Two dogs whose presence will have already done away with any attempt to identify the relation between the human and the animal as having a singular quality and an already established meaning. The first dog – in Turner's Dawn after the Wreck – appears loyal (see Figure 9.1). The dog awaits its drowned owner. The dog is faithful. The dog's presentation is a reiteration of the dog as the iconographical presence of loyalty and devotion. However, it is equally the case that once the relation is stripped of the gloss within which loyalty is always painted as unthought and thus ill considered, it may be that what is being staged is a more complex form of relation. Indeed, if this watercolour is viewed after the hold of the without relation has been suspended then it is possible to begin to approach the work in terms of a modality of friendship. Or, at the very least, to take it as marking the presence of a relation that cannot be reduced to mere animal obedience. To the extent that this other possibility can be maintained it provides Turner's work with its founding tear, a tear which signals the moment beyond any possible reduction of the dog to the figured presence of the animal. In addition, it is precisely this other possibility that has already been identified by Voltaire.
Is it because I speak to you that you judge that I have feelings, memories and ideas? And yet, I am not talking to you, you see me enter my house in an agitated manner, looking for a paper with worry, opening the desk where I remember locking it away and reading it with joy. You judge that I experience the feelings of affliction and of pleasure, and that I have memory and knowledge.
Give then the same judgment to the dog who has lost its master, who with painful cries had searched all the usual paths, who enters the house, agitated, worried, who descends, who goes from room to room, who finally finds in his room the master that he loves, and which is evidenced by his cries, by his jumps and his caresses.1
Figure 9.1 Turner, Dawn After the Wreck (c.1841). The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Gallery, London. Reproduced with permission.
Voltaire's observation already troubles any fixed understanding of animal presence, especially those instances that signal the reiteration of the way the work of figures is itself reinforced by the tradition of iconography.
The second dog appears in Piero di Cosimo's Satyr Mourning the Death of Nymph (1495–1500)2 (see Figure 9.2). It is one of a number of dogs that are present in the painting. The dog in question is positioned to the right of the satyr who is mourning the nymph lying dead before him. The satyr, who is already part animal, evinces both care and sadness. Solicitation and remorse mark his demeanour. The dog is neither loyal nor aggressive. It is neither threatening nor attentive. This dog, along with the others roaming the lakeshore in the painting's background, cannot be incorporated immediately. While present they satisfy neither the demands of iconography nor the traditional expectations of the animal. The dogs are indifferent. However, it is that very indifference that can be understood as the mark of a form of relationality that in lieu of relations that have been determined in advance can only take place within the continuity of their being lived out. Relationality exists therefore in its remove from any form of singularity. Moreover, the move in which this takes place is from the positing of an absolutely determined relation which having occurred then structures all subsequent relations – this would be the link between the without relation and immediacy – to the interarticulation of relations and life. The latter is not the negation of a posited singular relation. To the extent that relations and life become this other possibility, i.e. acting within the abeyance of the without relation – then what is signalled is a departure from the positing of singularity. This gives rise to the demand that such a set-up be accounted for philosophically.
Figure 9.2 Piero di Cosimo, A Satyr Mourning the Death of Nymph (1495–1500). The National Gallery, London. Reproduced with permission.
These two dogs complement each other, the first since the tear opens up the potentiality of a refusal of that which is given – the distancing of iconography understood in this context as the refusal of the figure – the second insofar as what it stages are relations that can be neither assumed nor denied. The second dog announces what may be described as the form of co-presence that any attempt to take up the question of animals demands once it is no longer possible to define the plurality of animals within the terms provided by the figure of the animal. The complementarity between the two emerges because this co-presence is there in the continuity of a coming into relation, a process that had been occasioned by the tear. What this means is that as a result of the elements comprising this complementary relation it is no longer be appropriate to assume that the position of the animal or the relation between human and non-human animals can be thought in terms of either a logic of sacrifice or a founding without relation. The dogs do not represent two different end points. What their presence indicates is a sense of relation that allows itself to be transformed – clearly the case with the Turner watercolour – while at the same time allowing for the possibility of relations that are to be defined in terms of potentiality. The first dog stages an already existent relation, and hence what is suggested is a form of finitude. The other dog, the one in Piero di Cosimo's painting, brings a more complex set-up into consideration. In this latter case there is the absence of visible relations, an absence captured within the painting by the countenance of the dog closest to the satyr and the nymph. The indifference of that dog when taken in conjunction with the preoccupied dogs in the background of the work, point towards relations that are to be understood purely in terms of potentiality.
The dogs continue to complement each other. What they demand is a return to the preceding analyses, not in terms of a summation but of a further attempt to take up the emergence of specific modes of thought. Central to the position developed in each of the preceding chapters and staged by these dogs was the argument that what stood opposed to ‘abstraction’, ‘the work of figures’, ‘immediacy’, ‘sacrifice’ and the ‘without relation’, were modes of thought within which terms such as ‘affirmation’, ‘relationality’, ‘porosity’, ‘negotiation’ and ‘potentiality’ were central.
The question of the name has already been addressed. Once freed from the hold of the differing forms of essentialism that philosophical terms, if not words themselves, were taken to harbour, perhaps in a curious mixture of the philosophical and the etymological, and thus thought to contain a secret that will come to be revealed, the language of philosophy will then have to confront the problem of invention. And yet, invention can never taken place ex nihilo. The terminology – terms, words concepts, etc. – already have given determinations. Moreover, those determinations bring with them modes of inclusion and exclusion which in this context can be understood as the work of figures, that are themselves central to the effective use of terms and thus central to traditional modes of thought. In part what has been indicated in the preceding analyses, equally what has had to have been assumed as providing the way into each of those analyses, could be summarised in the following way:
1. The constitution of the philosophical, the act of constitution itself, has for the most part necessitated a radical severance between the human and the animal. Indeed, the human as that which is brought into philosophical consideration by the animal's elimination – the consequence of the operative dimension at work in the without relation – would be a central element within that act of constitution. Such a mechanism is also at work in certain conceptions of the literary.
2. This severance is not simply a topic within the philosophical. Rather, the position is that the concepts and categories proper to the philosophical are themselves marked in advance by their always already present implication in that founding act of separation between humans and animals. The without relation – as with the logic of the synagogue – retains an implicit presence within what is assumed to be the neutrality of philosophical language. Neutrality is only there as a feint.
3. The consequence of this redescription of the relationship between philosophy and the animal – one in which the question of the constitution of the philosophical is central – is that the animal's reintroduction within the domain of philosophy would pose a challenge to philosophy precisely because the concepts and categories that come to be deployed, or even redeployed, in the attempt to think the presence of the animal may be those which had already been used to found the philosophical as that which exists without relation to the animal. Again, this position can be reiterated in terms that would give a role of comparable significance to the logic of the synagogue.
Specific works by Pascal, Hegel, Heidegger and Blanchot in addition to certain art works indicate the way these processes take place. Hence, once the act of constitution can be understood in these terms, it is not just that the animal can be allocated a privileged position, it is also the case that what then matters is the way the question of the animal's presence – and thus that in which the animal's presence is announced – allows for a re-evaluation of the language of philosophy. This latter possibility will have a reciprocal effect insofar as it allows for a transformation in how the relation to the animal is itself to be formulated. In order to understand and develop these different senses of transformation, it needs to be recognised that what was at work within them is a repositioning of ‘particularity’. This repositioning folds the question of the Jew into these concerns. Not only has it been of central importance to trace the way the work of the figure of the Jew established a singular identity that is always external to the concerns of Jewish life, even if its locus of registration functions as a constraint on Jewish life and identity, it is equally important to identify philosophical positions which fail to engage with the Jew's figured presence precisely because of the inability of such positions to think what might be described as an inaugurating sense of particularity. (Here this was undertaken in relation to the work of Agamben.)3
Particularity has a twofold presence. In the first instance the particular – Jew or animal – receives its identity from the work of figures. However, that identity, as has been indicated, is always imposed externally. Moreover, it assumes the absence of an already existing complex of relations as it has to posit a single relation. The singularity of relation unifies both elements. This position has already been noted in general terms in regard to the presence of the other as enemy, a position in which enmity is given by ‘nature’ and thus cannot be contested. After all, what would it mean to contest the hold of nature! This position arose in the analysis of Pascal in which the Jew was already identified with the state of being ‘wicked’ (méchant). The result of this identification is that not only was the Jew named and identified in advance (thus given an identity with which actual Jews would then have to live). In addition, the central reason, for Pascal, that ‘justice’ involved the dimension of ‘force’ was due to the Jew's presence. This led to a state of affairs in which the presence of the Jew as ‘wicked’ was conterminous with the immediacy of ‘justice’. While this position was always complicated by the interconnection between the figure of the Jew and the logic of the synagogue, the latter always retaining the Jew as excluded, it remained the case that as this immediacy is inextricably bound up with the inevitability of violence, the ‘justice’ in question needed to be understood as external to a conception of justice in which judgment prevailed. The prevailing of judgment, involving as it does the place of judgment as well as the temporality of deliberation, is the introduction of an already mediated relation (a position predicated on what was described as the doubling of ‘force’ in fragment 102 of the Pensées). Within that mediated relation the category of the ‘enemy’ is from the start empty. While it cannot be pursued here what this gives rise to is the need to rethink what is meant by ‘enmity’ within such a set-up.
The other aspect that is central to the development of a conception of particularity, where the particular was located beyond the hold of figures, arose in the context of the figure of the Jew as it appeared in Hegel's Philosophy of Right. In that setting the determination of being a Jew was not just irrelevant, it stood in the way of the most appropriate expression of human being. As such it had to be effaced in the name of universality. (And yet, of course in the Hegelian context that universality becomes the ‘Germanic peoples’.) Precisely because being a Jew was deemed an ‘anomaly’ that allowed for its rectification, the cure of a certain sickness, it followed that what could never be affirmed is the identity of being a Jew. The figure of the Jew always precludes such a possibility. It has to be precluded since, as will be argued below, a repositioning of identity necessitates a change in position, one where identity would be the result of internal affirmations having more than one determination and as such not able to be controlled by the work of the figure, or rather cannot be controlled other than in those terms by which the figure is involved in the violent imposition of identity.4 It is imposed in this way on Jews, thus underscoring the vacuity of the claim that such a position involves ‘bare life’, as though within such a life the particularity of being a Jew – that which prompted the figure's work in the first place – was not itself already marked out. In being there originally, that mark would always have been retained.5
The animal, or rather the figure of the animal, works in tandem with the figure of the Jew. The animal's excision is a structural necessity within that conception of the philosophical that takes the human's abstract presence as fundamental. (In this instance it does not matter if that abstraction is re-expressed as Dasein or simply as universal human nature, the effect is the same.) However, what emerges with the animal is firstly the identification of a singular presence, e.g. the animal is absent from the domain of logos – a form of singularity in which it became possible to write ‘the animal’ – and equally that this conception of the singular was interarticulated with the without relation. Central to the position that has already been advanced is that the response to the without relation is to argue for the presence of always already existing relations with animals (both relations and animals in the plural). Those relations are as much actual as they are potential. What this means, of course, is that taking this position further will necessitate taking up the detail of relationality rather than adducing arguments that sought either to concentrate on the animal as though it were an end in itself or to posit modes of equivalence between human and non-human animals. If it can be argued that what characterises human being is the primacy of relations then once the restrictions of the without relation have been suspended then there is no reason to restrict relationality to those which only obtain between humans.
The weave of three terms – ‘potentiality’, ‘relationality’, ‘affirmation’ – announces the next step. There are a number of ways in which there is an important interconnection between relationality and potentiality.6 The first involves relations that need be neither noticed nor assumed. Relationality in this sense assumes an ecological relation between human activity and animal habitat (where the latter includes the places of animal life as well as animal life itself). These places may be shared between human and non-human animals, e.g. cities, parks, gardens. Equally, they may be geographically distanced. What matters is that place, in the sense in which the term is being used here, is comprised of differing sites of interconnection and thus involve relations of dependence. Within the places defined by non-human inhabitation there will be a complex relations of interdependence between and within species. While the network of relations within and between human and non-human animals may not be direct, it is still the case that such relations have, nonetheless, an insistent reality. Moreover, this form of relation may have a precarious structure. Within that structure of relations, an action could have an effect that is not direct and whose registration is not automatic. This would occur because such actions either interrupt a pre-existing relation to the detriment of the ecology involved (where ecology is understood as a network of non-intentional but nonetheless interdependent relations) or they would establish connections where hitherto there had not been any. What marks the possibility of relationality, in this sense, is that they exist within what may be described as indirect potentialities for relation.
Furthermore, working with the presupposition that human being is defined in terms of a network of relations will mean – given the suspension of the without relation – that the relations between humans can be approached in a manner that is similar to the way relations obtain between human and non-human animals. That similarity involves not just the primacy of relation but the recognition that the interplay between human being, human animality and non-human animals involves divisions that are both porous and infinitely negotiable. The presence of negotiation is from the start the acknowledged presence of potentiality.
Different though nonetheless connected senses of potentiality arose in the analyses of Pascal and Derrida. The distinction between them lay in the way they were recovered from the texts in question. In working through Derrida's deconstruction of the place of anthropocentrism within philosophy it became clear that the way in which the term ‘play’ (jeu) was being used could be interpreted as a potentiality that had been constrained. In regard to Pascal it was fundamentally important, in the context of an analysis of fragment 102, to distinguish between two different senses of ‘force’. In the first instance force had to be understood in terms of immediacy in which violence had a necessary component. Furthermore, if justice is defined in terms of immediacy then not only would the object be given, the quality of the object would have been imposed in advance. Identity, as outlined above, would have been provided by the work of figures. The other sense of force within the fragment opens in an importantly different direction. Here force is still linked to both justice and judgment (where the latter involves both place, deliberation and negotiation), though what these terms, including force, now mean and entail has been transformed in the process.
Fundamental to this other sense of force is Pascal's insistence that if there is to be justice then it must have an operative dimension. Justice must be able to be enacted. That enactment is judgment. Rather than an already determined object, the move from the immediate to the mediate meant that justice is that to which recourse is made and will continue to be made. Therefore the other possibility for force is that it becomes the potentiality that must be there as integral to justice, if justice is to have a capacity to be enacted. Without force, as Pascal argues, justice is ‘powerless’. Once justice is ‘powerless’ then the work of figures – understood as the domain of pure force or immediacy – is triumphant. (The triumph will have occurred even if it brings with it the enforced necessity for institutionalised force – with the attendant risk of violence – in the form of the police.) That absence of power therefore means that justice cannot be thought as differentiated from its having an inherent potentiality for its own actualisation. Potentiality, in this sense, always allows justice to be held back from the immediacy of its application and in so doing continue to maintain the opening between justice and judgment. This opening is one which, as has been argued, brings both place and time into any consideration of justice.
The relationship between potentiality and actuality, a relationship that is integral to the move from justice to judgment, is also present in Derrida's conception of ‘play’ (jeu). To be more exact, the identification of that distinction, a project undertaken in Chapter 5, is the result of one way of interpreting what is meant by ‘play’ (jeu). Derrida's argument concerning ‘play’ can be explicated in terms of a potentiality that finds its perhaps inevitable restriction by the necessity of structure. However, ‘play’ – and henceforth the term no longer has a strict correspondence with the detail of Derrida's argument – as form of potentiality need not be understood in terms of the possible restrictions that the attempted actualisation of potentiality encounters. What is at stake within this position will emerge with greatest clarity if that actualisation is repositioned as finitude. In the same way as a given judgment is finitude in relation to the inherent potentiality within justice – potentiality as inextricably bound up with force – play takes up the position of the infinite as potentiality. That infinite is neither constrained nor undone by actuality. Actuality can be understood as the necessity for measure in relation to potentiality as the measureless.
The place of affirmation within this reworking of terms is defined in relation to a conception of identity that in working beyond the hold of figures retains, as evidence of their hold having been relinquished, the repositioning of identity in terms of conflict.7 Names, and thus identities, are as a consequence repositioned. This occurs, firstly, in terms of the continuities of the lives to which those identities pertain, and secondly, in regard to the specific identity in question. Conflict, in the sense that it is being used here, always has to incorporate those positions which, even though they are advanced from within the identity in question, still attempt, nonetheless, to provide it with a singular and thus univocal conception of identity. In sum, this involves a form of essentialism. There is, however, a fundamental distinction between a form of essentialism that is one possible response to the question of identity and the singularity of identity that is imposed by the work of figures. In the case of the latter the imposition of identity, as has been argued, precludes the possibility of conflict while at the same time it seeks to and often succeeds in determining the mode of life in question. The determination occurs in terms of the imposition of the singular. The imposition is always external. The above noted conception of essentialism, on the other hand, is a possible move – one amongst many – made within an internal conflict concerning identity.
Affirmation therefore will always have an inbuilt fragility. The latter arises because affirmation, in being what it is, is a complex in which not only is there affirmation of particularity, there is, at the same time, an implicit refusal to universalise. And yet, with that fragility there is a form of force (perhaps another sense of force). Affirmation becomes the assertion of particularity while at the same time enjoining a defence of particularity. Affirmation therefore is as much part of a philosophical argument concerning the relationship between universals and particulars as it is a potential political or social strategy. The two have an important affinity. Affirmation as part of a strategy has to work with already given determinations. Particularities within collectives, particularities within the arbitrary constructs that are nations, continue to work within universals. However, the insistence of affirmation means that it will have become possible to insist on the position in which the universals in question neither direct nor subsume particulars.
Affirmation as it pertains to animals necessitates the recognition that what is involved are relations. Hence affirmation does not involve the application of positions that pertain to the human as though they were identical with the domain of non-human animals. A different approach is involved. The point of departure is that in regard to animals the affirmation of relationality – a complex of relations – needs to be understood in terms of particularity. Hence the question to be addressed – the question that pertains to an affirmation of the diversity of animal existence is what is involved, in such a content, in being just to particularity. In other words, once the division between human and non-human animals can no longer be understood in term of an either/or and thus of what could be described as the exclusivity of existence (which would have to obtain were the without relation to be effective) then what is of primary significance is relationality. The relations, however, are far from unitary in nature. Not only are they at work within an ecology of relations, there is also the continuity of negotiated relations between humans and animals. The latter brings with it a diversity that mirrors the original plurality within the domain of the animal. If there is a way of addressing this complex of relations, an address that takes the affirmation of animal presence as central, then it has to be explicated, as has been suggested, in terms of particularity and specifically how that question opens up the domain of justice and judgment.
The affirmation of relations becomes the way of positioning a philosophical approach to animals. The difference between the human and the non-human and thus the difference between relations that are simply between the human and those with greater extension has to be accounted for in terms of differing forms or modes of relationality (accepting that relations also involve distinctions set in play by the presence of both potentiality and actuality). The difference cannot be accounted in terms of world or language; to do so would necessitate the reintroduction of the without relation.
Once relationality is central it is no longer a question of a form of reintroduction in which Jews and animals will be allocated a place. Their exclusion, be it conceptual, theological or visual, is not just a form of inclusion: what it signals is the presence of that which is already present. The problem of the already present is not merely the presence of the other. More is involved – it is the presence of that which cannot be assimilated to a generalised and abstract sense of alterity. In Dürer's Jesus Among the Doctors (see Figure 8.4) it was the other's face. That face is already there. The dog in Piero di Cosimo's Satyr Mourning the Death of Nymph (see Figure 9.2) acknowledges relationality while it is yet to form part of an actualised relation. It does both. Jews and animals, in being there, make demands. These demands, however, have their greatest exigency once they can be located at the point where the work of figures has been suspended. This is the point of return, the point of Jews and animals
1. Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964), p. 64.
2. For a discussion of the work in terms of its art historical background see Dennis Geronimus, Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 83–7.
4. It can always be argued that such attempts fail. The cost of the failure is the violence that is, from the start, implicated within the attempt. What this points to is a form of exhaustion within the continual attempt to universalise. This occurs because the differing projects are always versions in which the universal equates to a form of particularity. That equation is of course systematically excluded (though it is clear in the case of Hegel in which the universal becomes the ‘Germanic peoples’). Each attempt has to evoke the violence, implicit or explicit, that has always accompanied this move. While recognising that the conception of modernity that is at work within it brings with it attendant problems, Lyotard's outline of how the move is to be understood, especially in the context of both European history and European thought, has an incisive edge to it.
My argument is that the modern project (of the realisation of universality) has not been abandoned, forgotten but destroyed, ‘liquidated’. There are several modes of destruction, several names which are the symbol of it. ‘Auschwitz’ can be taken as the paradigmatic name for the tragic ‘incompleteness’ [inachèvement] of modernity. (Jean-François Lyotard, Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1986), p. 38)
Both the analyses from which the project is comprised, taken in conjunction with Lyotard's diagnostic observation, could provide the basis for questioning the all too quick evocation of the universal wherever it may arise.
5. This is a position that is overlooked continually once the evocation of ‘human being’ as an unqualified abstraction is advanced. A similar problem arises with Paolo Virno's argument that:
Every naturalist thinker must acknowledge one given fact: the human animal is capable of not recognizing another human animal as being one of its own kind. The extreme cases, from cannibalism to Auschwitz, powerfully attest to this permanent possibility. (Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), p. 181)
The problem with this claim is that once cases are documented then the argument does not have to do with the ‘human animal’ qua abstract generality. There is an initial act of discrimination between humans. This act of discrimination identifies Jews in this way, though it is an act of identification that occurs for the National Socialist. It only pertains to Jews insofar as they have to live out the consequence of that act. The reciprocity is such that the act of discrimination, i.e. between Jews and other Germans, reinforces the identity of what are then produced as authentic ‘Germans’; a similar process takes place with regard to the Tutsis and Hutu in Rwanda, and there are many other examples. The point is that what is at work here is never as bland or benign as a relation between ‘human animals’. Not only is such a claim unaware of the complex politics of identity once the work of figures is allowed, it also dulls the possibility of a response to such a predicament.
6. Throughout the analyses that comprise this one register of potentiality concerned the way the term was either used by a particular philosopher or was necessitated by the work. This occurred specifically with regard to Hegel and Agamben. That sense of potentiality is the least important. What matters is that the sense of relation and thus relationality being worked out necessitated recourse to an importantly different sense of potentiality.
7. I have tried to develop this conception of naming in my The Plural Event (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 61–83.
