June 29, 2012

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 5/10)


IV.2
Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz

The second chapter is titled “The Muselmann.” “Muselmann” (or “Muslim”) was a term created by those interred in Auschwitz to describe those who had lost any sense of individual will, the ability to use language, and the consciousness of pain, their surroundings, and their fellow inmates. The Muselmann represents, in other words, the “extreme” or “limit situation” of the camps, and beyond him or her “lies only the gas chamber.”[i] The production of bare life in the form of the Muselmann can therefore be seen as the “decisive function” of the Nazi camps, in which one apprehends, in the progressive dehumanization of people, “the emergence of something like an absolute biopolitical substance that cannot be assigned to a particular bearer or subject, or be divided by another caesura.”[ii]

Though it is somewhat unclear how Agamben wants the Muselmann to function in his book—that is, whether Agamben would like the Muselmann to become a transhistorical category or retain its historical and material particularity (a problem that will be returned to later in this essay)—it is essential for Agamben that the Muselmann not be misunderstood as a fundamental disjuncture between life and death; rather, this figure of the camps is to be understood as a “threshold” between the human and inhuman.[iii] It is for this reason that the concept of an ethical limit has to be rejected: “[I]f there is a zone of the human in which these [ethical] concepts make no sense, then they are not genuine ethical concepts, for no ethics can claim to exclude a part of humanity, no matter how unpleasant or difficult that part of humanity is to see.”[iv] In other words, because “there is still life in the most extreme degradation,” the Muselmann becomes “the guard on the threshold of a new ethics, an ethics of a form of life that begins where dignity ends.”[v] Building on the argument of the previous chapter, Agamben argues that it is in the name of this dehumanized human that one must bear witness—one must employ one’s own voice in search of the deafening soundlessness of the Muselmann. Now the gravity of Agamben’s comment that “the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to” is completely clear.

In the third chapter, “Shame, or On the Subject,” Agamben turns from the reflective commentary of the first two chapters toward building a theory of ethical subjectivity that takes testimony as its center. It is unfortunate that this chapter introduces a formal disjunction between the two halves of the book that Agamben is unable to completely resolve; while the first half of the book focuses on survivor testimony and its position in formulating a new form of ethics, the latter half of the book tries too hard to systematize these observations and, as such, loses much of the specificity that gave the first half of the book its clarity and weight. Thus, while both halves of the book share the same key terms and concepts, one cannot help but detect a palpable shift in the meaning of these terms and concepts congruent with the shift in context and intention in which Agamben uses them. By the final chapter, Agamben’s argument becomes so diffuse that it is difficult for him to tie together all the loose ends. This having been said, Agamben’s insights into ethics and subjectivity are valuable, and I would contend that they must be taken seriously. Therefore, it behooves me to give equal attention to the book’s second half.


[i] Ibid., 48, 84. The origin and meaning of the term “Muselmann” is uncertain; Agamben lists several possibilities, but the most likely meaning of the epithet is the literal definition of the word “Muslim,” i.e., “one who submits unconditionally to the will of God” (44-45).

[ii] Ibid., 84.

[iii] Ibid., 55.

[iv] Ibid., 63-64.

[v] Ibid., 69.

June 28, 2012

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 4/10)


IV.1
Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz

Agamben begins his book with a prefatory reflection on the state of Holocaust studies. He argues that while sufficient attention has been paid to the specific historical and material circumstances, enough to establish a “general framework” for current and future studies, there is insufficient understanding of its “contemporary relevance” due to limited investigations into the continued “ethical and political significance” of the extermination of the Jews during World War II.[i] Though one could easily dispute the totalizing nature of Agamben’s claim—nearly all literature on the camps grapples in some way with the ethical and political significance of the extermination—Agamben seems to be right to suggest that the aura of unsayability surrounding the camps limits the ability for critical dialogue to trace precisely these problems. An investigation into the ethical and political significance of the camps for people living today (and in the near future when there will no longer be anyone alive who experienced firsthand the horrors of the Nazi camps) is therefore essential.

Agamben believes that such an investigation must take as its locus the written and verbal accounts of the survivors of the camps, and he positions his own book as “a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony.”[ii] At the very center of testimony, Agamben discovers an “essential lacuna”: “the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to.”[iii] This potent discovery made Agamben realize that all formulations of ethics in contemporary society are rendered inadequate when faced with this gap, and his critical intervention must take shape as a tireless rethinking of ethical categories. Therefore, in response to the crisis of ethics in the postmodern world, Agamben declares the modest intention of his book: “For my own part, I will consider myself content with my work if, in attempting to locate the place and theme of testimony, I have erected some signposts allowing future cartographers of the new ethical territory to orient themselves.”[iv] In the four chapters that follow, Agamben offers a moving commentary on the testimony of Auschwitz survivors, focusing especially on the implications of Primo Levi’s 1987 book The Drowned and the Saved.

Agamben’s first chapter, “The Witness,” introduces the fundamental paradox of witnessing Auschwitz. Termed “Levi’s paradox,” it is taken from an unsettling but incontrovertible statement in Levi’s book: “We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses.”[v] This is the “lacuna” Agamben refers to in the preface, the fundamental lack that constitutes all testimony on Auschwitz—the only ones who can bear witness are the ones who did not witness the ultimate horror of the camps; the only ones who witnessed the ultimate horror of the camps cannot bear witness. Thus, it is the vocation of the witness to bear witness for the true witness, that is to say the one who cannot bear witness.

This chapter also begins Agamben’s engagement with issues in ethics. Though later chapters will develop ethics as integrally bound to testimony and subjectivity in what I call the “fragile ethics of testimony,” in this chapter he lays the groundwork for those later reflections by attempting to separate ethics as a philosophical vocation from law (and, because it is “contaminated” by law, religion as well).[vi] The goal of law is judgment, and judgment, Agamben notes, is essentially self-referential in the sense that it is concerned exclusively with guilt or non-guilt rather than “the good” or “the ethical.”[vii] Consequently, Agamben argues that it is a mistake to think that the trials of Nuremberg have allowed society to “overcome” Auschwitz, for a juridical framework, which can only arrive at a simple, ultimately meaningless verdict of the guilt or non-guilt of an indicted party, cannot exhaust the ethical problem posed by the camps.[viii] It is essential, therefore, that one not confuse ethical categories with juridical or legal categories like “responsibility” or “guilt” when discussing the ethics of testimony.


[i] Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Rosein (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 11.

[ii] Ibid., 13.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid. Alex Murray has helpfully summarized Agamben’s approach to ethics in two necessarily interwoven positions: first, in its linguistic/historical operation, ethics deals with trying to find a way of “remembering and representing those to whom the greatest injustice was done”; and second, in its political operation, ethics is engaged in a thorough critique of the power structures that authorize injustice as well as an attempt to found a “new idea of community” (117).

[v] Cited Agamben, Remnants, 33.

[vi] Ibid., 18.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid., 19-20.

June 27, 2012

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 3/10)


III.
The Homo Sacer and the Sovereign Exception:
Some Preliminary Notes on Agamben’s Political Philosophy

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is at once a standalone volume and the inaugural volume of a series of books that also bears the name Homo Sacer (of which Remnants of Auschwitz is the third volume, though it was the second to be published). Agamben begins the book, first published in Italian in 1995, with a reference to two words for “life” in ancient Greek, zoē (natural or biological life) and bios (“the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group”), a basic lexical distinction that allowed for Aristotle’s well-known definition of the human as a “political animal” (that is, an animal with the additional capacity for politics).[i] Agamben notes that in most ancient systems of law, only bios, the qualified life of human beings, is formally legislated, while zoē as such was excluded—excluded from, yet always already implicated by, the polis.[ii] And it is precisely this originary moment of the politicization of natural life that, for Agamben, marks the beginning of biopolitics, a political structure organized around the control and maintenance of biological life.

Drawing on the work of Foucault, Agamben sees the mass production of “bare life” (a form of life that results from the violent separation or extraction of zoē from bios) as the concealed operation of modern politics, common to the totalitarian states of the twentieth century and today’s liberal democracies. However, whereas Foucault sees the inclusion of biological life as specific to the modern era of governmentality,[iii] Agamben shows how this inclusion, which is operative even in the earliest juridico-institutional systems, ensures that the “production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power.”[iv] For Agamben, this mass production of bare life is prefigured by the homo sacer (literally “sacred human”), a figure in ancient Roman law who “may be killed and yet not sacrificed.”[v] In other words, the homo sacer is one who is deprived of both a political and religious identity and therefore may be killed with total impunity; it is the ban from any form of political contact or legal intervention that, paradoxically, brings this one under the fullest manifestation of the law’s power.

The juridical mechanism that allows for this paradoxical “inclusive exclusion” is the state of exception, or the sovereign ability to suspend any and every law in a time of political crisis.[vi] The state of exception must not be understood as a measure “external” to the law; rather, the sovereign exception is originarily present as a “virtual rupture”—the capacity within every law to be suspended by the sovereign.[vii] For this reason, Agamben takes seriously the controversial political theorist Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception.”[viii] In this way, Agamben’s work examines the political implications when the state of exception becomes a working paradigm of government rather than a provisionary measure, at which point the exception to the rule and the rule itself enter into a “zone of indistinction.”[ix]

This is why Agamben dedicates an entire book to the question of Auschwitz; for, contrary to Foucault, who explored the operations of biopower through such social institutions as the psychiatric hospital (Madness and Civilization) and, most famously, the prison (Discipline and Punish), Agamben chillingly concludes that the paradigm of modern government is, rather than Foucault’s omnipresent panopticon, the camp.[x] The camp, Agamben argues, is the structure that “normalizes” or “realizes normally” the state of exception, and the legal and juridical processes through which the Jewish people and other ethnic minorities were interred in concentration camps in Nazi Germany, are, in fact, still in operation today.[xi] To understand what is at stake for people living under this political paradigm, then, Agamben argues that one must examine the most violent, extreme historical example of the sovereign exception and the production of bare life; one must commit to an investigation into the circumstances of the Nazi death camps. As Agamben notes, Hitler’s ascension to power was immediately followed by the suspension of all the articles of the Weimar Constitution ensuring individual liberties. Consequently, “The entire Third Reich can be considered a state of exception that lasted twelve years. In this sense, modern totalitarianism can be defined as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reason cannot be integrated into the political system.”[xii]
It is with this context and perspective in mind that I turn to my reading of Remnants of Auschwitz.


[i] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Rosein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1, 7. An analogous distinction, one that will be essential to Remnants of Auschwitz, presents itself between voice (belonging to most biological life) and language (belonging only to humans).

[ii] Ibid., 2.

[iii] See, e.g., Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977-1978, ed. Michael Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007). In defining loosely the concept of “biopower,” Foucault notes, “…Starting from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species” (1).

[iv] Ibid., 6. See also 82-83.

[v] Ibid., 8. This use of the term “sacred” in homo sacer is potentially misleading to the modern reader because of the subsequent sedimentation of modern anthropological understandings of the category “sacred.” The homo sacer is sacred in the sense that s/he already belongs to the gods of the underworld. This explains both the unpunishability of the act of murdering the homo sacer (whose death is now of practical rather than moral importance) as well as the unsacrificeability of the homo sacer (“to sacrifice” in the ancient context literally meant “to make holy”; because the homo sacer is already sacred, s/he cannot be made holy and therefore cannot be sacrificed). See pp. 71-74.

[vi] Ibid., 26-27.

[vii] Ibid., 37.

[viii] Cited ibid., 11. This statement will be more fully explicated and theorized in a later work, The State of Exception , trans. Kevil Attell (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005); see esp. the preliminary discussion (1-4) and the brief history of its usage as a governing paradigm (11-22).

[ix] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, 26.

[x] Agamben, Homo Sacer, 119, 123.

[xi] Ibid., 170. Examples of contemporary manifestations of the camp abound: In State of Exception, written only two years after September 11, Agamben focuses on the USA Patriot Act and illegal (or, more precisely, “non-legal”) internment of suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay (see esp. 3-4). However, as Agamben himself would point out, the only necessary step to transform a sports stadium or gated community into a camp, whether in the United States or elsewhere, would be an executive decision.

[xii] Agamben, State of Exception, 2.

June 26, 2012

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 2/10)


II.
Biographical Note

Biographical information on Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) is, unfortunately, scarce. In an interview given in French, Agamben speaks a little of his formative years and the influences of his thought. In the early 1960s, Agamben, then in his early twenties, attended law school; however, his true passion was writing, which led him to philosophy. In 1966 and 1968, Agamben attended two intimate seminars led by Martin Heidegger, and it was during these seminars that, for Agamben, “philosophy became possible.”[i] However, of his time studying under Heidegger, Agamben also commented, “Any great work contains a dark side and poison, against which it does not always provide the antidote. [Walter] Benjamin was, for me, that antidote, which helped me survive Heidegger.” His work thus oscillates between Heidegger, to whom Agamben attributes his interest in ontology and negativity, and the more politically responsible Benjamin, to whom Agamben attributes his interest in philology and “the material contact with texts.”[ii] More recently, his thinking has been equally informed by Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and, especially, the discussions of biopower and the archaeological method of Michel Foucault. Commenting on this diverse array of influences, Agamben describes himself as an “epigone...trying to finish, to complete what others, far better than him, have left unaccomplished.”[iii]

Having published prolifically since the early 1970s, over his career Agamben has developed a singular approach to questions of literature, aesthetics and, more recently, politics, law, and religion, working through these topics with a foundational attention to the uses of language in constituting, representing, consolidating, and unworking power relationships. Agamben’s international reputation as one of Europe’s leading thinkers has grown considerably through his publication in English, starting in the early 1990s; his work has been particularly well-received by proponents of critical theory as decisive commentary on the juridico-institutional and political crises facing the world. However, in 2004, Giorgio Agamben unexpectedly cancelled a highly anticipated series of lectures at New York University in protest of the United States’ invasive identification policies for immigrants and visitors—in an article published in a French newspaper, Agamben unequivocally referred to the fingerprinting, retinal scans, and data registration that homeland security requires of visitors as a form of “biopolitical tattooing.”[iv] Agamben’s decision to cancel this series of lectures, as well as his reasoning, may seem puzzling to those unfamiliar with his work; therefore, to understand Agamben’s decision, as well as lay the necessary theoretical groundwork for a discussion of Remnants of Auschwitz, it will be necessary to examine the content of an earlier book, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.


[i] Giorgio Agamben, 1999, “Agamben, le chercheur d’homme [Agamben, researcher of humankind],” interview by Jean-Baptiste Marongiu, Libération, April 1, http://www.liberation.fr/livres/0101279283-agamben-le-chercheur-d-homme (accessed April 26, 2012).  This and all following direct quotes from this source are my own translation.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Cited Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (New York: Routledge, 2010), 74.

June 25, 2012

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 1/10)


[Full Title: The Fragile Ethics of Testimony: Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz]

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.
---Elie Wiesel, “Hope, Despair and Memory”


I.
Introduction

This essay engages the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s book Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, which was published first in Italian in 1998 and subsequently translated into English in 1999. My essay will begin with a brief overview of Giorgio Agamben’s education and philosophical perspective, followed by a more thorough discussion of some of his recent work on political theory and modern government. Next, I offer a reading of Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz that highlights the ethical aspect of the work. Fundamentally, I argue that the book contains a central, though fragile, ethical imperative toward witnessing that is a distinctively philosophical response to the ineluctable place Auschwitz inhabits in the collective memory of Europe and the world. This “fragile ethics of testimony,” grounded in a provocative approach to human subjectivity, constitutes a new form of ethics that attempts to overcome the malaise of postmodernism without evoking the totalizing (or totalitarian) narratives of modernity. Finally, I will conclude with a critique of Agamben’s philosophy and method that places him in the context of an indispensable strand of anti-postmodern continental philosophy.

June 21, 2012

Architectural (poem)

What radical architecture could defer
its own wish for unmaking?
For in dwelling, a building, like history,
is taken part, is dis-mantled:
the whole is forgotten,
and what once presented itself as impermeable
ceases to be the total object of our fictions.

Consider the deteriorating cathedral
and the sallow walls of its forgotten nave,
whose ovoid apse swells for collapse,
whose columns snap like branches or curl
under the weight of a sinking, sunken ceiling.
The cracks and gaps map that building's un-sealing,
its eventual, inevitable end.

Why must anticipation
always be accompanied by the darker will
to destroy the conditions of its own existence
and all that goes before it?

Vertigo accompanies the unfinished inscription,
as it memory, too, were only a ledge to fall from.


December 1, 2011 (last two lines)
June 13, 2012

June 20, 2012

To have taken ill (poem)

to have taken ill
following the familiar paroxysm
a thick viscous strand of white sputum
pulled from the mouth hangs limply
agleam with faint unsourced light

disquiet
the clouded mind refuses to cease its heated operations
like black lizards
turning over stones
in the night


June 12, 2012

June 12, 2012

De La Torre, Latina/o Social Ethics (Part 2/2)


De La Torre is absolutely correct that powerlessness is the only possible starting point for a new ethics, since, as De La Torre has already established in the first chapter, an ethics of power can only lead to devastating essentialisms and “complicity with empire” (31). That chapter, titled “The Need to Move Beyond Eurocentric Ethics,” will be the focus of my discussion for the rest of this review, and I will argue that it contains several valuable insights into the concealed operations of regulation and control in academic and political discourse.

Eurocentric ethics could be defined as any mode of moral discourse that is produced by the dominant culture and, concomitantly, privileges that culture—whether this privileging is intentional or not does not affect the exclusionary consequences and is therefore irrelevant for De La Torre’s investigation. De La Torre identifies such ideological bias in three figures: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Stanley Hauerwas. If anything is surprising about De La Torre’s reading of these authors, it is how little “digging” he had to do to locate the instances of ethnic elitism and reactionary politics in their work. De La Torre argues that Eurocentric ethics is characterized by covert rationalizations of the normalizing function of state and law, which is expressed in these three authors in various ways. Thus, despite his progressive, socialist leanings, the only way Rauschenbusch could imagine the betterment of minority communities is as a result of their uncritical, wholesale adoption of “white” attitudes, customs, and culture. Similarly, Niebuhr’s “realism” signifies a sort of defeatist pragmatism that systematically excluded from its consideration the reality of the oppressed.

On this evidence, one must conclude that it would be ethically and intellectually indefensible to employ uncritically the paradigms of these thinkers. In fact, the only problem with De La Torre’s critique of such figures as Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr is that few if any serious ethicists in the academy today would build on the ground laid by these thinkers, for whom ethics, after all, was merely a channel for them to transmit their theological concerns. However, even though De La Torre’s discussion would be much more incisive and relevant if he could find examples from contemporary ethics—for instance, in human rights discourse one often finds both a rationalization of state power and the totalization of cultural or ethnic particularities—De La Torre’s critique of Eurocentric ethics is not dulled by his perhaps inappropriate selection of these three twentieth century thinkers.

This chapter of De La Torre’s book has its most immediate and important implications for the classroom. The public school system largely ignores the significant contributions to ethics, to science, to history that minority groups and non-European cultures have made—this is perhaps especially true when it comes to contributions made by Latina/os, despite the rapid growth of the Hispanic population in the United States. And not only the public school system, but in the university, too, the historical discipline, which is itself a construct of the modern West, implicitly asks students to identify with “the winners,” while engagement with contemporary issues constantly seeks a normative position from which other positions can be judged. Such rhetorical gestures aim at “cleaning up” the messy playing field of epistemological ethics, and any approach to ethics that seeks order is complicit with the state and therefore anathema to De La Torre’s “vulgar, earthy way of doing ethics” (122). Education, therefore, must engage with marginalized voices by asking the students to read history from the perspective of “the losers,” and it must also resist the perennial temptation to simplify, to reduce, to categorize. Our future and our liberation depend on the messiness that will result from an ethics and a pedagogy para joder.

De La Torre’s ethics carries within it the radical capacity to overturn the established order. It is fitting, then, that an instrument used to deprive marginalized people of a voice will now be used exclusively as a means to force those in power to hear the powerless speak. Even so, De La Torre does not dispense with the ethical paradigms of the modern West, nor does he attempt to wipe away the residue of the Enlightenment, inasmuch as such a project, as Foucault too has shown, is impossible. Most significantly, this book succeeds instead at redrawing the boundaries and re-centering the discursive space in which ethics are constructed and practiced. It is therefore a welcome contribution to the collaborative construction of a multicultural resistance to the injustices of state power and world capitalism.

June 11, 2012

De La Torre, Latina/o Social Ethics (Part 1/2)


Latina/o Social Ethics: Moving Beyond Eurocentric Thinking. By Miguel A. De La Torre. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2010. Pp. xii + 157.

In Latina/o Social Ethics, a vital and urgent book written with clear, crisp prose, Miguel A. De La Torre engages the problematic of ethics, which he defines as a privileged and privileging discourse that, as it has operated in Western history, constantly finds itself between those with power and those without power. By situating his analysis in the perspective of marginalized and oppressed people, De La Torre frames his book as a “corrective measure” (xi) that aims at two levels of liberation—the liberation of Latina/o people from the limits imposed by normative, Eurocentric ethics and, to ensure that he cannot be accused of narrow perspectivism, the ultimate liberation of all oppressed people from the crippling power of the modern nation-state and world capitalism. De La Torre performs admirably in pursuit of this noble, essential goal.

De La Torre’s task is two-fold: first, he must expose and exploit the fissures in the totalized ethics of the dominant culture by deconstructing ethics from the inside; then, he must reconstitute the discipline of ethics for the occupants of heterogeneous space and time. Therefore, the first half of De La Torre’s book, “Deconstructing Ethics,” inches the reader out from under the limits of ethics as it has come to be constituted in “ivory towers” (122) as a dry, abstracted, and exclusivist discipline. (Later, I will return to the issue of “Eurocentric ethics” and the validity of De La Torre’s critique of some of its practitioners.) It should be noted that De La Torre’s use of the word “deconstruction” is not strictly Derridean; while his analysis serves to destabilize the dichotomous thinking of the West, it nevertheless presupposes an “outside,” which, in this book, is symbolically identified with the subaltern figure of the Latina/o. De La Torre’s project, interested as it is in power dynamics and epistemological regimes, might fall more accurately under Foucault’s anti-modernist notion of critique as an investigation into the processes and techniques through which the modern subject has come to constitute him or herself relationally and ontologically.

This terminological misidentification notwithstanding, the radical project De La Torre undertakes in the first half of the book constitutes only half of his contribution. Thus, in the second half of the book, having realized that his own task of reconstituting an ethics of and for the oppressed cannot terminate with the “deconstruction” of Eurocentric ethics, he returns to the perspective of the subaltern to reconstruct a praxis-based, “Christocentric” (79) form of fallible ethics drawn especially from Latina/o “scholarship, customs, and traditions” (67)—an ethics that is contingent (en lo cotidiando), liminal (de nepantla), engaged (para la lucha), collectivist (en conjunto), and focused on solidarity (de acompañamiento)—and pushes Latina/o ethics forward by advocating “an ethics para joder”—an ethics that “screws with the prevailing power structures” (92). For De La Torre, the marginalized Latina/o, who in popular and political discourse is often configured as “alien,” as that which is literally on the threshold between human and inhuman, can find a positive, productive mirror for her/his own situation in the ambiguous trickster figure of Hispanic folk tradition. Therefore, the basis for a new ethics is not in any empowered figure but originates precisely in the one whose powerlessness continuously creates radical, unpredictable possibility.

June 3, 2012

Lo(o)sing "The Animal" (Part 7/7)


VII.

For a conclusion, it is fitting to note that Confucius also appears in the Zhuangzi, though his many appearances are anything but reverential. Usually, Zhuangzi appropriates Confucius’s likeness and influence to subvert it and, in doing so, locate the formal disjunctions between Confucianism and his own proto-Daoism. Especially important in the context of this essay is one appearance of Confucius in which he relates the following story: “I was once in the state of Chu on a commission, and I saw some piglets trying to suckle from their dead mother. After a while, they started up and left her. She did not seem to notice them and so they no longer felt any affinity with her. What they loved about their mother was not her body but what gave life to her body.”[i]

These lines are notable because the Confucius of the Analects would never have spoken them. The passage unworks the qualitative distinction between human and animal inasmuch as Confucius anthropomorphizes the behavior of the piglets and, consequently, animalizes the behavior of humans: pigs have the capacity to “notice,” to feel “affinity” for others of their own kind, to “love.” In other words, this passage enacts a fragile articulation between human and animal, and, by creating the necessary conditions of their coincidence, Zhuangzi calls into question these very categories. For Zhuangzi, philosophy takes place precisely in the moment of the flight of an animal, in the kitchen the “gentleman” is taught to avoid, in the hyphen that connects “human” to “animal” in the phrase “human-animal relation.” To put it simply, the Zhuangzi is a book that asks its reader to follow the piglets. Only by following these loose animals can one lose “the animal” and forget the human will to power over animal life. Therefore, to speak of animal/ized ethics is to learn from an animal that “the animal” does not exist.


[i] The Book of Chuang Tzu, 42.

June 2, 2012

Lo(o)sing "The Animal" (Part 6/7)


VI.

The current political program or paradigm that is of utmost concern for any animal (or “animalized”) ethics must be the contemporary discourse on “animal rights,” which, as it continues to grow in global influence, has begun to operate as a covert form of imperialism that cannot, as it is currently formulated, solve the problem of human-animal relation. It is especially relevant for the present study that many advocates for animal rights specifically target China as a site of many violations of such hypothetical rights. Miyun Park and Peter Singer, two well-known activists for animal liberation, have recently published an article on the globalization of animal welfare initiatives by NGOs and anonymous collectives and have sounded an unequivocal call for international measures and regulations—similar to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—to combat cruelty, especially in Asian countries like China;[i] and, in a related editorial written for Project Syndicate, Singer specifically condemns the prevalence of animal cruelty in China, where dominant cultural attitudes remain largely unmoved by (if not formally critical of) the appeals of animal welfare activists, and where currently there are no national laws protecting captured animals from torture and cruelty.[ii]

While I agree that incidences of animal cruelty—at home and abroad—must be addressed by a global, collective activism, I have serious objections to the particular solution proffered by Singer and Park. What I find problematic in their argumentation is the notion that the legislation of animal life is the only or even the best possible solution to the prevalence of animal cruelty and the devaluing of animal life; a problem of ethical and practical importance always arises when one grounds an appeal to collective action in a reductive legalistic or juridical framework, for this tactic increases activists’ reliance on state-power and entrenches the world further into the biopolitical paradigm of modern liberal democracies. Furthermore, while juridical frameworks based in rights are capable of punishing infractions, they have proven again and again to be incapable of preventing such infractions from occurring, as the numerous and continued infractions of “human rights” by multinational corporations and state governments have demonstrated.

Instead, to ground a global, collective resistance to animal cruelty, one might, as I have argued, (re)turn to classical texts with the current context in mind—and, furthermore, one should not only examine texts that belong to the Western tradition to which Derrida and Agamben subscribe and subvert, but one should make use of a plurality of texts from Asian traditions as well. This essay has looked at texts from three classical Chinese philosophical traditions—the School of Names (Gongsun Longzi), Confucianism (the Analects, Xunzi, and Mengzi), and Daoism (Zhuangzi)—of which the latter two schools have retained some influence in contemporary China and continue to shape (and be shaped by) East Asia’s intellectual landscape. Furthermore, I have argued that Daoist or proto-Daoist teachings about humans and animals as preserved in the Zhuangzi may provide a more suitable ethical framework for a new politics of human-animal relation. Thus, even though Bai Tongdong argues that the basic premise of Confucianism is an expansion of compassion “to eventually encompass everything in the universe, including animals,” he admits that obligations to other humans necessarily override similar obligations to animals.[iii] Confucius himself summarizes the anthropocentric orientation of Confucian thought in the Analects, when Zigong, a disciple, seeks to spare the sacrifice of a sheep at a certain ceremony and Confucius reproaches him by saying, “You grudge the sheep—I, ritual propriety” (3.17). In the final analysis, when the care of the animal is entrusted to the state, it cannot but lead to sacrifice, whether to a deity or, bloodlessly, to the will of law itself.


[i] Miyun Park and Peter Singer, “The Globalization of Animal Wellfare,” Foreign Affairs 91.2 (2012), n.p.

[ii] Peter Singer, “Moral Progress and Animal Welfare,” Project Syndicate, July 13, 2011, http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/moral-progress-and-animal-welfare (accessed April 10, 2012). In the editorial, Singer cites footage which has circulated online, footage that includes the extraction of bile from caged bears for medicinal purposes and furred animals being skinned alive. A documentary produced for Al Jazeera features images similar to the ones Singer describes. The documentary goes on to say that the animal rights or animal welfare movement in China is most prevalent in larger cities, where such footage has spurred various popular movements across the country to combat what they see as infractions of animal rights. See Al Jazeera, “China’s animal crusaders,” Al Jazeera 101 East, July 12, 2011, 20:00ff., http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2011/07/20117129224537494.html (accessed April 10, 2012).

[iii] Bai, “The Price of Serving Meat,” 94.

June 1, 2012

Lo(o)sing "The Animal" (Part 5/7)


V.

If Confucianism’s complicity with sovereign power and ambiguous, seemingly contradictory stance on human responsibility toward animals would be problematic for the ethical grounding of animal welfare initiatives today, one can seek an alternative model in other schools of Chinese philosophy. Indeed, my argument that animal ethics, especially as configured in classical Chinese philosophy, is integrally tied to issues of language and categorization reaches its most intense expression in the Zhuangzi, which, I will argue, may provide a possible theoretical basis for a new ethics of human-animal relation.

The Zhuangzi’s primary target seems to be language and the way it is used to limit human thought and structure human experience. The animal thus becomes for Zhuangzi a site of possibility for a way of living outside of the normalizing constraints of language; “The animal,” Irving Goh writes, “points the way toward thinking the Way.”[i] Furthermore, Goh argues that Zhuangzi’s writings prefigure Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of “becoming-animal,” which, as developed in A Thousand Plateaus and Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, expresses “a desire for [human] thought to pass through the animal.”[ii] Indeed, there is a faint resemblance, though Deleuze and Guattari never explicitly make use of the Zhuangzi.[iii] But, similarly to Zhuangzi, for Deleuze and Guattari the leave-taking of the subject from subjectivity marks a departure from the limits imposed by anthropocentric modes of thought, especially identified with state politics: “To the inhumanness of [politics], there is the answer of a becoming-animal: to become a beetle, to become a dog, to become an ape, ‘head over heels and run away,’ rather than lowering one’s head and remaining a bureaucrat, inspector, judge, or judged.”[iv] With Deleuze and Guattari as his starting point, Goh goes on to examine such well-known passages as Zhuangzi’s dream about the butterfly and Huizi and Zhuangzi’s conversation about the “happy fish,” though, as Goh himself stresses, the Zhuangzi follows the animal throughout the text, in both the inner and outer chapters. In what follows, I will make use of two additional examples.

In the Zhuangzi, Deleuze and Guattari’s “run[ning] away” is mirrored by a desire to depart from normativity that often takes the form of the literal fleeing of animals. One early chapter contains a fictitious exchange between Wang Ni and a disciple in which Wang Ni says, “People said that Mao Chiang and Li Chi were the most beautiful women in the world, but fish seeing them dived away, birds took off into the air and deer ran off. Of these four, who really knows true beauty? As I see it, benevolence and righteousness, also the ways of right and wrong, are completely interwoven. I do not think I can know the difference between them!”[v] At work in such passages is a radical desire for human ontological displacement similar to that of the better known “butterfly dream,” in which perspectival difference comes with a challenge to preconceived notions and received wisdom.

Rather than being portrayed in negative light (as in the Xunzi), the chaos and confusion that necessarily results when mutually exclusive categories enter into an intimate indistinction becomes the productive site of a new politics of human-animal relation. As Zhuangzi writes, “In this time of perfect Virtue [至德], people live side by side with the birds and beasts, sharing the world in common with all life. No one knows of distinctions such as nobles or peasantry!”[vi] This image, drawn from the utopian imagination, is rarely registered in the text as a “return” to some imagined state or time of perfection but rather as a perennial, continually open (or open-able) possibility that emerges from the fissures of any attempt at a systematized political program or paradigm. It is therefore this utopian image that one must seek to activate or actualize in the context of modern systems.


[i] Irving Goh, “Chuang Tzu’s Becoming-Animal,” Philosophy East and West 61.1 (2011), 110.

[ii] Ibid., 111.

[iii] Deleuze and Guattari do, however, at one point make a perfunctory reference to Daoism, though it has no relevance for the current discussion. See A Thousand Plateaus, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 157.

[iv] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 12.

[v] The Book of Chuang Tzu, 17.

[vi] Ibid., 73.