Humans and Animals

Abstract

The animal is excluded from the essential domain of the strife between unconcealedness and concealedness. The sign of this essential exclusion is that no animal or plant 'has the word.'-Heidegger, Parmenides[I]f αλήθeια [aletheia] as unconcealedness determines all beings in their presence (and that means, for the Greeks, precisely in their Being), then certainly the πI?λις [polis] too, and it above all, has to stand within the domain of this determination by αλήθeια, provided the πI?λις does indeed name that in which the humanity of the Greeks has the centre of its Being.-Heidegger, ParmenidesUnavoidably, in our eyes, the animal is in the world like water in water. -Bataille, Theory of ReligionIn play the human enters a zone of indiscernibility with the animal. -Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about PoliticsPROLOGUEAnimals1 and animality-the focus of this article-clearly have implications for understanding the situation of particular humans, as it is in relation to the animal that the human has often been defined and understood. While a great deal of work in the ever-expanding field of animal studies has endeavoured to counteract the anthropocentrism seemingly inherent in human conceptions of animality, my concern is to counter-act a particular animalisation of the human. By this I do not mean that there is an essential animality to which sectors of humanity have been reduced. For, indeed, the aim is to question 'essential animality' Rather, I am referring to the way that the animal defined as mere life or nothing but a struggle for survival (the view of the doxa) has been applied, as others have noted (cf. Agamben, Oliver, Calarco), to designated sectors of humanity.Philosopher and critical animal activist2 Matthew Calarco has recently offered an overview of theoretical and philosophical approaches in animal studies while at the same time coming out in support of a version of what he calls 'indistinction' to describe the human-animal relation. Interesting as it is as a counterfoil to anthropocentrism, the way that Calarco presents indistinction is, I believe, problematic. Indistinction is contrasted with approaches to the animal designated as 'identity' (represented by the approach, amongst others, of Peter Singer) and 'difference' (particularly as presented by Jacques Derrida) and presents the relation between human and the animal as continuous, not discontinuous. According to Calarco, both entities are united in the struggle for survival, a struggle in which they would both show their joint biological heritage, where the human body, like the animal body represented in the paintings of Francis Bacon, is also fundamentally and essentially meat (Calarco 2011: 57). A more nuanced interpretation of Calarco's argument would be that our author wants to avoid reductionism. Thus, both animal and human would have a biological component without either being reducible to this. And, indeed, it will be argued that 'indistinction' together with 'indiscernibility' as presented by Brian Massumi (2014), are not essentially reductive, but indeed offer the possibility of revolutionising thinking about the animal-human relation. The problem, however, is that, for many, the most felicitous way to unite animal and human is at the biological level, hence the prevalence of biological language in discussions of the human-animal relation. Calarco's words cited above are a case in point.As a reminder of what has gone before in philosophy regarding animals I will look at the way that the animal and the human appear in the philosophy of Descartes, Heidegger, and Bataille. In the case of Descartes and Heidegger, albeit in different ways, the human and the animal are irrevocably estranged from one another.With regard to Bataille, the human, even though it can also rise above it, originates in animality. Bataille thus sees the myth of Icarus as a warning as to what can happen if humanity strays too far from its material, animal roots. …