Asceticism is the Lutric Component of Lutrae

A fine initial foray into the demanding but necessary work of archaeo-lutrosophy.

It is also worth noting that, at least the last time I was there, the Monterey Bay Aquarium had installed a substantial, purpose-built basement wing to house a colony of Oriental Small-Clawed Otters.  At the time, I admit, I dismissed this as a venal attempt to capitalize on the rampant popularity of their captive sea-otters, at the expense of their stated mission to study, preserve and display the marine fauna of the Monterey Bay and its associated Trench (not the Orient).  However, G.B.'s analysis makes me quesiotn whether we should not rather discover a more profound movement here.  Let us recall Foucault's (1961) preface to Folie et Déraison, with a key substitution:

In the universality of the Western ratio, there is this division which is the Orient[al Small-Clawed Otter]: the Orient[al Small-Clawed Otter], thought of as the origin, dreamt of as the vertiginous point from which nostalgia and promises of return are born, the Orient[al Small-Clawed Otter] offered ot the colonizing reason of the Occident, but indefinitely inaccessible, for it always remains the limit: the night of the beginning, in which the Occident was fomed, but in which it traced a dividing line, the Orient[al Small-Clawed Otter] is for the Occident everything that it is not, while remaining the place in which its primitive truth must be sought. (History of Madness, xxx)

Is it possible that in fact what we were witnessing was a "primitive caesura" in the experience of ott(h)erness?  Did this installation mark the birth-pangs of an epistemic shift in the conditions of possibility of otter discourse?  I suspect so, and if I am right a return to that exhibit may produce a fuller understanding of what I propose is being constituted as a "limit experience" in the Western experience of the otter and, by extension and as Bremsëlhacker suggests, of "cuteness" as such.  It seems to me that the most important initial question is to delineate precisely the relations which are being constructed between Lutra marina and Aonyx cinerea.  Not to prejudice the investigation, but I fear we are going to find the rudiments of a Control Society among Mustelidae.

Bremsëlhacker's analysis of "cuteness" and his question as to whether otters are fetishes for one another seems to me to return us to a question which emerged from the Cotswolds Wildlife Park Circle in 2005 or so, viz. "can animals be interpellated?"   It seems clear from at least Lutra marina's apparently incessant self-offering as a "cute" object of adoration that in some sense it participates in maintaining the relations of production which are manifested in, say, "Hairy Otter" t-shirts "all by itself."  However, I for one (following Goefferey Galt Harpham,) am inclined to believe that whatever the phenomenological events in otters which produce their constant photogenic displays are, they are part of a broader ascetic imperative and are perceived as such by the otters.  Thus, it would be an oversimplification to consider them simply as fetishists or interpellees without understanding the larger structure of their ascetic Weltanschauung.