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Portrait of a Dead Rat
(SA/2026)
'From the point of view of mankind, the rat is an unmitigated nuisance and pest.
There is nothing that can be said in its favour. Its destructiveness is almost unlimited.' [1]
I.
It's not often Phoevos the Cat manages to catch (and kill) a rat; but that's what he did today.
Not a very big rat, I grant you. But a rat all the same.
And disposing of the body brought to mind two very different essays by two very different authors: a soon-to-be-published work by punk scholar Russ Bestley [2]; and a much older text written by the philosopher Nick Land [3].
II.
Bestley insists on the symbolic meaning of the rat within punk subculture, history and design - or what he terms punk lore. The rat, he says, is something that can be read - although how it might be read is constrained by the fact that it comes with "a range of negative linguistic connotations [that] have persisted for more than 500 years" [4].
When you think of all the terrible things threatening man and society - disease, decay, degeneration - the rat is associated with all of them and whilst "the negative symbolism of rodents" [5] horrifies most right-minded individuals, it appeals to those "seeking to shock and disrupt" [6] - from Hell's Angels to punk rockers; mad poets to cybergothic theorists like Nick Land ...
III.
Like Bestley, Land also has a thing for rats (he likes wolves too, but that's another story).
However, whereas Bestley sees the rat merely as emblematic of counterculture, in his 1993 essay, 'Spirit and Teeth', Land positions the long-tailed rodent as positively anti-historic - a barbarian force of desire that challenges the two things he places himself vehemently in opposition to: academic philosophy and progressive humanism.
Operating in sewers and deep underground tunnels, the rat gnaws away at the lofty speculations and high ideals of enlightened philosophers and old-school theologians upon which Western civilisation is founded.
Indeed, Land wishes to demonstrate that even Heaven "is not without ratholes, its sewage system, an entire impersonal architecture characterised by porous heterogeinity" [7] and irrespective of his celestial visage, the Lord Almighty "still has ratbites on his ass" [8].
For Land, philosophy should be evaluated not just from the perspective of man - which he regards as no more privileged than that of sea slugs - but from the perspective of an uncontrollable swarm. Thus, rather than viewing death, for example, as a tragedy for the individual, he asks us to view it from the perspective of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe: as an impersonal, global event.
Land allies himself with thinkers and outsiders he refers to as rat-poets - Nietzsche, Rimbaud, and Georg Trakl, for example. Their work, he argues, is a plague of the spirit, bringing an end to rigid thought structures by descending into formless chaos. He singles out Trakl's superb poem Die Ratten as a text that "functions as a vermin-core for an entire pattern of infestation" [9].
IV.
In sum ...
For Land, rats are not merely symbols or abstract representations of meaning and metaphor; they are engines of chaos that directly impact reality.
Bestley wants to know what rats mean - to read and interpret them so as to make sense of punk imagery. But Land, like Willard, "in a gesture of beautiful treachery against mankind" [10] wants to feed them and breed them and set them free to do their thing, decomposing interiorities and triggering irreversible changes.
One final thought ...
In killing the rat, does Phoevos not only express his predatory instinct, but also demonstrate that the cat remains the eternal enemy of the rodent and thus (inadvertently) acts as the guardian of humanity, protecting us and our civilisation from chaos, destruction, and disease?
As Bestley and the other contributors to Punk & the Animal might well ask: Are cats the anti-punk creatures par excellence?
If we need a libidinal rat theory "from beyond representational discourse" [11] on the one hand, then so too do we need a feline politics that recognises their animality in all its cultural and philosophical complexity.
Notes
[1] An adapted quotation from Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History (Bantam Books, 1965), pp. 150-151. Cited by Nick Land in his essay 'Spirit and Teeth' (1993) - see reference in note 3 below.
[2] The essay by Bestley - which he has kindly sent me to read in advance of its forthcoming publication - is titled 'Rattus rattus: the Rat in Punk Lore'. It forms chapter 2 in Punk & the Animal: Ethos, Ethics and Aesthetics, ed. Laura D. Gelfand and Angela Bartram (Intellect Books, 2026), pp. 25-44.
I published a post on TTA in anticipation of this book earlier this month (17 May 2026): click here.
[3] Nick Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), pp. 175-201. This essay was originally published in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, ed. David Wood (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.
[4] Bestley, 'Rattus rattus: the Rat in Punk Lore', in Punk & the Animal ... p. 25.
[5] Ibid., p. 30.
[6] Ibid
[7] Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena ... p. 192.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
This poem by Trakl - translated into English by Eric Plattner as 'The Rats' - can be read on the All Poetry website: click here.
[10] Ibid., p. 193.
[11] Ibid., p. 200.
