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UNBECOMING HUMAN Philosophy of Animality After Deleuze

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UNBECOMING HUMAN Philosophy of Animality After Deleuze Plateaus – New Directions in Deleuze Studies ‘It’s not a matter of bringing all sorts of things together under a single concept but rather of relating each concept to variables that explain its mutations.’ Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations Series Editors Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong Claire Colebrook, Penn State University Editorial Advisory Board Keith Ansell Pearson, Ronald Bogue, Constantin V. Boundas, Rosi Braidotti, Eugene Holland, Gregg Lambert, Dorothea Olkowski, Paul Patton, Daniel Smith, James Williams Titles available in the series Christian Kerslake, Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze Jean-Clet Martin, Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, translated by Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton Simone Bignall, Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence – Deleuze and Philosophy Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History Sean Bowden, The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense Craig Lundy, History and Becoming: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Creativity Aidan Tynan, Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms Thomas Nail, Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event with The Vocabulary of Deleuze edited by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith, translated by Kieran Aarons Frida Beckman, Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality Nadine Boljkovac, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema Daniela Voss, Conditions of Thought: Deleuze and Transcendental Ideas Daniel Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence F. LeRon Shults, Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism Janae Sholtz, The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political Marco Altamirano, Time, Technology and Environment: An Essay on the Philosophy of Nature Sean McQueen, Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk Ridvan Askin, Narrative and Becoming Marc Rölli, Gilles Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism: From Tradition to Difference, translated by Peter Hertz-Ohmes Guillaume Collett, The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School Ryan J. Johnson, The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter Allan James Thomas, Deleuze, Cinema and the Thought of the World Cheri Lynne Carr, Deleuze’s Kantian Ethos: Critique as a Way of Life Alex Tissandier, Affirming Divergence: Deleuze’s Reading of Leibniz Barbara Glowczewski, Indigenising Anthropology with Guattari and Deleuze Koichiro Kokubun, The Principles of Deleuzian Philosophy, translated by Wren Nishina Felice Cimatti, Unbecoming Human: Philosophy of Animality After Deleuze, translated by Fabio Gironi Ryan J. Johnson, Deleuze, A Stoic Forthcoming volumes Justin Litaker, Deleuze and Guattari’s Political Economy Nir Kedem, A Deleuzian Critique of Queer Thought: Overcoming Sexuality Jane Newland, Deleuze in Children’s Literature Sean Bowden, Expression, Action and Agency in Deleuze: Willing Events Andrew Jampol-Petzinger, Deleuze, Kierkegaard and the Ethics of Selfhood Visit the Plateaus website at edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/plat UNBECOMING HUMAN Philosophy of Animality After Deleuze 2 Felice Cimatti Translated by Fabio Gironi Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com English translation © Fabio Gironi, 2020 © 2013, Gius. Laterza & Figli, All rights reserved Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Sabon LT Std by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4339 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4341 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4342 5 (epub) The right of Felice Cimatti to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Published with a contribution from the Department of Humanistic Studies of the University of Calabria. Contents Introduction: Animals Do Not Exist 1 1 Animal? 24 2 The Anthropologic Machine 43 3 Rage and Envy 63 4 To Be Seen 87 5 Becoming-human 110 6 The Artistic Beast 132 7 Becoming-animal 152 8 Beyond the Apparatus 170 Coda 189 Bibliography 207 Index 223 Introduction: Animals Do Not Exist Bien sûr, l’homme fut animal; et pourtant il ne l’est plus [Of course, man was an animal; and yet he is no longer] (Bimbenet 2011: 22) Animals are not others. Let us be clear about this: Unbecoming Human is neither exclusively nor mainly about nonhuman animals – like cats and jellyfish. The book you are holding deals with our animality, with human animality. Unbecoming Human attempts to delineate the still-unknown features of human animality. That is to say, all those inhuman characters that must be cut off by the appa- ratus (the ‘anthropologic machine’, as Agamben defines it) through which we become human, for otherwise we could neither become, nor define ourselves as, human. The double process of de- animalisation on the one hand and linguisticisation on the other, which we all must go through (for otherwise we could not be defined as properly human), produces a peculiar entity: the human psychological subject. The subject – which, as we will see, is nothing but a body referring to itself as an ‘I’ – speaks, and only in virtue of this is it indeed a subject. For this reason, animality concerns language: on the one hand lan- guage engenders the ‘subject’, on the other animality is animal (i.e., nonhuman) precisely because it is not traversed by language. The purpose of this book, then, is that of describing the difficult – if not impossible – relationship established between Homo sapiens and other animals (and animality in general) from different points of view: those of philosophy, science, art, literature, cinema, and psy- choanalysis. This relationship is impossible more than it is difficult because, ultimately, Homo sapiens simply means ‘the living being that is not an animal’ or ‘the living being that continuously expels its own animality’. However, since every individual of the species Homo sapiens is, clearly, an animal – a vertebrate and a mammal, to be precise – to be human also means to be something intrinsically contradictory. It follows, therefore, that Unbecoming Human will also deal with nonhuman animals, but only insofar as this will help 1 unbecoming human in drawing the contours of human animality. When we speak of animality, therefore, we should certainly think about animals, but also – and perhaps mainly – about all those circumstances wherein something eludes the grasp of thoughts and words. Animality avoids our grasp, it cannot be captured; it is indeed the very elusiveness of life. It is for this reason that we will find animality in the most unsuspected places, where we would never think of encountering it, since animality abides even where no animals dwell. In order to track human animality, however, it is necessary to start from that of nonhuman animals. This book will, then, also deal with cats and jellyfish. As Derrida (2008) warned us, this is a risky operation. Because the animal of which we speak is never the animal as it is in and of itself: the animal is always an ‘animot’, the spoken-of animal, metaphorised and idealised. That is, it is always the animal as thought and feared by human beings. In this sense, as we will see, the animal does not exist. In fact, the ‘animot’ is literally made up by language, since our talking about animals (humans always talk about animals, and indeed it could be said that they invented language in order to speak about animals, and distance themselves from them) requires the hypothesis that, in the world, a referent for the word ‘animal’ can be found. The concept of ‘animot’ allows us to subvert the common supposition according to which language simply nominates objects, independently existing in the world. As Derrida, like Hegel before him, observes, there are no cats, or viruses, in the world. Rather there is this living being in front of my eyes, or this particular virus that I can examine through the lenses of an electronic microscope. Clearly, the animal does not exist. Indeed, the category animal is a linguistic invention. We will return time and again to the relationship between language and animality, but for now it should be clear that the question of animality cannot be separated from that of language. Let us come back to how to talk about animality. We have just seen that this is an unknown animality – still and perhaps forever unknown. This does not mean questioning the many scientific dis- coveries that have put our belonging to the animal kingdom beyond any doubt. But this is not the point. Darwin notwithstanding, the definition of the humanity of the human always implies, more or less explicitly, a radical differentiation from the world of animals. Even in prehistoric human cultures, for example, ‘animals act primarily as metaphors’ (Russell 2012: 11). An animal is a metaphor when it functions as a
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