Why I Became Vegan (Part 1/4)

I. Introduction

After about five years spent vacillating between anxious vegetarianism and frustrated (if not shame-filled) pescetarianism, I, on May 17, 2012, became vegan. This is a decision that I did not take lightly, and, despite the well-meaning skepticism of many of my meat-eating friends and family members, I can confirm here that it was perhaps the greatest decision of my life (certainly of recent memory). Even though I do not characterize my choice as the final resolution to the ethical tension of vegetarianism/pescetarianism (for reasons that I will get into later), it has greatly increased my happiness.

The only changes to my diet were to cease partaking of dairy products, eggs, and the occasional extravagance of fish (easily replacing the protein, vitamins, etc. with other foods/drinks). After careful inspection, I was happy to discover that no other significant changes to any other aspect of my daily life were necessary. I am even happier to report that my decision has not been a significant burden on anyone else, with the exception of a patient family member who does the grocery shopping and prepares some of my meals. Though my choices of restaurants are certainly more limited now, this does not bother me. Dining at public restaurants is a terribly bourgeois ritual that I try to avoid whenever possible anyway.

[Sidebar: It is a myth, by the way, that it is difficult to live vegan in a city like Springfield, Missouri, even though this is an assertion/objection that I have encountered with surprising frequency from meat-eaters. I realize that it would be infelicitous and unjust (probably) to call such an assertion a thinly veiled rationalization for their own eating practices, but I cannot help but wonder why this is such a common refrain.]

However, even though this decision has negatively affected no one, I could not simply “get away with it.” This decision of mine is a private decision that necessarily addresses itself in public, and it is therefore at the same time a political decision, subject to the constitutive antagonisms of politics. For this reason, I discovered that to be vegan presents itself to others as an inherently confrontational choice, as if, for some unknown reason, my choice infringes on their own sense of dietetic agency, that it sits in judgment on or is a direct challenge to the validity of their own lifestyle. Naturally, I do not intend it that way—but what do I know about my intentions, anyway?

Sometimes, my choice is met with a variety of hastily generated rationalizations for eating meat. But, more often, in a mixture of curiosity and disturbance, a reason is demanded of me. The onus is on me, in other words, to defend myself and my choice, to provide an adequate and convincing (but never adequate or convincing enough) argument for veganism. But responding in the way that is expected of me is always something that I wish to avoid, if at all possible; after all, it seems to me that thinking only happens when one rejects the framework created by one’s inquisitor and attempts to found another. Therefore, let me make clear (what I think are) my intentions in writing this.

I do not wish to produce an “apology” for veganism. Plenty of literature in this mode already exists, highlighting everything from the ethical angle to the ecological and personal health benefits of this choice. While such pre-existing arguments naturally affected my own decision, I do not wish to rehearse them here. Instead, I want to focus on one thing that I think is lacking from popular discourse on veganism as a lifestyle—the limitations of “veganism” when constructed as an ethical practice, limitations that I wholeheartedly accept and, I think, allow ethics and veganism to continue to be practiced. Therefore, my purpose here is not to justify my choice over and against the objections of an imagined interlocutor, nor (heaven forbid!) to try to convince an imagined reader that veganism is “right.”

I don’t know what is “right.” That is why I became vegan.

From a future project

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 10/10)

VI.

Concluding Notes

Because I have evoked the current identity crisis of the left, it would be fitting to conclude with a reflection on the place of Agamben’s political philosophy in the context of dialogues of the contemporary left. Agamben is often discussed as part of a new anti-postmodernist wave in continental philosophy that seeks to recover philosophical and political content from such notions as subjectivity, ontology, and truth; he further expresses, with other radical philosophers, the need to escape from the moral degradation and nihilism of postmodernism, while fully realizing the impossibility of a return to modernism. Agamben’s project can therefore be linked, as many others have noted, to the projects of Alain Badiou (b. 1937) and Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949). However, though all three philosophers want to redefine the nature of political practice and the identity of the left, crucial differences emerge when considering the three together. Unlike Žižek and Badiou’s search for a new philosophical grounding for a politics of universal identity, Agamben is much more hesitant and cautious about evoking any kind of universalism, betraying, perhaps, the substantial influence of Foucault and the “messianic nihilism” of Benjamin. Agamben is thus less explicitly Marxist and is certainly less “militant” than Badiou and Žižek (though I do not mean to use “militant” in the pejorative sense). Also unlike his contemporaries, Agamben shows a closer attention to language and the historical development of concepts, whereas Žižek and Badiou are generally more psychoanalytical, showing especially the influence of Lacan. Finally, Agamben’s cautious return to an ethical imperative is a fundamental departure from Badiou especially, who considers any evocation of “ethical principles” to be “evil” and reactionary.[i]

Agamben’s return to the question of ethics, filtered through his singular perspective on subjectivity, is in other words a particularly relevant and novel reaction to the crippling relativism of postmodernism, a response that safeguards and values individual difference—for relativism, after all, can also always be understood as a kind particularism, in the sense that a relativist always regards his or her own perspective as beyond reproach. Though I would agree that the book has its weaknesses, Remnants of Auschwitz is nevertheless an important intervention in continental philosophy and critical theory. Therefore, Agamben does achieve the modest goal with which he starts—to establish “some signposts allowing future cartographers of the new ethical territory to orient themselves.”[ii]

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[i] I am referring here to Badiou’s book on ethics, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2000).

[ii] Agamben, Remnants, 13.

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 9/10)

V.2

Critiques of Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz

Though the critiques mentioned above are all completely valid, with the exception of Bernstein’s, I feel that they somewhat misunderstand Agamben’s fundamental intention, which is not to compose the authoritative material, technical, or juridico-institutional history of the camps.  In an interview, Agamben himself iterates this point with regard to the questionability of his use of the Muselmann as a paradigm: “I am not an historian. I work with paradigms. A paradigm is something like an example, an exemplar, a historically singular phenomenon. As it was with the panopticon for Foucault, so is the Homo Sacer or the Muselmann or the state of exception for me. And then I use this paradigm to construct a large group of phenomena and in order to understand an historical structure….”[i]

This statement reminds the incautious reader that, as a philosophical work, Agamben’s book needs to be approached with a different sensibility and sensitivity than one would approach a work that purports to be historical or sociological or anthropological. However, though critiques such as those rehearsed above misinterpret Agamben’s intention, they do locate a problematic aspect of Agamben’s book: the clarity of Agamben’s argument certainly suffers in this book from the dual-functionality of the Muselmann. When Agamben used the paradigmatic method in earlier works like Homo Sacer, he was able to maintain a much clearer distinction between historical fact and his own interpretation of historical fact. In this book, Agamben’s discretion fails him, and the Muselmann as a historical being begins to blur and merge with the Muselmann as an abstract category.

Other readers of Remnants of Auschwitz have focused on what they see as a fundamental pessimism in Agamben’s philosophical outlook; however, I find that such critiques are largely unfounded. Jean-Philipe Deranty, for instance, has chosen to base his critique in the immediate concern of grounding political action. For Deranty, Agamben’s ethics of disempowerment leads to a disempowered praxis that is rendered incapable of achieving any of its revolutionary goals, noble though they are. Agamben’s insistence that we systematically rethink all categories of politics, history, community, and law leads Deranty to conclude, “[D]espite its amazing sophistication and erudition, Agamben’s philosophy only leads to an evanescent theory of praxis that has little to say and indeed is not really interested in having anything to say to and about real practices.”[ii] However, it is my contention that Deranty misunderstands Agamben’s insistence on an ethical employment of language and, consequently, misreads Agamben’s philosophy as nihilistic (a common misreading). In this book and in others, Agamben shows his readers that language is a site of political struggle, a struggle that the left must recognize as essential if it is to offer an alternative form of politics. To use language radically, moreover, does not conflict with other, larger revolutionary goals but rather reinforces such goals and prevents a counter-hegemonic discourse and praxis from simply reinscribing systems of injustice through an unimaginative inversion of the existing power structures. In the final analysis, Deranty’s insistence that Agamben’s ethics of disempowerment is fundamentally pessimistic, as well as his insistence that one exclude Agamben’s ideas from consideration and look elsewhere for praxis, simply further divides an already fragmented left and prevents a multi-dimensional praxis from emerging from that state of fragmentation.

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[i] Giorgio Agamben, interview by Ulrich Raulff, The German Law Journal 5.5 (2004), 610. Durantaye summarizes Agamben’s method accurately in writing, “[A]s with all of Agamben’s paradigms, [the Muselmann] is a figure through which we might be able to try to understand ‘a historical structure’ full of relevance for our ‘present situation’” (270).

[ii] Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Witnessing the Inhuman: Agamben or Merleau-Ponty,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107.1 (2008), 184.

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 8/10)

V.1

Critiques of Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz

Agamben’s book is a thoughtful and, for the most part, meticulously argued work, a moving contribution to the discourses of continental philosophy, political theory, ethics, and Holocaust studies. Agamben carefully integrates survivors’ testimonies and critical theory into a complex and thoroughly engaging reflection on the place of Auschwitz in the cultural memory of the postmodern West and with regard to individual responsibility. Above all, Remants of Auschwitz is a brave work that refuses to retreat from the most difficult questions regarding the extermination, refining along the way theories of subjectivity and political power in order to found a fragile ethical imperative for the post-Auschwitz world.

However, Agamben’s book has not avoided, and indeed should not avoid, criticism for some of its more problematic aspects. In his monograph on Agamben, Leland de la Durantaye calls Remnants of Auschwitz both Agamben’s “most daring” and “most flawed” book, a paradoxical statement that summarizes the majority response to the book in American academia.[i] Largely, the negative response to the book focuses on Agamben’s method, which, in the eyes of some critics, made a paradigm out of the Muselmann that ignores the historical context and material conditions of the camp. And while Durantaye agrees with other reviewers of this work that Agamben stretches the credibility of his method by using the Muselmann as a confirmation of his analysis of the homo sacer, an assessment with which I am personally inclined to agree, he also argues that the shortcomings of Agamben’s paradigmatic approach should not totally nullify the value of the book.[ii] Therefore, though Durantaye sides with several readers who have noted its fundamental problems, his close reading is generally sympathetic and goes some way toward correcting some of the more egregious misreadings of some of Agamben’s more hostile interlocutors.

To repeat, the negative response to this book largely focuses on Agamben’s paradigmatic method rather than Agamben’s conclusions or the content of the book. For example, Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, in an otherwise largely positive review, share the assessment that Agamben’s scope is simultaneously too narrow and too broad—too narrow because he focuses solely on the Muselmann as the key to reading all testimony, and too broad because, by employing the Muselmann as a transhistorical paradigm, he runs the risk of forgetting the specific historical and material circumstances of the camps.[iii] Similarly, Nicholas Chare mourns the loss of context in Agamben’s careful selection among several survivors’ accounts, contending that Agamben’s overlooks the essential materiality of the language of testimony, and questions Agamben’s “unnecessary” emphasis on the Muselmann as the ethical center of all testimony, noting that this figure is “an extreme example of a more general process.”[iv] (61) Catherine Mills, additionally, points out that Agamben’s paradigmatic method comes dangerously close to treating the atrocities of the camp and the current biopolitical norm of modern government as if they were the inevitable results of various traditions or concepts of Western thought rather than terrible mutations of such traditions and concepts.[v]

A more extreme form of the same critique can be found in J. M. Bernstein’s response to the book, in which he argues that Agamben “aestheticizes” witnessing to the extent that his fragile ethical imperative borders on “pornography.”[vi] In the ensuing discussion, which tenuously links the “extraordinary and excruciating” war photography by James Nachtwey to Agamben’s book, Bernstein vaguely concludes, “[T]here is something photographic about Agamben’s practice of one by one removing from consideration the historical, the political and above all the moral frames through reference to which some understanding of the meaning of the Muselmann might be achieved.”[vii] I cannot help but feel that Bernstein would be well-served by another, slower reading of Agamben’s book and a more critical examination of his own terms. It is simply not sufficient to posit “something photographic”—much less something “pornographic”—about Agamben’s work without a much more rigid attempt to theorize photography or pornography as technologically mediated social categories. In fact, I would argue that Bernstein, with his deliberately provocative vocabulary and his repeated insistence that he has exposed some hidden perversity in Agamben’s work, comes much closer to producing “pornography” than Agamben. Agamben’s paradigmatic approach, though obviously problematic, is neither aesthetic nor pornographic in even the loosest senses of the terms.

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[i] Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009),  248. See 268-272 for a good summary of the various critical responses to the book.

[ii] Ibid., 271-272.

[iii] Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, “Auschwitz and the Remains of Theory: Toward an Ethics of the Borderland,” Symplokē 11.1 (2003), 29.

[iv] Nicholas Chare, “The Gap in Context: Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Remnants of Auschwitz,’” Cultural Critique 64 (2004), 61.

[v] Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 87.

[vi] J. M. Bernstein, “Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the Pornography of Horror,” Parallax 10.1 (2004), 3.

[vii] Ibid., 10, 12.

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 7/10)

IV.4

Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz

It is difficult to understand precisely what point Agamben is trying to prove here. To elucidate Agamben’s argument, then, it is useful to note that the four modalities of Being can be represented with a semiotic diagram[i] that illustrates their structural-linguistic relationship.

“The subject,” it turns out, “is a field of forces always already traversed by the incandescent and historically determined currents of potentiality and impotentiality, of being able to be and not being able to be.”[ii] Until the advent of the camp, these processes were held in more-or-less stable alignment. However, in Agamben’s analysis, the fragile balance of these four modalities is shifted decisively in the space of the camp in such a way that impossibility subordinates possibility and necessity subordinates contingency. The resultant “catastrophe of the subject”[iii] reaches its nadir in Auschwitz’s production of the Muselmann.

It is therefore necessary for testimony to offer a way out of this violent rupture between subjectification and desubjectification, whose warping of the modal categories remains, according to Agamben, a working model for government today. Testimony, however, does not simply allow the subject to return to the original alignment of modalities; rather, it represents a total break from the modalities, generated through the structure and content of testimony.[iv]

Agamben explains, “In the Muselmann, biopower sought to produce its final secret: a survival separated from every possibility of testimony, a kind of absolute biopolitical substance that, in its isolation, allows for the attribution of demographic, ethnic, national, and political identity… With its every word, testimony refutes precisely this isolation of survival from life.”[v] Thus, testimony allows him to conclude with a fragile imperative to bear witness to the inhuman within oneself, so that the two can never be separated again.

By way of conclusion, Agamben then notes that the witness is comparable to the messianic concept of the “remnant”: “So the remnants of Auschwitz—the witnesses—are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the saved. They are what remains between them.”[vi] This statement is a deliberate reference to a passage from Paul’s Letter to the Romans that, appropriately enough, serves as an epigraph for the book: “Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace….and so all Israel shall be saved” (Rom 11:5, 26).

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[i] See Algirdas Julien Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). See also the cogent discussion in Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), 46-49, 82-83, 165-169, 253-257.

[ii] Agamben, Remnants,147-148.

[iii] Ibid., 148.

[iv] For this imaginative graphic arrangement, I am indebted to the novel use of the Semiotic Square in Davina C. Lopez, Apostle to the Conquered: Reimagining Paul’s Mission (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), see esp. 147-152.

[v] Agamben, Remnants, 156-157.

[vi] Ibid., 164.

The Fragile Ethics of Testimony (Part 6/10)

IV.3

Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz

In contrast to many sociologists and philosophers who have examined the phenomenon of “survivor’s guilt” in relation to the Holocaust, Agamben prefers to discuss “shame,” reminding the reader that “guilt” cannot be recouped from its juridical implications. After briefly focusing on expressions of shame and resentment in survivors’ testimony, Agamben, following Emmanuel Levinas, attempts to understand shame as that which is “grounded in our being’s incapacity to move away and break from itself,” or, as he rephrases it, “to be consigned to something that cannot be assumed.”[i] Agamben attempts to confirm his distinctive understanding of shame through reference to a variety of disciplinary discourses, including philosophy, poetry/literature, psychoanalysis, and, finally and most convincingly, linguistic theory. Shame, it turns out, is inherent to the structure of testimony, for shame is the result of a subject’s self-expression through language, which takes place only through an unavoidable process of desubjectification. To constitute oneself through an “enunciation” (defined here as an act or “taking place” of language), one must subjectify oneself to that enunciation and identify with the pronoun “I,” which, like other “shifters” of enunciation, has no fixed or relational meaning but is instead given meaning only through the context of a specific discourse.[ii] Thus, “The subject of discourse is composed of discourse and exists in discourse alone,”[iii] and shame is the “hidden structure” of subjectivity because “consciousness constitutively has the form of being consigned to something that cannot be assumed.”[iv] Unfortunately, Agamben does a poor job of connecting this digression into linguistics to his original thesis, but it seems that testimony, insofar as it bears witness to that which it is impossible to bear witness, represents the subject’s struggle to assume an unassumable role, that of the “true witness” who can never bear witness. According to Agamben, both the structure and result of this struggle is shame.

In the fourth and final chapter of Agamben’s book, “The Archive and Testimony,” Agamben positions his understanding of testimony in contrast to Foucault’s use of the term archive. Briefly stated, Foucault’s archive “designates the system of relations between the unsaid and the said” in an enunciation, and therefore brackets the question of the subject; testimony, on the other hand, designates the system of relations between what is sayable and what is unsayable—the possibility and impossibility of speech—and therefore marks a return to the question of the subject.[v] Because subjectivity is produced through the interplay of the possible and impossible, Agamben turns to the four modal categories (possibility, impossibility, contingency, and necessity) to understand how the modal categories function as “ontological operators, that is, weapons used in the biopolitical struggle for Being…[T]he subject is what is at stake in the processes in which they interact.”[vi]

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[i] Ibid., 104-105.

[ii] Ibid., 115-116.

[iii] Ibid., 116-117; italics original.

[iv] Ibid., 128.

[v] Ibid., 145.

[vi] Ibid., 146-147.