Why Were the Bears Shot/Killed: Examining the Force of Law in the Bear Chapter of Tales from the Inner City

This article examines the bear shooting scene in the Bear chapter of Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City (2018), exploring the force of the diegetic Bear Law with reference to the Derridean term, carnophallogocentrism. The story is about a legal battle between bears and human beings but ends with a legal shooting of the bears, depicting an antagonistic human–animal relationship, and challenging animals’ impossibility of becoming a legal entity. In exploring the force of law and human–animal relationship, this article considers Derrida’s carnophallogocentrism a significant viewpoint, which includes the issue of eating as the prefix suggests. As an intertwined focal point of animality, the issues of subjectivity and sovereignty and the matter of eating date back to religious rituals. At the same time, these issues around animals offer a connecting point with the theory of the Other. To analyse the chapter in connection with those points, this article first discusses the autochthonous cultural sediments associated with bears in human cultures of the Northern Hemisphere. These regions highlight the shared characteristics of how bears evolved into significant symbols for humans, drawing a parallel with carnophallogocentrism. Second, it outlines the structure of sovereignty and the force of law, and then explores how the Bear Law is founded, comparing it with the structure of human legal systems. Finally, this article examines the bear shooting scene through the lens of the power of language and carnophallogocentrism.