart of the sacrifice zone.
Indeed, the question of the sacrifice zone is likewise one of framing, or rather of 'enframing' (Gestell), the term coined by Martin Heidegger to describe the essential logic of techno-capitalist modernity which transforms the natural world into a 'standing reserve' (Bestand), a collection of resources to be extracted and made available for human consumption. 15This process entails what David Farrier calls a 'mass simplification' or homogenisation of the natural world, a 'reduction of all life into the categories of resource and waste.' 16 Farrier is drawing here on Jason W. Moore's insistence that capitalism should be seen first and foremost as a 'way of organising nature,' rather than as a social or economic system that might be regarded as distinct from the natural, nonhuman world. 17Indeed, as Moore compellingly argues, one of the most important products of this system is precisely an idealised conception of 'Nature' as ontologically separate from and antecedent to human society and historyand, by implication, as a frontier of human conquest and exploitation. 18Historically, the zoo has played an important role in shaping and maintaining this image of Nature by including its 'elsewhere' within the urban metropolis, while simultaneously organising it according to taxonomic orders and value hierarchies of capitalist consumption.As an inherently heterotopian space, the zoo constitutes a microcosm of the world outside its gates, a 'metropolitan "elsewhere",' 19 that represents in an idealised manner 'the smallest parcel of the world and the whole world at the same time.' 20Meanwhile, the formation of the sacrifice zone hinges on its being an 'elsewhere' (an alibi) both to the ideal of pristine nature and modern, urbanised existence.Needless to say, the image of nature traditionally represented at the zoo necessarily omits, or at a minimum defines itself in opposition to, the blasted landscapes of the sacrifice zone.But if the boundaries of the sacrifice zone are now encroaching upon these 'insides' from which it was designed to be excluded, what does that mean for our understanding of the cultural logic of the zoo?Soon enough, the habitats recreated within the zoo enclosures will no longer refer to an actual real space outside the zoo, just as many endangered species will likely only survive in captivity, far from their native habitats.If and when these species go extinct in the wild, the zoo will be a 'space of exception' in a different sense, namely a space in which life is preserved only by virtue of being excluded, or removed, from its natural surroundings.When the state of exception becomes the norm outside the walls of the zoo, then the zoo in turn becomes the space where a now vanished 'normality' is preserved.What happens to the cultural conception of the zoo at a time when the human impact on the planet is causing ever greater disruptions in the world's ecology?
The exception becomes the norm Judging by mainstream cultural production of the past twenty-five years or so, roughly the period in which the concept of the Anthropocene has risen to public prominence, it seems that the dominant mode of representing zoos is in the form of what Elisha Cohn has referred to as 'zoo-break' narratives. 21These are narratives in which the zoo serves as a setting for the confusion and transgression of boundaries and the breakdown of the established order, often in the wake of war or some other calamity.Such zoo-break narratives can take various forms.In some cases, notably in books and films aimed at children, the 'zoo-break' may involve light-hearted escapades featuring anthropomorphic animals, e.g. in the Madagascar series, which usually end up with the escaped animals returning to the zoo, having decided they were better off in the safety of captivity.
More frequently, we encounter the zoo-break in the context of darker, speculative techno-dystopias like the Planet of the Apes or Jurassic Park franchises, in which the breakdown of the barrier between 'Man' and 'Animal' serves as a warning against scientific hubris and promethean violation of a natural order in the tradition of Frankenstein and The Island of Doctor Moreau.A frequent catalyst for this latter type of zoo-break scenario is a natural disaster or global pandemic, with perhaps the most iconic example being Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995) in which the image of a lion roaring from the city rooftops serves as a visual shorthand for the collapse of civilisation and a sign that nature has taken back control following the outbreak of a deadly virus that decimates the global human population. 22A more recent example is the CBS TV series Zoo (2015-2017), in which the mauling of a zookeeper at the Los Angeles Zoo signals the beginning of a global animal uprising, caused by a genetic mutation which can be traced back to the unscrupulous and under-regulated practices of a Monsantoesque biotech firm. 23Almost invariably, the narrative arc involves a race to find a cure or some other technoscientific fix that will bring things back to 'normal,' which is to say with the animals safely locked away in their enclosures and the humans restored to their positions of dominance.Although Cohn does not frame her discussion of the zoo-break trope in terms of climate change or extinction, the recent preponderance of such narratives testifies, I believe, to a growing anxiety that the 'natural order' has been disrupted, and that this disruption poses an existential threat to the future of humanity.This would go some way towards explaining why, when it comes to representations of the zoo in the age of the Anthropocene, the state of exception has become the norm.
In addition to these speculative dystopias, one of the most prevalent forms of contemporary zoo-break narratives is the 'zoo-in-wartime.'A prominent example of this motif is Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, specifically the chapter entitled 'The Zoo Attack,' which describes in gruesome detail how Japanese soldiers, retreating from the advancing Soviet army, 'liquidate' the animals at Manchuria's Hsin-ching Zoo, 'on a miserably hot afternoon in August, 1945.' 24 The chapter was published separately in the New Yorker in 1995, in an issue marking the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Since then, there has been a steady stream of 'zoo-in-wartime' narratives in literature, film, and other cultural media.Perhaps the best-known examples are Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife (2007), which tells the true story of zoo director Jan Żabiński and his wife Antonina who hid Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto in the bombed-out Warsaw Zoo to save them from Nazi persecution; Téa Obrecht's The Tiger's Wife (2011), which deals with the war in Yugoslavia and the plight of the animals at the Belgrade Zoo under the 1999 NATO bombardment, an eerie echo of the Nazi bombardment half a century earlier; and Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon's graphic novel Pride of Baghdad (2006), which centres on a group of lions that escaped from the Baghdad Zoo after it was bombed during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. 25n contrast to the aforementioned sci-fi parables, which are typically set in a not-too-distant future in which the natural world begins to 'bite back,' and where the link between the zoo-break scenario and the global environmental crisis appears relatively clear-cut, in the case of the zoo-in-wartime motif, this connection may seem rather less plausible.To be sure, Murakami's story, for instance, is haunted by the shadow of the atomic bomb, and is thus at least implicitly preoccupied with the world-ending power of human violence, but overall the texts in question do not reflect explicitly on ecological issues. 26Nor do I wish to imply that they are somehow 'really' about the Anthropocene.Indeed, while being quite different in terms of form, genre, style, and even message, these texts are all based on actual, historical events, and in many cases to contemporary conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. 27Yet beyond this immediate context, it is undeniably striking that the wartime destruction of a zoo should have become such a prominent recurring theme in literature, film, and other media at a time of growing public concern about climate change and mass extinction.Given the zoo's cultural status as a microcosm of the relationship between humanity and nature, the image of a bombed-out zoo will be instantly legible as a metonymy for the destruction of the natural world beyond the gates.
The texts mentioned above all foreground the figure of the animal in order to highlight the brutality and suffering of war, and in so doing, they draw attention to the more-than-human dimension of the conflicts they depict.One might even argue that by representing the major conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from a more-than-human perspective, they reframe them in terms of what has increasingly come to be described as a global 'war against animals.' 28 In these narratives, the zoo functions as what Judith Butler calls a 'frame of war,' one in which both human and nonhuman lives may potentially be seen as vulnerable and valuable, and, in Butler's terms, 'grievable.'The condition of grievability implies a recognition that a life 'has been lived': 'Without grievability,' Butler writes, 'there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life.'In other words, what Agamben would call bare life: '["]a life that will never have been lived," sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost.' 29 Grievability is not an intrinsic a priori quality that certain lives possess; in order to be recognised as grievable, it must first be framed as such by others.Furthermore, it is not specifically or uniquely human, since in most cultures the lives of certain nonhumans are considered grievable, at least in certain circumstances, while, conversely, there are entire groups and populations of humans, e.g.those who inhabit the world's 'sacrifice zones,' whose lives simply 'don't count' 30except within a sacrificial economy that benefits a community of fellow creatures from which they are excluded.Grievability, then, cuts across species lines and underscores the instability and normativity of the categories of human and nonhuman.It is, in short, itself one of the outcomes of the 'ceaselessly updated decision' undertaken by the anthropological machine.One of the key aspects of the 'zoo-in-wartime' as a motifand indeed as a dispositifis its potential to lay bare the underlying logic of this process.It may even offer a fleeting glimpse of an alternative conception or framing of coexistence with other living beings, one that is not predicated on sacrificial instrumentalisation and exploitation.

The natural history of destruction
With this in mind, let me turn to what is something of a locus classicus when it comes to the figure of the zoo-in-wartime, namely W. G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999), published in English as On the Natural History of Destruction. 31In it, Sebald discusses the representation of the trauma of the Allied bombardment in post-war German literature, or rather what he regards as the 'scandalous' lack of such representations.Sebald attributes this lack on the one hand to a forward-looking emphasis on the post-war reconstruction of Germany that went hand-in-hand with a determination not to dwell on the past, and, on the other, to a pervasive, if unspoken, taboo surrounding the issue of German victimhood. 32ear the end of the third section, Sebald describes the destruction of the Berlin Zoo under the Allied bombing in 1943, drawing on the detailed accounts written by Lutz Heck, who was the Zoo's director at the time, and by Katharina Heinroth, who succeeded him in 1945: Incendiary bombs and canisters of phosphorus set fire to fifteen of the Zoo buildings.The antelope house and the enclosure for the beasts of prey, the administration building and the director's villa were entirely destroyed, while the monkey house, the quarantine building, the main restaurant and the elephants' Indian temple were left in ruins or badly damaged.A third of the remaining 2,000 animals that had not been evacuated died.Deer and monkeys escaped; birds flew away through the broken glass roofs.'There were rumours,' writes Heinroth, 'that lions on the loose were prowling around the nearby Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, but in fact they lay charred and suffocated in their cages.'Next day the ornamental three-storey aquarium building and the thirty-metre crocodile hall were also destroyed, along with the artificial jungle.The great reptiles, writhing in pain, writes Heck, now lay beneath chunks of concrete, earth, broken glass, fallen palms and tree trunks, in water a foot deep, or crawled down the visitors' staircase, while in the background the firelight of the dying city of Berlin shone red through a gate knocked off its hinges.Over the next few days the elephants who had perished in the ruins of their sleeping quarters had to be cut up where they lay, and Heck describes men crawling around inside the rib cages of the huge pachyderms and burrowing through mountains of entrails. 33bald pauses to reflect on the peculiar power these graphic accounts hold over our imagination: 'the horror which comes over us in reading such passages,' he writes, is linked to 'the recollection that zoos, which all over Europe owe their existence to a desire to demonstrate princely or imperial power, are at the same time supposed to be a kind of imitation of the Garden of Eden'. 34he spectacle of the zoo-in-wartime thus invokes a peculiar combination of political and religious symbolism: the ruins of Empire and the Loss of Innocence.Yet there is another, more visceral power to these 'images of horror,' which, he writes, 'fill us with particular revulsion because they go beyond those routine accounts of human suffering that are to some extent pre-censored.' 35In other words, there is a tendency, and, according to Sebald, perhaps even a license, to dwell on the gory details of nonhuman suffering and death that would be considered obscene or pornographic in the case of human victims of war.The 'particular revulsion' we feel at these images (textual and visual), then, would be linked to the standards of decency and decorum in the representation of atrocity.
Oddly enough, Sebald himself omits a striking detail from Heck's account of the disposal of these elephants' bodies: the men, Heck writes, crawled around inside the elephants' charred and half-dismembered bodies, 'as if inside a metal cage' [wie in einem Gitterkäfig]. 36This image poignantly illustrates the upending of the 'natural order' and the collapse of physical and symbolic boundaries, with the men seen through the bars of a cage made out of the bodies of the animals that had died inside the man-made cages of their enclosures.And indeed, perhaps this 'particular revulsion' also testifies to an uncomfortable recognition of a certain shared vulnerability and finitude; to a recognition, in other words, of the fact that in death we too are reduced to fragile assemblages of flesh and bone.The principal difference of course being that the survivors do not typically cut up and eat the bodies of the human victims, as was the case with the nonhuman casualties of the Allied bombardment, a fact likewise described in some detail by Heck: 'We did not live badly in those weeks.There was meat in plenty; many an animal that had fallen victim to the raids went into the cooking pot, sometimes animals which no housewife would have dreamed were eatable.' 37 By framing these animals as 'eatable,' Heck re-establishes the 'natural order' that had been disrupted by the air strikejust as his offhand reference to the incredulous housewife serves to reassert heteronormative gender roles.Sebald, in an extraordinary phrase (not least given Heck's Nazi credentials), surmises that the main reason these graphic accounts of the destruction of the Berlin Zoo were deemed palatable was that they were written by 'professionals' who, even in the face of extremity, 'did not lose their minds [Verstand]' or even 'their appetites.' 38'Verstand'meaning 'understanding,' 'intellect,' 'sense'is a central term in the philosophical distinction between 'man' and 'animal.' 39 In coupling the intellect so firmly to the appetite, Sebald's phrase thus perfectly encapsulates the sacrificial logic of what Derrida famously calls carno-phallogocentrism, a logic which establishes the rational human(ist) subject as implicitly masculine, heterosexual, and carnivorous by means of the literal consumption of the animal other and the concomitant suppression or disavowal of one's own animality. 40t this point it is important to acknowledge that one of the functions of the zoo-in-wartime motif, specifically in the German context, was that it provided a way to speak about the Allied bombardment of German cities and to mourn for the victims while sidestepping the problematic issue of those victims' complicity in the Nazi regime.A grievability-by-proxy, if you will.In one sense, this was an important step in coming to terms with the past in that it provided a language in which to acknowledge and give expression to the trauma of the wartime destruction of cities like Berlin and Dresden.At the same time, however, precisely because of the victims' innocence and the 'particular revulsion' we feel at the fate of animals in wartime, the zoo-inwartime motif has also served as a handy vehicle for revisionist historiography.
A central figure in this context is Jörg Friedrich, whose incendiary monograph Der Brand, published in 2003, unleashed a torrent of debate and criticism surrounding the question and representation of German victimhood. 41riedrich's book was controversial above all because of the way he deliberately and consistently employs the vocabulary and iconography of the Holocaust in order to frame German wartime suffering as on par with that of the Jews, and the atrocities committed by the Allies as comparable to those committed by the Nazis.A centrepiece of these efforts to establish parallels is the firebombing of Dresden, to which Friedrich had devoted an entire chapter in his previous book, Das Gesetz des Krieges [The Law of War], which Sebald cites approvingly as one of the few examples of a post-war engagement with the collective trauma of the Allied bombing. 42The destruction of the Dresden Zoo plays a crucial role in Friedrich's construction of German victimhood.His account consistently oscillates between the human and the nonhuman, cataloguing in graphic detail the myriad different ways in which the people and animals were killed in the air raid: burnt, charred, melted, suffocated, poisoned, gassed, torn limb from limb, crushed by falling debris, cut apart by shattered glass, etc.In a television interview conducted by the author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge, Friedrich explains that he decided to place the zoo at the centre of his account of the bombing of Dresden in order to emphasise the indiscriminate and exorbitant nature of the attack.This was not an act of war against a clearly defined political opponent, but rather a generalised 'war against all living creatures' [ein Krieg gegen die Kreatur], against life itself.What is destroyed in the air war, Friedrich says, is not a specific target, but 'the ability to breathe.' 43 Friedrich here anticipates the arguments of critics of modern warfare such as Peter Sloterdijk and Jairus Grove, who frame the strategy of area bombing in terms of an 'ecologisation' of war, in that it targets the enemy's Umwelt and draws no distinctions between human and nonhuman victims. 44The 'air war' can thus be read, in Daisy Hildyard's phrase, as 'a war on the air itself, a war on the breathable world.' 45 All of this is undoubtedly true, and it is important to acknowledge, as Friedrich does, the terrible reality of the suffering and death of the victims of the bombing, human and nonhuman.Yet, in framing his account of the city's destruction via the figure of the zoo, Friedrich nevertheless reintroduces a distinction between human and animal that leads to a rhetorical instrumentalisation of the latter that is ultimately sacrificial.'Animals,' he explains, 'are the symbol of innocence.They bear no responsibility for the wars of men.It is not the guilty but rather animate life [die Kreatur], everything that walks under the sun, that is extinguished.This is the principle of "tabula rasa": nothing remains.It is the Last Judgment.' 46 The Biblical rhetoric that Friedrich adopts here is designed to reflect the Allies' self-righteous desire for total annihilation, while the invocation of the animals' symbolic innocence is designed to purge the human victims of any trace of guilt.
The author Marcel Beyer has drawn critical attention to such sacrificial instrumentalisation in this and other historical accounts of the Dresden firebombing, which, as he observes, leads the authors to abandon historical objectivity in favour of an aesthetics of shock and awe (Überwältigungsästhetik) characterised by an almost pathological investment in animal death.Beyer points to several instances in these accounts where the same animals are first said to have died in one gruesome way, only then to reappear later on, invariably to be killed all over again.When it comes to such narratives, Beyer sardonically observes, 'there can never be enough animal deathand if you run out of animals, the ones that are there will just have to die several times over!' 47 The insistence on animal innocence thus feeds directly into a sacrificial logic of metonymic purification by fire.The zoo during wartime thus becomes a discursive sacrifice zone in which the breakdown of the natural order serves as a vehicle for the reaffirmation of human exceptionalism, albeit a negatively inflected one.

Double framing
Insofar as they strive for the restitution of the status quo ante, the majority of zoo-break narratives ultimately conform to what philosopher Brian Massumi refers to as the 'all-too human logic' of 'double framing'a 'frame within a frame'whereby even in situations where the strict nature/culture binary seems to be subverted, the larger biopolitical framework remains intact. 48he state of exception thus serves only to reaffirm the norm which is that those lives recognised as human are precious and irreplaceable, whereas those categorised as animal are expendablekillablebecause they are not legible as individuals but rather as inherently fungible specimens or exemplars of their species.In this way, 'zoo-break' narratives end up perpetuating the very biopolitical logic they appear to subvert, in effect becoming what Cohn punningly calls 'zookeeper' narratives. 49his problem of 'double framing' pertains not only to the zoo or to its visual or narrative representation but also to the theoretical and conceptual frames we employ to 'read' the zoo, perhaps especially when attempting to read the breakdown of the zoo as a metonym or allegory for broader, ecological questions.Massumi himself notes how the inclusive exclusion enacted by the zoo cage re-enacts Agamben's model of biopolitics, but that model, he continues, leads to an impasse.Essentially, it is what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a 'strong theory,' i.e. one whose explanatory power grows in accordance with the number of phenomena it can account for, but which is thus effective precisely to the extent that it is ultimately invested in the continued functioning of the particular political or discursive formation it critiques. 50Thus, any analysis of zoo-break narrativesor any other narrative, for that matterthat is framed in terms of such a 'strong theory' runs the risk of confirming the premise, and thus ultimately reinforcing, rather than challenging, the sacrificial logic of the 'inclusive exclusion.' To give an example, let us return briefly to Murakami's 'Zoo Attack,' or rather, to one particularly salient reading of it, namely the one presented by Randy Malamud in his polemical 1998 study Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity.Malamud's reading is significant for the way it establishes an analogy between the historical destruction of a zoo in wartime and the currently ongoing destruction of the natural world.Murakami's story is told to the first-person narrator by Nutmeg Akasaka, whose father, as the chief veterinarian of the zoo in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, was in charge of overseeing the systematic killing of the animals at the end of the war.Nutmeg was a young girl at the time, and while she had grown up at the zoo, she did not herself witness the 'liquidation,' as she and her mother were on board a ship transporting refugee settlers back to Japan.In revisiting the atrocities perpetrated by the Japanese in occupied Manchuria through the eyes of an innocent character, Murakami's text is thus preoccupied with the question of cross-generational implication in state-sanctioned violence.Malamud argues that this question of implication extends to the contemporary reader and invites us, half a century after the end of the Second World War, to confront our own implication in that moment in history, including of course the spectre of the atomic bomb which haunts the narrative.
The fact that Murakami frames this exploration of guilt and complicity in terms of the 'liquidation' of a zoo, Malamud writes, invites us to read the text allegorically, as a 'mea culpa' on behalf of 'humanity as a whole … for the transgressions our species has committed against other animals.' 51 This reading is plausible enough, but there is nevertheless something apocalyptic, not to mention sacrificial, about the eagerness with which Malamud indicts 'humanity as a whole' here and conscripts Murakami into issuing this mea culpa on our behalf.Malamud's entire analytic framework posits a strict ontological division between Culture and Nature, human and animal, where the former is invariably cast as sinful and violent while the latter is innocent, pure, and the victim of human aggression.Malamud thus buys into the 'alibi' of nature wholesale, which, as we saw, is itself the product of a techno-capitalist nature industry.This framing, moreover, is doubly sacrificial, in that it not only tends towards what Greg Garrard calls 'disanthropy,' 52 an ultimately human-exceptionalist fantasy of a world purged of people, but, conversely, as Anat Pick observes, it also harbours 'its own zoocidal inclinations.' 53This latter aspect comes out most clearly in the first chapter of Reading Zoos, in which Malamud suggests that zoo animals are better off dead than being bred in captivity, and that 'extinction (which is, of course, part of the cycle of evolution) may be a more natural path than interventions by zoos.' 54 'A species so tenuously dependant on the kind of human intervention that the zoo provides,' he adds, 'should perhaps die outa horrible eventuality, certainly, but the perversely appropriate consequence of the indignities people have wreaked on our planet.' 55In this scenario, the only way to redeem humanity is to sacrifice the animals in our care.As Matthew Chrulew observes, this position ultimately stems from the utopian desire 'to be free of all power relations with animals, to keep the wild untainted by humanity's fallen touch.' 56 From this perspective, there can be no hope of a multispecies future in which both humans and other animals may coexist.

Reframing the zoo
In Frames of War, Judith Butler argues that the frame can never quite contain the image or narrative inside it, because 'the very sense of the inside' is made possible and 'recognisable' by the presence of an outside that exceeds it and 'troubles our sense of reality.' 57 On the other hand, she continues, the ability of the frame 'to contain, convey, and determine what is seen … depends upon the conditions of reproducibility in order to succeed.'This is how framed images are able to circulate in the media.Yet, this condition of reproducibility 'entails a constant breaking from context … , which means that the "frame" does not quite contain what it conveys, but breaks apart every time it seeks to give definitive organisation to its content.'In this sense, she argues, the frame inevitably permits, or 'even requires,' the break. 58Thus, on the one hand, the 'zoo-break' is already implicit in the biopolitical framing logic of the zoo, which is why the state of exception depicted in zoo-break narratives often serves ultimately to re-establish the norm and re-affirm the logic of what is to be included and what is to be excluded.At the same time, however, it also means that no frame is ever total or definitive, and that there is always room for renegotiation and resistancefor re-framing the ground according to other parameters.How might we frame the zoo differently in order to escape the implacable logic of sacrifice?
So far, we have been considering how the zoo functions as a sacrifice zone, especially when it intersects with a war zone.For better or worse, however, the zoo is also one of the paradigmatic contact zones where species meet in modernity.A 'contact zone,' as defined by Mary Louise Pratt and subsequently borrowed by Donna Haraway, is a culturally overdetermined space 'where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present,' albeit 'within radically asymmetrical relations of power.' 59 In her book Imperial Eyes, Pratt conceived of the contact zone as an alternative framing for the colonial encounter, and for our purposes, it might similarly provide an alternative framing for imagining the zoo as a site for humananimal encounter.'The term "contact",' writes Pratt, 'foregrounds the interactive, improvisational dimensions of imperial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by accounts of conquest and domination told from the invader's perspective.A "contact" perspective emphasises how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other.' 60 In other words, the 'subjects previously separated by geography and history' who meet in the contact zone do not 'precede the meeting,' 61 but rather are produced as subjects by the zoo apparatus itself, which serves to divide living beings into the categories of human and nonhuman, bíos and zoē, and to capture, determine, and control the behaviours, attitudes, and possible relations between the beings on either side of the dividing line.This subjectivising function, moreover, pertains to the zoo not only as a physical institution, but also as a discursive formation, a space of the cultural imaginary.And when the physical and symbolic boundary breaks down, as in these zoo-in-wartime scenarios, a different mode of relating, an alternative distribution may briefly come into view.
Such is the discursive force of the zoo apparatus, however, that the narratives and the established modes of interpretation will almost inevitably appear to foreclose such a reading.This is clearly visible in Heck's account of the destruction of the Berlin Zoo: immediately before his vivid description of how the men cut up and ate the animals killed in the air raid, Heck pauses to note how, for the keepers, gardeners, and workmen, 'the destruction of the Zoo was the destruction of the world for which they had lived [die Vernichtung ihrer Umwelt], and I saw old men among them who could not hide their grief and wept.' 62 Heck himself remains committed to his staunch and ruthless pragmatism, of course, and immediately goes on to say that there was no time to indulge in sentimental contemplationthere was work to be done, 'and that was perhaps the good thing about those days of terrible pain: there was no time for grieving!' 63 The task of rebuilding the zoo in the wake of disaster is thus explicitly predicated on the foreclosure of grief on the part of the human keepers, and implicitly, of the very grievability of the nonhuman animals in their care and with whom they had shared a common Umwelt.This is not to imply that the relationship between the keepers and the animals was or ever could be entirely peaceful and egalitarian.Indeed, to imagine it as such would be it indulge in the fantasy of an abolition of 'all power relations with animals,' 64 and thus to fall back into the mythopoetics of Edenic innocence and apocalyptic purification by fire that pervade the cultural imaginary surrounding the zoo in wartime.If anything, the acknowledgement of these animal lives' grievability entails an acknowledgement of a particular responsibility towards those lives, a responsibility rendered all the greater and more difficult by the very unequal relations of power that pertain between humans and other animals.And it entails a recognition of one's own animality, precisely that quality of the human which the sacrificial logic of the anthropological machine seeks to disavow.'It is precisely as human animals that humans suffer,' Butler writes.'And in the context of war, one could, and surely should, point to the destruction of animals, of habitats, and of other conditions for sentient life, citing the toxic effects of war munitions on natural environments and ecosystems, and the condition of creatures who may survive but have been saturated in poisons.The point, however,' she continues, 'would not be to catalog the forms of life damaged by war, but to reconceive life itself as a set of largely unwilled interdependencies, even systemic relations, which imply that the "ontology" of the human is not separable from the "ontology" of the animal.' 65Thus, if the figure of the zoo-in-wartime holds any critical potential for imagining multispecies futures in the Anthropocene, it can only be through careful attention to the intricacies of the more-than-human entanglements that emerge during the breakdown of the established order, before the 'natural,' sacrificial order is restored.It can only be, that is, through an ethics of reading that resists the instrumentalising, extractivist logic of the sacrifice zone and instead seeks to recover alternative modes of solidarity and coexistence with the creatures with whom we share this world.

Notes
1. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014), p. 169.with prehistoric animals and a forest primeval to rescue scores of endangered neighbors and friends' (p.321), thus drawing a rhetorical parallel between human and nonhuman 'endangerment.' Ackerman would go on to write The Human Age, a popular history of the Anthropocene published in 2014, which is similarly optimistic about human ingenuity in the face of adversity and our ability to deal with the global threat of climate change by technological means.27.For a brilliant analysis of Western media coverage of zoo animals in war zones, particularly in Gaza, see Sara Salih, 'The Animal You See', Interventions, 16.3 (2014), pp.299-324.28.See Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel, The War against Animals (Brill, 2015).See also Jacques Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, trans.David Wills (Fordham UP, 2008), pp.24-29; Dominic O'Key, Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature: Narrating the War against Animals (Bloomsbury, 2022), pp.11-39; and Justin E.H. Smith, 'A Form of War: Animals, Humans, and the Shifting Boundaries of Community', in Klaus Petrus and Markus Wild (eds), Animal Minds & Animal Ethics: Connecting Two Separate Fields (Transcript, 2013), pp.59-82.29.Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?(Verso, 2016), p. 15. 30.Klein, This Changes Everything, p. 148.31.W. G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur (Fischer, 2001); On the Natural History of Destruction, trans.Anthea Bell (Penguin, 2004).The English title implicitly frames Sebald's text in terms of the ecological impact of war, and, moreover, establishes an additional link between warfare and the zoo: The phrase is not Sebald's own, but rather borrowed from the British zoologist and military strategist Solomon 'Solly' Zuckerman.Zuckerman, who after the war became president of the London Zoological Society, served as a senior scientific advisor to the British government during World War II, and in that capacity had travelled through Europe in the final months of the war to survey the impact of the Allied bombing campaign.By his own account, Zuckerman had planned to write an essay entitled 'the natural history of destruction', but abandoned his plans after visiting Cologne in 1945 and seeing the devastation there, a sight which, he felt, called for a more 'eloquent' writer than him.32.The debates surrounding Sebald's text and the theme of German victimhood are extensive and I shall not attempt to rehearse them here.For an overview, see Annette Seidel Arpaci, 'Lost in Translations?The Discourse of "German Suffering" and W. G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur', in Helmut Schmitz (ed.),A Nation of Victims?Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to the Present (Rodopi, 2007); and, more generally, Stuart Taberner and Karina Berger (eds.),Germans as Victims in the Literary Fiction of the Berlin Republic (Camden House, 2009).33.Sebald, Natural History, p. 92 (translation modified) / Luftkrieg, pp.97-98.Cf.Katharina Heinroth, Mit Faltern begann's -Mein Leben mit Tieren in Breslau, München und Berlin (Kindler, 1979), p. 131; Lutz Heck, Tiere -Mein Abenteuer.Erlebnisse in Wildnis und Zoo (Ullstein, 1952), p. 116.34.Sebald, Natural History, pp.92-93 / Luftkrieg, pp.98-99.35.Sebald, Natural History, p. 93 / Luftkrieg, p. 98. 36.Heck, Tiere, 116.This entire passage is omitted from the English translation.37. Lutz Heck, Animals, My Adventure, trans.E.W. Dickes (Methuen, 1954), p. 107 / Tiere, p. 116.