Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and the Question Singular: What Marks the Difference between Humans and Animals?

Abstract

What marks the difference between humans and animals? At what point does a human become an animal and vice versa? What is the difference between human flesh and animal meat and reversibly, between human meat and animal flesh? Where is the line to be drawn between them, if possible? This paper seeks to problematize and rethink the long-established difference between humans and animals via Merleau-Ponty's notions of flesh and animality and Deleuze's notions of meat and the zone of indiscerniblility, as they are presented, respectively, in The Visible and the Invisible and in the second and third courses on nature in Nature: Course Notes from the College de France—Animality, the Human and the Passage to Culture and Nature and Logos: The Human Body— and in the fourth chapter, Body, Meat, and Spirit: BecomingAnimal, of the book, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. In addition, Francis Bacon's paintings are used to illustrate the ambiguity and indiscerniblility between the human flesh and the animal meat. Suffice it to say, the clear-cut traditional distinction between a human animal and a non-human animal is called into question and is rethought through their corporeity rather than their intrinsic mental faculties. The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible We study the human through its body in order to see it emerge as different from the animal, not by the addition of reason, but rather, in short, in the Ineinander with the animal (strange anticipations or caricatures of the human in the animal)... Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the College de France Auslegung, Vol. 28, No. 2