The Dog Man: Becoming Animal in Coetzee’s Disgrace

Abstract

Crossing borders or the ends of man I come or surrender to the animal--to the animal in itself, to the animal in me and the animal at unease with itself. --Jacques Derrida (372) With their parallel lives, animals offer man a companionship which is different from any offered by human exchange. Different because it is a companionship offered to the loneliness of man as a species. --John Berger (6) The comfort lavished by animals ... is as timely as grace. --Luce Irigaray (197) Anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool. --Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus 240) An extraordinary moment in Levinas: And then, about half way through our long captivity, for a few short weeks, before the sentinels chased him away, a wandering dog entered our lives. One day he came to meet rabble as we returned under guard from work. He survived in some wild patch in the region of the camp. But we called him Bobby, an exotic name, as one does with a cherished dog. He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men. (153) In desperate conditions Emmanuel Levinas comes close to articulating a new relationship with the animal, with the creature that confers on each and every member of the seventy of us in a forestry commando unit for Jewish prisoners of war in Nazi Germany (152) the status that is proper to man. Levinas goes a considerable distance toward the other animal; he tries not to allegorize or metaphorize dog; he tries to see Bobby in his own right. But as the moment of identification passes, Levinas returns to more philosophically conventional modes of thought: Bobby has neither ethics nor logos, he is the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives (152). For Levinas, the dog is, as David Clark observes, too stupid, trop bete, the French condensing idiocy and animality into one crassly anthropocentric expression (188). But at the same time, Bobby has done something that the human beings surrounding the detainees of Camp 1492 (the guards, the locals living outside the camp) do not. By not differentiating between categories of his fellow beings, by being unconcerned whether these men are gentiles or Jews, Bobby has recognized the of the prisoners; he has acknowledged the absolute and irreducible worth of the other. But for Levinas, the strain of coming to terms with the fact that one's very has been affirmed by an animal creates passages of remarkable tension and irresolvable contradictions: what or who is animal? How to respond to the gift he has bestowed on you? How is it possible to be with and alongside fellow being, dog, without reducing him to a mere representative of his kind? Levinas's difficulties with the animal are by no means unique. Indeed, Jacques Derrida includes Levinas amongst the pantheon of European philosophers (he is thinking in particular of Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, and Lacan) whose discourses [on the animal] are sound and profound, but everything goes on as if they themselves had never been looked at, and especially not naked, by an animal that addressed them ... as though troubling experience had not been theoretically registered, supposing that they had experienced it at all, at the precise moment when they made of the animal a theorem, something seen and not seeing. The experience of the seeing animal, the animal that looks at them, has not been taken into account in the philosophical or theoretical architecture of their discourse. (383) When Levinas so movingly registers his debt to cherished being, we can see a temporary testing of the limits of discourse, of what Derrida terms this immense disavowal whose logic traverses the whole history of humanity (383). …