“An animal looks at us and we are naked before it. Thinking, perhaps, begins there.”1 These two lines from Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am have been much cited even as they remain elusive and haunting. What does it mean that thinking begins in the confrontation between human and nonhuman animal? What is this thinking that has not been thought before or that has not been thought by the philosopher before? And what is this nakedness to which the encounter with an animal (an individual animal and not “the animal” or the concept of animality) returns us? Does a confrontation with and acknowledgment of another animal expose us as humans by stripping us of those clothes and thinking caps with which we have claimed to stake our difference from animals? If so, how and why, as Derrida goes on to say, does he and/or the philosopher experience shame in this nakedness before his cat?
Since Aristotle, man (as used in most texts) has been defined as the “rational animal,” distinguished from other animals by his (and, more recently, her) ability to think and to reason. But this distinctive property has come under much questioning in recent years as we learn almost daily how many other species do something that appears to be thinking—whether in the ways they prepare their nests or hide their food or court their mates. One wonders if it is in anticipation of such discoveries that in his essay “What Is Called Thinking?” (1954), Martin Heidegger professed that we, humans, have not yet really begun to think, that we have not thought in the ways that only our humanity can allow for. Heidegger was critical of the distinction of “rational animal” because it insisted too much on animality as the basis for human rationality.2 The phrase, he believed, discounts the qualitative difference of our ability to know and relate to the world around us—even if we have not always seized the full potential of thought. Writing against Heidegger’s brand of humanism, Derrida claims that the kind of thinking that has not been done and that has become all the more urgent to do is a thinking that happens through recognition and acknowledgment of the animals we are and with whom we share our world.
Bêtise, which is most often translated as “stupidity,” is a word that Derrida uses to describe the kind of knowledge that excludes real thinking. It is a word he takes from the nineteenth-century French author Gustave Flaubert (among others), whose novel Bouvard and Pécuchet illustrates the particular stupidity of attempting to master the world through a cataloging of knowledge. “La Bêtise,” wrote Flaubert in a famous letter, “consists in wanting to conclude.”3 Of course, what is especially intriguing in this word that is derived from the French word for beast (bête) is that it refers to a kind of beastly stupidity that is proper to humans. “The animal,” Derrida reminds us, “cannot be bête.”4 According to the distinctions we humans make between animals and ourselves, animals cannot be stupid in this way. Is this why real thinking must begin in or through our confrontation with the look of animals, through their gaze upon us and upon the world, a gaze that ignores our conclusions? “The best literature,” Derrida writes, citing Gilles Deleuze, “lets itself be ‘haunted’ by bêtise, haunted by the problem of bêtise.”5 It is that haunting in literature as well as in the visual arts, philosophy, and theory that is the focus of this book insofar as it results from our encounters with animals and our relations with them. Our engagement with animals may reveal to us our particular human stupidity, and it is only by deeply attending to animals or, more precisely, by becoming “attuned” to them, I want to suggest, that we may be able to think otherwise and overcome some of the limitations of our so-called rational condition.
Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that animals are “good to think,”6 but my book’s premise is that it is good to “unthink” animals and so to rethink our conclusions about who we are, who they are, and how we all are intertwined. Donna Haraway uses the word entanglement to speak of the inseparability of human and nonhuman worlds and of the “naturecultures” that have evolved as a result.7 Derrida’s term heteroaffection, or the way that the self is touched or moved by an other, takes on a similar valence when he uses it in relation to animals. His book The Animal That Therefore I Am exposes the false autonomy of his thinking self that has been moved by his cat’s gaze and thus feels, often to his dismay, the cat stirring and stirring within. The narratives and artworks I address here also reveal or attempt to come to grips with the animals that get inside of us. As a consequence, they demand a kind of “unthinking” from their keepers and viewers. To be sure, the demand to unthink or to destabilize our conceptual categories has been especially associated with postmodernism, but only some of the works I treat here are postmodern. Modernism shares with postmodernism a sense of the inadequacy of Enlightenment categories for knowing the world and representations of animals, and our engagements with them have brought this inadequacy to the fore in both movements. What may be different in modernism and postmodernism, however, is the act of representation itself and how the act of representation may or may not be a part of the problem of understanding and responding to our entanglements.
It would appear that modernism (or at least the modernist works I treat here), even in its turn to animals, relies on a greater degree of conceptual coherence and distinction in its representation of such categories as “man,” “woman,” “dog,” “cat,” “life,” “death”—representations that clearly borrow from realism—with the result that it appears to be grounded in the very humanism that has authored those categories. Such is this humanism, moreover, that it has denied ethical standing to animals while assuring the exceptionalism of the human condition. But in most cases this coherence also results in a clearer ethical or political affiliation and agenda insofar as there are distinct identities; in modernism, we know (or believe we can determine) who is acting, who is acted upon, what is right, what is wrong, and who consequently is to be condemned for wrong actions. Postmodernist works, in their enthusiastic disruption of identities and breaking down of boundaries, often seem to give up the ethical to an anarchic thrill. They do important work by bringing us into the thick of our entanglements, of our irreducible heteroaffections and infections. But they make it difficult to determine what, if any, our responsibilities are for and to those relations. By moving between modernist and postmodernist works, I respond to the request that Haraway made many years ago in her cyborg essay to take “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and the responsibility in their construction.”8 Indeed, I hope to go further than merely taking “pleasure in confusion” in order to show the urgency of undoing those boundaries between human and animal. Derrida, like Giorgio Agamben, writes of the violence produced by categories such as “the animal” that are used to separate humans from what they are not and to establish and justify our dominance. The ultimate violence may result from the kind of thinking that concludes that there are beings against whom it is impossible to commit a crime—in other words, that there can be no crimes against animals, only against humans. But it is unclear to me whether the remedy for such violence is, as Agamben seems to suggest, a “Shabbat of both animal and man”9 or abandonment of such distinctions rather than taking on the full responsibility for the construction of such distinctions.
The writing of this book began with a haunting of my own. I was haunted by J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. I began to write about this book as a way to understand why it was so upsetting and why I could not get it out of my mind. That writing went through a number of versions, some of which are now parts of chapters 7 and 8. I had already begun to write about animal subjects, mostly about women and gender and horses in nineteenth-century France—work I am still pursuing. Disgrace brought issues of gender, race, and animals together in a way that I had not yet experienced and could not get my mind around. To be sure, feminists such as Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan have illustrated and theorized how oppressions of gender, race, and species are interlocking, and their work has been groundbreaking.10 In the way Disgrace affected me, it seemed both to support such theories and in the end to render them inadequate. Surprisingly, if not perversely, the very male protagonist appears to make amends for his own acts of violence and to discover the power of true love—love worthy of its name—in the company of animals and in the act of killing them.
As is my way when I come up against such a difficulty and perversion in thinking that the best of literature produces, I look for clarification in other works, usually theoretical or philosophical. The oppositional way of thinking that fiction (or poetry) and philosophy promote is one that Coetzee himself thematizes in his book The Lives of Animals, as if to suggest that some sort of dialectic between the two may be necessary at times for recognizing the pains and pleasures of others—especially other animals—and simultaneously for finding ways to respond to the ethical and political dilemmas they present. Thus, I move in this book not only between modernist and postmodernist works, but also between works of art (literary and visual) and works of philosophy (or theory), even if at times the one kind of thinking may appear to haunt the other or arise from its core. Divided into four parts, the book thus begins by focusing on questions of theory and philosophy (with the aid of literature and visual art), moves to literary readings (read through or against philosophy and theory), and ends with a combination of both. More specifically, the first part focuses on why animal studies has become important for theory and philosophy; the second and third examine a few exemplary modernist and postmodernist fictions of the ways we live with animals and the ways they live and die with us and often under our command; the fourth weaves themes broached in the first two in an effort to think through some of the ethical stakes of our theories and our fictions alike. French, German, British, Russian, and American, these texts spring from even as they write against our Western literary and cultural heritage regarding human–animal relations. I have chosen these texts not because they promote a common ethical stance—except insofar as they pay close attention to nonhuman animals, which is remarkable in itself—but because they illustrate the difficulties of arriving at such a stance. Ethical considerations, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith writes, are the product of historical and social example, shaped “by the approval or disapproval of other people, at least those we see as our own kind,” as well as by individual, “critical reflection.”11
Part I—“Why Animal Studies Now?”—is divided into two chapters. The first, “A Report on the Animal Turn,” examines the recent rise of animal studies in the academy and the critical shifts that have made the question of the animal a central issue for theory. Here I suggest that theory’s turn to animals grows out of, on the one hand, a weariness with post-structuralism’s linguistic turn and a resulting search for a postlinguistic and perhaps posthuman sublime and, on the other hand, an often conflicting turn to ethics that raises the question of our human responsibility to the animal–other. The theoretical issues raised in this chapter are illustrated through a reading of Franz Kafka’s 1917 story “A Report to an Academy” and are also disturbed by the story’s ape-turned-human, whose account of his life shores up theory’s blind spots. The second chapter, “Seeing Animals,” couples core philosophical arguments surrounding the nature or being of animals and the grounds on which they may or may not be granted subjectivity, using two documentary artists’ efforts to make visible what might be called the very being of animals. Moving from Heidegger’s and Jakob von Uexküll’s writings on animal worlds to Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat” and Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, I chart the persistent desire to know what it is like to be an animal (especially the “animal I am”) and the way this desire is frustrated by our means of apprehending and representing such knowledge. This frustration is announced in the title of Bill Viola’s I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, a video that, I argue, strives for an aesthetics of “attunement,” to borrow Heidegger’s term for a capacity to be affected or tuned by that of which we have no knowledge, but that is common to all animal life, human and nonhuman. Whereas Viola’s attempt to capture this animal likeness that we long to know but cannot see might be characterized as a “posthumanist posthumanism,” photographer Frank Noelker’s contrasting “humanist posthumanism” captures and makes visible the humanity of our fellow animals, especially chimpanzees.12 In his photographic exhibition Chimp Portraits, I argue, Noelker makes use of what I call a strategic or critical anthropomorphism that turns chimps’ “human” gaze back upon us to make us question how well we know who or what is human. Perhaps this is why Derrida suggests that thinking begins in the confrontation with an animal who looks at us.
Part II, “Pet Tales,” begins with an overview of theories regarding our most common form of interaction with live animals in industrial societies—the institution of pet keeping. In an essay from 1980 that has become a classic of animal studies, entitled “Why Look at Animals,” John Berger grouped pet keeping with zoos and other institutions whereby we try to regain a closeness to animals that we have lost in our modern, industrialized world but in the end imprison them in an artificial way of life that demands their deanimalization. Berger’s views are echoed in the theories of “becoming animal” elaborated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who dismiss pets as commodified, oedipalized, and anthropomorphic projections of their owner’s bourgeois individuality. Against such negative accounts of pets, the historian Keith Thomas argues that pets and their keepers had a crucial role in challenging dominant philosophical and scientific views concerning animal emotions and intelligence and thus the human monopoly on notions of personhood, thought, and subjectivity. Vicki Hearne and Donna Haraway have written more recently of the importance of pet–human relations as models for relating linguistically and empathically to otherness. I test such theories in a number of literary works and especially those of two exemplary modernist writers—Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf, each of whom wrote a full-length novel or novella about dog–human relations—Man and Dog and Flush, respectively. Although dogs may thus appear to be typical of all pets in these chapters, my intent is not to generalize about them or about any species, but rather to insist, as do Mann and Woolf, on the singularity of each animal and of the relationships each demands. Such relationships can bring out the best and the worst of our capacities as human animals, and Mann and Woolf alike expose both the potential violence in our desires for pets and the potential for real love. It is in such relations, each author reveals, that the animals we live with—animals for whom sex and desire seems to operate without regard for gender—challenge our views of ourselves and bring us to question the processes of domestication we, too, undergo in order to become the gender and species we think we are. Mann and Woolf are especially significant in this regard, moreover, because, as I argue, their works engage with their contemporaries (primarily Friedrich Nietzsche in the case of Mann and Sigmund Freud in the case of Woolf) and thus with prominent theories regarding a human–animal divide and the alternatively threatening and heartening possibilities for breaching it.
Part III, “Grieving Animals,” begins by taking up theorist Richard Klein’s suggestion that “a dog should die like a dog” in order to ponder what a “proper death” might be for the creatures we love.13 Here I begin by examining representations of human and animal death in Flush and in Leo Tolstoy’s “story of a horse,” “Strider,” where the pomposity and extravagance of human rituals is contrasted with the ecological harmony of an unmarked animal death. I then move to consider what I see as a postmodernist and melancholic fascination with a kind of life in death or life feeding off death in Sam Taylor-Wood’s short video piece A Little Death and Hélène Cixous’s story “Shared at Dawn.” Both works combine the incomplete mourning that Freud describes as melancholia with the exhilaration of Deleuze and Guattari’s “becoming animal” such that boundaries of identity are lost in the representation of species’ irreducible interdependence and mutual implication in each other’s lives and deaths. Something is lost or dying, but we don’t know what. In the end, however, what these modernist and postmodernist works share is a representation of animal death as unmourned, raising the question of the extent to which any animal may constitute what Judith Butler calls a “grievable life.”14
This part and part IV bring together themes discussed in the previous sections—grief and death, shame and love, gender and species—in an effort to illustrate the difficulties we have in doing right by animals and in thinking ethically about what is our most common animal practice—killing them. Ethical thinking may itself be a contradictory endeavor when it comes to animals, if not a bêtise, because ethics itself grows out of a humanist and thus, if we believe Cary Wolfe, a necessarily anthropocentric tradition.15 In chapter 7, “Thinking and Unthinking Animal Death,” I begin with recent efforts by Derrida, Haraway, and Cora Diamond to problematize an ethics that is grounded in a “calculation” that questions how many it serves and how great is the cost or that is grounded in the belief that only humans know death. Although these writers represent different schools of thought, each argues that the ethical must grow instead out of an experience of shared mortality or bodily vulnerability that is, as Diamond writes, “painful to think.” Such an ethics is derived from what she calls “the difficulty of reality”—a difficulty that our thinking often deflects in order to avoid the pain it can cause—both physically and psychically.16 That our ways of knowing the world may constitute such a deflection of experience, especially the experience of death, is a problem that poet Rainer Maria Rilke raises in “The Eighth Elegy,” written in 1922 and whose understanding of human thinking’s dependence on language offers a counterpoint to Heidegger. Here, moreover, I argue for a theoretical link between animal studies and certain kinds of disability studies that has also emerged in conjunction with what has been called a “counterlinguistic turn” by focusing through two very different works on the experience of the death of an animal or, more accurately, the killing of an animal: Temple Grandin’s autobiographical account of her autism, Thinking in Pictures, where she describes an act of kosher slaughter that is also something of an epiphany for her; and Coetzee’s description of the euthanizing of an unwanted dog in Disgrace. In both of these scenes, a certain “technology” of death—by which I mean a very carefully executed form of killing, reveals what Agamben calls “bare life”—a zone of indeterminacy between human and animal as between human and machine. Language falters in that moment of such painful intensity that at it is depicted as sublime. But the sublimity of this posthumanist moment is also troubling, I suggest, because it privileges a spiritual or aesthetic ideal of love over love’s prosaic manifestations.
It is with this notion of aestheticized killing in mind and in resistance to firm conclusions that I return to the ending of Disgrace and to David Lurie’s decision to “give up” and euthanize the dog he has grown fond of. I read this act in light of what might first appear to be a very different account of our debt toward animals according to Rutgers law professor Gary Francione. Francione represents an extreme position in animal ethics and politics that can be described as authorizing the sacrifice of all domestic animals in the name of delivering humans from the crimes of sacrifice—crimes committed daily around the world. Lurie, I suggest, acts, however blindly, in the name of a similar “idea of the world”—a world freed of the animal eyes that remind us of our indignities and our shame. My critique of this ideal takes me to recent work in feminist ethics and “material feminism” and to what philosopher and animal trainer Vicki Hearne calls the “moral uprightnesses,” if not the righteousness, that humans often assume in their dealings with other animals. In Hearne’s writing, a philosophical and poetically inflected thinking about animals is combined with the practical knowledge that comes from the excitement and challenge of working with them as individuals. There is no moral high ground and no shame of shame. Indeed, if Hearne and the feminists I consider are indicative, the apparent blow that Charles Darwin struck to human pride seems to have had greater visible effects on a kind of masculine pride. This is true in Coetzee’s novel as well: the life “we share with animals,” as Lurie’s daughter, Lucy, refers to it,17 can make us feel small or powerless, deprive us of our place of privilege—a deprivation that is often associated with women and with which they have been familiar. What is to be found in that shared life is that we are not the only thinking beings or the autonomous authors of our history. Autonomy, because illusory, may be the “bête noir” of humanism and patriarchy alike.
In the end, this book returns to the heteronomy and heteroaffection of our lives as and with animals. To some extent, it is a queer ending that, like “queer ecology,” celebrates the antiessentialism of evolution theory that “abolishes rigid boundaries between and within species” and assumes that we are related to all life forms.18 However, if I argue that it would be wrong to essentialize the affinities between women and animals and thereby to reaffirm a gendered binary of nature and culture, so would I be cautious about an ecology that, according to Timothy Morton, advocates that all “strange strangers” must be brought into the collectivity, where the abolition of boundaries means there is no possibility for distinguishing the parasite from the host and where all “naturecultures” are accepted as a part of coevolution.19 In a world where everything is considered part of a universal evolution, how can one distinguish ethical actions or responsibility? Would the recent BP-caused environmental disaster and the oil-coated animals in the Gulf of Mexico not then be just one more example of queer ecology?
Evolution may be antiteleological, as Darwin acknowledged, and that may mean there is no end in sight to what humans and other animals can yet become. Indeed, we are not and have never been the sole authors of a history that is always intertwined with the animals we feed and feed off of. But that is not a reason for us to shirk our human responsibility for the wrongs that our thinking has produced or for thinking in new ways about the humans we want to become. Thinking as and about animals is an art that requires rumination, as Nietzsche says about the art of reading in the book’s epigraph; it should be haunted by our bêtises even as it takes stock of and pleasure in our capacities for rumination or for just walking (with) the dog.