Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?

It has been more than thirty years since Peter Singer introduced the term speciesism into philosophical parlance and wrote eloquently against a form of discrimination that went largely unnoticed both inside and outside academia. Although Singer has had enormous influence over the years in the area of animal rights, his effort to put the discrimination against nonhuman species on par with the prejudicial treatment and injustices caused by sexism or racism has had less success; the fight against speciesism has not had the same force in the academy, perhaps until now. In the past few years, there has been an explosion of conferences, books, and discussion networks around the question of the animal. On H-Net Animal, a lively and heated discussion took place around the question of whether “animal studies” is already or should become a new discipline and, if so, whether it should model itself on women’s studies and ethnic studies.

Such questions are both pertinent and misconceived. Women’s studies and ethnic studies programs demanded that the academy acknowledge and address the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of groups of people under the forces of sexism and racism. This redress was to be done not only by focusing on those gaps and misrepresentations, but also and more importantly by bringing the voices of women and minorities into the academy to write and represent themselves. The result was that previously marginalized or silenced groups were no longer to be confined to the status of object but would be subjects of representations; their voices were speaking loudly and demanded to be heard. How can that situation be comparable to animal studies? True, for centuries nonhuman animals have been locked in representations authored by humans, representations that moreover have justified the use and abuse of nonhuman animals by humans. Unlike in women’s studies or ethnic studies, however, those who constitute the objects of animal studies cannot speak for themselves, or at least they cannot speak any of the languages that the academy recognizes as necessary for such self-representation. Must they then be forever condemned to the status of objects?

Many of those who have taken nonhuman animals as their objects of study over the past ten or fifteen years (if we think back to the founding of the Great Ape Project in 1993) have nevertheless worked to prove that many animal species possess the basic capabilities deemed necessary for subjectivity: self-consciousness, rational agency, the capacity to learn and transmit language. Given a long tradition in Western philosophy that has declared the capacity for rational thought and its manifestation in language as that which distinguishes human from nonhuman animals, apes’ proven ability to learn and teach sign language to other apes aims to show that a God-given human–animal divide is untenable and to confirm Darwin’s apparently still controversial view that humans and apes are not so different. For Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri, who founded the Great Ape Project, such findings are at the basis of efforts to include chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans in a “community of equals” with basic rights that must be protected by law.¹

Alongside and sometimes against such attempts to bring (some) animals within the community of humans, an emerging facet of animal studies has increasingly questioned the justification for granting legal rights or protection to nonhuman animals on the grounds or to the extent that they are like humans. Influenced both by postmodern theory and by feminist and postcolonial critiques of the ways Western, educated Man has acted as the norm for what counts as human, recent discussions in animal studies have questioned to what extent our understanding of rights and protection are adequate for animals. Following feminists who have been critical of the way that the very notion of “women’s rights” may reify a fictional identity of women as subordinate and thereby entrench women within their subordination, one might ask how the notion of “animal rights” might similarly entrench animals under a falsely unifying idea of “the animal”? The inequities of rights discourse, whether for humans or for animals, seems inevitable, and just as a prejudicial definition of the human has been used to grant privileges to some while excluding others, so the notion of animal rights privileges a particular group of animals—those who can demonstrate a capacity for so-called rational agency—and leaves others unprotected.² In this way, the question of the animal becomes an extension of those debates over identity and difference that have embroiled academic theory over the past quarter-century. If animal studies has come of age, it is perhaps because nonhuman animals have become a limit case for theories of difference, otherness, and power.

But how do we bring animal difference into theory? Can animals speak? And if so, can they be read or heard? Such questions have deliberate echoes of the title of Gayatri Spivak’s seminal essay in postcolonial theory, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” where she warns that the critical establishment’s attempt to give voice to dispossessed peoples will only result in those peoples’ speaking the language of Western intellectuals or in their being further dependent on Western intellectuals to speak for them.³ Her essay may serve as a warning to some who, for example, would try to teach apes to sign in order to have them tell humans what they want. Long before the existence of the Great Ape Project, this problem was exposed in Franz Kafka’s 1919 story “A Report to an Academy.” Red Peter, the story’s narrator and protagonist, is presented as a representative of a minority or subaltern group: he is an ape. But the appropriateness of any of these designations is immediately brought into question as we learn that he is an ape-turned-human who has been singled out by the “academy” to give a report about his former life. Such a report, he admits, he is unable to give. His memory of his life as an ape has been erased as a result of his efforts to adopt his human captors’ manners and language. Instead, he can only describe the process and progress of his assimilation from the moment of his capture to his current success as an artistic performer who smokes, drinks red wine, and converses like an “average European.”⁴

Language is at the core of Kafka’s critique of assimilation as a process that gives voice only by destroying the self that would speak. What is the self, Kafka’s story asks, if it has no memory of its past and no means of representing it? Must that (animal) self be a blank page for others to write upon? Or might there be some other source of selfhood in his body, some physical locus where memory may be stored and known? Although “A Report to an Academy” is most often read as an allegory of German Jews in Prague, it illustrates the significance of a fundamental problematic of “the animal question”: How does one have access to “the animal,” whether it is the animal that must be “civilized” to exist in human society or the animals with whom we share the world? We might teach chimpanzees and gorillas to use sign language, but will that language enable them to speak of their animal lives or simply bring them to mimic (or ape) human values and viewpoints? Indeed, if they learn our language, will they still be animals?

Animal studies in this regard joins trauma studies both because of the violence done to animals and their habitats (what indeed has been called a genocide) and because of the difficulty of assessing how animals experience that violence.⁵ Both raise questions about how one can give testimony to an experience that cannot be spoken or that may be distorted by speaking it. In Kafka’s story, Red Peter has learned to live and, more important, to speak as a human, but with the result that he has lost the ability to remember his former life as an ape. Language gives him access to knowledge that he was an ape, but it does not allow him to represent that life. Indeed, his “report” takes the place of that former life that exists only as an aporia, a knowledge lost along with that of his ape life. He was wounded in his initial capture, and it is by virtue of his own self-flagellation that he is able to learn to speak. His speech is thus a kind of post-traumatic expression, symptomatic of, if not a repetition of that original wounding whose scars he readily displays even as he is unable to recall the events that led up to them.

Like trauma studies, animal studies thus stretches to the limit questions of language, epistemology, and ethics that have been raised in various ways by women’s studies and postcolonial studies: how to understand and give voice to others or to experiences that seem impervious to our means of understanding; how to attend to difference without appropriating or distorting it; how to hear and acknowledge what it may not be possible to say. Here I want to trace the emergence of the “animal question” by focusing on three trends or moments in literary and critical theory for which the animal has become a test case: the linguistic turn, a counterlinguistic or affective turn, and the ethical turn. I will continue to make reference along the way to Kaka’s story, much as J. M. Coetzee’s feisty vegetarian protagonist Elizabeth Costello does in her lecture to an academic audience in The Lives of Animals.⁶ I do so not because I feel like Red Peter, as Costello says she does, but because both she and Red Peter raise doubts about the academy’s efficacy for dealing with this question.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, subjectivity is born of a fall from wholeness into sexual division and desire and marked by a fall into language.⁷ Language, as we see with Red Peter, irreparably splits the self between an experiential self and a speaking self who is never in the same place or time as the self that is to be represented. Although he is compelled to speak, his speech inevitably fails, becoming what might be read as a traumatic symptom. My point here is not to level traumas or to equate the trauma of coming to language with the trauma of physical injury or of Red Peter’s wound. Rather, I wish to set up two different projects within animal studies that revolve around the question of language. On the one hand are those who look to our nonhuman others with envy or admiration precisely because they remain outside language and thus suggest the possibility of unmediated experience. On the other are those who would prove that animals do indeed speak and can tell us, however imperfectly, of their lives and their traumas.

“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in a statement that, according to Cary Wolfe, might stand as epigraph to debates of the past century regarding animals, language, and subjectivity.⁸ Wittgenstein’s remark stands as an ambiguous retort to René Descartes, who, in his claim that speech marks a clear and infallible line of demarcation between humans and animals, warned, “Nor must we think, as did some of the ancients, that brutes talk although we do not understand their language.”⁹ To think so would be to attribute some form of rational thought and hence a soul to animals and thus ultimately to deny God. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, research has proven both Descartes and Wittgenstein wrong (at least to the extent that lions may speak for animals in general) and affirmed (though not without contestation) that, indeed, some animals can be taught to use language and can be understood. Washoe, a chimpanzee, was just the first of the great apes to be taught sign language and demonstrate that he could even combine signs in new and even metaphorical ways. The research that Roger Fouts began with Washoe and Loulis was continued by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and the bonobos, Kanzi and Panbanisha, at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa.¹⁰ Against the skepticism of linguists and scientists who said it was impossible, Savage-Rumbaugh showed that Kanzi and Panbanisha could indeed learn to use and to respond to full sentences and understand the demands of grammar as well as of signs. Moreover, she discovered, they would say more when they had something to say and thus were not merely imitating. Kanzi used the keyboard more than three hundred times the day he was separated from his mother, from which Savage-Rumbaugh concluded: “What I had to do is come up with an environment … a world that would foster the acquisition of these lexical symbols in Kanzi and a greater understanding of spoken human language.”¹¹

Savage-Rumbaugh’s research seemed to prove that these apes were not simply “reacting” to stimuli in the Cartesian sense in which animals can obey a fixed behavior, but “responding” to humans and to each other with an awareness of language and the world around them.¹² Moreover, her research also raised new questions as to the relation between language and world and how one might affect rather than simply translate the other. In other words, her research made it imperative to ask whether language allowed Kanzi to express his thoughts or whether it replaced those thoughts with available and communicable signs. “He asked her for food. He asked her for affection. He asked her for help finding his mom.”¹³

Similar questions about language are raised by Irene Pepperberg’s research on her African Grey parrot, Alex. In her view, the linguistic deficiencies attributed to the parrot were more correctly deficiencies on the part of the researchers, who hadn’t figured out how to give him a reason to speak. “People used to think birds weren’t intelligent,” said Pepperberg; “well they used to think women weren’t intelligent either.”¹⁴ Much like Savage-Rumbaugh, Pepperberg saw language not as the putting together of sign and signified, but as a response to a social environment in which one is motivated to communicate either by imitating models or by challenging rivals for food, affection, and attention. Alex’s last words to Pepperberg before he died were “I love you,” a simple phrase whose meaning has been as debated as much as Alex’s ability to understand it. Were these words an indication of cognitive ability (response) or merely reactive imitation? But the question, as Verlyn Klinkenborg made clear in a New York Times editorial, is not a question for animals alone. “To wonder what Alex recognized when he recognized words is also to wonder what humans recognize when we recognize words.”¹⁵ It is to wonder how recognition and response (or intention) are ever clearly distinct from imitation. When it comes to language, are not all of us dependent on a field of signification that precedes us, making it difficult to say that language itself is ever not imitative? How do we know what our lovers mean when they say “I love you”?

The alternative to language as imitation entails its own absurdities, as Wolfe suggests in recalling Wittgenstein. “What can it mean to imagine a language we cannot understand, spoken by a being who cannot speak?”¹⁶ The emphasis must be on our own impoverished capacities, Vicki Hearne reminds us, because Wittgenstein did not say that the lion could not speak, only that we could not understand him. A poet, philosopher, and animal trainer, Hearne adds, moreover, that Wittgenstein’s statement, like Descartes’s, has been used to evade the fundamental “tragedy of language,” a notion that she takes from Stanley Cavell. We experience this tragedy when we acknowledge that there is another consciousness there, a consciousness we desperately desire to know through language, but that may remain impenetrable. Training, for Hearne, is a means to begin to penetrate that consciousness, but only to the extent that we humans can relinquish the stance of impenetrability that we claim for ourselves and with which we protect ourselves from being known by the animals we live with.

Hearne writes about animal training in a Cavellean mode, a mode that is full of tragedy as well as comedy and that is fundamentally about language and “what it can be.” Language, in her view, is not a matter of attaching a sign to a signified. “If we describe the integrity of a language as the physical, intellectual and spiritual distance talking enables the speakers of that language to travel together, then it looks very much as though the dog and the horse have a greater command of language than chimpanzees do.”¹⁷ In other words, through training, dogs and horses are given tools for entering a relationship within which they can be said to speak, not merely to react. We may not always understand them, but it is imperative that we acknowledge that they may have things to say. Hearne gives the example of teaching dogs to track or follow a scent. Once they learn their job, they become much better at it than we humans could ever be because we can’t read or even find the scents that exist as signs for them and that they read. There is no question of imitation.

“What is linguistic in this relation?” asks Paul Patton of the training of horses. Despite Hearne’s insistence that training is a form of communication that depends on dogs’ and horses’ capacities for language, Patton, a professor of philosophy and a dressage rider, raises concerns about the coercive measures of training. “Both training and riding involve the exercise of power over the animal and, contrary to the view of many philosophers and trainers, relations of communication are not external but immanent to relations of power.”¹⁸ What this means is not that power lies only on one side or the other of the relationship, but rather that horses and humans alike are subservient to patterns of semiosis that precede them—whether those signs be linguistic or somatic; whether they consist in words or in touch, pressure, and tone. Teaching dogs to track and training horses in dressage involve communication between beings who are “unequally endowed with capacities for language, for hearing and scent discrimination, or for movement and kinesthetic sensation. As a consequence, human–animal relations cannot be regarded as incomplete versions of human–human relations but must be regarded as complete versions of relations between different kinds of animals,” says Patton.¹⁹ In such relations, the problem of language is less one of imitation than of translation.

Perhaps what is linguistic in training is that relations between different kinds of animals are like relations between humans. Training, like language, compels me to acknowledge that there is another phenomenal world, or Umwelt (as ethologist Jakob von Uexküll called it),²⁰ even as it reveals that our worlds (and our means of expressing them) are not commensurate. Training cannot give me your world or give you mine—although it may allow us to find a place of intersection between our worlds. Hearne’s writing on training illuminates the problem of skepticism that has been central to the linguistic turn and takes the discussion of this problem a step farther. For her, training necessitates skepticism regarding our knowledge of the other and, through this, our knowledge of the world. It also sheds light on the Cavellean skepticism that concerns what others (myself included) can know of me. Hearne writes that horses stand as a rebuke to our knowledge because they seem to know us better than we can ever know them. Cavell comments on this notion in an exchange with Hearne where he writes that the horse “is a rebuke to our unreadiness to be understood… our will to remain obscure.”²¹ Here, skepticism is revealed as a kind of crutch, a protection against that which may be unmediated and which we may fear as much as we disbelieve it is possible. We may know animals in ways they cannot—we may know their breeds, their color, their weight, their names, their “histories”—but they may also know us in ways that we cannot know because they know the world and us by other means. Thus, Hearne agrees with Cavell that when it comes to dogs or horses (or perhaps chimpanzees and parrots), the issue is not that we are too skeptical (of their cognitive abilities, for instance), but that we are not skeptical enough of our skepticism and why we embrace it.

The difficulty, of course, is discovering how and where to cite what is outside of our language, if, indeed, we have access to that outside. Post-structuralism insisted that we humans can never get outside of our linguistic frameworks and that we have no knowledge and no experience that escapes language. In this regard, the turn to animals may be seen as an attempt not only to escape from post-structuralism’s linguistic trap but to reexamine its confines. Animals are at the very origin of our systems of representation. According to John Berger, animals like those drawn on the caves of Lascaux seventeen thousand years ago were our very first symbols.²³ But insofar as language and the possibility for self-representation constitute that by which humans have distinguished themselves from nonhuman animals, we must ask whether our representations act to bridge or to increase the distance between us and them, if not between us and the animals we are.²⁴ In The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker writes that there was no modern or modernist animal because pictures had to be about the act of picturing before they were anything else. “The animal is the first thing to be ruled out of modernism’s bounds.”²⁵ In other words, modernism’s insistence that representation can refer only to itself or to its specific linguistic or ideological system and modernism’s consequent privileging of the act and method of representation over and above the represented object rule out ever getting to the animal as animal. Modernism thus can be seen as a precursor to post-structuralism’s representational cage.

Such ruling out of the animal is also at the crux of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy.” The story can be read as an allegory of our entry into modernity through enlightenment and the concomitant loss of animality, a loss that has regrettable results. This is one reason that Red Peter is quick to dissociate his liberation from his ape cage with freedom. “I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by ‘way out.’ I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense. I deliberately do not use the word ‘freedom’” (198). In “What Is Enlightenment?” Michel Foucault points out that the term way out or Ausgang is the one Immanuel Kant uses to define enlightenment (Aufklärung) as a negation or difference.²⁶ Kant understands enlightenment as the process by which humans will escape from their former subjection to despotic rule or irrational authority and find their rightful status as autonomous subjects. The state of subjection, in other words, is comparable to the status of animals or infants who must rely on others to make rational choices for them. For Kafka’s Red Peter, however, escape from the state of animal is not to be regarded as the achievement of freedom or autonomy. Even as Red Peter describes his transformation as a “gradual enlightenment,” the phrase indicates an alternative to the cage as a means of coercion and an imposed conformity to the “way of humanity.” “And so I learned things, gentlemen. Ah, one learns when one has to; one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs. One stands over oneself with a whip, one flays oneself at the slightest opposition. My ape nature fled out of me, head over heels and away” (203). Condemned to be free as a human, Red Peter learns how to beat his ape self into obedience.

Kafka’s story poses the question, “At what cost enlightenment?” To the extent that the Enlightenment has, as Foucault suggests, “determined, at least in part, what we are, what we think, and what we do today,”²⁷ must we not also wonder what it deterred us from thinking, what it made us leave behind or whip into submission? The turn to animals in art as in theory is to attempt to envision a different understanding of what we humans are and consequently to enlarge or change the possibilities for what we can think and what we can do in the world. The postmodern turn to animals that Baker explores in his book is part of this ongoing reassessment of Enlightenment ideals and a concurrent effort to give new definition to the human not as a being opposed to animals, but as animal. The project is similar to the literary and historical focus on the body over the past few decades—whether the body is understood as the inseparable support and interface of thought and language or as the material register or trace of experiences lived outside of or prior to language and interpretation, much like Red Peter’s wound. How to recuperate those experiences that may have been forgotten or repudiated has been the focus of recent historical writings concerned with traumatic events. In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben takes the phrase “the open wound that is my life” from Georges Bataille as a metaphor for the existential trauma of life caught in the caesura between human and animal, “the central emptiness, the hiatus that—within man—separates man and animal.”²⁸ Inferring that efforts to articulate or locate that emptiness can result only in violence, Agamben asks that we “let it be” outside knowledge and “outside being.” In Sublime Historical Experience, Dutch historian F. R. Ankersmit similarly brings notions of trauma and the sublime together by virtue of their disruption of normal ways of understanding the world and our selves. To focus on the sublime is to recognize the dangerous inadequacy of our language for communicating experiences outside our consciousness, much as Red Peter realized that any human representation of his life as an ape would necessarily be a “misrepresentation.” But even though Red Peter has forgotten his former life and is unable to represent it, that life must still be considered a part of who he is. “We are not only the past we (can) remember (as the historists [sic] have always argued),” writes Ankersmit, “but also the past we can forget.”²⁹ The attention to the sublime, as Martin Jay describes it, is an attempt to access that lost or repressed experience that is outside of or prior to language and that may bring us to a “deeper reality.”³⁰

The privileging of a “sublime” disruption or disassociation of normal ways of knowing is central also to the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, which have inspired a postmodern if not posthuman project in animal studies. Their notion of “becoming animal,” which they elaborate in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, is an attempt to undo accepted and recognizable definitions of the human by replacing notions of exterior form and function with notions of affects and intensities and flows of movement as means to describe and value life. Their notion of experience as a tactile or visceral affair exceeds the possibilities of language to contain or identify it because becoming “produces nothing but itself.”³¹ There is no identity or subject that precedes becoming and no identity that a subject becomes. Hence, one cannot even be said to become an animal; one becomes “becoming.” Becoming animal is a creative rather than intellectual endeavor, and Deleuze and Guattari associate it with the writing or artistic process. “Either stop writing or write like a rat,” they assert.³² Write like a rat? The point is that this writing cannot be done through imitation. The term like in this phrase demands at once the undoing of our assumptions of rat identity and a creative inhabiting of a rat’s body, for this is the purpose of Art. The artist must be responsible to the ever-changing intensities of speeds and matter that is the life of a body.

It should come as no surprise that the author Deleuze and Guattari most associate with “becoming animal” is Kafka. They describe Kafka’s writing itself as a form of becoming where words are wrenched or uprooted from their meanings and turned into “deterritorialized sounds.” Thus, in reference to Kafka’s Metamorphosis they write:

Such privileging of becoming and the sublime are part of what can be called a “counterlinguistic turn,” an effort either to lay claim to what lies outside language or to destroy language and the meaningful relations it enables.³⁴ In contrast to Hearne’s attempts to found a community of humans and animals through the meaningful relations that language makes possible, Deleuze and Guattari want to free humans and animals from meaning altogether and thus to undo the very identities that confirm a distinction between human and animal. For them, Kafka’s animals are unidentifiable creatures who effect upheavals of the human self, turning it into something it was not and could not conceive of. Indeed, in a theoretical move familiar to students of deconstruction, differences between animals and humans are displaced onto differences within the human: to deterritorialize is to become aware of the animal otherness within the human.

With Agamben, as with Deleuze and Guattari, theory’s concern for the animal moved quite a distance from questions of rights or even protection for animals. In both, we find an attempt to locate what might be called a “postmodern sublime” in extreme experience that risks an aestheticization of trauma or, at the least, a denial of its effects on the flesh. Thus, what Deleuze and Guattari see as a liberatory plunge into animal difference, outside the confines of human signification and into a state of animality (like that of Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis), has, indeed, little to say about the actual animals we live with. Donna Haraway’s recent assessment is more than telling in this respect. Referring especially to Deleuze and Guattari’s dismissal of domestic animals as figuring into ideas of becoming, she writes, “I am not sure I can find in philosophy a clearer display of misogyny, fear of aging, incuriosity about animals, and horror at the ordinariness of flesh, here covered by the alibi of an anti-Oedipal and anticapitalist project.”³⁵ In a related vein, Dominick LaCapra warns against Agamben’s evasive fascination with a sublime abyss. Noting that Agamben “does not thematize the relation of his thought to trauma,” LaCapra does it for him: “One could redescribe Agamben’s ‘central emptiness’ as an insufficiently situated version of transhistorical, structural, or existential trauma that, in Agamben’s account, may well induce an evasion or misconstruction of specific historical, social and political problems, including the status and use of the animal in society.”³⁶

It is in part in reaction to such theories’ inability to deal with the concerns of live animals (including aging women) that animal studies is coming of age in conjunction with theory’s ethical turn. Animals are and should be of concern not only as instruments of theory, not only because they affect us, but because our lives also affect them. Ethics in this respect is not a concern for “the good.” We can no longer say with certainty what the good is. Nor does ethics refer only to a Foucauldian ethos or care of the self, although a mastery of the animal self or body is relevant. Rather, the ethical turn that has followed in the wake of deconstruction is an attempt to recognize and extend care to others while acknowledging that we may not know what the best form of care is for an other whom we cannot presume to know. It is a concern with and for alterity, especially insofar as alterity brings us to the limits of our own self-certainty and certainty about the world. This is an area that has brought animal and trauma studies together: we can recognize the serious harms rendered to victims of horrific acts, but we cannot count on those victims to tell us their stories or what to do about them.

Deconstruction has revealed the unstable foundations and false oppositions to “the animal” on which notions of the human have been built. But it has also made it difficult, if not impossible, to proceed from acts of representation to acts of engagement with others who are or have been oppressed in some way. Recent efforts to speak about that which is supposedly outside language and outside the discursive systems that determine experience as much as they may reflect it show that animal studies has turned away from deconstruction’s insistence that there is no hors texte. Some writers in the field, furthermore, would claim that this effort to attend to the ineffable is itself an ethical act. The dilemma is a familiar one to feminist theorists who in the past, faced with their own pronouncements that language is not only unstable but also patriarchal (and thus foreign to the expression of women’s desires), nevertheless encouraged forms of writing that would point toward or imagine an “elsewhere” outside of language. Such a practice was associated with a practice of hearing otherwise and with a nonmastery of knowledge that was understood to be expressly ethical.³⁷ For some theorists of trauma, the opacity of traumatic events to representation is similarly regarded as engendering new forms of testimonial or, in Cathy Caruth’s terms, the “imperative of a speaking that awakens others.”³⁸ Kelly Oliver writes of the act of witnessing as foundational to the experience of responsible subjectivity because witnessing engages “the sense of agency and response-ability that are constituted in the infinite encounter with otherness, which is fundamentally ethical.”³⁹

Attempts to articulate a posthuman (or posthumanist) ethics—ethics toward an unknowable or “incalculable” other—have more recently made it imperative that we look beyond the Kantian foundations of the ethical in a human subject. The term posthuman first appeared in relation to the realm of informatics, where the “thinking life” is shared by humans and machines alike. As Katherine Hayles uses the term in her book How We Became Posthuman,⁴⁰ the word posthuman refers to a conglomerate of independent agents of information that can flow easily between human and machine. The very notion of artificial intelligence thus challenged the enlightenment view of the human as sole proprietor of consciousness and agency. Such dismantling of the enlightenment “human” furthermore offered a new path for feminists such as Donna Haraway, who invoked the “cyborg” as a means of creating alliances between feminism and technology and of contesting entrenched dualisms of nature and culture that had been obstacles to imagining new, postmodernist, and perhaps posthumanist identities.

But what was also explicit in Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs,”⁴¹ if underemphasized, was the simultaneous critique of the boundary between human and animal and hence of the belief in human exceptionalism that this boundary maintained. Just as Haraway moved her focus from cyborgs to dogs, so animal studies more generally has brought attention to a notion of the posthuman that acknowledges human animals as having coevolved with innumerable species without whom we would not be who we are and with whom we share our environment and its resources. Barbara Herrnstein-Smith writes:

Animals, of course, have long been a focus of Haraway’s work, but it is only recently that she has turned from examining how the language of otherness has structured scientific research on animals to questioning what we can learn from our actual engagements with animals. Dogs are not “surrogates for theory,” Haraway insists; “they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with.”⁴³ And it is through both research of their evolutionary complexity and deep attention to their embodied capacities that Haraway seeks a model for relating to “significant otherness.”⁴⁴ Such “ethical relating,” as she calls it, once again is said to demand a relation to what cannot be known or at least known in advance—their needs and capacities are not ours, even as they respond to ours.

In its focus on values of love or respect or achievement, Haraway’s language of training, like Vicki Hearne’s, has been criticized as overly anthropomorphic and anything but posthuman. But the turn to ethics in animal studies has brought a new focus on the notion of anthropomorphism, regarded not only as a problem, but also as a potentially productive, critical tool that has similarities to empathy within recent historical research. That anthropomorphism may have its place for rethinking human difference is the motivating idea in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman’s collected volume Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. “Before either animal individuality or subjectivity can be imagined, an animal must be singled out as a promising prospect for anthropomorphism,” Daston and Mitman write in their introduction; the animal must be seen as capable of pain and pleasure, as having his or her own affects and capacities.⁴⁵ On the one hand, as a process of identification, the urge to anthropomorphize the experience of another, like the urge to empathize with that experience, risks becoming a form of narcissistic projection that erases boundaries of difference. On the other hand, as a feat of attention to another and of imagination regarding the other’s perspective, this urge is what brings many of us to act on behalf of the perceived needs and desires of an other/animal.⁴⁶ Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello calls this urge “sympathy,” but she means the same thing: it is the faculty that some poets have that “allows us to share at times the being of another.”⁴⁷

The term critical empathy, which has arisen in trauma theory (and especially trauma related to the Holocaust), is relevant here. In her book Empathic Vision, Jill Bennett distinguishes critical empathy from the “crude” empathy that Bertolt Brecht critiqued as overidentification. Critical empathy is a “conjunction of affect and critical awareness [that] may be understood to constitute the basis of an empathy grounded not in affinity (feeling for another insofar as we can imagine being that other) but on a feeling for another that entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible.”⁴⁸ With this in mind, we might then want to call an ethical relating to animals (whether in theory or in art) “critical anthropomorphism” in the sense that we open ourselves to touch and to be touched by others as fellow subjects and may imagine their pain, pleasure, and need in anthropomorphic terms, but stop short of believing that we can know their experience. In addition, critical anthropomorphism must begin with the acknowledgment that the irreducible difference that animals may represent for us is one that is also within us and within the term human. Which human are we allegedly projecting onto animals?⁴⁹ When is anthropomorphism another form of zoomorphism?

The dangers of essentializing notions of “the animal” and of “the human” through those notions are most emphatically addressed in the last essays Jacques Derrida wrote before his death. In The Animal That Therefore I Am, he denounces the phrase the animal as a “catch-all concept” used to “designate every living thing that is held not to be human.”⁵⁰ Animals have been homogenized into a singular concept, he argues, through blindness to the differences that exist among animals as among humans. The question of “the animal” is a blind spot in philosophy, an unquestioned foundation upon which the notion of the human has been constructed. Writing against this tradition, Derrida writes of both the shame and the vulnerability he feels when looked at naked by his cat. “It has its point of view regarding me,” he writes. “The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through this absolute alterity of the neighbor than the moments when I see myself naked under the gaze of a cat.”⁵¹ Derrida thus suggests that the struggle for recognition that from G. W. F. Hegel through Jean-Paul Sartre is described as a struggle between men might find its ultimate expression between a human and an (other) animal. Describing the other with the Levinassian term neighbor, moreover, he qualifies that confrontation less as an adversarial struggle than as an ethical one—an attempt to relate across unknowable distance. Thinking itself, Derrida says, begins in such moments when we see an animal look at us, see ourselves placed in the context of an other world, where living, speaking, dying, being mean otherwise.

“The animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there,” Derrida writes.⁵² Thinking begins in the space between the animal I am and am not—a space that is also at the foundation of thinking the ethical. Our very notion of ethical relating has been grounded in a humanism that gives permission to act unethically toward animals—sacrificing them as food, clothing, medicine. This is the ethical founded in a (often unacknowledged) notion of the human defined by its capacities: thought, reason, agency. And yet the notion of “what is proper to man”—whether it be language or consciousness or agency—has been and will continue to be shown as an illusory exclusivity, either because shared by some animals or not possessed by some humans. That is why Derrida shifts his attention from our capacities, whether in a Cartesian sense as language and reason or in a Deleuzean sense as affects and intensities, to focus on our shared vulnerabilities, our inabilities (impouvoirs). For a posthumanist ethics, Derrida elsewhere returns to Jeremy Bentham’s question: “it is not whether they can reason, but whether they suffer.” From this vantage point, the “industrial, scientific and technical violence” that is wrought upon nonhuman animals must change. “The relations between humans and animals must change.”⁵³

Echoing Derrida, Wolfe writes, “there can be no science of ethics, no ‘calculation’ of the subject whose ethical conduct is determined in a linear way by scientific discoveries about animals (or anything else).” Wolfe critiques the scientific but essentially humanist underpinnings of certain animal rights philosophy (such as the Great Ape Project) that would recognize the moral status of certain animals “not because of their wonder and uniqueness, not because of their difference, but because they are inferior versions of ourselves.”⁵⁴ Posthumanist ethical relations, for Wolfe as for Derrida, cannot be grounded on rational principles or scientific measures of brain activity or capacity for language. In the domain of ethics, such normative rules, if not incompatible with alterity, end up by privileging the alterity of the human and defining the human in ways that exclude some humans. Even as Wolfe deftly points out the stubborn humanism at the base of most efforts to extend ethical concepts to animals, he also senses a necessary double bind—the need to advocate certain principles of rights or protection with the knowledge of that faulty foundation. The only way to move beyond what might be called this “strategic ethics” (recalling feminism’s strategic essentialism) is not through any form of “becoming animal,” but on the contrary through an engagement with others through theory. Theory may reveal ethics as an essentially human duty, but only by constantly challenging our understanding of what it is to be human. “My premise,” says Wolfe, “has been that maintaining a commitment to distinctly posthumanist ways of theorizing the questions at hand… will enhance our understanding of the embeddedness and entanglement of the ‘human’ in all that it is not, in all that used to be thought of as its opposites or its others.”⁵⁵

This entanglement of human and nonhuman is what Derrida exposes in looking at his cat. It is not a denial of difference by any means, but rather an attention to the construction of difference at the very foundation of the ethical. And this is true for the ethical difference itself. The ethical, like the animal, is a category of the human. Indeed, it is in the name of the human as an ethical animal and because of what the violence done to “the animal” does to the image of humanity that, Derrida says, change will come. Ethics, for Derrida as for Kant and Emmanuel Levinas—perhaps the thinker most important for Derrida’s ethical thinking—is and remains one of the dividing lines between humans and animals. An animal can address us. But until a sense of disinterested obligation can be witnessed in and by animals, Derrida is not ready to relinquish an ethical decision as a human duty or to shift the ethical difference to the animal realm, for doing so would be to run the risk of the worst forms of biologism. “What I am saying is that we must not invoke the violence among animals, in the jungle or elsewhere, as a pretext for giving ourselves over to the worst forms of violence.”⁵⁶ The ethical imperative, then, for Derrida as for Haraway and Wolfe, is analysis of the very construction of the ethical, especially because ethics is used to configure the human as well as its animal other. We must always be vigilant of the ways our promotion of an ethical treatment of animals can and has been used to discriminate among groups of humans as well as of how ethical treatment of humans is often performed at the expense of animals. But there can be no law of ethics. What is ethical depends on situated contexts and knowledge. To be ethical is to weigh incompatible needs and inevitable sufferings and to come to a “least bad solution.”⁵⁷ Indeed, for Derrida, to be ethical is to take the risk of deciding the undecidable: “The difficulty of ethical responsibility is that the response cannot be formulated as a ‘yes or no’; that would be too simple. It is necessary to give a singular response, within a given context, and to take the risk of a decision by enduring the undecidable. In every case, there are two contradictory imperatives.”⁵⁸

Why animal studies now? It has become clear that the idea of “the animal”—the instinctive being with presumably no access to language, texts, or abstract thinking—has functioned as an unexamined foundation on which the idea of the human and hence the humanities have been built. It has also become clear, primarily through advances in a range of scientific studies of animal language, culture, and morality, that this exclusion has taken place on false grounds. As our improved understanding of animal lives and cultures changes, so must we change our view of the nature of the human and of the humanities. Thought, consciousness, and language are not humans’ exclusive property. Indeed, there is no shared consensus on what these properties consist in. From the perspective of theory, animal studies may have emerged only in time for its existence to be outdated. Much like the “women” in women’s studies, the “animal” in animal studies must be placed under erasure.⁵⁹

And yet even as the humanities may, as Cary Wolfe suggests, be struggling to catch up with this “radical revalution of non-human animals,”⁶⁰ recent theoretical reflections on the question of the animal suggest that scientific research cannot offer sufficient grounds on which to construct a postwomen, a postanimal, or a posthuman ethics. Perhaps in contrast to the sciences, much of contemporary theory gives value precisely to the ways animals resist our tools of analysis even as they succumb to our invasive and dominating need to know. “The animal question” has thus replaced the “woman question” (indeed, it is easier for many to contemplate animals as significant others than women) in coming to stand for what is incalculable—it points to an aporia in our reason and our knowledge—but also unavoidable in and for our lives.

“I am not appealing for any man’s verdict,” Red Peter says at the end of Kafka’s story, “I am only imparting knowledge, I am only making a report” (204). Speaking from a place of uncertainty, a place that is neither wholly ape nor wholly human, Red Peter figures the space of theoretical investigation today. It is a space of productive inquiry but offers no clear standard of how to measure progress. “Do not tell me that it was not worth the trouble,” Red Peter says, realizing that the fate he escaped still claims the lives of others. He admits that he “cannot bear to see” the half-trained female chimpanzee who is brought to him for “comfort” in the evening, “for she has the insane look of the bewildered half-broken animal in her eye” (204). Looking at her, he sees the distance he has traveled, but he also recognizes her suffering—something “no one else sees.” Red Peter cannot deny the existence of animal suffering, but neither has he gained clear criteria for doing something about it. More critically, it would appear that his professional success, like his virility and indeed his humanity, depend on not acting upon that recognition and thus refusing kinship with the chimpanzee.⁶¹

In the wake of post-structuralist and postmodern decenterings that have displaced the human as a standard for knowledge, theory finds itself in a similar predicament. It cannot avoid seeing the animal suffering around us, but it has contradictory foundations on which to judge the good or the right thing to do about it. Responding to an urgent call for concern, those of us working on “the animal question” may only be able, like Red Peter, to make a report, but such reports, it is to be hoped, will enable us to make decisions (for that is our human prerogative and responsibility) that will, to the best of our imperfect and partial knowledge, enhance the lives of all animals, ourselves included.