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.
Thus did gender bias and species bias converge in a supposedly objective environment”
(p. 33). In tackling the subaltemity of animals/nature and women separately, we risk reifying the hierarchies that caused such groups to be outside hegemonic power structures to begin with. Similar arguments have been made within disability scholarship. In “When
Black Women Start Going on Prozac,” Anna Mollow writes that “In their efforts to stake out a claim for disability as worthy of intellectual and political attention, disability scholars often represent the relationship between people with disabilities and other political minorities in hierarchical terms” (p. 69). Although this may have been a necessary move at first, analogizing disability and political minority (or ethnicity)
1 Weil credits the work of Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan in particular. 5
“assume[s] a false separation between the forms of oppression being compared” (p. 69).
In other words, seeing disability as “merely additive” to race or sexuality falls short of holistic conceptions of real, complex arrays of oppression (p. 70).
On the one hand, it is almost certainly true that women and animals (and children) have experienced oppression or subjugation as a result of their being deemed highly affected beings “to be tamed or controlled by the masculine, rational element.” On the other hand, handling women’s and animals’ historical and continued subjugation as fused runs at least three risks: 1) If Chandran Reddy is right in his discussion of gay rights and illegal migrant advocates in his book chapter “Moving Beyond a Freedom With
Violence” that the state is commonly viewed as a purveyor of legal rights, rights which
“are construed as goods” in limited supply, then women and animals would be pitted against each other, one group (women, of course) asserting their place in line ahead of animals as recipients of political representation (p. 189). The logic here is: ‘As soon as we get what we want, you’ll get what you want.’ Even this statement is problematic, since we are assuming that we know what animals want, and that all animals want the same thing. 2) Women’s studies and ethnic studies have redressed a lack of representation in the academy by joining the academy and voicing their views through it; animals, however, do not have voices with which to do so. Writes Kari Weil, “those who constitute the objects of animal studies cannot speak for themselves, or at least they cannot speak any of the languages that the academy recognizes as necessary for such self- representation” (p. 4). Why not speak for them then? 3) Weil suggests that Gayatri
Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” provides a cautionary note here, that just as 6
intellectuals in the northern and western parts of the world risk putting words in the
subalterns’ mouths when giving them voice, animal behaviorists sometimes risk
overlying nature with culture: “We might teach chimpanzees and gorillas to use sign
language, but will that language'enable them to speak of their animal lives or simply
bring them to mimic (or ape) human values and viewpoints?” (p. 6).
Perhaps not so strangely, the tension between two poles - a push toward
articulation and a resistance to articulation - has been a driving force in both women and
gender studies and, more recently, in animal studies. Referencing Jacques Lacan’s notion
of “the symbolic” register of human reality - the world of the social, the law, and of
language - Weil observes that “Language... irreparably splits the self between an
experiential self and a speaking self who is never in the same place or time as the self that
is to be represented” (p. 7). Of course, this has been part of the draw of “the animal,” as a
(partial) subject who potentially exists in some pre-discursive, sublime state that
language-possessing humans have fallen from, and it is thus that theorists who work with
animals can be, according to Weil, split into two general camps; those who are envious of
animals’ perceived access to “unmediated experience,” and prefer that they continue not
speaking, and those who believe animals can and do use language, and encourage
animals (as with the Great Ape Project) to speak so that they can tell us something of their experiences (p. 7). Feminist theorists are familiar with exactly this tension: “Faced
with their own pronouncements that language is not only unstable but also patriarchal
(and thus foreign to the expression of women’s desires), [they] nevertheless encouraged
forms of writing that would point toward or imagine an ‘elsewhere’ outside of language” 7
(Weil, p. 17). In this way, animal studies takes from feminist theory - and showing
exhaustion with the linguistic turn at the same time - the idea that “attending] to the
ineffable is itself an ethical act,” which Weil alternately refers to as “posthuman ethics”
or a “counterlinguistic turn” (p. 17,15).
An attendance to the sublime within an animal’s gaze, as conceived of or felt in
the human imaginary, may then be a profoundly ethical move, as such considerations
open the possibility of connecting with the trauma many animal species - wild,
domesticated, or synanthropic - have undoubtedly suffered at the hands of humans, as
well as the more general possibility of “attend [ing] to difference without appropriating or
distorting it” (Weil, p. 7). Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, dealing as it does with difference and citationality, has recently come under attack for seemingly not allowing the realms of discourse and materiality to ‘talk’ to one another, rendering nature mute and distancing the possibility of attending to nonhuman subjectivity “without appropriating or distorting it.” In her introduction to Bodies That Matter, Butler puts forth a neither- constructionism-nor-essentialism standpoint in her writing on “pure bodies” and processes of gendering: “linguistic monism” is just as much to be avoided as unmediated biology (p. 10, 6). Discourse cannot happen without the materiality that it describes and originates from, yet the realm of the material can only be approached and elaborated through discourse.
For some, the closed loop of Butler’s performativity, the disappearance of Nature
in performativity’s citationality, feels like a theoretical impasse. Gayle Salamon, in her 8
criticism of some trans writers’ misuse of the notion of social constructionism in their understanding of “lived gender, ” refers to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s rearticulation of
Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological reduction: “ ‘The world is not what I think by but what I live through’ ” (p. 91). Her phenomenologically real body “is to be situated at materiality’s threshold of possibility rather than caught within a materiality that is at its core constricted, constrictive, and determining” (p. 92). In Mel Chen’s Animacies, the notion of the materiality of language as “a multimodal series of conceptual directives, meant to alert and enliven the conceptual imaginary in order to... animate cognitive entities,” creates an even further inmixing of the material and the conceptual (p. 52). For
Chen, when words “are a first level of animation,” language becomes “a corporeal, sensual, embodied act” (p. 53, 54). Language and materiality go beyond enmeshment here; one becomes (or already is) the other. Further muddying Butler’s more cleanly dialectical materiality/discourse binary is Vicky Kirby in Quantum Anthropologies, who writes something close to Chen’s materiality of signs in pointing to the natural languages of genetic inscriptions, cells ‘talking’ to each other, and other “biological codes” (p. 73).
Directly criticizing Butler’s assertion that “the human endeavor to capture a world ‘out there’ through cultural signs will always be a failed project” and the entire idea of culture as a closed system that mysteriously “authenticates its own special properties and self- sufficiency,” Kirby proposes the possibility that “it is in the nature of biology to be cultural” (p. 73, 75). Whereas Butler does not allow for the reduction of one pole to the other (nature/outside language // culture/inside language), making talking about nature an impossible task since it will only ever be our own representations that we are engaged 9
with, Kirby literally interprets Derrida’s idea of the “general text” to mean the originary ground from which cultural signs and “the clairvoyance of cellular communication and lightning strokes” somehow emanate (p. 13). Following Kirby, it seems that Butler discounts the possibility of Weil’s “posthuman ethics” since the sublimity of the animal’s gaze, as “a world ‘out there,’ ” renders its trauma unthinkable: Any such ethics would be
“a failed project.”
To aid with the openness that she wants to achieve in her thinking through the nature/culture binary, Kirby borrows the concept of entanglement from quantum mechanics, in which particles, experimenters, and equipment are inseparable in their interactions (a redistribution of agency reminiscent of Bruno Latour’s science studies, which she also borrows from). “Entanglement suggests that the very ontology of the entities emerges through relationality: the entities do not preexist their involvement” (p.
76). The “consubstantiality” of ideality and materiality that the empirically verifiable phenomenon of entanglement presents - “entities emerging] through relationality” - can act as a guiding metaphor for animal theorists deconstructing the human/nonhuman animal binary. Donna Haraway’s writings on the co-evolution of dogs and humans works on this “consubstantiality”: “Dogs are not ‘surrogates for theory,’ Haraway insists; ‘they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with’ ” (Weil, p. 19). We cannot conceive of the human without invoking innumerable other species, not only because we arrive at an understanding of being human by othering ‘the animal,’ but because we historically came into being through our interactions with other animals - we have lived and spiritually communed with other animals. We have observed, intimidated, killed, and 10
eaten one another. And, as chapter three will more fully elaborate, one of the central
lessons of evolutionary biology is that species are truly made up of one another.
Considering this entanglement, and considering evolutionary theory’s insistence on antiessentialism and therefore its amenability to being conceived of as an antiteleological process, theories o f‘the human,’ ‘the animal,’ and ‘nature’ must now rely on openness and possibility for their accuracy. The case can never be closed. Closure would constitute “betise,” a lack of tolerance for ambiguity, an impatient desire to conclude, and would almost certainly be scientifically inaccurate. In the realm of poetry, precisely this idea has already been articulated. Kari Weil points to Rainer Maria Rilke’s
“The Eighth Elegy,” where he expresses his idea of “the Open, which is so / deep in animal’s faces.” Whereas the humanist tradition upholds human exceptionalism by pointing to the nonhuman animal’s lack - lack of self-consciousness, lack of language, lack of rationality - Rilke, here, is writing of our lack, that “we know what is really out there only from / the animal’s gaze” (p. 33). Perhaps this is the sublime or “unmediated experience” that some animal theorists believe risks being polluted by, for example, teaching apes sign language. Apropos Rilke, other writers have recently shown a similar commitment to a productive and ethical openness. Georgio Agamben has written of
“zones of indiscemability,” in which “fundamental indistinction[s]” exist between terms
(like “animal” and “human”) are merely polarized rather than static in their distinction
(Gilson, p. 98). Derrida’s idea of “limitrophy,” works by introducing “a plural and repeatedly folded frontier” within the human/animal binary (p. 398-9). Add to these
Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour’s writings on “naturecultures” and Vicky Kirby’s 11
“consubstantiality,” and we seem to have a growing body of posthumanist work in which hybridity and assemblege are priviledged over theory that highlights distinction or ontological difference.
Historian Joan’s Scott’s vision of nonfoundational history is a productive model of the openness or nondistinction being described here. Scott’s problem with conventional historiography is its insistence on experience as an epistemological starting point. The problem is twofold: If seeing/experiencing is the origin of knowing, then invisible histories remain invisible. Secondly, invisible histories and marginalized peoples exist(ed) as such for a reason. There is clearly power in recounting some histories at the expense of others, power being exercised by subjects who have continued recounting histories in which they themselves figure centrally. The ineffability of the animal’s gaze is a unique problem in this light: What makes its gaze ineffable for us is that although animals’ histories have always been constructed for them, they do not seem to care, as if they stand outside of history - the animal as timeless totem. However, as part of Donna Haraway’s ruminations on co-evolution, the question of who instigated domestication interrupts the notion of animals being nonparticipants who have no historical agency. What Joan Scott’s astute reflections on experience as foundational for traditional historiography can help to highlight with regard to “the question of the animal” is that, just as the attempts of “historians of difference” to undermine traditional notions of “experience” did not go far enough - indeed only further naturalizing experience - a thorough questioning of “experience” in the pursuit of nonfoundational history can (or must) also mean taking it away from human subjects. Where Scott writes 12
that “Each category taken as fixed [‘the worker, the peasant, the woman, the black’] works to solidify the ideological process of subject-constraction,” we might add that certain ideological processes of object-construction - robbing animals of whatever subjecthood they may possess - are also at work (p. 792).
Our conceptions of what experiencing is, what it means, and who’s capable of it has the power of upholding human exceptionalism, and this can be seen in the language we use to describe nonhuman animals and their behavior and the language we reserve for ourselves: We’re “novel” language-users, they merely “imitate”; we “experience pain,” they “respond to negative stimulus”; we “get angry,” they “exhibit aggression”; we “get frightened,” they “show flight behavior,” etc. (Weil, p. 8-9; Masson & McCarthy, p. 34).
Indeed, the norm in traditional ethology, in order to avoid charges of anthropomorphism, is to employ a vocabulary that denies the possibility of nonhuman animals having the propensity for the kind of complexity of thought and affect that we are capable of. That elephant funerals or crows’ facial recognition prowess makes science news points to a prior collective disavowal of the possibility of nonhuman subjectivities that has become indefensible as empirical evidence of animal minds continues to build.
Writes Scott: “Experience is a subject’s history. Language is the site of history’s enactment. Historical explanation cannot, therefore, separate the two” (p. 793). These statements are strongly suggestive of Vicky Kirby’s entanglement, the
“consubstantiality” of biology and culture, and Derrida’s “limitrophy”: Kirby’s invoking of “poststructural accounts of identity formation,” which confound simple distinctions between organism/environment or interior/exterior, inmixes nature and culture to where 13
one cannot be said to precede the other or to not already be in the place of the other, also
smacks of Derrida’s multiple, layered dividing line between human and nonhuman (p.
70). Scott writes that “experience is at once always already an interpretation and
something that needs to be interpreted,” and I suggest that we could say the same thing
about nonhuman subjectivities. If anthropomorphism is both necessary (to establish
empathy and therefore render animal behavior understandable) and unavoidable (since
we are limited to our point of view when thinking about them), then observable nonhuman behavior - the gaze of Derrida’s cat - would already be overlaid with the meaning we give it, yet would still seem to require some other to read it. For all three theorists, there is a productive disturbance of categories, such a disturbance being an epistemological prerogative for Scott, an ontological prerogative for Kirby, and ultimately an ethical one for Derrida.
We have seen that an attention to the sublime in animal studies, to the ineffability of the animal’s gaze and the possibility of trauma therein, and our own frustration at the
mutual unintelligibility of human languages and innumerable animal languages (and
songs), can be expressly ethical. Perhaps if animals could speak, they could convey the
fact and the specificity of their suffering2. Even if we desire that animals remain mute, it
is only out of envy of a pre-linguistic state in which we posit an immediacy of experience that we can only wish to tap into. (In the U.S., it is not uncommon to equate “zenning out” with the middle class family dog’s seemingly simple lifestyle - don’t we wish that
2 The question of animal suffering (over and above the question of thinking) is of principle concern to Derrida, and Jeremy Bentham before him (The Animal, p. 396). 14
we could just eat and sleep and play as she does?) However, in our attempt to articulate some deeper world that human consciousness has broken off from, we risk not only an overlaying of nature with culture - putting words into the ape’s mouth - but romanticizing a nature that never was.
According to William Cronon, the modem American environmental movement has its roots with Wordsworth and Thoreau, who described nature in sublime terms, a
“pious stance” toward its “terrible awe” the appropriate orientation of the individual to
Nature, the new secular God (p. 12). This “awe,” combined with ideologies of primativism and the frontier (where white settlers could tap into “primitive racial energies” and retool “direct democratic institutions”) led to a peculiarly American religiosity-come-nationalism utterly wrapped up with conceptions of “wilderness” (p.
13). For Cronon, the paradox is that we celebrate an “untouched” nature even as we construct it. Yet in desiring to see Nature as wild or untouched, we set up an untenable human/nature binary where humans, their domesticated animals, and the trees and flowers in their backyards are unnatural.3 One strangely logical outcome that follows from the paradox of preserving the “naturalness” of a place is by protecting its perceived biological diversity: We inflict homeostasis on an environment by micromanaging it as we have found it, artificially inserting human beliefs about the importance of certain species over others to keep an environment “wild” (p. 20). Both William Cronon and
Slavoj Zizek, in fact, see such conceit regarding the so-called natural world as an
3 We should be reminded here of Vicky Kirby’s assertion that, in Cartesianism and in some of its misguided critiques, “humanness is profoundly unnatural” (p. 74). 15
unchanging, pure (as in devoid of culture) background from which humans emerged, as implicitly religious: For Cronon, “Wilderness fulfills the old romantic project of secularizing Judeo-Christian values” and for Zizek, “this notion of nature... as an harmonious, organic balance, a reproducing, almost living organism, which is then disturbed, perturbed, derailed through human hubris, technological exploitation and so on, is... a secular version of the religious story of The Fall” (“Examined Life”). So, where
Cronon is suspicious of wilderness preservation, Zizek is critical of a “conservative ideological mistrust of change,” a conservative ecology which says, “ ‘Don’t mess with
DNA. Don’t mess with nature.’ ”
However, just as we must be on permanent guard against ideology creeping into that which is supposed to be devoid of ideology (devoid of us), and just as anthropomorphism has its attendant dangers, in theory and in practice, primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal would also warn against what he calls “anthropodenial”: the “
‘willful blindness to the human-like characteristics of animals, or the animal-like characteristics of ourselves’ ” (Weil, p. 45). As Kari Weil points out, just as we risk true communion with animals when we teach, train, or coerce them to communicate with us in languages we understand, an equal danger is to not even attempt to imagine what their lives might be like. For historian of science Laurel Braitman, “all human thinking about animals is, in some sense, anthropomorphic since we’re the ones doing the thinking. The challenge is to anthropomorphize well” meaning not “ascribing] meaning where it might not exist” (Animal Madness, p. 36, 37, italics mine). Kari Weil uses the term
“critical anthropormorphism” to describe an “ethical relating” in which human observers 16
are open to animals as “fellow subjects,” but are wary of slipping into the presumption that they know what animals are thinking or feeling (p. 20). Ultimately, the entanglement of human-animal worlds, where one term is understood only in opposition to the other, means for Braitman that understanding specific forms of mental anguish suffered by animals ultimately teaches us more about the ways in which we suffer. For Weil, such entanglement is registered in critical anthropormorphism’s primary recognition that “the irreducible difference that animals may represent for us is one that is also within us and within the term human” (p. 20). Such a poststructuralist muddling of inside/outside or separable/inseparable (as used by Vicky Kirby in her critique of the nature/culture binary) would certainly be familar to Derrida, whose reiteration of Jeremy Bentham’s question -
“Can animals suffer?” - points to an ethical relating that seems most fundamental; the simple recognition that, as embodied creatures, human and nonhuman animals are lacking in many of the same ways, and that perhaps we should be “thinking [about] the finitude we share with animals” (p. 396). Our shared /^abilities, like controlling “animal” desires, controlling bodily functions, controlling when or how we die, should not be sources of shame regarding a creatureliness we feel we must be destined to fully shed, but should be perceived as nodes of empathic possibility. 17
Chapter Two: Human Exceptionalism and the Disavowal of_Nonhuman Subjectivities
“Man is a star on the stage of the universe.”
- anonymous quote, “Yogi” brand tea bag
The question I seek answers to in this chapter is: As a theory of the human’s relationship to the world and to herself, where does psychoanalysis place animals and animality? The germ of an answer might be found in the above epigraph. One would be hard-pressed to find a more telling instance of anthropocentric thought popping up in the course of ordinary life, appearing as it did for me on a tea bag. Telling, since the quote is clearly intended to be inspirational, to get one ready to face the day. The denial of the possibility that man might not be a star on the stage of the universe is given as operational, a functional illusion. For Freud and Lacan, such functional illusions are part and parcel of how human minds work, as for both, the ego - the self you know yourself to be - is basically a fabrication, an idea that, for Freud, goes at least as far back as his early work with hypnosis, and especially a particular result of hypnosis called ‘negative hallucination.’ Whereas ‘positive hallucination’ would refer to falsely perceiving something to be present, ‘negative hallucination’ erases a thing’s perceived presence.
Freud was struck by the findings of neurologist and hypnosis expert Hyppolythe
Bemheim in which hypnotized patients would be convinced that, for example, the room they were in contained no furniture (when in fact it did), then asked to fetch an object from the opposite end of the room. When asked why they took such a circuitous route (of course, to avoid the furniture), they would confabulate, believing the excuses they made; 18
“the ego, being intolerant of such gaps in consciousness, produces illusory representations with the aim of filling in for these absences.” Seeing similar falsifying operations at work in neurosis and in the structure of repression, Freud began to suspect that such misrepresentations of reality may be more fundamental than late 19th century hypnotists had believed, that “the ego fabricates realities so as to bear this failure to perceive” (Borossa et al, p. 20). In other words, the ego, even in its ‘normal’ functioning, tends to gloss over gaps in perception, preferring instead to suture reality together. Lacan systematized the notion of such “false connections” given through this suturing, labeling the process meconnaisance, or misrecognition, a central concept in his mirror stage, in which the burgeoning subject misrecognizes herself as another, the ego essentially given in alienation (Ecrits, p. 80).
For the above quote to truly be an inspiration, a certain misrecognition and/or a certain narcissism must be adhered to. Consider the narcissism of a species that calls upon all others, often in the form of the (religious/scientific) sacrifice of those others, as witnesses to his glory. As Freud famously stated, psychoanalysis is the 3rd blow to human narcissism, after Copernicus’ overturning of the geocentric model of the universe and
Darwin’s theory of evolution, which places the human merely at the end of a biological continuum. Kelly Oliver reminds us that as a theoretical stance, “biological continuism” lies in stark contrast to “metaphysical separationism,” the latter most commonly exemplified by Heidegger’s writings on the animal, in which he posits that animals are
“poor in world” since they lack language, and therefore culture, powers of abstraction, and knowledge of death (Oliver, p. 8-9; Weil, p. 29-30). I speculate that Heidegger, if 19
alive today, may be tempted to engage in the same kind of disavowal of animal worlds so often implicit in contemporary theory and in contemporary everyday life, perhaps arguing that despite recent findings that orcas and corvids, among other nonhumans, defensibly possess what can be called “culture,” there still must be some mysterious extra ingredient, if not culture or language or tool-use, that makes humankind the gem of creation.
And indeed, humans want to be special, or at least to be seen as special, such specialness figuring large in cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s theory of “death denial.” Drawing equally from the psychoanalysis of Freud and Otto Rank and the existentialism of Kierkegaard (whom he refers to as a “psychoanalyst”), Becker asserts that ego formation and cultural processes collude in covering up the basic terror of embodiment and therefore vulnerability. We are mortal creatures destined to die, and as intelligent, symbol-wielding creatures, we know it. This situation - the “human condition” - produces a tremendous amount of anxiety, and culture provides its participants ways of assuaging that anxiety. Culture gives us a sense of meaning and dignity, a sense that our individual lives are not lived in vain, and Becker contends that without these things, we would live (if one could call it ‘living’) in a state of constant, unbearable anxiety at the immensity of the cosmos and the smallness, precariousness, meaninglessness of our existence. Individual character is a lie conceived to suppress the fact of our mortality, and cultural heroics are impressed upon us to create functional contributors to society, creating a logic that hinges on humans’ symbolic nature, a logic that says, Society/My children/My colleagues will remember me if I ______. Basic 20
self-esteem as children, then “cosmic significance” as adults - fundamental human needs, both - can only germinate in the soil of illusions of character and culture (p. 3). “To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics - what we might call ‘prison heroism’: the smugness of the insiders who ‘know’ ” (p. 87). Animality figures large in his theoretical edifice, as that from which one must gain a comfortable sense of distance: “The prison of one’s character is painstakingly built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness” (p. 87).
One can have no cosmic significance if one is ‘only’ an animal. Becker, in my view, takes important steps towards understanding how psychoanalysis and philosophy can help explain the history of humans’ use and abuse of nonhuman animals. The history of humans’ relations with their nonhuman others can be seen as overdetermined - a long history of practical dependence aided and abetted by an undercurrent of melancholy and aggression, negative affects which might be explained through the repression of mortality reminders, our most obvious link with nonhuman animals being that which we most want to deny: embodiment or “creatureliness.”
Take the modem factory farm, with its routine mechanism, as an example of such overdetermined collective behavior. Surely slaughterhouses provide a practical and economic function: they provide meat, a plentiful source of protein. If we modernize all the gears that function to pluck feathers or saw through bone, it is for efficency’s sake - get the meat out faster, maximize profit margins, etc., and the entire apparatus could easily be explained in these terms. This is not all slaughterhouses do, however. The meat industry, I will argue, is a culture industry as well. As John Berger once wrote, “ 21
‘Everywhere animals disappear’ ” (in Lippit, p. 1). We have witnessed the death of animals on farms (although this is less and less the case), we see roadkill along highways, we see them kill and eat each other, and in the news we receive constant bulletins on the staggering losses of biodiversity in this or that geographical area due to the expansion of human settlements and our rapacious desire for resources. Is it possible that the trauma of witnessing all this death, and the trauma of feeling like there’s little we can do to stop it
(except drive more slowly or become vegetarian), is collectively presenting us with a loss that we are inappropriately trying to master?
“Repetition compulsion” is the term Freud gave to the reenactment of past experiences, often traumatic events, without the subject being aware of his behavior’s meaning or his “own role in initiating the repetition” {Psychoanalytic Terms and
Concepts, p. 226). Although the concept was revised several times, Freud suggested that one motivation might be to gain control or mastery over a hurtful event, or simply mastering the feeling of loss. Seen this way, an experience is repeated precisely because we haven’t yet mastered it. Are we trying to master our feeling of losing our animal others by repeatedly killing them? If so, the mechanical efficiency of the modem slaughterhouse betrays our lack of mastery over this loss - we kill over and over again in the hopes that eventually we’ll accustom ourselves to this loss. Worse yet, the mechanical nature of the job means that we are not ourselves doing the killing, distancing us from any possibility of ‘working through’ the trauma we are trying to figure out how to manage - we are acting without acting. Freud’s notion of “melancholia” might also inform this analysis. Melancholia is an “ ‘incomplete’ form of mourning”, a mourning in 22
which one is not (completely) aware of what one has lost (Lippit, 17). This “unknown loss” consumes the subject since the work of mourning is being carried out unconsciously and ambivalently, resulting in the ego becoming “poor and empty” instead of the external world becoming “poor and empty,” as is the case with mourning {Standard Edition, p.
245-6). Lippit has suggested that animal sacrifice may be viewed “as a melancholic ritual,” “serv[ing] to affirm and renounce humanity’s primal identification with animals, and the need to overcome it” (p. 18). Can we not view the factory farm or scientific experimentation on animals in this light as well, as “melancholic ritual [s]” in which animals take on the role of a “pre-egoical self,” and the split between this pre-egoical self and the ego is ruthlessly reaffirmed by repeatedly killing this other, the ‘animal’ that ‘we’ ambivalently identify with but no longer want to be? Is this the kind of pathological relationship we want to have with nonhuman animals, in which conscious, moral decisions about their livelihood and destiny give way to the cruelty of unconscious, compulsive, and melancholic actions?
The figure of the animal is a recurrent one in Freud and Lacan’s writings, and while remaining largely unthematized, is a kind of alien presence that insists on being not-quite-absent. In bridging Akira Mizuta Lippit’s Electric Animal with Kelly Oliver’s
Animal Lessons, I argue that psychoanalysis historically opens the door to human identification with the animal other, but also repeats the humanism it purports to undermine. Vicky Kirby identifies this as a bonafide trend in much antihumanist theory today, in which attempts to critique the Nature/Culture split, which can translate also as the Cartesian mind/body split, often end up reifying the silence and mechanism of nature 23
against the interpretive capacity of culture: “Nature is deemed to be thoughtless - either relatively or absolutely - and political interventions into Cartesian logic are much more likely to preserve this assumption by expanding the category ‘Culture’ to transform and textualize whatever it is defined against.” When culture is expanded in this way, it eclipses the material world, rendering nature “absent,” not unlike the infant in Lacan’s mirror stage, who seeks to annihilate the other by subsuming them (p. 71).
Psychoanalysis is by no means immune from such cultural expansiveness, despite its essentially antihumanist nature in Freud’s formulation, as Kelly Oliver points out.
Oliver detects in much of western philosophy, including the writings of Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva, a “latent humanism” (p. 7). Lacan’s animal musings, for example, are indicative of a general trend among psychoanalysts, delving into the biological sciences not out of any particular concern for animals, but only to lend credence to whatever theory of human mind is being explicated, as well as (and this was especially the case for
Freud the psychiatrist) “science envy.” Zoology is used and abused in order to “add rhetorical force to their descriptions of the distinctive qualities of the human,” animality adding up to so many sandbags to “shore up the borders of man” (Oliver, p. 10). The central thrust of Animal Lessons is precisely this covering up of tracks, referred to throughout the book as “animal pedagogy”: Animals teach us about ourselves, but when we arrive at this new understanding we aver that we got there through our reason alone.
That such disavowal takes place, however, does not render psychoanalysis useless to animal studies, and indeed, that Oliver’s Animal Lessons is peppered with the word
“disavowal” could be seen as testifying to this, as it is a major concept in psychoanalysis. 24
Throughout the history of human’s relationship to animals, one can see patterns of disavowal, as well as patterns of abjection, narcissism, anxiety, and melancholia, concepts which, of course, are the stock and trade of psychoanalytic theory.
The development of the notion of the unconscious is historically rooted in Freud and Joseph Breuer’s experiments with the application of animal magnetism and hypnosis to hysteria (Lippit, p. 97). With the discovery of neurosis and the “splitting of the mind,”
Freud and Breuer, as if detecting a black hole, uncovered an invisible psychical dynamic that has “the capacity to accept and nurture ideational complexes that - structurally as well as thematically - cannot otherwise find their way into the world of consciousness.”
In the words of Lippit, this elsewhere, this other subjectivity, “opens a space within the psychophilosophical constitution for the entry of a formerly inadmissible ideational plexus grouped under the figure of the animal” (p. 103). The occurrence of condensation and displacement in the dreams of “normal” individuals shows that they share in the same psychic economy as neurotics. As Lippit points out, the resemblance between
“unconscious ideas” in Studies in Hysteria and “properties attributed to the animal” indeed becomes ‘uncanny,’ such that the text actually performs a release of repressed affect in its laying bare of the operations of repression. The unconscious is an immediacy of affect, since, like the figure of the animal, it is “disengaged from the discursive indexes of consciousness,” an absent presence that is always in danger of erupting (p. 103).
Regression (not to be confused with ‘repression’), as the return to a previous state, enacts the “primal scene” of man becoming man (p. 104). Because of their lack of contact with or complete splitting off from the discursivity of consciousness, unconscious ideas are 25
not subject to the wear and tear of conscious ideas, and so “are endowed with a perpetual vitality” (p. 104). From Studies: “The ideas which have become pathological have persisted with such freshness and affective strength because they have been denied the normal wearing-away processes by means of abreaction and reproduction in states of uninhibited association” (Freud and Breuer in Lippit, p. 104). This vitality resembles the vitality attributed to animals in the western philosophical tradition, as entities that lack language, and therefore singularity and death, a kind of fluidity uninterrupted by the cancellation of a single organism. Such unimpeded vitality, the repression of the “primal scene” evinced through the hypnosis of hysterics, and the unconscious and animal life as participating in prelinguistic communication, shows that psychoanalysis has not only always been linked to animal studies, but actually, along with Freud’s incorporation of
Darwinian evolution, further paved the way for thinking about human and nonhuman animals occupying different positions along the same spectrum of being. Or, as Lippit puts it, “Psychoanalysis had undone the exclusion of animals from the field of subjectivity” (p. 121).
Freud’s forays into the animal world, however, do not end there. Two years after
Studies in Hysteria was published, Freud wrote a letter to his friend and physician
Wilhelm Fliess in which he connects the evolution of man’s posture and subsequent locomotion with his sense of smell: “the notion was linked to the changed part played by the sensations of smell: upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth becoming repulsive”
(Lippit, p. 125). In the history of western thought, the sense most identified with animals 26
and animality has been that of smell. Animals are guided by, and think with, their noses.
Animals, most notably dogs since humans and dogs share such a long coevolutionary history, do not seem to be disgusted by odors that are repulsive to humans, odors that are closer to the ground, as Freud notes. Vicky Heame writes of the dog, “he sees what we see - his eyes aren’t defective - but what he believes are the scents of the garden behind us” (Lippit, p. 124). It is difficult for humans to imagine basing any stable knowledge on our sense of smell, however, as scents are fleeting, and our memory tends to fail us when it comes to smells, an empirical truth noted by Freud and historian Alain Corbin. Writes
Corbin, “olfactory sensations are ephemeral, and thus defy comparisons through memory” (Lippit, p. 124). Corbin also notes, however, that (most likely due to the nose’s proximity to the brain itself) “in the nineteenth century it was elevated to being the privileged instrument of recollection, that which reveals the coexistence of the self and the universe, and, finally, the precondition of intimacy” (Lippit, p. 125). As noted in a recent Psychology Today article, “Interestingly, visual, auditory (sound), and tactile
(touch) information do not pass through these brain areas. This may be why olfaction, more than any other sense, is so successful at triggering emotions and memories.”
Paradoxical, then, that for humans, smell is at once a connecting force and that which is used to distance ourselves from the animal world, and also both an ephemeral sensation and that which opens deep wells of memory.
Here, we must make a slight detour with regard to sight, smell, and the different world-building activities that result from privileging one sense or the other - a sensorial fork in the evolutionary and cognitive road. There are two interesting parallels, in fact, 27
that may light the way here: The location of meaning in language according to structural linguistics, and the location of Being in the phenomenology of Henri Bergson. In both, notions of purity and stability are deconstructed. Ferdinand de Saussure posited that meaning in language arises from difference, derived from the spaces between signifiers, the arbitrariness of the sign being fenced in by how it contrasts with other elements in the system, making any language closed and necessarily self-referential. Both Lacan and
Derrida borrow heavily from Saussure, Derrida for his notion of grammatology and
Lacan for his ‘return to Freud,’ meaning Freud’s constant references to speech and language. Both Lacan and Derrida stress the elsewhere of meaning, its constant deferral in signifying chains. Henri Bergson’s notions of Being and flux resemble this
‘elsewhere.’ From his Creative Evolution: “Life in general is mobility itself’ (in Lippit, p.
83-84). According to Bergson, western philosophy has tended to derive notions of Being from “snapshots,” frozen states artificially plucked from the flow of time, and argues that a truer understanding of Being must include understandings of the space between fixed intervals. Or in Akira Mizuta Lippit’s words, “What is at rest thus gamers the designations of presence; the mobile, transitory form receives no such recognition” (p.
86). Analogous to the animal vitality of unconscious ideas, whose excess cannot be assimilated into conscious thought, Being is for Bergson an “indefinable surplus of movement and becoming.” “There is more in a movement than in the successive positions attributed to the moving object, more in a becoming than in the forms passed through in turn, more in the evolution of form than the forms assumed one after another”
(Bergson in Lippit, p. 90-91). We see here a relationship between Bergson’s “snapshots” 28
and signifiers in linguistic systems as entities that are at once present and absent, absent because of a reliance on something else, always requesting deferral (but never itself admitting lack). There is also, of course, a relationship between these terms and animal vitality and the unconscious - “antidiscursive forces” though the latter are, in the difficulty (or impossibility!) of making them submit to thought and language. There is something ineffable in the movement of animality, unconscious processes, Being, and meaning, realms from which the human, in her experience of the world, seems to have been abjected.
Why this digression? Knowledge can only be rendered from a world that is intelligible, and thus actionable, and the ephemeral nature of smell makes it difficult to systematize. Ignoring the constant deferral in signifying chains and paying attention to
“snapshots” to arrive at conceptions of Being are examples of a difficult and fluid reality being simplified for intelligibility’s sake. For human beings, the seen world is that which is most consistent (the size of our visual cortexes relative to other animals is evidence of this), making sight a stabilizing force, providing for the fixity of the sign, and thus for all human communication: “Scents do not provide material and thus repeatable signifiers, and therefore cannot form a semiotic system” (Lippit, p. 123). No wonder, then, that humans’ inability to conceive of cogitation based on smell (or anything other than sight) led to the disavowal - often in the form of a knee-jerk reaction - of the possibility of animal thought. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, “when we see we remain what we are; but when we smell we are taken over by otherness” (Lippit, p. 123). Why this otherness? For Freud, the move to a bipedal stance is wrapped up, firstly, with the turning 29
away from olfaction as a more central means of processing environment and, secondly,
with shame, the exposure of genitalia coinciding with this diminishment of the
importance of the realm of scent. For Horkheimer and Adorno, since smell enjoins the
human to entertain an animal past, representing “the archetypal longing for the lower
forms of existence,” it is disgraced in its association with “lower social strata, lesser races
and base animals” (p. 123). For Freud as for Horkheimer and Adorno, smelling reminds
us of a shameful past (a past we should be admonished for begrudging), of being an animal.
That humans have a hard time imagining (without disgust) ways of thinking that
revolve around smells and smelling does not render such ways of thinking impossible. In
their attempt to locate in the animal kingdom “the beginnings of aesthetics,” Jeffrey
Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy write of the coatimundis of Arizona, and their
tendency to “sniff the air intently” for extended periods of time:
One old female, the Witch, would also sometimes arise during one of the group’s intervals of relaxation on a cliff ledge, go to the edge and sit for five minutes or so, sniffing calmly, slowly, and deeply. The thought that she might be appreciating and not just assessing the world around her occurred to observers, who could not resist comparing her to a concert-goer or gallery visitor, (p. 197-8)
To the traditional ethologist, of course, such comparisons are anthropomorphic, and so
have little scientific purchase. However, it is only through such anthropomorphic
projections that any kind of continuity between human and nonhuman forms of cognition
or affect can be established. Freud, at the end of his letter to Fleiss, detects a scent of
human narcissism in the turning away from olfaction, and in a clever visual metaphor, 30
writes “He turns up his nose = he regards himself as something particularly noble”
(Lippit, p. 125).
Humans’ ambiguous relationship with olfaction, the shame but also the longing and loss associated with the sense, connects with Freud’s notion of melancholia and Julia
Kristeva’s notion of abjection. The whole of animal studies, including this paper, is, in a sense, a bringing to consciousness animality as a lost object and a coming to terms with abjection, going through a process of acknowledging that notions of the human have been constructed on top of a disavowed “animal pedagogy,” as Kelly Oliver would say. We might call this an anthro-apology. Kari Weil writes of the changing orientation Freud took towards smell, largely as a result of being a dog owner. His favorite chow’s reticence to be close to him because of the stench given off by Freud’s cancerous jaw led him to rethink the sense of smell, according to Weil, “as a capacity for truth telling rather than something to be ashamed o f’ (p. 95). Having read the biography of a dog whose battle with cancer he identified with, he wrote a letter to the author in which he remarked that “in spite of the remoteness in organic development there is nevertheless a feeling of close relationship, of undeniably belonging together” (Weil, p. 95). Julia Kristeva provides a mode of analysis, based on Freud’s notion of the uncanny, that sheds light on the recurrent nature of humanity’s disavowal of its animal origins. Abjection is an essential part of the process of subject formation, whereby the distinction between self and other is made clear through reactions of horror and disgust at that which the self does not want to be. Abjection is essentially about place, about where the self has its proper 31
home apart from the location of the abject; “ ‘Where am I?’ instead o f‘Who am I.’ ” The carver of such a place, the “deject,” never rests in his operations of border-patrol, he
“never stops demarcating his universe,” for the space that concerns the deject, the becoming-subject, “is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic” (Kristeva, p. 8). What marks out abjection from uncanniness is precisely the continuous nature of the job, that “discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confronts that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate” (p. 6). The nature of the unconscious, as we know from Freud, is that it represses, but in abjection, repression takes on a strange character. In both, that which is repressed or abjected is never completely excluded. Repressed material, however, returns of its own accord, and does not have the horrific ambiguity of abjected material, which the self is both drawn to and repulsed by. The abject is kept at arm’s length, a defiled rem(a)inder of where one does not want to stand, implying “a refusal but also a sublimating elaboration” (p. 7). For
Kristeva, the feeling of horror is precisely this dual sense of attraction/revulsion, the height of ambivalence. Strangely in line with recent findings in cognitive science on proprioception and sense of bodily self, the experience of “this body is mine” is not assumed from the beginning, but “must be developed and maintained” (Youtube, 1:02).
“The ambivalence of horror is a semiotic force that territorializes the body. Without the powers of horror, the symbolic’s prohibitions that demand individualization would have no teeth, no space” (13:23). 32
Becoming a human subject means not standing in the place of the animal other.
“The abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal. Thus, by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals, or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder” (Kristeva, p.
12-13). The othering of animals and of animality, once cast in terms of abjection, links processes of ego development to human exceptionalism. Bridging Kristeva’s abjection and Kelly Oliver’s notion of “animal pedagogy,” human exceptionalism seems to unfold as (at least) a three-part process whereby humans’ abject animality, learn from them as from an other conveniently forgotten to have been othered, then forget the origin of the lesson as residing in the animal; abjection, learning, disavowal. Seen this way, ambivalence-as-horror also unfolds within animal pedagogy, since the figure of the animal cannot be totally erased without also confusingly suspending notions of the human. Thus, the animal, as an abjected construct, must be kept close enough to continually reject in order to reify that which is human. As Kristeva warns, however, the subject or deject cannot keep this up forever, the abject being “at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject” (p. 5). Eventually, the self must abject itself, and this comes about through the realization that the experience of want is the signified of abjection, the subject’s realization that “all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being” (p. 5). In my view, the process of finding 33
“the impossible within,” finding that which has been abjected inside oneself and actually as constituting oneself, would then be a step towards dismantling human exceptionalism, since the abjection of self consists in boundary-testing rather than boundary-patrolling.
Alice Kuznier finds a similar cure in what she calls “empathetic shame,” in the words of
Kari Weil, “accepting or acknowledging abjection in oneself rather than disavowing it by projecting it onto an animal” (p. 140-1).
We find ambivalence similar to abjection and a metaphysics of biological continuism in the ‘surrealist biology’ of Roger Caillois, whose psychoanalytic exposition of the male entomologist’s gaze onto the mating rituals of the praying mantis provide us further means of bridging human and nonhuman worlds. Recall that for Julia Kristeva, horror is, at base, ambivalence, and instances abound in human cultural life of ambivalent attitudes towards nature and its representatives for man: animals. Caillois locates one such instance - “an ambivalent attitude” - in the myriad names attributed to mantises throughout Europe: “On the one hand, the insect is considered sacred, which explains its usual name ofprego-Dieou [pray-to-God]... On the other hand, it is at the same time considered diabolical, as manifests in the symmetrical name of prego-DiableJpray-to- the-devil] ...” (p. 71). Moreover, likely “encouraged by the mantis’s remarkable anthropomorphic appearance,” Caillois notes that unlike other insects, names of mantises around the world do not tend to carry the name of the entomologist who discovered it, and after a long digression regarding mantis’s names, concludes that “these terms, on the whole, are purely and simply lyrical” (p. 73, 74). After noting the general (male) human obsession with mantises, and especially their mating ritual, in which the female’s 34
devouring of the male so closely mirrors the human psychoanalytic drama of castration anxiety, Caillois extrapolates from the mantis a “symmetry” or “continuity between nature and mind,” leading him to postulate “the possibility as well as the efficacy of objective ideograms” (p. 76, italics mine). The objective ideogram is, for Caillois, not only a symmetry between mind and nature, but, borrowing from Freud’s notion of condensation in dream analysis, an overdetermined element, indeed, a clue to the
“systematic overdetermination” of the universe at large (p. 76). Such overdetermination is not given by humans or cultural life, but is built into the structure of the natural world, meaning that in the case of the mantis, the entomologist does not read into the mating ritual a coincidental appearance of castration anxiety. Rather, the human observer of the ritual is merely noticing the cause of that particular anxiety as already being in the world, a prehuman artifact. Read this way, Caillois concludes his reflection on the mantis by urging psychoanalysis to ground itself in comparative biology, and recognizing that the fear of being eaten (what happens to the male mantis while mating) is “the original phenomenon,” of which castration anxiety would be but a “vestigial residue”: “Castration anxiety would be a specification of the fear of being devoured” (p. 81).
Caillois’s redistribution of the various complexes discovered by psychoanalysis into the broader, natural world, and Kristeva’s idea of abjection as a process that territorializes the body, preface the questions I pose in chapter three. In a process similar to abjection of self and to Caillois’s idea of “psychasthenia,” by which something akin to the Freudian death drive draws subjectivity outside the body, can deterritorializing the body lead to greater identification with, and thus caring for, nature? As remarked earlier 35
in this chapter, we find a certain excess throughout theory’s grasp of animality, a remainder that haunts philosophy and psychoanalysis, never drained of its vitality, always returning with the same force, like unconscious ideas or like the engine driving changes in states in Bergson’s ontology. The converse of the ‘something more’ which is almost pathologically posited as that which demarcates human being from the rest of the natural world each time the old demarcation (language-use, tool-making, culture) is erased by empirical observation, there exists also a ‘something more’ in the wilderness beyond language, a callous substance, an excess that stubbornly refuses circumscription by human symbolic activity. Can we trace human aggressivity toward animals to their status for us as representatives of a sublime nature - the bearers of nature’s message to man that it will not submit to representation? As psychoanalysis draws us into confrontation with our limited nature, our lack of control over that which was previously experienced as ours, that “our ego does not even rule in its own house,” we begin to conceive of humanity not as a storehouse of rational being, or even a ‘something’ at all, but of a fundamental lack, a lack to be mourned (Zizek, p. 2). As Lacan reminds us, “the subject is the introduction of a loss in reality” since its fragmented body is brought together by identifying with the Other in the mirror stage, an image, furthermore, that is articulated through the exteriority of language (in Lippit, p. 98). Does psychoanalysis bring us to a place of proper mourning in that it confronts us with this loss - not our loss, since the loss does not occur for a subject that was once whole, but by confronting us with a constitutive loss, that we are the loss'? 36
According to Lacan, we are closest to the real, that terrifying indivisibility beyond signification, as infants, before being caught in the signifying web of language and culture. It is the slippery realm of that which is beyond and resists symbolization, and is therefore “ ‘the object of anxiety par excellence’ ” (Dictionary, 163). As that which cannot be (fully) articulated, but rather that which interrupts articulation, the Lacanian real bears more than a passing resemblance to notions of the sublime, as variously defined throughout the history of philosophy and aesthetics. Despite differences in their conception of the sublime, for Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Jung, the sublime was beyond the ken of thought, radically other, alien and awesome (Morley, p. 16-17). Beyond reason, beyond language, sometimes terrifying, sometimes striking one with awe and wonder, the sublime experience was said to consist of a confrontation quite similar to what might be expected from a confrontation with the real, as both realms exist as a positive negativity, radically undetermined yet impossibly powerful. For Kant, the natural world was a source of sublimity - both beautiful and crushing. Recalling the etymology of the word, from the Latin ‘sub,’ meaning ‘up to’ and either ‘limen’ or ‘limes,’ meaning
‘threshold’ or ‘boundary,’ respectively, sublimation, in Freudian analysis, is the process whereby unacceptable urges are pushed down into the subterranean layers of the unconscious, and forced to submit to a process of being stripped down or molded in accordance with where social convention establishes the threshold for acceptable behavior. Since for Freud, normal ego functioning is based on repression and the reworking of animal drives, sublimation positions culture as essentially the shunting of nature; culture abjects nature. Could sublime experience, regardless of how it comes 37
about, then enact a radical reorientation of the individual, or put more bluntly, would crushing the ego be good for nature? Certainly, if built on a fundamental lack, one less smudge on the ‘as such’ of the real might leave the natural world, and animals as the representatives of that world for us, in a better place. From Simon Morley’s introduction to The Sublime:
If this experience [of the sublime] is enacted within the dialectics set up between ‘nature’ on the one side, and ‘culture’ on the other - with the sublime signifying the unconstrained and unconditional power of nature (desire, void, loss of self) - then to what extent is succumbing to its allure also a way of accepting our domination by and subjection to nature? (p. 18) 38
Chapter Three: Microbiomes. Abjected Animalitv. and the Prepersona/ Body
“Ultimately, from whatever angle one may approach things, the fundamental question proves to be that of distinction''’ - Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”
“...it seems only natural to think of an origin as a fixed and discrete event, captured forever in the aspic of one particular place and time. After all, we require initializing coordinates in order to discriminate one thing from another.” - Vicky Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies
To where can we point and say, ‘The human subject is there ’? Darwin and Freud both complicated the discreteness of “the human” as individual subject and category by positing a continuum in which humanity arrives at itself through the animal, deflating
Enlightenment smugness by refusing to grant the human any special place from which to enumerate its own being. In poststructuralist accounts of identity, the subject’s shifting
coordinates are determined more by context than by some internal coherence, a
distributed selfhood existing only as a node where anonymous social forces converge, not unlike the figure of a pointillist painting. I would add to this picture another field of
anonymity, a biological one, one in which an experiencing self is pulled together and
sustained by a life which is not strictly one’s own. This will not, however, be a treatise on
biological determinism, but more one that explores an indeterminate biology, the idea that the specificity of our biological information only thickens the boundaries between
human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, exposing the human subject’s frayed edges.
In this chapter I borrow from both Darwinian evolution, psychoanalysis, and the
poststructuralism of Vicky Kirby in contesting the centrality of the human subject,
interrogating her location, and wondering aloud whether the dissolution of her bodily 39
boundaries might facilitate a broader dissolution of the Nature/Culture binary that is kept
in place largely (or perhaps only) because of our collective insistence on Culture’s self-
generation and enclosure. (By this, I mean culture’s special ability to enumerate its own properties, not by appealing to some brute materiality or the reality of an objective
‘outside,’ but as a discursive force that proceeds by way of citing a (privileged) historical past). By adhering to a strict division between nature and culture, culture seems to enumerate itself out of thin air, the human becomes unnatural, and nature abjected, all of which is problematic.
In psychoanalytic and poststructuralist accounts of identity formation, nature cannot tell you who you are. In the picture of ontogenesis afforded by Julia Kristeva’s writings on abjection, a loathing enters the world and carves a space for the subject-to-be.
Recall that the symbolic, in the Lacanian framework Kristeva borrows from, refers to that
social-cultural-linguistic realm that structures the subject’s relation to herself. The symbolic’s footing on the loose terrain of Nature’s realness (its being beyond the reach of language and therefore thought) is always unsure, leaving this subject-to-be anxiously
scrambling for firmer ground through which it can know itself and through which the
symbolic can enact its prohibitions. The brute materiality of nature, by definition beyond or immune to language and the productive capacities of culture, is abjected as the subject
- now the ego - is inducted into the world of language, the world of unmediated nature
forever foreclosed. However, for Kristeva, the untenableness of this foreclosure
foreshadows the eventual abjection of the self, when she realizes (and who is it, precisely,
that realizes?) that she is in fact constituted by the abject. Concordant with 40
psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and cognitive scientists working on “embodied cognition,” I reiterate that a self is always a bodily self, and Kristeva’s is a provocative account of body-forging, of boundary construction, maintenance, and dissolution. But if we concede the violence or horror required in maintaining distinction (and what could be more basic than the distinction between an organism and its environment?), if the subject is doomed to drown in nature anyway, then it seems pertinent to me to limit the struggle of maintaining distinction as a way of dampening human-on-nonhuman violence. In the previous chapter, we linked processes of ego development in Lacan and Kristeva to broader, cultural enactments of human exceptionalism via the abjecting of humans’ animal otherness. In the fashion of psychoanalysis, with its anonymous, amorphous, and atemporal ‘system unconscious,’ and various poststructuralist theories of identity formation with their emphasis on anonymous social forces, I hope to discover in this chapter an anonymity within bodily being in order to further dislodge the Cartesian subject by thickening the boundary between human organism (the subject of culture) and environment (the Nature whose boundaries must be delimited and contained for culture to believe its sovereignty). However, I also must attend to the fact that distinction, despite its basic violence, is what allows me to write at all.
It is now an established fact in the biological sciences that the human body is mostly nonhuman. By cell count, bacteria outnumbers ‘me’ ten to one; by gene count, ‘I’ am outnumbered one hundred to one. Depending on how we conceive of physical constitution, therefore, the average human body is actually only ten or one percent human. The rest is a panoply of organisms that live out their own miniature dramas with 41
‘you’ as the environmental background of their activity. This is not to suggest that these critters are passive riders, or worse, parasitic (although they certainly can become virulent). Molecular biologist Bonnie Bassler reminds us that bacteria inform the systems that constitute our body’s very functioning, educating our immune systems, guiding our bodies in the processing of environments so as to keep us from being ill (and thus keeping their communities intact). And, as the Earth’s oldest living organisms, it is even possible that the single-celled bacteria devised multicellularity, essentially paving the way for evolution to proceed along more complicated lines. Thanks largely to the Human
Microbiome Project, biologists seem to be increasingly aware of the interworking of individual vertebrates’ “microbiomes,” the totality of nonhuman genetic material that thrives in and on individual bodies (nytimes). These bacterial communities are unique to each of us, but across the board, they defend us from illness, break down our food, produce vitamins, and - perhaps not surprising given all these physiological influences - may even sway our moods and appetites for certain foods, providing scientific weight to the idiom “a gut feeling.” As modem theory continues to vacillate between various degrees of porousness between self and world, the existence of the multifarious worlds of microbiomes overlapping with the body’s ‘own’ territory pinches whatever remains of the (devastated) Cartesian subject into an ever-squeezed space, confusing and multiplying boundaries between body and world.
If psychoanalysis has already revealed an other within us, a parallel universe of
unconscious complexes and ideas with which we live in extreme intimacy despite their
stubborn refusal (I’m anthropomorphizing here) to be integrated into conscious 42
experience or any coherent ‘sense of self,’ microbiology provides an image of another world, equally other and yet also extremely intimate. I argue that these fields of alterity that at once compose us and precede us without actually feeling like they are (a part of) us, are not merely analogous to one another, but tell us something fundamental about the self-world correlate that is typically the project of phenomenology, and with which psychoanalysis must also contend. Only an incredibly bloated self, an impossibly capacious conscious bandwidth, could accommodate a rich and working sensation and perception of all the others in its world and that seem to impinge on its identity. Indeed, how are we to know when our microbiome is affecting our mood at any moment, differentiating between ‘their’ needs and ‘ours’? How can I be sure that the deliciousness of a particular food is due to ‘my’ preference and not ‘theirs’? Is it not an affront to the autonomous, Enlightenment subject that it should be so affected by a world whose encroachment onto its home turf we are only beginning to realize the extent of?
Microbiomes offer a particularly instructive image, a connective node between several concepts or theoretical frameworks that, in their own way, complicate and confuse the boundaries between nature/culture, living/nonliving, and human/nonhuman:
Julia Kristeva’s Powers o f Horror, Derrida’s concept of “limitrophy” from The Animal
That Therefore I Am, Vicky Kirby’s Quantum Anthropologies, and Timothy Morton’s
“queer ecology” all trouble the very notion of distinction through an attention to origins.
Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust o f This Planet offers unique syntheses of various philosophers’ views on the living/nonliving binary. Roger Caillois’s “legendary psychasthenia” is an instructive case for how those in the humanities might productively 43
talk about biological phenomena. Just as Caillois writes of praying mantises and walking sticks in his theoretical pursuit of a deeper reality that eclipses and, in fact, prefigures all cultural phenomena, the concept of the microbiome, I contend, fortifies the attempts of these theorists in their pursuit of a common and evolving origin shared by human cultural activity and the broader nonhuman world. The late writings of Merleau-Ponty provide fertile ground, as well, for thinking through the very real species-muddles that evolutionary theory puts forward, which Dylan Trigg has heavily borrowed from in formulating his “unhuman phenomenology.” Throughout, we will also be exploring analogy, which, like anthropomorphism, is a necessary danger.
Let us start by examining this ‘home turf mentioned above. In Julia Kristeva’s
Powers o f Horror, we are afforded a theory of identity sprung from a body whose known borders are given from the outside by an Other, an Other whose law cannot grip a porous, fluid substance but requires a piece of terra firma through which to enact its prohibitions.
In other words, the symbolic only has power over a differentiated subject, making the loathing of abjection, as an engine driving the division of subjects from objects, a tool of the symbolic order. ‘Our’ bodies, and thus our selves, are told to us, communicated through signs that are not only information and law, but the ground upon which that information is understood and on which that law is enforced. Like Lacan, then, Kristeva’s ego is not a ‘something,’ an addition to the world, but a negative space, a covering up, a void. The ego is given in mimesis, as with Lacan’s mirror stage, but Kristeva’s contribution here is that mimesis is “logically and chronologically secondary. Even before being like, ‘I’ am not but do separate, reject, ab-ject” (p. 13). For the ego/body-to- 44
be, a horror sets in, a disgust, a drive-like loathing which demarcates the place where the symbolic (Lacan’s “big Other”) can dictate its terms. This demarcation is difficult to imagine, almost like a ripping of space-time, a cloud of egoic potentiality that can only consolidate after the something-who-will-be-someone violently clears away a space for it to become. Time passes strangely for the subject who is secretly, impossibly composed of the abject, a “double” time in which a pre-objectal field “before the [subject’s] beginning,” a past which is never entirely forgotten, a world prior to the subject/object split, breaks forth into the speaking subject’s present (p. 12). In other words, if “primal repression” occurs “prior to the springing forth of the ego,” “secondary repression” is the speaking subject’s sublimation of the abject, a naming and curtailing of the “pro nominal” or “pre-objectal” (p. 11). The abject is what creates a world of subjects and objects, but is essentially a process that is never finished and doomed to fail, as the materiality (object-ivity) of the corpse is every living person’s fate. The field of the abject ♦ fascinates the subject through ambiguous presentations of the objects of its primal repression, forcing the subject to continuously revisit the emptiness of its objects and its own true whereabouts. This ‘forcing’ is jouissance, the experience of the “I” as
“heterogeneous,” when the subject feels a joy that is not its own desire, or discovering the
Other to already be in its place, finding a deeper part of ‘himself that came before him
and fashioned his existence but which is maddeningly immune to his attempts to possess
or incorporate it: ‘It’ possesses him by dint of having paved the way for him, but he will
never possess ‘it.’ Worse, the impossible realness of it, this horror that is ambiguous to its
core, is that I am as repulsed as I am drawn to this field of oblivion. For Kristeva, 45
jouissance is linked to the double-time in which the abject that is primal repression’s object, a forgotten past, returns and the speaking subject discovers in the present that his desire is that of the Other. This “straying on excluded ground” is the source of his jouissance (p. 8). Jouissance and desire represent opposing poles of experience, where desire comes only through sublimating the abject, the subject not consciously knowing the truth of his desire, whereas jouissance comes through the ego folding back upon itself, discovering to both its detriment and fascination that its desire is not organic but instead has been given. Since jouissance refers to the sublime experience of discovering the Other to already be in our place, it is not without jouissance that this paper has been written.
I see two points of intersection between Kristeva’s conception of abjection and the human subject’s physical constitution in light of microbiota. In both, we have something preceding the felt sense of self - before the subject, there is the abject - something before the subject or ego’s origin. Microbiota provide an image of the “primal repression” that is the object of abjection: “But what is primal repression? Let us call it the ability of the speaking being, always already haunted by the Other, to divide, reject,
repeat” (p. 12, italics mine). What’s being partitioned here is the subject through
abjection, abjected bits falling away in the unceasing process of border patrol. What we
have here is something of a concrete metaphor between the speaking subject of
psychoanalysis and ‘life itself,’ for what else could be the simplest, most fundamental
image of what life is than the cellular process of dividing, rejecting, and repeating? And,
as pointed out in chapter two, Kristeva gives us an image of ‘the animal’ as always 46
having been abjeeted from ‘the human’: “The abject confronts us... with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animaF (p. 10). So, we find the animal within as abject(ed), but what of the bacterial within? Could the “deepest wells of memory” opened up by the abject’s ambiguously bidden/unbidden return trace a prepersonal history of the body, which not only existed before the individual speaking subject, but also participates in (or is) the evolutionary fabric from which the human was fashioned, the anonymous field of biological life from which the fixity of species emerges? Confronting this anonymity shall be a task tackled at the end of this chapter.
The other way in which I see a resemblance between the abject and microbiota is that, in both, we encounter a disturbance of categories, of what is ‘properly’ human, a disturbance that is brought about through questioning notions of dependence. In finding our bodies and thus ourselves - since selves arise out of and are sustained by bodies - to be mostly bacteria, we find “the impossible within” simply by placing the human body under the microscope, and as a result, our personal borders become harder to define (p,
5). Kristeva finds the cause of abjection in “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (p. 4). If our otherly constitution, the lack of respect shown for ‘our’ boundaries, does not disturb us enough, we also find that we need these others. The powers of horror carve out a space where the subject will stand.
Similarly, by breaking down our food and producing our vitamins, and also by coming billions of years before us and instructing the world in the ways of multicellular organization, bacteria past and present allow us to have been and to be. We are shot through and sustained by these collective others. The ‘impossibility’ of these microbial 47
communities, which highlights the porousness and dependence of the human, as individual subject and as collective autobiography - the story we tell ourselves about ourselves - only exists as an impossibility to the Enlightenment subject, the subject who has heretofore clung to an image of species fixity and to an image of the autonomous, rational human who became modem by his own hand.
I take the figure of the microbiome as a useful jumping off point for the concepts written of here, but Kristeva’s notion of abjection seems a special case, where the microbiome within the human body is not simply a metaphor for abjection, but a case in point, a kind of non-analogue. Does the psychoanalytic concept of abjection need a biological or physiological component, or does thinking through the biological side to
Kristeva’s notion of abjection make her arguments more apparent or more robust? I do not pose the question to suggest that Kristeva’s Powers of Horror - or psychoanalysis as a whole - has not always been about the body. Since Freud, the ‘theory’ of psychoanalysis has kept the body front and center - its preoccupations with drives, the phallus, etc., and how identities and communication cohere around the facticity of embodiment. Rather, since so much of this paper is concerned with interrogating the nature/culture binary, and with probing the boundaries of life, boundaries which are simultaneously material and semiotic, it is important that we do not, in Vicky Kirby’s words, slip into a “reaffirmation of cultural mediation” when we talk about abjection, especially since those theorists fully enthralled with the linguistic turn might take the numerous literary examples in Powers o f Horror as grounds for seeking its evidence only in cultural production (p. 8). 48
The most important reason for making a strong, explicit case for collapsing the metaphor between microbiomes and abjection is that metaphor tempts us to preserve distinction, and this can be especially harmful due to the very nature and process of abjection: If the thingness of the corpse, to use Kristeva’s example of that which constitutes “the utmost of abjection,” is approached as ‘the corpse is analogous to a thing’ as a way of circumscribing what a corpse is, then we are still abjecting the corpse by eschewing a degree of the corpse’s thingness (p. 4). If we consider that invoking similarity requires terms in a comparison to have been originally conceived as separate, the corpse cannot be viewed in its thingness if the corpse is merely like a thing. Since
“jouissance alone causes the abject to exist as such,” the writer attempting to approach abjection as he would the sublime must be fatalistically drawn to - and repulsed by - the corpse in a way that the corpse is a thing. Abjection cannot be viewed from afar, and metaphor, as the communication of an analogous pair, keeps us at a safe distance from the abject, from our own jouissance. Consider Eugene Thacker’s analysis of Junji Ito’s comic series Uzumaki, in which an obsession with the symbol of the spiral afflicts a small town, becoming contagious. Sufferers begin to the see spirals everywhere, in natural things and manmade objects alike, from snail shells to hand-made pottery. The fate of one Mr. Saito is such that, in an attempt at spiritual fusion with the spiral, his body contorts itself “into a giant fleshy spiral.” Following Mr. Saito’s cremation, the townsfolk’s spiral obsession intensifies as more and more manifestations of the spiral begin to appear until its shape becomes unavoidable in daily experience. The idea fleshed out by Thacker’s analysis of Uzumaki is that “on the one hand, the spiral has no existence 49
except as manifestation... On the other hand, throughout the Uzumaki series, the spiral is more than just a pattern in nature - it is also equivalent to the idea of the spiral itself’ (p.
79). The inseparability, for Thacker, of the spiral as both symbol and manifestation leads him to an entanglement of flesh and ideation that parallels the discussion here: Perhaps the best way of conceiving of microbiota through the lens of Powers o f Horror (as with all the works through which microbiota’s implications are being discussed here) is as simultaneously analogous to abjection and as abjection. (In some cases, analogy will have to do, and as the reader will see, has been an indispensible tool for some philosophers’ attempts to approach the unthinkable). Suffice it to say for now that microbiota is not only an apropos analogy, but also a living example, and why not?
The seemingly growing recognition that the humanities has always been engaged with the nonhuman attests to a greater awareness of human contingency, and that perhaps logos is not all. As Richard Grusin’s introduction to The Nonhuman Turn makes apparent, Donna Haraway’s focus on animals, Bruno Latour’s “actors,” various theories of “assemblage,” and, I add, some communication theorists’ shifting conceptions of
“media” to include the meteorological and the climatological1 all point toward an enlarged vision of the world wherein human activity occupies increasingly less space, or is increasingly more informed by nonhuman elements. The speculative realist movement within philosophy has helped widen the range of topics those in the humanities can talk about with confidence. The most cutting attack from that camp on the poverty of a
1 See John Durham Peters’ The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media for an augmented sense of “media” that includes actual clouds. 50
philosophy that cannot begin to conceive of a Nature existing apart from humans’ representations of it has been Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of what he calls
“correlationism,” the often unchecked assumption that being and thinking (or ontology and epistemology) are doomed to collapse into one another, that “we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never either term considered apart from the other” (in Bryant, p. 36). Viewed from within the correlationist circle, that which might be genuinely exterior to the self-world correlate is a no-man’s land
Meillassoux terms “le grand dehors” (“the great outdoors”): “ ‘ [An] outside which was not relative to us... that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory - of being entirely elsewhere’ ” (in Trigg, p. 44). The potential danger of overlaying nature with culture was discussed in the previous chapter by way of anthropomorphism; anthropomorphism’s pros outweigh its cons in the observation of animal behavior, and actually cannot be avoided anyway. Must the same fear that motivates the avoidance of anthropomorphism mean that cultural critique has to
leave nature be? In posing such questions, we are partaking in the same spirit of inquiry
as Vicky Kirby in not only adopting a more exploratory (“speculative”) style, but also in
the sense that keen readers and decipherers of texts are doing something quite similar to
those scientists deciphering the molecular language of bacteria: “intertextuality suggests
that in some quite uncanny sense, so-called cultural critics are already practicing science”
(p. xi).
The biological sciences teach us that species or genus can exhibit shared features,
like wings or eyes located at the front of the head, because they either share ancestry or 51
faced similar environment constraints (in biological terms: homology and analogy, respectively). This boiling down of resemblance, while necessary to generate formal rules of the evolutionary game, belies the uncanniness of what it means to be a singular organism. Darwin, of course, posited descent with modification, which may or may not be revealed by morphological similarity, and natural selection as the guiding forces shaping manifestations of life. Darwin’s main point of attack in The Origin o f Species was species mutability, the idea that individual species were preordained and not subject to variability over time, that when looking at species what you see is what you get. On the contrary, “On the view that species are strongly marked and permanent varieties, and that each species first existed as a variety, we can see why it is that no line o f demarcation can be drawn between species, commonly supposed to have been produced by special acts of creation, and varieties which are acknowledged to have been produced by secondary laws” (Darwin, p. 505, italics mine). The uncanny nature of a species, that it derives from or is made up of other species, can only be seen by taking the long view:
“The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; it cannot add up and perceive the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations” (p. 517-8). The mortality of the human observer becomes here an obstacle, preventing the strangeness of a species’ arrival at the scene of life from being fully witnessed; we cannot see species becoming. Timothy
Morton seems to appreciate Darwin’s point: “Evolution means that life-forms are made of other life-forms. Entities are mutually determining: they exist in relation to each other and derive from each other. Nothing exists independently, and nothing comes from 52
nothing” (p. 275). Morton emphasizes that we need look no further than Darwin to register this strangeness, that species are already uncanny, since a species’ apparentness is only the variety of a life-form captured at a fixed point, not unlike Henri Bergson’s
“snapshots,” which lend tractability to a flow of life/time, rendering the flow cognizable.
Manuel De Landa, in A Thousand Years o f Nonlinear History, provides a similar idea in his thickening of the living/nonliving boundary by emphasizing flows of energy and matter as structuring (the emergence of) life: “Our organic bodies are... nothing but temporary coagulations in these [energy and mineral nutrient] flows: we capture in our bodies a certain portion of the flow at birth, then release it again when we die and micro organisms transform us into a new batch of raw materials” (p. 104). Morton, arguing that queer theory and ecology (as ecology stems from biology) share “nonessentialist aspects,” calls for a “queer ecology.” After all, both derive energy from multiplying difference, and are ultimately concerned with interrogating nature and origins. This queer ecology would recognize that “life is catastrophic, monstrous, nonholistic, and dislocated, not organic, coherent, or authoritative” (p. 275). Thus, in denuding the category of ‘the natural,’ we need only examine the life-forms that are its representatives or manifestations, an idea Morton claims to have inherited from Derrida: “Life-forms themselves undermine distinctions between Natural and non-Natural. Derrida hypothesized that deconstruction applied to the life-nonlife boundary” (p. 277). This intellectual lineage is not difficult to trace. It can be found within Derrida’s three hypotheses of his “limitrophy” in The Animal That Therefore I Am:
Beyond the edges of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single 53
opposing side, rather than “the Animal” or “Animal Life,” there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or more precisely (since to say “the living” is already to say too much or not enough) a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead, relations of organization or lack of organization among realms that are more and more difficult to dissociate by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death. These relations are at once close and abyssal, and they can never be totally objectified (p. 399)
The “limitrophy” is thus what complicates and thickens boundaries - between
‘human’ and ‘animal,’ ‘living’ and ‘nonliving’ - “what sprouts or grows at the limit,” but does so by “maintaining the limit,” not effacing it (p. 398). In borrowing from Derrida,
Darwin, and Richard Dawkins, Morton contends that “life-forms are liquid,” emphasizing their mutability, and proposes the concept of the “mesh,” “a nontotalizable, open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment” (p. 275-6). The “mesh” is, then, queer ecology’s object. Limitrophy and queer ecology are neither wholly positive nor negative approaches - if a parasite kills its host, it will die too. If all differences collapse, from where does one speak? Such concepts (or non-concepts) are hard to register as practices in themselves, and perhaps better conceived of as systems of checks on the rigidity of boundaries, on any absolute or authoritative claims of difference. Their power, like deconstruction, is to confound, to reread, to offer alternatives. Nature, viewed on smaller and smaller scales, becomes weird
-just ask a particle physicist. Like quantum mechanics, molecular biology also presents its own weirdness (read: “queerness”). Biology’s smallest scales attest to something of a limitrophy - a limit that feeds off the differences it produces, that folds back on itself, 54
resulting in a thicker line, fractal in its dimensions. Like the coastline of Britain,2 it is a limit infinite in its jaggedness, making an impossible task out of drawing a hard line between living and nonliving matter or between life’s myriad manifestations.3 Pointing to the example of plasmids in bacterial DNA, in which “ ‘genuine’ code sequence[s]” and
“viral code insertions” become impossible to distinguish between, Morton emphasizes
DNA’s status as a “literal” code that is “translated,” paving the way for his claim that nature (and, by extension, the natural sciences) can be approached deconstructively: “In a sense, molecular biology confronts issues of authenticity similar to those in textual studies. Just as deconstruction showed that, at a certain level at any rate, no text is totally authentic, biology shows us that there is no authentic lifeform” (p. 275). Just as is every text, every biological entity is a palimpsest.
Morton is not alone in realizing the appropriateness of bridging Derrida and the sciences. Vicky Kirby’s Quantum Anthropologies is a much bigger version of a very similar project, in which Derrida’s dictum “no outside of text” is reread as “no outside of nature” (p. x). Rather than adhere to the conventional wisdom within the humanities that
“defines language as a forfeit and substitution” wherein language’s referent — Nature — is
2 In a paper entitled “How Long is the Coast of Britain?”, mathematician and founder of fractal geometry Benoit Mandelbrot contended that any coastline is infinite in length if a small enough yardstick is used. In essence, the more detail captured, the longer an edge will be. See James Gleick’s Chaos, pages 94-6, for a digestible bit of math history on the topic. 3 Vicky Kirby has made similar use of the image of fractals’ self-similarity at multiple scales when thinking through how deconstruction muddles the concept of ‘origin.’ “Hoping that an exuberance offractal dimension might emerge,” she invokes semiotics and poststructuralist notions of identity to confound the terms that would allow difference to exist at all (p. 1, 70, italics mine). 55
lost, Kirby imbricates the human subject within a “general text” or a process of “constant morphogenesis” in which communication precedes the human, actually calling the subject forth, enlivening Derrida’s “ ‘language in the general sense’ ” (p. 19-21,40).
Human observers of nature must always be careful not to overlay nature with culture, to over-interpret, but must this render the humanities mute regarding the natural world?
Kirby does not think so, broadening ‘textuality’ to include “brute materiality,” “the stuff of the body,” and even “life itself,” acknowledging previous efforts to bridge the semiotics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Pierce with biological codes, such as genetic structures (72-73). Kirby’s is a metaphysics of biological continuism a la semiotics, but it is something else as well. Her critique of Judith Butler’s contention that signs are always bound to the human world is also tantamount to a material feminist rebuff of correlationism. Kirby asks why signs cannot be conceived of materially, why
“the code-cracking and encryption capacities of bacteria” cannot be considered “language skills”? Butler’s response to this line of questioning amounted to “a reminder that language is circumscribed, that its author and reader is human, and that the human endeavor to capture a world ‘out there’ through cultural signs will always be a failed project” (p. 73). Although Kirby admits that Butler’s concerns are warranted in realizing the risk of conflating representations of things with the things themselves, and in guarding “against the hard-edged empiricist and positivist scientific claims” that refuse to recognize that cultural interpretation is at work even in the laboratory, Butler ultimately guarantees human exceptionalism by insisting on culture’s ‘closed’ status, a view that renders the human as “profoundly unnatural” and nature a black hole (p. 74). All of this is 56
to say that nature (which is also to say ‘the nonhuman,’ according to the line of thinking
Kirby criticizes), having been shunted by the linguistic turn, now seems a cluttered part of the room, a mountain of dust no longer hidden under the tiny rug that is “the hermetic enclosure of the interpretive enterprise” (p. 75). Unfortunately, many attempts to ameliorate this situation only recuperate the nature/culture binary. Statements like “we remain indebted to the materiality of the body” inevitably preserve a logic of separation between a primordial nature and culture, which continues to emerge out of itself, and assumes that “the thinking self is not an articulation of matter’s intentions” (p. 71).
Instead, by pushing the materiality of semiotic processes, by ‘reading’ - as with the example of bacterial communication - nonhuman phenomena deconstructively, Kirby replaces the ultimately untenable “cultural expansiveness” of antihumanist or poststructuralist arguments with its opposite - biological expansiveness - thereby severing an insidious human exceptionalism from its logical foundations.
Vicky Kirby is not content with noting resemblances between human and bacterial communication, insisting instead that they occupy the same continuum, are equally examples of language and therefore subject to similar (if not the same) methods of critique. In establishing other kinds of relations between seemingly radically different things, however, analogy seems the best and only tool. Emmanuel Levinas pointed to analogy as a means by which the philosopher could arrive at an understanding of relation, in his case between Being and beings, Existence and existents. We have, strangely, an overarching, faceless, structuring force that lends itself to and manifests itself in the world as separate entities. How to render the precise relationship, in all its enfolding, 57
between ‘us’ as discrete entities, and a power that proceeds and lends its force to us? For
Levinas, the task is to conceive of “a phenomenology of the ‘instant’ when the subject appears” and a metaphysics of a “general existence [that] transcends the specificity of a manifest thing” (Trigg, p. 46, 47). How do we begin thinking about Being in a way that doesn’t fall back into an account of individuals, “without tying it down to the specificity of things” (Trigg, p. 47)? This is tricky, though, if we assert that the only way of formulating this general existence is, paradoxically, through the subject in its discreteness. The difficulty here is that of the subject conceiving of a radical objectivity - a world without it, a world Husserl’s phenomenology is not capable of approaching.
According to Dylan Trigg, in a move “which undercuts the anthropomorphism of classical phenomenology,” Levinas posits the there is (“il y a”), an Existence stripped of all existents, not at all localizable, not manifest as a determinate ‘thing,’ and not “ ‘the sum total of persons or things’ ” (Levinas in Trigg, p. 49). Beyond representation, it is a
“nocturnal ontology,” an “excess” of “nothingness,” that which manifests as a dissolution of boundaries (Trigg, p. 50,49). This absence-as-presence appears horrific to Levinas, as it necessarily punctures the subject — “the finite being is divested of its singularity” — much like the jouissance of Kristeva’s deject approaching the abject. Levinas writes of the possibility of this relationality to an absolute as approachable only through indirect analogy. Dylan Trigg uses Levinas’ ily a as his first conceptual tool in fashioning an
“unhuman phenomenology,” a phenomenology paradoxically attendant to a prepersonal
subject, to the human body as already structured by nonhuman elements. What’s
interesting here is the reappearance of analogy in Levinas as a conceptual tool. 58
Following the definition of analogy as “likeness” or “resemblance,” it might seem that the positioning of analogy as central to the philosophical projects above risks falling into Meillassoux’s “correlationism,” as if the only way to talk about this essentially nonrelational radical alterity which can never be confined to finite subjects is through finite subjects. Is this not a gross anthropomorphism, a conceptual error? As Trigg articulates these relations through the work of Levinas, though, this is not just an unavoidable risk, but a thoroughly paradoxical tenet of what will be his unhuman phenomenology - that “it is precisely because the human remains intact that the thinking of the unhuman becomes possible” (p. 51). If the subject were thoroughly lost in his unhumanness, then there would be no unhumanness to articulate. Given the prevalence of analogy as a tool for thinking through relations between the living and the nonliving or between a species and its individual members, it seems that analogizing is unavoidable, and yet I previously stated that viewing microbiota as analogous to abjection is self undermining, as it strips the possibility of jouissance by forcing the writer to view the abject from afar - dropping the experiential for the coolly conceptual. Thus, just as there are cautious and conscientious applications of anthropomorphism, best brought about through realizing its unavoidability, there is, and must be, cautious and conscientious analogizing. Paying attention to the late Middle English sense of analogy as
‘correspondence’ helps here. Meaning both ‘close similarity’ and ‘communication by exchanging letters,’ correspondence suggests either a similarity that was established through communication, or a communication that was only enabled through a preexisting similarity. Viewing analogy as correspondence provides a check, therefore, on 59
correlationism and its attendant anthropocentrism: A similarity that was established through communication implies the centrality of a (human) observer, but a communication that was only enabled through a preexisting similarity decenters the observer - which is it in any particular case? Such irreducible ambiguity is becoming par for the course at this point: Kristeva’s powers of horror hinges on it, as does Derrida’s limitrophy.
Just as Kristeva’s theory of the abject isolates a process of boundary-construction
- albeit one defined by horrific ambiguity - and subject location, Roger Caillois’s notion of “legendary psychasthenia” deals with boundary dissolution.4 Both thinkers, however, are equally concerned with the distinction between the organism/the subject and its environment, and emphasize both the porousness of the subject and the subject’s strange attraction to a beyond-itself, or field of otherness. To Kristeva’s description of a
“jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up” or “a space which engrosses the deject,” Caillois writes of “a lure of space” which “is inevitably accompanied by a diminished sense of personality and vitality” (Kristeva, p. 9, 8; Caillois, p. 99, 101). Both combine the trope of night with the subject’s “fascination” with an alterity that only seems to be anterior. Above all, both seek to describe a “sublime alienation” in which the subject grasps a terrifying objectivity, that it already is other (Kristeva, p. 9). Drawing
4 They are linked as a matter of intellectual genealogy as well: Caillois’ studies on mimesis influenced Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage and the imaginary, and Lacan’s imaginary-symbolic-real triad influenced Kristeva’s notion of abjection. 60
from the medical literature of the time,5 Caillois points to the demoniac role of space, its devouring nature, in the world of the schizophrenic, who is in constant fear of being swallowed up or possessed by darkness: “He is similar; not similar to anything in particular, but simply similar” (p. 100). This is his “instinct d’abandon” seeking an outlet, the notion or sensation of being drawn into similarity and thus threatening to dissolve the self, an instinct opposite to that of self-preservation, in which the organism/subject seeks
“a kind of diminished existence” (p. 102). In both “Legendary Psychasthenia” and his essay “The Praying Mantis,” Caillois references “the human desire to recover its original insensate condition,” linking this affective tendency to “the pantheistic idea of becoming one with nature, which is itself the common literary and philosophical translation of returning to prenatal consciousness” (p. 79). As similarity here becomes a kind of confusion, a loss of difference, of boundaries, analogy might be seen as a resemblance
‘out there’ that tempts the observer to collapse the difference between the objects ‘it’ proposes as analogous. In connecting the mimicry of insects and other nonhuman life to the phenomenal world of schizophrenics in his overarching project of bridging comparative biology and myth, Caillois provides “a common origin” for both, grounding the lived experience of humans in natural processes, and linking natural processes to the magic of resemblance. This is not done, however, through simple addition, of claiming that, somehow, the natural and supernatural, the human and the nonhuman, share a world. Caillois’s is a surrealism through and through, melding the world’s subjective and
5 Caillois references Eugene Minkowski and Pierre Janet in his essay. See text and footnotes on page 100. 61
objective elements so completely as to give the mind pause as to its true origins, but does so in a way that is wary of lapsing into anthropomorphism or solipsism. It is an uncanny realism, or a revelation of realism as always being uncanny. It is also the affective quality of Caillois’s writing, slightly more exploratory than critical, that I hope to emulate here:
Empirical facts can be astounding, and the things that are the most intimate to us can be the least understood.
Attention to process (at all levels), which was Darwin’s brilliance in The Origin of
Species, is also an attention to realities that precede and extend beyond the experience of a unified subject, a subject who is necessarily anchored within a particular spatio- temporality. Reflecting on the reality of our bacterial constitution confronts us with a deep time, a time beyond humanity’s origins, and also solidifies the earth's grip on us in light of our dependence on bacterial communities, and confounds questions of agency.
The discovery of the sheer extent of microbiomes in and on the human body might be seen as provoking abjection in its displacing the autonomous, rational subject. However, the empirical fact of microbiomes also correspond to the idea o f abjection on the grounds that it is the (collective) Other that precedes and constitutes the subject, but remains irreducible to it. Microbiota empirically render the human body uncanny. Since there are a finite number of cells that make up the human body, discovering that 90% of them are not human means that only 10% of them are, the affective dimension of this zero-sum discovery then being that of loss, not merely the discovery of extra dimensions: I do not see something added to my constitution, but subtracted from it. This discovery nicely mirrors “the abjection of self’ that Kristeva describes “when it [the subject] finds that the 62
impossible constitutes its very being,” when “the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being” is discovered (p. 5). Since the “abominable real” of the abject is
“inaccessible except through jouissance,” it is not without jouissance that I confront here the nonhuman elements that I discover in me (p. 8). There is a life within me that is not mine - it is permanently uncanny, no matter how much I learn about its operations.
Another node of correspondence between Kristeva’s notion of the abject and microbiota is that of “forgotten time:” The “land of oblivion that is constantly remembered” by the deject is a territory whose border was constructed - it is true - prior to the formation of the ego, but not prior to the life of the subject’s very body (p. 8-9). I suggest that an analogous “forgotten time” of microbiota would refer to an anonymous field of existence out of which the human subject first emerged, harkening a deep time before humanity’s arrival. This deep time, while not denied to make way for the symbolic’s prohibitions, might be denied, suppressed, or simply remain unrealized due to the concreteness and stability of the first-person experience, the experience of being a unified subject, which is both a necessity and, as some philosophers and cognitive scientists contend, an illusion.
The “forgotten time” which microbiota assist us with remembering (“deep past” for Dylan Trigg) is not built into humans’ phenomenal world and is therefore only accessible to scientific inquiry (p. 27). In just the way that quantum phenomena appear
‘weird’ to even the scientists that study it, the unfamiliarity or downright bizarreness of bacteria or the quanta are owed to the simple fact that we do not directly experience their existence or effects (apart from when bacteria become virulent). Trigg describes empirical revelations of this sort (I use the example of microbiota where he uses that of 63
extraterrestrial life-bearing meteorites) as disrupting the subject’s sense of a unity of personal history through revealing “an unknowable mass of materiality that becomes the site of a parallel history” (p. 27). Against the stable, immanent subject of Husserl’s phenomenology, Trigg proposes an “unhuman phenomenology” in which, while it remains central, the human body becomes the site of a radical alterity, “of another life,” one that “manifests in the contours of the human body,” yet remains irreducible to it (p.
9). Similarly to Kristeva’s abject, Trigg posits “the affective response of horror” as “the necessary symptom of experiencing oneself as other,” and borrows heavily from the literary fiction of H.P. Lovecraft and the respective filmographies of John Carpenter and
David Cronenburg (p. 8).
Like Eugene Thacker, Trigg singles out genre horror as the conceptual tool most suited to exploring the far sides of human experience, specifically the paradoxical experience of “the body as constitutive of subjectivity but at the same time a betrayer of subjectivity” (p. 11). There is a rift, however, between the slew of thinkers presented here: Despite equal preoccupations with the defamiliarizing of (bodily) subjectivity,
Kristeva, Thacker, and Trigg posit horror as somehow central to human constitution, whereas Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Kirby, and Caillois do not, a difference Trigg chalks up to the temperament of the writer rather than any theoretical shortcomings: “If this augmentation of the bodily self produces a sense of the uncanny in Merleau-Ponty, then it is only a question of temperament that the same structure is read as outright horror in
Lovecraft” (p. 76-77, italics mine). The later writings of Merleau-Ponty inform the bulk of The Thing, and Trigg uses the phenomenologist’s notion of “the flesh” in forming a 64
counter-argument against Meillassoux’s branding of phenomenology as inescapably
“correlationist.”
That Merleau-Ponty’s brand of phenomenology, one informed by psychology and psychoanalysis, be used in such a project should not completely surprise those familiar with his work. Even in his earlier writings, such as Phenomenology o f Perception, one can see efforts to ground the human subject in a world that also permeates him, forming not so much a straightforward self-world correlation, but an onto-epistemological loop that can never be completely reduced: To Husserl’s “epoche” or phenomenological reduction, in which Husserl presses the philosopher to adopt a process of constantly suspending judgment, of seeing all judgment as containing a kernel o f‘for-me,’ Merleau-
Ponty insists that “ ‘the world is not what I think, but what I live through,’ ” referring to the primacy of perception, and thus embodiment, as the ground upon which Husserl formulates his “epoche” (Salamon, p. 91). For Merleau-Ponty, the subject is caught in the world; his body is made of the same stuff. This ensnaring, though, is not merely spatial; it is also temporal. Referencing the “latent content” of Freudian dream analysis, which is never manifest at the moment of recalling a dream, Merleau-Ponty laments that a complete understanding of his life history is always asymptotically out of reach, as it will always require another future moment to fully take stock of itself: “I shall never manage to seize the present through which I live with apodeictic certainty, and since the lived is thus never entirely comprehensible, what I understand never quite tallies with my living experience, in short, I am never quite at one with myself’ (p. 404). “The unmotivated upsurge of the world,” which is the phenomenological reduction’s ultimate and only 65
realization, for Merleau-Ponty is most brilliantly articulated through sculpture and poetry, but especially painting: “Every theory of painting is a metaphysics” (POP, p. xv; Reader, p. 361). Considering that the ensnarement of the body in the world’s spatial-temporal flux is the reason why we can never fully seize it, why “there is no thought which embraces all our thought,” is it at all surprising that Merleau-Ponty’s touting of Husserl as “a perpetual beginner,” one who goes to the end and is critical of his own critique, should finally lead to his questioning of the phenomenological self s boundaries, boundaries which, for the most astute painters, have already been under careful deconstruction (POP, p. xv)?
In Cezanne’s Doubt and one of his last essays, Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty attempts to elaborate a metaphysics of painting that he largely gleans from the work and writing of Cezanne. Cezanne presents the notion of a vision that reaches out into the world to address a lack, a lacuna of Being, becoming entangled with this non-thing, almost as if the painter is the receiver of a correspondence from an elsewhere requesting birth, a notion which Merleau-Ponty, in “Eye and Mind,” positions against a strictly dualistic science which “only manipulates things and gives up dwelling in them”
(Reader, p. 351). In “Cezanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty takes very seriously the mystical reveries of Cezanne as revealing deep truths about the painter/subject’s whereabouts in the process of painting: “ ‘The landscape thinks itself in me,’ he said, ‘and I am its consciousness’ ” (Reader, p. 77). If “every visual something... is given as a dehiscence of Being,” then whatever sight catches hold of, while seeming wholly manifest, is only its
“frontal properties,” the underside of the visible (the invisible) being tied to “the deep 66
postural latency whereby the body raises itself to see,” the project of the painter then being to harness vision to transform herself into a conduit which links up the visible and invisible {Reader, p. 375, 376). Merleau-Ponty’s summation of this event syncs up nicely with the nature/culture binarity currently under assault, the painter becoming something of an ontological smear: “There is no break at all in this circuit; it is impossible to say that here nature ends and the human being or expression begins” (p. 376). To truly become a vessel for this “dehiscence of Being,” the painter is not merely who expresses, since this still implies a gap between painter/nature, but actually becomes the expression to an indeterminate degree.
Trigg sees Merleau-Ponty’s use of the human-animal relation as a solid starting point for articulating a possible human-alien relation, a way of approaching the excesses piling up behind the traditional phenomenological subject, of approaching the human body as already other. By beginning his Nature: Course Notes from the College de
France by a “discussion of the origin of the subject in terms of a ‘metamorphosis’ rather than ‘beginning from zero,’ ” Merleau-Ponty emphasizes both the antiteleological nature of evolution, and through this - the blind striving of life - the fact that we are made up of other organisms (Trigg, p. 27). This “ ‘lateral’ relation ‘that does not abolish kinship’ ” between humans and animals also lends a non-painterly vision of the “circuit” enumerated above, as seeing the animal within the human (and also ‘ “strange anticipations or caricatures of the human in the animal’ ”) is a rendering of “the visibility of the invisible” (p. 28, 29). For Trigg, the alterity humans find in their abjected animal otherness is readily construed as alienness, his “unhuman phenomenology,” which blends 67
Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Husserl with Freud’s notion of the uncanny, essentially being
“a genuine alien phenomenology in that it is concerned with the limits of alterity rather than simply replacing subjects with objects” (p. 6). In this, Trigg finds a limit to speculative realist critique with its flattened ontology of subjects as objects6 but shares the movement’s concern with the nonhuman, proposing instead to account for the nonhuman within the human, therefore escaping both the correlationism of traditional phenomenology while avoiding what Steven Shaviro calls the “performative contradiction” of thinking outside of thought - after all, how is this to be achieved except through the phenomenological subject, through being someone? Trigg borrows from
Merleau-Ponty the idea that there exists a kind of distributed humanity, one that is nontotalizable (to borrow Morton’s adjective), intermixed with its environments and consisting of nonhuman elements, and it is precisely through this intermixing that we can even conceive of or talk about either the human or the nonhuman: It is only because of our own ‘unhumanity’ that we can think it.
Life is fundamentally strange. Against entropy, it emerges - crawling, slithering - out of a primordial depth, not knowing where to go and essentially without a home; in its striving, it makes a home. “If life can be characterized in biological terms as a blind striving toward change and growth, then the other side of this striving is the sense of a deformation in the cosmos catching sight of itself being abjected from nothingness”
(Trigg, p. 36). In De Landa’s summation of neo-Darwinism, “evolution has no foresight”
61 am referring specifically to Levi R. Bryant’s The Democracy o f Objects and his notion of “onticology,” “in which there is only one type of being: objects” (p. 20). 68
but is an “abstract machine,” the “coupling of variable replicators with a selection pressure,” life itself then being a combination or interaction of flows of genes (although genes are only one kind of replicator) and flows of biomass (p. 139). De Landa’s sweeping scope and thorough explication of the inmixing of the social and the material in his accounts of life and “nonlinear history” do not, however, emphasize the sheer weirdness of life’s appearance the way Trigg’s “unhuman phenomenology” does. They do, however, intersect in Trigg’s use of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, as for the latter
(and one can already detect these moves in his reflections on Cezanne), body and world are already intertwined, the body being the world’s vehicle through which it “catch[es] sight of itself.” “What this means is that body and world come together in a symbiotic or dialogical structure, both being co-constitutive of the other” (Trigg, p. 42). This
“corporeal dynamism” that marks bodily subjectivity is repeatedly disturbed, as Trigg points out, throughout Merleau-Ponty’s early and later writings in ephemeral glimpses of a mysterious underside to subjectivity, an impersonal or anonymous aspect to bodily being that evades phenomenological detection. From Phenomenology o f Perception: “ ‘if
I wanted to render precisely the perceptual experience, I ought to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive’ ” (in Trigg, p. 67). It is through these glimpses that
Merleau-Ponty marks a beyond-subjectivity, and thus a beyond-phenomenology: Who or what is this anonymous field that sustains the body while remaining beneath it? “Here, the paradox of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy comes to the foreground. For him, phenomenology is the work of recovering the ‘unreflective experience of the world’ that is anterior to subjectivity while also being implicated by subjectivity” (Trigg, p. 68). 69
Sensation is not only that which anchors experience to a body, but also, paradoxically, that which depersonalizes. It is not hard to link these occulted body-world configurations
(which are structural and temporal, as there is also a “deep past” implicated in this prepersonal self) with evolutionary processes. Here, it is necessary to quote Merleau-
Ponty at length:
My history must be the continuation of a prehistory and must utilize the latter’s acquired results. My personal existence must be the resumption of a prepersonal tradition. There is, therefore, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. This captive or natural spirit is my body, not that momentary body which is the instrument of my personal choices and which fastens upon this or that world, but the system of anonymous ‘functions’ which draw every particular focus into a general project (in Trigg, p. 71).
We are granted a rare vision here of an enfolded dualism at the heart of experience, of a subject that prefaces the / without effacing it, an anteriority that
structures bodily experience but remains irreducible to it. As with the discovery of the microbiome, how is it possible for the heretofore unified subject not to see this as a threat? Is my perceived autonomy as an embodied being truly only the “ ‘resumption of a prepersonal tradition,’ ” or an extension of it? How can the body, which anchors and
organizes my world and is thus experienced as mine, also be the site of anterior histories that I ‘resume’? As Trigg points out, “can we be sure its [the prepersonal body’s] buried teleology coincides with our own cognitive intentionality?” (p. 72). This ambiguity over
being or having a body jangles everyday perceptions and conceptions of selfhood, and
like microbiomes, forces us to contend with anonymous, nonhuman forces that
temporarily align themselves in such a way for human subjectivity to emerge, but the 70
consistency of this symbiosis is not guaranteed. There may be several reasons that, for
‘healthy’ bodies or minds, this is probably not a typical concern. Barring paralysis,
seizures, or phantom limbs, which might temporarily interrupt the usually stable
experience of bodily unity and ownership, I venture that most adult individuals do not
likely question (beyond the Cartesian idea of a soul or homunculus existing within yet
separate from the body) the otherness o f‘their’ bodies. Additionally, it is in the subject’s
best interest, and developmentally necessary, in fact, to preserve the unity and continuity
of conscious experience to remain functional in the world, not unlike the infant in
Lacan’s mirror stage whose fragmented body must be pulled together by identification
with an outside image; the original, fragmented body must remain glossed over to be some-body, and to move about. Even if the subject has been fashioned from brute
materiality, from other organisms, abjection provides a model whereby for unity to be,
such multiplicities or parallel histories must first be repressed: violent and falsifying
differentiations are necessary for ‘higher’ organisms to exist ‘in themselves.’ Thus, the
figure of the microbiome, like the prepersonal body, acquires its structure as an absent presence, a haunting.
The “deep well of memory” that is the abject exists for the subject as another time
and place, similar to the immemorial time revealed in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the
prepersonal body (Kristeva, p. 6). Eventually, as Kristeva tells us, the self must reach a
point at which abjection is too taxing, and, “fmd[ing] the impossible within,” must abject
itself (p. 5). We must not take all this nonhuman or unhuman talk to mean that selves are
not phenomenal realities. We also, however, must admit that bodily ownership and the 71
subjective experience of being someone is not an absolute, and is more likely a kind of productive illusion under constant threat of dissolution. If proprioception, that system embedded in our musculature that tells us where in time and space our bodies are, turns out to be the magic by which phenomenal realities are afforded ground from moment to moment, how could it not be simultaneously fascinating and disturbing when philosophers and cognitive scientists insist on its being so easily fooled?7 Consider the reversibility of perspective and consequent decentering of the human that David
Cronenberg elicits in lauding cinema’s ability to confront the audience with a kind of radical objectivity: “The AIDS virus: look at it from its point of view. Very vital, very excited, really having a good time. It's really a triumph if you're a virus. See the movies from the disease’s point of view” (goodreads.com). The microbiome cannot be considered the trace of a nonhuman other we are destined to shed in our continual becoming as humans. Rather, humanity itself is the trace; we are a trace even in our immanence - living fossils. If the microbiome disturbs us, we must remain disturbed, for only - and here I employ a psychological idiom - by ‘staying with’ the uncomfortable feeling of being other in mind and body can we begin to approach the objectivity of our subjectivity. As Dylan Trigg reminds us, “the organic life of the human body is short, and its finite experience of lived time remains incommensurable with the anonymous existence that brought human subjectivity into the world in the first place” (p. 74). In
7 Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel provides a detailed and technical account of this. His TEDx talk, available via YouTube, provides a succinct explication, and uses one of his go-to demonstrations of the body’s phenomenal malleability, the “rubber glove experiment”. 72
taking the discovery of the empirical reality of the microbiome as our starting point, we see that there is no need to efface the human, if ridding the world of the evils of human exceptionalism is our goal. Instead, we need only zoom in on the human to register - literally, at the cellular level - the nonhuman at the heart of the human, the uncanniness of the human body, that we are constituted by the abject. We might liken this realization to the attitude of Buddhism to the ego: The most direct way to get rid of it is to prove it was never there to begin with.
Anthropocentrism, to some degree, is underwritten by a certain naive realism regarding the human subject’s species-story; the general story of how we arrived at ourselves, and the specific life-history that both subtends and is subtended by that general story. An adage in psychotherapy is that, to change, the analysand has to want to change, and this want will be a result of feeling (sometimes intensely) uncomfortable. How open are we, as a species, to a different, uncomfortably decentered view of ourselves, one in which we come out of the world rather than being bom into it? How receptive might we be, as individuals, to the unnerving truth of the inaugural loss of an abjected animality that laid the foundations for “us” as both species-category and individual subject? Can we collectively admit to our melancholic relation to our animal other, that we have killed and continue killing in order to prove to ourselves our difference, the pathological nature of our mourning of our animal other revealed in this repetition? Must the cries of tortured animals reach a fevered pitch, and the silence of biodiversity loss be deafening, for such a collective admittance to take place? 73
Chapter Four: The Tao and the Flesh
“At the heart of the human there is nothing human.” - David Lapoujade
Biology itself concedes the strangeness of life. We need not look to ocean depths or imagine Martian microbes to be struck with life’s alienness. To reveal the uncanny- ness of the human body, for example, we need only cast a critical eye on the routine familiarity of being human in all its felt proximity. Evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology are probably the best tools for undertaking such a defamilarization.
This project, as I have argued before, is ultimately an ethical move on the grounds that a deep confrontation with the “human” - as category and empirical individual body - as constituted by so many “nonhuman” elements will rob humanity of the privileged place from where violence towards the nonhuman world emanates (viewing neither its own centrality or the Nature it positions itself against as a place where it can regenerate its own special powers). On an evolutionary time scale, we see the human on a continuum with nonhuman creatures, as coming out of other life-forms and therefore functioning agglomerations of myriad others - we are living fossils in this regard, as can be seen by looking at vestigial structures or organs in one’s own body, structures which functioned well for our ancestors but are no longer useful, such as wisdom teeth. Within the timescales of the everyday, however, we can arrive at a view of ourselves that we similarly cannot recognize or feel at home with, the human body a zone where nonhuman entities (like microbiota) play out innumerable, unthinkable dramas. At all scales of time 74
and space, then, ‘we’ come to the site where the human was supposed to be, but has not fully arrived. As I’ve previously suggested, our routine sacrifice of animals for food and for science may be overdetermined in that such practices are both of practical value and an unsuccessful exercise in mourning our evolutionary and cultural break with the broader nonhuman world. Theoretically, we reach a place at which Derrida’s
“limitrophy” and Kristeva’s “abjection” seem to coincide with Darwin’s theory of evolution, a place where the boundary between human and nonhuman is thick and constantly contested.
I cannot help but wonder here how it is that the world is structured in such a way as to give rise to (human) subjectivity, and in which scientific results can be tabulated and understood; in other words, a world in which human investigation of Nature can result in anything at all. How can evolutionary biology simultaneously ground the human in
Nature while maintaining a neutral zone from which to make the calculations and deductions necessary to produce such a grounding? In short, what transcendental something can we call upon? Is (human) consciousness, as is the case within Hinduism’s
Vedanta tradition, for example, a vehicle through which the universe comes to know itself? In the words of Vicky Kirby, “it seems quite possible that we may be investigating and witnessing an instantiation of a more general articulation and involvement whose collective expression we are” (p. 83). The world’s knowability, again, comes to the foreground here, and it is, again, with Merleau-Ponty that I seek an answer in the proceeding chapter. I want to do more, though, than enumerate Merleau-Ponty’s notion of this ‘involvement,’ for there is another thinker that, I believe, has been grossly 75
overlooked in the literature on human-nonhuman relations: The Taoist philosopher
Chuang Tzu.
I find Chuang Tzu to have already been engaged with many of the concepts this thesis tangles with. In its discovery of the limits of language, and in its semi-flattened ontology and perspectival reversibility, Chuang Tzu’s brand of Taoism is certainly antihumanist, and is an apropos lens through which to reconsider the (human) self-world correlate. (According to philosopher Rui Zhu, Taoism is general is antihumanistic in that it gives no quarter to the irrational human wish to be different from other entities in nature, and does not see human reason as a universal measure of all things) (Youtube).
Chuang Tzu also demonstrates a commitment to exploring a sense of the uncanny, and may even be considered a forerunner of the “modem” ideas of deconstruction and speculative realism. I see Merleau-Ponty’s later writings and Chuang Tzu’s (non)- philosophy as attempting to articulate a similar state of affairs, and it is my goal here to compare the former’s notion of “the flesh of the world” with the latter’s notion of the
Tao, and ruminate on the ways each thinker defamiliarizes the human. I cannot claim that once such uncanniness is achieved, the reader will be in a better position to identify with
Nature or the nonhuman entities that we have always been “chiasmatically” involved with, but I do hope to strip the reader of their confidence in the givenness of their humanity by way of robbing easy phenomenological identification with the reader’s own mind/body. To expose the granite-like solidity of the human to have been only pumice may just cause some readers, whatever their temperament, to cling only more tightly to ideologies of human exceptionalism. Others may take it as a starting point for reviewing 76
and revising their beliefs about “human nature.” In this, I hold in common with Chuang
Tzu (and Derrida, as well) the task of subtracting and destabilizing rather than building up or making plain. The ‘nonhuman turn,’ in general, can be gone about in one of two ways: elevating the nonhuman, or confounding or deflating the human. I choose the latter route, as it is my view that the lack of a stable ground from which to enumerate humanity’s complete ontological separateness is the most direct way to rid the world of the anthropocentrism that is at the heart of normativized, commoditized, and industrialized indifference toward the nonhuman world; the Gordian knot that needs slicing. If we succeed in destabilizing anthropocentrism’,s “anthro,” what would remain to polarize the “centrism?” We must remember, though, that such indifference is not senseless. It operates (at the level of societies and individuals) according to a circular and self-serving logic, and logic that I hope will run out of steam once we collectively reach the truth of ourselves as a species. (Whatever economic or political transitions occur from there is too large and complicated of a topic to go into here). I now turn to Merleau-
Ponty’s attempts to place the human back within a larger framework of worldly becoming, the all-encompassing “flesh.”
As Merleau-Ponty remarks in The Visible and the Invisible, “the secret of the world we are seeking must necessarily be contained in my contact with it,” a statement suggestive of the limits of classical phenomenology enumerated within Quentin
Meillassoux’s critique of “correlationism” (p. 32). Such a suggestion, at least at first glance, smacks of the anthropic principle within cosmology, in which the evolution of the universe seems to have been geared towards the creation of humanity. Evolutionary 77
theory’s view of life, of course, tells us that nonhuman consciousness could have just as easily arrived at the scene of the universe’s unfolding. And if the universe did not provide the right zone for any form of consciousness to emerge, then no matter.1 Actually, far from forwarding any philosophy sympathetic to humans, much less a philosophy that could be construed as anthropocentric, Merleau-Ponty takes the above statement as denoting a limit of phenomenological investigation, the starting point for a “non phenomenology,” in Vicky Kirby’s words, a “phenomenology of phenomenology”
(Kirby, p. 117). Merleau-Ponty admits in Phenomenology o f Perception that subjective experience always already leaves something out or is not in direct communion with the world: “ ‘If we want to describe the real such as it appears to us in perceptual experience, we find it burdened with anthropological predicates’ ” (in Trigg, p. 106). Dylan Trigg traces in Merleau-Ponty’s early works a latent realism, in which “not only is the nonhuman world hidden in all things, it is also alien and hostile, resistant to the human desire for dialogue” (p. 107). Despite the fact that Trigg’s summation here concerns
Merleau-Ponty’s writings on things, this ‘resistance’ could just as easily bear upon our relationship with nonhuman animals. As suggested in chapter two, human violence toward nonhuman animals, and perhaps toward the whole of a perceived nonhuman
1 We might extend William Cronon’s logic here, that conceiving of a sublime nature is, historically, a secularization of Judeo-Christian values, to the anthropic principle, as a cultural-historical vestige of western religious impulses. The idea is that, due to being the only ensouled creatures, the world needs us. Bruno Latour provides a colorful quote to the contrary, showing also that the anthropic principle can be racialized: “But if you missed the galloping freedom of the zebras in the savannah this morning, then so much the worse for you; the zebras will not be sorry that you were not there, and in any case you would have tamed, killed, photographed, or studied them. Things in themselves lack nothing, just as Africa did not lack whites before their arrival” (in Bryant, p. 34). 78
world, might be explained by way of our registering of animals as the bearers of nature’s commitment to silence, the drama of a human frustration borne of trying to wrench words from mute Nature.
Trigg finds “the seeds of an unhuman phenomenology” in Merleau-Ponty’s eventual rejection of Husserl’s body-world correlate - that neither could conceivably exist without the other - culminating in his formulation of “the flesh of the world,” which will attempt to locate a position between idealism and realism, beyond body and world as merely constitutive (Trigg, p. 108). In many of his earlier works, Merleau-Ponty already shows a concern with the permeability of the human revealed through the analysis of perception - from his forays into Cezanne to his engagement with psychoanalysis, the recurrent theme is that of the human emerging through worldly operations that are quite indifferent to humanity, operations only sensible or knowable to the human because we are of a piece with them. It is essential not to interpret this to mean that the world’s knowability requires a human subject, but rather that “he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it... ( Visible, pp. 134-35). As Trigg points out, Merleau-Ponty’s turn to psychoanalysis has an antihumanist bent. (Of course, psychoanalysis, barring ego psychology, is guided by an antihumanist philosophy anyway). Not at all concerned with restoring the ego to power, Merleau-Ponty seeks an
“analysis [that] proceeds by way of ruptures, invasions, and interruptions, all of which are deployed to destabilize the centrality of the subject as an autonomous or rational entity”
(Trigg, p. 124). “Such a psychoanalysis would find its strength in returning to the pre human origin that establishes itself as the real within the psyche,” an “archaeological 79
movement [which] conjoins phenomenology and psychoanalysis into the ‘same latency’ through contending with ‘that intemporal, that indestructible element in us’ ” (p. 124).
This element is the flesh, “an element anterior to experience yet at the same time implicated in experience” (p. 125). “The flesh of the world,” therefore, is a culmination of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, achieved through a discovery of its limits. It is with
“the flesh” that I continue to explore here what Kristeva’s notion of abjection opened: subject and object (de)formation/differentiation. Despite both thinkers’ concern with enumerating a process whereby subjects come to know themselves through
(differentiating themselves from) objects, a process in which there ultimately is no localized, definable object, Kristeva’s positing of horror as central to this process remains at odds with Merleau-Ponty’s more mystical take, his “inspired exegesis” of the visible, sensible world in which objects look at subjects and which seems to call to the subject from a depth: “What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of interrogating it according to its own wishes..?” (Visible, p. 133, italics mine).
In “Eye and Mind,” written three years before The Visible and the Invisible,
Merleau-Ponty glimpses a strange circuitry that does not necessarily begin or end with an autonomous subject: “The eye is an instrument that moves itself, a means which invents its own ends; it is that which has been moved by some impact of the world, which it then restores to the visible through the traces of a hand” (p. 356-7). The image here of a blurred subject - through which the world restores itself - achieves a more total inmixing with its object in the final chapter of The Visible and the Invisible, “The Intertwining -
The Chiasm,” in which the guiding image is “one sole world” or “one sole being,” the 80
two total maps of the subject’s interiority and exteriority enumerating themselves through the other (p. 110). Merleau-Ponty seeks no less than “that which works over [his] experience, opens it to the world and to Being, and which, to be sure, does not find them before itself as facts but animates and organizes their facticity” (p. 110). Merleau-Ponty’s claim in “Eye and Mind” that “the world is made of the very stuff of the body” does not capture the much finer-grained image of bodily being in “The Intertwining,” where
“double belongingness to the order of the ‘object’ and to the order of the ‘subject’ reveals to us quite unexpected relations between the two orders. It cannot be by incomprehensible accident that the body has this double reference; it teaches us that each calls for the other” (p. 137, p. 354). That the body is both seeing and visible is at the heart of the mystery, resulting in an “intertwining” of subject and object such that they are actually inseparable (p. 138). This “reciprocal insertion” exists as a counterpoint to
Cartesian dualism, claiming that objects can be active because they are not all object, and subjects can be passive because they are not all subject. “The flesh of the world,” then, is not a relation but what facilitates relation; it is elemental in that it is a “general thing” or
“incarnate principle,” situated “midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea” (p. 138,139). The flesh is thus neither wholly material nor ideational. It is complete in that it contains both while remaining irreducible to either. In Dylan Trigg’s words, it
“can only be approached as an anonymous zone that silently inhabits things,” and “in this way, it marks a union with the unconscious, as that which structures things while also retaining an autonomy from those things” (p. 126). Trigg reflects that although “the carnality of the body is in some sense a privileged matter,” “the ontology of the flesh 81
extends beyond that of the body” (p. 126). The anonymity of the human body, then, is that it “is less the expression of human subjectivity and more a manifestation of brute flesh” (p. 126).
This decentering of the human is not so radical as to strip humanity of the power of symbolic action; we may not be alone in the world as language or sign-users, but we are unique in our abilities to manipulate the symbol, that arbitrary and most abstract form of sign. However, if human symbolic action can be viewed as emerging within (or through) a subjectivity that extends beyond the human, then Merleau-Ponty seems to have located in “the flesh” a middle ground not only between ideality and matter, but between philosophies that privilege the human (like classical phenomenology) and the
“realist ontology” of Levi Bryant, for example, in which objects are the only kind of entity in the world, humans ‘simply’ being particular kinds of objects {Democracy, p.
20).
In The Book o f Chuang Tzu, we can see an entanglement evocative of Merleau-
Ponty’s “flesh” in its unification of opposites and in its complication of origins.
Comparing certain feeling-binaries like “Joy and anger, / sadness and delight,” Chuang
Tzu likens these to “notes from an empty reed,” suggesting, in line with modem affect theory, that certain intensities pass through or impinge on bodies without originating in them. On the heels of unifying these feeling-states, Chuang Tzu remarks that “day and night follow each other before our very eyes and we / have no idea why... / Morning and night exist, / we cannot know more about the Origin than this! / Without them, we don’t 82
exist, / Without us, they have no purpose” (p. 10). A couple of thousand years later, we know that morning and night exist due to the earth’s rotation, but does this eliminate the wonder of the cycle we call a day? If we explain the origin of the sun, does this put us closer? Of subject and object, existence and essence, Merleau-Ponty writes “they are the repeated index, the insistent reminder of a mystery as familiar as it is unexplained” (p.
130). Both thinkers are principally concerned with matters of ontology, and it is the familiar mysteries of everyday occurrences, both cultural and natural, that are equally
Chuang Tzu’s concern. His claim that “Without them [morning and night], we don’t exist, / Without us, they have no purpose,” while still echoing a weak form of the anthropic principle - and thus not immune from being stamped as “correlationist” - is concordant with Merleau-Ponty’s location of a middle ground between philosophies that privilege the human and decenter the human by way of emphasizing human contingency.
The connection between “the flesh” and the Tao of Chuang Tzu begins with the difficulty of conceiving them due to their subtlety and immensity. As Dylan Trigg writes,
“Of the flesh, there is nothing that can be said, as to name it would be to insert it into the world of particular things” (p. 127). How can one speak of something if one is automatically in the wrong by dint of opening one’s mouth? Compare this difficulty to the difficulty of conceiving of the Tao: “Who knows the argument that needs no words, and the Tao that cannot be named. .. .Pour into it and it is never full; empty it and it is never empty. We do not know where it comes from originally, and this is called our
Guiding Light” (p. 16). I draw the reader’s attention to the word “this” in the preceding sentence, referring to the “Guiding Light.” This Guiding Light is not a knowing-yet- 83
refusing-to-speak; it is, by definition, a not-knowing. Chuang Tzu has just undermined any descriptive science of the Tao, for, paradoxically, the Tao does not reside in knowing, knowledge seemingly only a hindrance to the perception of such a reality. It may be approached through parable or metaphor, through intensities that register in the body or through intuition, but it fundamentally cannot be known, for the Tao is the way of nature in all its complexity, in all its multitudinous flux, which the mind cannot bring together. The Tao, as with the flesh, is ineffable, more purely experiential than it is the product of ratiocination. ‘But who knows?' remains the proviso at the end of every statement about the Tao. Of the flesh, Merleau-Ponty prefers to think of it as “elemental” because of its irreducibility as a “general thing.” It is an “incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being” (p. 139). As a “style of being” and, as mentioned above, midway between ideality and matter, it seems to be its fundamentally and all-encompassing nature that renders it ultimately unthinkable. How can a thing be the object of thought if it is what organizes thought?
Therefore, in a move not uncommon in eastern philosophical traditions, Merleau-
Ponty assumes his exploration of the “general principle” of the flesh by saying what it is not: “The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance” (p. 139). Just as affect can be said to be the intensity that makes feelings feel,2 the flesh is that by which facts are afforded their facticity (p. 110). In teasing out such baseline realities, it may be tempting here for the western reader to engage in some kind of mystical reverie, attempting to
21 am paraphrasing neuroscientist Antonio Damasio here: “Without affect feelings do not ‘feel’ because they have no intensity” (M/C Journal). 84
achieve some kind of blissful union with ‘the all’ implicated here, but Merleau-Ponty has reservations about any such union: “it is not possible that we blend into it, nor that it passes into us, for then the vision would vanish at the moment of formation, by disappearance of the seer or of the visible” (p. 131). The flesh is not a relation, but something underlying relation, making relation possible - it is not a locatable thing-in- itself that one could have a relation to. This bears on Merleau-Ponty’s view of the relations between humans and Nature as well. According to Trigg, “nature” for Merleau-
Ponty “is not the opportunity for a subject to consolidate and reinstate their subjectivity.
Nature is not, in other words, an event of the sublime.” In other words, gleaning some secret formula of the flesh is not an opportunity for a rational, self-directed ego to expand its territory. Rather, “nature is the living ground of being in all its fleshy articulations - of us, yet at the same time, without us” (Trigg, p. 123). Similarly, the philosophy of Chuang
Tzu does not lend itself as support to those wishing to make of it guiding principles
(although this has not stopped people from trying, as evidenced by the existence of religious - as opposed to philosophical - Taoism). In The Book, when asked by an official’s messengers if Chuang Tzu would administer his lands, Chuang Tzu responded by telling the story of a sacred tortoise whose shell had been kept in an ancestral temple, and asked the messengers if the tortoise would have wanted to be venerated so or would have preferred to remain alive “to crawl about in the mud?” When the official’s messengers responded without hesitation that the tortoise would have wanted to remain alive and crawl about in the mud, “Chuang Tzu said, ‘Shove off, then! I will continue to 85
crawl about in the mud!’ ” (p. 146-7). The flesh and the Tao are not states, objects, or relations with which one ‘does something.’
Beyond language, the flesh and the Tao place a limit on knowledge, confining the rationality of the self-determining subject to the internal coherence of his projections.
Both are total or open systems as well, and perhaps ‘open’ is the preferred adjective here, as the word ‘total’ may be too suggestive of an already-elaborated system. Yet, there is something of a totality in each idea’s radical inclusiveness; each seeks to describe a natural state of affairs, and, of particular import here, this natural state of affairs is profoundly non-anthropocentric. Such totality or openness presents itself in Merleau-
Ponty as an inseparability of subject and object, or body and world: “We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body, or, conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box. Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?” (p. 138). As Vicky Kirby points out, the totality of the flesh is such that it contains difference without necessarily harmonizing it; there is no sense perception which does not fold back on itself or does not contain at atom of original difference, the flesh then taking on a kind of fractal dimension: “even closure is intrinsic to its makeup,” as “the world perceives itself by opening itself to the experience of its own difference” (p. 119).
The “horizon” of thought and of vision that Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “the flesh” attempts to glimpse is one “that encompasses our negations as our affirmations” (p. 109).
Or, in Trigg’s words, “the flesh” marks “a difference prior to a phenomenology of difference,” an “in-difference” (p. 127). With Chuang Tzu, this totality or openness is 86
less one of inseparability and more of “eclecticism,” to use Martin Palmer’s word (p. xx).
The Book o f Chuang Tzu reads like a collection of stories, mythologies, and historical anecdotes, each imparting a sense of the Tao (which is usually translated in English as
‘way’ or ‘path’) in its manifestation as Te, or power. Julian Pass writes that “the ‘real’ can be expressed in thousands of different ways and none is absolute; none is without partial truth either” (p. 9). In this, the ‘way’ as indicated by Chuang Tzu is entirely dependent on context, and, as immune to rational thought, is purely experiential. It is not entirely surprising, then, given Merleau-Ponty’s twin occupational concerns of existentialism and phenomenology, bodily being and lived experience, that these two thinkers might converge in certain respects, both emphasizing experience over rationality.
The explicit ontology of both thinkers also gels in that both present nature/world and
(human) consciousness as neither opposing poles nor lacking all distinction: Being manifests itself and folds back into itself in a circuitry that cannot be called dualist or monistic, fitting the description of that category of ontology referred to “dialectical monism,” in which Being cannot ultimately be distilled into one substance or cleanly separated into two. Both ideas depict a unity, but a unity never wholly present, a split unity, inescapably processual.
For Merleau-Ponty, the body is both seeing and seen, thus belonging to both the order of subject and object, and it is this “reversibility that defines the flesh” ( Visible, p.
144). The chiasmatic involvement of body/subject and world is exactly this intertwining of subject and object that is the complexity of “the flesh.” The body is a seen thing like any other object, but is “subtendjed]” by the body that sees, as it subtends all visible 87
things: Of the seeing and seen body, “there is reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other” (p. 138). Consequently, there exists a “fundamental narcissism of all vision,” since, if the “the seer is caught up in what he sees,” he looks at himself anytime he looks at anything else. Not only this, but when he has a sense of things looking at him, as Merleau-Ponty observes many painters to have said, this amounts to a “more profound narcissism,” when a perceived exteriority calls for completion by calling the seer into it
“to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen” (p. 139).
This reversibility, as mentioned above, is not an action or state by which the subject can somehow enlarge itself. Rather, every act of perception smears the subject a little; it does not provide grounds for the subject to consolidate any project or enhance its powers.
Dylan Trigg neatly summarizes this point: “This reversibility structured by the flesh is not, therefore, a fusion of sameness and difference, but the precise point at which the inferiority of the subject gains its structure through a relation with that which lies beyond the subject” (p. 127, italics mine). Vicky Kirby defines the irreversibility of the flesh as its “global capacity... to embrace itself,” and “the intention of this global embrace
(invagination) is to seize the essential fullness of Being in all its expressions” (p. 118,
119). (Merleau-Ponty’s term “invagination” is one I will return to at the end, as both the flesh and the Tao strongly allude to femininity in some way or another).
Perspectival reversibility is also an important theme in The Book o f Chuang Tzu, albeit in a different manner. The most cited example of this is the ‘butterfly dream,’ in which Chuang Tzu wakes up from dreaming he had become a butterfly only to discover 88
the irresolvable question of whether he was really Chuang Tzu waking up from a dream of being a butterfly or a butterfly who had just fallen asleep and is dreaming of being
Chuang Tzu! The passage ends with the remark, “we call this the transformation of things,” suggestive of “the flesh” in its reversibility of seer and seen, the seer in this case being Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly and the seen being the butterfly dreaming it was Chuang Tzu, both the dream and the waking from it a sign of “the global capacity o f‘the flesh’ to embrace itself.” This “capacity” for Chuang Tzu is wrapped up with a fundamental unknowability or undecideability as to which view of the observable facts is better or closer to reality, a frequent manifestation of this (un)principle being the preferability of life over death for the living: “ ‘How do I know that the love of life is not a delusion? Or that the fear of death is not like a young person running away from home and unable to find his way back? .. .How do I know that the dead now repent for their former clinging to life?’ ” (p. 19). This radical doubt, expressing itself as a consistent openness to other perspectives and ways of knowing and being, owes itself equally to the insistence of a fundamental limit to knowledge based on the fact that, as embodied creatures, we are all stuck in our own perspective: “I cannot look at something through someone else’s eyes, I can only truly know something which I know” (p. 12).
At the core of Chuang Tzu’s brand of reversibility is, as mentioned above, a unity which is dialectical in nature, the realization that “ ‘that’ and ‘this’ are bom from each other, most definitely” (p. 12). Thus, Chuang Tzu does not do away with distinctions, but realizes the limit of adhering to one or another. Distinguishing is inevitable since our view of things is concretized through this body/life, but we cannot base any ultimate 89
judgment on an act of distinguishing that is necessarily rendered through such limited vision: “...by the light shining out of chaos, the sage is guided; he does not make use of distinctions but is led on by the light” (p. 15, italics mine). We are reminded here of
Merleau-Ponty’s opening remarks in The Visible and the Invisible, in which he claims that “the secret of the world we are seeking must necessarily be contained in my contact with it” (p. 32). Since the seeing body subtends the seen body, it is only, paradoxically, through my lived, limited perspective that I have access to Being at all. Thought and therefore action are afforded only through this limit, as my body opens up onto a world.
Compare this to Chuang Tzu’s statement, “the Tao is made because we walk it,” or his assertion that “Heaven and Earth and I were bom at the same time, and all life and I are one” (p. 13, 15). Being trapped in a body is the only way consciousness can open onto a world: “It means being able to reside within limits which have no limit” (The Book, p.
157). Thus, just as “the flesh” can be approached as that which lends facticity to facts or that which “works over my experience,” the Tao is more than ‘just’ Nature; rather,
“nature is only the visible expression of that all-embracing reality” (Historical, p. 11).
As such reflections say something about the question of other minds, marking a serious set of considerations within the philosophy of mind, they also have special import for the ‘problem’ of anthropomorphism and the question of animal minds. The question of whether or not to anthropomorphize has two attendant dangers, the first a complete unwillingness to project anything (emotional states, for example) onto nonhuman animals
for fear of misattribution, the fallout from this first danger historically mapped out by classical ethology. Writing in 1995, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy 90
have elaborated in When Elephants Weep on the scientific establishment’s view of anthropomorphism: “To accuse a scientist of anthropomorphism is to make a severe criticism of unreliability. It is regarded as a species-confusion, a forgetting of the line between subject and object” (p. 33). The Book o f Chuang Tzu demonstrates this danger in the story of the Earl of Lu, who took it upon himself to care for a seabird by taking it to an ancestral shrine, playing music for it, and attempting to feed it with sacrificial offerings and wine. The poor bird died within three days: “The problem was trying to feed a bird on what you eat rather than what a bird eats” (p. 153). In a similar passage,
Chuang Tzu writes, “ ‘If someone sleeps in a damp place, he will ache all over and he will be half paralyzed, but is it the same for an eel? If someone climbs a tree, he will be frightened and shaking, but is it so for a monkey? Out of these three, which is wisest about where to live?’ ” (p. 17).
Such anecdotes and observations seem to impress upon the reader that the difference between species certainly cannot be ignored, species-confusion carrying with it deleterious effects for humans and nonhuman animals alike. However, the flipside of avoiding all identification with nonhuman animals or being completely unwilling to ascribe human attributes to them is to be like the Earl of Lu, an idiot in the ways of animal behaviorism, engaging in genuine species-confusion. Hui Tzu, a favorite philosophical sparring opponent of Chuang Tzu’s, once chastised him “when Chuang Tzu said, ‘Do you see how the fish are coming to the surface and swimming around as they please? That’s what fish really enjoy.’ ” Hui Tzu took issue with Chuang Tzu’s attributing emotionality (the ‘higher’ emotion of enjoyment, no less) to fish on the 91
grounds that Chuang Tzu was not himself a fish. Despite Chuang Tzu’s retort that “ ‘you are not me, so how can you know I don’t know what fish enjoy?,’ ” Hui Tzu pressed the point that being a fish was truly the only way into a fish’s emotional life. The story ends with Chuang Tzu’s returning to Hui Tzu’s original question: “ ‘You asked me how I could know what it is that fish really enjoy. Therefore, you already knew I knew it when you asked the question. And I know it by being here on the edge o f the River H ao’’ ” (p.
147, italics mine). Chuang Tzu’s final remark would have irked a classical ethologist or any philosopher, such as Descartes, who strictly adhered to the idea of animal-as- mechanism.
But is this the kind of bad anthropomorphizing that ethology has rightly wanted to eschew? Historian of science Laurel Braitman succinctly explains why anthropomorphism has not - and will never - go away: “In fact all human thinking about animals is, in some sense, anthropomorphic since we’re the ones doing the thinking” (p.
36). Anthropomorphism is not only unavoidable, but is in fact an extension of the kind of reasoning we engage in to know that other people have minds and feelings: We analogize and empathize, since ultimately, “what one person feels is never entirely available to another” (Masson and McCarthy, p. 15, 22). A kind of cautious, checked anthropomorphism is actually the only tool (outside the lab) that we can use to make valid inferences when observing animal behavior. Chuang Tzu’s knowledge-claim about what fish enjoy, set against other stories such as the one involving the Earl of Lu, portray a philosopher who gives animals space to be themselves without shying away from inferring what their observable behavior may mean. By observing, analogizing, and 92
empathizing, Chuang Tzu sees no reason to doubt that these fish were enjoying themselves, a skepticism that has come full circle, casting doubt on doubt itself.
Accordingly, there is a modesty that comes with such radical doubt, as when Chuang Tzu checks himself after claiming that everyone is dreaming: “When I say a dream, I am also dreaming” (p. 19).
One fascinating aspect of Chuang Tzu’s brand of lebensphilosophie is that it naturalizes without normalizing. Natural, for Chuang Tzu, is whatever appears to be happening, but if such events change course of themselves, then this, too, is natural: “All life is simply what it is and all appear to him [the sage] to be doing what they rightly should” (p. 19). The natural world cannot be circumscribed; there is always the possibility that future events might nix any conclusion gleaned from a past or present
‘natural’ event. Thus, Nature is immanent without being apparent, observable but nontotalizable. Chuang Tzu denaturalizes nature. Thus, there is something which is called Nature, but the question of what exactly it is must always remain open, hence all the talk within The Book about emptiness - only a mind rid of all concepts can begin to approach this ‘is-ness’ which is always in flux, which can be felt or intuited but not conceptualized, at least fully. In this, might we cast Chuang Tzu as a “queer ecologist,” to use Timothy Morton’s term? My point here is to suggest that Morton needn’t have relied on Derrida. The deconstructive spirit, the reinsertion of the human or culture back into the natural world - but a world in which what constitutes “nature” must always remain open - is already present in Chuang Tzu. He certainly seems to be engaged in a deconstructionist project in his rejection of all ‘case-closed’ scenarios, his objection to 93
plucking an observable phenomenon from the flow of events and abstracting it as
“natural,” as Martin Palmer puts forward in his introduction: “This rejection of the constructions of meaning which we place upon the world and which we then assume to be ‘natural’ is central to Chuang Tzu,” suggesting that he and another major Chinese philosopher, Lieh Tzu, were “perhaps the first deconstructionists” (p. xxiv). So much of
Chuang Tzu’s statements seek to throw the reader off balance, to render the world uncanny, especially by tracing language, reason, and even the very notion of difference to its origin, an origin which cannot be circumscribed by its own inventions. Vicky Kirby reminds us that “deconstruction aims to shake up the routine logic through which we conceptualize the world and our place in it,” and that deconstruction “shows a special fascination with the notion of beginnings,” that it “scrutinizes the foundations of an argument” (p. 1). Take the entanglement of binary oppositions that Chuang Tzu confronts us with here: “Therefore ‘that’ comes out of ‘this’ and ‘this’ arises from ‘that.’ That is why we say that ‘that’ and ‘this’ are bom from each other, most definitely” (p. 12). Even the very notion of difference is compromised here (and such is the dialectical monism of
“the flesh” as well).
Vicky Kirby notes that one of semiology’s lessons “is that when we identify something and attribute it with its very own meaning and properties we arrive at this determination through a web of sticky associations that corrupt its claim to autonomy” (p.
70). These “sticky associations” manifest themselves in Chuang Tzu, also, as a result of such entanglements mentioned above, an implication of ‘this’ being in ‘that’ and ‘that’ in
‘this,’ all of which challenges the notion of origins. How are we to orient ourselves in the 94
world or attribute causality without some sense of beginnings and endings, or, as Kirby writes, “the suggestion that a beginning has something of a mutating existence tests our comprehension in a most fundamental way” (p. 1). Chuang Tzu very much “tests our comprehension” in this department: “There is the beginning; there is not as yet any beginning of the beginning; there is not as yet beginning not to be a beginning of the beginning” (p. 15). That “the great Tao has no beginning” also challenges the notion of foundations: “ ‘Do I have to look to something else to be what I am? Does this something else itself not have to rely upon yet another something? Do I have to depend upon the scales of a snake or the wings of a cicada? How can I tell how things are? How can I tell how things are not?’ ” (p. 15, 20). Indeed, how can one tell if things are or are not if stripped of such fundamental notions? And is this not deconstruction’s aim, to be wary of absolute conclusions, to keep the question always open?3 Kirby, extending such notions of a no-beginning, observes that
there can be no final arrival any more than there can be a single atomic origin... This would mean, for example, that ‘humanness’ is not an entity in the world, as if in a container that is ontologically separate from the world: humanness could not justify its exceptionalism by claiming a special capacity for intellection in an inchoate universe. Rather, the world, by implication, would always have been in
3 Then again, science and mathematics in the 20th century bumped into their own limits in such a way as to cause exactly this kind of confusion. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica, containing hundreds of pages dedicated to a proof of 1+1=2, was written in an attempt to provide a foundation for all mathematics - they did not find one. Kurt Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem states that number theory will always have to include “undecidable propositions” (mathworld). Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle asserts an actual physical limit to how much can be known about subatomic events. Such built-in uncertainty suggests, very generally, a limit to what knowledge can be gained through strict divisions of subject and object. 95
the process of discovering, exploring, redefining, and reinventing the nature of its humanity, (p. 118)
This open-ended “process” is exactly what Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the flesh and Chuang
Tzu’s vision of the Tao of Nature presents us with.
Since Nature is the Tao’s visible aspect, the two bear a relationship to each other that is strikingly similar to Merleau-Ponty’s visible and the invisible. Chuang Tzu’s term
“hsing,” to use its phonetic spelling, is this visible aspect, translating as “innate nature,”
“the way a given species or part of creation either simply is in its givenness, or how it reacts to life” (The Book, p. xxii). That “innate nature” is often, in Chuang Tzu’s philosophy, broken or lost due to the corrupting influence of society or civilization does not mean that ‘human nature’ is not ultimately an outcropping of other natural processes.
In fact, parts of The Booh seem very much in line with the Darwinian idea of the transmutation of species. In the chapter “Working Everything Out Evenly,” Chuang Tzu questions whether human speech is inherently meaningful, observing that “words work because they say something, but the problem is that, if we cannot define a word’s meaning, it doesn’t really say anything.” He proceeds by way of linking this deconstructionist view of language with an ontology o f‘biological continuism’ by openly musing whether human speech is really “any different from the chirruping of chicks” (p.
12). “Perfect Happiness,” the same chapter that laments the species-confusion of the Earl of Lu, concludes with a chronological cataloguing of creation: “From the water came creeping plants, from the water’s edge comes Frog’s Robe, this gives birth to Hill
Slippers...” and so on until we reach the higher animals of the mammalians: “leopards 96
give birth to horses, horses give birth to humans, humans eventually sink back to what was in the beginning. All the multitudes of life arise from the mystery of beginning and return there” (p. 154). The notion of origins coincides here with that of the reversibility of the flesh, or its “volubility,” in Vicky Kirby’s words, “the dehiscence, or bursting open, of the origin itself in its infinite iterations” (p. 120). For Chuang Tzu’s brand of Taoism, since the existence or creation of all particularities - or “infinite iterations” - can eventually be traced back to the Tao, each particularity contains its trace. The superficiality of seeing and responding to the upper crust of this state of affairs, i.e., the failure to recognize the interconnection of these particularities, leads to thievery, corruption, and self-centered behavior.
The golden road, then, for Chuang Tzu and the other Taoist philosophers, is simply to allow things to be, to commit to noninterference, or “w w d .” As mentioned above, Chuang Tzu grounds the human in the natural world, but without imparting any firm idea of what ‘natural’ means. Naturalizing arguments are generally precluded in cultural and feminist studies because they either legitimize a racist or sexist status quo or
“seem like a prescriptive return to something from the past,” but Chuang Tzu’s concept of “innate nature” should not arouse any suspicion in cultural or feminist studies departments since his observations amount to an anti-essentialist philosophy (Kirby, p.
71). Chuang Tzu’s use of analogy to bridge the world of human affairs and the natural world is a two-way street; historical anecdotes are meant to shed light on the inner workings of nature not because culture or language determines nature, but because human affairs are outcroppings of the natural world. Guiding wuwei, or noninterference, 97
is the belief that nature is always already ideal (although we resist attempts to abstract this ideal), so why interfere with it? Chuang Tzu’s contemplation of the Tao does not bracket human activity off from natural phenomena. Jeaneane D. Fowler, quoting
American sinologist Derk Bodde, writes, “for the Chinese, this world of nature, with its mountains, its forests, its storms, its mists, has been not mere picturesque backdrop against which to stage human events” (Chinese Religions, p. 7). Rather, Chuang Tzu seeks to conceive of culture and nature as participating in the same becoming, the same mutating origin, “human events” ultimately seen as natural events.
Given all this, the idea of conservation, that humans should actively favor one species over another, or the idea of invasive species, treating one species as unnatural, are notions that Chuang Tzu would probably refrain from if he were alive today (also in light of his philosophy of perspectivism, or perspectivial reversibility). This semi-flattened ontology is noted by Martin Palmer’s introduction to The Book', “the approach of Chuang
Tzu to official status and power” is such that “he rejects anything which elevates one aspect of life over another,” and this is the case in and outside of human societies (p. xxii). Again echoing a kind of proto-Darwinism, “Life exists through scrounging; if life comes through scrounging, life is like a dump” (p. 151, italics mine). Indeed, the cheapness of life is such that it reproduces at any cost, using parts that already exist, and can be found everywhere physical conditions allow (as the existence of “extremophiles” show us, those critters that thrive in extremely hot, cold, or acidic conditions). Species exist as such only momentarily on evolutionary time scales, and are made of other species. Life is plastic in its cheapness and mutability. So, lest his insistence on observing 98
the natural world be taken as supporting any kind of naturalizing argument, consider that for Chuang Tzu, ‘life itself and earth as a whole engage in wuwei: “Earth does not support / yet all life is sustained” (p. 108). That “earth does not support” robs humanity of at least two cherished ideas: That we are at all central to natural processes (that the universe needs us in any way), and the quaint, simplistic notion of some kind of holistic
‘web of life,’ where everything is nourished by everything else. Rather, life simply is, and is indeed a unity, albeit one that feeds on itself. There is an engine that says “copy,” but no telos. This is also represented through Chuang Tzu’s rooting out and debunking of all ideological manifestations of anthropocentrism, manifestations that are in league with a kind of anthropic principle, that the universe was created for us, which we noted above to have already been done away with through Chuang Tzu’s resistance to bracketing human being as ontologically separate from natural processes. In one story, a man at a banquet observes the kindness of heaven for providing all the delicious meat laid out before him, only to be scolded by a 12-year-old boy: “One species is not nobler than another; it is simply that the strongest and cleverest rule over the weaker and more stupid. Things eat each other and are eaten, but they were not bred for this...” The boy then points to all creatures that feast on human flesh, such as gnats and mosquitoes, suggesting we were not created for their liking any more than the fish and foul were created for our liking (p. xxiv).
That ‘all things are one’ might sound trite to a 21st century reader, but barring its usefulness as a kind of New Age slogan, the anonymity of the Tao is strikingly similar to the anonymity of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the flesh. One of Chuang Tzu’s favorite 99
binaries to throw a wrench into is the life/death binary: The Tao, like the flesh, is not a place where the ego can hope to take refuge or gather strength. Rather, a smearing of the subject and even a productive kind of species-confusion are the results of deeply contemplating either of these ontologies. Many passages involve a Hamlet-like image of some character holding a human skull and wondering aloud whether life is preferable to death, and honestly taking account of death as the destiny of all life. Indeed, much of The
Book seems to be an emotional working-through of the anxiety that fuels death denial, apparently as much a cultural phenomenon 2,500 years ago as now. Take the following quote: “Life has its origin from which it emerges and death has its place from which it returns. Beginning and end follow each other inexorably and no one knows of any end to this” (p. 180). Far from comforting, if one is not prepared for such a revelation as this is meant to produce, that “no one knows of any end to this” may in fact only induce more anxiety or even existential dread. The solace of Taoism, as also with Zen Buddhism, is that there was never really a self to begin with that ‘one’ would have to fear losing.4
Seemingly in touch with this idea, only extrapolating it through her reflections on “the flesh” and Derridean deconstruction, Vicky Kirby muses that “the issuing forth of any identity is an involvement that is present across space and time” and that, therefore,
“there never was an atom, an individual, to be split, as all identity is given chiasmatically.” (p. 123).
4 That this also seems to be the case within some strains of psychoanalysis and even with certain experimental results in cognitive science is highly suggestive. I am thinking especially of Lacanianian psychoanalysis and the cognitive science referenced by philosopher Thomas Metzinger in The Ego Tunnel. 100
I return here to Merleau-Ponty and his “non-phenomenology” of the flesh as presented in “The Intertwining - The Chiasm,” in which the words “astonishment,”
“wonder,” and “fascination” crop up with some regularity, indicating an almost spiritual yearning present in his late writings. Emphasizing experiencing over possessing, he writes that “perception,” as a kind of “interrogative thought,” lets the world manifest itself for the observer, but only for an observer who does not try to aggressively arrest its becoming, to hold it “with forceps” (p. 102, 101). The Tao of “the ultimate and primary being” is such that the observer who gives it space to know itself puts herself as the question which this being posits, and this person who is Being’s question “obtains not an answer, but a confirmation of its astonishment.” “Let[ting] the perceived world be rather than posit[ing] it” is strongly suggestive of Chuang Tzu’s wuwei. To Merleau-Ponty’s
“sort of gliding, beneath the yes and the no” is Chuang Tzu’s philosophy of “not mak[ing] use of distinctions” or relinquishing of categories due to their hopeless entanglement (p. 102). Merleau-Ponty conceives perception as “a desiring organ that seizes upon its own alienness, and in the wonder of that encounter, is reconceived”
(Kirby, p. 120). In “Eye and Mind”, he observes that “the painter lives in fascination,” but so also do many of the principal characters in The Book o f Chuang Tzu (p. 358). In both ontologies, we are presented with a nontotalizable unfolding, a dehiscence of Being in which subject and object are inextricably enfolded. Both open onto nonhuman being through a defamiliarization of the human, but whereas Merleau-Ponty achieves this through a vision of a porous subject or subject-object interpenetration, Chuang Tzu engages in a radical skepticism, interrogating binaries - living/nonliving, nature/culture, 101
human/animal - by revealing their interdependence. Where they join Darwin and
Bergson is through an emphasis on flux as opposed to a static present/presence, taking the long view of history in which humanity is only a blip (and, moreover, a blip that has not totally come into itself!). Both ontologies are committed to an antihumanist framework in their decentering of the human or erasure of normative views of the human
(or species generally), announcing instead the human’s non-arrival, the notion that the human has never really been present, but is a stranger who is yet to come, a haunting that emanates from the future as much as from the past.
I must return here to the idea of an “ethics of sublimity,” that an attendance to nature’s (and animal’s) sublimity has ethical value. I was originally drawn to the sublime, and continue to be, for its ability to pierce the veil of ordinary experience, and possibly then to disrupt or suspend ideology, if only momentarily. Sublime experience is supposed to work on us rather than us on it, unearthing the trauma that comes of being open to the real, diminishing the self so that the awe of nature/the world/the universe in its terrible force and immensity can be more directly experienced. Ideology, however, in its power, can also put a fence around the sublime, taming it and making it accessible, like a carnival ride through a haunted house. The creation of the national park system in the
U.S., following William Cronen’s writings on “wilderness,” stand as a silent testament to ideologies o f‘sublime nature’ and to the secularization of Judeo-Christian values. How can I return to the sublime, and build an ethics around it, if it’s been so problematized?
Rather than getting rid of the idea, since it can so productively rattle us, I choose instead to re-energize it, but also to highlight its dangers, that it might encourage us to use 102
animals for the sake of theory, and that it “risks an aestheticization of [animals] trauma”
(Weil, p. 16).
Whereas the sublime deterritorializes the self or subject, the uncanny deterritorializes the other, the object. Nonhuman animals, for us, have the power of being a source of both (although we must also be wary of our attempts to make animals a source of anything). Their sublimity lies in their being in us. We need not commune with them for our animality to be brought to the fore; psychoanalytic and evolutionary theory provide ample evidence of our essentially animal nature. Their uncanniness might be said to lie in the same relation: Just as they are in us, we are in them. As equally participating in the facticity of embodiment, our ‘sharing’ cognitive, social, and empathetic attributes is a two-way street. Humans have animal-like characteristics and (some) animals have human-like characteristics, and to deny this two-sided truism amounts to “anthropo- denial,” to use Frans de Waal’s term. Just as the world of the quantum is counterintuitive
- even to physicists - because it is so removed from everyday experience, so also is the picture that evolutionary biology presents us with, a picture in which the human body is already other. Sublime and uncanny experience works against cultural assimilation, disturbs our sense of self, and destabilizes all the powers of the symbolic. As such, not unlike the unconscious, such experience approaches, is drawn towards, and perhaps even revolves around an unassimilable excess, just as nonhuman subjectivities present us with a certain excess. Nonhuman animals think and feel, but we should not presume to know what they are thinking and feeling. 103
The experience of oneself as a subject is rooted in bodily being, and the vulnerability that inescapably comes with embodiment is an empathic connective node among all animals. As noted in chapter one, there are at least two reasons why animal studies already has a friend in feminist theory. Feminist writers have long been concerned with vulnerability, especially the vulnerability of embodiment. The feminist care tradition in particular links the subjugation of women with the subjugation of nature, as women and nature have represented for patriarchal society wild or irrational elements to be tamed and controlled. Feminists are also intimately familiar with the struggle to inhabit or utilize an exteriority to language: If language is thoroughly patriarchal or phallocentric, then how can women genuinely talk about their desires, their experiences? As long as we are conscientiously anthropomorphizing and not idealizing animals’ presumed pre- linguistic state as a source of sublimity humans can tap into, then locating or registering this “ ‘elsewhere’ outside of language’ ” could be an ethical act (Weil, p. 17). It is here that this thesis comes full-circle, for both Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “the flesh” and
Chuang Tzu’s rendering of the Tao utilize feminine or maternal imagery to analogically approach ontologies resistant to thought or language. Merleau-Ponty’s “invagination” — certainly not a coincidental term - refers to the “principle” of the “actual,” that which is
“not the proper contribution of a ‘thought’ but is its condition, a style, allusive and elliptical like every style” (The Visible, p. 152). The maternal, then, is evident in the very act of perception; the visible world folds back on itself and is thus born. Vicky Kirby notes Merleau-Ponty’s “quite specific use of the term ‘invagination’ ” to denote the
“reversibility” of the flesh, its “(re)conceiving (of) itself’ (p. 119, 118). The totality of the 104
reworking of phenomenology that the flesh represents is such that it “cannot be defined against closure, for closing, sealing, and separating are intrinsic to its desire for itself’ (p.
119). This totality, which is a kind of dialectical monism, is on par with that of the Tao as presented in The Book o f Chuang Tzu and other Taoist texts. In Taoist cosmology generally, the Tao is the behavior of the physical universe, that observable universe having been created by the ineffable power of the Absolute. From the first passage of Lao
Tzu’s Tao De Ching:
The Tao that can be expressed Is not the Tao of the Absolute. The name that can be named Is not the name of the Absolute.
The nameless originated Heaven and Earth. The named is the Mother of All Things (R.L. Wing).
Note here the specific use of the word “Mother,” as the image of the womb-like void from which all things come, is a recurring one throughout the Tao De Ching and The
Book of Chuang Tzu. For Chuang Tzu, the earth is “the mother of all life” (p. 156). The mother is the womb, the caregiver, the embrace, the space or emptiness which allows things to be. The ‘emptiness’ of Taoism is not the nil of western philosophy but a positively charged, productive emptiness. Moreover, the Taoist conception of emptiness is one of a centrality around which all things hinge, configuring their utility - the space inside a cup or the hub of a wheel. I find it intriguing that a decentering of man - not only
‘human,’ but ‘man’ - is equally at work in so much 20th century theory and indigenous
Chinese religious thought, coalescing around an ethics of sublimity. This ethics stems 105
from a commitment to openness, a careful avoidance of betise with its fitful urge to categorize, conclude, and close the book on becoming, and instead embracing the inescapable truth of the vulnerability of embodiment, aging, and death that we share with our animal others. 106
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