Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?

Insofar as our engagements with animals bring us to think or, rather, to unthink—if we learn the lessons of Temple Grandin and David Lurie—they can have an immensely powerful effect. But the ethical demands produced by these encounters may be equally unfathomable. In response to the “impossibility of reality” and to the intensity of experiences that neither can quite understand, both Grandin and Lurie work within the system to make a difference to individual animals, one by one. For many, however, the difference they make is not enough. Indeed, many would regard their responses as deflections from the system that legitimates animal sacrifice, if not our sovereignty over animals. It is understandable, states Steve Baker, “that the focus has been on the so-called humanity, or lack of humanity, of the killing of the individual animal within slaughterhouse practices, because what is unthinkable is the scale of the whole industry and all its economic, social and cultural ramifications. That’s too big a thing to take on.” Comparing the pet industry to the meat industry, Jonathan Burt adds, “We have to embed the question of pets into the mass of human–animal relations rather than individualizing it.”¹

Burt points out how “slaughter in a sort of secular, ‘high-tech’ society is full of… religious sentiments,”² referring presumably to the sacrificial structure at the base of the industry. Such religious sentiments are the driving force behind Matthew Scully’s attempts to take on the system in his book Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals. Within the Judeo-Christian tradition, “dominion” is our “first calling,” Scully reminds his readers, even as the term has been misunderstood and misused.³ In his sympathetic and persuasive accounts of the systematic wrongs done to animals in slaughter, fishing, and safaris, Scully understands dominion as predicated upon our human ability to make “moral” judgments—something animals cannot do. We have a moral imperative to take responsibility for animals in the form of stewardship rather than domination. “Someone has to assume dominion, and looking around the earth we seem to be the best candidates, exactly because we humans are infinitely superior in reason and alone capable of knowing justice under a dominion still greater than our own.”⁴

Scully’s attempt to distinguish dominion from domination in order to promote a platform of animal welfare has been criticized by so-called animal abolitionists, who regard such animal welfare as a Band-Aid masking the fundamental problem of corrupt and unjust human sovereignty in the world.⁵ This is especially the case for domestic animals, the abolitionists argue, who have been “made” by humans and thus can only ever be exploited and controlled objects of human use. The system, they argue, can be taken on only by abolishing it. But the danger of such Marxist-inspired approaches to questions of domestication is that they deny the potential for any meaningful interaction between human and nonhuman animals; they refuse the “web of interspecies dependencies”⁶ of which we all are a part. Indeed, what appears to link the welfarists to the abolitionists is their common acceptance of “human exceptionalism,” whereby man, as a political (and ethical) animal, stands outside (either above or below) any necessary (or dependent) relation to other species—the former by understanding sovereignty as the essence of our ethical humanity, the latter by regarding sovereignty as the essence of our ignoble animality.

In The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida points to this double and contradictory figuration of man as a “political animal” whose sovereignty is both a function of and opposed to his status as animal. “Just where the animal realm is so often opposed to the human realm as the realm of the nonpolitical to the realm of the political, and just where it has seemed possible to define man as a political animal or living being, a living being that is, on top of that, a ‘political’ being, there too the essence of the political, and in particular of the state and sovereignty has often been represented in the formless form of animal monstrosity… an artificial monstrosity of the animal.”⁷ All of which is to say that the difficulty of the concept of “killing well” that I discussed in chapter 7 is one version of the “difficulty of reality” and that both issue from the inescapability of our bêtise, the term that Derrida, following Deleuze and Flaubert, uses to refer to that particular animality that only humans experience. “Bêtise” is that combination of knowledge and lack of understanding, of cruelty and impassivity, that is “proper” to man because of his sovereignty, because he believes that he is free to do otherwise than kill and be cruel—and because, in some instances, he cannot do otherwise. Derrida tries to come to grips with this bestial quality that is “proper” to man (animals cannot be “bêtes”), even as he admits that the “compulsion to know bêtise… is bête” itself.⁸ He quotes Deleuze directly: “Perhaps this is the origin of the melancholy that weighs down on the finest human figures: the presentiment of a hideousness proper to the human face, a rise of bêtise, a deformation in evil, a reflection in madness. For from the point of view of a philosophy of nature, madness rises up at the point at which the individual reflects himself in this free ground, and consequently, then, bêtise in bêtise, cruelty in cruelty, and cannot stand himself any longer.”⁹

As we humans see ourselves and our acts reflected in the more than human world, we see reflections of a bêtise that is as much a result of our unjust sovereignty over other animals as of our (unacknowledged) lack of sovereignty over ourselves. What may be most frightening is the realization that even our attempts at kindness can be bêtes (perhaps, as some say, our morality itself stems from our “animal” instincts) and that they can do harm even when we believe we are doing what is right. Indeed, the greatest bêtise, according to Derrida, may be believing that we are protected from doing wrong by our philosophical and ethical certainties—by our moral categories; “the category,” Derrida reminds us, is “a signature of bêtise.”¹⁰ It is in constructing exclusive categories of right and wrong or of human and animal that we refuse the “contagion” of our condition as human animals. Just as Derrida, following Flaubert, writes about a “compulsion for intelligence” that is itself bête (especially in separating intelligence from what is animal), so in this chapter I write about an ethical compulsion that is driven by a refusal of the deep bonds of affection we share with at least some animals and of the possibility that they, too, may accept those bonds as the price (and sometimes the point) of life. “All too often men are betrayed by the word, freedom,” says Kafka’s ape.¹¹ It is imperative that we not confuse ethics with a liberation that cleanses us humans of our sovereignty (and its presumed “animality”) only by denying the “humanity” we share with animals.

Derrida writes that “the best literature, for its part (‘best’ is Deleuze’s word),… even if it does not treat thematically and systematically the bêtise of thought, bêtise as a structure of thought, lets itself be haunted by bêtise, haunted by the ‘problem of bêtise.’”¹² It is in this respect that I want to return to Coetzee’s Disgrace—a novel haunted by this problem, much as the novel’s ending can be said to haunt its readers. This baffling ending illustrates the confusing ethical situations that issue from the “difficulty of reality.” In the final scene, as I mentioned in chapter 7, the previously unlikeable protagonist David Lurie “gives up” the one dog with whom he had developed a relationship. That dog, much like Lurie himself, is unwanted and beaten by life but nevertheless, as Lurie knows, “would die for him.” “Bearing him in his arms like a lamb,”¹³ Lurie determines the dog’s time has come and offers him up to be euthanized. But why?

In a review of the novel, Ian Hacking writes of this sacrificial gesture, “I cannot comprehend [it], and only barely feel it as possible.”¹⁴ Josephine Donovan admits that Coetzee does come close to aestheticizing evil in this scene but adds that she has chosen “to interpret the scene within the evident ethical context [she believes] Coetzee intends” and in which his protagonist can “experience a conversion to a heightened state of moral awareness.”¹⁵ In an opposing view, David Attridge warns against reading Lurie’s behavior as any kind of conversion to an “ethical response” to animal suffering. “This is not a practical commitment to improving the world, but a profound need to preserve the integrity of the self.”¹⁶ Refusing to find any such conversion in Lurie’s character, Attridge reads Lurie’s life as consistently living for an idea—an idea that has little to do with the dog. This is indeed how Lurie reportedly answers his own question about why he has taken on the job of giving the euthanized dogs an honorable cremation. “But the dogs are dead; and what do the dogs know of honor and dishonor anyway?—For himself, then, for his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing” (146). Like Attridge, Louis Tremaine resists reading Lurie’s gesture as ethical but does find that it marks an important change in his character. Tremaine suggests in opposition to Attridge that for the first time Lurie is able to see the dog in terms of its “own conditions of existence, without imposing his own idea of it… the dog is ‘just a dog,’ and David is just a human being—body–souls, animals both of them—and he cannot save either of them by rendering them into art.”¹⁷ Tremaine thus sees the ending as a beginning for Lurie, who in response to the crippled dog is finally able to come to terms with the “shame of suffering and of death” that no artistic project can relieve. But why, I have to ask, is the dog’s death or any death shameful, and is not shame an idea?

I thought of this ending again after reading and hearing a paper titled “Animal Welfare and the Moral Value of Nonhuman Animals” by Gary Francione, Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers University. The major premise of his paper is that the animal welfare position—that “it is morally acceptable to use animals as human resources as long as we treat them ‘humanely’ and do not inflict ‘unnecessary suffering’ on them”—provides “an insignificant level of protection to nonhuman animals.” More specifically, Francione argues that the welfare position supports the view that “the life of nonhumans has lesser moral value than the life of humans” and thus acts as a justification for using nonhumans as resources or “chattel property.”¹⁸ This point makes some sense and, indeed, is one reason why some municipalities in the United States are changing the designation of those who live with companion animals from pet owners to pet or animal guardians. Francione does not discuss guardianship in this paper, however, or any form of relationship with animals outside of property. Indeed, Francione’s ultimate conclusion forecloses any consideration of such relations. Because, he claims, there can be no justification for using animals in ways that we would not condone using humans (a familiar argument against speciesism) and that we nevertheless continue to turn them into property with interests that are necessarily subservient to our own interests as owners, we should stop producing domestic animals at all. “If we took animals seriously and recognized our obligation not to treat them as things, we would stop producing and facilitating the production of domestic animals altogether. We would care for the ones whom we have here now, but we would stop breeding more for human consumption and we would leave non-domesticated animals alone. We would stop eating, wearing, or using animal products and would regard veganism as a clear and unequivocal moral baseline.”¹⁹

As Francione clarified in the discussion following his paper, his conclusion does not mean we should let domestic animals breed on their own. Rather, he declared, we should sterilize all living domestic animals to ensure they all will die out. Only this action will stop the slavery. Only the extinction of all domestic animals—and he made no distinction between animals for food and animals for companionship—is a solution to our wrongs. This solution, I thought, is the law professor’s sacrifice of the animals for his “idea of the world.”

After hearing the talk, I went back to Coetzee’s novel to think again about how to read the ending. I had understood it as depicting Lurie’s one and only gesture of love, the proof that he had truly undergone a transformation during the novel and had come to a realization of his abuse of others.²⁰ In the beginning, Professor Lurie is presented as a self-important, divorced, and aging man who subjects women (including his students) and animals to his desires. He regards both as existing for his own use and pleasure and denies that either might have a right to a life or love of their own. In the course of the novel, however, during which he is dismissed from the university for sexual harassment and then finds himself and his daughter subjected to acts of violence from others, Lurie unaccountably becomes moved by the suffering of the animals he encounters on his daughter’s farm and, perhaps through them, to her suffering as well. As he befriends Bev, the woman in charge of the local animal shelter where dogs are abandoned and ultimately euthanized, he insists on accompanying the animals in their final moments and looking into their eyes at the moment of death. Ensuring a proper incineration after the act becomes his new job. It is a job motivated by the realization that to die alone is, in this society, the worst indignity, evidence of a life unloved and unmourned.

In the case of the crippled dog, however, a different reading also presents itself. The narrator mentions that Lurie refrains from calling this dog “his” or giving him a name—“Driepoot” is what Bev calls him. The reader might see this restraint as evidence of his refusal to enter into relationship of ownership or domination with the dog. But in his “giving him up,” it is clear that some form of relationship—whether of guardianship or ownership (though on the part of whom it is not certain because Lurie says “he has been adopted” [215] by the dog) or perhaps of love—has already taken place. And Lurie’s way of dealing with love, we know from earlier in the novel, is to manage it either by paying for it or otherwise by assuming full control. “I lack the lyrical. I manage love too well” (121), he says as a way of explaining his affair with a student. Love must be worthy of Wordsworth, or it must simply satisfy ones “natural” needs through good management. But the dog neither acts as an inspiration for high lyricism nor satisfies any simple needs of nature. What the dog can offer is a relationship or love of the kind that Lurie for much of his life has refused (and now feels himself drawn into)—“that force that drives the utmost strangers into each other’s arms making them kin, kind beyond all prudence” (194). In other words, the relationship with the dog offers a love that is not easily managed—a love or even a friendship that is messy because it cannot always be separated from dependence and power but that is not to be spurned because of that. My point is that it is possible to read the transformation Lurie undergoes as a replacement of his aesthetic ideal with an ideal of justice or morality, but in both cases he sacrifices those around him for that ideal rather than let himself be drawn further into a relation that compromises it.²¹ In this way, his ideal is not unlike Francione’s—if all relations between humans and domestic animals are relations of master and slave, we must let all the animal slaves die out so that we humans can feel good about ourselves and our purity.

Such an ideal, it seems to me, is wrong for a number of reasons. It is shamelessly anthropocentric. It suggests that animals should be extinguished for the sake of humans’ moral purity. Would that moral purity not be better served by letting humans die out? This anthropocentrism, moreover, and the moral ideal it upholds are grounded in a false view of history, nature, and evolution. In such a view, history is a process of human agency or activity over nature. As anthropologist Tim Ingold writes, “The story we tell about human exploitation and domestication of animals, is part of a more encompassing story about how humans have risen above and have sought to bring under control, a world of nature that includes their own animality.” In other words, Ingold adds, “when we speak of domestication as an intervention in nature, humanity’s transcendence over the natural world is already presupposed.”²² To propose the extinction of all domestic animals is thus to envision a redemptive “end of history” whereby humans rediscover their moral path through their ultimate transcendence or separation from the natural world.²³

Let me say, first, that there is much to applaud in Francione’s work: his concern for the mistreatment of all nonhuman animals, his insistence that nonhumans partake of the moral community regardless of their cognitive capacities, and, in a related manner, his critique of utilitarian attempts to draw a line according to which rights may be granted—all have merit. But his is also a view that forecloses the significance of the nonhuman world by seeing domestic animals as no more than slaves to their human masters. By focusing on human–animal relations solely in terms of property or master and slave, this view discounts domestic animals’ agency and social complexity as well as their desire—for connection, affection, and bonding across species, something we see in our dogs or horses.²⁴ There is no doubt that humans have abused and continue to abuse such affection, but to suggest that therefore dogs or horses should not exist is like saying women should not exist because men have abused them. It is to deny the ways that human and nonhuman animals alike (and here to speak only of domestic animals is to create another false dichotomy) have evolved together, producing more complex life forms through what biologist Lynn Margulis calls “symbiogenesis,” which Haraway defines as “intricate and multidirectional acts of association of and with other life forms.”²⁵ Francione’s scenario puts faith instead in what Haraway describes as the “culturally normal fantasy of human exceptionalism… the premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies.”²⁶ This fantasy, for reasons that I discuss in the next section, is one that feminists have been especially vocal in exposing and combating.

In Disgrace, it is Lucy, Lurie’s daughter, who espouses the view of the entanglement of the human and animal worlds—for better or for worse. “This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals.” This view guides the way she lives her life, hoping to improve the lives of animals and “to share some of our human privilege with the beasts” (74). Lurie, however, deliberately resists such a view at first, and if during the novel he is increasingly affected by the sheep awaiting slaughter or the dogs awaiting euthanasia, we can only attribute it to them—to the force of the nonhuman world and the impact it can have on humans. It is through this unwilled and unreasoned force that Lurie begins to experience, if not to acknowledge, his kinship with the animals, a kinship that consists first and foremost in having a body that is part of the world of matter or nature. But this kinship he understands as one of humiliation and disgrace, the shame of growing old, the shame of being the product of a fertile body, the shame of having to face death.³¹ Such abjection is what Lurie sees and identifies with in the old, crippled dog whom he euthanizes in what Alice Kuzniar interprets as an act of communion produced through “empathetic shame.”³² Kuzniar praises such empathy as a way of also accepting or acknowledging abjection in oneself rather than disavowing it by projecting it onto an animal. In Lurie’s “giving up” the dog, we see the extent to which he is moved to relieve the dog (and perhaps himself as well) of his shameful existence once and for all.

Coetzee’s foregrounding of shared, empathic embodiment is one reason that his fictions figure prominently in recent work by feminists from the “care tradition.” In their introduction to The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, Josephine Donovan and Carol Adams cite Coetzee as promoting “an awakening of moral awareness, which requires a kind of visceral empathy for the suffering of others.”³³ Such empathy is understood to be a necessary first step in tending to animals, which must be joined by a more analytic, political analysis to understand the causes of suffering. Donovan later relates this kind of empathy to the notion of “attentive love” developed first by Simone Weil and later by Iris Murdoch as a moral reorientation away from the self and to the particular experience of an other. Attentive love seems a particularly apt term to describe the euthanizing of dogs in Disgrace. Lurie “has learned by now… 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). Attention and empathy are key words in the feminist care tradition, where the emphasis is on the need for an ethic to respond to situated, particular experiences of suffering that are often overlooked by rights-based or ruled-based philosophies. And yet as feminists within the care tradition have themselves advised, empathy can be problematic insofar as it erases boundaries of difference between self and other, assuming that my suffering or, worse, my shame is yours.³⁴ “Attentive love,” as Simone Weil originally described it, is not only the recognition of suffering, but also the recognition of suffering in someone exactly like us.³⁵ This is how the final scene of Disgrace has been read—Lurie identifies with the male dog’s suffering and consequently with his shame. Kuzniar writes, for example, that “Coetzee suggests that the embodiment of shame in another can serve as a point of identification and empathy, perhaps even for the expression of compassionate love.”³⁶

The concept of shame is important to consider not only because it is a central theme in Coetzee’s novel (as it is for Derrida, who is mentioned alongside Coetzee in Donovan and Adam’s introduction to The Feminist Care Tradition as two of the “most influential thinkers of our time”), but also because it is the singular emotion that, at least since Darwin, has been theorized to distinguish humans from animals.³⁷ Shame depends on both self-consciousness and the supposed ability to transcend one’s body or one’s nature. If freedom is understood, from Aristotle to Sartre, to be the distinctly human possibility of being cause of oneself or not being enslaved to one’s body, shame results from the awareness (especially in the face of another) of not living up to this idea of freedom. In Coetzee’s writings, as in Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, however, shame seems to expose our kinship with animals even at the moment we most wish to deny it. Shame is the fact of our nudity, our bodily being that we can hide but not overcome. Shame, as Emmanuel Levinas writes, depends on “the very Being of our being… its incapacity to break with itself.”³⁸ Freedom, then, is an anthropocentric illusion of shamelessness that is blind to the unfreedoms that also determine human lives.

But perhaps the problem is that of regarding freedom and shame as necessarily and absolutely opposed. Freedom, Haraway writes, “cannot be defined as the opposite of necessity if the mindful body in all its thickness is not to be disavowed, with all the vile consequences of such disavowal for those assigned to bodily entrammelment such as women, the colonized, and the whole list of ‘others’ who cannot live inside the illusion that freedom comes only when work and necessity are shuffled off onto someone else.”³⁹ Indeed, Lurie and his daughter have very different ideas of freedom and consequently of shame. He tells his daughter the story of a pet golden retriever who became unmanageable whenever a bitch was around and was punished so often that eventually “it no longer needed to be beaten. It was ready to punish itself.” But Lucy takes issue with the moral of the story. “So males must be allowed to follow their instincts unchecked? Is that the moral?—No, that is not the moral, Lurie responds. What was ignoble… was that the dog had begun to hate its own nature. At that point it would have been better to shoot it” (90). Lurie’s ethic is that of a Nietzschean self-affirmation: death is better than becoming a shameful exemplar of a domesticated or slave morality. This is how he regards his own situation as well. Having fallen “from grace” into that degraded state that he previously assigned to others, he interiorizes the contempt that he had previously directed outward. Lucy, in contrast, identifies not with the dog who must be restrained, but with that dog who would be victim and thus sees the situation differently. Both before and after her rape, which turns the tables of racism to reveal her and her father’s powerlessness before an increasingly powerful class of black men, she refuses to let “subjugation” define her life. For her, there is no enduring shame in having limitations on one’s freedom (or having it violently taken away) because she considers neither freedom nor shame to be an absolute. She understands that to live (or to produce life) means giving in to relations that restrict and even at times humiliate. But that, she says, “may be a good point to start from again” (205).⁴⁰ For Lucy, it would seem, shame can be overcome and can even be productive. Indeed, it allows her to see what is vulnerable in others (even her rapists) by producing empathy without contempt. If she refuses her father’s efforts to save or rescue her by helping her move away, it is because she refuses to accept her predicament, unjust as it is, as a state of shame. The crippled dog, however, cannot refuse.

Lurie’s empathy for Driepoot—as for his daughter—is evidence of both his profound transformation and his short sightedness. From an anthropocentric faith in human exceptionalism, Lurie comes to see shame as an ontological state shared with the others around him. But the line here between empathic suffering and anthropomorphism (or narcissism) is thin, and it is dangerous to believe that love for animals consists only in putting them out of their misery. Philosopher and animal trainer Vicki Hearne has described the “sin of pride” that consists in imagining “that one has unmediated awareness of cruelty” toward or even of the suffering of animals. Hearne is critical of the way that, following Bentham, suffering has become the exclusive focus of the attention of so-called animal lovers or the animal rights movement, as if we all know what suffering consists of and, hence, how to relieve it. In an elegant and polemical reading of the biblical story of Job, who was an upright or, in other terms, “humane man,” Hearne explains that Job learns that his “uprightnesses” are “nothing but pedantries beside the… sort of thing learned in the contemplation of animals.” And this is because “the love of animals is not professed in a catechism of their suffering,” she declares, “but in uncanny catechisms of their joys,”⁴¹ joys that can be learned only through attention to and acknowledgment of each animal’s particular temperament. In the case of Driepoot, Lurie is moved by his idea of disgrace more than by attention to the dog himself, whose signs of joy——the way, for instance, he “smacks his lips” in time with Lurie’s music (215)—or whose signs of building his own world, Hearne would say, Lurie ultimately betrays. He refuses what Haraway calls “the unsettling obligation of curiosity” (a critique she also brings against Derrida and his cat)⁴² and turns away from his world to wonder whether he can aestheticize such a creature and cast him in his opera.

To be sure, tending to the joys of another may be equally as demanding as tending to their pain. In either case, it would seem that the responsibilities of such an “adopted” relation are too much for Lurie to bear—more than he can manage and more than he has allowed from any human relation. Animals and in particular domestic animals affect us when offered the possibility of doing so, when not removed from sight in factories or laboratory cages. They move us, they call upon us, and thus they interfere with the will to be wholly free, especially when such freedom is understood as the anthropocentric and masculinist idea of the ability to separate from the body or from physical and emotional dependency. Animals interfere with our “idea of the world” if that idea refuses to see that we all must share the responsibilities of responding to others’ vulnerabilities and affections. Perhaps this is why Francione can see freedom for animals only in death.

Hearne, by contrast, would look at Driepoot’s musical appreciation and at what she calls the “pieties” and “the unlikely and unsuspected happinesses” of animals and people alike and see them as a “rebuke to moral excesses.”⁴³ Indeed, Lurie is in agreement with Hearne on one thing, that domestic animals are unconcerned with the “uprightness” of human morality, unconcerned with the purity of abstract ideas of freedom or kindness, though they are concerned with the consequences of specific practices.⁴⁴ “Freedom,” Hearne writes, quoting Emmanuel Levinas, “can never be justified, only rendered just.”⁴⁵ And like kindness, freedom in our actions toward an animal is rendered just only through knowing that animal over time, in a sustained relation, whether that relationship be one of care, companionship, or work.⁴⁶ The ambiguity of Coetzee’s ending stems from the fact that Lurie’s acts of euthanasia, in at least one way, are “rendered just.” In refusing to allow the animals to die alone and in the individual attention he bestows upon each animal so that he or she may die loved, he makes each life a “grievable life.”⁴⁷ A “grievable life,” according to Judith Butler, is a life that can be properly mourned, a life that, in her terms, is recognized as a human life.⁴⁸ Lurie demands at least this final possibility for animal lives, making sure that he will grieve even if no one else will. He does not wish for the animals’ disappearance, but to mourn their (and his) shame. In this, he moves in a very different direction from the moral uprightness exhibited by Francione, who in seeing only animal slaves sees no loss in their death. That, in my view, is shameful.