Vivacious remains: An afterword on taxidermy’s forms, fictions, facticity, and futures

That taxidermy, in whatever form, requires a recognizable physical trace of a once-living animal calls attention to the inescapably elegiac ground of taxidermy and its ability through such traces to point to the world outside the home, the museum, the gallery walls, and even literary taxidermic fictions. The remains function multidirectionally in time and space. They point outward to the wider world—backward in time to when and where the animal was living— and forward in time to an imagined future of new human-animal relations. Taxidermy thus offers us new possibilities of encounter, through what I term a “speculative interspecies physicality” and “translational phenomenology,” both embodied ways of imagining empathically beyond the human.