“There she was, looking at me with those eyes of her”: l’animal mis en regard dans le théâtre d’Edward Albee

In the plays of Edward Albee, the animal – or as Jacques Derrida would say, the animot – can only be approached indirectly: in The Zoo Story, Jerry is haunted by the glaring eyes of a dog and a whiff of bestiality pervades the stage of The Goat. In their monologues, male characters keep reenacting their visual encounters with animals. Yet, although theater is etymologically bound up with the act of seeing, the audience hardly ever sets eye on non-human species. This paper seeks to investigate this paradoxical dramatization through speech of animals lurking offstage. I will therefore question Emmanuel Lévinas’ claim that animals cannot partake in face to face encounters, dwelling on the ethical consequences of Derrida’s postulate that “The animal looks at us and we are naked before it”. In the plays under study, these encounters, be they confrontational or lustful, enable the male characters to assert their predatory masculinity by “catching sight” of these figures of the other. Indeed, as the often feminized beasts remain offstage, or are even sacrificed in a gruesome reenactment of the tragic goat song, the audience is led to question the boundaries between species, speeches, gender and genre.