Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?

Of course, the ethical status of killing has always depended on ontological distinctions, such that murder, as Derrida reminds us, and the commandment “Thou shall not kill” are understood to apply to humans alone. But the fact is that human and nonhuman animals alike have at various times been “made killable,” to use Donna Haraway’s phrase. Moreover, Haraway suggests, in a world where to eat is to kill and to deplete resources for others and where to live is necessarily to live off another, it may be “a misstep to pretend to live outside killing.” “The problem is not figuring out to whom such a command applies so that the ‘other’ killing can go on as usual and reach unprecedented historical proportions. The problem is to learn to live responsibly within the multiplicitous necessity and labor of killing, so as to be in the open, in quest of the capacity to respond in relentless historical, nonteleological, multispecies contingency. Perhaps the commandment should read, ‘Thou shalt not make killable.’”²

As opposed to “making killable,” Haraway proposes that we think instead about “killing well”—a concept that she builds around Derrida’s notion of “eating well.”³ Both ideas begin with the premise that “we all must eat” and that eating, like living, entails feeding off another’s life or livelihood. Both Haraway and Derrida, however, attempt to think outside the humanist, “sacrificial structure” whereby only some are “made killable” or, as Derrida explains, whereby the line between a criminal and “non-criminal putting to death” is drawn by the giving of a name (the name of the animal), by the invocation of an a priori moral law, or by a “calculation” of costs versus benefits. Thus, with regard to “killing well,” Haraway writes of the need to learn to kill and be killed responsibly, “yearning for the capacity to respond and to recognize response, always with reasons, but always knowing there will never be sufficient reason.”⁴ Derrida similarly emphasizes that there can be no truly responsible or ethical act that does not pass through the proofs of the “incalculable” or the “undecidable.”⁵ Otherwise, ethics would not be a response at all, but the application of a rule or mathematical equation; it would be more of a “reaction” than a “response” and hence an opting out of responsibility.⁶

The insufficiency of reason and thought for providing an ethics of killing and eating as well as the importance of acknowledging and experiencing our concomitant vulnerability in this regard are the subject of a profoundly moving essay by Cora Diamond. Borrowing the term exposure from Stanley Cavell, Diamond writes of the importance of our sense of exposure to “sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share with them.” That exposure may make us panic, she admits, and part of why we panic is that we cannot put into words either what it is exactly that affects us so or how to respond to it. The very “difficulty of reality,” Diamond says, is what makes “reality resistant to our thinking it, or painful in its inexplicability.”⁷ And yet, she suggests, the experience of such difficulty must be the foundation of any ethics.

Insofar as we humans are often very good at avoiding such exposure, the turn to animals or, as I consider here as well, to the alternately abled is a turn to learn from those who have fewer possibilities for escaping from such exposure and may have developed other means or modes of getting their minds around it. This is one reason why animal studies has come of age in conjunction with a so-called counterlinguistic turn. Although many current projects are intent on proving that certain animals do have language capabilities like those of humans, other sectors of animal studies are concerned with forms of subjectivity that are not language based. They are instead concerned with ways of knowing that appear to work outside those processes of logocentric, rational thinking that have defined what is proper to the human as opposed to the nonhuman animal. These concerns are also shared by a subset of disability studies that focuses on persons with so-called disorders that manifest themselves linguistically, such as Asperger’s syndrome and autism. Temple Grandin’s work has been exemplary in this respect, perhaps because she is so keenly aware of the way her autism challenges preconceived ideas of what constitutes rational thought. “I think in pictures,” she writes in the beginning of her second book, Thinking in Pictures. “Words are like a second language to me.” Moreover, she emphasizes, “I would be denied the ability to think by scientists who maintain that language is essential for thinking.”⁸

Grandin’s work is especially compelling for the postlinguistic turn because of the way she turns her linguistic disability into a special ability or gift.⁹ She claims that her autism has given her special insight into the minds of nonhuman animals, cattle in particular. In addition to a greater sensitivity to touch that allows her to read cows’ and horses’ body language with her fingers, she maintains that she is able to see what and how nonhuman animals see. In her third book, Animals in Translation, Grandin goes even further to point out the visual impairment of so-called normal humans because of an overactive consciousness that screens out much of what is before them. She cites a study in which test subjects were asked to watch a basketball game and count the number of passes made by one member of the teams. Focused on the task, 50 percent of those watching did not notice a woman in a gorilla suit who walked onto the screen and began to pound her chest. “It’s not that normal people don’t see the lady dressed in a gorilla suit at all,” Grandin writes; “it’s that their brains screen her out before she reaches consciousness.”¹⁰

Where Grandin speaks of “screening,” Cora Diamond writes of “deflection” in order to describe the ways we avoid ideas that we are unprepared to think either because they aren’t logical or because they are too painful. According to Diamond, ethical reasoning may itself be a deflection from the very “duty of moral thinking,” a duty that above all means not deflecting our exposure to the world, but rather forcing ourselves to experience the confusing and wounding “difficulty of reality.”¹¹ For the early-twentieth-century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, screening and deflection are included in the “world” that structures and shapes our vision of reality, thereby reducing the intensity of that world’s hold on us. For Rilke, these aspects of the world get in the way, diminish what we take in from reality, and, he suggests furthermore, prevent us from seeing what animals see. Articulating a critical perspective that Martin Heidegger will challenge, Rilke claims that humans are disadvantaged by their consciousness and unable to perceive “the open” that is available to animal eyes.

Rilke’s “Eighth Elegy” articulates already in 1922 what seems to have become an increasingly powerful, contemporary notion—one that is both mournful and hopeful—that (1) human consciousness is an obstacle to a knowledge we may have once possessed—a larger, less circumscribed, and less rational way of knowing—and (2) it may be possible if not to retrieve, then to imagine a fullness of vision in poetry or through the eyes of those who are removed from “normal” sociolinguistic behavior, whether nonhuman animals or persons with certain linguistic and cognitive disabilities. For Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of J. M. Coetzee’s Lives of Animals, poetry is best suited to these animals’ or persons’ task of accessing this knowledge because it is not dependent on reason for its insights and because reason is “not the being of the universe, but on the contrary merely the being of the human brain.”¹³ Reason, Costello argues, is a tautological structure that represents only a “small spectrum of human thinking” and dismisses animals either as silent or as speaking in unreasonable or unthinking ways that need not be listened to. In her lectures, Costello opposes the truths of reason and philosophy to the insights of poetry and the empathic imagination that poetry depends on. She describes Ted Hughes poem “The Jaguar” as “poetry that does not try to find an idea in the animal or that is not about the animal, but is instead a record of engagement with him.”¹⁴ The goal of such poetry, in other words, is to engage the animal not as an object over which the poet and poem establish a certain knowledge or mastery, but rather as a subjective interlocutor whose very being shares in the creative force behind the poem.

Costello thus echoes Rilke’s skepticism regarding the language of reason, which she regards less a tool of mastery than of masking weakness. Paraphrasing Jacques Lacan, Derrida writes, “Man is an animal, but a speaking one, and he is less a beast of prey than a beast that is prey to language.”¹⁵ In other words, what is proper to man (and presumably to woman) is to be caught, if not trapped, by his own words and the world they enforce. This is a crucial point in Derrida’s critiques of Heidegger, whose obstinate humanism, Derrida contends, is built upon essentializing terms such as the animal in order to draw false and dangerous boundaries between them and us. In his essay The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida turns Heidegger’s hierarchy upside down; where Heidegger sees human language as the mark of our superiority over animals, Derrida asks us to consider whether the animal’s apparent “lack” of language is indeed a lack. “It would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals, but perhaps of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, as something other than a privation.”¹⁶

The hunch that human language may be an obstacle to knowing and that, therefore, those who are somehow outside the symbolic may have access to domains that humans cannot know may also explain why the counterlinguistic turn is contemporaneous with particular attention to death and the act of putting to death. This has been the case not only in reference to right-to-life issues, but also with regard to a philosophical reevaluation of the human as the only animal who knows death “as such.” Heidegger attributes this knowledge, if obliquely, to the human faculty of speech. “Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do this. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought.”¹⁷ The precise relation of death to language, as Derrida comments, and what it might mean for any being to have access to death “as such” without actually dying are unclear.

Here again Heidegger reverses Rilke’s privileging of the animal’s freedom from death. “We, only, can see death,” Rilke writes in “The Eighth Elegy.” The English translation appears to emphasize the exclusive status of vision—we only see it, whereas the German, “Ihn, sehen wir allein,” emphasizes that “death is all we see”—like the world of objects that obstructs our vision of the “open.” Only when we are in fact “near death” does our sight see beyond it: “For, nearing death, one perceives death no longer, / And stares ahead—perhaps with large brute gaze.”¹⁸ And then, we must assume, we see no more.

Only death brings us close to the brute or animal gaze (Tierblick). But whose death: our own or the death of another? What about the death of an animal that for many of us is the first encounter we have with death and with killing, whether it be the fly we swat, the lobster we see dropped into boiling water, or the pet that we euthanize? Do these deaths count as knowledge of death “as such,” or do they somehow change the stakes of that knowledge? What exactly might an animal death do for us—not in terms of what it might supply us as food or clothing, but rather in terms of any “knowledge” gained from seeing an animal die, if not from killing it ourselves? These questions come in part out of what we know to be the relative invisibility of the enormous numbers of animal killings that take place daily in slaughter yards, science labs, and animal shelters—killings that before the middle of the nineteenth century most often took place before our eyes on the streets, if not in the kitchen. The look of the animal that, according to John Berger,¹⁹ we have lost in the past century may also be the look of the animal we kill—whether for slaughter, for sport, or perhaps out of mercy.²⁰ The importance of this look is nevertheless one that Grandin foregrounds in a section of her own book that deals with her work in slaughter yards. Her description of this killing bears striking similarities to a moment in Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, especially in its appeal to a realm beyond what can be thought. Coetzee’s writing has wrestled with questions of animals and death for at least the past decade, and in this novel the look of the animal we kill provokes, however disturbingly, a transforming moment in the life of the main protagonist, David Lurie, as I discuss in what follows.

In the concluding discussion of the recent volume of essays entitled Killing Animals by the Animal Studies Group, Jonathan Burt states, “It’s almost as though the closer and closer you get to animal killing the more everything begins to fall apart, perspective and everything.” “And language,” adds Steve Baker.²¹ Indeed, in Grandin and Coetzee’s work we find that killing animals brings us face to face with the inadequacies of our language or at least with the rational and logical thinking it enables. Death, as in the death of Sam Taylor-Wood’s hare in A Little Death, is the place where the conceptual and ontological distinctions that language makes possible break down—including the distinctions between human and animal. But also apparent in Grandin and Coetzee’s writings is that everything also comes together around the right kind of animal killing in a way that is at once elemental and religious—at least for the persons directly involved. For their readers, on the contrary, what falls apart is a framework for judging those killings, especially as we are witnesses to conversion experiences precipitated by what most interpretations would count as a “good death,” a euthanasia. But what is a good death, and whom or what does it serve?

Toward the beginning of Thinking in Pictures, Temple Grandin tells of a “breakthrough” she had while assisting in the act of slaughter at a kosher plant that she had redesigned. Having replaced a cruel system of hanging live cattle upside down by one leg with a kind of hydraulic “squeeze machine” into which the cattle would enter one by one and be held calmly in place for the rabbi to perform the final deed, she tries out the controls of the hydraulic machinery herself, working the levers as if they were extensions of her own body.

This passage is remarkable for a number of reasons. First, as Grandin herself emphasizes, is the revalorizing of what is generally understood to be a disability. The “problems” autistics have with body boundaries and knowing, for instance, where the body ends and the chair begins here become an enabling force that allows her to become one with the machine, if not with the animal.²³ Second, of course, is the act of slaughter itself. Here, technology is not an evil force, but rather that which, when lovingly implemented (as Grandin describes), allows for an untraumatic and painless death for the animal and something of a religious epiphany for Grandin—indeed, a Heideggerean “revealing” of Being. “As the life force left the animal, I had deep religious feelings. For the first time in my life logic had been completely overwhelmed with feelings I didn’t know I had.”²⁴ It must be remembered, however, that in all this breakdown of boundaries between human, machine, and animal, what remains unaffected is the sacrificial structure that violently reestablishes those boundaries at the moment they appear to be effaced. It is, of course, the animal alone who dies or at least perishes. My point here is not to find fault with Grandin, who has done much to improve the handling of cattle, but to draw attention to the scene’s contradictory and competing interests.

A similar problematic is at the heart of the novel Disgrace, and although Coetzee, unlike Grandin, is an avowed vegetarian, that novel seems also to suggest that some sort of “grace” can be found through animal sacrifice, if not through the right killing of animals. This “grace,” moreover, is the culmination of the protagonist’s transformation from one who abjects animals (and women) to one who recognizes himself in animals. We may remember that David Lurie is, at least in the beginning of the novel, a wholly despicable character—a university professor of literature with a bothersome sexual appetite that he feeds with prostitutes and students. He considers animals, like women, soulless creatures who exist to satisfy him: they “do not own themselves,” he thinks to himself when looking at a pair of tethered sheep. “They exist to be used, every last ounce of them, their flesh to be eaten, their bones to be crushed and fed to poultry.”²⁵

Lurie, however, experiences a change with regard both to the animals around him and to his own “animal” nature once he is charged with sexual harassment and forced to retreat to his daughter Lucy’s farm. The animals on that farm and in particular those animals who are in their “grace period”—the time they have before being put down or slaughtered for food—begin to have an odd and inexplicable effect on him. It begins with the same two sheep: “suddenly and without reason, their lot has become important to him.” “I am disturbed,” he says, “I cannot say why” (126–127). This irrational bond is deepened when Lurie begins to help Lucy’s friend Bev euthanize sickly and unwanted dogs and cats in a local clinic. As if overwhelmed by what happens in this “theater,” as he calls it, he is slowly drawn to devote his life to the death of the animals, ensuring that they die with his full attention and, indeed, with his love—a word that Grandin also uses and that it seems both Grandin and Lurie experience only in the silent act of killing. “He and Bev do not speak. He has learned by now, from her, to concentrate all his attention on the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name: love” (219).

Whereas for Claude Lévi-Strauss animals are good to think, for Coetzee killing animals is good to unthink, to strip us of the rational and metaphysical assumptions by which we have distinguished ourselves from animals. It is in the animal clinic, in the “theater” where the performance of life is enacted through a putting to death, that Lurie begins to value what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life,” a zone of indistinction between human and animal.²⁶ It is “bare life” that Lurie first experiences when four intruders beat him, rape Lucy, and kill her dogs. And it is that life—the one that, as Lucy says “we share with animals” (74)—that Lurie begins to devote himself to as he tends to proper burials for each animal, making sure that their corpses “will not be beaten into a more convenient shape for processing” (143). Calling himself a “dog-man,” Lurie takes heed of his own creatureliness and in particular of his smell—the smell he gives off to the dogs in the clinic, the smell, he says, of his thoughts. As “world” begins to fade around him, he becomes in effect captivated by the dogs, as by the unformed music in his head—captivation being the word that Agamben borrows from Heidegger to describe the animal’s being open to its environment, “ecstatically drawn outside of itself,”²⁷ even if it cannot know it. It is in this state that Lurie, like Grandin, senses the overwhelming if irrational need to respond not only to the animals’ suffering, but even more so to an unfathomable absence of Being that, because of our shared mortality, we will also share with animals in death. “Mortality,” writes Derrida, “resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower, the possibility of this impossibility, the anguish of this vulnerability and the vulnerability of this anguish.”²⁸ “Du musst dein leben åndern: you must change your life” (209), Lurie says to himself, citing Rilke’s famous line about the power of art, if not the intense power of a headless body.²⁹

Like art, animals call us (pace Levinas)³⁰ to witness our own and the other’s time-bound, vulnerable existence. But how does this experience change our lives? It seems surprising, if not contradictory, that for both Grandin and Lurie communion with animal suffering leads not to “the sacrifice of sacrifice”—that is to say, to the condemnation of a noncriminal killing of animals—but rather to the embracing of such sacrifice in its lost ritualistic aspects, its lost look. “There is a need,” writes Grandin, “to bring ritual into the conventional slaughter plants and use it as a mean to shape people’s behavior. It would help people from becoming numbed, callous, or cruel. The ritual could be something very simple, such as a moment of silence. … No words. Just one pure moment of silence. I can picture it perfectly.”³¹