Beginning from the Kekule essays, this article shows how McCarthy's view of the human emerges from his account of language, its relationship to evolutionary biology, and its difference from other forms of animal signaling. For McCarthy, the human is defined by the unique form of representation found in the capacity for language, the ability of words to not only stand in for but replace the things they represent the basis of human society and culture. While much is entailed by this claim, one of its central implications is that any posthumanism worthy of the name must presuppose a notion of creatureliness not fundamentally defined by the representational logic of language. Hence, one sees in McCarthy's account of language and human nature the parameters not just of his own thinking of the posthuman but that of any posthuman project; the possibility of a posthuman life capable of a truly sustainable relationship to the natural world necessitates a radical transformation in the human relationship to language. In this sense, McCarthy is, the article suggests, a paradigmatic thinker of the environmental humanities, his account of human and animal consciousness clarifying an important element of what it might mean to think a posthuman consciousness.
As much of Cormac McCarthy scholarship has time and time again observed, McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian (1985) owes a great debt to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Nowhere is this clearer than in McCarthy's thematic preoccupations and in his characterization of Judge Holden. Judge Holden indeed appears to be a composite of multiple characters in Moby-Dick-including Captain Ahab, Fedallah, and the White Whale itself. However, another and perhaps more fascinating influence on McCarthy's Judge Holden can be found in one of Moby-Dick's many narrative digressions. Namely, "the learned gentleman with the copy of Blackstone," found in chapter 90 of Moby-Dick, significantly shaped how McCarthy chose to portray Judge Holden. Given the significance of Judge Holden's representing "the law," Melville's learned gentleman likely shaped McCarthy's views of the law, justice, society, civilization, and "progress."
