II.
The question of the animal has been taken up by various
scholars and philosophers in recent years, and some of the insights of these
thinkers are important as intellectual background for the present study. I
would like to single out the contributions of two major continental
philosophers, Giorgio Agamben and the late Jacques Derrida, who have written
and spoken on the subject in the last ten years. In the playful The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida takes
as his starting point the sense of shame (and “shame at being ashamed”[i])
at being seen (and “having been seen seen”[ii])
naked by his own cat and asks, “Can one speak of the animal? Can one approach
the animal? Can one from the vantage of the animal see oneself being looked at
naked? From the vantage of the animal before evil [le mall] and before
all ills [les maux]?”[iii]
Derrida arrives at
a conclusion congruous to that of Agamben, who argues in The Open: Man and
Animal that one must “let [the animal] be outside of being.”[iv]
In other words, one must avoid founding any relational epistemology in an
ontology of animalness, since animalness, by its very definition, points to a
place beyond the reach of Being. Agamben continues, “Insofar as the animal
knows neither beings nor nonbeings, neither open nor closed, it is outside of
being; it is outside in an exteriority more external than any open and inside
in an intimacy more internal than any closedness.”[v]
For both Agamben and Derrida, the animal is construed as an “other” so absolute
that, by virtue of its radical alterity, it must be elevated to some sort of
ethical status; paradoxically, it is the fragility of the biological boundary
that separates human from animal that becomes essential to the human’s ethical
responsibility to let the animal be.
One shortcoming of the two recent monographs by Agamben and
Derrida is that they approach the question of “the animal” with exclusive
reference to European conceptualizations of nature, even though the ultimate
goal of these thinkers has been to overturn such conceptualizations. These
thinkers implicitly code the problematic of human-animal relation as a
specifically “Western” problematic and consequently overlook the various ways
other cultures have constructed the distinction between humans and animals. For
the present study, it is important to
realize that biological and/or philosophical distinctions between humans and
animals as such need to be reconsidered in the context of classical China, in
which such distinctions were differently configured in philosophy and politics.
In the only book-length academic work of which I am aware
that brings the insights of animal studies to bear on the question of the
animal in pre-modern China, Roel Sterckx argues, “[T]he classical Chinese
perception of the world did not insist on clear categorical or ontological
boundaries between animals, human beings, and other creatures such as ghosts or
spirits…Consequently the animal world, in several ways, provided normative
models and signs for the guidance of human society,” which were in turn
interpreted by the “human sage” or “ruler-king.”[vi]
Therefore, animals were less often the objects of proto-scientific inquiry and
were more often “subjected to predominantly cultural and social
classifications” that emphasized change and transformation.[vii]
This clearly indicates that in Chinese philosophy and politics there was little
or no sense of a prediscursive ontology of “the animal” in the singular tense.
[i]
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That
Therefore I Am, ed. by Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. by David Wills (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 21.
[ii]
Ibid., 13; emphasis original.
[iii]
Ibid., 21.
[iv]
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal,
trans. by Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 91;
emphasis original.
[v]
Ibid.
[vi]
Roel Sterckx, The Animal and the Daemon
in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 5. Though
I do not believe that this cultural difference in perception can be reduced to
linguistic difference, language is an obvious point of departure between European
and Asian contexts and must be considered for the role it plays in constructing
social perceptions. Since, as Sterckx points out, “the notion of definition
itself needs to be qualified in the Chinese context” (20), I am obliged to note
that no single Chinese sign refers to the animal—there are, in fact, several
words that can refer to animals or “beasts” generally, though these words
usually function polysemantically and can thus simultaneously refer to specific
groups or types of animals. For an excellent discussion of the problem of
definitions in Chinese in relation to the question of the animal, see Sterckx,
16-21.
[vii]
Ibid., 6.
