If domestication is the human activity where the division between self and other arises, it is in the hunt where the rift opens up definitively. While domestication brings the wild into the house, hunting extends the limits of the house (domus), its periphery, into the world. Thus, hunting means to leave the house to exercise an exclusively human form of domination. Indeed, the fact that hunting was originally an act of communion and reciprocity with the prey (0.23) reveals the threshold from which the dynamics of dominance and sovereignty originate.
A relevant myth in this regard:
In the Metamorphoses Ovid tells us that a young hunter named Actaeon having finished hunting wandered aimlessly through a forest. Accompanied by his dogs he found a hidden grotto surrounded by cypresses where the water resounded and, led by curiosity, went inside. Unfortunately it was Diana’s sacred spot, where the goddess bathed with her entourage of nymphs. Humiliated by having been seen disrobed, the goddess curses Actaeon saying: “now you may tell how you saw me undressed, if you are able to tell!” Suddenly, from Actaeon’s head sprout stag’s horns, his neck lengthens and the tips of his ears sharpen, his hands turn into hooves, his arms and legs into stilts, his whole body is covered with fine mottled fur. Actaeon/deer runs in his new shape but soon enough his hounds reach him and devour him like they would any other prey.
The figure of Actaeon reveals the two aspects of sovereignty as described by Giorgio Agamben. Namely, that “the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri [sacred men], and homo saceris the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.”1 The sovereign and the homo sacer are thus two sides of a single symmetrical figure (0.12), which finds its originary image in Actaeon, who is both hunter and hunted. Curiously enough, understood as aspects of the same figure, neither the hunter nor the prey are aware of each other. Each is the image of the other’s unconscious. Both are trapped in the relationship and are unaware of their counterpart.
The intimate relationship between the hunter and its prey, simultaneously absent and present in the figure of Actaeon, reveals an interesting Latin etymology: the common origin of venator, hunter, and venatus, hunted, which originates “venado”, the Spanish word for deer. In fact, these two words come from Indo-European root wen- which expresses desire, effort and search and which also originates the name of Venus, the goddess of love and beauty. The search implied in this root, the fervent desire for the prey, is the origin of the hunt, and it is through this action that Actaeon passes from being the subject, venator, to being the object, venatus.
It is thus in the hunt where we find the threshold where human sovereignty originates as an unconscious dialectic that translates into action.
- Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, 53. ↩︎
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