SubStance, vol. 37, no 3 (117 - 2008) - The Political Animal

In publication continuously since 1971, SubStance is a major interdisciplinary journal with a reputation for excellence. It is an international nexus for discourses converging upon literature from a variety of fields, including philosophy, the social science, science, and the arts. Readers have come to expect the unexpected from SubStance, and to experience a sense of participating in the formulation of emerging theories.

Vol. 37, no 3 (117 - 2008) - The Political Animal
Sous la direction de Chris Danta et Dimitris Vardoulakis

Chris Danta
Dimitris Vardoulakis
The Political Animal
There is an anecdote, or perhaps a fable, about the philosophers of the Platonic Academy attempting to define the human. After much debate, the members of the Academy arrived at a seemingly succinct and accurate definition: man is a wingless biped (dipous apteron). At that moment, Diogenes the cynic, who had been eavesdropping on their deliberations, suddenly threw in the philosophers' midst a chicken whose feathers he had plucked and proclaimed: "Here is your man!" Although the horrified Academicians recoiled from this scene of animal cruelty, philosophers have not since shied away from defining the human in opposition to other animals. In a fable that is no longer fabulous, human being constitutes itself through a definite violence against the animal. Diogenes's denuded chicken becomes a primal scene of the human-animal relation -- and thus a scene that is repressed, a scene from which philosophers have consistently turned their gaze every time man is the issue. In the variegated history of the philosophical definitions of man, one has survived... (Extrait)

Cary Wolfe
Flesh and Finitude: Thinking Animals in (Post)Humanist Philosophy
In what follows, I want to suggest that a good deal of confusion about "animal studies" has stemmed from our inability to locate the question properly.1 More specifically, if philosophical work that takes the moral status of non-human animals seriously is, in some obvious sense, posthumanist (i.e., challenging the ontological and ethical divide between humans and non-humans that is a linchpin of philosophical humanism), such work may still be quite humanist on an internal theoretical and methodological level that recontains and even undermines an otherwise admirable philosophical project. My aim here is to map a kind of philosophical or theoretical spectrum that moves from humanist approaches to posthumanism (or anti-anthropocentrism) to posthumanist approaches to posthumanism, moving from a cluster that includes Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian "capabilities approach," Peter Singer's utilitarianism, and Tom Regan's post-Kantian animal rights philosophy at one end, through the post-Wittgensteinian work of philosopher Cora Diamond... (Extrait)

Slavov Zizek
Nature and its Discontents
Beyond Fukuyama Where do we stand today? Gerald A. Cohen enumerated the four features of the classic Marxist notion of the working class: (1) it constitutes the majority of society; (2) it produces the wealth of society; (3) it consists of the exploited members of society; (4) its members are the needy people in society. When these four features are combined, they generate two further features: (5) the working class has nothing to lose from revolution; (6) it can and will engage in a revolutionary transformation of society (Cohen, 2001). None of the first four features applies to today's working class, which is why features (5) and (6) cannot be generated. (Even if some of the features continue to apply to parts of today's society, they are no longer united in a single agent: the needy people in society are no longer the workers. Correct as it is, this enumeration should be supplemented by a systematic theoretical deduction: for Marx, they all follow from the basic position of a worker who has nothing but his labor power to sell. As such, workers are by definition exploited; with the progressive...
(Extrait)

Timothy Morton
Ecologocentrism: Unworking Animals
...with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. --Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (293) Whoever is the wisest among you is also just a conflict and a cross between plant and ghost. --Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (6) Ecology without Nature1 One of the things that modernity has damaged in its appropriation of the Earth has been thinking. Unfortunately, one of the damaged ideas is that of Nature itself. (I shall be capitalizing this word where necessary, to highlight its metaphysical qualities.) How do we transition from seeing what we call "Nature" as an object "over yonder"? And how do we avoid "new and improved" versions that end up doing much the same thing (systems theory, Spinozan pantheism, or Deleuze-and-Guattari type worlds...
(Extrait)

Julian Murphet
Pitiable or Political Animals?
The first and decisive question will rather be to know whether animals can suffer. --Derrida, 396 I. On the Suffering of Animals As first questions go, this one (actually posed by Jeremy Bentham) seems answered in advance, not only by the terminal emphasis with which Derrida stamps it, but by the felt preponderance today of a public pity for what is here posed only in the subjunctive. It is a pity about which a veritable war has been waged for two centuries at least, Derrida tells us; a pity whose fateful power it is, on the far side of modernity, to permit the two terms "animal" and "human" to enter once again into alignment. The war of which Derrida speaks was the protracted humanist effort, by way of innumerable atrocities and torture against other species, to enforce an absolute distinction between us and them, "the thesis of a limit as rupture or abyss" between two irreconcilable orders of biological substance, to disable and forestall any childish upsurge of emotion on behalf of life forms devoid of language and properly incapable of death and thus free to be experimented upon and industrially consumed... (Extrait)

Paul Sheehan
Against the Image: Herzog and the Troubling Politics of the Screen Animal
Late in 1968, while students in the European capitals were still dreaming of revolution, another version of it was being enacted several thousand miles away. The instigator was West German filmmaker Werner Herzog, directing his second full-length feature on the island of Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands. Entitled Even Dwarfs Started Small, the film describes the discontent brewing among a community of dwarves in an institution on the island, and the insurrection they launch against their keepers. The revolt is by turns, farcical, incompetent and destructive - setting fire to various objects, smashing windows and crockery, and killing a pig. In the grotesque climax to the film, a monkey is tied to a cross and symbolically "crucified," then paraded about in a nightmarish caricature of a victory march. It is not hard to detect here a response to the événements of the previous spring. The student radicals are intellectual midgets, Herzog seems to be saying, mounting an ill-considered charade... (Extrait)

Dimitris Vardoulakis
The "Poor Thing": The Cosmopolitan in Alasdair Gray's Poor Things
A humanist politics sees its fulfilment in individual liberation. As Kant argued in "Idea of a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose"--a text I will examine later -- the perfect operation of reason will result in autonomy. But, as Descartes had already argued, the animal needs to be excluded from this project of individual liberation because it acts without reason, that is, it acts automatically (139). Autonomy and automaticity structure the subject through the division between an intelligence inside and an outside mechanical body. Such a division becomes unstable as soon as it is recognized that it will always be impossible to determine who is in control.1 As Catherine Liu puts it: "The figure of the automaton mediates the representation of a catachrestic imperative: how has Enlightenment represented that machine as its infernal Other, while at the same time adopting a principle of mechanical reason to justify the giddy optimism of its expansionist project?" (xi.). In other words, how can the... (Extrait)

Chris Danta
Kafka's Mousetrap: The Fable of the Dying Voice
You're wrong to adopt a moral point of view. I adopt that of an animal. I am not a man among men. I am animal. --Georges Bataille in conversation with Maurice Heine We have made the louse in our image; let us see ourselves in his. --Michel Serres, The Parasite I. The Dying Voice Sometimes fiction acts in a gently prophetic way and by a strange coincidence a writer awakes one morning to find himself taken at his word by reality, the literary dream having become a biographical actuality. This idea is not as strange as it first sounds, especially when one considers how Aristotle distinguishes the historian from the poet in the Poetics: "The difference," Aristotle writes, "is that one tells of what has happened, the other of the kinds of things that might happen" (2000: 68). Given that the poet speaks of "the kinds of things that might happen," there is no reason why fiction can't act predictively. The last story Franz Kafka wrote, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," is a case in point, being poetic in just this sense of the term. It concerns a mouse called... (Extrait)

Leonard Lawlor
Following the Rats: Becoming-Animal in Deleuze and Guattari
Undeniably, globalization defines the epoch in which we are living. As the word suggests, this means that the earth has been enclosed within a globe. And this means that all the ways out have been closed, so that one species -- the human -- is able to dominate all other species.1 What justifies this -- what gives us the right to dominate the animals? The answer is well known: humans believe they have the right to dominate the animals because humans believe that they possess a special kind of subjectivity. The concept of subjectivity that we think we possess has its conceptual origins in Descartes's "cogito," but the concept of the "I think" develops into the Kantian idea of autonomy. The Kantian idea of autonomy means, of course, that I am self-ruling; I give the moral law to myself, unlike the animals upon whom nature imposes its laws. But in order to give the law to myself, I must tell it to myself. Kantian autonomy therefore is based on auto-affection.2 What makes me, as a human, autonomous is my supposed ability to hear... (Extrait)

Simon Lumsden
Habit, Reason, and the Limits of Normativity
In recent years one of the views that has risen to prominence in both analytic and continental philosophy is the idea of the fundamental sociality of reason. This socialized reason is presented as both the condition for and the context in which all norms are framed. Of course not everything can be a norm in this sense; for something to count as a reason it must be able to be recognized as a reason by our interlocutors and be something that we can individually and collectively commit ourselves to -- that is, give reasons for. This view of normativity and the rationality of this social sphere assumes a public domain supported by liberal social and political institutions that provide the kind of deliberative social conditions by which what can count as a reason to act or as a justification can be seen to be collectively sanctioned. The whole social sphere so conceived is the "logical space of reasons," a social space for "the giving and asking for reasons". The great social and legislative advances in the twentieth century that have challenged racism, sexual discrimination...

(Extrait)

Andrew Benjamin
Another Naming, a Living Animal: Blanchot's Community
1. The dog appears.1 Its head is above the line. Is the dog slipping back? Its head is on the line. Is it submerging again, tasting death as the admixture of fear and the quicksand that will eventually end the ebb and flow of life? Is it scrambling futilely up a bank that no longer holds? The dog is being defined by its eventual death. While still allowing for the severity of the animal's predicament, its appearance may be precisely the ebb and flow, thus a continuity of life not structured by death but by having-to-exist.2 Within what then does the dog appear? The question has force precisely because it has an exigency that cannot be escaped since neither answer nor direct resolution is at hand. The question endures. Once allowed, the question repositions the line. No longer mere appearance, the line is neither the sign of a simple division nor is it able to sustain a simple either/or. Death cannot be equated with the dark. Equally, the light cannot be reduced to the life that may be escaping. (Though it should not be forgotten that Goya's work belongs to... (Extrait)