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BEYOND SPEECH, BEYOND SPECIES: THE HUMAN/NONHUMAN BINARY AND AN ETHICS OF SUBLIMITY As A thesis submitted to the faculty of 34 San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of HOMAfi the requirements for the Degree * b 3 S Master of Arts In Humanities by Shane Andrew Baker San Francisco, California Spring 2016 Copyright by Shane Andrew Baker 2016 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read BEYOND SPEECH, BEYOND SPECIES: THE HUMAN/NONHUMAN BINARY AND AN ETHICS OF SUBLIMITY by Shane Andrew Baker, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Humanities at San Francisco State University. Cristina Ruotolo, Ph.D Director and Professor of Humanities Laura Garcia-Moreno, Ph.D Associate Professor of Humanities BEYOND SPEECH, BEYOND SPECIES: THE HUMAN/NONHUMAN BINARY AND AN ETHICS OF SUBLIMITY Shane Andrew Baker San Francisco, California 2016 The harsh realities of ecological catastrophe and biodiversity loss are currently forcing us to reappraise our ambiguous relationship with the nonhuman world. Ideologies of human exceptionalism abound not only in our everyday lives, but also in some antihumanist attempts to bridge nature and culture, and surely, along with a faceless neoliberalism’s commodification of nature, have a hand in this deteriorating state of affairs. The denial or disavowal of nonhuman subjectivities is pathological and overdetermined, serving more than the self-preservation of industries or economies that profit from animal bodies, and it is such defense mechanisms that this thesis seeks to understand. I see individual psychic processes of abjecting nature or animality mirrored at the level of culture, territorializing ‘the human’ as both individual body and category. The work of Darwin, Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Caillois, and Merleau-Ponty have destabilized the notion of the autonomous rational entity of ‘the human’ above and against the entity of ‘the animal,’ but one figure who was intensely critical of nature/culture binarity has been hugely overlooked in the antihumanist literature: The Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu. I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. Chair, Thesis Committee Date ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to thank my thesis advisor Professor Laura Garcia-Moreno of the School of Humanities and Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University. She was a great listener and a syncretic thinker, and the guided discovery of our many conversations allowed me to connect the dots I wanted to connect. She also pulled me back in when I was too far adrift. I would also like to thank Professor Cristina Ruotolo of the School of Humanities and Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University. As the second reader of this thesis, her comments and keen editing proved invaluable. Thank you also to my wonderful wife Elena for being there when the seas got choppy, which was often. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: At the Crossroads of Animal Studies and Women and Gender Studies........1 Chapter Two: Human Exceptionalism and the Disavowal of Nonhuman Subjectivities ..17 Chapter Three: Microbiomes, Abjected Animality, and the Prepersonal Body .............. 38 Chapter Four: The Tao and the Flesh................................................................................73 References........................................................................................................................106 1 Chapter One: At the Crossroads of_Animal Studies and Women and Gender Studies “Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized.” - Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore 1 Am “The question of the animal,” as it is often put, is an ethical as much as it is an intellectual one. Since philosophers’ and scientists’ dealings with animality since at least Descartes have tended to reinforce theoretical and ethical blindspots regarding the place humans (think they) have in nature, much recent work in the posthumanities has sought to upend a humanist tradition of “othering” the animal. I begin this project by following Derrida’s oft-quoted suggestion from The Animal That Therefore I Am: “The animal looks at us and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins there” (p. 397). Animal studies, as a burgeoning field, is a rich source of theory that expressly commits to openness in one way or another. I suggest, following Derrida, that the animal’s gaze, and also our continued theoretical and practical entanglement with nonhuman animals, impresses upon the theorist a need for openness with regard to human being and its relation with its myriad ‘others.’ That a commitment to openness would exist here is not surprising since the case had been incorrectly closed too many times before; that final, thin, secure line between human and nonhuman animals has had to be redrawn again and again (in vulnerable narcissistic fashion), and has served as justification for all manner of uses and abuses of nonhuman animals and the nonhuman world in general. 2 There are pertinent observations to be made as well from the crossroads of animal studies and women and gender studies, and not simply because women and animals have shared a history of domination and subjugation by men. Since feminist theory predates animal studies, as fields unto themselves, it seems that tribulations endured through successive “waves” of feminism might have something to teach theorists who work with animals, and they do, including some cautionary tales regarding what we should not being doing or thinking regarding “the animal” (a term that really should be relegated to the dustbin in that it both maximizes the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and grossly minimizes very important distinctions between nonhuman animals). Derrida borrows the word “betise” from Gustave Flaubert’s usage, to refer to a particular kind of human stupidity. “ ‘La betise,’ wrote Flaubert in a famous letter, ‘consists in wanting to conclude’ ” (Weil, p. xvi). Where better could the operation of concluding be put to use than in the service of cultural myths meant to keep us at a safe distance from truths too traumatic to bear, particularly the primacy of embodiment? Connecting embodiment and shame in her reading of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, Kari Weil writes of “a kinship [between man and dog] that consists first and foremost in having a body that is part of the world of matter or nature.” This kinship is “one of humilation and disgrace, the shame of growing old, the shame of being the product of a fertile body, the shame of having to face death” (p. 140). Shame is the starting point of Derrida’s The Animal as well, as the inexplicable emotion the philosopher felt when caught nude before the gaze of his cat (p. 372). 3 It is not without irony, then, that shame can be a connecting point between human and nonhuman animal since shame is tied up with the idea of self-consciousness, a feature that we like to think is exclusively human. When we consider, for example, the shame of a child who’s young enough to wet the bed but old enough to know he shouldn’t have, the capacity for shame seems built on a self-conscious belief that one has the freedom to go against nature, to act against the body (Weil, p. 142). Shame surrounding embodiment happens when the child is aware that he let the body take control when it is has been impressed upon him that he should have taken control of it. We must also contend with the terror of embodiment, as being (in) a body destined to decay and death. Ernest Becker thoroughly develops this thesis in The Denial o f Death, suggesting that human aggression toward nonhuman animals might be explained through the repression of mortality reminders, our most obvious link with nonhuman animals being the fact of our embodiment. Understanding a particular form of dualism to be at the heart of human existence, Becker writes that “man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever” (p. 26). Becker posits all of human culture as an escape from the “inadmissible realities” of a nature that is all too awesome and terrible to behold for very long (p. 19). Nature is a force that robs humanity of his significance, an idea that I will link to certain historical notions of ‘the sublime’ at the end of chapter two. I write “his significance” above in response to Kari Weil’s statement at the beginning of her Thinking Animals that “the apparent blow that Charles Darwin struck to 4 human pride seems to have had greater visible effects on a kind of masculine pride” (p. xxiv). Weil suggests that the smallness we feel as we face the natural world, the tendency of that world to deprive us of truly feeling that we are at the top of earth’s Hierarchy of Beings, is “a deprivation that is often associated with women and with which they have been familiar” (p. xxiv). Indeed, Weil credits the “materialist turn” in recent feminism1 with providing a needed critique of “the mutual subjugation of women and nature,” a subjugation dating to at least Aristotle, in which “women have been identified with animals and nature in their need to be tamed or controlled by the masculine, rational element” (p. 139). Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy make a similar point in When Elephants Weep regarding male ethologists’ attitudes toward their female collegues: “Women, it was felt, were more likely than men to attribute emotional attitudes to animals by projecting their own feelings onto them, thereby polluting data.

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