To Live: Exploring the Meshwork of Being in Aristotle, Agamben, Walcott, Hughes, and Coetzee

Abstract

The aim of this paper will be to explore the insidious moves by which human discourse transforms the nonhuman world from an existing alterity to a dead object. The objective will then be to trace paths by which we can potentially make space again for the oikos/eco, the home, to exist. As such, it is an objective that can be identified with a multiplicity of discursive formations—literature, philosophy, anthropology—all of which are threads that intertwine in an orientation that must needs also be political since it is openly conducted with an ecocritical stance (though not a predetermined agenda). The ecocritical methodology I adopt is ultimately premised on the comparative principle of combination or contamination of discourses and against their separation into strict, “pure” forms. In the same vein, this reflects the understanding of the world implied by Tim Ingold's term “meshwork,” as a more accurate description of the “entangled lines of life, growth, movement” (Ingold 63), rather than the commonly used term “network,” which would imply discrete, “interacting entities” (Ingold 63). These paths to be then traced are really a form of relation to the earth as world expressed in poetic and philosophical language; such a relationality is first and foremost a way of imagining and experiencing being that decenters the human while relying nonetheless on a human form of expression for its achievement. The humanist objection that a radical alterity divides us irredeemably from the rest of the animal, plant, and inanimate forms that make up the Earth would seem to condemn any project relying on human language as a delusional undertaking.1 However, I will be arguing against such views of extreme alterity, the limitedness of language, and incommensurable differences in my reading of Aristotle's De Anima and Giorgio Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal, alongside two poems by Ted Hughes and J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals. The close reading of the two poems by Hughes constitutes the focal center for the comparative study of literary and philosophical apprehensions of the alterity of life forms. Ultimately, the contextualization of the critical and philosophical debate through this reading is being proposed here on two accounts. First, because the poems are already a philosophical meditation on the apprehension of alterity in life forms. Following upon this, the comparative study exposes mutualities in literary and philosophical language that are sometimes underplayed, though the distinctness of these discourses, when separated, remains significant.