IV. Suffering Bodies
I have characterized my own
choice to become vegan as a response to the Other, but more than that it is a
response to the body—my body and the Other’s body—undelimited by any
conceptualization of “the human” or “the animal.” So, to follow my above
discussion of the political aspect of this choice, I will conclude with a
discussion of the importance of the body and the irreducibly physical dimension
to veganism/vegetarianism.
With regard to our ethical
responsibility toward animals, Jeremy Bentham famously wrote, “The question is
not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” If we could unburden Bentham’s statement from his
consequentialist/utilitarian perspective (a rehabilitative reading ably
performed by Derrida in The Animal That
Therefore I Am), what we would have left is an evocation of the shared
vulnerability of all life and life-systems, a shared vulnerability that places
humans, animals, and ecosystems on the same ground ethically, regardless of
ontological constructions or epistemological categories: for everything that
exists has the inherent ability to be destroyed.
In Philosophy and Animal Life, this realization is central to Cora
Diamond’s essay: “The awareness we each have of being a living body, being
‘alive to the world’, carries with it exposure to the bodily sense of
vulnerability to death, sheer animal vulnerability, the vulnerability we share
with them” (74). In other words, using reason and rationality to arrive at our
(ethical) choices is merely a deflection
from the raw experience of lived reality, by which I mean the reality of our
bodies, of our embodied experience as living beings. I don’t “inhabit” this
body. I—what I call “I”—am this body. Furthermore, this body that I am can
suffer and is infinitely destructible; when you destroy this body, you will
always find something more to destroy. And can I live knowing this and continue
to eat animals, whose suffering and destruction for the sake of human interests
exposes me not only to the animals’ vulnerability but forces me to remember my
own? No. I simply cannot forget, and I cannot deny the face that these Other
animals present to me, this face whose suffering transforms my being.
So veganism and vegetarianism are
not reducible to ethical reasoning alone but are sites in which my obligations
toward the Other are transformed by our encounter, in which my own interests—my
own selfishness, my construction of myself as an autonomous and impermeable
being—are interrupted. And I realize that I can no longer eat meat or any food
containing animal byproducts.
Perhaps it is just this sort of
transformative realization to which Derrida attests in The Animal That Therefore I Am, when he writes, “The animal looks
at us, and we are naked before it. Thinking perhaps begins here” (29). The
second sentence of this commonly quoted passage is purposefully vague. Does
Derrida say that it is in this specific circumstance that thinking, for him,
begins (again)? Or is the statement prescriptive—thinking should, perhaps,
begin (again) here? Or, we could ask,
Where is the “here” that thinking begins? In his mind? Or the cat’s? And does
thinking really “begin” here? Or does it, in fact, endure a particular
paroxysm?
When I look into an animal’s
eyes, when I see myself being looked at by another animal, I am reminded of how
fragile everything is, including the
boundary that I set between myself and this animal, this real, living animal.
To draw this boundary, to be complicit with it, to maintain it for whatever
reason, is violent and enacts violence, not only to animals but to humans as
well. We know this. For any concept of what it means to be “human” will necessarily
exclude from its ranks countless humans—as the disasters of the twentieth
century and our own time firmly attest—just as any concept of “the animal” is
used to enable further destruction.
Yet no matter what cognitive or
linguistic abilities may be used to set us apart, our shared fragility will
disturb any epistemo-ontological boundary.
The animal and I can be
destroyed. Thinking begins here.
May 30-June 3, 2012
