Matthew Calarco ‘Life and Relation Beyond Animalization.’ A Review of Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animals

The following article ‘Life and Relation Beyond Animalization’ by Matthew Calarco is a review of my book Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animals (2014) recently published in the open access journal Humanimalia 9:1 (Fall 2017), pp.152-159.

I would like to sincerely thank Professor Calarco for taking such time and effort in order to produce such an insightful, in-depth and generous essay.

It can be accessed here (HTML):

http://www.depauw.edu/humani…/issue%2017/calarco-iveson.html

Or here (PDF):

Click to access calarco-iveson-pdf.pdf

 

‘Life and Relation Beyond Animalization’ by Matthew Calarco

The growth of animal studies from an emergent field of inquiry into a mature set of discourses and practices over the past several years has been marked by two particularly welcome developments. First, concerns and questions about the status and nature of animals and animality have penetrated ever deeper into the core of disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences. This trend has helped to call into question some of the most stubborn dogmas in these disciplines and to provide the space for important intellectual and theoretical transformations. Second, extant approaches and frameworks among animal activists have increasingly come to inform the work being done in animal studies, enriching its ethico-political sensibilities and providing practical support for its enrichment and evolution. What has perhaps gotten lost in the rapid growth of animal studies, however, are deeper questions about what is ultimately at stake in the field. Although the multiplication of disciplinary perspectives on animals and animality is no doubt important, we might ask ourselves: Are some frameworks  more critically insightful than others in terms of trying to discern violence and disrespect aimed toward animals and animalized others? Similarly, we might also wonder: Which perspectives are most fecund for transforming those relations and ultimately arriving at alternative forms of life?

Richard Iveson’s book, Zoogenesis: Thinking Encounter with Animals, seeks to frame and address these important questions. With this ambitious, wide-ranging, and erudite book, Iveson hopes to provide nothing less than new critical and affirmative groundings for future work in animal studies. On Iveson’s account, unless we understand the deep sources of violence toward animals, we will never arrive at a place from which we might begin to contest those sources and eventually reconstitute more respectful relations with animals. In this review, I will track some of the basic elements of Iveson’s fascinating and powerful argument before closing with some questions about some of its possible limitations.

Rejecting the Institutionalized Genocide of Animals. Iveson’s overall project begins from the premise that animals matter for themselves — which is to say, in and of themselves — and not simply in view of how they might shed light on certain questions concerning human nature or human sociality. That the study of animals and animality might illuminate certain aspects of how power circulates among human beings is, to be sure, something worthy of our attention for Iveson; but his primary emphasis is placed on ensuring that animals are seen as beings who have value beyond their instrumental usefulness to human beings. As he writes in the introduction, to accept the chief premise animating his work is

to accept that humans do not have the right to do whatever they like with other animals. It is to accept that our given state of affairs is unacceptable and must be radically transformed. Put simply, it is to no longer accept the economy of genocide into which we have all been thrown. (25)

The overarching aim of his project, then, is to find ways to allow animal lives to matter, that is, to count and become salient in those disciplines, institutions, and practices that have traditionally excluded animals from the circle of concern. Given Iveson’s philosophical background, the natural place to look for allies for such a project is the analytic philosophical tradition, populated by luminaries such as Peter Singer, Tom Regan, and Paola Cavalieri. The standard gesture in this discourse is to extend ethical consideration to animals by way of analogical reasoning, demonstrating that animals are sufficiently similar to human beings as moral patients so as to warrant similar moral standing and consideration. Iveson, though, takes a critical stance toward this tradition, as it tends to gloss over the radical singularity and alterity of animals and to neutralize human-animal differences by way of conceptual and practical schemas. In so doing, he joins philosophers and theorists in the pro-animal feminist care tradition, who seek to ground animal ethics in caring relations between and among human beings and animals. And yet, despite Iveson’s proximity to this tradition, his deeper philosophical commitments derive from the Continental tradition, with Jacques Derrida and Friedrich Nietzsche being among the primary sources of inspiration. From Nietzsche and Derrida, Iveson borrows the notion that the denial of animal finitude and singularity lies at the very heart of the current crisis in human-animal relations. As such, the task of Zoogenesis can perhaps best be read as a meditation on the sources of that denial as well as what it would take to acknowledge and affirm animal finitude and singularity. The latter, affirmative task would not be so much a matter of granting animals their uniqueness and relation to death but of discovering and encountering it in various ways in the shared spaces in which human-animal relations emerge and are sustained. I will track the main thread of this critical and affirmative analysis in Iveson’s work by examining some of the key themes in each of the five main parts of the work.

From Animalization to Zoogenesis. The bulk of Iveson’s book provides a condensed but rigorous reading of the history of philosophy and theory in view of animals and animality. In Part One, he argues that the guiding thread linking together thinkers as diverse as Plato, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Blanchot is a denigration of animality (both human and nonhuman forms) and a denial of death to animals themselves. In a close reading of Plato’s Meno, Iveson shows how Platonic dualism (the reigning metaphysical system in much of intellectual and Western culture for over two millennia) teaches us to seek the highest truth, beauty, and the Good by leaving behind the sensible world and preparing for a disembodied life beyond death. Although this non-finite mode of human existence is disavowed by post-metaphysical thinkers such as Blanchot and Heidegger, both of whom return the human to its irreducibly mortal mode of existence, such mortality is not understood to be shared between and among human beings and other animals. Instead, mortality and the “capacity” for dying one’s own death come to be seen as  something proper only to human beings. As such, Iveson notes, the post-metaphysical decentering of the human subject that throws the subject outside of itself and toward its singular being-toward-death is insufficient to displace the anthropocentrism at the heart of the philosophical tradition. In order to accomplish this latter goal and to continue the post-metaphysical task of thought require giving finitude back to animals, or rather catching sight of the shared mortality at the heart of all human and animal life.

Failure to recognize the finitude and singularity of all living beings creates the conditions for what Iveson calls animalization. Lives that are animalized are lives that do not matter; such lives are reduced to deathless objects to be annihilated and consumed with impunity. In view of this reduction, Iveson argues that it is

imperative to disclose another way to give death, and to the giving of dying, to animals. To give death to other animals: the gift of and the giving that is the shared finitude of living beings. Only then will the monstrous hubris of an unthinking utilization and consumption of fetishized corpses itself become unthinkable. (94)

If we are to acknowledge the death of animals, Iveson suggests we must begin with the recognition that all singular animal life (whether human and nonhuman) emerges in a process he names zoogenesis.  Zoogenetic relations emerge from a shared, ex-propriated site of encounter. In Part Two, Iveson tracks such animal encounters in literary form with Kafka (“Investigations of a Dog”), in ethico-poetic form with Derrida (in his much-discussed naked encounter with a cat in The Animal That Therefore I Am), and in ontological form with Nietzsche (with the theme of a form of life beyond nihilism). The key to Iveson’s notion of encounter is that it does not ultimately stem from an act of ethical will (which is to say, conscious responsibility for another animal) or a desire for spiritual perfection (understood as seeking out animal encounters as a way of improving oneself and expanding one’s consciousness). Rather, on Iveson’s reading, these thinkers and writers all point toward animal encounters as events, that is, as something that one undergoes — beyond full understanding, presence, and mastery. Thus, animal encounters testify to the ways in which animals are more than a given subject can think. Animal encounters are ways of naming the manner in which animals announce themselves in their singularity and finitude, beyond the strictures of traditional philosophical and theoretical discourses that would seek to strip them of their radical alterity. For Iveson, such unpredictable and astonishing encounters speak to a way of life beyond the nihilism of life-denying transcendence and the incomplete nihilism of the “last man,” a relational encounter with a world that Nietzsche describes in The Gay Science as “over-rich” in all that is “beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine.”

In Part Three, Iveson explores how such encounters cannot be delimited either to the realm of the inter-human or to one’s preferred forms of animality and nonhuman otherness. As for the former delimitation, he argues that this sort of restriction of the ethics of encounter is at work in Judith Butler’s writings on the recognition and mattering of vulnerability. As with Heidegger and Blanchot, Iveson suggests that Butler’s post-humanist ethics fails to go far enough to displace anthropocentrism. Conversely, he argues that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of becoming-animal, while radically non-anthropocentric, re-establishes its own zoogenetic limit in the manner in which it configures the outside of the human as populated only by pack-like, feral, and untamed animals and forms of life. In configuring the outside of the human in this manner, Deleuze and Guattari run the risk of missing precisely the kinds of encounters with animal singularities that Kafka and Derrida track and ending up in a kind of undifferentiated, deep ecological holism. While Iveson’s reading of Deleuze and Guattari will be somewhat contentious for some readers, there is certainly merit to this concern with their work and with the manner in which their notion of becoming-animal has sometimes been put to work in pro-animal and ecological discourses.

In Part Four, Iveson tracks this same failure to think zoogenetically at the level of the socius, a restriction that has led to an anthropocentric delimitation of the boundaries of community and the political. Through an analysis of a host of political thinkers, Iveson convincingly demonstrates that no politics based on humanism — no matter how widely or generously the concept of the human is defined — will suffice to constitute a genuinely post-anthropocentric sense of community. Rather than being a neutral designation, on this analysis “the human” nearly always functions in the dominant culture of the West in a performative manner to circumscribe a group of beings considered to be properly human and properly part of the society over and against those who are sub- or non-human. Commenting on this anthropocentric logic in the humanism of Susan Buck-Morss, Iveson explains:

Buck-Morss misunderstands that humanism is only insofar as it sets up a limit between the human and the animal. Such is the demand for line-drawing which humanism can never avoid, and which ever again founds that animalization of the other which is the very condition for those political collectives she imagines her humanism will overcome. (244)

For Iveson, it is only with the more radical Nietzschean and Derridean affirmation of more-than-human life that we can arrive at a conception of community and being-with that overcomes this humanist closure and violence. To say yes to life (and to the finitude at the heart of life) is to affirm that one is always already encountered by singularities that are shared in and with others, that communities and relations pre-exist our encounters, and that community with animals only happens in the midst of these ongoing relations. In Iveson’s words, a community beyond the human is a

“community without limit” … an infinite commonality of singularities which shares and in which is shared all finite living beings. (258)

It is important to note that community and relation, if they are understood in terms of Derridean différance and Nietzschean will to power (as Iveson’s account is), will not issue in a hands-off, rights-based, non-interference ethics and politics but will instead entail considerable transformation among and between those beings called animal and human. Such transformations might even involve a fundamental transformation in the species heritages of human and animal beings, whether through biotechnological transformation or other similar kinds of interventions. In the final section of the book, Iveson explores the question of how his ethics, politics, and ontology both feed into and challenge certain animal biotechnological research. Here, in a complex reading of Bernard Stiegler and related thinkers, Iveson acknowledges that animals and relations can and will change over time and that biotechnological interventions cannot be ruled out a priori; the question is rather one of which relations and transformations to undertake. Iveson suggests that the key limitation with the transhumanist technological project is that it is based on an attempt to master animal life and finitude more generally, seeking to guide zoogenetic becomings along a single dimension or axis (largely structured by the demands of capital). By contrast, Iveson outlines a notion of technicity that is open to becomings that unfold in a variety of un-master-able and unpredictable directions.

On the Scope and Limits of Zoogenesis. The potted overview I have offered here of Iveson’s book fails to do justice to the complexity and intricacy of his arguments as well as the charitable and thoughtful engagement he offers with each of the major figures he analyzes. His book is to be highly recommended for any reader who hopes to gain a deeper understanding of how a critical animal studies perspective might thread its way through the hegemonic history of the West as well as the contemporary theoretical scene. In this closing section of the review, I want simply to pose a couple of questions in view of Iveson’s project for those of us who might take up portions of it in various ways.

Given Iveson’s attempt to think relation and singularity zoogenetically, one wonders about the broader scope of his project. How does the path of thought outlined in the book help to negotiate relations and singularities with non-living beings, systems, and so on? Here the question is not so much one of how mortality and finitude figure in the constitution of living human-animal singularities, but rather one of whether ethics and politics might be extended beyond this particular set of relations. In other words, how should we read Iveson’s call for a “community without limit”? The only example of an ethic of non-animal others discussed in Iveson’s work is deep ecological holism, which is rejected precisely because of its tendency to override singularity in favor of relational wholes. But what if one sought to construct an ethic that recognizes a wider range of singularities, both living and non-living? In other words, how might Iveson’s zoocentrism either be supplemented by or be in opposition to phytocentric, biocentric, or multi-centric environmental ethics? Likewise, how might his project be situated in view of an ethics of the more-than-human world that aims to displace any and all centers in favor of a form of life lived in view of “all our relations”? With Iveson’s close relation to both Derrida and Nietzsche in mind, one can see how such questions and possible tensions might arise. Derrida does not rule out the possibility of thinking through the ethics and politics of such a broad set of relations, but his overwhelming focus is on how différance constitutes the matrix through which living singularities emerge and maintain some semblance of sameness. Nietzsche’s thinking, by contrast, casts a much wider ontological and relational net. He thinks will to power as properly cosmic, insists that the Apollonian and Dionysian agon emerges primordially from nonhuman nature itself, and teaches us to be wary of thinking that life is anything but an exception in the planetary and cosmic order of things.

Such questions arise not simply because of the zoocentric nature of Iveson’s project; this delimitation is entirely understandable given the need to work carefully through the human-animal boundary in particular and the unique forms of violence and becoming that occur along this axis. Rather, what prompts one to consider the scope of Iveson’s framework is his tendency to present zoogenesis as the intractable, sole (“only” is a frequent word deployed by Iveson when considering the necessity of a zoogenetic thinking) site from which to contest the established anthropocentric order and constitute an alternative socius. Were zoogenesis understood as a partial but important aspect of a form of life beyond animalization, there would be no need to pit zoogenesis against ecological or planetary holism. Rather, the latter ethical and political frameworks might come to be seen as supplementary forms of normative consideration, which would themselves be nested inside a host of micro- and macro- singularities and relations that exceed the economy of the living. Of course, to do justice to such a wide variety of singularities and relations, one would have to do away with the desire to privilege any single ontological or normative framework and allow thought to enter into a realm in which plural ontologies (which are rather different from a single pluralist ontology) proliferate in view of doing justice to all our relations. Such questions hover on the edges of Iveson’s project, and it will be of considerable interest to see how Iveson’s forthcoming work on posthumanism and the path of thought he has opened up for his readers will unfold in view of these additional ontological and normative considerations.

The Wrongs of Animal Rights

 

One might perhaps be forgiven for thinking that the proponents of rights for animals are the only ones left who have not yet heard about the challenges posed to the liberal subject of right from all sides. While this is not strictly true, neither is it particularly false.

A large part of the problem centres upon the fact that the so-called “fathers” of contemporary animal rights theory absolutely refuse any truck with possible alternatives, dismissing them out of hand as without relevance. As a result, a great many activists today – having inevitably turned to animal rights discourse in the first instance due to its privileged media position – believe that rights theory is not so much the best as rather the only position from which to address animal concerns. This is part of a retrograde and, at times, extremely bitter defensive battle concerned only with preserving that privileged position. While this is of course an all too human reaction, it is, however, just such anthropocentric conservatism that must be done away with.

Here then, the discourse of “animal rights” must be contested from both sides, that is, as regards both animal and right. Ironically perhaps, this can best be illustrated by way of its two greatest proponents, Peter Singer and Tom Regan, whose books, Animal Liberation (1975) and The Case for Animal Rights (1983) respectively, are generally considered the founding texts of contemporary animal rights theory.

According to Singer’s utilitarian philosophy, it is insofar as nonhuman animals are sentient, and only by virtue of this, that they are therefore entitled to have their interests taken into account in any utilitarian calculation. In this, however, Singer is not – as he himself makes clear – making a case for animal rights, but rather only for the necessity of including sentient animals in the determination of morality by utilitarian calculation in order to avoid falling into contradiction and thus irrationality. Singer’s basic position, in other words, remains inevitably inscribed within the calculus of ends, a human mastery which thus views the animal only according to its enclosure within an ordered technological schema. A schema, moreover, within which any oppression of a minority for the sake of that judged – by human standards – as the “common good” can all too easily be justified.

While Singer is not strictly proposing a theory of animal rights, Tom Regan meanwhile is not proposing a case for animal rights. Rather, Regan attempts merely to demonstrate that certain privileged nonhuman animals are the “same” as humans insofar as they too are “subjects-of-a-life,” that is, that they, in common with humans, possess interests and desires regarding their own individual existence. In other words, Regan’s neo-Kantian liberal approach determines the place of the nonhuman animal only according to an essential human morality, and in so doing inscribes human subjectivity as the ground of the animal. As philosopher Matthew Calarco notes, “Regan’s work is not a case for animal rights but for rights for subjects, the classical example of which is human beings.”[1]

Already then, we see how the notion of “animal rights” necessarily moves within the same or another humanism, redrawing again and again the same unthought lines of exclusion, the same metaphysics of either-man-or-animal. In both cases, it is man who must determine, and thus delimit, the animal. Similarly, the bourgeois liberalism upon which rights theory rests is clearly evident in the shared privileging of the individual – of individual consciousness (Regan) and of an individual capacity for suffering (Singer) – at the expense of wider considerations. In short, for both Singer and Regan it is only ever sentient animals who count, that is to say, it is only the most human animals who matter.

Here then, it is not only the anthropomorphising of the animal that renders rights theory hugely problematic, but also the liberalism that necessarily inheres within the notion of “right” itself. As Jacques Derrida insists, insofar as rights theory remains structurally incapable of dissociating itself from the Cartesian cogito, it necessarily finds itself condemned to helplessly reiterating an interpretation of the masculine human subject “which itself will have been the very lever of the worst violence carried out against nonhuman living beings.”[2] This inevitable contamination of the notion of “right,” as well as the refusal of its principal theorists to consider other possible avenues, has resulted in the alienation of several potentially sympathetic groups from thinking with other animals, feminists chief among them.

This chasm is further broadened in that, insofar as the Western human male constitutes the measure of everything, rights theory fondly imagines that the inferior status of nonhuman beings can be fundamentally challenged by way of the legal and political institutions of that same Western human male. As a result, as Calarco again points out, animal rights activism is left with no other choice than to adopt “the language and strategies of identity politics.”[3] which in turn serves to further isolate animal concern from other arenas of political activism that are similarly seeking to challenge structures of oppression such as ecofeminism.[4]

Moreover, there are further, less directly related problems regarding the underlying liberalism of rights discourse. Consider the political and ethical issue of veganism, for example. The individualism inherent in animal rights, itself dependent upon the liberalist idea of the free human subject of will, results in the ethico-political praxis of “enlightenment.” Politics, in other words, becomes for the adherent of animal rights the ethical practice of enlightening others through the power of that very will.

As a result, it becomes very easy to understand the widespread negative perception of veganism as the last pure, proselytising religion. Indeed, in a book written with Anna Charlton, rights theorist Gary Francione and even attempts to defend animal rights on the basis of its reduction to a “belief system,” that is, to a religion.[5] It thus comes as no surprise that animal rights activists tend to believe that “active inclusion in the movement carries with it certain proscribed beliefs such as the assertion of the moral righteousness of the movement and the necessity of spreading that revelation.”[6] Or, as Tom Regan puts it, one must – with all the moral superiority that this entails – enlighten “one person at a time.”[7] Here then, the focus is once again returned to the human “believer,” with animal concern being displaced onto a human concern serving what Jamison, Wenk and Parker describe “as an alternative expression of ‘repressed transcendence’” – a repression that is itself characteristic of modernity.[8]

It should be noted, however, that all such people in need of moral “enlightenment” in fact already know about the almost unspeakable horrors, about the intense suffering and resolutely quotidian cruelty undergone by other animals every minute of every day all over the world – a systematic and systemic torture-slaughter machine which, transcending every geographical boundary, carries on regardless. Where then does this leave the righteousness of “persuasion”? Presumably waiting either for a much more effective art of rhetoric, or for a messianic (re)incarnation. In the meantime, how can a proselytising practice founded precisely on liberal or neoliberal individualism ever result in the cessation of exploitation and consumption?

Intimately related to these Christo-capitalist foundations of contemporary animal rights theory is the all too frequent recourse to the rhetoric of moral innocence as regards nonhuman animals. At the same time as reinstating a very traditional human-animal dichotomy, this conservative yet unfounded rhetoric again serves only to burden animal concern with religious overtones – activism thus becomes penance for the moral culpability of the fact of being human. In this way, human exceptionalism finds itself once more safely inscribed within a Christian teleology as the only animal to Fall into sin and thus in need of salvation.

By contrast, the priority of animal liberation resides instead in disclosing an epistemic shift that, already underway, ultimately makes eating flesh simply unthinkable. In this sense, the issue of veganism is both subordinate to, and a necessary consequence of, a thorough deconstruction of speciesism, itself dependent upon the dismantling of the various mutually-articulating structures of oppression. Without this, veganism all too easily risks becoming merely a pious operation of ressentiment.

One way to think about this is through Carol Adams’ concept of the absent referent understood here as that which solicits – in the double sense of both shaking and importuning – that unacknowledged knowledge of the global torture-slaughter machine. Not, however, in the staging of a one-to-one dialogue – itself an all too human, all too individualist, all too egoist privilege – but by way of an undeniable manifestation of an habitual and constituent refusal to think and to see, one with the potential to solicit on a far larger scale. From this we can begin to understand why the future cessation of exploitation and consumption of other animals does not rest with the persuasive power of the minority of “enlightened” humans, but with the return of the repressed. A return which, as that which is most real, quite simply can no longer be denied at the level of our very being. Only then will consuming other animals become unthinkable in an absolutely literal sense.

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Notes

1. Matthew Calarco Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p.8.

2. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … A Dialogue trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p.65.

3. Matthew Calarco Zoographies, op.cit., p.7.

4. It would seem that, forming a group dedicated to exposing connections between sexism and speciesism, ecofeminists Carol Adams and the late Marti Kheel sought perhaps to “queer” the associations of rights theory by naming the group Feminists for Animal Rights (FAR). This, however, only confuses the issue, which is that of removing the focus on “rights” entirely.

5. See Francione & Charlton Vivisection and Dissection in the Classroom: A Guide to Conscientious Objection (Jenkintown: The American Anti-Vivisection Society, 1992).

6. Wesley V. Jamison, Caspar Wenk, & James V. Parker “Every Sparrow that Falls: Understanding Animal Rights Activism as Functional Religion” in The Animal Ethics Reader 2^nd Edition. Ed. Susan J. Armstrong & Richard G. Botzler (London & New York: Routledge, 2008), pp.609-614 (p.611).

7. Tom Regan “Preface: The Burden of Complicity” in Susan Coe Dead Meat (New York & London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995), pp.1-4 (p.4).

8. Jamison, Wenk, & Parker, op.cit., p.610.

But Hitler was (not) a vegetarian …

In the dialogue with Derrida entitled ‘Violence Against Animals’, Elisabeth Roudinesco brings up the ‘fact’ of Hitler’s vegetarianism precisely in the overdetermined terms so beloved of the humanist opponents of pro-animal activism (Luc Ferry, for example), in which vegetarianism is explicitly linked with the bad conscience of a deflected misanthropy: ‘from a psychoanalytic point of view, the terror of ingesting animality can be the symptom of a hatred for the living taken to the point of murder. Hitler was a vegetarian’ (‘Violence Against Animals’, 68). Aside from the patent absurdity of such thinking, it should be made known that Hitler was in fact not a vegetarian, but rather it was the case that he only seldom ate meat as it caused him physical discomfort (i.e. stomach pains and flatulence). Nonetheless, he continued to eat sausages throughout his life, and a favourite dish was fledgling pigeon. In addition, upon coming to power in 1933 he banned all vegetarian societies in Germany, arrested their leaders, shut down the main vegetarian magazine, and persistently persecuted vegetarians. During the war, all vegetarian organisations were banned throughout the occupied territories, even though, as Charles Patterson points out, ‘vegetarian diets would have helped alleviate wartime food shortages’ (Eternal Treblinka, 127). Historian Robert Payne writes that the myth of Hitler’s vegetarianism was a public relations exercise organised by Joseph Goebbels: ‘According to the widely believed legend, he [Hitler] neither smoke nor drank, nor did he eat meat nor have anything to do with women. Only the first was true. … His asceticism was a fiction invented by Goebbels to emphasize his total dedication, his self-control, the distance that separated him from other men. By this outward show of asceticism, he could claim that he was dedicated to the service of his people’ (cit. ibid. 127-8). What is perhaps more interesting is why this propaganda should continue to be promulgated with such insistence. Why, in other words, do people find it necessary to reiterate this myth ad nauseum, that is to say, what anxiety does this recycled ideology conceal?

Derrida’s vegan hors d’oeuvre: Politicians, rapists, and vaches à lait

In his final seminars at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales between 2001 and 2003, Jacques Derrida addresses himself to the questions of the beast (la bête) and/or the sovereign (le souverain), of the “who” (qui) and/or the “what” (quoi), the who or what which is an animal and/or is a marionette, and of the indissociability of liberty and sovereignty, of the “free” decision and the machinery of response and responsibility. In the Eleventh Seminar, in an analysis of sovereign knowledge which depends upon the “possession and mastery of its object” (Beast and the Sovereign I 280), he speaks of a seventeenth century dissection of an elephant “under the orders and under the gaze of the greatest of kings, His Majesty Louis le Grand” (ibid.). Imagine, says Derrida, “think about it, represent it,” for it is a performance [une représentation]: perform for oneself this “enormous, heavy, poor beast … dragged in from I know not where on its side or its back into a luxurious room, a beast no doubt bloody, among doctors, surgeons, or other armed butchers [médecins, chirurgiens ou autres charcuteurs armés]” (284). Imagine, he continues, the king’s entrance and all the doctors and academics bowing down, the crowd and courtesans: “represent to yourselves the whole ceremony,” this “political picture … so much more stylish than … a Salon of Agriculture in the midst of an election campaign.” Speaking thus in March 2002 at the height of the presidential election campaign in France, during which every candidate was expected to perform such a visit, expected to represent such a political picture at the Salon, Derrida points to all those “pretending to the throne” who must—

stroke the cow’s rear end [caressent le cul des vaches à lait] (consenting cows, of course, as thieves and rapists [les voleurs et les violeurs] always say, by definition) and walk around candidly, candidately among the stands, their mouths full of foie gras, beer, presidential pâte de campagne, their mouths also full of verbiage … in a crowd in which it would be harder than ever to tell a beast from a sovereign (284-5).

In this, whilst analysing the performance of an elephant autopsy, Derrida at once performs—without remarking—a deconstruction precisely of the “what” or the “who,” of qui or quoi and the beast or the sovereign. Doctors and surgeons are here species of the genera “armed butchers” in their gaze and their performance that reduces a singular elephant to a piece of meat on a slab. This genera, moreover, is extended far beyond the butchering of murdered nonhuman animals for human and other animal consumption, carrying with it the atrocities of war, of terror, of cannibalistic killers, in a shift of sense which brings “biomedical” practitioners together with the most “beastly,” the most so-called “animal” of “human” acts, these doctors and surgeons who—these doctors and surgeons that—assume to possess together with their scalpels the certainty of knowledge and the mastery of their object. Here then, the highest of rational sovereign beings become, for a moment, indistinguishable from the most bestial, the most “animal.”

While still within the vicinity of the majesty of Louis le Grand, in an overlaying of the contemporary “political picture” we find today’s French politicians caressing the backsides of vaches—but these are not “dairy cows” [vaches laitière] as the translation maintains, but rather such “cows” are those who are easily taken in (with all its certain superiority of the masculine), such suckers [vaches à lait] whose arses politicians caress at election time (and thus we too are vaches à lait, and with the same assumption or presumption of sovereignly given consent). The cows in question, however, are produced as stupidly willing, a consent supposed by those rational men “by definition” in order to justify theft and rape. And yet, by speaking of  political candidates as les voleurs et les violeurs, which in turn carries with it a certain feminist notion of the theft and rape of the world as programmed by Christian-Enlightenment thought, Derrida thus speaks of those so-called “food animals” shown at the Salon not as quoi, but as qui: these specific cows who, stolen and raped, fondled without their consent by those “pretending to the throne” in an intimate public caress, these cows who, in a jolt of recognition, cease to be what, cease to be “mere” beasts but who become sensible, become beings that are no longer invisible noise but are rather being violated by beasts, beasts stuffed with empty words and swollen with the cruelly swollen organs of other animals, an enactment of bestial molestation amidst a crowd in which it is no longer possible to tell the human apart from everyone traditionally supposed to be everything that that—that human—precisely, irredemiably, “is” not.

What is performed, and represented by Derrida who exhorts us to represent it to ourselves, is the autopsic enactment of positivist mastery in which all but “the human”—which is not to say all human beings—are never “who” but only “what,” only things to be inspected and displayed for consumption (one thinks of the recent Channel 4 series Inside Nature’s Giants, displaying “layman” dissections of a variety of the world’s largest animals). Here then, we find what Derrida calls the inspectacular imbrication of the theatrical and the theoretical (296) at the intersection of convention and consent, which is at once the setting of the scene of the possible (that “always necessary context of the performative operation (a context that is, like every convention, an institutional context)” (“University Without Condition”)); such representations that, recognised within an institutional context, are countersigned without consent and thus necessarily nonevents. Other if not opposite to this ob-jectifying performance of the phenomenal elephant “is” the animal encounter, the impossible that is the in-sensée (madness, delirium) that enacts bodyings as and at the limit of sense and thus of existence.