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<p>Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1985 flash fiction “She Unnames Them” has been consistently read as a feminist revision of the Genesis naming scene, yet existing critical accounts stop before the story’s final image: trees that the narrator, having relinquished taxonomy, calls “the dark-branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.” This article argues that the closing sentence is the story’s most serious philosophical claim and reads it accordingly. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s account of the anthropological machine, the apparatus through which Western thought continuously produces “the human” by separating it from the animal at an interior threshold, and on Jacques Derrida’s analysis of Genesis naming as a founding visual asymmetry, this article argues that the story does not merely reverse patriarchal naming conventions but dismantles the biopolitical apparatus that makes naming an act of sovereign classification. The story is set not in Eden but in the post-lapsarian world after the expulsion, where the original hierarchy has long settled into domestic routine. Eve’s voluntary unnaming, examined through Vinciane Despret’s ethological account of consent and Donna Haraway’s sympoietic ethics, is not a seizure of naming authority but an abdication of the machine’s logic altogether. The closing syntax, slow and tentative and lateral, enacts what Derrida calls the poetic thinking that philosophy has constitutively excluded: a language that attends to presence rather than classifying objects at a distance. The tall dancers are what language looks like when the machine stops.</p>

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Tin cans and tall dancers: Le Guin’s “She Unnames Them” and the posthuman refusal of taxonomy

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年7月7日

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  • Serhat Uyurkulak

摘要

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1985 flash fiction “She Unnames Them” has been consistently read as a feminist revision of the Genesis naming scene, yet existing critical accounts stop before the story’s final image: trees that the narrator, having relinquished taxonomy, calls “the dark-branched, tall dancers motionless against the winter shining.” This article argues that the closing sentence is the story’s most serious philosophical claim and reads it accordingly. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s account of the anthropological machine, the apparatus through which Western thought continuously produces “the human” by separating it from the animal at an interior threshold, and on Jacques Derrida’s analysis of Genesis naming as a founding visual asymmetry, this article argues that the story does not merely reverse patriarchal naming conventions but dismantles the biopolitical apparatus that makes naming an act of sovereign classification. The story is set not in Eden but in the post-lapsarian world after the expulsion, where the original hierarchy has long settled into domestic routine. Eve’s voluntary unnaming, examined through Vinciane Despret’s ethological account of consent and Donna Haraway’s sympoietic ethics, is not a seizure of naming authority but an abdication of the machine’s logic altogether. The closing syntax, slow and tentative and lateral, enacts what Derrida calls the poetic thinking that philosophy has constitutively excluded: a language that attends to presence rather than classifying objects at a distance. The tall dancers are what language looks like when the machine stops.