Posthumanities

Bare life and animal life

2011-10-24T05:01:00.000-02:00

I'm currently reading Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life carefully for the first time and I'm having a hard time separating the many thematic strands that comprise such issues as the homo sacer itself, bare life and sovereignty. Let me just also add that I'm also currently reading (i.e. haven't finished) the 1st volume of Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign and Ludueña-Romandini La comunidad de los espectros: Antropotecnia ("The community of specters: Anthropothecnics"), and both can be said to be responses to Agamben, so they may still hold answers to me.

First, I'm having trouble pinpointing exactly what the homo sacer is. I know it is a life which can be killed with impunity but not sacrificed in a religious rite, what kind of life is that exactly? I guess I'm trying to establish the frame-of-mind/rationalization behind the granting of the homo sacer status, but it's hard. Let's see what I could gather so far:

As far as I can tell, Agamben states that the homo sacer is a crucial element for the establishment of sovereign political power and vice-versa (politics as opposed to religious law and the state of nature). As I understand it, the homo sacer is the object of a monopolization of power that determines politics. All power needs to stay in a relation of exception (inclusive exclusion) with life. Well, in order for sovereign political power to be different and above the "law" of nature and religious/divine law, it must mark off its subject, its subjected life, as unattainable to both divine right and the law of nature and/or culture. It does that first by establishing that it can be killed. Its "killability" is a way of determining that no power could ever be superior to the sovereign, who is in fact the most interested in having such a fatal power over such a life. If the homo sacer's death can be brought upon with impunity, it means that the sovereign political power can exercise its power over it at will, completely superior to any other right.

In a way, the fact that the homo sacer cannot be sacrificed seems to me to be much more important. As Agamben himself states, almost all acts in Antiquity which we today would call capital punishment were actually forms of religious rites of purification and/or consecration. As such, the sovereign makes sure that the sacred life is subjected only to him, it is his subject, his source of power and marks off his sphere as politics, as opposed to divine law.

As such, the homo sacer is different from animal life (zoé), which can always be sacrificed to the gods, and from human life (bíos), which can not be killed with impunity (and can also be sacrificed). And so it is the best subject to the kind of political power which wished to separate from godly law and religious norms.

But Wikipedia, although not the best source, states quite emphatically that the homo sacer was essentially a religious concept: sacred/accursed (sacer) was the life of a person who had broken an oath. This life now belonged to the god which had been invoked in the oath, and as such could be killed (for such death would be considered to be a heavenly fated punishment, and not a true criminal act) but not sacrificed to any gods (since it already belonged to one).

Did Agamben just twist this concept to fit his idea of a secular political power? Or did sovereignty perhaps actually exploit this religious concept in order to create its necessary bare life? Or does that infringe upon Agamben's definition that the homo sacer and the sovereign must have originated side by side?

Ludueña's main contention with Agamben (and it's a big one) is that the homo sacer cannot be the originary from of political relation because it is essentially a penal institution and as such cannot apply to all kinds of situations. More than that, he says the homo sacer cannot answer to how biopolitics manages life, only death. To Agamben's concept, Ludueña opposed the ius exponendi, which was the law that stated that the father could decide to expose a child - that is, to abandon it in order for it to die, thereby deciding what life is worthy of living and what is the human. This process of eliminating animality from the human is what Ludueña defends to be at the origin of politics, which he calls zoopolitics. Thus, what he is in a way saying is that the life of the newborn is essentially an animal, biological life, and this life is the subject of sovereign political power.

Which leads me to the question: what is the difference between bare life and animal life? Apparently in my initial reading of Agamben, they differ in regards to the latter's sacrificability, but many, many people seem to be creating whole systems of thought based on the assumption that animal life is bare life. And I wonder if sovereign power as Agamben describes could work equally well in relation to animal life in general. And then I wonder if Ludueña is right. And after that I wonder if maybe the homo sacer and the ius exponendi are the same thing!

Also, I tend to think that the homo sacer simply names a life which has no value (thus utterly different from what we moderns understand by sacred life). Its unsacrificability only answers to the fact that it has no currency with gods or religious rites (and Adorno already defended the overtly economical nature of sacrifice, and Derrida, too, implicitly defended it): it cannot serve as payment to connect with god.

I tend to like Ludueña's position for two reasons, well, three actually: one, his writing is clearer; two, he stresses the essentially zoopolitical process of deciding on the humanity of the homo sapiens; and three, his reading of the ius exponendi bring him incredibly close to Derrida. In his treatment of the sovereign power which essentially springs from the father, he comes very close to Derrida's reading of the father/son relationship in Plato's Pharmacy. And that is awesome.

Due to Derrida, I tend to believe that all religious thought is a way of dealing with a problem which is essentially grammatological. The existence of God; the origin of technique; the connections between speech/writing, origin/derivation, father/son, and human/animal; messianic doctrine (etc. etc.) are all attempts of countering the violence and force of the grammé, of the pharmakon, of writing, of supplementarity as the truth of life. If political power is born with the father, that means it is also derived from the very grammatological (speech/writing) father/son dichotomy.

Anyways, that said, I still have many questions. I have found some amazingly interesting articles online and I believe I'll find some answers after I read them (and finish the books I'm mentioning here!). But here are my questions:

Is there a difference between bare life and animal life? What is this difference, if any?
According to Agamben, our modern concept of the sacredness of life, which we tend to oppose to any political power, is the same as the homo sacer. How is it possible, if the homo sacer is not sacred by any modern, common sense standards and therefore can be freely killed?
Is there the possibility of bare life independent of a sovereign power? Or does sovereignty create it only to exercise its power over it?
Considering that bare life and animal life are different things, over which does the ius exponendi exercise power? That is, is the baby's life animal life or bare life? And is this power indeed sovereign and political, as Agamben defines these terms? Is it really different from the homo sacer?
Is the homo sacer a genuine problem that Agamben has diagnosed, and its paradoxes are due to the complexities of sovereignty? Or do things not fit because, in the end, the homo sacer is only a very complex, aporetic riddle invented by Agamben?

Any answers are welcome!

What is language, after all? (+ a short review of "The Sensible Life")

2011-09-18T18:25:00.002-03:00

Recently I've been attempting to think of language as having no inherent relationship to communication. I believe it could be argued that communication and transmission of information are purely accidental and contingent to certain kinds of language (such as so-called natural human languages). Language is, in this tentative opinion of mine, ultimately an issue of relating to alterity, environment, specularity, spacement, death, etc. In this sense, every living being - down to single-cell organisms - would have a linguistic relationship to their (or "the") world. Chemical reactions would eventually be identified as the model linguistic phenomenon. To a molecule or a bacteria, a chemical connection would effect linguistic meaning (I refuse to employ the expression "carry linguistic meaning"), rendering this interaction as a instance of language.

From the little I know about second order systems theory via Cary Wolfe, this formulation does indeed resemble language viewed from such perspective - systems in general would "communicate" to their environments (or constituent parts) via effects of meaning. I like how it seems that Cary Wolfe has finally convinced me that systems theory does resemble Derridean philosophy of language. Derrida's defense of writing as the ultimate model of grammaticality and diacriticity (the conditions of possibility for language, since all language must be built upon schematic differences) reflects precisely this idea that language is, after all, nothing but a relationship to a differential and "grammatical" alterity. Only specific instances of "messages" (we could call them "grammatical") trigger the effects of meaning in chemical compounds, paramecia, systems in general, or in human language. This leads me to the exciting book I'm currently reading - Emanuele Coccia's La Vita Sensibile ("The Sensible Life," or "The Sentient Life").

I first heard of Coccia when he gave a talk at my grad program on his then recent book on theology and angels. He was introduced as being Agamben's TA and disciple. From what I could gather from Google, he is not as well-known and respected in the English-speaking ~~Internet~~ ~~world~~ Internet as he is in my campus and I'm guessing that this book was probably published here in Brazil even before the Italian and French editions came out. Which is a pity, because he engages most of the issues which seem to me to be so dear and problematic to the current question of the animal, biopolitics, posthumanism, feminism and philosophy of language.

In this book, he attempts to determine that the sensible (i.e. images) is not really reducible to the Platonic diagram of intelligible intellect/soul/ideal and corporeal body/sensations. Images are, in his opinion, essentially ultra-objective and infra-psychic, that is, they are beyond mere corporeality and not yet only products of the mind. His privileged example is the mirror, in which an image can form irrespective of the "original" object (in that the image is not an object and does not transform objective reality) and does not necessarily need a mind beholding it to actually be an image. He does a way better job than I can in explaining how this is not a step back to an ancient belief in an objective reality totally independent of any subjectivity. But believe me, he is very convincing.

What I find particularly useful is how he stresses the fact that the sensible is what ultimately grounds and founds animal life (in the sense of all life that is animate). "Animal" quickly becomes a synonym for "sensibility" and for any life that is open to mediality (the mode of being of the register in which images are formed, i.e. any kind of medium, such as a mirror, the air, polished wood, a piece of paper, or words). When he eventually talks about actual non-human animal life, it never sounds contrived when he is apparently defending human-animal continuity, or when he stresses that there is a difference in degree between human and animal sensibilities. Usually both these stances feel forced and problematic, but Coccia makes them both sound like simple conclusions to his theory of images.

Another thing that I love is how he stresses that images (and the medium) are always neither objective nor psychological - that is, they are neither natural nor cultural. He employs expressions such as "supplementary capacity" and "supplementary life" (when talking about all objects or forms) too many times for me to ignore the obvious Derridean overtones. Coccia's medium works exactly as Derrida's supplement in regard to the complex connections between nature and culture, human and animal, language and world. The supplement is also neither natural nor culture, but it is what makes possible such distinction and passage. Also, the human and the animal are only thinkable in supplementary terms, just as are signification and "reality", which is exactly what led me to the main argument of my dissertation that "the animal" is essentially a linguistic, supplementary, grammatological concept. Coccia seems to be saying the same thing as I am (and as Derrida implied in Of Grammatology), but in a new and refreshing register. His articulations of classical philosophy (it's amusing when he quotes Latin to explain how broken mirrors work), posthumanist continental thought and a theory of images (which discusses Lacan and comes close to systems theory) should have many, many people excited.

A zoogrammatology of literature

2011-06-16T02:43:00.001-03:00

Having recently been to a major international conference here in Brazil on the interfaces between animality and literature (the name translates to "Animals, Animality and the Limits of the Human"), I'm beginning to feel even more the urgent need for the very thing my talk was about - a zoogrammatology of literary texts, literary theory and literature in general.

While I acknowledge the difference in focus between me and most of my peers (I have a BA in English Language and Lit, which brings me closer to an Anglo-American strand of criticism), I have a tendency to think that most of what passes as critical and theoretical engagements with literary texts in Brazilian academia betrays some kind of naïveté and an uncritical, ellitist, perfunctory celebration of literariness.

This is certainly not only the case in Brazil, but since the vast majority of scholars I know who analyze what Spanish-speakers call "el giro animal" (the animal turn) exclusively in literature are indeed Brazilians, I tend to think that it's safe to assume that this is a problem endemic to literary animal studies (what some people have started calling zooliterature).

The name itself is confusing - is zooliterature the name for specific literary texts which depict, represent, problematize and give voice to animals, or is it the name of a type of critical and theoretical alignment and criticism within literary thought? I'm afraid many people would say the former.

Personally, I have little interest in revisiting, discovering or revealing authors who have written texts whose contents depict new, daring, exciting or outright posthumanist views on animals. Most of the times this kind of mapping goes little beyond pointing out where specific literary texts echo liberal and eco-friendly philosophical views. This concern for some kind of "literary translation" of animal philosophy always has me wondering whether anyone would care if I were to paraphrase Derrida or Lévinas or Bataille on a Post-It and stuck it to the refrigerator door. The fact that when literature does it, it matters, just leads me to the conclusion that many of these thinkers are going along the lines of "if a writer wrote it, it's hot!" (Luckily I am proud to say that my advisor is not one of them!)

As for me, I believe that the mere thinking of animals when dealing with literature should disrupt many things we take for granted about literary texts. If animal "presences" in texts are valued for their potential of disrupting traditional ideas of mind, language and representation, it seems contradictory to me to read the language in which the text is written in any direct and transparent way when one will show the textual representation of such animal. This is clearly paradoxical, but that's why it's so intoxicatingly interesting.

When a scholar points out that an animal is being represented in a new light in such and such section of such and such text, I always feel like asking "But how do you know that? How can you be so sure of what these words mean? How can you treat literary language as description or narration when this animal staring you right in the face is precisely telling you this can't be done?" Because that's what I think animals do in literature and that's what really draws me to this issue in the first place - animals reveal that literature relies on very specific linguistic functions in order to work at all (things like the sign, syntax, mimesis and objectivity come readily to mind) precisely by presenting themselves as evidences of it. For it is clear to me that most of the metaphysical bases of many literary concepts are the same which have created the animal when the human/animal boundary was established (think signifier/signified, form/content, code/utterance, system/instance). Going into "animal lands" feels like traversing an imaginary line beyond which literature threatens to stop working, or at least start working in an entirely new way or foregrounding entirely different things.

In short, the animal short-circuits literary functioning by plugging literariness directly into the metaphysical concepts of animality which have engendered it. But happens after that is what I think a zoogrammatology of literature should be able to find out (and that's exactly the argument of my dissertation). I would risk saying that, in zooliterature, there can be no stable, graspable meaning and "animal presences" can be found only as the conditions for the very signification and literariness of texts.

Kojève's posthumanism

2011-02-07T19:54:00.002-02:00

The first time I got in contact with Kojève's thinking was in Agamben's The Open, where he quotes what Kojève has to say about the End of History and what that would imply - the end of dialectics and Man. In general, I thought it was a really interesting discussion, if overall a little naïve in its understanding of history (does it really march forward towards a completion?). What I found very uncomfortable was Kojève's diagnoses of Japan and the USA's societies, in which he concluded that they were living in post-history. That made me feel uneasy, because that sounded very clearly to me as if he was saying he believed those societies had returned to a certain animal state.

I mean, I am the first to point out that equating someone with animals should not mean belittlement, but I still believe this issue should be treated carefully. For starters, I could not understand how exactly the American way of life could be deemed to be an animal state in any way. Some pages later, Agamben tells us that Kojève, some years after his lectures on Hegel, had the opportunity of visiting Japan and changed his mind: the Japanese did live in post-history, but they were not animals, since they were snobs - and no animal can be a snob, according to Kojève.

I started to think that maybe Kojève had a total different idea of what post-history and the post-human meant when compared to mine. For starters, I remember reading about Kojève's post-history in The Open and wondering outloud, "But would we still wear clothes??". Anyways, I had the opportunity of finally confronting my and Kojève's views on the subject last semester, when one of the professors in my (Literature Grad School) Department taught a course called "Post-historical, Post-autonomous, Post-human". I took it and I was a little surprised. He said his main focus in the course was mapping the reception Kojève's lectures had in Latin American readership especially on the debate on the "post-human". We read some interesting things that made sense to me, like Sloterdijk's Rules for the Human Park and Agamben's The Open. But most of the time we had some very weird discussions, not helped by the fact that most of my colleagues think discussions should go like: "There is this author, y'know? And he wrote this book, and I read it."

For some reason I spent half of the semester believing I was missing something. In the last class in the course, when we were discussing Bataille's reading of Kojéve's thoughts, I decided to ask: "Professor, how is it that talking about the human understading of death as something that separates us from the animal can be called 'post-human'?" His answer, which I guess I saw coming, was that from the moment you have a philosophical crisis in Europe (like the one around the 1930s) that threatens to evaporate most of what has been understood by God, Religion, the Nation, Society, Philosophy, the State and the task of Men in such a society, we no longer have a human per se. Especially if we're seeing everything from a Latin American point-of-view, which was our case.

So, after all that, I still don't know what to feel. In my mind, I tend to call Kojève's line of thought "institutional posthumanism". I understand the importance of placing the crisis in these institutions in their historical moment and comprehending the impact it had on reshaping our conceptions of humanity and animality. But at the same time I lean towards thinking that this a very narrow take on "the human". I don't think "the human" in the "post-human" can be reduced to only these institutions, otherwise I think it would be much easier to deconstruct. Or am I still missing something?

Disability, the animal, and the question of the "lack"

2010-08-26T14:17:00.002-03:00

Long time since I've posted, but I've certainly been busy reading and writing and going to conferences. Right now we are having our annual international seminar on Gender Studies here at UFSC called Fazendo Gênero, which is in its 9th installment. I've had the pleasure of participating of a symposium within the event focused on culturar criticism, Border Studies and Silviano Santiago's concept of the entre-lugar, which was later adopted by Mary Louise Pratt as The Contact Zone.

I wrote my article on and talked about the sometimes tense contact zone between Disability Studies and Animal Studies. This has been explored by many scholars I have read, and the main dilemma seems to be that DS asks us to humanize our ideas of disability, while AS urges us to let go of the concept of the human as a yardstick for moral relevance and, sometimes, to pinpoint how dangerous it might be to a trans-species ethics to give higher moral consideration to humans regardless of their cognitive capacities. This last argument is, of course, based on the premisse that all our ethical systems are sustained by the concept of mental capacity, which supposedly is the only thing that can make you even realize that you're happy or suffering.

Cutting to the end of my article, I arrived at serious aporias which I cannot seem to solve. One of them is the question of the "lack". As Scu at Critical Animal has discussed, this questions offers two opposite paths for thinking. On the one hand, by looking closely at our fellow animals, we may see that our supposed biological and mental superiority is a fiction, since many animals show outstanding abilities on so many areas of cognitive capacity that we can conclude that species difference is, after all, a question of degree and not of kind. Therefore, our moral system has the duty to include these animals under its wing because they share the traits valued in humans in the first place, the ones which, supposedly, make humans be morally relevant.

Of course, the other path is direct critique of this. It points out that seeking animal cognitive abilities is just a way of trying to determine which animals are more like us, constituing this a serious case of speciecism, human exceptionalism and, potentially, of ethnocentrism. The other issue with the "Yes, they can!" approach is how it impacts negatively on those marked by stigma of the "can't" - mostly people living with so-called disabilities (not to mention animals which haven't yet had their chance of being broadcast on YouTube doing cute, smart things). The main problem seems to be that determing ability as the yardstick for moral consideration may be read as just an extension of the classical humanism which has, to give a rushed example, permitted racial segregation and mass genocides - not to mention slaughterhouses. Trying to correct the humanist propension for sacrifice just by perfecting its selecting filter may not be the best idea of a good post-humanist strategy for ethics. This clashes horribly with Derrida's insistence on the question of the páthos, of vulnerability and compassion when writing of the question of the animal. "Can they suffer?", Bentham's question which Derrida echoes, is a direct attact on the "Yes, they can!" ethical platform, and moves the question towards the "can't" - at the same time that tries to strips it of its negative status.

But my question is whether we can really strip the negative status of incapacity. As we discussed in the symposium, it is, for example, the absence of Jetson-like treadmills all over the entire city that makes being hadicapped a disability, and not the biological contigency itself. It is important to establish disability as a discursive concept, created outside of essentialist biologism in order to reinforce ability, but, at the same time, I believe it is important to face the real incapacities and inabilities faced by people who struggle with so-called disabilities everyday. For them (and I could say "for me", since I have my share of problems, too), it is important to be considered, heard, treated with dignity, but having their (and my) disability considered, at the end of the day, as incapaciting.

All this is closely related to the other question that I leave open at the end of my article which is the question of the post-human redescription of the human. Quoting Andy Mousley:

If [...] the human is hybrid, mutable, open to ongoing re-description and reconstruction, then at what point, if at all, might we want to (temporarily?) halt the process of re-description/reconstruction, for polemical, political and/or ethical purposes?[1]

The question is if the post-human critique of the humanist concepts of the human might have to be halted in the name of concrete problems still faced by many when the label "human" fails to protect them from harm - which can be physical, mental, or emotional harm, and may derive from others or from oneself.

Putting it perhaps too simply, should "lack" be considered "good"? Should "bad" things be hailed for the sake of their potential for overruling carnophalogocentrism? Or should we keep the human strategically essential (and I am not comfortable with this expression) for the sake of the protection it still conjures? The questions seem endless, and I don't know how to answer them - not in a "theoretical" philosophical dimension, much less in my own life.

[1] MOUSLEY, A. Limits, limitlessness and the politics of the (Post)human. Postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies. Leicester, v. 1, n. 1, 2010. pp. 247-255. p. 247.

Temple Grandin's ableism

2010-02-07T17:45:00.005-02:00

As an autistic animal scientist who seemed to problematize even further the connections between the disability critique and posthumanist thinking, Temple Grandin had always been a very interesting and intriguing character and author for me for a long time, when I finally found a reason to buy one of her books from Amazon. One of my Literature teachers in my undergrad program, Eliana Ávila, who was also in my BA dissertation committee, has recently become deeply interested in Disability Studies to the point that she founded a research group focused on the interconnections between post-colonialism and disability. She invited some of her students to present something in a future conference on Gender Studies about disability-related othering. And my publication-greedy self thought that that was exactly what I needed to finally start reading Temple Grandin, to analyze what she brought of interest to the posthuman/disability 'conflict', and to present her to the Brazilian academia.

But now that I'm halfway through the bestseller Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, I see that I was totally wrong and that her ideas are way too problematic to even be quoted. I could go on and on about the many cringing moments in which she seems oblivious to the amount of ideology she seems to be hiding under 'biology' or just plainly supporting with her weird take on disability and animal mind. But, in a nutshell, the problem is that she is basically a humanist through and through. Through the book, she never once tries to bring the notion of disability into question, to see it as consequence of an unconditional love for ability, or to problematize the human/animal distinction. Basically, she tries to value, in a very humanistic fashion, the 'abilities' that she feels the 'disability' that she shares with animals gives her. That is doubly unnerving because one of her main 'superhero disabled abilities' is the capacity to "see the details that make up the world, while normal people blur all those details together into their general concept of the world." (30).

It may seem that she is making the very sophisticated point that maybe animals and autistic people, due to their 'different' relationship to language, can have access to the open, the alétheia, but she's not. In typical bestseller fashion, she is just celebrating the (humanist) values that the underdog turns out to also have (no pun intended). I guess everything would sound much more thought-out if she didn't insist on using expressions like "the real world" as opposed to "their idea of the world" or on summarizing every chapter with a dumbed-down sentence at the end.

I have other quibbles with her reasoning, especially with her constant quoting of biological fact as if she were quoting the Holy Writ. Her refusal to take the conclusions of complicated, fuzzy behavior experiments with a grain of salt begs me to do so. After reading so many maxims about the brain and neurotransmitters, I began to wonder what she would say if someone pointed out to her that most (if not all) research on the brain and behavior have been done by "normal people", who, according to her, "are built to see what they're expecting to see" (51) and who basically can only perceive what they want, and not the 'real world', with all its 'details'.

I, for one, also believe that whoever explained 'normal people' to her didn't give her a correct picture. To being with, I don't think she understands the gigantic difference between thinking linguistically and thinking verbally. She may say that verbal thought is alien to her, but her description of thinking visually still sounds very linguistic to me. This distinction, which brushes on the definition of the nature of language, is of course very delicate. But I believe that language is not reducible to words, and that the kind of categorical thinking she calls visual is still linguistic. Also, take a careful look at her description of mixed feelings, as in "a love-hate relationship", which is something she says she is incapable of imagining, to see that she is missing the point of how feelings intersect in a linguistic maze.

I know she has another book (I don't remember which) that contains a chapter called "Why I still work for the industry." I would like to read that, because that's exactly the question that goes on my head while reading Animals in Translation. But I guess I'm not really reading the right author if she has written a book called Animals Make Us Human. This is such a passive description of the problematic connections between humanity and animality (connections that she avoids) that I feel discouraged to even critique her.

But I believe what finally strikes me the most about her is her refusal to rethink disability, to embrace an ethics of vulnerability, and to follow Derrida's transformation of the word "can" to a non-ability, a passivity. In the end, it's her confidence in a humanist belief in ability, potency, and evolution that makes such an interesting project implode.

Edit. Other people have written very intelligently on the connections between disability and posthumanism, such as Kari Weil, Licia Carlson and Cary Wolfe (on Temple Gradin herself). You can also watch Wolfe reading his paper at a talk and taking some questions at the end.

The Production of Early Modern Humanism in "The Tempest"

2009-11-14T16:13:00.002-02:00

The following is a term paper I wrote for a course I had this semester on The Tempest and how it has been read by several theoretical frameworks. In it I analyze the ways in which Prospero (and consequently the play) produces Early Modern humanism by the means of a reconfiguration of Renaissance science and (especially) art, together with the inauguration of the human/animal divide.

Origami chickens

2009-10-18T15:19:00.001-02:00

That's what McDonald's "chicken" sandwiches are made of. At least according to the little box the sandwich comes out of. Now they have the "ingredients" of the sandwich pictured around it, and there are two origami chickens standing in for the actual meat. I checked it online and found that Brazilian McDonald's had adopted the same boxes that are used internationally - so I guess this new box with fake paper animals can be found anywhere.

Not only in the boxes, but I found that there is a real advertisement campaign focusing on origami animals.

I do not really expect McDonald's to depict actual dead animals on their products or images, but I feel there is something almost outrageous in representing chicken as geometrically folded paper. Most food industry advertisement here in Brazil depict chickens as cartoons, happily trying to convince you to eat it.

In a different strategy, there was a fast food chain here that offered you the choice between beef or chicken by the means of a cartoon cow saying "Eat chicken," and a cartoon hen saying "Eat beef." That did not last very long. I guess most people did not like the fact that the cartoons were actually begging you not to eat them.

I believe this trend of exaggerating the effacement of the presence of animal flesh is part of the larger campaign in the fast food industry (as least as I can see it in Brazil) to "clean" its food of undesirable ingredients. I guess the first blow came with Supersize Me, and then from Linklater's Fast Food Nation, with its infamous quote "There's shit in the meat," made real by recent events. Now it seems there's an outright paranoia to rid fast food of seemingly "unhealthy," or plain gross ingredients. Here that includes selling all kinds of sorry-looking salads and R$1 apples.

But the turn towards origami chicken does look like the last and final move in this abstraction campaign. There is such a vague, clean and geometric appeal to origami which looks just insulting, both to chicken and to consumer. It's sad that the concern for the depiction of dead animals (as well as the notion that the costumers may not feel comfortable knowing they're eating meat) is inserted in this larger issue of eating habits and health problems — and not in a real discussion of carnivorism and vegetarianism.

I guess that in fact this kind of cultural pedagogy is just typical of McDonald's. Deep down, there is a strong connection between establishing the acceptability of invisible flesh and the truly neo-colonial gender identities they enforce when coming up with boys' and girls' Happy Meal gifts. Some time ago, for example, they were giving little alien robot toys for boys — the caption saying something like "alien supreme force, thrust, (insert phallic word here), etc." — and little dolls for girls (caption? "Sweet kisses"). In sum, alien evil destructive machines versus dolls that blow kisses.

Unfortunately I couldn't find a picture of the poster they were displaying in the restaurant themselves, where the design, the color, the actual captions, and especially the way it was so furiously divided in two were the source of most of the shock. I was amazed by how well they could take such basic sexual stereotypes and distill them until they had nothing but the pure obnoxious dichotomy. Hand in hand with their campaign of hygienizing their food and their costumers from the view of animals.

September 1, 1939

2009-09-05T01:41:00.136-03:00

On September 1st, which was last Tuesday, I was watching Katyń by Andrzej Wajda and I realized during it that that Tuesday marked the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Poland, and of the Second World War. I was really intrigued that no one had mentioned anything during that day (but not so much, since I hadn't turned on the TV or opened up a newspaper). I had to check afterwards to see if it had been really September 1st, but yes, it had. Because I came of age in the 90s, I got used to the idea that WWII had happened 50 years ago, because my mind always made the math based on 1945. But realizing that such event happened exactly 70 years ago kind of disturbed me. Seventy years felt like a long time ago, and I felt a pang of fear that it might some day be forgotten.

And we know it never should. We know that all that happened in Europe in the 40s has been exploited ad nauseum in many different ways, movies being just one of them. You may approach the Holocaust through several different perspectives, but so many of them will feel wrong, exploitative, cheap and unfair. But I believe one must still try. A good example of both the importance and the fragility of this issue can be seen in J M Coetzee's The Lives of Animals. In one of the many interesting passages, the character Elizabeth Costello believes the Holocaust to be important to be talked about, especially under the posthumanist thought she seems to be trying to get at in her speech (and I in here), but she also proves how delicate the subject is. After establishing that we believe the crime of Nazi Germany was to have killed people as animals, she then draws a comparison between killing animals for food and the Jews who died in the camps. As a result, her listeners are offended and one of them writes her a note refusing to have dinner with her, stating that if she refuses to 'break bread' with the Germans for their animal treatment of the Jews, he, too, will not break bread with her for drawing such comparisons between animals and Jewish people.

This subject is fraught with polemic, especially within such a field as Animal Studies, where important concepts and ideas are interrelated in ways which sometimes are almost untraceable. Like Costello shows in her speech, the concepts of humanity and animality are thrown around many times when we discuss the Holocaust, both attached to killers and victims, and then also when we try to think of torture and genocide as something that also happens to animals. The problem, it seems, is that although we throw these concepts around, they never seem to stick. There's always room to be self-righteous, to be shocked, to be speechless - and also room to scorn at these attempts. For many different reasons, relating genuinely to what happened in the camps seems to be impossible. For those who were not there, it seems like there is only the possibility of acknowledging vaguely that it happened, and of abusing the word barbarity for whatever moral code we may be trying to defend. My question is: isn't what happened in Europe in the 40s important to our understanding of humanity, even if we arrive at no neat conclusion? Shouldn't there be a way to relate to all that, to think the tragedy, without falling short of something? And especially within the wide field of what may be called posthumanism, doesn't the question of the animal (and of the human) depend on taking the tragedy into account? But how can it be done?

I do not have answers for these questions, but I have some clues - and some unacceptable answers that I hope might get us closer to some good ones. For example, it should never be thought of as a German crime. As much as the Holocaust may have been a humanist crime, it should not be thought of as an exclusively German event. The attempt to relate to the Holocaust should not be seen as way to see into the crazed minds of German soldiers and check what we should look out for. We shouldn't look at the Holocaust to try to find the elements in German culture that supposedly might have led to it. All I'm saying is that the Holocaust important, it should be considered, and the ordinary urban citizen of the New World finds himself or herself unable to reach it through any means that would be considered appropriate. How can one think the Holocaust properly?

Take me, for example. I have Polish background and, even though my great-grandparents came to Brazil in the 1910s, I grew up listening to horrible stories about oppression from the Germans, the Russians and of mutual hate with Ukranians. And about the war. Not a specific one, but for the Poles, war seems to run deep no matter what you are talking about. Having grown up in such an environment, Polish stories and national identity were no other than family trivia for me, just like the nice food and the enigmatic Polish words. But when I decided to take an interest in my background in my teens, I started having some questions which came very close to the ones above. One of them is like the chicken-egg question: do the Poles hate everybody around them because they were invaded by virtually every nation in Europe or were they invaded by virtually every nation in Europe because they hate everybody around them? Others were more serious, such as: what part exactly do the war and oppression play in the formation of Polish identity? Why do Poles are so hateful if they have seen many times the effects that hate has had for them? Why are they so intensively Catholic? Can the Poles teach us something about humanism and the relationship with Otherness, or at least something about how such relationship can go wrong?

This last question is a good one. For those who don't know, the word for Germany in Polish, Niemcy, means simply "foreigners" (apparently from the old form of the word niemowa, meaning "mute", that is, "those who do not speak our language"). As such, it seems that Poland's relationship with Otherness has always been relevant. Do the answers to my questions reside in Poland? Would a Polish way of relating to the Holocaust be more respecful, more inclusive, closer to the bone? Can Poland's history and national identity give us an insight into this relationship with the Other that may trigger compassion, humanism, barbarity or posthumanism?

When I was there (in 2006) I got a very different picture of the country from the one conveyed by my grandmother. Actually, based on what I was familiar with, what I saw spelled "national identity crisis". Most of the Poles I met had strong bonds with the Outside, but not as a way to define their identity and to seek segregation. Most of them studied Languages in college and were obsessed by the culture and language of a particular country (I met many obsessed about Portugal, Brazil and Portuguese language, which was plain surreal). All peolpe I met were atheists, or did not care about the church. And most importantly, most of them were ashamed of being Polish. They confessed to having lied about their nationality more than once. Poland's religion and patriotism were important weapons against a series of invasions that left them without borders, government, flag or army. With no flag to project themselves onto, they needed Catholicism to set themselves apart - and apparently a lot of xenophobia. Could the carefully organized humanism of Polish Catholicism and nationalism have finally crumbled under the humanist projects of the Others, who invaded or numbed them?

Those questions were only half-formed at the time, but I guess I had some of this in my mind when I visited Auschwitz, which is the German name for the Polish town of Oświęcim, and the name of the 'museum' there which was once what many consider the apogee of humanism. The group of Brazilian students I was part of went to Oświęcim on a tour and I missed it because I had to stay in the hotel writing a paper for college back here in Brazil. So I went on my own, along with four other Brazilians, two that had also missed the tour, and two others that we met on the hotel. In a way it was better, because we had to find our way around. Because I could speak Polish best in our group, I was in charge of arranging our way there, which I believe included never asking "How do I get to Auschwitz?", but asking "Please, what bus do I get to go to Oświęcim?". Apparently deep down I already thought that the Poles would have a "truer", different vision of what I was about to see, and it seems I felt I had to be careful not to step on their toes.

Once there we realized we were very late and that the camp was closing in one hour. I was struck by the beauty of the place, and the tranquility. You have to walk a long way along the train track and you remember the stories they tell about the place's not having flowers. I know deep down I was thinking: "Isn't this a decent way of approaching the Holocaust?" Once past the gate with the words about the joys of work, I didn't know what to feel. I felt okay, it was just a quiet meadow with a lot of lined-up brick buildings. We moved about a lot and eventually I got separated from my friends except for a woman who was too scared to actually go see anything. I paid a visit to just some of the barracks closest to the gates. One of them was just about Ukrainian prisoners, another only about the Armia Krajowa, the resistance army. I walked around some more and my three other friends showed up later, minutes before the place closed, telling us how they had hurried in and out of every barracks in order to see everything. They said they had got to see the horrible things people talk about (the ovens, the gas chambers and piles of eyeglasses and other belongings) but they did not seem too impressed. The whole of Auschwitz was blown away from my mind right after, because it was dark and there were no trains or buses leaving. We had to walk to the nearest train station and overpay a taxi to drive us back to Kraków, where we eventually headed to a bar and the hotel.

But after all those years I still felt that I had not really been to Auschwitz. I mean, I was there, and I was not blocking anything, I was looking and looking, and walking - not trying to understand something or searching for answers, especially because I had no conscious questions. But I felt no closer to the war or the Holocaust than the average person, even though I had been fed Polish sad stories as a child, even though I found my family's last name in the list of prisoners in Auschwitz, even though I had walked among the very barracks where it all happened. What other openness did it take? My feeling was not, as my boyfriend usually criticizes, an attempt to understand the Holocaust, to give Auschwitz a coherence that would soothe my otherwise peaceful suburban mind so I could purge all barbarity from me and isolate it in Nazi Germany, as if only they could have accomplished such a thing. It was not that. In fact, what I wanted was to be scarred by that place, by those six years of humanist intensity, to really assimilate both the suffering and the barbarity. But I just felt I couldn't.

That was until yesterday, when I watched the documentary Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) by Alain Resnais, from 1955. By the end of the movie, I just gave up wiping my tears. Never was crying so joyless and unredemptive. Like I said, it's not about organizing and understanding repugnance so we can live with it, it's not about demonizing Germany to blame them or pity them, it's not about a historical knowledge, it's not about vaccination, it's not just so those people won't have died in vain. If you go to Oświęcim, or if you watch said film, or if you just sit at home thinking about Poland in the 40s, do not shudder before barbarity, for it's your own. Don't grieve for the prisoners, grieve for your own humanism. Do not pity the dead, pity the living. Not the ones to whom all of this may happen again, but those who are capable of doing it. And pity yourself as one of them. Because we need that in order to reach anything resembling the understanding of humanity and animality, we need it to perhaps know exactly how important the Holocaust is to all this and then to decide what to do with such knowledge, if we ever know it.

Animality, animals and racial Otherness

2009-09-04T17:25:00.006-03:00

Renee, posting in two feminist blogs (Feministe and Womanist Musings), authored a comment on the connections between animal rights groups and the political fight of people of color that has sparked relative polemic in philosophy and Animal Studies blogs. She says she feel uncomfortable with animal rights groups' (such as PETA) discourse on the seemingly unquestionable fact that human, as animals, are the same as the latter. Quoting her:

Much of the time, they buttress their position by saying that we are no different than animals and therefore are undeserving of special treatment. This line of thought does not solely apply to PeTA. Many animal rights groups are fond of pointing out that humans are also animals. This is a biological fact, however; using it to defend your position can be extremely problematic and it is rarely to ever acknowledged as such.

I am not very familiar with the exact arguments put forth by PETA for the equal treatment of animals, so I cannot really say if Renee is missing their point. However, even if there's no misreading going on, I still believe there are some issues running deeper than the biologist vs. political clash. To quote the end of her post:

They may scream biology until the end of time but we remember when such comparisons were used to justify slavery, rape, and segregation. For as long as my skin is Black I will be a devoted speciesist. My dignity and humanity demand no less.

Are they really screaming biology? Is that what PETA really believes, that we as taxonomical animals we should not force our power over our Animalia siblings? If that's what they are propagating, I feel it's superficial. Either that, or it's just a more popular, simplified form of the argument, the one they send in press releases to news programs. Before I expose my views on why Renee is missing the point, I believe we should take a moment to really address this animalaise (to use Derrida's term) that she — and many other 'non-paradigmatic human beings' — has expressed.

Licia Carlson, who I guess comes from a Disability Studies background, has an interesting article on a similar clash between Animal Studies and her area. She explains the dilemma that she sees — and probably also the one felt by Renee — like this:

On the one hand, the disability critique challenges associations between the “cognitively disabled” and non-human animals, and calls for us to humanize our view of disability; on the other hand, the critical discourse on non-human animals calls in to question the ontological and ethical privileging of the human over the non-human animal, and calls for us to “reassert our human animality,” i.e., to recognize our own animal nature.

I believe it's even unnecessary to point out that Carlson and Renee have a valid point. It's understandable that centuries of dehumanization and animalization leave a mark, and Animal Studies' attempt to make the human lean close to the other side of the line and brush with animality must make historically oppressed people shudder just to glimpse the possibilities of biologist supremacy discourses ingrained in such a move. Like Renee pointed out, we may have a black American president, but that doesn't mean that people won't picture him as a monkey. Any comparisons between oppressed minorities and animals are dangerous, especially because they have served as basis for the oppression itself, and we must be careful with them. But there is a reason why people also advocate for the the erosion of the human/animal divide for the sake of human equality. This was pointed out by other bloggers, such as Critical Animal:

For me, it is obvious that the wrong done to the non-paradigmatic human beings is based upon the ability to do wrong to animals. If we end the ability draw lines between the human on one side and all animals on the otherside, if we embrace the monstrosity of the human animal, then we end the ability to continue to do harm to people of color by calling them animals.

And also there at Vegans of Color:

In my soul I know it would be just as wrong for me to withdraw my solidarity to those who are seen as less than me, because of a species barrier. To construct the worth of a being by their humanness is an embrace of a world where white patriarchy is the standard. Humanness is so connected to able-bodiedness, whiteness, maleness, cisness, straightness, because these were the people who got to decide who got to count, and when they got to count as human.

And Carlson quotes Cary Wolfe, in his introduction to Zoontologies, where he makes a similar point:

One might well observe that it is crucial to pay critical attention to the discourse of animality quite irrespective of the issue of how nonhuman animals are treated. This is so because the discourse of animality has historically served as a critical strategy in the oppression of humans by other humans – a strategy whose legitimacy and force depend, however, on the prior taking for granted of the traditional ontological distinction, and consequent ethical divide, between human and nonhuman animals.

I like Wolfe's wording better because his quote reveals something I deeply believe in: that we must separate between "the discourse of animality" and "nonhuman animals", that is, living organisms that are alive and that are not people. And, as such, I believe that what he calls a strategy is not only a strategy. The human/animal division is not just a model which we apply to situations where we want to oppress Otherness — it is the very thing that makes humanism(s) possible at all.

I have been mildly criticized for my inclusion of Agamben in my list on the left (which is a list of books I managed to get my hands on while writing my undergrad thesis), and I have defended the validity of his thought as I will again now. I believe his writings on animality in The Open are crucial to the present issue. Employing 'man' to mean 'human' (why?), he writes:

Man is a field of dialectical tensions always already cut by internal caesurae that every time separate — at least virtually — “anthropophorous” animality and the humanity which takes bodily form in it. Man exists historically only in this tension; he can be human only to the degree that he transcends and transforms the anthropophorous animal which supports him, and only because, through the action of negation, he is capable of mastering and, eventually, destroying his own animality.

And which is also reinforced by Derrida:

[the human/animal divide] is the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself.

So, according to them, the first thing for us to keep in mind in the clash between Animal Studies and the struggle of non-paradigmatic humans is that humanness must not be thought of as dignity or the Good, but as only the product of the expulsion of an undesired trait. To this Rennee would, of course, respond something along the lines of what she wrote on her post:

Whiteness can afford such a comparison [between humans and animals] because it is still the dominant and the norm. It is not reduced by such a comparison because its power has become socially entrenched and its humanity validated.

And I agree with her, it's very easy for the "largely white run animal rights groups" to unsubscribe from human nature because, as my professor would say, the act which most stresses one's power is one's refusal to use such power. But that's not all. It's not only humanity which must be reconsidered, but also animality — and its difference from 'animals'.

Again according to Agamben, we must think of the human “as what results from the incongruity of the [human and animal] elements [within the human], [an incongruity] without which no division of existence into vegetal, animal, human, and divine would be thinkable". As such, what we think 'animality' is, and what Rennee is fighting against, is nothing but a linguistic abstract notion which is produced within us only to be expelled and to allow us to call ourselves 'human'. And by calling ourselves human by the means of an expulsion we have founded humanism, which at the end of the day is nothing but a machine to determine one identity by sacrificing another. When we expel such inner linguistic notion of 'animality', we must attach it to something, and we have attached them to animals (the nonhuman living beings) and that is where our comprehension of those beings come from: the pasting of a human (and human-forming) concept to a nonhuman group of beings. As such, it is only by a coincidence that the word 'animal' is similar to 'animality' and such different is what enables the blogger over at Philosophy in a Time of Error in his response to Rennee to write: [...] we have to stop treating animals like animals. Which, under this light, means: "We must stop treating non-human living beings as the Other we have found within ourselves and which we have exploited and sacrificed in the name of our identity (that we have named 'human')."

That's why all the successful attempts to insert continuism within the human/animal divide haven't had the effect of extinguishing the humanist model of belitting those we decided to attach the 'animality' label to. Darwinism, the humanities and social sciences have proved that there are fewer and fewer 'human exclusives' and yet we still feel the presence of the 'bestial animalized Other' to be available, up in the air, to be thrown in the face of oppressed people of color or people with bodily differences. That is because the fight has been fought in the wrong front — attempting to see the unfortunate individuals who have been deemed animality-donned as rightful humans, when in fact we should try to embrace the thing that is really being belittled, which is animality.

Actually, it seems to me that an idea of continuism between humanity and animality is impossible, since they have been conceived as opposites in the first place (and if I remember correctly, I guess Derrida agrees with me). What inferiorized others demand that we do is that we no longer rely on such internal division so much in order to establish identity, that is, we should aim for a non-negative form of identification process. That's because the expulsion of animality is only the first step of dialetically negative identification, since identity is layered with different degrees of specificity, and thus it will follow that a human white male will, after chopping away his animality to be human, sacrifice racial otherness to be white and femininity to be a man.

And that's what I think the message to other identity politics movement should be: embrace the animal rights (or animal studies) movement because they don't mean to say that you are the same as animals, they mean to say that animals were just the first others to be sacrificed in the name of the human, and you may have been or might become the next, unless we jam the humanist machine by accepting the animality in the very heart of what we have called human.

What's in a name? or Post- vs. Trans-

2009-09-01T17:01:00.066-03:00

Within the larger field of the (post-)humanities, the terms 'posthumanism' and 'posthuman' have been difficult to determine. A quick Google search on any of these words will list many websites which don't seem to tackle the topics which are in discussion here, such as animality and the limits and limitations of what has been called 'humanity'. Many people seem to consider the prefixes 'post' and 'trans' as interchangeable, and therefore use 'posthumanism' and 'transhumanism' as synonyms, when, in fact, they must be conceptualized as two very distinct lines of thought.

Not being an avid reader of transhumanist issues, I will quote a very reader-friendly definition found on one of these sites misnamed as 'posthumanist':

Posthumanism (or transhumanism to use the standard term) is the view that we ought to try to develop - in ways that are safe and ethical - technological means that will enable the exploration of the posthuman realm of possible modes of being. Transhumanists believe that all people should have access to such technologies. The choice of whether to use them, however, should normally rest with the individual.

In other words, transhumanism seems to defend the idea that we should use humanism's ultimate tool - technology - in order to make us "better" humans. As another blogger has deemed it, transhumanism seems much more as humanism on speed than any form of critique that the prefix 'post' should entail. And indeed, the idea of a critique (or a crisis) is what I think is central to the prefix 'post'. Posthumanist thinking should not be seen as "after humanism" (which, after all, does not seem to be readily possible) or "anti-humanism", but as a form of problematization of the thinking behind humanism, as well as its institutions, tools, apparatuses and interconnections to other areas of cultural and philosophical expression and action. Quoting the same website from above:

The word "posthumanism" has also been used in other senses, for example to refer to a critique of humanism, emphasizing a change in our understanding of the self and its relations to the natural world, society, and human artifacts. Transhumanism, by contrast, advocates not so much a change in how we think of ourselves, but rather a vision of how we might concretely use technology and other means to change what we are - not to replace ourselves with something else, but to realize our potential to become something more than we currently are.

So, as Scu, the blogger of Critical Animal, has so rightly put it, transhumanism does not seem to want to change anything - if anything, it seems to want to take us into überhumanism, brushing aside all the networks of relations between humans and other beings (whether they are living, institutional or ideological entities) that only recently have been brought to the surface.

Not many writers, I believe, use the term 'posthumanism' in the sense I employ here, at least assuming that a Google search is any kind of reliable corpus. There seems to be much more websites devoted to an understanding of the posthuman as an 'enhanced' human. Also, I have noticed that usually my strand of posthumanist thinking comes together with phrases such as 'the question of the animal', 'human-animal divide' and 'animal studies' - sometimes even 'animal rights'. My interests certainly align most correctly with such animal-populated expressions, but I fear that they might in some level narrow the scope of the discussion, and that's why I tend to use 'posthumanism' hoping that my readers will understand that I'm talking about the relations between humanity and animality, but that I also hope to include and to learn about other areas that have been called posthumanist.

Scu and his blog on Critical Animal Studies seem to tend towards a line of posthumanist thinking focused on animal issues (which is, after all, the most interesting one, in my opinion), but he also states that theorist Cary Wolfe calls his own strand of thought simply 'Posthumanism'. And although most of his writings (at least the ones I have read) have focused on questions related to animals and animality, his upcoming book, What is Posthumanism? seems to try to argue that this growing field of study should not forget the animality which is always central to any understanding of the human, but that it should also permeate other paths in rethinking the human:

Exploring how both critical thought along with cultural practice have reacted to this radical repositioning, Cary Wolfe—one of the founding figures in the field of animal studies and posthumanist theory—ranges across bioethics, cognitive science, animal ethics, gender, and disability to develop a theoretical and philosophical approach responsive to our changing understanding of ourselves and our world. Then, in performing posthumanist readings of such diverse works as Temple Grandin’s writings, Wallace Stevens’s poetry, Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, the architecture of Diller+Scofidio, and David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he shows how this philosophical sensibility can transform art and culture.

But Cary Wolfe, and his new book, is a topic for another post.

The Cat Who Reads the Map: Posthumanism and Animality in "Harry Potter"

2009-08-31T11:44:00.013-03:00

To premiere the blog, I thought it would be fitting that I should post the full text of my latest research - which was my undergraduate end-of-course thesis, focusing on a posthumanist reading of animality and humanity in the Harry Potter novels. This is an embedded version of my text on Scribd.