Pitiable or Political Animals?

The first and decisive question will rather be to know whether animals can suffer.

—Derrida, 396

I. On the Suffering of Animals

As first questions go, this one (actually posed by Jeremy Bentham) seems answered in advance, not only by the terminal emphasis with which Derrida stamps it, but by the felt preponderance today of a public pity for what is here posed only in the subjunctive. It is a pity about which a veritable war has been waged for two centuries at least, Derrida tells us; a pity whose fateful power it is, on the far side of modernity, to permit the two terms "animal" and "human" to enter once again into alignment. The war of which Derrida speaks was the protracted humanist effort, by way of innumerable atrocities and torture against other species, to enforce an absolute distinction between us and them, "the thesis of a limit as rupture or abyss" between two irreconcilable orders of biological substance, to disable and forestall any childish upsurge of emotion on behalf of life forms devoid of language and properly incapable of death and thus free to be experimented upon and industrially consumed without moral risk (398).

The unexpected contemporary resolution of this blood-soaked antagonism in favor of the avowed pitiability of animals casts some unsettling light not only on that tortuous history, but on the very notion of the human erected on its basis. For what would it mean to the history of ethics that (as the geneticists never tire of reminding us) mice and human beings share 99.9% of their genetic code? Would all that unquantifiable suffering not now return with a traumatic force and overwhelm us with pity, disabling thought and action? At the same time, what remains to admire about an animal that shares almost everything of its nature with others, yet is bent on violently using them? Derrida's valiant deconstructive efforts to keep open the humanist abyss while insisting on the Real of animal suffering, his refusal to succumb to the sinister "biologistic continuism" underwriting much public debate today, will regrettably have been only a minor footnote in the triumphant technocratic reestablishment of a vastly profitable continuum between all varieties of animal DNA, and of a new eugenics that dare not speak its name. "We are meat," as Francis Bacon put it, "we are potential carcasses" (Bacon, 46). "For certain philosophers," writes Paul Virilio, "the body is already no more than a phenomenon of memory, the remnants of an archaic body; and the human being, a mere biped, fragile of flesh and so slow to grow up and defend itself that the species should not have survived" (63). What, apart from suffer and die, is such a life form to do; and what, apart from pity, would be the appropriate comportment of Dasein to such a wretched scrap of "mere life"?

Thus the rhetorical question whether animals can suffer bears within it the freight of a silent assumption: that humans, as animals, above all else suffer too. The animal is that which is worthy of pity; the human, cruellest of animals, whose sufferings are redoubled and infinitized by consciousness, is therefore supremely worthy. The title of Susan Sontag's last work, Regarding the Pain of Others (2004), perfectly encapsulates the liberal West's prevailing ethical attitude today, its irreducible point of departure within a plenum of photographic testimony. Human life would be, in Judith Butler's words, that which is especially "precarious" and subject to the pitiful-Levinasian attentions of the ethical self. Our rediscovered pity for the full spectrum of biological being has its roots in the rich humus of compassion that the twentieth century composted from the multitudinously wretched, abused, abandoned, afflicted and insulted human "objects" of modernity's grim history. Freud's updating of Hobbes' homo homini lupus, his disabused vision of "man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien" can only have gained in credibility from everything that followed its utterance in 1929 (104). "The total humanization of the animal coincides with a total animalisation of man," writes Giorgio Agamben, (77) and...